Madness and Suicide
A persistent pre-occupation with madness and suicide can be found throughout the poetry of Sexton; it is what she is most famous for writing about. So inextricably intertwined is the connection between mental illness and thoughts of suicide in her verse that it even shows up in the titles of entire collections. The notorious London asylum known as Bedlam is referenced in the title of her first collection. She would later win a Pulitzer Prize for a collection tellingly titled Live or Die. In addition, an extensive number of individual poems that show up in these and other collections published both during her lifetime and posthumously directly confront the issue of mental illness pushed to the point of the contemplation of suicide.
Identity
Part of the issues driving Sexton both to seek treatment for her mental health issues and contemplate the suicide she eventually acted upon were connected to a drive to establish an identity as a rebellious artist while struggling with the need to conform to a repressive expectation of what it meant to be a woman in mid-20th century America. At the very same time she was writing what would poems that would become part of the feminist manifesto of latter 20th-century history, Sexton was fulfilling the expectations of the iconic Eisenhower-era housewife. Perhaps the tension between these extraordinarily different identities is best summed up not by any single one of the thousands of lines of verse which it inspired, but in a quote she attributed to her daughter: “a mommy is someone who types all day.” The famously confessional poetry of Sexton may not be her greatest contribution to this particular theme, however, as the conflict between identity engendered from outside and self-identity is more artfully implicated in her collection which re-interprets famous fairy tales, Transformations. Here, the tension between identity and self-identity is expressed metaphorically through such imagery as Sleeping Beauty becoming an insomniac and Snow White gazing adoringly at her reflection immediately after torturing the Queen tried to steal her rightful place as fairest of all.
Incest
Transformations is also deeply immersed in the imagery of one of the most controversial recurring themes to be found in the poetry of Sexton. Rapunzel becomes a metaphor for young girls everywhere held captive from the speculative interest of young men by incestuous relatives. Even more striking is symbolically explicit dreams of Sleeping Beauty in which her father has become predatory shark circling her bed before committing his abomination. Sexton’s confessional poetry makes the recurrence of acts of incest more personal with the result being a widespread assumption despite conflicting evidence and testimony that this theme arises from autobiographical events. The reader is likely to benefit more from viewing incest thematically as a significant singular thread woven into a much more encompassing tapestry of imagery positioning males as authority figures to be both dependent upon and feared. Another way to confront the repetition of references to incestuous relationships thematically is through the prism of her search for identity; incest by definition implies a dual relationship to the co-existing much like the poet’s conflicted arrangement between conventional housewife/mother and radical artist.
