A Twist on Fairy Tales

There are many similarities between Dickenson and Sexton. Just as Dickenson has an interesting biography, so does Sexton. She was the youngest of 3 daughters and didn’t really know what her role in the family was. Her eldest sister was the “smart” one and her other sister was her father’s favorite. She grew up privileged just as Dickenson did. She was known as violate, untamed and very social as a young girl. She was also very popular. There are allegations about molestation by her father and possibly her favorite aunt, whom she was very close to. When she was 17 she was sent to boarding school in hopes of making her come back more of a lady and refined. She met Alfred Sexton and eloped with him. She first started becoming unfaithful to him while he was on his tour of duty and was compulsive about sex. Her husband was very sensitive and understanding about her indisgressions.

It was in 1974 when she gave birth to her second child that triggered her mental illness. She had depression and suffered from catatonic stupors. She attempted suicide multiple times and was sent to psychiatric hospitals for counseling. One therapist, Martin Orne seemed to help her and had her begin writing poetry about how she feels and what she experiences. She still drank a lot, and was heavily medicated with Thorazine, an anti psychotic. Orne diagnosed her with Bipolar disorder but many people dispute the validity of it because she had a sexual relationship with Orne. Her public persona was that of a “sexy crazy” such as a Marilyn Monroe.

In Transformations, she begins to refer to herself as a middle age witch.

“I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.”

She continues the idea of the middle age witch in her collection of Transformations. At the beginning of each chapter, the witch discusses the moral of the poem or story. For example, in Rumpelstiltskin, the witch warns of a small old man inside of us that wants to get out. The witch describes this old man as an “enemy within” and your Doppelganger. With this warning in mind, Sexton begins to tell the story of Rumpelstiltskin. In her poem, there are two different stories, the dwarf’s story and the story about marriage and motherhood. In this poem the marriage between the girl and the king is not one of love, but one of greed. It is a relationship of possession and servitude. Sexton doesn’t seem to care much for babies in the way that she describes the girl’s baby with the king. “He was like most new babies, as ugly as an artichoke but the queen thought him a pearl. “ (pg. 20) For Rumpelstilskin the baby was just another object for his possession. “but he wanted only this- a living thing to call his own.” (pg. 20) Many parents seem to think this way when they are in custody battles over their children. They want to have them but not really take care of them or show them love.


Just as we discussed in class, I like when you get to see fairy tales and their characters from different perspectives. This is the newest Shrek and the villain is Rumperlstilskin, the master manipulator and deal maker. There are many movies out now that give multiple perspectives on characters in fairy tales, one of them being the movie Hoodwinked. Hoodwinked gives perpectives of every main character in the movie with the story of Red Riding Hood. The book Briar Rose by Jane Yolen is another example of twisting a fairy tale. It uses the story of a girl named Briar Rose in Germany during the Holocaust. Teachers can teach history using fairy tales, just like this book Briar Rose.






Briar Rose is kind of disturbing when you know about Sexton’s background of abuse and mental illness. When I was reading this I was wondering if she was writing about herself as Briar Rose and then in class we discussed that same idea. The king is her dad and the price who saves her is her husband. After her hundred days of sleep she is afraid of sleep and becomes an insomniac. One passage that made me think she was talking about her own experiences was “each night the king bit the hem of her gown.” (109) The passage about her father kissing the back of her neck also disturbed me. To me that is not a fatherly kind of kiss, it’s erotic and shouldn’t be shared with a child. Another was “they all lay in a trance, each a catatonic stuck in a time machine.” Anne’s daughter discusses her mom’s disease and said she would often fall into a trance at the dinner table and stare. The trauma began when the curse was put on her each night when the king “bit the hem of her gown.” That may be why she was afraid of going to sleep because he would come at night and she would have to relive the nightmare. This type of poem exposes the vulnerability of the nuclear family and what can be the horror of it.