The night of my cousin's wedding
I wore blue.
I was nineteen
and we danced, Father, we orbited….

Mother was a belle and danced with twenty men.
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.
--Anne Sexton, from “How We Danced”

Theme Seven:  Incest and Molestation

When Anne Sexton first displayed the “Elizabeth” personality, she constantly talked about something that Sexton herself couldn’t say.  In one of her typed-in-the-dark letters to Dr. Martin Orne, “Elizabeth” exhorted the shrink to administer sodium pentothal so that Anne would tell him some deep dark secret.

Sodium pentothal is a barbituate that doctors might give to a patient for a number of reasons.  They can use it as anesthetic, to inhibit phobias, or to induce a coma.*   But here, Anne/Elizabeth is asking for its use as “truth serum.”  The purpose here would be similar to that of a criminal suspect begging to take a polygraph.  Both the suspect and Sexton want their examiners to believe that they‘re speaking the truth.

“Elizabeth” specified that she wanted Dr. Orne to administer the drug to Anne so that the latter could finally talk about something that was at the core of her psychic injuries:  her turbulent relationship with her alcoholic father, and the degeneration of her relationship with Aunt Nana.  

If you’re wondering why Dr. Orne might not believe Sexton if she talked about something exceedingly personal, it’s because Sexton admitted to deliberately lying about her past:  transgressions she frequently referred to as “truth crimes.”  In one instance, she told Orne about an incident she had on one summer vacation when, as a little girl, she was raped by a family friend.  In the next session she claimed that she had deliberately made up the story on the spot--sort of an improvisatory narrative, if you will.  As she herself once said:

I am nothing, if not an actress off the stage.  In fact, it comes down to the terrible truth that there is no true part of me. . . . . . It is as if I will permit my therapy and think it all very interesting as long as it doesn’t touch me.  I am a story-maker, a--doesn’t it strike him as odd that this ‘story’ is too pat?”

This posed a problem in assessing the veracity of what Sexton said in treatment.  It’s for this reason that nieces Lisa Tompson and Mary Ford objected to Orne’s release of the tapes in the first place.  Even in context one could consider them possibly defamatory, especially because of the explosive nature of this secret that Anne wanted to hide, but “Elizabeth” wanted to expose.

During the initial appearance of the “Elizabeth” persona, Dr. Orne noticed the increasing use of the epithet “little bitch.”  Moreover, he began to associate it with “Elizabeth,” but not Anne.  In probing this further, Sexton lapsed into a trance, where the following revelation took place:

Sexton:  Father comes in drunk; wakes me up, saying ‘I just wanted to see where you were--your sister [Jane] is out letting someone feel her.’  And he says it again.  Sits on the bed, takes a bottle out of his pocket and drinks.  I asked where Mommy was; gone to bed and locked the door.  He says, ‘Do you like me?’

Orne:  What side of the bed is he sitting on?

Sexton: [Points with finger.] He asks me if anybody ever felt me.  I don’t know what he means.  I lay down and cuddle with Nana.  I know that isn’t good, I shouldn’t.

Orne:  Shouldn’t what?

Sexton:  He is holding me.  He says to press up against him, sort of wriggles and asks if I like it.  And it feels good.

Orne:  Does he say you are a good girl?

Sexton:  He puts his hand on me and asks if I--if I ever do this and did I ever do it.

Orne:  What did you tell him?

Sexton: [Shakes head]:  He kissed me on the lips and he started to leave and I held on and didn’t want him to go.  Then he came back, left his bottle on the table.”

Here, Sexton accused not just her father, but her Aunt Nana of sexually abusing her.  Once conscious of this, Sexton explored the theme of incest in her writing.  The subject rings as clearly as a bell in such poems as “How We Danced.”  It also serves at the core of her play 45 Mercy Street, a pivotal scene in which depicts a freshly adolescent girl (thirteenish) being intimately fondled by her father, while an elderly woman (reminiscent of Aunt Nana) listens in from the next room. 

Dr. Orne said that he did not automatically believe the allegation.  He subsequently interviewed family members to see if Sexton’s claim of childhood sexual abuse had any merit, and found that  others could corroborate a noticeable friction between Sexton and her father.  After all, Ralph Harvey not only drank, but was excessively formal inside the home.  Sexton found herself rebelling against these tendencies early and often.  But Orne wanted to know specifically if any of this friction between parent and child were sexual.  Sexton’s mother confirmed that her father could be somewhat crude with her.  For example, she told of how Anne, then seventeen, was about to leave the house for a date dressed in a sweater blouse and skirt, when her father asked her, “Are you planning to get laid?”**  Sexton had told the same tale to Orne shortly before.

Sexton’s friends had different opinions as to whether or not her father actually molested her.  One close friend, a psychiatric social worker named Lois Ames, stated with confidence “I could never believe anything but that Anne was a victim of child sexual abuse by both Nana and her father  [emphasis original].   Maxine Kumin, however, disagreed, characterizing the notion as more of a “dramatization,” similar to other “truth crimes” she had told to Dr. Orne in therapy.   As our friend Susan wrote in an earlier post in this series:

Anne strikes me as someone who didn't live in her body much, so she acted out in order to feel something--irresponsible sexuality and self abuse made her come back into her body for a while--she lived more in her head.

Or as Dr. Diane Middlebrook wrote:

“…once she had put a memory into words, the words were what she remembered.  Thus she could give dramatic reality to a feeling by letting it generate a scene and putting that scene into words for Dr. Orne while in a trance.”

In other words, this premise hypothesizes that Sexton created fictional characters (similar to Elizabeth) based on herself.  This gave them a verisimilitude, but they nevertheless remained fictional characters, with fictional histories.  Because of mental illness (or poetic license?), Sexton might not have been able to distinguish her characters from herself.  Thus if she told a story of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father and aunt, would that have originated in fact, or fantasy?

Sexton herself seemed to question the actuality of the memory, but seemed quite certain that it was, at least, based on some real aspect of her relationship to her father:

Sexton:  I couldn’t make all this up, or I don’t exist at all!  Or do I make up a trauma to go with my symptoms?

Orne:  There wasn’t a simple cause; it’s something that happened many times without its necessarily happening just this way.  When your father was drinking he was communicating something to you.

Sexton:  Disgust.

Orne:  Or attraction.

Sexton:  Sitting beside Daddy, his saying I can’t eat when she’s at the dinner table--I thought pimples were a sign of things inside that were showing.

Orne:  Your feelings about him?

The tapes Dr. Orne submitted to Dr. Middlebrook gave every indication that he thoroughly believed the story at face value at that time.  He acted as if the allegation were true, prompting him to explain to Middlebrook:

I dealt with it in therapy as a real event, because there were times that it was real to her.  Anne, like most patients with this kind of disorder, easily adopted pseudo-memories in treatment which are experienced with great vividness, and their treatment may help the patient even though the events may never have occurred.  If you ask me either as a psychiatrist or as a scientist, however, I would have to say I am virtually certain that it never occurred.  It’s not plausible the way she described it, and it wasn’t the father’s style when he was drinking.  But it fit her feelings about her father having abused her, and since she sexualized everything, it would become the metaphor with which she would deal with it.

Whether or not the sexual abuse actually occurred, one could say that this psychiatric disclosure might have indicated something more pertinent to Sexton’s sexuality.  During the writing of Anne Sexton, Linda Gray Sexton told Dr. Middlebrook that Anne sexually abused her.   Linda gave further details about this in her 1994 memoir, Searching for Mercy Street:  My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, in which she frankly discussed such things as very intimate bedtime touching (similar to what Nana supposedly did to her mother), and Anne’s tendency to masturbate in front of her.

Personally, I don’t like to take anything at face value, and am loath to state something as fact based on a single source--unless the source happens to be me.  At the same time, I’m in no position to question Linda Sexton’s memory or account of these incidents.  And what she says does make sense in a way.  If her mother had been sexually abused as a child, then that could conceivably put her at greater risk for sexually abusing her own kid. 

This incestuous behavior allegedly began shortly after Dr. Orne left the Boston area to teach at the University of Pennsylvania, thus making him unable to continue as Sexton’s main shrink.  Although the timing might make his leaving seem like a causal factor, this could have been due to the fact that Linda had just begun her adolescence, and was consequently developing into maturity.  At the same time, however, even though he was no longer her psychiatrist, Dr. Orne continued to see Sexton once a month for several years, and maintained contact with her until 1973, about a year before her suicide.  One thus has to wonder how he reacted when she disclosed this to him, or if she disclosed it to him at all. 

_____________________
*It’s also used, in combination with other drugs, to kill condemned prisoners during lethal injection.

**The wording is that of Sexton’s mother.  Sexton herself remembered the question as “Are you planning to get fucked?”