Anne Sexton – Sylvia Plath: The Confessuicidal Poets

Confessuicidal poets? What a gloomy title that I chose! But yes, in my opinion, these two poets really trapped my attention with their popularity as confessional poets yet decided to end their precious life by committing suicide. Considering in detail and subjecting to an analysis in the poetry entitled “Housewife” and “Daddy”, I would like to discover the essential features or meaning on their peculiar works in relation with their life story.

Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are very famous and regarded with great favor, approval, or affection especially by the general public for their controversial poetical life and poems. Both of them suffered the same condition of despair and mental breakdowns that somehow became their aspiration in writing their pieces. Most of their poems recounted their life experience, their personal life, their family life, their fight against depressive disorder, and their foremost notorious theme: death and inclination of committing suicide.

In my opinion, these two poets had [almost] the same family background that eventually formed them and instilled them with such kind of trauma that later on would affect their way of thinking and cause terrible mental breakdown in the rest of their life. 

Living in a dysfunctional family, Sexton and Plath ended up with awful memories of their family. Sexton was abandoned by her parents and Plath was being raised by an authoritarian father who died when she was eight years old. Thus, I could conclude why they’re so drown into such kind of bitterness they underwent at their young age. Along these lines, they appeared to endeavor an attempt to survive from their depression. As a result, themes on suicidal attempts, depression, death, family life, and desperation are considered as their object of escapism.  

The two poets were also best known for their death controversy. They said to have several suicide attempt that later on ended up with the same scheme of death in the depths of despair. Sylvia Plath died at age 30 on February 1963 by carbon monoxide poisoning in the kitchen, with her head in the oven, while Anne Sexton died at the age 45 on October 1974 also by carbon monoxide poisoning in the garage. She might have inspired by her fellow student in Robert Lowell’s writing seminar at Boston University; Sylvia Plath. This was a surprising and lamenting fact that the poets revealed. 

The poems “Housewife” by Sexton and “Daddy” by Plath talked much about their family lives; their relationship with their family members. In Housewife, Sexton merely narrated about her self reflection episodes through a simple and concise poem. As it is said in her biographical information, Sexton’s poems articulate some of the deepest dilemmas of her contemporaries about her most fundamental hopes and fears. She might have depicted her life’s experience as a mother and a housewife in this poem.

Sexton gave rise to a desire by being attractive in her opening lines. As she stated, “Some women marry houses.” For me, it’s kind of true, since most women, when they become a housewife, they will have a 24/7 affiliation with the ‘house hold’ things. It’s not surprising that after a woman got married, she seems to marry the house not the husband. It is shown by the line, “It’s another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver, and bowel movements.” This line represents how women deal with the life after marriage. The house is portrayed to be the other kind of skin and having some human’s body parts such as heart, mouth, and liver. It shows me that the ‘house’ revealed to be a real living thing, a real companion in struggling through the life after marriage.

Then, I could draw conclusion for the reason why Sexton wrote this line. As I got some information from her biography, it was due to the leaving of her husband. Her husband joined the marine and was sent to Korea. During the absence of her husband, she entered therapy. She appeared to be a single mother raising her child alone while her husband was away. This might caused a disturbance in her life, that a family should consist of a husband and wife that should share job in enduring their marriage. Or, according to my own interpretation, Sexton and her husband have a certain outward aspect that somehow they could not communicate and work together as a husband and wife.

When I came to the line where Sexton said, “The walls are permanent and pink,” it appeared in my mind that every married woman in the world really want to have a permanent marriage, none of them, including me--later, wanting to have a difficult marriage that ends up with divorcement. It did happen to Sexton, a year before she killed herself; she split up with her husband. Then, as we all know, pink color symbolizes love, romance, and excitement. Sexton used the pink color to symbolize the celebration of love, the romantic life, and the excitement in the marriage itself. Yet, it looks as if it is the outer skin of the marriage, in fact, as it is said in the fifth line, “See how she sits on her knees all day,” wives contribute their whole life to serve the husband, and if they have children, they are the one who completely deprive their selves into their children’s development. The line “Men enter by force,” shows me that men just engage with the forcing of their demands. Here, particularly, men always associated with the sexual abuse or domestic violence in a family. “See how she sits on her knees all day” also shows me the domestic violence part. It reveals how a woman forced to do the household things up till “faithfully washing herself down”.

Just exactly like what I have in Indonesian culture, where most of the society acknowledges the concept of patriarch family. Women, or wives, should obey their husbands’ demands. They are not allowed to complain and criticize the husbands’ decision. Javanese culture particularly, holds high the position of husband in a family. Yet women are more inferior to men. They always put aside. They have to choose; to be married or continue their career while receive mockery from other people.

Responding to this tradition, no, it’s not a tradition actually. It’s a mindset. It’s a stereotype infused by the other people. Not to give a bad valuation to my own culture, it’s just my fidgetiness towards this old-fashioned mindset. Javanese people tend to have a hand in other people’s business even though they still have their own problems waiting to be solved. If I have to choose, I will choose to pursue my cherished desire, my strong drive for success. Then, after that, I will be married, have children, and continue what I will have achieved.

Whereas Sexton narrated her life as a woman and a housewife, Plath described her father and child relationship in her poem Daddy. Still in the theme of confession, this poem clearly reveals her anger, her hatred, and her vengeance towards her father. Known as an authoritarian and dictator in the family, Plath expressed her rage for her father died when she was only eight years old.

Most Plath poems are lengthy and use so much imagery. In the first stanza of Daddy, she depersonified her self as a foot and her father as black shoes. She used the shoe figure as we know that shoes are worn to protect the foot from stepping something. It illustrates that her father was her protector but he was died and letting her lived under poverty and sufferings. Yet, this shoe imagery could also be something ‘ladylike’ (as you suggest). It somehow represents the uncomfortableness, the state of being tense and feeling pain when wearing a pair of shoes. I could imagine my self wearing stilettos and what a hurtful sensation that I felt on my toes, ankles, and heels. Using this stilettos analogy, I would like to determine following investigation about the usage of the shoe imagery in Plath’s poem, Daddy. As we all know, stilettos is a kind of woman shoes with a very high narrow heel on the shoes. It appears to be perfect and elegant shoes. Graceful and classy. Yet, to wear this kind of shoe, needs a sacrifice to endure such hurt feeling, be uncomfortable or in pain. This is kind of shoe that Plath tried to portray her father, to give a mental representation of her father. 

The second stanza, where she wrote, “Daddy, I have had to kill you, You died before I had time----“ gave me the idea about the time she couldn’t spend with her father. She seemed to blame her father for leaving her without giving any affection from a father to his daughter. She was lacking of warm compassionate feelings during her childhood. 

In the 27^th line, the German words, “Ich, ich, ich, ich” instead of revealing an inclination of her existence (Ich means I in English), somehow it gives me the impression of hurt feeling, as I tried to pronounce it, the words sounded almost like “itch, itch, itch”. It’s like a contagious skin infection caused by the itch bug and causing skin irritation. In my opinion, this was another imagery used by Plath to divulge the figure of her father as the one who cause what I called as her “mind infection” and “heart irritation”.

Plath exploited so many harsh words and cruel imagery as I discovered in the seventh stanza, the 31^st line and so on, where she positioned herself as a Jew in the Nazi concentration camps of Holocaust. She even wrote that her father was like an engine that chuffing her off like a Jew. It might be her father as a German descendant that caused her used German’s imagery as she told that “I thought every German was you”. At this point, I would like to ask, whether or not she conceive her father and Nazi leader, Hitler, having the same personality? Or it’s kind of tribute to the brute treatment that she received from her father so she used such Nazi imagery?

Lines by lines she consistently scorned and expressed her hatred towards father in words. From “I have always been scared of you”, “Brute heart of a brute like you”, “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot, But no less a devil for that…”, “There’s a stake in your fat black heart, And the villagers never liked you”, until “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”.

Furthermore, Plath also described her father as God and Devil. Two completely inverse things. Plath, who’s been left by father since she was eight years old, considered her father as someone who has a God-like dignitary. A father to a child will be a guiding star, someone who will always be there to accompany and to guide his child. However, Plath felt the other way around. She might think that she did not have a good memory with her father, so she juxtaposed the Godlike with the Devil-like character. It is clearly seen that Plath’s words and imagery are all of the tokens of the same symbol: bitterness, satirical mimicry and hatred towards her father.

As I came to the end of the poem, I found out that she used the word black so many times. The first one is in the second line, the black shoe, then in the 55^th line, A man in black with a Meinkampf, in the 69^th line, the black telephone, and in the 76^th line, your fat black heart. As we all already know, black represents dark power, sexuality, sophistication, formality, mystery, fear, evil, unhappiness, depth, sadness, remorse, anger, anonymity, underground, mourning, and death. Specifically, this poem emphasized the black color as a color that symbolizes dark power, fear, evil, unhappiness, sadness, remorse, anger, mourning, and death. By using this metaphor, Plath again and again tried to convey all her feelings and poured it all into this poem.

As the end result of an analysis process of the family backgrounds of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, I could reach a conclusion that their splendid writings are overshadowed and overwhelmed by things they experienced throughout their lives. The core link between these literary works is the poets’ experiences that they apprehended as an accumulation of psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning that residues from direct engagement commencing the time they were raised by their parents and family. 

In addition, I also found out that these two poets; Sexton and Plath had come to believe on the basis of emotion, intuition, or indefinite grounds that poetry with confessional themes are their way to relief such burden in their life. They used poetry to remove oneself from a familiar environment, usually for pleasure or diversion. To come upon after searching; find the enjoyment, find the joyous revenge of something or someone that was missed or lost. In this specific theme, Sexton tried to discover what’s been missing from her as a housewife, what she experienced and lived through her firsthand knowledge of states, situations, emotions, or sensations of being a housewife, while Plath tried to perceive her loosing of her father by paying lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense dislike.