Marital and extramarital relationship in anne sexton`s selecta poems - USD Repository
IN ANNE SEXTON’S SELECTED POEMS
A Thesis Presented to The Graduate Program in English Language Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Magister Humaniora (M.Hum)
in English Language Studies
By
i
This is to certify that all the ideas, phrases, and sentences, unless otherwise stated, are the ideas, phrases, sentences of the thesis writer. The writer understands the full consequences including degree cancellation if he/she takes somebody else’s idea, phrase, or sentence without a proper reference.
Yogyakarta, 23 August 2007 Nandy Intan Kurnia iv
♥ ♥
♥
I dedicate this graduate thesis to:
H. Achmad Muzamil bin Moehammad Alie
My Beloved Papa
Who died on July 24, 2005 (Three days after my sister’s birthday, and 2 days before mine)
Thank you for the joy and wisdom that you brought to me
♥ ♥
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
First of all I would like to thank Allah SWT for all His blessings. My life, happiness, this thesis and everything that I have now are all because of Him, only
Him who can make all things possible.
Thank you to all of my family who have not stopped believing in me. Papa (
H. Achmad Muzamil) and my big brother (Cikwie). I know both of you are watching me from Heaven. Pa, thank you for your critical questions and loving memories. If everyone in this world had a father like you, they would understand why I love you so much. Mama (
Hj. Maria SKM. M.Kes) and Dedek (Ririn Ramadhany S.Si). Your constant love and support have kept me going through the hard and easy times.
Mas (
Bagas Prakosa S.IP) – My Guardian Angel. You are always there to help me to keep my feet on the ground. Thanks for kicking my tail all the time, yet in return picking me up and pushing me to success. I love you.
My great thank is also for Dr. Novita Dewi, M.S., M.A. (Hons.). I would not get this far if you did not give me your time, patience, friendliness, care, guidance and support. Without all of that, my thesis would be a blank page. I am honored.
My appreciation is also for some encouragement and care given by my best friend, Nilam Maharani S.S., M.Hum. Well this is it! Thank you from the bottom of my heart. For me you will always be a beautiful person inside and out.
Nandy Intan Kurnia vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE ………………………………………………………………..... i APPROVAL PAGE ………………………………………………………....... ii ACCEPTANCE PAGE ……………………………………………………...... iii STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY ………………………………………........ iv DEDICATION PAGE ……………………………………………………........ v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………………………………........ vi TABLE OF CONTENTS …………………………………………………....... vii ABSTRACT ………………………………………………………………........ ix ABSTRAK …………………………………………………………………...... x
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………. 1 A. Background of the Study …………………………………………….
1 B. Research Problems ………………………………………………….
5 C. Objective of the Study ……………………………………………….
5 CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW ...................................................... 7 A. Review of Related Studies ..................................................................
7 B. Theoretical Review .............................................................................
13 B.1. Women and Marriage in Sexton’s America ................................
13 B.2. Feminism and The Feminine Mystique.......................................... 18 C. Theoretical Framework ........................................................................
23 D. Object of the Study ...............................................................................
23 E. Approach of the Study ..........................................................................
24 F. Method of the Study..............................................................................
25 CHAPTER III MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL RELATIONSHIP IN THE EYES OF MEN AS SEEN IN SEXTON’S SELECTED POEMS .…..
28 A. Abuse of Power in the Marital Relationship from Men’s Perspective as Seen in Sexton’s Selected Poems .....................................................
29 B. Abuse of Power in the Extramarital Relationship from Men’s Perspective as Seen in Sexton’s Selected Poems ……………………
36 C. Two Sides of a coins: Marital or Extramarital Relationship?.................
38 C1. Marriage as a Nightmare.................................................................
38 C2. Temporary Adultery .......................................................................
39 CHAPTER IV MARITAL AND EXTRAMARITAL RELATIONSHIP IN THE EYES OF WOMEN AS SEEN IN SEXTON’S SELECTED POEMS .
42 A. Abuse of Power in the Marital Relationship from Women’s Perspective as Seen in Sexton’s Selected Poems .................................
43 B. Abuse of Power in the Extramarital Relationship from Women’s Perspective as Seen in Sexton’s Selected Poems .................................
58 vii
CHAPTER V THE POEMS AND THE POET .............................................. 72
A. Anne Sexton’s Marital Relationship .....................................................72 B. Anne Sexton’s Extramarital Relationship .............................................
79 C. Anne Sexton as an American Woman Poet...........................................
84 C.1. The Body Image ............................................................................
86 C.2. Marital and Extramarital Relationship in the Poem and the Poet’s life.......................................................................................
92 CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION ....................................................................... 96
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 99 APPENDICES .................................................................................................... 102
Appendix 1................................................................................................. 102 Appendix 2.................................................................................................. 129 viii
ABSTRACT
Nandy Intan Kurnia. 2007. Marital and Extramarital Relationship in Anne
Sexton’s Selected Poems . Yogyakarta: English Language Studies. Graduate
Program. Sanata Dharma University.This thesis examined nineteen selected poems written by an American woman poet - Anne Sexton. Sexton’s poems have various subjects to discuss, however they have similar underlined theme, i.e men and women relationship in terms of marital and extramarital relationship.
There were three research questions that the researcher tried to answer. First, the researcher tried to discover the question on men’s views on marital and extramarital relationship as revealed in Anne Sexton’s nineteen selected poems. Second, the researcher wanted to find out how are women’s perceptions on marital and extramarital relationship revealed in those poems. Third, sought to examine how the marital and extramarital relationship is contextualized with the socio-cultural condition and Sexton’s own perception.
Library research was used in this thesis and there were two types of data. The primary sources were taken from Sexton’s nineteen poems having similar theme, which is men and women relationship in terms of marital and extramarital relationship. Secondary sources were some sources related to the research problems, and they were divided into several parts. First, the researcher used some criticisms to get more information on the authors’ profiles and the poems that she produced. Finally, the researcher applied some books that gave some data related to the discussion on, first, the issues on women and marriage in American History. The second one is feminism and The Feminine Mystique.
In producing her poems, Sexton used a lot of carefully selected words related to human bodies’ parts, commonly women related objects and commonly men related objects. Those words created a strong atmosphere, which allow readers of her poems see her views, beliefs and understanding to the women’s issues. Sexton is definitely a woman poet who is aware of the socio-cultural in the United States of America, along with the development of women movements by presenting issues of adult men and women relationship through her artistic works. The study itself is not a final work about Sexton literary works. For that reason the researcher encourages others to see Sexton’s works deeper and learns from her dynamic and revolutionary’s way of thinking. The woman is gone, but her literary works remain. She has proven herself as a solid writer and a notable poet. ix
ABSTRAK
Nandy Intan Kurnia. 2007. Marital and Extramarital Relationship in Anne
Sexton’s Selected Poems . Yogyakarta: English Language Studies. Graduate
Program. Sanata Dharma University.Thesis ini menganalisa sembilan belas puisi yg ditulis oleh seorang penyair wanita asal Amerika - Anne Sexton. Puisi-puisi Sexton yang dianalisa disini memiliki subyek pembahasan yang amat beragam, akan tetapi kesemuanya memiliki tema yang sama, yakni hubungan antara pria dan wanita didalam pernikahan dan hubungan diluar pernikahan (affair).
Peneliti thesis ini menjawab tiga pertanyaan. Pada pertanyaan pertama peneliti bermaksud untuk mencari jawaban mengenai pandangan pria mengenai isu-isu pernikahan dan hubungan-hubungan diluar pernikahan yang diangkat didalam kesembilan belas puisi Sexton. Kedua, peneliti ingin mengetahui persepsi wanita mengenai topik yang sama. Ketiga, peneliti ingin mengkontekstualisasikan data-data yang telah ia dapatkan sebelumnya dengan kondisi sosial-budaya dan persepsi Sexton sendiri.
Penelitian ini dilakukan dengan melalui penelitian kepustakaan. Ada dua tipe data yang digunakan. Sumber data utama adalah kesembilan belas puisi karya Sexton yang memiliki tema yang sama, yakni hubungan pria dan wanita didalam pernikahan dan hubungan diluar pernikahan. Sumber data pelengkap adalah beberapa data yang berhubungan dengan topik yang dibahas. Data-data tersebut dibagi menjadi beberapa bagian. Pertama, peneliti menggunakan kritik-pembahasan mengenai Sexton dan karya-karyanya. Peneliti juga menggunakan beberapa sumber data mengenai isu-isu wanita dan pernikahan didalam sejarah negara Amerika Serikat, dan juga data tentang feminisme dan The Feminine Mystique.
Pada karya-karyanya, Sexton menggunakan diksi-diksi yang berhubungan dengan bagian-bagian tubuh manusia, obyek-obyek yang biasanya dikaitkan dengan wanita dan obyek-obyek yang biasanya dikaitkan dengan pria. Diksi-diksi tersebut menciptakan atmosfir yang kuat, yang memberikan akses pada pembaca puisi Sexton kepada cara pandangnya, hal-hal yang ia percayai dan juga membantu pembaca untuk memahami permasalahan-permasalahan yang berkaitan dengan wanita.Sexton adalah penyair perempuan yang sadar akan perkembangan sosial-budaya di negaranya, dengan cara mengangkat isu-isu hubungan pria dan wanita. Penelitian ini belumlah lengkap. Oleh karena itu peneliti mengajak semua pihak untuk terus menganalisa karya-karya Sexton dan belajar dari cara berfikirnya yang dinamis dan revolusioner. Ia memang telah tiada, akan tetapi karyanya akan terus bertahan. Ia telah berhasil membuktikan dirinya sebagai penyair yang tidak dapat diragukan lagi kemampuannya. x
[Poetry] has never been used for the common purpose of life. Prose has taken all the dirty work on to her own shoulders; has answered letters, paid bills, written articles, made speeches, served the needs of businessmen, shopkeepers, lawyers, soldiers, peasants (Virginia Woolf in Olson, 2003: 42).
The above quotation illustrates how people consider poetry and prose as having different kinds of function. People often use prose as one of the literary genres to expose such social, economical, political, and cultural problems in society, while poetry is rarely seen as a media to carry such a variety of functions. However, Gill argues that similar to prose, poetry can explore someone’s feelings, and create pictures (either detailed or impressionistic ones) about ideas, feelings, places, people and events (1995: 4).
British women poets in the nineteenth-century, for example, took up various topics in their poems, ranging from factory conditions, industrial labor, slavery, abolitionism, militarism, the rise of nationalism, to marriage and its discontents, motherhood and passion, as well as the ‘fallen’ woman and the prostitute (Armstrong
el al , 1998: xxv).
In the spirit of promoting work of literature written by women, this thesis will examine poetry written by a woman poet. The reason is that nowadays people start to give position and treat women writers equally as their opposite sex. Most importantly, working with poems written by woman poets will offer readers the chance to dispel
1 any assumptions or stereotypes they may hold regarding the literary works produced by women. Women’s poems are as important as men’s, even some of those women poets are able to produce valuable literary works that sometimes are regarded as their way to expose their sorrows, as Montefiore puts it:
Poetry is, primarily, the stuff of experience rendered into speech; a woman’s poems are the authentic speech of her life and being. In reading or listening to a woman’s poem, we share the poet’s experience, which is the experience of suffering and resistance common to all women, and we enter into her mind (1994: 3). For that reason, it is necessary to study poetry written by women poets. Indeed, nowadays issues on female identity has gained currency so it makes some woman poets do their best to explore the nature of female experience through their poetry (Gill, 1995:4).
The various topics in the works of women poets can be seen as a means of those woman poets’ to explore their freedom of expression, which mostly are related to their own experiences and/or other women’s experiences. Among the variety of topics often tackled by woman poets, adult men and women relationship is dominant as shown by Anne Sexton. As an American woman poet from the middle upper class society who was aware of the women movement’s development, she is known for her confessional mode in many of her poems. Confessional mode itself is a movement in the twentieth century which can be categorized into the genre of contemporary poetry (Middlebrook, 1992:78). Sexton, along with many other poets such as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, was inspired by the publication of W.D. Snodgrass’ “Heart's Needle”, which describes Snodgrass separation from his three year old daughter.
2 Sexton makes use of her personal problems with the unusual frankness as her source of writings. She chooses to explore topics which are closely related to women and their problems in the society, namely adult men and women relationship. Many of her poems discuss the suppressed aspects of feminine experience, such as adultery and abortion, and also the normative ones, such as housekeeping and childbirth (Showalter, 1971: 137). In most of her poems, she is able to explore female experiences, which make readers, especially women, “identified strongly with the female aspect of the poems” (Kumin in Sexton, 1999: xix). As for the form of the poems, mostly they are written in narrative free verse poetry. Yet, one particular poem that actually draws my attention is written in the monologue, “The Interrogation of the Man of Many Hearts”, which will be addressed in the analytical part of this thesis.
That being said, this thesis will examine some selected poems of Sexton, which reveal complicated problems in the relationship experienced by adult men and women. Apparently, the portrayals of the relationship between both sexes are the theme holding together the nineteen poems selected in this study. As a woman poet, Sexton gives a serious attention to the women’s problems, especially those related with the marriage life. Furthermore, she does not only discuss this imperfect portrait of marriage from the point of view of those who are bound together in the name of marriage, but also gives voice to those who are practicing extramarital relationship.
This thesis, therefore, uses Sexton’s nineteen selected poems to highlight and reveal Sexton’s attempts in presenting adult men’s and women’s point of view on the issues
3 of marital and extramarital relationship. Basically, this thesis is dealing with Sexton’s own perception on the way men and women see those subjects.
In conducting the research, Feminist approach was employed. There were some reasons why the researcher chose to utilize the feminist approach. First, as stated by Montefiore, poetry written by woman is “a huge resource of both female and feminist meaning” (1994: 3). Accordingly, the readers of that poetry will be able to understand female experiences, woman’s awareness and criticism of those experiences (1994: 3). Given that Sexton’s poems deal with women’s experiences, especially relating to the issue of marital and extramarital relationship in the perspectives of men and women, as well as their awareness of those experiences, Feminist approach may open up to some understanding of women’s poetry. Second, Feminist approach was used to help diminish suspicion because throughout the history, women have suffered, often without hope of improving their situation, and in this poor condition, the feminists have for long struggled for the women’s betterment. Nevertheless, some people suspect that feminists along with their activities will threaten the society. The quotation below shows these phenomena:
Women may be acceptable as equals, but feminists are often seen frightening, threatening, or simply unnecessary. This hostility to feminists and feminism cannot be dismissed simply by avoiding the terms, for these harsh stereotypes can always be used to discredit women activists, whether they call themselves feminists or not (Freedman, 2002:10). The stereotypes that people give to the feminist come from their own background of knowledge. They are not well-informed about what feminism really is and many of them are still confused about what kind of movement feminism is. Feminism has many faces depending on its respective goals, such as radical feminists; socialist
4 feminists; Marxist feminists; lesbian separatists; women of color; and etc (Mitchell and Oakley, 1986: 9). As such, this study will hopefully promote not only the works of woman poets, but also the concept of feminism itself which has thus far developed through time.
The study, however, does not intend to argue whether Sexton is a feminist or otherwise. Rather, this thesis will examine how Sexton as a woman poet who is aware of the development of women movements in the United States of America presents issues of marital and extramarital relationship through her artistic works.
B. Research Problems
The research questions can be formulated as follows: 1. How are men’s views on marital and extramarital relationship revealed in Anne
Sexton’s nineteen selected poems? 2. How are women’s views on marital and extramarital relationship revealed in
Anne Sexton’s nineteen selected poems? 3. How are the poems studied contextualized with Sexton’s own socio-cultural condition and perception on marital and extramarital relationship?
C. Objective of the Study
In this thesis there are three objectives of the study. First, it seeks to identify and describe the way adult men see the issue of marital and extramarital relationship.
Second, it tries to find out how are women’s perceptions on those two kinds of
5 relationship described. Those two objectives can be obtained through the close reading of Sexton’s nineteen selected poems.
The third objective is to elaborate the connection between the intrinsic elements with the extrinsic element, that is, to find out how the marital and extramarital relationship is contextualized with the socio-cultural condition and perception of Sexton herself as an American woman poet.
6
CHAPTER II
LITERATURE REVIEW A. Review of Related Studies All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I wastrying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out (McCabe in Her Kind <http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z /sexton /herkind.htm>).
In an interview in 1968, Anne Gray Harvey or later known as Anne Sexton, explained that she really wanted to have a blissful life with her own family. As an American woman who came from the middle-class society, she tried to live in a conventional life, which was to be a wife and mother.
Sexton, who was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in November 9, 1928, started to write poetry as well as to perform in 1945 after her parents sent her to Rogers Hall, a boarding school in Lowell, Massachusetts. As stated by Martin in
Anne Sexton’s Life, in Rogers Hall, Sexton mastered formal techniques of writing
poems which then convinced her that poetry is an essential thing in her life (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/ sexton/sexton_life.htm). Sexton tried to commit suicide for several times. On 29 May 1957, when she once again attempted to commit suicide, her psychiatrist named Dr. Martine Orne encouraged her to keep writing poems (Middlebrook, 1992: 42). Therefore, for her, poetry serves as a form of therapy after being hospitalized for suicidal depression (Matthews, 1987: 214). After she received encouragement through her poetry writing, her life began to change, as narrated by Middlebrook as follows:
7 In April 1960, Anne Sexton for the first time wrote “poet” rather than “housewife” in the “occupation” block of her income tax return (Middlebrook in Matthews, 1987: 214).
This is a momentous event both for Sexton and also for the history of American literature because, as stated by Middlebrook, there are no other poets before her who have the courage to write female subjects related to the family life and also problems in it (Middlebrook in Matthews, 1987: 214). However, her decision to become a poet was closely related to her poor mental condition.
She entered the peak of her successful career as a confessional poet at the age of 46 in 1974. Regardless of her successful career in writing, she lost her battle with mental illness and then committed suicide <http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm? prmID =14>. For this reason, sometimes critics associate her with some of the confessional poets who committed suicide after suffering the mental illness, such as her own close friend Plath, and Berryman (Baldick, 1996: 43).
Many people, who knew Sexton, consider her as a clever woman. As commented by Furst, while taking the photographs, Sexton, cleverly, planned her own death. She determined who would be her photographer and who would handle her writing, and then she asked Furst to be her ‘authorized’ photographer. As stated by him, “It was all part of Anne’s strategy. Like an Egyptian queen she was planning for afterlife” (2000: viii). However, as stated by George in On Sexton's Career and
An Overview of Sexton's Canon , some others are furious with Sexton for killing
herself, because she is a poet who often wrote the enjoyment of being alive (http://www.english.uiuc. edu/maps/poets/s_z/sexton/career.htm).
8 Sexton published some poetry’s books entitled To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960); All My Pretty Ones (1962); Live or Die (1966); Love Poems (1969);
Transformations (1971); The Book of Folly (1972) and The Death Notebooks (1974).
She also produced a play entitled 45 Mercy Street (1969). Her early poems deal with her positive improvement from a mental breakdown, the death of her parents, mother- daughter relationship, and her constant desire to commit suicide. The second volume,
All My Pretty Ones , continues to deal with several themes found in the first volume,
but its main concern is “the loss of the beloved others that gave the speaker her fragile sense of identity” (George in On Sexton's Career and An Overview of Sexton's
Canon ).
Related to the publication of Sexton’s poetry’s books, some critics also share their opinion about her life, both as a woman and also as a woman poet. Kumin says, “The facts of Anne Sexton’s troubled and chaotic life are well known; no other American poet in our time has cried aloud publicly so many private details” (Kumin in Sexton, 1999: xix). Her frankness attracts many readers, especially women readers.
Most of her poetry’s readers are able to see the female aspect in her poems. She is able to explore various themes that obsess her, such as “love, loss, madness, the nature of the father-daughter compact, and death” (Kumin in Sexton, 1999: xxix). She produces poems in colloquial style with various kinds of subjects, and it attracts many people from different backgrounds (http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/heath/ syllabuild/iguide/sexton.html).
Meanwhile some other critics admit that Sexton is a talented writer. Showalter states the following:
9 In explosive, self-lacerating verse, Anne Sexton (b. 1928) lays bare her anxieties, guilt, and suffering with a confessional frankness few women writers have ever been able to afford (1971: 137). It is clear here that Sexton reproduces her problems into some forms of literary works. She exposes her own weaknesses, anxieties and problems in her works, which are known as the confessional mode. Many of her literary works confront the issue of gender, social role, and female life from her own perspective as a woman poet.
Showalter also adds that many of Sexton’s poems reveal the suppressed aspects of feminine experience and also all the things that are related to the normative ones (1971: 137). As commented by Manlapaz, it is not until Sexton deliberately broke the taboo by writing poems celebrating her body’s experiences that poet discuss the uncommon issues in their poems. (1997: 9). It means that Sexton consciously and unconsciously had give assistance to open the sacred door, which is not only for women poets, but also for female issues. She wrote from an easily identifiable feminine position concerning subjects considered taboo, before such issues were even topics for casual discussion. As explained by McCartan in Anne Sexton “She dove headlong into territory considered taboo in her era: incest, addiction, mental illness, and abortion, to touch on a few.” (http://empirezine.com/spotlight/ sexton/ sex1. htm). As a woman, she is also successful in entering the world used to be known as ‘the men’s domination’, namely education. She becomes the first woman who is able to gain a fellowship at Radcliffe College’s Institute for independent study.
Nonetheless, there are also many poets and critics, mostly male who took offense. As quoted by Kumin, Louis Simpson in the New York Times Book Review criticizes Sexton’s poems in All My Pretty Ones saying that Sexton is absolutely not a
10 good writer because she insistently writes about things that he calls as a “pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience…” (Sexton, 1999: xx). Kumin also quotes the statement of Robert Lowell who shares the same opinion with Simpson:
For a book or two, she grew more powerful. Then writing was too easy or too hard for her. She became meager and exaggerated. Many of her most embarrassing poems would have been fascinating if someone had put them in quotes, as the presentation of some character, not the author” (Kumin in Sexton, 1999: xx). He sees Sexton, as a poet who dares to expose taboo’s subjects in her poems, in the negative sense. It seems that although many people fall in love with her works, it cannot make her a great poet.
As a confessional poet, there are many controversies related to her works, as commented by Kumin, that her works “rapidly became a point of contention over which opposing factions dueled in print, at literary gatherings, and in the fastnesses of the college classroom” (Kumin in Sexton: 1999: xx). Nevertheless, Kumin believed that poetry is the only thing that keeps Sexton alive for eighteen years, “the making of poems remained her one constant” (Kumin in Sexton, 1999: xxiv). Although many critics criticized her works, she won many awards, such as The American Academy of Letters Traveling Fellowship in 1963 for her All My Pretty Ones and the Pulitzer Prize for her Live or Die in 1967.
It cannot be denied that the confessional label had turn out to be a trap that prevents readers and critics from interpreting the range of her achievement. Yet it cannot stop her from writing poems that are able to reach beyond the personal boundaries which is ostensibly formed the confessional territory. The academic feminist movement has been central to a reconsideration of this misdirected
11 judgment. In the early days, feminism's appropriation of Sexton creates another problem, because it only discusses her poetry on the surface and it constitutes another form of limitation. One thing that keeps her works visible is the Anthologies of women’s poetry: yet, the selections are limited to a few poems that celebrated feminist subjects or reflected feminist concerns. George in On Sexton's Career and
An Overview of Sexton's Canon explained that recent feminist approach has created a
great effect in the effort to clarify the range of her themes, the subject of her poetics, and the radical nature of her vision (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/ s_z/sexton/career.htm).
Based on these criticisms reviewed above, it can be concluded that they mostly discuss her life or more general topics and ideas relating her works to the feminine experience. It is quite difficult to find critics who specifically analyze her poems with regard to an adult men and women relationship which covers perspectives from both sexes. However, one critic deserves some mention is Matthews, but she only focuses her discussion on one of Sexton works, entitled “Housewife” (Matthews, 1987:214-215).
This thesis is different in that it examines adult men and women relationship in terms of marital and extramarital relationship through Sexton’s poems. Moreover, this thesis will show some similarities and also differences of how both sexes see those two kinds of relationships based on Sexton’s poems. Therefore, the nineteen poems of Sexton selected here are worth further analysis. This thesis also intends to get a deeper understanding on how Sexton sees the relationship between men and
12 women and how such relationship can be contextualized to the emerging of women’s movement.
B. Theoretical Review
This section will discuss relevant theories applied in the study. The first is Women and Marriage in Sexton’s America and the second is Reframing Feminism: Feminine Consciousness in Poetry.
B. 1. Women and Marriage in Sexton’s America
Marriage in America where Sexton was born, commonly, is seen as an institution. As commented by Kenschaft there are two important meaning when people starts to see marriage as an institution. First, marriage is a social structure, which leads to the opinion that laws, customs, traditions and cultural assumptions are intrinsically involved in defining what is and is not a marriage. Those aspects make the married couples must always come to terms in some way with the societal expectations of marriage. Second, marriage has a history and a trajectory. It means that marriage is a cultural creation, and like all cultural creations it has changed through time in response to changing material and ideological conditions that emerge in a certain society (The Making of Modern American Marriage: 1998).
Similar to Kenschaft, Humm defines marriage as “the institution traditionally provides women with a social identity” (1990: 127). She also explicates three aspects of marriage. First, it is the site where categories of gender are reproduced. Second, it is the site of sexual division of labor and women’s subordination. Third, it is the
13 model for other social institutions of a sexual norm. She also reveals that sociologists and historians suggest marriage as “a simple social contract” which is closely related with the reproduction of children (1990: 128).
Kenschaft explains that through the middle of the eighteen century, the expectations of American marriages seem to have been primarily practical, “Courtships were often quite short, lasting only a few weeks or months, and a courting couple would spend most or all of their time in a larger group. Such courtships gave the couple little opportunity to get to know each other as individuals” (Kenschaft: 1998). It means that knowing each other as individuals was not considered as an important matter. Then, she sees the changing idea of material and ideological basis of marriage in the United States around the end of the eighteenth century. People at that time started to change their way of thinking when the issues of land’s ownership and the beginning of urbanization emerge, at this point, to have children is regarded as less important. By the turn of the nineteenth century many married couples had chose to control their fertility, rather than simply accepting the natural reproductive cycles that typically produced a child every two years or so.
When couples decide to get married, it means that they have to be a good partner for each other: Women and men will have to work together. They will want to together, to cooperate, and by doing so; they can free each other from the shackles that bound them for so long. By working together in harmony, men and women will coffer the greatest benefits upon each other and upon the whole of humanity (Montaqu, 1953:153). The cooperation between women and men will create a lot of advantages for both of them. Montagu notices that the most important thing in marriage is being kind and
14 cooperative. It means both husband and wife have to work together to accomplish harmony, health, wealth, welfare, and happiness in their life (1953: 161). They also have to build good relationship thus they can create a good condition for their children’s character development (1953: 162). Moreover she states:
Above all, marriage must be based on mutual respect; and in the present state of the relations of the sexes I should add that on the man’s part it should be accompanied by sense of responsibility and obligation to the woman of his choice. (1953: 162)
Therefore, the main thing is respecting each other, which means that both of them have to think they are equal. This concept of equality is called as ‘democracy’, where “Men and Women must become partners in the greatest of democratic enterprises— the making of a democratic world can only be made by persons who are themselves truly democratic” (1953: 164).
In Women: A Feminist Perspective, Jo Freeman explains that God as the world's creator creates women and men with a certain “inalienable rights". Thus, both sexes can have and pursue a happy life because they are created as equal beings (1975: 439). Besides, in the relationship between man and woman in a marriage, there must be a mutual relationship, in other words, both of them have an equal position. Wife does not serve as the servant of her husband, both of them must be complementary to each other (Dufoyer, 1964:48).
Unfortunately, women and men rarely gain equality in their relationship. In marriage, sometimes women have to lose their freedom; even some women believe that marriage can be seen as an institution that robbed their rights. Some people believe that women possess distinct natures because of their biological difference
15 from their opposite sex and it is the fundamental reason why the society placed them in different sphere to men. It is even worse that some people also believe that women are supposed to be very emotional, deserving for household works (Rowbotham, 1992: 16).
The society expects women to get married and to be good mothers for their children; it means that women have to stay at home while men act as the breadwinners. The traditional view of women’s role and place was adopted not only by men but also most women, and in fact, by the mid-twentieth century many women had begun to call themselves as “just a housewife” (Matthews, 1987: xiii). Although then the number of women who entered the working force increased after 1945, however most working women still considered themselves primarily wives, mothers, and housekeepers. Even when women had more opportunities to pursue education and careers during the 1960s, some of them still believed that marriage is the important thing for them and their future identity is “ largely encompassed by the projected role of wife and mother” (Ward and Green, 1993: 89).
In the history of American, under the English and American common law, a married couple's presumed union of economic interests was embodied in the legal principle of coverture. It declared that a married woman's economic and legal rights were indistinguishable from her husband's. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the social consequence of the shift to a market economy, with its sharp division between work and not-work, was making many people questioned the importance of having this principle. The married women's property acts acknowledged the possibility that married women might have an economic existence
16 that was separate from their husbands. It was not until the 1970s, however, that married women gained equal access to such capitalistic necessities as credit (Kenschaft: 1998).
However, as stated by Carlson in Marriage On Trial: Some Lessons From
History , although some women sees marriage as their primarily plan, according to the
survey on married life, since the 1960s some of the American couples who are able to marry are in increasing numbers choosing not to do so. In general, the U.S. marriage rate has fallen nearly 50 percent. Meanwhile, what the Census Bureau calls as the "unmarried partner households" has climbed in number from 523,000 couples in 1970 to 4,900,000 in 2000. At the same time, the number of married couple families with children actually declined slightly in absolute numbers, from 25.7 million back in 1960 to 25.2 million in 2000 (http://www.defendmarriage.org/allan.asp).
In terms of marriage age, by the end of the 1950s, the average marriage age of women had dropped into 20 years old, and it was still dropping into the level of younger women. Fourteen million girls were engaged by the age of seventeen. When the discussion on the marriage age is linked to the discussion of education, by the end of mid-fifties, 60 percent of women had dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would create a marriage bar. Some of college even built dormitories for so called “married students”, but the students were almost always the husbands, while the wives – as stated by an American feminist Betty Friedan – had got a new title as “Ph.T” as the acronym of Putting Husband Through (Friedan, 1997:16).
17 When discussion of divorce based on race appears, only 14 percent of white women who married in the early 1940s eventually divorced, whereas almost half of white women who married in the late 1960s and early 1970s have already been divorced. For African-American women, the figures are 18 percent and nearly 60 percent (http:members.iquest.net/~dkoons/marriage.html).Young people, especially young women, were more pessimistic about their chances to have a happy and long- lasting marriage. Many of them even did not hesitate to take a divorce as a way out when they were not succeed in their marriage lives. For children whose parents divorced, the risk of divorce was two to three times greater than it was for children from married parent families (http://marriage.rutgers.edu/Publications/pubwhats happening.htm).
Thus, according to projections based on the divorce rates above, marriage at the time when Sexton lived is more likely to be broken by divorce or permanent separation than by death. It is also the case of Sexton own marriage. She chooses to divorce Kayo at the end of 1971 than trying to maintain her marriage in a good shape for their two daughters -Linda and Joy.
Given the unbalanced position of husbands and wives in marriage as explained above, America in Sexton’s time called for women’s struggle for equality.
Indeed, for more than a century women have tried to achieve full citizenship, the right to take part in the political and social life and to stand on equal human dignity with men in their relationship. They have to struggle very hard for their freedom because
18 sometimes the society where they live cannot accept their existence; status and position in the society. The society seems to accept this poor condition as a kind of
culture that cannot be changed because it exists since a long time ago and most of
people already admit it as a true thing.The feminist movement arouse to construct betterment for women, and slowly but sure, the feminist movement forms the public opinion about women and able to make people share their opinion about the existence, status and position of women. For women themselves, feminist movement is like a little window of opportunity, and with a bit of luck can lend a hand to them to get the betterment. As one of the women’s movement, the feminist movement has come far enough for them to look back and see where they started, and how they reached their present status. The familiar term to call the way of thinking and acting of the feminist is feminism.
Encyclopedia of Knowledge stated that:
Generally, feminism means the advocacy of women's rights to full citizenship — that is, political, economic, and social equality with men. Feminism encompasses some widely differing views, however, including those which advocacy female separatism (1993: 235).
Therefore, it is clear that feminism supports the idea of giving women right to get the same position as men in every sector of life that can give a strong influence to their life as a person who lives in a society. Margaret L. Andersen adds:
Feminism is a way of both thinking and acting; in fact, the union of action and thought is central to feminist programs for social change. Although feminists do not believe that women should be like men, they do believe that women's experiences, concerns, and ideas are as valuable as those of men and should be treated with equal seriousness and respect. As a result, feminism makes women's interest central in movements for social change (1997: 8).
19 The quotation above is clearly stated that the feminists are fighting to make a social change for women and they do not want women to be exactly like men, they only believe that women are as precious as men, thus the society have to treat them equally.