A Summary and Analysis of Anne Sexton’s ‘Her Kind’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Her Kind’ is a poem by the American poet Anne Sexton (1928-74), written in 1959 and included in Sexton’s first collection of poems, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, the following year.

Sexton’s reputation has been somewhat eclipsed by that of Sylvia Plath. Both women had their first poetry collections published in the same year, 1960; both have been called ‘confessional poets’; both took their own lives, having explored their struggle with such thoughts in their mature poetry.

Before we offer an analysis of ‘Her Kind’, which is one of Sexton’s most famous and widely studied poems, here’s a stanza-by-stanza summary of its meaning.

Summary

The speaker of the poem begins by identifying herself as a witch possessed by some demon or other dark force. She tells us she has gone out into the world, among the night air, feeling braver during the hours of darkness. She has dreamt of committing evil deeds as she flew over the houses, each lit up by the fires and lights within.

She has an extra finger on each hand, and leads a lonely existence. She has even gone a little mad. Such a woman is not quite a proper woman, the speaker confides, presumably because she sits outside of societal norms. She has been this ‘kind’ of woman.

I have gone out into the world, a witch controlled by an evil spirit, lurking in the dark, more courageous at night; plotting some wickedness, I have flown wildly over the ordinary houses, from lit building to lit building: a solitary creature, with twelve fingers, not in my right mind. Such a woman is somehow not quite a woman. I have been that type of woman.

In the second stanza, the speaker tells us how she found warm caves within the forests and made a home within them, filling them with domestic items such as shelves, cupboards, clothes, cooking utensils, and many other ‘goods’.

She made meals for the ‘worms’ (probably a reference to dragons) and the elves who live in the forests (one presumes they have different dietary requirements), and tidied up those things which have become disordered (though she tells us she complained about having to do so). She has been this kind of woman.

In the final stanza of ‘Her Kind’, the speaker addresses the driver of a horse and cart, telling him that she has been conveyed through villages in his cart, waving her naked arms at the villagers as they drove past them. She has memorised the very last paths she will see during daylight, and she has been a survivor who has suffered fires burning her leg and her ribs being broken as she was put to death under the winding wheels of the cart.

Such a woman, she concludes, feels no shame in dying, and she has been such a woman: ‘her kind’.

Analysis

‘Her Kind’ offers us three ‘kinds’ of women: three archetypal roles played by women and girls throughout history. In the first stanza, this ‘role’ is that of the outcast: the witch, the lonely woman who is not a wife or mother, the outcast. Because she is neither a wife nor a mother, she is viewed as less of a ‘real’ woman, or ‘not a woman, quite’ as the poem has it.

The second stanza focuses on the domestic woman: the wife, the mother, the feeder of others, the one who keeps house. This woman is viewed as fulfilling the typical ‘womanly’ duties, because she is inside the domestic sphere, but she is nevertheless ‘misunderstood’.

The woman in the final stanza is harder to categorise. There’s a suggestion that she is being carried naked through the streets to her place of execution: Sexton may have had in mind the punishment that awaited young religious martyrs who were burned at the stake (and fire appears in this stanza, possibly implying that the woman has been tortured with flames against her thigh to extract a confession; she is also not ‘ashamed’ to die), although it’s also possible to view her as an adulterer or woman who has ‘transgressed’ by having sex outside of marriage.

‘Her Kind’ can be regarded as a feminist poem, in that it raises and then rejects all three of these visions of womanhood as unacceptable: the first and third women are socially unacceptable because they – witchy outcasts and sexually transgressive women – stand outside of the paradigms of marriage within which women were historically expected to attain their ‘identity’.

But the middle ‘kind’ of woman, too, assuming it represents the homely wife and mother who does sit within the bounds of ‘acceptable’ womanhood, is scarcely better off than the other two women: although she has the worms and elves for company, she seems as ‘lonely’ in her woodland cave as the witch in the previous stanza, who flies above all those houses full of traditional families.

Thus in ‘Her Kind’, Sexton appears to sketch out three types of woman: the witch/spinster, the wife/mother, and the prostitute/adulterer. This tripartite formation of women’s possible roles had already been outlined by other feminist writers – and, indeed, other poets. In 1914, the modernist poet Mina Loy drafted her ‘Feminist Manifesto’, which argued that women had only three options open to them: ‘Parasitism’ (i.e. marriage), ‘Prostitution’ (selling her body for money), or ‘Negation’ (essentially, spinsterhood).

About Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton is often labelled a ‘confessional’ poet like Sylvia Plath, and – as with Plath – the label is reductive, if not outright misleading. For in many ways, both poets are perhaps more accurately regarded as late modernists whose work develops the poetic language forged by early twentieth-century practitioners such as H. D., Mina Loy, and Marianne Moore (and even T. S. Eliot).

Rather than viewing herself as a confessional poet, Sexton preferred to think of herself as ‘an imagist who deals with reality and its hard facts’. The imagists were an early twentieth-century movement in Anglo-American modernist poetry; imagists prioritised the poetic image above abstract language and self-indulgent Romanticism. There’s a hard clarity to Sexton’s work, an almost crystalline quality, which is evident in ‘Her Kind’.