“FOR WE SWALLOW MAGIC AND WE DELIVER ANNE”:
ANNE SEXTON’S USE OF HER NAME
Karen Alkalay‑Gut
The Anna Book, ed. M. Pearlman, Greenwood Press, September 1992, 139-151.
Anne Sexton is generally regarded as a confessional poet, a woman whose talent for formal poetry and whose madness coincided for a number of years until her madness took control, her poetry lost its polish, and she took her life. It is because of this reputation as a “mad” poet that criticism of Sexton’s poetry deals primarily with her earlier, formal work, and that her later work in particular is judged more as a phenomenon than as poetry. Her subjects -‑ parental relations and the perversions of these relationships, abortion, menstruation, sexuality, love, and the body -‑ are considered fascinating as documents in the history of feminism, but are not treated as works of art. As a result Sexton is often viewed as a precursor of modern feminism, as a psychological case study, but not as a poet.
Recent criticism, however, is beginning to reevaluate Sexton’s motivations and control, and it is becoming apparent that Sexton was not a “mad poet” but a poet of madness. {1} This distinction is crucial. If Sexton does not understand what she is doing, but is only allowing her “emotions” full rein, she is not an artist. If she is operating within some understanding of her situation and using this material in a controlled way in her work, her poetry needs to be reconsidered as poetry.
A key to understanding precisely how Sexton perceives and manipulates her sense of identity can be seen through an examination of the way in which Sexton uses her own name. Her sense of “Anne” as a child, a character, an almost mythic person, is readily apparent. But an examination of her poetry reveals that Sexton’s manipulation of herself through her name surpasses analysis and approaches mysticism. She comes to use her name as a mantra, as a means to transcendence, as well as a tool for analysis. In fact Sexton’s use of the name Anne shows a clear progression as she endeavors to wrest control over her identity and examine through her poetry the personalities of “Anne” as they exist within her, and the possibilities of transcendence from her untenable neurotic situations without the loss of her identity.
But in her final poems, this transcendence fails, and the name is both parodied and rejected as identity is objectified and lost.
Early in her work, Sexton uses her name to give the impression of an incorporated disciplinarian, much as any individual refers to the self in the third person to give a parental or social perspective. When she uses her name, it is to recall herself as others perceive her. In her later poetry, however, she examines different “Annas,” looking at the kinds of characters she has been ‑ from her real life, mad aunt Anna, to the cartoon character, little Orphan Annie. Elsewhere, she sees her name as the “Ane,” the donkey that will help her to escape her untenable situation, and as the self‑named newborn who will emerge from a mystical unification with the universe.
Although it might be argued that the use of the name “Anne” is simply an autobiographical necessity, it should also be clear that in the genre of autobiography the name may itself become a kind of imperative. As Sidonie Smith points out, “Trying to tell the story she wants to tell of herself, [the autobiographer] is seduced into a tantalizing and yet elusive adventure that makes of her both creator and creation, writer and that which is written about. The very language she uses to name herself is simultaneously empowering and vitiating since words cannot capture the full sense of being and narratives explode in multiple directions on their own.” {2} And Sexton too is exploring and using her name in a quest for self discovery.
The fortunate chance that gave the poet the name Anne also allowed her to rise beyond autobiography in her use of her own name: to use a name associated with all manner of literary heroines is to make the individual confessional speaker into a representative literary heroine. Which heroine to choose is the only problem.
1
The importance to Sexton of her name is apparent even in her most adolescent of poems. At finishing school she published a poem called “On the Dunes” in which she advises that if one wishes to bring her back from death, “Stand on the seaward dunes and call my name.” {3}. Her awareness of her name and the roles it evokes abound in her early letters. She is “Anne Sexton, Poet.” (LP, 31), “Anne Frank not Anne Sexton.” (LP, 194) “Your Princess Anne..” (LP, 207, 212‑4). And in an allusion to Anne of Green Gables, she signs letters, “Anne of Weston” (LP, 328). Clearly she associated herself with the other Annes and the element of artificiality in the association allowed her a needed dramatic freedom. Even her close friend, Maxine Kumin, wrote her name in quotation marks on occasion. “‘Anne,’” she notes in her introduction to Sexton’s Selected Poems, “is possessed by terrifying forces of darkness and prophecy.” {4}
The name is a portion of her self. Writing to W.D. Snodgrass, Sexton notes, “It is too long since I have poured out Some Anne and offered it up to you.” (LP, 91) To Hollis Summers, she writes about an element called “Anne soul.” (LP, 101, 102). Distinguishing names for her is also a way of delineating identity: In one of the poems in “Words for Dr. Y.,” unpublished during her lifetime, but included in her volume of collected poems, she writes to her psychiatrist about her transference and ends the poems with a clear effort at crispness and separation with the rhyme: “I am in a delight with you, Music Man./ Your name is Dr. Y. My name is Anne.” {5}
Throughout her work, names were powerful for Sexton. She named her daughter Joy, she claims in “The Double Image” (CP, 42) and “A Little Uncomplicated Hymn” (CP, 148) because it would be a means for achieving Joy. In a poem written two years before her death, she finds in her address book the name of someone she now hates, probably her teacher John Holmes whose approval she sought and failed to achieve. “The bird in me is blind/” she rages, “as I knife out your name and all your dead kind.” (CP, 586) Other examples of the power of names alone abound in her poems.
Sexton’s early poetry, however, reveals some of the power and limitations of the primitive in her use of her name as described in the Golden Bough:
unable to distinguish clearly between words and things, the savage commonly fancies that the link between a name and the person or thing denominated by it is not a mere arbitrary and ideal association, but a real and substantial bond which unites the two in such a way that magic may be wrought on a man just as easily through his name as through his hair, his nails, or any other material part of his person. In fact, primitive man regards his name as a vital portion of himself and takes care of it accordingly. {6}
Sexton’s first use of her own name occurs in “The Operation.” An exceedingly concise narrative, “the Operation” encompasses both the story of her mother’s illness and death from cancer and her own subsequent operation for the same disease that killed her mother. The standard guilt of the survivor is coupled with the guilt that she is the cause of the cancer which “grew in her [mother]/ . . . as simply as a child would grow,/ as simply as she housed me once, fat and female.” (CP, 56) So she is both killer and victim, both disease and mother. And her own identity is further effaced by the situation of the operation, where reign her “almost mighty doctor” who makes all the decisions concerning her most private self and the nurses who treat her like an anonymous patient, a nameless lamb. With these “great green people” (CP, 58) controlling her, she loses all sense of identity, becomes a “shorn lamb. /A nurse’s flashlight blinds me to see who I am.” But even though she blinds her, the nurse doesn’t recognize her. In the morning “I smile at the nurse/ who smiles for the morning shift.” (CP, 57) Under anesthesia Anne calls for her mother, either asking to join her in death or asking for help in separating, or simply for strength. She calls again as she begins to come out “to help myself”, and once again when she begins to recover, she says, “God knows/ I thought I’d die ‑- but here I am,/ recalling mother, the sound of her/ good morning, the odor of orange and jam.” (CP, 59) The invocation of her mother has become an incorporation of Mother. She knows there is no mother to help her, but also that she must take on the maternal function in herself in order to make the monumental effort required to recover.
In the next and final verse the incorporation is complete. The speaker refers to herself in the third person, calling her as her mother would have: “Time now to pack this humpty‑dumpty/back the frightened way she came/ and run along Anne, run along now . . .” (CP, 59) She has incorporated the voice of “Mother,” separated herself from her real mother, and become the mother of herself. {7} And the transition is accomplished through the invocation of “Mother” and “Anne.” {8} Despite the unification of their bodies, Anne has her own name.
Individuation from her mother is accomplished in “The Operation,” but the struggle for individuation from her mother continues throughout her poetry. {9} Her poems are structured to lead to solutions, but solutions are not as simple as poems. And Sexton’s difficulties were complicated by two major factors related to names: Although she perceived the symbolic significance of her name and that of her mother, Mary, she was unable ultimately to create a positive interrelationship between these two interrelating names. She could not become Anne, the mother and creator of Mary, but always remained Anne, who can never be as good as Mary. This symbolic name conflict becomes more significant for her in her later poetry, and will be discussed more fully in that context.
An earlier, more convoluted name‑bind, is based on the fact that Anne Sexton was named for her aunt, Anna Ladd Dingley, with whom she was extremely close. While her mother Mary played the perfectionist role of superior humiliating disciplinarian and rejecting mother, Aunt Anna, or “Nana” as she was called, was a warm maternal substitute for the first thirteen years of Sexton’s life.
Sexton’s relationship with “Nana” appears throughout her poetry. When she retells the Grimm fairy tale of “Rapunzel,” she returns to her memories of Nana who read her these tales as a child {10}. Sexton’s version of “Rapunzel” gives the girl and the witch who imprisons her in the tower a similar idyllic relationship, maternal and sexual in nature. But, as with Rapunzel, romance in Sexton’s life interfered with the idyll. Sexton recounts that at the age of thirteen she kissed a boy and joyfully told her aunt, who went mad a week later and blamed Sexton for it. It is here that Sexton seems to have learned of her sexual powers for destruction and her supposed need for punishment. It was only when she could learn to harness these powers that she could discover her potential to save herself.
Her identification with Anna Dingley was great, but in her early poetry of the mid‑fifties she wrote about her using the name ‘Elizabeth.’ Perhaps this name change was necessary because Anna had recently died (in 1954), or because the material and the identification was too great, or because the confusion between author and subject would have distracted the reader. But Elizabeth was also a significant name for Sexton. In a letter to a friend and potential biographer, Lois Ames, Sexton writes, “Did I ever tell you about Elizabeth? She’s manic‑Anne and sometimes sexy‑Anne. You’ve seen her. But perhaps didn’t know her name. My father called me ‘a‑little‑bitch.; I thought he meant my name was Elizabeth.” (LP, 327) By calling her aunt Anne Elizabeth she could isolated the “little‑bitch” aspect of herself and project it onto another. Perhaps this allowed her, at least temporarily, to feel a limited sense of integration.
Despite the necessity to objectify her aunt by giving her another name (something she very rarely does in her poetry), Sexton displays their very close relationship in later poems. In XLive or DieY (1966), Sexton attempts to make her peace with her Nana by following literally in her footsteps. After reading Nana’s epistolatory description of an 1890 visit to Paris, Sexton relates to these letters in “Walking in Paris.” Her purpose is double ‑ to “clean off/ the mad woman you became” (CP, 135) and to identify with that clean person, to be her “sister” and exist with her as “two virgins” (CP, 136) with pure, uncorrupted lives. In this way she reclaims the name Anne, but by denying part of its connotations for her.
Given the partiality of this reconciliation, it is not surprising that Sexton must return again to this subject later. “Anna Who Was Mad” and “The Hex” from The Book of Folly, (1972) are also direct addresses to “Nana” but on a more primary level. “Did I make you go insane?” (CP, 312) she asks three times in “Anna Who Was Mad.” “Give me a report on the condition of my soul.” Her imprecations to Nana indicate the necessity for wholeness, the desire to know all sides of Nana and Anne, but in asking, she returns to the maternal image: “Speak Mary‑words into our pillow.” “The Hex,” in contrast, describes the curse of Anna which has so infiltrated the speaker that her life is unbearable. Whatever positive achievements “Anne” may fulfill, her responsibility for the madness of her “Nana” is so great that these achievements become part of a further crime, that of concealing evidence. “”Yes!” she admits at the end, “I am still the criminal./ Yes! Take me to the station house./ But book my double.” (CP, 314).
In the former poem Anne is too remote from her Nana; in the latter she is too deeply enmeshed. In both cases she is not in control of her memory or her identity. Reaching out to “Nana” or endeavoring to escape, she is controlled. {11} But, a few poems later, she reaffirms her resolve to continue. In “The Hoarder” she thinks of herself as a “digger,” as someone constantly searching. Even as a child when she broke “Nana’s clock” (CP, 319), symbolic of her sanity and order, she now understands, she was seeking some truth. In this search there is a partial justification for her inveterate destruction.
Most significant about these two Anna poems are that they are included in The Book of Folly, and that they are consciously self‑indulgent and wallowing in folly. This suggests Sexton’s perception of a need for further objectification -‑ a need to proceed beyond folly.
2
It is only when Sexton is able to disassociate her name from its personal and traditional connotations that she is capable of using it as a means to freedom. In “Flee on Your Donkey,” Sexton takes another association of her name from the French word for donkey, “ane,” and uses it to create a bootstrap theory of self healing. “I was reading a quote from Rimbaud that said, “Anne, Anne, Flee on your donkey,” and I typed it out because it had my name in it and because I wanted to flee.” {12}
Ma faim, Anne, Anne,
Fuis sur ton ane . . . Rimbaud
It is interesting that Sexton uncharacteristically begins this poem with lines from another poet and selects a foreign language in which to interpret her name. As Carolyn Burke has noted, French was often the language in which women early in the century learned to speak “herself into existence” {13}. It is the foreignness of the words of Rimbaud and, more specifically, the word “ane” which allows a different perspective, allows a duality within the simple name. Here she is both the victim and the source of escape.
“Flee on your Donkey” is much revised, nevertheless Sexton achieves great immediacy in describing the despair and boredom of her sixth hospitalization in a mental home as well as her “frustration with the themes and strategies of her poetry to date.” (Kumin, SP, xiv) The poem begins with an explanation of the reason for a breakdown ‑ the lack of alternatives. The “scene of disordered senses” is both a reference to Rimbaud and a description of what R.D. Laing called the “schizophrenic experience.” But the distinction is important ‑ she is not any more disordered than she was before ‑- she simply has no other place to go. After a careful description of the hospital in all its banal familiarity, the speaker bewails this very familiarity and the unproductive circularity of her existence.
Six years of such small preoccupations!
Six years of shuttling in and out of this place!
O my hunger! My hunger!
In the course of the poem she reviews the whole history of her psychoanalysis, and her reliance upon psychoanalysis, the psychoanalyst, drugs, and even the asylum to cure her, to relieve her of the “hunger.” And finally, as in “The Operation,” she returns to her name, calling herself to take responsibility for and control of the situation:
Turn, my hungers!
For once make a deliberate decision.
…..
ride out on some hairy beast,
gallop backward pressing
your buttocks to his withers,
sit to his clumsy gait somehow.
Even while she is riding backward, reviewing that repetitive and unproductive past, Sexton here manages to “flee this sad hotel” both by addressing herself, and by using her name ‑- the donkey -‑ to ride upon, like Jesus into Jerusalem. This is “the recognition that she has exhausted both her repetitious sickness and its therapies as sources of creative self‑knowledge; she needs a new angle of vision,” as Coburn notes {14}. But it is also more than a tactical alteration; it is an attempt to reunite, to recompose her identity ‑- incorporating her maternal self. “. . .From now on,” Dianne Middlebrook notes, “Sexton assumes an unconventional relation to her own madness. No longer merely its victim, she is now its interrogator.” (Coburn, 453) “Anne” is now a character, a word she will attempt to control, to work with, and to create.
3
When Sexton divides into two characters, Anne and “Ms. Dog,” in her poem, “Hurry Up Please It’s Time” (CP, 384), it is to analyze the nature of her personal identities. “Ms. Dog” {15} is “man’s best friend,” hungry for a pat on the head, the social self in part created or determined by implied male readers or viewers. “Anne” is now the power behind Ms. Dog, allowing Sexton her exhibitionistic exposure, but with a separate intellectual and analytic counterpart. Even the poetic personality is no longer “Anne,” no longer the exposed, divided self, but the calculating exhibitionist “Ms. Dog,” “spilling her guts . . . into the mike.” (CP, 387)
“Anne” is the weary poet behind the public poetic character who is “sorrowful in November” but knows this is not what her audience wants to hear. They want, instead, “bee stings” ‑ powerful, compressed, painful and formal verse. “Anne” allows the flagrant Ms. Dog her thrills of nude sunbathing while her neighbors stare, and other productive and creative outbursts, such as the one against her critics who wish to limit her “flagrancy”: “And you too! Wants to stuff her in a cold shoe/ and then amputate the foot.” (CP, 394) Ms. Dog, this poetic persona, is the only one who dares find answers, salvation:
Bring a flashlight, Ms. Dog,
and look in every corner of the brain
and ask and ask and ask
until the kingdom,
however queer,
will come.
“Anne” remains the good girl ‑ an additional character is created to accomodate what she wants to become. Clearly this is not an integrated solution.
4
It is in the next poem, “O Ye Tongues,” that the queer kingdom does come, and “Anne,” a central character in this poem, is born. “Oh Ye Tongues,” modelled on Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, is a series of ten “psalms,” which seem more like caveats creating a God‑like world than psalms in praise of God. {16} In it gradually appear ‑ like Adam and Eve ‑ Christopher and Anne, newly born into a new world in which innocence is physically confined and emotionally tortured. “Christopher,” her imaginary brother, is both Christ the redeemer and, as Alicia Ostriker has pointed out, Christopher Smart, “another madman who spoke ‘language,’” {17} whose Jubilate Agno is imitated here. Carolyn King points out that Sexton and Smart were both “poets; both drank excessively and spent time in mental institutions, both had two daughters. And the real, unrealized love of Christopher Smart’s life was a woman named Anne, who appears as ‘Anne Hope,’ her real and thematically significant married name, in this poem.” (CP, 141) The transformation of Smart’s name into Chris and Sexton’s into “Anne” makes the two of them equal. The poet becomes the sacrificed redeemer: Anne = Christ. This equation is not heretical, but visionary. By the fourth psalm it emerges that Anne and Christopher were “born in my head” when the speaker (Sexton herself since she uses autobiographical material frequently used in previous poems) was locked in her rose‑papered bedroom for days and nights by her mother. The use of nouns and pronouns here are particularly of concern:
For Anne and Christopher were born in my head as I howled at the grave of the roses, the ninety‑four rose creches of my bedroom.
The speaker, referring to herself in both first and third person, is both “Anne” and Anne. In this psalm she describes the agonies of childhood loneliness in the first person, but when she comes to realize that even this unbearable situation of helplessness in the face of confining parents is possible to escape through an act of will, she has triumphed:
For birth was a disease and Christopher and I invented the cure.
For we swallow magic and we deliver Anne.
(CP, 403)
This delivery of Anne is the magic. She has created herself as her own Messiah.
5
This euphoric condition ‑ so steeped in names and reliant upon word associations ‑ is not translatable to reality. The transcendent vision of “O Ye Tongues” is not repeated in Sexton’s later work. What is left in Sexton’s later, and undated, poetry, is the association with lesser, and less free, myths.
Two other “Annes,” used by Sexton, reveal her subsequent limitations: “Orphan Annie” and “Anne‑not‑Mary.” The former is a realization of the self as caricature, the latter a rejection of self‑identity.
In Sexton’s narrative of Snow White which appeared in Transformations (1971), the naive heroine who is so self‑deceived about her mother’s intentions that she succumbs three times to similar schemes, is compared—with her wide‑eyed innocent glance—to Orphan Annie. (CP, 227) Although the argument is too complex to develop here, “Snow White” deals with the way in which the daughter becomes the mother within the closed circle of social values. Snow White, because of the emphasis upon her beauty, must become the wicked queen. In this poem Sexton identifies with the passive heroine who is tortured by her jealous mother and who grows to resemble her in her behavior. Her orphan state, then, is connected to her motherlessness. In her unpublished biographical poem,’ “’Daddy’ Warbucks,” in memory of her father, (CP, 543) her orphanhood is linked to the father. Since Sexton’s own father’s wool firm was made successful by the increased need for wool during World War II, (LP, 3) she could accurately call him “Daddy Warbucks,” and since she wrote the poem in his memory, she was literally “Orphan Annie”—the fatherless child who is endangered by her unprotected innocence and in constant need of a protector. To what extent Sexton actually identified with “Orphan Annie,” with her innocent, expressionless eyes, is not clear, but her use of “Orphan Annie” expressions such as “Jumping Jampots” and “Jumping Catfish” (LP, 217) in her letters is telling.
The poem “’Daddy’ Warbucks” is a version of Plath’s “Daddy.” At first innocent and accepting, it becomes distorted in its willful innocence and then finally wise and rejecting of the role of daughter. Death “offers a clear escape” for “Annie” from “Daddy,” who is, like Plath’s “Daddy,” both father and husband.
Annie, Annie you sang.
…..
But I died yesterday,
“Daddy,” I died,
swallowing the Nazi‑Jap animal
and it won’t get out
it keeps knocking at my eyes
my big orphan eyes,
kicking! (CP, 544)
Since she will never be able to really escape the identity of Orphan Annie, her attempt to reject the role imposed upon her by her name and her father is a clear sign of her attempt to deal with the question of identity through her name. But her growing awareness of the significance of her name in relation to that of her pure mother, “Mary,” {18} in those poems concerned with her mother and her own identity reveal an antithetical direction. In Sexton’s introduction to “Red Riding Hood” she uses herself as an example of a living lie: “I built a summer house on Cape Ann./ A simple A‑frame and this too was/ a deception—nothing haunts a new house.” (CP, 269) Her late mother comes to reproach her “for losing her keys to the old cottage.” Sexton’s attempt to be Anne without the baggage of her mother, without the old keys, must lead to failure, and this failure is flamboyantly proclaimed in the posthumously published “The Angel Food Dogs:”
Mother, may I use you as a pseudonym?
May I take the dove named Mary
and shove out Anne?
…….
Mary, Mary, virgin forever,
whore forever,
give me your name…
(CP, 539‑40)
The name “Mary,” inherently successful because it can incorporate the identities of both “virgin” and “whore,” is finally judged the only possible name that could redeem the poet. Anne is always partial, always limited.
This is Sexton’s ultimate failure, the inability to “deliver” Anne. Despite her perilously achieved self‑knowledge, she is incapable of integrating that self‑knowledge into her identity, incapable of magically making the name “Anne” into the source of unified strength.
NOTES
1. The consciousness and control of Anne Sexton is suggested by Diana Hume George in a study of “The Death Baby”: “…while Sexton was not a psychoanalytic theorist by any measure, she was preeminently a psychoanalytic poet, and . . . she clearly wishes to convey not only a truth she has lived but something close to a thesis about the working of unconscious mental life.” Diana Hume George, ed. Sexton: Selected Criticism, (Urbana: U. of Illinois Press, 1988), 78.
Middlebrook claims Sexton employs a persona, that she always introduced her readings with “Her Kind” which “conveys the terms on which she wishes to be understood: not victim, but witness and witch.” (Diane Middlebrook, in Steven Coburn, Telling The Tale (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 449.
2. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self Representation. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 46.
3. Anne Sexton, A Self‑Portrait in Letters. edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (Boston: Houghton‑Mifflin, 1977) 9. Subsequent quotations from this volume are denoted by “LP” followed by page numbers in the text.
4. Maxine Kumin, “Preface,” in Selected Poems of Anne Sexton. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989) xiv. Subsequent quotations from this text are denoted by “SP” followed by page numbers in the text.
5. Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 573. Subsequent quotations from this text are denoted by “CP” followed by page numbers in the text.
6. James George Frazer, “Taboo and the Perils of the Soul” Vol. III The Golden Bough. 3 ed., 12 vols. (London 1911‑1915), 318.
7. Sexton’s theory of the incorporation of the mother into the daughter’s mentality can be seen elsewhere, particularly in “Housewife.” See my essay, “The Main Thing: Anne Sexton’s ‘Housewife’” Explicator (Winter, 1989), 52‑54.
8. It is interesting to note that Sexton found a different, less creative solution in her letters from this problem of identity: “I am working on a new thing that may not work (an operation, death,cancer, mother, me) thing. Damn thing. I could really write it if I could just die at the end. Full cycle. Mother dies her ugly death and now Anne follows, trailing her guilty gowns down the last aisle” (LP, 92).
9. Her realizations that the solutions she found in poetry were not always transferable to her life were everywhere. “I haven’t forgiven my father,” she says in an interview, “I just wrote that I did.” (The Poets’ Craft Interviews from New York Quarterly ed. William Packard. New York: Paragon, 1987), 19.
10. Maxine Kumin, “A Friendship Remembered,” in To Make a Prairie: Essays on Poets,Poetry, and Country Living. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1979), 89.
11. Other poems, unpublished in her lifetime, deal with the subject of her guilt for Nana’s madness, particularly poems of “Words for Dr.Y.” (CP, 571)
12. Anne Sexton, No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interview and Prose. Edited by Steven E. Colburn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1985), 96.
13. Burke, Carolyn, “Report From Paris: Women’s Writing and the Women’s Movement,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Summer, 1978), 844.
14. Coburn, Steven, Telling The Tale (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989) 453. Subsequent quotations from this text are denoted by “Coburn” followed by page numbers in the text.
15. Ms. Dog has also been identified as “possibly a descendent of Eliot’s Wasteland dog… whose activity underscores both the attempt to bury memory and the failure of faith in resurrection and thus in ultimacy of life.” Carolyn King, Anne Sexton (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989) 137.
16. William Force Stead claims that the theme of Jubilate Agno is “the bringing together of the whole of creation in praise of the creator,” (13‑14) and Carolyn King, who quotes Stead, relates this idea to “O Ye Tongues” as well.” Smart, Christopher, Rejoice in the Lamb” A Song From Bedlam, ed. W.F. Stead. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939) as quoted in King, 142.
17. “Anne Sexton and the Seduction of the Audience,” in George, 8‑9. See also Alicia Ostriker, “Comment on Claire Kahane: Questioning the Maternal Voice” Genders 4 (March, 1989), 130‑33.
18. Sexton’s conscious use of her mother’s name deserves a full length work in itself.