Anne Sextons Retelling of Cinderella Essay - 1009 Words

Anne Sextons Retelling of Cinderella Michelangelo, perhaps the most gifted sculptor and painter of all times, once said that geniuses stand on the shoulders of other geniuses. As Michelangelo built upon the brilliance of his predecessors, Anne Sexton does the same with her poem Cinderella. Fairy tales originated as oral traditions and were passed along and sculpted by thousands of story tellers. Each raconteur changes elements in the story to fit their individual needs. Sexton reinvents Cinderella as a poem and integrates the story with her own opinion and†¦show more content†¦A few years into union, Anne had two children, Linda and Joy, and was hospitalized for postpartum depression after the birth of both children (McCartan 2). Her depression was severe, and Sexton was suicidal for most of her adult life. On October 4, 1974, shortly after the release of Transformations, Anne could no longer stand the pressures of her existence and committed suicide (McCartan 35). This biographical information is essential to understanding Sextons influences in writing Cinderella because the poem was written out of personal turmoil. The majority of Sextons poetry is confessional style, but through her interpretation of Cinderella, Sexton gives herself a more discrete outlet for her passions (Ostriker 255). Her biographer Diane Middlebrook notes that this poem was a way to place her struggles ‘in legend rather than personal history(37). There are two notable examples of this in Cinderella. First, the father and step-mother are reminiscent of Sextons own parents. In the poem the father is distant and the step mother is the cause of all of Cinderellas hardships. Annes mother and father both struggled with alcoholism, a struggle which, according to her biographers, influenced Sextons substance abuses later in life. Secondly, Sexton describes the way she sees herself through the stepsisters. She describes them as, pretty enough / but with hearts like blackjacks Show MoreRelated Anne Sexton1732 Words   |  7 Pageswe were told as children were false, or at least romanticized. At some point, the illusion was shattered, and Santa, the Easter Bunny and Cinderella were characters we fondly remembered. But although we recognized these figures and legends as illusions, we held on to many of the sentiments the stories, without questioning their application to adult life. Anne Sexton often uses these innocent, childlike images juxtaposed with cynical but more realistic situations in order show that the lessons society