Using Sexton to Read Freud:

Abstract

In her poem "Rapunzel," Anne Sexton maps out a model of lesbian etiology that at once parodies the model proposed by Freud and significantly amends it. Freud's famous model for female development, as he articulates it first in "Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes," and later in "Female Sexuality," may be profitably compared to the model implied by Sexton's poem. The female pre-Oedipal phase is crucially at stake in such a comparison, as Sexton's account suggests that the pleasures of the pre-Oedipal mother-daughter dyad are dangerously strong for the girl child, and seem to be the force that compels the majority of girls into the rechanneling of libidinal desire from the mother to the father. Sexton's poem emphasizes the continuous pressures exerted by the pre-Oedipal phase upon the psyche of the developing girl. Sexton's emphasis on the pre-Oedipal phase, and her depiction of heterosexual love, in "Rapunzel" and elsewhere, as regressive, suggests that the "normal" heterosexual female, who seeks a father figure in order to save herself from re-absorption into the primal mother-daughter dyad, is actually acting out an infantile fantasy of the devouring mother. The morbid irony of Sexton's "Rapunzel" stems from its depiction of a young woman who flees the boundary-less world of the pre-Oedipal state, only to resurrect the infantile fantasy of the devouring mother in the arms of a father substitute.