Social Pressures In Anne Sexton's Poem, Her Kind

Anne Sexton’s poem, “Her Kind” presents a stark look at the roles that women place themselves in and are forced into by societal pressures. Throughout history, women have been expected to take on the role of obedient wife, and failure to do so can result in a barrage of retaliations on a woman and her lifestyle. Though Sexton’s troubled past of depression and eventual suicide has cast negative light on the meanings of her works--particularly speculation that her work is a confession-- “Her Kind” is not so much a personal story as it is the story of the three roles women continue to fall into, even to this day: a witch, an old-school midwife, and a whore. The title is repeated in the last line of every stanza, “I have been her kind.” This repetition connects the different first-person scenarios described by each stanza: a witch, an old-school midwife figure, and a whore. These scenarios are described mostly through connotations, such as “haunting the black air, braver at night” (2), “fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: / whining, rearranging the disaligned” (11-12), and “I have ridden in your cart, driver, / waved my nude arms at villages going by” (15-16). Words like “haunting”, “black”, and “night” evoke an image of evil that strengthens the connotation of a witch as someone
A burning reinforces the idea of the three female roles portrayed in “Her Kind” are immoral roles worthy of punishment. Many religious texts recommend that women should be burned or killed if they give up chastity. This shift in imagery and figurative language from strictly environmentally descriptive to more of the speaker’s action colors the final stanza differently from the first two, and states, “A woman like that is not ashamed to die” (20). While women were once social outcasts for what they did, the final stanza shows a deep-seated, ‘burning’ hatred towards women for their