Postmodern Feelings In Transformations

Anne Sexton is one of the representative writers of American confessional school.The school is known for its opposition to T.S Eliot’s “impersonal theory” and advocate of direct and bold expression of personal feelings.Confessional poetry is full of such themes as hatred,suicide,madness and death.Sexton exposes personal privacy and dark feelings to the extreme in her poetry.In many of her most famous poems,based on such private experiences as adultery,abortion,incest and suicidal desire,she repeatedly expresses dark feelings,such as envy,hatred,anger,anxiety.However,in Transformations,she departs from confessional writing tactics and expresses personal negative feelings through the rewriting of Grimm’s fairy tales.With the utilization of critical points from feminism,consumerism and Foucault’s discourse power,the thesis intends to examine such feelings as anger,anxiety and paranoia in Transformations.First and foremost,with the support of related points from feminism,the thesis analyzes anger and exposes women’s oppression in the patriarchal society by comparing the images of witches and housewives between Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Transformations.Secondly,according to related points from consumerism,the thesis sheds light on consumer anxiety and reveals man’s alienation in consumer society via the comparison of the description of marriage and commodities between Transformations and Grimm’s Fairy Tales.At last,based on related points from Foucault’s discourse power,the thesis explores the influence of Mc Carthyism and the threat of nuclear weapons on people in the Cold War era by analyzing Sexton’s rewriting of privacy and political surveillance.Consequently,the thesis analyzes anger,anxiety and paranoia in Transformations from various perspectives.Based on the analysis of these feelings,it helps us realize that the collection,a departure from Sexton’s autobiographical writing,still reveals women’s enslavement in the patriarchal society,the alienation in the consumer society and the shadow of the Cold War era.Meanwhile,it analyzes Sexton’s rewriting of Grimm’s fairy tales and offers a new understanding of the classics.