The Cursed FairyBroken Spells in Anne Sexton's Poetry

Resumen

n Transformations (1971), Anne Sexton curses fairy tales to offer her own demythologizing versions of these traditional stories for children. Her poems are transformed into obscure looking glasses which, simultaneously, reflect Sexton’s self-image and other women in postwar America. While revealing boredom behind marvels, ordinariness behind fantasy or depravity behind beauty, her verses vanish the fairy-tale convention of the happy ending and tell the secret sad truth of her own life, fairylands and the modern United States: women’s subordination to unheroic men and patriarchal institutions, as young wives are condemned to domestic prisons of silence, or old women are punished for being malevolent, powerful witches railing against conservative values of male supremacy.