1. Alicia Ostriker writes that Sexton is committed to the erotic view of life in “Anne Sexton and the Seduction of the Audience,” in Sexton: Selected Criticism, ed. Diana Hume George (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 3–18, p. 7. Estella Lauter praises Sexton’s refusal to cover up and her refusal to be shamed into silence in Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 25. Brian Gallagher claims that it was “on matters of overt sexuality” that Sexton made the most significant contributions to a protofeminist dialogue. See his “A Compelling Case,” Denver Quarterly 21:2 (Fall 1986): 95–111, p. 105. Finally, Liz Porter Hankins argues that despite Sexton’s Puritan background, she attempts to achieve a sense of identity through the body, in “Summoning the Body: Anne Sexton’s Body Poems,” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 28:4 (Summer 1987): 511–524.
2. Brian Gallagher, in the essay cited above, calls Sexton a “major religious poet,” a poet of “belief in belief” (111), while Estella Lauter, also cited above, claims Sexton’s work from 1970–74 as a prophetic body of work (23). Further, Louise Calio writes that Sexton and Plath are “modern pioneers” of goddess poetry in “A Rebirth of the Goddess in Contemporary Women Poets of the Spirit,” Studia Mystica 7:1 (Spring 1984): 50–59, p. 51. For more on Sexton as a spiritual poet, see David J. Johnson, “Anne Sexton’s The Awful Rowing Toward God: A Jungian Perspective of the Individuation Process,” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 7:1–2 (March 1986): 117–126; Kevin Lewis, “A Theologian on the Courtly Lover Death in Three Poems by Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath,” Lamar Journal of the Humanities 8:1 (Spring 1982): 13–21; Diane Wood Middle-book, “Poet of Weird Abundance,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 12–13:2–1 (Spring–Winter 1985): 293–315 (cited hereafter as Middlebrook “Poet”); William Shurr, “Mysticism and Suicide: Anne Sexton’s Last Poetry,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 68:3 (Fall 1985): 335–356.
3. Alicia Ostriker writes that after Transformations Sexton sees herself as “the heroine on a spiritual quest… [while the] woman question … deepens and darkens” in “That Story: Anne Sexton and Her Transformations,” The American Poetry Review 11:4 (July–Aug. 1982): 11–16, p. 13 (cited hereafter as “That Story”). See also Diana Huma George, “Is It True? Feeding, Feces, and Creativity in Anne Sexton’s Poetry,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 68:3 (Fall 1985): 357–371.
4. “Reconstructing the Impact of Trauma on Personality,” Personality and Psychopathology: Feminist Reappraisals, ed. Laura S. Brown and Mary Ballou (New York: The Guilford Press, 1992): 229–265, p. 238.
5. The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1953); rpt. (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 188–189; originally published as Le deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).