Anne Sexton Fairy Tale Feminist Critique

Kimberlee Beach

English 35

Professor Capps

17 October 2016

Fairy Tales Revisited and Transformed: An Anne Sexton Critique

For many children, fairytales are the most common thread in their childhood structure. Digitalized and printed fairy stories such as Rapunzel and Cinderella are among the foundations most common in various mediums. In light of Anne Sexton’s transformative poetry, her style of writing produces a particular measure of cynicism towards the fairytale concept of ‘happily ever after’. Following Sexton’s admission to a neuropsychiatric institution after suffering from post-partum depression, it would be accurate to assert that her writing was influenced by the harsh factors in her life. Her mode of writing was dictated by her complicated and perhaps abusive childhood relationship with her parents. Moreover, Sextons earlier works are identified as confessional poetry following the fact that they spoke directly from her personal feelings.  Sexton challenges the ideology of fairy tales based on their classist and more obviously sexist depictions. Her poems retell the fairy tales in a new and different female voice; however, her critiques present complexities that surpass the feminists’ protestation and other concepts related to happiness and perfection. Against that background, it would be appropriate to draw that Anne Sexton transformational poems are not based much on feminist re-writing but rather on darker post-structural and more realistic re-readings.

In Sexton’s version of fairy tales, she pursues the darkness haunting her every waking moment exclusive of the presentation of desolate personal revelation. In her version, Sexton illustrates her ability of narrating tales in a way that appears alarming while excluding her from the poem’s actions taking all the attention from her and compelling her audience to be keen of the assertions in her tales. Additionally, her style of writing uses moderate musing and anecdotes. The introductions in Sexton’s work exposes her audience to the probability of problematic tendencies in approaching fairy tales regarding absolute happiness being a reflection of the bigger problems in our perspective of life. For example, Sexton’s translation of “Cinderella” and “Rapunzel” fairytales, her transformation is more of an act of leadership. Her writing style does not precisely reshape or bend the original fairy tale ideology rather they discover and narrate elements that were implicit in the tales. Author Jack Zipes remarks that, “Sexton enlarges and pronounces the elements already existing in the stories and subjects them to scrutiny while enabling her transformation to take its course in how we perceive the world” (12).

Given the authentic versions of these tales, the audience can efficiently comprehend with Sexton's strains with the impractical nature of tales that kids were brought up believing. Additionally, the sad fact that her family and marriage were both in disasters supports her strains in agreeing with the ideologies in these tales.  In light of Sexton's works, her readers are effectively able to identify the cynicism within these fairy tales. Or in Sexton’s own words, “the girls who had their lives transformed with a kiss” (234). On close inspection of her work, Sexton’s poems criticize the patterns that are familiarized as holding universal value, for instance, the familiar fairy tale phrase, ‘from rags to riches’ correlated to Cinderella compelling us to perceive them as problematic. In her introduction of the Cinderella fairytale, Sextons starts off with four small anecdotes that change the reader’s recognition of this common phrase. Despite the difference in characters and their situation, Sexton maintains a general pattern of the story. For instance, the fairytale ideology of people who live as members of the under-rewarded, over-worked and such as nursemaids meeting good fortune and climbing on to an escalated class and status is severely subjected to scrutiny compelling readers to view such ideologies as nothing more of insignificant unrealistic fantasies.

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