“Doing the Undoing Dance”: Anne Sexton’s Brutal—and Brave—Struggle for Agency
By Therese Gleason
Featured Art: “Persona-1” by Mateo Galvano
Dance imagery abounds in Anne Sexton’s ouevre, but the waltzes and allusions to fairy-tale-inspired ballets in her poems are characterized by compulsion and madness like that of the girl in “The Red Shoes” whose feet “could not stop” doing “the death dance.” In this and other archetypal tales interwoven in Sexton’s poems, danger—a wolf, a witch, a dark wood—lurks beneath the choreographed steps of the perilous rites of passage to womanhood, especially marriage. As Sexton’s truth-telling, taboo-shattering work attests, breaking destructive intergenerational cycles to chart a new path—symbolized by the amputated feet in the red shoes that “went on” and “could not stop”—is an ongoing, even violent struggle.
In her 1971 collection, Transformations, Sexton reinterprets and revises stories such as “Cinderella,” “Briar Rose,” “Rapunzel,” “The Maiden Without Hands,” and “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” with a personal (and female/ feminist) lens. (Notably, a number of the fairy tales in Sexton’s poems are also classical ballets with famous waltzes, such as Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake.) Yet Sexton’s preoccupation with these themes transcends just one collection, permeating her entire body of work. In particular, marriage, as an institution—and as a reflection of dysfunctional relationships in the family of origin—is dissected under Sexton’s brutally honest and psychologically astute gaze in numerous subsequent poems, including “How We Danced” (number two of six parts in the poem “Death of the Fathers” (The Book of Folly, 1972) and “The Wedding Ring Dance” (in the posthumously published 78 Mercy Street, 1978). These mirror-image poems expose cycles of abuse and oppression at the hands of the father (both literal and symbolic), and they articulate the struggle for female selfhood and self-expression.
“How We Danced” opens with the speaker dancing with her father “the night of my cousin’s wedding.” The two shorter, end-stopped lines—“I wore blue. / I was nineteen”—sandwiched between the first line and the longer, enjambed line “and we danced, Father, we orbited / ” suggest a catch in the throat, a hitch or hesitation in which the speaker is grappling for a foothold, off balance. Or, perhaps they echo the three-part, step-step-close (with a strong accent on the first beat) rhythm of the waltz. Certainly, from the beginning, there is something off-kilter in the scene: although the wedding is the cousin’s, the spotlight is not on the bride but the speaker and her father, who “waltzed me like a lazy Susan / and we were dear, / very dear.” The emphasis on how “dear” the father-daughter dancing is suggests an exaggerated, uncomfortable intimacy. In this dance, the speaker isn’t in control but is being “waltzed” by her father as the orchestra plays “‘Oh how we danced on the night we were wed.’”
As the pair spins around the room, there is a blurring or overlapping of boundaries between the traditional dyads of father/daughter and bride/groom, as well as the triad of mother/father/daughter. At this wedding, it is the speaker’s mother, rather than her young, unattached daughter, who “was a belle and danced with twenty men,” while her daughter waltzes with her mother’s husband (her father). The waltz itself is symbolic, a traditional wedding dance. It was banned by religious leaders (e.g., Pope Leo XII) in the 1800s because it was considered vulgar given the close proximity of the dancers. As Sexton’s diction and strange imagery suggest, there is a dizzying, uneasy, even queasy quality to this father-daughter waltz in which “We moved like angels washing themselves. / We moved like two birds on fire. / Then we moved like the sea in a jar, / slower and slower.” The supernatural imagery of winged creatures beset by fire and water here suggests a need for cleansing—for why would two angels need to wash themselves, unless they were impure (fallen)? Fire, like water, is also an element of purification and transformation, and here the simile of the father/ daughter as burning birds contains echoes of the fairy-tale ballet The Firebird as well as Greek myth. Like Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, these dancers are bound to crash and burn, to fall (like the bathing, ‘fallen’ angels). As the music slows and the couple move like “the sea in a jar,” the sensation of seasickness— or intoxication—heightens, suggesting a trance-like state.
The sea imagery intensifies in the second half of the poem, in which “pure oxygen was the champagne we drank / and clicked our glasses, one to one” and “the champagne breathed like a skin diver.” This sequence suggests the speaker is taking in a long breath, suspending it in order to dive deep into memory. In a scene that is becoming increasingly hazy, the speaker describes the “bride and groom” who “gripped each other in sleep / like nineteen-thirty marathon dancers”—but it’s unclear which bride and groom she’s referring to, the cousin and her husband, or the father and daughter. Sexton’s reference to the 1930s marathon dance craze, in which people competed to dance the longest, for hours on end, not only for prize money but also to be housed and fed during the Depression, indicates the stakes of this waltz, in which some people did collapse and dance to their death. The marathon dance craze also alludes to the artistic genre of the ‘danse macabre’ in the late Middle Ages, which depicted people dancing with skeletons, representing a fear of, and fascination with, death—a theme in Sexton’s work and life (and, ultimately, her death by suicide).
Indeed, death is also a partner to the speaker, who reveals midway through the poem—“Now that you are laid out, / useless as a blind dog, / now that you no longer lurk”—that the father with whom she waltzed is in fact dead. It is only when the speaker’s father is as impotent and harmless as a “blind dog” that she can reveal what might “lurk” between the daughter and her “dog” of a father. From this point on, the murkiness begins to recede, and the truth (“the song”) “rings in my head.” Continuing the direct address to the father, the speaker exposes the dark secret of this father-daughter dance: “You danced with me never saying a word. / Instead the serpent spoke as you held me close. / The serpent, that mocker, woke up and pressed against me / like a great god and we bent together / like two lonely swans.”
In this terrible and taboo revelation, the suggestion of incest (sexual abuse of the daughter by the father) is heightened by Sexton’s imagery of the “great god,” perhaps a reference to Zeus, who in various versions of Greek myth fathered children with his daughters. One myth in particular seems especially relevant: that of Leda and the Swan, in which Zeus takes the form of a swan and rapes Leda, who then bears his children along with those of her husband. The serpent, an obvious phallic symbol (and symbol of the devil/evil/knowledge), and the simile describing the father and daughter as a pair of “two lonely swans” also suggests not only a sexual but also a marital relationship, given that swans are known to mate for life. Here, too, are echoes of Swan Lake, in which Von Rothbart captures the beautiful Odette and transforms her into a swan, then tricks the prince into marrying his daughter, Odile, instead of Odette.
Although it is tempting to assume that Sexton, known for her trailblazing, confessional work, is referring specifically to her own experience, there are other possibilities as well. The mythic and biblical allusions, deep sea imagery suggesting the collective unconscious (reminiscent of Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck”), and the compulsive nature of the dancing in this poem might also refer to the patriarchal social order against which Sexton and her women/woman-identifying counterparts—past and present—strain(ed). For instance, the serpent as a “great god” also alludes to the story of Adam and Eve in the garden: humanity’s loss of innocence for which the woman is blamed for all eternity—a culpability which appears inverted in this poem. After all, the old-testament, biblical “great god” (as a stand-in for Christianity, particularly the Catholic religion), has often been seen as castigating the female body, systematically repressing the divine feminine, and explicitly disallowing women’s participation in church leadership while expecting them to be subservient to their husbands.
Another Sexton poem, “The Wedding Ring Dance,” contains strikingly similar subject matter and imagery to “How We Danced,” and it illustrates the evolving arc of Sexton’s poems dismantling the strictures of society’s prescribed notions of womanhood on her person. “The Wedding Ring Dance” opens with a kind of anti-wedding dance: the speaker is “orbiting” alone in her kitchen, her husband gone: “I dance in circles holding / the moth of the marriage,” which is “thin, sticky, fluttering / its skirts, its webs.” Given “its skirts, its webs,” the moth appears to be female and wearing a (wedding?) gown. But unlike the winged creatures at the beginning of “How We Danced”—the awesome (if also fearsome) “angels washing themselves” and birds on fire—the moth of marriage is sickly, if also moribund, leaking bodily fluids (“oozing a tear, / or is it a drop of urine?”). The moth is described as “grinning like a pear,” or, as the speaker reconsiders, “is it teeth / clamping the iron maiden shut?”—the simile and metaphor suggesting gritted teeth, a grimace of pain, even agony, given the reference to the “iron maiden,” once believed to be a medieval torture device. Perhaps it represents the speaker, gripped in the teeth of her marriage, or the institution itself: there is a sense of being trapped, squeezed, which contrasts with the way the moth “floats airily out of my hands,” suggesting both loss and liberation. Sexton also compares the “moth of marriage”—“who is my mother, / who is my father, / who was my lover”—to her family of origin. In this way, the troubled mother/father/daughter (lover?) triad on display in “How We Danced” with the daughter “gripped” in her father’s clutches during the wedding waltz recurs in this poem.
Just as the speaker’s orbiting dance slows down in “How We Danced,” so too does “The Wedding Ring Dance” unfold: “I dance slower, pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, / pulling off the elopement wedding ring, / and holding them, clicking them / in thumb and forefinger.” Here, the clicking of the rings echoes the champagne glasses at the cousin’s wedding in which “we clicked our glasses, one to one.” And, like in “How We Danced,” the speaker, also dancing a waltz to a familiar song, describes a feeling of drowning or gasping for breath, almost like a flashback:
And I keep dancing,
a sort of waltz,
clicking the two rings,
all of a life at its last cough,
as I swim through the air of the kitchen,
and the same radio plays its songs.
Like the speaker in “How We Danced” dredging up the truth of her father’s incestuous sexual urges/abuse, the wedding-ring dancer is waking up and becoming conscious of what lies beneath the learned, inherited patterns of behavior and societal expectations of her dissolving, dissolved, marriage. As she muses and dances, the speaker notes “the indent of twenty-five years, / like a tiny rip of a tiny earthquake” left by her wedding rings. Murmurs of secrets and damage remain: “underneath the soil lies the violence, / the shift, the crack of continents, / the anger, / and above only a cut, / a half-inch space to stick a pencil in.” Pondering her ringless hand, the speaker acknowledges that “the finger is scared / but it keeps its long numb place.” The image of the “long numb” finger suggests the speaker’s emotional state—but, along with the pencil, it’s also an emergent way out of the trap of marriage and the wedding “rings” that enclose and imprison, the hoops women jump through, unconscious, until they wake up. For there is a cut, an opening, a handhold for the speaker to drag herself out of the darkness, to freedom—and, just like in fairy tales, as if by magic, the appropriate tool appears at her fingertips: the pencil, a writing implement.
Thus, at the conclusion of “The Wedding Ring Dance,” although “the same radio plays its songs” and the speaker continues to waltz in her kitchen, this is not “How We Danced” but a different dance in which she can “make a small path” through the same old songs “with my bare finger and my funny feet, / doing the undoing dance.” Naming the date, “on April 14th, 1973,” as if to stake her claim on her own new destiny, the speaker describes “letting my history rip itself off me / and stepping into / something unknown / and transparent”—almost like a new wedding dress. In this there is a “violence,” but there is also clarity, and freedom to chart her own path, her own steps rather than the choreographed, stultifying waltz of society’s expectations of women: daughter, wife, mother. Although at first the naked, vulnerable “finger is scared,” the poem ends with the speaker looking forward, with “all ten fingers stretched outward, / flesh extended as metal / waiting for a magnet.” This final image is hopeful, suggesting that the speaker is newly oriented toward that which attracts her (the magnet), rather than focusing on attracting, or being attractive, in society’s, or a marriage partner’s, eyes. She is poised to untie the destructive “red shoes”: inherited patterns and ways of being (which “are not mine. / they are my mother’s. / Her mother’s before”) and chart a new path, dancing into a newfound, and hard-won, agency.
Therese Gleason is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Hemicrania (Chestnut Review, 2024); Matrilineal (Finishing Line, 2021); and Libation (South Carolina Poetry Initiative Chapbook Competition, 2006). Her work appears in 32 Poems, Indiana Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, she teaches literacy to multilingual learners in central Massachusetts.
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