19 pages • 38 minutes read
Anne SextonSnow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Confessional poetry, or poetry that takes the personal experiences of the poet as the subject, often examining fraught subjects like sex, gender, trauma, depression, and others, emerged in the late 1950s and continued as a key poetic school in the 1960s. As one of the prominent figures of the movement, Sexton’s poetry closely examined her experiences not only of mental health, but of sexism and the weight of the cultural patriarchy. While “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” is not explicitly confessional and came about after the heyday of confessional poetry, readers can still find the poetic values that undergirded Sexton’s writing until her death, as she takes to task the American culture's expectation of female submissiveness, sexual purity, and deference to men.
The editors at the Poetry Foundation point out:
Although the original confessional poets were all white, middle- or upper-class, and heterosexual, their insistence that trauma and—in the case of poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath—painful realities of gender and patriarchy were not simply subjects worthy of poems but also experiences that altered the very conditions of poetry have inspired countless others (“An Introduction to Confessional Poetry.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation).
Historical Context
Sexton’s writing career took place roughly during the same years that second-wave feminism emerged and established new goals of equity for women. In contrast with first-wave feminism, which sought to gain the vote, second-wave feminism increased the scope of activism to include aspects of sex and sexuality, reproduction, domestic violence, inequality in the workplace, and other areas. As women began to chafe against domestic expectations of homemaker/mother roles and the inaccessibility of privileges afforded to men, writers like Sexton used their art to call attention to specific inequalities. Sexton notably wrote directly about female bodily experiences in poems like “In Celebration of My Uterus” or “Menstruation at Forty,” presenting complex and nuanced images of female bodies and experiences that were previously taboo. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and other poems in the collection Transformations offered a critique of how the fairy tales deeply embedded in Western culture presented women as sexual objects with unrealistic standards of youth and beauty, and used the dwarfs’ fairy tales themselves to highlight problems of sexism in the contemporary American culture.
