Society’s Witch - a Feminist Analysis of Poems by Anne Sexton and Alice Fulton

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