A Woman’s Alienation from Society

In the poem “Her Kind” by Anne Sexton, the three stanzas each act as three stages in the speaker’s life. Anne Sexton cleverly uses the metaphor of a witch in order to portray a woman alienated from society. This metaphor refers back to the Salem Witch Trials in which the women labeled as witches were rather women who were different from society’s expectations. The metaphor of a witch is employed throughout the entire poem even though the word witch is only explicitly mentioned in the first stanza. In essence, “Her Kind” is the story of a woman’s stages in life and her experiences with alienation from society.

The first stanza introduces the speaker as a witch who only comes out at night, representing not only her separation from society but also the way society perceives the speaker to be. Simply because she is different, “twelve-fingered,”(line 5) and “dreaming evil,” (line 3) the society views her as evil and subhuman—“not a woman, quite” (line 6). When the speaker says she is “braver at night” (line 2) she gives the sense that at this stage in her life she is not quite ready to show her true self and therefore hides from the “normal” world. The speaker portrays “normal” life to be monotonous when she describes her crusade “over the plain houses, light by light” (line 4).

The second stanza describes the traditional, socially accepted home “filled with skillets, carvings, shelves,/ closets, silks, innumerable goods” (lines 9-10). She continues the metaphor of a witch, however, when she says, “fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves” (line 11). This quote hints that although she displays herself to society through the appearance of her house as a normal woman, on the inside (or in the privacy of her own home) she is still separated in her mindset from society. When the speaker says “A woman like that is misunderstood,” (line 13) she is most likely meaning that the woman’s integrity and intelligence go unnoticed because only the superficial possessions in her house are acknowledged.

The third stanza completes the third stage of the speaker’s experiences in her life as an alienated woman. Sexton uses imagery and alludes to the Salem Witch Trials. She creates the image of a nude woman being driven in a cart, exposed to the public, and tortured and burned at the stake. This intense image shows the extremity of the speaker’s alienation from society and the way she feels when society judges her and makes her an outcast. When the speaker says, “your flames still bite my thigh,” (line 18) it suggests that the psychological pain society inflicted upon the speaker is like an unhealed wound: the memory of it still affects her. In a way, the physical pain used in the Salem Witch Trials is transformed into psychological torture for the time period of this poem. The quote, “A woman like that is not ashamed to die,” (line 20) signifies her acceptance and pride of being unlike the traditional expectations of women and her preparedness to be vilified by the society because of it.

The repetition of “I have been her kind” at the end of each stanza acts as the thread throughout the poem; it connects each of the stanzas together to form the experiences of the speaker rather than three separate types of women. The three stanzas represent the speaker’s stages of feeling alienated from society. She begins by hiding her true feelings and avoiding society, then attempts to put up a superficial front in order to deceive society, and then finally she allows her true sentiment to be seen by the public and consequently accepts her alienation from society and the thematic “social death” that ensues. (628)