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81 CHAPTER FOUR “. . . [I] Bend Down My Strange Face to Yours, And Forgive You” A Study of Anne Sexton’s Pedagogy of Reparation What she couldn’t give me, she made sure I got from someone else. —Joy Sexton, Anne Sexton’s daughter A FAMILY PORTRAIT Sunday, October 6, 1974. Anne Sexton has been dead for two days. She is remembered in the New York Times as “a disciple of Robert Lowell . . . a confessional poet who fashioned art out of anguish. . . .A forty-seven year old woman . . .recently divorced from her husband,found dead in an idling car from a possible suicide . . . leaving behind two daughters, Linda Gray and Joyce Ladd.” Sexton had a particular purchase on the image of the suicidal female poet who failed as a mother and wife. In a 1961 family publicity photograph taken for the Boston Globe that includes Joy,Linda,Sexton,and her husband,Kayo,we are faced with some popular images of suburban life. At first, this photograph, taken only four years after Sexton’s first suicide attempt in 1957, appears to be a typical, middle-class domestic scene. It is a memento of the past that offers a record that can be read in several ways. Kayo, dressed in a dark suit and tie, takes the traditional place as “wife”—he sits behind Sexton, who somewhat seductively looks into the camera, holding a copy of her newest collection of poems, All My Pretty Ones. Her gaze suggests an appetite for something that lies beyond the confines of domestic responsibilities.This shot includes a background of shelves neatly lined with books. Sexton wears a fitted, white V-neck knit sweater and black-and-white striped skirt. A barometer hangs on the wall behind Kayo.Within the frame of this publicity photograph is another smaller 82 ANNE SEXTON photograph—a head shot of Sexton.This small photograph appears on the back cover of her book. In both images, Sexton looks directly out, toward her audience , while Kayo, Joy, and Linda gaze down, toward the pages of All My Pretty Ones as if they are looking at a family photo album. But there is more. Linda’s eyes are rimmed with dark circles. If you frame her face, you might detect a sense of sadness in her expression, perhaps fear. Eight-year-old Linda looks aged, worn. If we look closer at her expression, we can see the effects of living in the Sexton household in 1961. These effects are registered in the pallid tone of her skin, the hesitancy in her smile. In Linda’s memoir, Searching for Mercy Street: A Journey Back to My Mother, she remembers one weeknight in autumn, when she was eight. A dinner of calves’ liver and baked potatoes is over. Sexton is sitting at the table, smoking, twirling her hair, and, as Linda recalls, “stirring the melting ice in her martini with her finger”(1994, 43).This evening, there will be a violent fight that begins because Sexton wants eight-year-old Linda to do the dishes. Kayo becomes angry. He accuses Sexton of “just not wanting to do them herself.” Their “discussion,” which is the family euphemism for “fight,” deteriorates. And in the midst of their arguing, Sexton screams at Kayo,“Go ahead and hit me. It’d be a relief to have you kill me” (45). Sexton accuses her husband of babying their children, dishes clatter, noises rise and fall as the rage between Anne and Kayo finally subsides amid their daughters’ pleas for them to leave one another alone. The traces from evenings like this appear in Linda’s eyes. In order to locate the fear and anxiety that accrues there, one has to look beyond what is available to ordinary perception. One has to sustain an engagement with the image and what lies beyond it. One has to be willing to complicate what appears evident or straightforward. “MY BELOVED, SIT UPON MY KNEE . . .” What other narratives are housed in this publicity photograph? If you look closer, you will recognize the slight trace of a smile on Linda’s face. Her subtle expression hints at the times when Sexton offered her children love and comfort in what Linda describes as the “proper proportion.” In the following memory scene, it is late afternoon, and dusk settles in on this Thanksgiving day: Mother and I nestle beneath a thick wool afghan on top of the bed in Nana’s bedroom. We are...

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