| Anne Sexton described herself in a letter as "the woman of poems, the woman of the kitchen, the woman of the private (but published) hungers." I argue that because she wrote about taboo subjects and improper appetites she expanded the collective consciousness and gave greater freedom to women. Her titles alone could shock a reader who was accustomed to the image of a docile and obedient 1950s "housewife." She wrote "Menstruation at Forty", "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator" and "In Celebration of My Uterus" with noteworthy candor in tackling subjects of female anatomy which had been deemed improper for polite conversation. Her poems were and are powerful tools for consciousness-raising because if the personal is political, then the poems of a woman who writes about her hungers for sex, success, personal identity and more are charged with an urgent social message. This paper investigates the feminist poetics of Sexton's writing including her writing about illicit appetites, her shattering of the image of the 1950s housewife, the role of revisionist mythmaking and her embodiment of the grotesque. |
