Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

212
The Poetry of Anne Sexton
“adding up the crimes / Of how he came to me, / how he left me.”
Sexton’s speaker takes on the voice of any woman working out her
childhood love for her father, any woman still
waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home
and stuff me so full of our infected child
that I turn invisible, but married,
at last.
To be born a woman in a patriarchy is often to be compelled to live
out precisely this ritual. The maternal urge becomes a parody of its first
manifestation in the desire to present the father with a child. This, in
the tortured psychic world of the poem, is the only true marriage; all
others are only pale and inadequate reflections of this primal union. To
marry one’s father is, indeed, to “turn invisible,” for it means that the
daughter, becomes not herself, not her mother, but an inverted parody
of herself and her mother, of wife and daughter. Acknowledging the
incestuous foundations of romantic love on which not only the family,
but all western culture is based, Sexton exposes the underbelly of the
myth—that we are all “the infected child” of incest, that we all become
“invisible,” effaced, in the need to “marry, at last.” Marriage is the
sanctification of incest, the sacred profanity whose nature we expend
our sublimated energies denying. We are all possessed by the dybbuks
of our personal and cultural pasts. What Sexton speaks of here is as
narrow as the room of each womb we come from, and as broad as
our dedication to Classical culture. We are all implicated, fathers and
daughters alike, all dwelling in a shadow world in which the realities
we perceive are shadows of original forms—and of original desires.
We stay in the cave willingly, perceiving reflected forms, because we
cannot look upon those forms directly without becoming “invisible.”
Yet we seek that original form, that original desire, never quite content
with its substitute.
While Sexton breaks this ultimate taboo, thereby acknowledging
her self-effacement, her speaker also wants to affirm the divorce. The
“solution” of the poem is a continual process of divorce, an unending
courtroom scene, but one which always returns from courtroom to
bedroom, where the woman is “opening and shutting the windows.
Making the bed and tearing it apart.” Before and after the divorce
of man and wife is this continuous marriage to and divorce from the