Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

The Poetry of Anne Sexton 211
cancer,” matters equally little whether the mother’s trauma over her
daughter’s suicide attempt actually contributed to the development of
her disease. Like Oedipus, she has sought and found her psychic truth:
she slew her mother, who had literary aspirations that Sexton would
fulfill, who was jealous of this beautiful daughter; and she dearly loved
the mother that she slew. That is a hard truth. It is peculiarly Anne
Sexton’s; it is also mine, may be any woman’s. Daughters both “love”
and “slay” their mothers.
Oedipus/Anne acknowledges the other half of her sin in the
countless father poems distributed throughout the canon. Having
detailed this intense and lifelong romance elsewhere, I will here
rely on the late poem, probably composed almost fifteen years after
“The Double Image,” in which she most explicitly acknowledges her
marriage to the father. Part of the sequence in 45 Mercy Street called
“Eating the Leftovers,” “Divorce, Thy Name is Woman” begins in the
aftermath of that lifelong marriage:
I am divorcing daddy—Dybbuk! Dybbuk
I have been doing it daily all my life . . .
In this poem, Sexton constructs a kind of allegory for woman in
western culture. The marriage of daughter to father is represented as
literal.
Later,
When blood and eggs and breasts
dropped onto me,
Daddy and his whiskey breath
made a long midnight visit
in a dream that is not a dream
and then called his lawyer quickly.
Daddy divorcing me.
The “dream that is not a dream” is a psychic fact, a fact of mental life,
something that “actually happens” in the netherland of unconscious
primary process. The father seduces the daughter, then rejects her,
disowning his own passion and hers. “I have been divorcing him ever
since” in the interior world of psychic realities, where the Mother is
her witness in the courtroom. The daughter keeps on divorcing him,