Ann Sexton and the Daemonic Lover

Ann Sexton's background was similar to Sylvia Plath's. She was born in the New England world of facade orientation—of manners and images—that children were to fit into. And when children were to be women, they were to remain in the mold. Yet Ann, like Sylvia, was to remain dormant only so long, before smashing the mold with her madness, and erupting into a creative passion that unsettled or embarrassed all those to whom she was tied. Like Sylvia, she became a confessional poet, and like Sylvia, it was through her own creative hand that she took her own life. Yet, in the whirlwind of those years, when she bled herself onto the pages of her manuscripts, seeking to keep her haunting delusions at bay by mastering and designing the images behind them, she made her madness into a craft.

Also, like Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton had a father obsession! It drove her to create, and it drove her to destroy. Torn apart by the conflicting internal object themes, she crawled and rowed towards the idealized God father, only to be caught up each time in the web of her own devious journey. The demonic shadow father—an eroticized dark devil—was the vivid after-image of her own degenerated, alcoholic dad. Maxine Kumin writes, in an introduction to Ann Sexton's collected poetry (1981):

It would be simplistic to suggest that the oedipal theme overrides all other considerations in Sexton's work, but a good case might be made for viewing her poems in terms of their quest for a male authority figure to love and trust… in Sexton's poetry the reader can find the poet again and again identifying herself through her relationship with the male other, whether in the person of a lover or, in the last, hasty, and often brilliant poems in The Awful Rowing, which make a final effort to end on ‘the island called God—in the person of the patriarchal final arbiter.’ (pp. xxix-xxx).

The cloak of disillusionment is swiftly thrown over the romantic oedipal