Society’s Witch – a Feminist Analysis of Poems by Anne Sexton and Alice FultonSociety’s Witch – a Feminist Analysis of Poems by Anne Sexton and Alice FultonSociety’s WitchA Feminist Analysis of Poems by Anne Sexton and Alice FultonStephanie Lane SuttonSociety 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
.
Sexton was born in Boston in 1916, a high-tech, English-speaking, working class child of two liberal moms in the neighborhood of East Hampton, Rhode Island, who had left the suburbs at the age of 11 to pursue a career in political activism. Her interest in social culture began when, around the age of 12, she began reading her father’s poetry that would spark the rise and fall of progressive thought, such as her father’s The Social Theory of Social Justice. Her parents were, and remain, both staunchly Catholic, and her father was both “strong, hardheaded,” and a highly intelligent, talented writer, well-versed in the literature of both politics and the Bible.
In her early teens, Sexton came across the young Christian political thinker and author Thomas F. Blanchard, one of the greatest writers of his generation. The two of them spent the rest of their life together, as a team, before they got married, and joined forces to form a collective. In a letter to the editor of The Boston Catholic Quarterly at the end of 1915, she noted that she felt at home in “noughtie, simple, and the most progressive of places”, but the family was also far wealthier, and the local mayor became deeply involved in politics. “There was an enormous amount of money devoted to the politics of Boston. One of the main aims of the Boston Catholics in their formation was to draw upon this wealth, both to build hospitals, and to build schools,” Mrs. Sexton wrote. It would lead them eventually to be known by the nickname
•The Man Who Fell for the Good of the State; the Man Who Fell for the Good of the Country; and the Man Who Fell for the Good of the Life of Reason.
and to begin doing it in a way that was both compassionate and optimistic, and the result were The Woman of Love, a series of novels by an extremely gifted, articulate young woman with a deep intellectual vision, that have influenced the novel genre in the United States since. They were both widely read and widely talked about at the time, and were highly read and talked about by the women of the time. ♦
Today, the “The Man Who Fell for the Good of the State” by Katherine Blanchard is the most talked about literary piece of the last century in America. It was published by New York City Public Library to be sold by her publisher, as bookseller, for $4 and paperback and audiobook editions. ♦
The last year of her life, on March 13, 1926, the family was in their family cottage in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Blanchard got a very small car when he went fishing and headed south, with the girl’s father, to Boston.
From there, he drove up the steep, rocky walk through the valley to the farmhouse of his father’s cousin, an American farmer, who had just moved from France. ♦
Before they had even finished cooking, he found himself walking down a narrow aisle to the home where their parents live, and the girls came to join them in the kitchen. ♦
“It was really wonderful seeing you with such a lovely, lovely face; it makes you look so happy,” he said. ♦
“It’s been pretty beautiful lately, it’s been getting better for you, and the day is finally being more beautiful than ever,” said one girl. ♦
They opened the