Society's Witch

Society's Witch

A Feminist Analysis of Poems by Anne Sexton and Alice Fulton

Stephanie Lane Sutton

Society has always had a perverse fascination with women who bend the ideas of what a woman should and shouldn't be: in ancient Greece, those who would not conform to misogyny would be made eternal in literature as the Medusas and Circes; colonial Salem was turned upside down by accusations of sex magic from young girls toward one another; in the 1970's, those who bent the bars of what was socially acceptable were labeled as both sexy and dangerous. Those women who dared to question conformity were marked a witch, in both the literal and figurative sense. In the form poems Her Kind (Anne Sexton) and You Can't Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain (Alice Fulton), a glance is cast at these women with the same glorifying eye given to male heroes and martyrs for the past thousands for years, and the portrait of Janis Joplin created in Fulton's poem coincides with Sexton's sympathetic description of society's witch.

In Her Kind, Sexton approaches the idea of the house wife with the counter-idea of the "witch," looking at the life of the outcast woman from three different angles. In the first stanza, the idea of the sexual deviant woman is introduced: I have gone out, a possessed witch,/haunting the black air, braver at night; /dreaming evil, I have done my hitch/over the plain houses, light by light (lines 1-4). These first few lines introduce the idea of being "possessed" and something deemed as evil, as well as the image of a woman who appears, at first, to be a prostitute. In fact, this woman is not a street worker, but merely one who "dreams evil" - that is, feels sexual desire. The woman is "braver at night" because that is when mankind is asleep, unable to observe her deviance. The poet goes further, to establish the woman who expresses her sexuality as set-apart from the gender as a whole: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind./A woman like that is not a woman, quite (l. 5-6).

The next stanza introduces the unhappy housewife. I have found the warm caves in the woods,/filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,/closets, silks, innumerable goods;/fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves (l. 8-10) Again she associates the life of a woman with the fantastical, but this time it is not society who feels uncomfortable with the woman, but rather the woman who feels uncomfortable servicing society. The typical tasks of a housewife become those of a fairytale - she is not caring for her husband and children, but worms and elves. Her discomfort makes her into the witch - although she has conformed to society's standards, she is still an outcast.

The final stanza makes clear the fate for society's witches: persecution, torture, rape, and death. The image is obvious: a witch being carted out and burned at the stake. However, a tone of sexual violence lays beneath; the flames bite the narrator's thigh, and an image of nakedness is evoked with "nude arms." "My ribs crack where your wheels wind" (l. 19) suggests violence and an image of someone being crushed as something is laid on top; combined with the vaguely sexual allusions, an image of sexual violence is evoked. Ultimately, this aggression destroys the woman, but "A woman like that is not ashamed to die" (l. 20).

Alice Fulton's You Can't Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain mirrors Anne Sexton's description of an outlandish woman destroyed, but the poem is laid in more literal terms. It is about Janis Joplin, the infamous singer whose pinnacle coincided with the height of second-wave feminism and counter-culture. As in Sexton's poem, she is also described as a victim of sexual violence: Once you clung to the legs of a lover,/let him drag you till your knees turned to blood,/mouth hardened to a thin scar on your face,/cracked under songs, screams, never left to heal. This image is partnered with descriptions of Joplin's social and romantic rejection -