Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

The Poetry of Anne Sexton 209
complicity in this complicated lie, she will provide her child with a
way to escape its implications; or if not to escape them entirely, then
to know that the trap lies baited for her.
But I have called Anne Sexton Oedipus, and Oedipus wanted to
marry his mother, not to harm her. Sexton’s Oedipus/Anne knows
that the mother is the “first overthrown love” for both sexes, and
that the differentiation of desire in males and females occurs later.
It is my contention that Oedipus/Anne does “slay” her mother and
“marry” her father, just as Oedipus slew his father and married his
mother. That Sexton thought herself guilty of her mother’s death,
and of marrying her father, is explicit throughout her canon. (In
“All My Pretty Ones,” she also acknowledges the possibility of an
unconscious guilt connected with her father’s death). Here I will
concentrate on her self-perception of this deadly configuration in
three poems ranging throughout her career: “The Double Image,”
(Bedlam); “Those Times . . .” (Live or Die); and “Divorce, Thy Name
is Woman” (45 Mercy Street). In “Double Image,” she is accused of
her mother’s death; in “Those Times” she acknowledges this unintentional
sin; and in “Divorce, Thy Name is Woman,” she speaks of her
“marriage” throughout life to her father. This is what Oedipus must
discover himself guilty of: the murder of the parent of the same sex,
and forbidden incest with the parent of the opposite sex.
“The Double Image” includes one of the most startling and
frightening of Sexton’s stanzas, made more so by the clever facility
and unexpectedness of the rhyme:
They hung my portrait in the chill
north light, matching
me to keep me well,
Only my mother grew ill.
She turned from me, as if death were catching,
as if death transferred,
as if my dying had eaten inside of her.
That August you were two, but I timed my days with doubt.
On the first of September she looked at me
and said I gave her cancer.
They carved her sweet hills out
and still I couldn’t answer.