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The Poetry of Anne Sexton 203
ultimate peace in Colonus are still torturous and tragic. Not until he
awaits death does he find his peace. Bettelheim sees the Oedipus in
us all as able to be “free” from our own “destructive powers” and their
ability to “harm us.” 8 This is, of course, the expression of psychoanalysis’s
own profound wish that it might provide “cure,” a wish that Freud
himself became suspicious of near the end of his life. I prefer a more
realistic phrasing of what the search for self-knowledge might hope to
accomplish: a lessening of the destructive hold of unconscious material
over people’s lives, and a diminished likelihood that one might
single-handedly cause a pestilence in the city.
This important reservation aside, I find Bettelheim’s reading of
Oedipus convincing and important, if not entirely new: Oedipus is a
hero who is fated to feel guilty for something he has done but did not
know he was doing and did not mean to do; and, more importantly,
he is a quester after truth against tremendous inner and external odds,
determined to recognize that truth when he finds it, no matter how
painful it may be for him and for other people he loves. That truth is
peculiarly his own—Bettelheim points out, through DeQuincey, that
the Sphinx posed different problems for different people, so that the
answer to the riddle is not merely man in general, but Oedipus in
particular. But it is also universal. “The answer to the riddle of life is
not just man, but each person himself.” 9
In the Oedipus story, it is the woman/mother/wife, Jocasta, who
says that she does not want to know the truth and who cannot cope
with it when it is revealed. She kills herself because she possesses
unwanted knowledge—not, as Bettelheim points out, the knowledge
that she has committed incest, but repressed knowledge that she helped
to abandon her son to death years earlier. Perhaps it is ironic that I
should see Anne Sexton as Oedipus and not as Jocasta. Anne Sexton
killed herself. Yet despite that final irony, the essential characteristics
of Anne Sexton’s poetry identify her not with the overwhelmed and
helpless victim/victimizer, Jocasta, but with the hero Oedipus, whose
struggle for the truth was determined and tragic. As Alicia Ostriker
says in a comparison of Plath and Sexton, Sexton “fought hard with
love, greed, and laughter to save herself, and failed.” 10 Her “failure” was
heroic rather than pathetic, courageous rather than cowardly. Unlike
Jocasta, who is immediately defeated by the revelation of the truth,
Sexton grappled with her truth again and again, in a deadly hand to
hand combat she might be said, on some terms, to have won.