Her Kind (1960). Content and Description

In a 1968 interview with Barbara Kevles, Sexton claimed that her intention in writing the poems that make up her first collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was to “give the experience of madness” (qtd. in McClatchy 13). The last poem that Sexton wrote for the book, “Her Kind,” became the poem with which Sexton most wanted to be identified; she gave a dramatic performance of it to open all of her poetry readings. In the short, three-stanza poem Sexton created a disturbing but powerful persona to show what kind of person and poet she was: a dangerous madwoman-witch.

In a tightly structured format the poem hints at the roles Sexton has played in her own life. The rhyme scheme of ababcbc is formal and serves to control the material, a description of a woman clearly out of control. As with much of Sexton’s early poetry, she has worked hard to impose stylistic order on disordered content. The key line in each stanza is the penultimate one, in which the narrator describes “a woman like that.” Each of the descriptions is followed by the five monosyllabic words that leave no question of the author/narrator’s attitude toward this disturbing persona: “I have been her kind.”

The woman described, though troubled, however, is not a passive victim of fate; in each stanza she is active. She haunts and dreams, finds and fills, waves and survives. Sexton’s imagery invokes witches, night, evil, loneliness, domesticity, sensuality, and pain. She combines third and first persons in narrating the poem, blurring the line between the other and the self. The first stanza introduces “a possessed witch” who haunts the night. She has “done [her] hitch,” indicating a duty fulfilled, rather than a choice made, over “the plain houses” where normal people live. The abnormality of the narrator is confirmed by her being “twelve-fingered.” Sexton reinforces her deformity in the final B line: “A woman like that is not a woman, quite,” before the first and third persons merge: “I have been her kind.”

The second stanza raises images of the home and hearth: “skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods.” These common domestic items, however, carry the taint of the witch who uses them. She fills “warm caves in the woods” with these things and uses them to fix meals for an unusual kind of family: “the worms and the elves: / whining, rearranging the disaligned.” After this unsettling image, the tone of line C becomes an almost humorous understatement: “A woman like that is misunderstood.”

The third stanza addresses a specific audience, the driver of a cart. It is possible to envision Sexton’s therapist in such a role. In the presence of this guide who has taken her on a painful journey, whose “flames still bite [her] thigh” and whose wheels have cracked her mental ribs, she feels herself stripped to “nude arms” that wave at villages as she searches for her own route. Recovery and survival may be the goals, but the narrator ultimately reasserts the power of this sensual housewife-witch: “A woman like that is not ashamed to die.”

For Discussion or Writing:
1. What connotation does the phrase “her kind” usually carry? Contrast the colloquial use of the term with the manner in which it is used in this poem. Analyze the tone of the final cbc triplet in each stanza.

2. Compare the voice and role of the narrator in “Her Kind” with those of “The Double Image” and “The Starry Night.” What similarities do you see in the ways Sexton creates the persona of narrator? How does she achieve the masking and revealing of the speaker?

3. Confessional poetry involves autobiographical self-revelation. Sexton said that “Her Kind” emerged from and was a means of describing her own experience of madness and exploration of identity during her early psychotherapy. Yet, she resisted the confessional label for her work. Analyze “Her Kind,” evaluating its potential to exist as a poem on its own, without the reader’s knowing details of Sexton’s life. Has she managed, for example, to create pleasing and meaningful word patterns and images that provide more than a representation of the author?

4. Sexton is noted for the power of her images. Examine the imagery of each stanza and try to penetrate its meanings. For example, in stanza 2, consider the domestic images and the manner in which Sexton twists their normal implications. Who are the worms and elves? Who is whining? Who are the disaligned in need of rearrangement? What do the warm caves in the woods mean to a mad housewife-witch?