The earlier ending lines provide a key to understanding the final version, one that moves beyond interpretations that rely on the argument that the poem is a comment on Sexton’s “madness,” and the alienation it produced in her. “Who sees me here / this ragged apparition / in their own air / sees a wicked appetite / if they dare.”
Witch as Symbol of the Reclamation of Female Power
Rather than an expression of mental illness and alienation, the poem speaks of the reclamation of female power and the idea that women can rightly claim a different identity for themselves than the one patriarchal western society imposes on them. The line "in their own air" is a challenge to all women to recognize their "wicked appetite" - "if they dare."
Three roles for woman have been recognized in the poem, one for each stanza: the “possessed witch,” the “housewife persona,” and the “adulteress.”
Inhabitant of the Chthonic World
In the figure of the “possessed witch” Sexton is said to depict feelings of being controlled, possibly by her own depression, whose results are inherently evil. The first stanza is said to mean that Sexton feels feared and opposed by society and the line “lonely thing, twelve fingered” is related to Sexton’s feeling like an outcast.
The tone Sexton achieves is less forlorn than this interpretation allows. While the “lonely thing…out of mind” evokes solitariness, it is one of power and individuality, the self unconstrained by society. “Out of mind” can be read as madness, but also as not of the mind but of the dark, chthonic world close to the earth, a world woman is connected to by her biology, one of internal tides, of blood and hidden places.
The Female Body as Sacred Cave
The second stanza of the poem, with its evocation of “warm caves in the woods” where the first “I” in the poem fixes “suppers for the worms and the elves,” accommodates the housewife interpretation where the housewife persona makes her home more comfortable by filling the cave with “skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods.” This interpretation stays on the surface of things though.
To carry this idea to a deeper, biological level, let’s turn again to the chthonic nature of women. Sexton’s witch is the poet’s female nature, an earth-cult being hidden within her social self, one defined by her biology. Further, the cave is the female body, a secret sacred place, here filled with the charms and totems, the amulets and talismans of woman’s magic.
An Erotic Being in Defiance of Society’s Expectations
In the last stanza of “Her Kind” the interpretation of the final persona as the adulteress falls short. Rather, “I have ridden in your cart driver, / waved my nude arms at villages going by,” suggests a conflict between the ego, or super ego, and the id. In this case, the driver is the ego who must conform to society’s expectations, who must act as judge and executioner when taboos are broken.
The id, the repository of instincts and biological drives, the erotic and sexual being who waves her “nude arms” in defiance, strives to know herself, to learn “the last bright routes,” to be a “survivor” even while the “flames still bite” her thigh. This interpretation suggests the part conflicting elements in a person’s own nature play in the infliction of pain and does credit to a poet who fought her demons with such courage.
Reference -
Middlebrook, Diane Wood. “On “Her Kind.’” From Anne Sexton: A Biography (1991).
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