Not that it was beautiful,
     but that I found some order there.
     There ought to be something special
     for someone
     in this kind of hope.
     This is something I would never find
     in a lovelier place, my dear,
     although your fear is anyone's fear
     like an invisible veil between us all …
     and sometimes in private,
     my kitchen, your kitchen,
     my face, your face.
 
                    —Anne Sexton, "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further" To Bedlam and Part Way Back

What the story of the Sphinx seems to emphasize is that the answer to the riddle of life is not just man, but each person himself…. In contemplating Sophocles' Oedipus as Freud did, one realizes that the entire play is essentially Oedipus' struggle to get at the hidden truth. It is a battle for knowledge in which Oedipus has to overcome tremendous inner resistance against recognizing the truth about himself, because he fears so much what he might discover…. What forms the essence of our humanity—and of the play—is not our being victims of fate, but our struggle to discover the truth about ourselves.

                      —Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man's Soul

BETTELHEIM'S OEDIPUS

Oedipus, Sophocles, Freud: this is preeminently a man's story, told by men to and for men, about a tragically fated hero who unknowingly slays his father and marries his mother. Despite Freud's attribution of the Oedipus complex to women as well as to men, the story of Oedipus has also remained essentially masculine in the popular imagination. That imagination, sensing perhaps the culturally masculine tenor not only of the myth but of its symbolic meanings, has even tried (with a brief assist from psychoanalysis) to provide a womanly equivalent: The Elektra complex. But Freud stuck stubbornly to his assertion that the story of Oedipus was that of all humankind, and a number of revisionist theorists and practitioners have attempted to explain why. Among the most convincing retellings is Juliet Mitchell's in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, in which she urges us to construe the Oedipus complex as more than a term for normal childhood sexual conflicts revolving around intense attachments to the parents, by which measure the significance attributed to it by psychoanalysis may indeed seem inflated. According to Mitchell, the Oedipus complex designates a set of internal and external acts through which every person is initiated into the cultural order; it is not only "a metaphor for the psychic structure of the bourgeois nuclear family under Viennese capitalism," but "a law that describes the way in which all [Western] culture is acquired by each individual."

Critics have been endlessly irritated by the recurring themes of infancy and the relationship to the mother and father in Anne Sexton's poetry. Beginning with her first teacher, John Holmes, Sexton has been accused of childishness and of infantile preoccupations. She insisted that these themes were at the heart of the matter—and not only her matter, but by implication, everyone's. "Grow up," said the decorous world of poetry to her throughout her career; "Stop playing in the crib and the sandbox—and especially stop sniveling about your childhood." Her poetic reply frightened the critics who disliked her work—most of them transparently opposed to psychoanalytic theory—for that reply asserted again and again that grown woman though she might be, successful professional though she might be, the process of working out her relationship to her parents and her childhood was a life's work. Nor did she permit the poetic community to suppose it was only her life's work. If we acknowledged it as hers, and as the legitimate domain of poetry, then we would have to come to terms with the possibility that it might be our own lifelong process as well. Blind as Teiresias, she revealed to all of us the truth about Laius' murder. As Bruno Bettelheim writes in Freud and Man's Soul, "we encounter in Teiresias the idea that having one's sight turned away from the external world and directed inward—toward the inner nature of things—gives true knowledge and permits understanding of what is hidden and needs to be known."

But it is not Teiresias, finally, with whom I identify Anne Sexton. Rather, it is Oedipus, and specifically the Oedipus of Freud and Man's Soul. Bettelheim attempts yet another re-reading of Freud's Oedipus, and I find it the most moving and accessible that contemporary psychoanalysis has offered to an audience larger than its own members. Freud's Oedipus, through Bettelheim, takes on the luminosity of the prophet, and becomes not merely a tragic victim, but an embattled seer. According to Bettelheim, the suggestiveness and referential richness of the Oedipal story only includes the implication that little boys want to kill the man they know is their father and marry the woman they know is their mother. This "common and extreme simplification" ignores the fact that Oedipus did not know what he was doing when he killed Laius and married Jocasta, and that "his greatest desire was to make it impossible for himself to harm those he thought were his parents." This crucial detail expands the story's mythic power to include "the child's anxiety and guilt for having patricidal and incestuous wishes," and the consequences of acting on such wishes.

As Bettelheim reads both the Sophocles play and Freud's adaptation of it, the central issues are Oedipus' guilt and his discovery of the truth. Oedipus' lack of initial awareness about what he has done is reflected in psychoanalysis' version of the story by the repression in adulthood of both the murderous feelings toward the parent of the same sex, and the incestuous feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex. Oedipus behaved as he did as a consequence of his real parents having rejected him in the most brutal and literal way possible; he loved the parents he thought were his. "It is only our love for our parents and our conscious wish to protect them that leads us to repress our negative and sexual feelings for them."

Bettelheim also emphasizes another portion of the story often glossed over by theory and by practice: when he fled Corinth, Oedipus did not fully heed the temple inscription, "Know thyself," which implicitly warned against misunderstandings of the oracle's prophecies. He was not sufficiently self-aware in his flight, and later acted out his metaphorical blindness by literally blinding himself. So Oedipus, truth-seeker, sought the complex truths too late; or, translated into psychic parlance, self-knowledge requires an understanding of the "normally unconscious aspects of ourselves." It's Bettelheim's conviction and that of psychoanalysis—and here I part company with him and it regretfully—that knowledge really is power, that to know the unconscious is to be able to control it, and more or less completely. "This is a crucial part of the myth," writes Bettelheim: "as soon as the unknown is made known … the pernicious consequences of the Oedipal deeds disappear." That is indeed the most hopeful reading of the cease of pestilence in Thebes, but not the only one. No one, after all, can restore Oedipus' sight to him, and his wanderings toward ultimate peace in Colonus are still torturous and tragic. Not until he awaits death does he find his peace. Bettelheim sees the Oedipus in us all as able to be "free" from our own "destructive powers" and their ability to "harm us." This is, of course, the expression of psycho-analysis' own profound wish that it might provide "cure," a wish that Freud himself became suspicious of near the end of his life. I prefer a more realistic phrasing of what the search for self-knowledge might hope to accomplish: a lessening of the destructive hold of unconscious material over people's lives, and a diminished likelihood that one might single-handedly cause a pestilence in the city.

This important reservation aside, I find Bettelheim's reading of Oedipus convincing and important, if not entirely new: Oedipus is a hero who is fated to feel guilty for something he has done but did not know he was doing and did not mean to do; and, more importantly, he is a quester after truth against tremendous inner and external odds, determined to recognize that truth when he finds it, no matter how painful it may be for him and for other people he loves. That truth is peculiarly his own—Bettelheim points out, through DeQuincey, that the Sphinx posed different problems for different people, so that the answer to the riddle is not merely man in general, but Oedipus in particular. But it is also universal. "The answer to the riddle of life is not just man, but each person himself."

In the Oedipus story, it is the woman/mother/wife, Jocasta, who says that she does not want to know the truth and who cannot cope with it when it is revealed. She kills herself because she possesses unwanted knowledge—not, as Bettleheim points out, the knowledge that she has committed incest, but repressed knowledge that she helped to abandon her son to death years earlier. Perhaps it is ironic that I should see Anne Sexton as Oedipus and not as Jocasta. Anne Sexton killed herself. Yet despite that final irony, the essential characteristics of Anne Sexton's poetry identify her not with the overwhelmed and helpless victim/victimizer, Jocasta, but with the hero Oedipus, whose struggle for the truth was determined and tragic. As Alicia Ostriker says in a comparison of Plath and Sexton, Sexton "fought hard with love, greed, and laughter to save herself, and failed." Her "failure" was heroic rather than pathetic, courageous rather than cowardly, Unlike Jocasta, who is immediately defeated by the revelation of the truth, Sexton grappled with her truth again and again, in a deadly hand to hand combat she might be said, on some terms, to have won.

ANNE'S OEDIPUS

That Anne Sexton identified herself with Oedipus is evident in only one modest place in her poetry, in the first collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back. The epigraph for the collection is from a letter of Schopenhauer to Goethe in 1815:

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable enquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer, But most of us carry in our heart the Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God's sake not to inquire further …

Sexton's biographer, Diane Middlebrook, reveals the previously unavailable details of the story that led to Sexton's use of this epigraph, and to the poem that opens Part II of Bedlam, which contains the most intensely confessional material in the collection. "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further," was Sexton's ultimate poetic reply to John Holmes' fierce objections to Sexton's "sources and subject matter." She should not, he warned, write about her experiences in mental institutions or her private neuroses; these were not legitimate subjects for poetry, and were more dangerous than useful. Although Sexton could not have known it at the time, Holmes was to be only the first of a series of Jocastas whom Sexton would have to confront in the many years of productivity remaining to her. Her argument in this poem is that of the truth-seeking Oedipus:

      Not that it was beautiful,
      but that, in the end, there was
      a certain sense of order there;
      something worth learning
      in that narrow diary of my mind,
      in the commonplaces of the asylum …

Like Oedipus, Sexton does not pretend to be a seeker after beauty here, though she will seek beauty as well later in her poetic life; she seeks, rather, "a certain sense of order," if knowing the truth about oneself, however awful, can yield a pattern, a structure, that will teach one "something worth learning" about how one's mystery can be unwoven. The "narrow diary of my mind" elicits images of the private person confiding confidences to a small and secret book, and she is aware that in employing this image, she addresses the implicit reservations anyone might have about the divulgence of confidences. Yet it seems to me that straight as this image is, Sexton must have intended some slight irony, angry as she had been during the process that led up to this finally loving, forgiving, giving poem addressed to a father figure, teacher, and friend who was, as she later said, "in the long run, ashamed of me where you might be proud of me." The "commonplaces of the asylum" include the "cracked mirror," in which the beholder must acknowledge the fragmented pieces of the self, held up to the scrutiny of whatever wholeness that perceiver can manage. It also prefigures the next and central image of the poem, which Diane Middlebrook finds central not only to this poem, but to Sexton's entire poetics:

      I tapped my own head;
      it was glass, an inverted bowl,
      It is a small thing
      to rage in your own bowl.
      At first it was private,
      Then it was more than myself;
      it was you, or your house
      or your kitchen.

Like that other star-crossed poet, Plath, Sexton is trapped in her bell jar, "an inverted bowl." But by the act of tapping it, she tentatively releases powers that reveal to her that her pain is more than private, that she shares with other isolated beings this "small thing" enlarged by sympathy and empathy.

The scene of this coming into connection with others trapped in their inverted bowls is, significantly, the "house," and more particularly the kitchen, locale of so many of Sexton's scenes of recognition, as it was of Plath's. It is not only, I think, that the kitchen is such a female place, but that here the ritual of preparing and eating food takes place: here all modern people are most literally nourished. This is the room in which her world, suburban America, finds itself most at home. The domesticity suggested by the kitchen implies that here, in this most ordinary and yet formally ritualized room, the most extraordinary human truths will emerge, in the midst of simple converse about the everyday matters of commonplace lives. In this respect, the kitchen and the asylum are perhaps closely related. Neither is Thebes or Corinth, but either may be the crossroads at which one kills one's father, or the ceremonial place in which one marries one's mother.

      And if you turn away
      because there is no lesson here
      I will hold my awkward bowl,
      with all its cracked stars shining
      like a complicated lie,
      and fasten a new skin around it
      as if I were dressing an orange
      or a strange sun.

It is on this passage that Middlebrook bases her contention that tapping the head "produces 'stars,' signs radiant with significance, uniting sufferer and beholder despite the 'glass bowl' that shuts them off from other forms of contact." To that insight, I would add that the cracked stars resulting from tapping the bowl are yet another reflection of the cracked mirror in the asylum, that we all, in kitchens or madhouses, aim toward the same general human truths that shine differently in different lives. The speaker, under the critical scrutiny of the one who has "turned away," must hold her bowl awkwardly, partially disarmed by the withdrawal of an invited commonality. The cracked stars shine "like a complicated lie," Sexton's acknowledgement that we each create our own story, are trapped within our own private perspectives in which we style and shape a truth that has as much of the necessary lie as of authenticity; the lie is "complicated" by our complicity in the egotistical desire to make ourselves, perhaps, the heroes of our stories. There is also a suggestion here, muted from reprimand into plea, that the stars will more likely constitute that "complicated lie," that partial denial of the sought truth, if the invited other rejects the partnership by which a complicated truth might emerge: "And if you turn away …" When the fellow sufferer changes to the detached or disdainful observer, the speaker has no choice but to "fasten a new skin" around the bowl, an action which defensively separates her from him, and blocks any progress that they might together make toward an understanding; yet the stars still shine underneath, a luminous invitation toward truth.

      This is something I would never find
      in a lovelier place, my dear,
      although your fear is anyone's fear,
      like an invisible veil between us all …
      and sometimes in private
      my kitchen, your kitchen,
      my face, your face.

Whatever truth the speaker seeks, it will not be available in "lovelier places" than the private mind speaking its halting language to another private mind, trying to make contact. What separates them, she knows, is the hearer's fear, "anyone's fear," not only of the sick or mad or sordid; "your fear" is also the subject of the inquiry itself. Although the grammatical construction of the last lines is ambiguous, I read them to mean secondarily that the fear pulls down the veil between them in their kitchens and on their faces, and primarily that this "something," this "special sort of hope," takes place in the kitchen and is revealed, through the mutually cracked glass bowls, on their distorted, human, striving faces.

The two lengthy poems that follow this preface to Part II of Bedlam reveal the "source and subject" of the cracked stars that John/Jocasta does not want to hear. "The Double Image" and "The Division of Parts" show us this other "cracked mirror" of the mother, image of fragmentation and wholeness for the speaker.

    … my mocking mirror, my overthrown
    love, my first image. She eyes me from that face,
    that stony head of death
    I had outgrown.

Addressed to her daughter, "The Double Image" tells the story of a thirty-year-old mother who goes to live with her own mother after the speaker's suicide attempt. An "outgrown child," she inhabits her mother's house as an unwelcome guest who must submit to her mother's resentment for her suicide attempt, and who must sit for a portrait of herself to be hung on a wall opposite her mother's portrait, freezing in time her dependence on her mother, herself as reflection of that "mocking mirror," and her stubborn refusal to become that bitter woman. The mother contracts cancer (blaming her daughter), the daughter is institutionalized again, and the mother begins her slow dying. The speaker estranged from her own daughter by her inability to mother her tells herself one of those complicated lies, and then unravels it:

      … And you came each
      weekend. But I lie,
      You seldom came. I just pretended you …

The lesson she learns that she must pass on to her daughter—this complicated truth made up of so many self-serving lies that must be exploded—is "why I would rather / die than love." And this has much to do, she knows, with her relationship to that "overthrown love," and the speaker's need to turn away from her:

      The artist caught us at the turning;
      we smiled in our canvas home
      before we chose our foreknown separate ways.
      And this was the cave of the mirror,
      that double woman who stares
      at herself, as if she were petrified
      in time …

If she is to survive, she will have to acknowledge that she is unwillfully guilty of her own mother's sin, passed now to another generation:

      And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure
      nor soothe it, I made you to find me.

In telling her young daughter this truth, she is giving that child a chance to escape the prison of poisonous identifications handed from mother to daughter to mother to daughter. Mary Gray, Sexton's mother, could not admit or acknowledge this human truth inherent in the reproductive urge; it is Sexton's hope that in admitting her own complicity in this complicated lie, she will provide her child with a way to escape its implications; or if not to escape them entirely, then to know that the trap lies baited for her.

But I have called Anne Sexton Oedipus, and Oedipus wanted to marry his mother, not to harm her. Sexton's Oedipus/Anne knows that the mother is the "first overthrown love" for both sexes, and that the differentiation of desire in males and females occurs later. It is my contention that Oedipus/Anne does "slay" her mother and "marry" her father, just as Oedipus slew his father and married his mother. That Sexton thought herself guilty of her mother's death, and of marrying her father, is explicit throughout her canon. (In "All My Pretty Ones," she also acknowledges the possibility of an unconscious guilt connected with her father's death). Here I will concentrate on her self-perception of this deadly configuration in three poems ranging throughout her career: "The Double Image," (Bedlam); "Those Times …" (Live or Die); and "Divorce, Thy Name is Woman" (45 Mercy Street). In "Double Image," she is accused of her mother's death; in "Those Times" she acknowledges this unintentional sin; and in "Divorce, Thy Name is Woman," she speaks of her "marriage" throughout life to her father. This is what Oedipus must discover himself guilty of: the murder of the parent of the same sex, and forbidden incest with the parent of the opposite sex.

"The Double Image" includes one of the most startling and frightening of Sexton's stanzas, made more so by the clever facility and unexpectedness of the rhyme:

      They hung my portrait in the chill
      north light, matching
      me to keep me well,
      Only my mother grew ill.
      She turned from me, as if death were catching,
      as if death transferred,
      as if my dying had eaten inside of her.
      That August you were two, but I timed my days with doubt.
      On the first of September she looked at me
      and said I gave her cancer.
      They carved her sweet hills out
      and still I couldn't answer.

The speaker of this poem is the same woman who remembers putting "bees in my mouth" to keep from devouring her mother in the nursing process as an infant; who knows that "all my need took you down like a meal"; who, though she does not know it as a child, will utterly defeat her mother in "Those Times …"

      I did not know that my life, in the end,
      would run over my mother's like a truck
      and all that would remain
      from the year I was six
      was a small hole in my heart, a deaf spot,
      so that I might hear
      the unsaid more clearly.

The "hole in the heart," that "deaf spot," becomes the poet's source of the knowledge of absence; blocked by childhood indignities from hearing the ordinary music of daily life, she takes on the special sensual acuity of the handicapped: what she will hear is the unsaid, just as blind Oedipus will "see" with the sight of the blind visionary.

And like Oedipus, Sexton did not want to run over her mother's life like a truck, or to give her cancer, or to defeat her, or to slay her; she intended, rather, like Oedipus, the opposite; to protect that beloved if rejecting parent. Oedipus is utterly rejected by his biological parents, who wish to murder him that he might not murder his father; his other parents, unknowingly adoptive, are those he loves and flees Corinth to protect when he hears the Oracle. In so fleeing, he fulfills the prophecy. In the Oedipus myth, then, the parental figures are split; the actual and rejecting parents, and the adoptive and loving ones, who might after all be called the "real" parents. In the normative infant and childhood psyche, these roles of rejecting and loving parents are united, so that reality and imago emerge from the same identities and bodies; it is the real parents we love and wish to protect, their imagos we wish to murder and marry. Seeking this complex truth, Sexton knows that she must make reparation for the split inside her that duplicates the split in the psyches of her parents, who both rejected and loved her, just as she rejects and loves them.

Having "murdered" her mother in the psychic sense, she processed such guilt as if fated to do so. It matters little, I would say, whether or not Mary Gray actually told Anne Sexton that Sexton "gave her cancer," matters equally little whether the mother's trauma over her daughter's suicide attempt actually contributed to the development of her disease. Like Oedipus, she has sought and found her psychic truth: she slew her mother, who had literary aspirations that Sexton would fulfill, who was jealous of this beautiful daughter; and she dearly loved the mother that she slew. That is a hard truth. It is peculiarly Anne Sexton's; it is also mine, may be any woman's. Daughters both "love" and "slay" their mothers.

Oedipus/Anne acknowledges the other half of her sin in the countless father poems distributed throughout the canon. Having detailed this intense and lifelong romance elsewhere, I will here rely on the late poem, probably composed almost fifteen years after "The Double Image," in which she most explicitly acknowledges her marriage to the father. Part of the sequence in 45 Mercy Street called "Eating the Leftovers," "Divorce, Thy Name is Woman" begins in the aftermath of that lifelong marriage:

      I am divorcing daddy—Dybbuk! Dybbuk /
      I have been doing it daily all my life …

In this poem, Sexton constructs a kind of allegory for woman in western culture. The marriage of daughter to father is represented as literal.

      Later,
      When blood and eggs and breasts
      dropped onto me,
      Daddy and his whiskey breath
      made a long midnight visit
      in a dream that is not a dream
      and then called his lawyer quickly.
      Daddy divorcing me.

The "dream that is not a dream" is a psychic fact, a fact of mental life, something that "actually happens" in the netherland of unconscious primary process. The father seduces the daughter, then rejects her, disowning his own passion and hers. "I have been divorcing him ever since" in the interior world of psychic realities, where the Mother is her witness in the courtroom. The daughter keeps on divorcing him, "adding up the crimes / Of how he came to me, / how he left me." Sexton's speaker takes on the voice of any woman working out her childhood love for her father, any woman still

     waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home
     and stuff me so full of our infected child
     that I turn invisible, but married,
     at last.

To be born a woman in a patriarchy is often to be compelled to live out precisely this ritual. The maternal urge becomes a parody of its first manifestation in the desire to present the father with a child. This, in the tortured psychic world of the poem, is the only true marriage; all others are only pale and inadequate reflections of this primal union. To marry one's father is, indeed, to "turn invisible," for it means that the daughter, becomes not herself, not her mother, but an inverted parody of herself and her mother, of wife and daughter. Acknowledging the incestuous foundations of romantic love on which not only the family, but all western culture is based, Sexton exposes the underbelly of the myth—that we are all "the infected child" of incest, that we all become "invisible," effaced, in the need to "marry, at last." Marriage is the sanctification of incest, the sacred profanity whose nature we expend our sublimated energies denying. We are all possessed by the dybbuks of our personal and cultural pasts. What Sexton speaks of here is as narrow as the room of each womb we come from, and as broad as our dedication to Classical culture. We are all implicated, fathers and daughters alike, all dwelling in a shadow world in which the realities we perceive are shadows of original forms—and of original desires. We stay in the cave willingly, perceiving reflected forms, because we cannot look upon those forms directly without becoming "invisible." Yet we seek that original form, that original desire, never quite content with its substitute.

While Sexton breaks this ultimate taboo, thereby acknowledging her self-effacement, her speaker also wants to affirm the divorce. The "solution" of the poem is a continual process of divorce, an unending courtroom scene, but one which always returns from courtroom to bedroom, where the woman is "opening and shutting the windows Making the bed and tearing it apart." Before and after the divorce of man and wife is this continuous marriage to and divorce from the father, a permanent oscillation between two conflicting desires: to divorce and be done with; and to "marry, at last."

Far from being done with the horrors he discovers in his pursuit of truth when he does indeed uncover it and blind himself, Oedipus does not find peace until he awaits death at Colonus, in the wake of years of blind wandering. The Jocastas in Anne Sexton's life begged her not to inquire further; when she did, psychoanalysis held out to her the hope of which Bettelheim speaks on behalf of psychoanalysis: that knowledge of the truth will set one free. Her truth, tougher by far than either the willed ignorance of Jocasta which cannot endure revelation, or the mandated "liberty" of analytic cure, is more like that of the original Oedipus: complex, tragic, visionary. Sexton did not, like Jocasta, find the sought truth and simply die of it; in the many years between her first exploration of truth in Bedlam and her death in 1974, she triumphed over her guilt and her ghosts again and again. The "strange goddess face" of the slain mother whom the infant ate—"all my need took / you down like a meal"—is redeemed in a dream of reparation and mutual forgiveness in "Dreaming the Breasts:"

      The breasts I knew at midnight
      beat like the sea in me now.
      Mother, I put bees in my mouth
      to keep from eating
      yet it did you no good.
      In the end they cut off your breasts
      and milk poured from them
      into the surgeon's hand
      and he embraced them.
      I took them from him
      and planted them.

The planting of the mother's severed breasts enables "those dear white ponies" to "go galloping, galloping, / wherever you are;" and the daughter, for the moment of this poem, is renewed into her own life, free of guilt and pain. In "All My Pretty Ones," the daughter discovering her father's flaws after his death in her mother's diary is able, by coming to terms with them and with their small duplications in her own life, to reach some kind of catharsis of pity and fear:

      Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.
      Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,
      bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.

If this act of mutual forgiveness with mother and father must be repeated more than once, this is not a sign of weakness of resolve and will and heart, but of their strengths and determination. No resolution is ever quite so permanent as humans might wish. Anne Sexton could not be utterly and finally freed of her ghosts and her guilt in this life, and her poetry thus reveals these other "complicated lies:" of poetry as celebration only, of knowledge as ultimate freedom. "What forms the essence of our humanity—and of [Oedipus Rex]—is not our being victims of fate, but our struggle to discover the truth about ourselves." What forms the essence of Anne Sexton's poetic achievement is not her status as victim, but her struggle to discover the truth about herself, to turn her blindness into insight. And unless we "turn away," like Jocasta, like John Holmes, there ought indeed to be "something special" in "this kind of hope," perhaps in private.

     my kitchen, your kitchen,
     my face, your face.