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The Poetry of Anne Sexton 201
explain why. Among the most convincing retellings is Juliet Mitchell’s
in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, in which she urges us to construe the
Oedipus complex as more than a term for normal childhood sexual
conflicts revolving around intense attachments to the parents, by
which measure the significance attributed to it by psychoanalysis may
indeed seem inflated. According to Mitchell, the Oedipus complex
designates a set of internal and external acts through which every
person is initiated into the cultural order; it is not only “a metaphor
for the psychic structure of the bourgeois nuclear family under
Viennese capitalism,” but “a law that describes the way in which all
[Western] culture is acquired by each individual.” 3
Critics have been endlessly irritated by the recurring themes of
infancy and the relationship to the mother and father in Anne Sexton’s
poetry. Beginning with her first teacher, John Holmes, Sexton has been
accused of childishness and of infantile preoccupations. She insisted
that these themes were at the heart of the matter—and not only her
matter, but by implication, everyone’s. “Grow up,” said the decorous
world of poetry to her throughout her career; “Stop playing in the crib
and the sandbox—and especially stop sniveling about your childhood.”
Her poetic reply frightened the critics who disliked her work—most of
them transparently opposed to psychoanalytic theory—for that reply
asserted again and again that grown woman though she might be,
successful professional though she might be, the process of working
out her relationship to her parents and her childhood was a life’s work.
Nor did she permit the poetic community to suppose it was only her
life’s work. If we acknowledged it as hers, and as the legitimate domain
of poetry, then we would have to come to terms with the possibility
that it might be our own lifelong process as well. Blind as Teiresias, she
revealed to all of us the truth about Laius’ murder. As Bruno Bettelheim
writes in Freud and Man’s Soul, “we encounter in Teiresias the idea that
having one’s sight turned away from the external world and directed
inward—toward the inner nature of things—gives true knowledge and
permits understanding of what is hidden and needs to be known.” 4
But it is not Teiresias, finally, with whom I identify Anne Sexton.
Rather, it is Oedipus, and specifically the Oedipus of Freud and Man’s
Soul. Bettelheim attempts yet another re-reading of Freud’s Oedipus,
and I find it the most moving and accessible that contemporary
psychoanalysis has offered to an audience larger than its own members.
Freud’s Oedipus, through Bettelheim, takes on the luminosity of the