Siti Aisah 1209503162/BSI/IV/E

The Ambiguity in Anne Sextons Poems and Her Writing Technique especially in Us
Anne Sexton is a poet and playwright. She is famous for his poetry that plays some of his personal life. She also has the same tragic fate as Sylvia Plath. Anne Sexton's poetry tells stories that are immensely significant to the mid-Twentieth-century artistic and psychic life. Sexton understood her culture's malaise through her own, and her skill enabled her to deploy metaphorical structures at once synthetic and analytic. In other words, she assimilated the superficially opposing but deeply similar ways of thinking represented by poetry and psychoanalysis. Sexton explored the myths by and through which our culture lives and dies: the archetypal relationships among mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, gods and humans, men and women. She perceived, and consistently patterned in the images of her art, the paradoxes deeply rooted in human behavior and motivation. (The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 1987) Her poetry presents multiplicity and simplicity, duality and unity, the sacred and the profane, in ways that insist on their similarities, even at times, their identity. In less abstract terms, Sexton made explicit the intimacy of forces persistently treated as opposites by the society she lived in. From some of her poems, there is one poem that made me impressed and wants to analyze more about it. The poem is 'Us'. In this poem there are some statements or words that make us wonder what was intended by the author. Sexton actually created this poem with a simple but implies what she felt. It means that it is not clearly described and will make us a little confuse.

An expression that is ambiguous if it contains two or more different (usually mutually exclusive) meanings between which the interpreter must choose is called ambiguity. (Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, 2010) The ambiguity is seen starting from the first until the last stanza. In the first stanza Sexton reveals: I was wrapped in black Fur and white fur and You undid me and then You placed me in gold light And then you crowned me, While snow fell outside The door in diagonal darts, While a ten-inch snow Came down like stars In small calcium fragments, We were in our bodies (that room that will bury us) If we read only a glimpse of it, we would conclude that in this section Sexton reveals about his admiration for the figure of a man who was so glorifies women. But actually in this part, Sexton was mocking the men. From each row, Sexton revealed how a man treats a woman with full attention. As if the men are the helper for women. Women are nothing if no men. Men who make women become valuable. But Sexton thinks differently. Men can only issue their seductions without any accountability. In the second stanza, the ambiguity is showed again by her, even more clearly. And you were in my body (that room that will outlive us) And at first I rubbed your Feet dry with a towel

Because I was your slave And then you called me princess. Princess! In the first line, And you were in my body means that a man is in a woman. The point is that the woman's own process of creation by God. God created woman from the rib ruling male. Therefore, Sexton wore the sentence to ensure that indeed women and men are a unity. But on the next lines, Sexton showed her feeling with no affection towards the men who sometimes feel the most powerful. Women must serve them with all her heart, and then they will give a compliment to the women. However, in Sextons point of view, the compliment is even regarded as an insult. She considered when the women serve the mens desire means that the women are the slave of men. The women even willing to do anything to expected a compliment from the men, which is actually just nonsense. Later in the last stanza: Oh then I stood up in my gold skin And I beat down the psalm And I beat down the clothes And you undid the bridle And you undid the buttons, The bones, the confusions, The New England postcards, The January ten oclock night, And we rose up like wheat, Acre after acre of gold, And we harvested, We harvested. From this last stanza, Sexton shows more that the women were a slave of the men. Women serve the men with everything they can. Then they

were going to give gifts in the form of compliment or flattery, seduction on women. Compliment and flattery was indeed making a woman's heart flowery and happy. However, after all of it is uttered, feels like it is just a crap. Lie uttered by men so that they get more pleasure. From this poem, we will get some interpretations which are different for each person. The differences in interpretation will occur when our first reading of this poem without knowing the background of the author. It is also happened to me. At the first time, when reading this poem I feel that Sexton was happy with her life and her partner. Because of her partner giving her what she wanted and she also served her partner with a deep love. But in reality, everything is different. In ordinary usage "ambiguity" is applied to a fault in style; that is, the use of a vague or equivocal expression when what is wanted is precision and particularity of reference. (Abrams, 1999) From this statement, it is clear that the ambiguity will cause two or more perceptions of each individual which are different. This ambiguity is already a characteristic of the poets in the 20th century, especially for Sexton. Most poets in those days were using some new techniques that became the hallmark of poetry at that time. .And among the barriers the self constructs are the familiar defense mechanisms: repression, displacement, suppression, screen memories, condensation, projection, and so on. Such psychological techniques, in turn, have their rhetorical analogues, not surprisingly those most favored by modernist poets and their New Critics: paradox, ambiguity, ellipsis, allusion, wit, and the other "tensions" that correspond to the neurotic symptoms by which the self is obscured. (J.D. McClatchy, 1978)

In order to write with greater directness and honesty about her own experiences, Sexton and the other confessional poets have tended to avoid the poetic strategies of modernism. It is purposed to de-repress poetry, so it has sought to achieve their effects by other means. In generally, it can be said that Sexton's poems, as of other confessional poems, has the patterns that she assumes and by which she manages her meanings are those which more closely follow the actual experiences they are recreating. The other reason why Sexton chooses to add or even make her poetry style as an ambiguity is because her life which is filled with doubts and too complicated. Sexton is still dealing with the subjects that have concerned her from the start: personal transformations from housewife to poet, from sanity to madness, from love to loss, and from life to death were always her subjects. Sexual anxiety, relationships between parents and children, the ambiguity of role reversals were her firmly established territory. (George, 1988) The problems that occurred in her life, changing the character of Sexton's own. Even these issues made prolonged depression that happened to her. However, precisely because of the complexity and variety of her problems makes Sexton created numerous works that can show her true identity and even become a major focus in her time.

REFERENCES

Abrams, M.H. 1999. A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th Ed. United States: Earl McPeek. George, Diana Hume. 1988. An Essay from "Anne Sexton and the Seduction of the Audience" in Sexton: Selected Criticism. McClatchy, J.D.1978. An Essay from "Anne Sexton: Somehow to Endure." In Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. Nurrachman, Dian. Survey of American Literature: The Anthology of Learning Materials (Second Half Semester). UIN Bandung: English Department. ---------------.2010. A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory. ---------------.1987. From Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton. Copyright by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.