Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

206
The Poetry of Anne Sexton
home. The domesticity suggested by the kitchen implies that here, in
this most ordinary and yet formally ritualized room, the most extraordinary
human truths will emerge, in the midst of simple converse
about the everyday matters of commonplace lives. In this respect, the
kitchen and the asylum are perhaps closely related. Neither is Thebes
or Corinth, but either may be the crossroads at which one kills one’s
father, or the ceremonial place in which one marries one’s mother.
And if you turn away
because there is no lesson here
I will hold my awkward bowl,
with all its cracked stars shining
like a complicated lie,
and fasten a new skin around it
as if I were dressing an orange
or a strange sun.
It is on this passage that Middlebrook bases her contention that
tapping the head “produces ‘stars,’ signs radiant with significance,
uniting sufferer and beholder despite the ‘glass bowl’ that shuts them
off from other forms of contact.” 13 To that insight, I would add that
the cracked stars resulting from tapping the bowl are yet another
reflection of the cracked mirror in the asylum, that we all, in kitchens
or madhouses, aim toward the same general human truths that shine
differently in different lives. The speaker, under the critical scrutiny
of the one who has “turned away,” must hold her bowl awkwardly,
partially disarmed by the withdrawal of an invited commonality. The
cracked stars shine “like a complicated lie,” Sexton’s acknowledgement
that we each create our own story, are trapped within our own
private perspectives in which we style and shape a truth that has as
much of the necessary lie as of authenticity; the lie is “complicated”
by our complicity in the egotistical desire to make ourselves, perhaps,
the heroes of our stories. There is also a suggestion here, muted
from reprimand into plea, that the stars will more likely constitute
that “complicated lie,” that partial denial of the sought truth, if the
invited other rejects the partnership by which a complicated truth
might emerge: “And if you turn away . . .” When the fellow sufferer
changes to the detached or disdainful observer, the speaker has no
choice but to “fasten a new skin” around the bowl, an action which