The dream life of Ms. Dog: Anne Sexton's revolutionary use of pop culture.(Critical Essay)

 
    Words in a poem, sounds in movement, rhythm in space, attempt to 
    recapture personal meaning in personal time and space from out of 
    the sights and sounds of a depersonalised, dehumanised world. They 
    are bridgeheads into alien territory. They are acts of insurrection. 
    (R.D. Laing) 

It might be difficult to conceive of Anne Sexton as building "bridgeheads into alien territory." Indeed, despite her popularity she is often perceived as a kind of victim, and until very recently, much of the criticism of Sexton's poetry focused primarily upon her scandalous and disturbed life. This is particularly true in the decade following Diane Middlebrook's sensational biography (1991) which suggests that Sexton's work only leads back to a hallucinatory woman controlled by her madness and aberrations. But in the following pages I wish to argue that through the use of popular culture Anne Sexton attempts a revolution, a reconception of herself as well as the contemporary concepts of art and identity.

Because so many readers discuss the difficulty of separating Sexton's life from her work, (1) the devaluation of her life would in itself be a great obstacle to the understanding of her poetry. But just as it is difficult to imagine actually contextualizing her very personal voice in an additional or alternative framework to her biography, an alternative analysis seems irrelevant to her extraordinary poetry of the self. The usual paths into her poetry just don't seem to lead anywhere else than her self, and although we can identify the literary allusions, the psychoanalytic innuendoes, the feminist statements and the abject confessions, they fail to explain the attraction of her work. This is particularly true of her later poetry, which defies traditional methods of reading--not because the poems are impenetrable, but because they initially appear raw, associative, and replete with ostensible nonsense.

But nonsense is by nature comparative and relative, and depends upon an alternative rationale. Often Sexton's apparent non sequiturs can be discovered to be heard parts of dialogue, and Joanna Gill has recently discussed this as an intentional strategy in "Hurry Up Please, It's Time." Gill argues that "the poem enters into a critical dialogue with Eliot's "The Waste Land," making sophisticated and purposive use of multiple personae, self-reflexively contemplating questions about memory, language, and subjectivity, and juxtaposing private introspection and public display." (2003, 41). This argument is strong and indicates that Sexton's work is not simply spun from the self, but that literary allusions and contexts are significant throughout her poetry.

 
    Sexton's poem refers to the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, to 
    the Sibyls of classical mythology, and to Buddhist texts. Like 
    Eliot's "The Hollow Men," her poem inserts incomplete fragments of 
    prayer or Gospel, borrowing a line from the Book of Common Prayer 
    ("Forgive us, Father, for we know not") which is, itself, a 
    borrowing from the Gospels ("Father, forgive them; for they know not 
    what they do" [Luke 23.34]). In both poems, these allusions are 
    typographically set apart, as though to imply that they are spoken 
    as an aside, or that we are in the presence of several simultaneous 
    voices or levels of contemplation. That the quotations in both cases 
    are incomplete suggests failure and confusion, and foreshadows the 
    lack of resolution in the text as a whole. Sexton's poem juxtaposes 
    the intense and mystical and the superficial and mocking, hence the 
    refrain "La de dah" which mimics Eliot's "Weialala leia / Wallala 
    leialala" and in so doing subverts its serious and incantatory 
    potential. Indeed, Sexton's line parodies the presumptuous 
    erudition of Eliot's phrase, mimicking its intonation and 
    transforming it into a slang reference to snobbery. (Gill 2003, 43) 

Gill's work is a powerful step forward in lending validity to Sexton's language, imagery, and purpose and countering the constant accusation concerning what David Trinidad calls "the blatant deterioration of her talent," echoing numerous other critics and poets. However, Gill's context remains a literary one, one to which Sexton can not be confined, and although Gill notes Sexton's references to "jello," "milk," "juice," and "peanut butter" and the subsequent identification of America "with consumption and thus inevitably with expulsion," there is a far greater and more significant context of popular culture within which Sexton places herself.

If, for example, we trace the snatches of pop culture that permeate this pivotal poem, "Hurry Up Please, It's Time," (2) the poem becomes part of a dialogue with contemporary social contexts. References to the comic film of Walter Mitty, suggestions of the comic strip Gasoline Alley, and verses from a quintessential pop song by Al Jolson (with significant hiatuses) create a larger social scaffolding, and the many literary and social allusions emerge as integral parts of developing dialogues. This substantive use of the popular arts obfuscates the distinctions between levels and degrees of culture, and favors instead the original, "mad" lateral thinking of the eccentric individual who is more driven by the need to comprehend contemporary existence and less by the need to be accommodated by and to transform a literary canon. In this way the exploration in the poem becomes far more intimate, unique, and genuine. This approach is aided by some of the concepts of R.D. Laing's existential explanation of schizophrenia and society in his popular classic, The Politics of Experience (1967), with the intention of a general, cultural quest out of a stratified and unsatisfying culture into unknown territory. (3)

The choice to use various elements of popular culture is critical. Although films are often employed by Sexton's contemporaries, they are usually references to "art films" such as films by Goddard in poetry by Adrienne Rich, or the classic film of Dracula at the conclusion of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" (4) or even Sexton's own use of Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc in the final verse of "Her Kind." These references lend a patina of intellectual respectability to the image, whether the immediate reference is "caught" or not. In the earlier poem "Her Kind," for instance, the allusion to Joan of Arc bestows upon the speaker a sainted identity even while it confirms a social definition of madness:

 
    I have ridden in your cart, driver, 
    waving my nude arms at villages going by, 
    learning the last bright routes, survivor, 
    where your flames still bite my thigh 
    and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. 
    A woman like that is not ashamed to die. 
    I have been her kind. (Sexton 1999, 15) 

In Sexton's later poetry, however, the needs have changed. It is precisely the lack of respectability of film that is the issue in "Hurry Up," since it goes against the modernist cultural hierarchy. Popular films have rarely been considered acceptable points of reference in modern poetry. When Berryman jokingly quoted Eliot, "I seldom go to films ... said the Honorable Possum." (1964, 60), he was not referring to Eliot's own echoes of Tristan and Isolde in "The Wasteland," but to a general poetic prejudice. Allusions to an ephemeral genre not only tie the alluding work to a transient source that will soon disappear, but also help to create the assumption that the alluding work is no "better" than the alluded work, for it possesses a similar transience.

Even if films can be granted, the use of comic strips in the seventies would have diminished the respectable patina of the poem. Stefan Economou recently noted, "Who apart from an academic rag-picker cherishes Pogo or Krazy Kat or Gasoline Alley, even while the movies of that era are still publicly revered on 100-best lists?" (n.d.). While contemporary cultural criticism may well find treasures in these strips, it is difficult to imagine a critic of the seventies taking seriously a poem with reference to these characters. But it is precisely the discrepancy between the prevailing culture and the proffered culture that is essential to the conflict in "Hurry Up," because it is indicative of more basic conflicts both within the society and within the individual.

In the poem, "Hurry Up Please It's Time," Sexton sets up two polarities, the normal life and the life of fantasy and imagination, and attempts to seek meaningful existence in their relationship. Skeezix, the foundling from the comic strip "Gasoline Alley" who grew up in real time with Sexton and millions of other readers of the 20th century, is the person against whom the speaker initially places herself. He is the "ear" of normality, and her repetition of the word "middle," living in Middlesex, (1. 32) and middle-class (1. 218), emphasizes this need to be connected to and accepted by the norm.

The opening confirms this need to connect the eccentric behavior of the speaker with a normal world outside. The poem begins with a response to the Hemingway remark in A Movable Feast with which the…