On the Motif of Suicide in the Poetry of Anne Sexton (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine", language: English, abstract: The following thesis aims to give an insight into Anne Sexton's life and work. First, I will give an overview of Anne Sexton's biography, concentrating on her childhood and youth, the beginning of her illness, the marriage and her "other" character as a poet. Further, I will focus on her poetry with special remarks on the motif of suicide. Due to the multiplicity of her works and an even greater amount of diverging analytical approaches, I am going to concentrate on a selection of concepts, including the aspect of guilt, escape from life, society, religion, love and spirituality. I will pay special attention to the poem "Wanting to Die" and examine the representation of suicide along the poem.

Anne Sexton is counted among the most influential American poets of modern times. She was raised in a society in which women could only reach feminine fulfillment by being the perfect suburban housewife: healthy, attractive and only concerned about her husband, children, and the household. A society in which mental disorders and depression were seen as inappropriate behavior or harmless housewife blues. A society in which thousands of women missed to meet those expectations and considered themselves as individual failures. Anne Sexton was one of them. Raised by callous parents, she found herself deeply depressed and overstrained in a household with a husband and two small children. What followed were several suicide attempts, psychiatric treatment and her so-called rebirth at twenty-nine, when she started writing poetry, that was centered on her personal feelings and experiences.

What was intended to serve as a form of self-therapy was soon becoming a poetic confession dealing with topics many women and suicide patients had experienced but had been too afraid to talk about. To do something that was valued by others gave Anne Sexton strong self-esteem, but also created a wide gap between her public representation and her personal state of being. Critics were in disagreement whether she was groundbreaking confessional or narcissistic or completely insane. Or everything at once. Dealing with such a complex personality a variety of questions come to mind: To what extent did Anne Sexton's biography influence her writing? Did writing poetry help her to overcome times of despair or did it even enhance her mental disorder? How is the topic of suicide depicted in her poems? Can Anne Sexton be considered as a forerunner for later feminist movements?