Anne Sexton's "Her Kind"

A Pens and Poison Poetry Analysis

It’s hard to be a woman. One day you’re too strange, the next day you’re too bland; one day you’re too wild, the next day, you’re too tame.

Anne Sexton knew this all too well.

Despite enjoying great acclaim during her short lifespan, Sexton struggled with depression after childbirth and used poetry as a way to cope between her fraught therapy sessions. In her haunting poem “Her Kind,” she explores much of her inner turmoil by inviting us into the minds of a variety of different women, all of whom embody an “Every Woman” figure we can recognize within our own psyches. Rivaled only by the great Sylvia Plath, Sexton presents us with an integral work that establishes her as a key player in the confessional poetry tradition. “Her Kind,” lending itself to several captivating interpretations and presenting an apt commentary on the female mind, offers a unique window into 20th-century womanhood.

Let’s first give the poem a read.

Her Kind

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. 

I have found the warm caves in the woods, 
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: 
whining, rearranging the misaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved 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.

From its opening lines, you might imagine “Her Kind” as a Halloween poem, with possessed witches haunting the air as they wreak havoc on its unsuspecting inhabitants. Yet Sexton’s poem references a different sort of witch—the witches of the Salem Witch Trials, one of history’s most salient examples of the oppression of women, where women were painted as mystical viragos and later sentenced to death. Sexton’s poem suggests that not much has changed in the 20th century—and that, in fact, many women are still wrongfully accused of ills to which they have no direct relation. In the first stanza, Sexton imagines herself as such a witch, reclaiming this negative image of women to comment on the multifaceted nature of a woman’s inner turmoil.

At its core, the poem cycles through three stages of what we might consider “traditionally feminine” struggles, and its opening stanza addresses women who, like the women in the witch trials accused of madness, are driven out of their minds. Interestingly enough, each of the poem’s three stanzas starts off with a traditional ABAB rhyme scheme and then diverges from it entirely, as if progressively undermining traditional norms through verse. Because of fraught societal standards, Sexton explains, many women gravitate towards darkness, feeling “braver at night” when not scrutinized under the light of day. The poem’s first stanza thus comments on the dangerous consequences of loneliness and despair—and the way that these common female struggles can make a woman seem “possessed.” Sexton’s own experience with postpartum depression likely informs her take on the madness of women as she pushes back on the common portrayal of women as hysterical.

In the poem’s second stanza, Sexton takes on another traditional female stereotype—that of the woman in the house—and refutes the societal perception of women as maternal, warm, and hospitable. She describes an assortment of kitchen utensils as she challenges the woman-as-housewife motif, depicting the men around her who do not adequately appreciate women as “worms” and “elves.” A traditional woman, she claims, is misunderstood by these creatures because, though seemingly restoring order to the world through her work, such a woman cannot adequately express her inner turmoil and becomes increasingly unstable on the inside as a result.

In the final stanza, Sexton puts herself into the shoes of a wild woman, playing into the stereotype that women are hysterical. She states that she, too, has experienced the mindset of a woman burned and tormented to death, calling our attention back to the image of the Salem Witch Trials in the opening lines as she imagines herself barbarically immolated. Yet in fighting against this sort of subjugation, she establishes herself as a woman who is both strong and unafraid, staring death in the eye as she announces that if women are subjected to such demeaning treatment, she is unabashedly ready to take on the challenge of womanhood—even if it ends in death.

While we might speculate that Sexton sees herself in the sort of women she describes in the poem, we can also read this deeply confessional poem as a plea for women to consider their historical position in society and realize that they are not alone.

“Her Kind” is a unique poem in the feminist tradition that encapsulates the complicated feelings that come with womanhood in elegant verse. When we consider our own feelings of confusion and shame, we will forever recall the words of Anne Sexton as we realize that, yes, we have all been “her kind.”

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