Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

208
The Poetry of Anne Sexton
to be hung on a wall opposite her mother’s portrait, freezing in time
her dependence on her mother, herself as reflection of that “mocking
mirror,” and her stubborn refusal to become that bitter woman. The
mother contracts cancer (blaming her daughter), the daughter is institutionalized
again, and the mother begins her slow dying. The speaker
estranged from her own daughter by her inability to mother her tells
herself one of those complicated lies, and then unravels it:
. . . And you came each
weekend. But I lie,
You seldom came. I just pretended
you . . .
The lesson she learns that she must pass on to her daughter—this
complicated truth made up of so many self-serving lies that must be
exploded—is “why I would rather / die than love.” And this has much
to do, she knows, with her relationship to that “overthrown love,” and
the speaker’s need to turn away from her:
The artist caught us at the turning;
we smiled in our canvas home
before we chose our foreknown separate ways.
And this was the cave of the mirror,
that double woman who stares
at herself, as if she were petrified
in time . . .
If she is to survive, she will have to acknowledge that she is unwillfully
guilty of her own mother’s sin, passed now to another generation:
And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure
nor soothe it, I made you to find me.
In telling her young daughter this truth, she is giving that child a
chance to escape the prison of poisonous identifications handed
from mother to daughter to mother to daughter. Mary Gray, Sexton’s
mother, could not admit or acknowledge this human truth inherent
in the reproductive urge; it is Sexton’s hope that in admitting her own