"Her Kind"

-Sarabeth Hogshire

“Her Kind” by Anne Sexton is a poem about a woman who challenged society’s expectations of women. She was so different, that she often felt like an outcast. She compares her feelings of exclusion to being a witch during the Salem Witch trials.
The speaker in this poem is motivated by feelings of not belonging. She compares herself to a woman accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century, because she feels like society does not accept her because she violates what they expect of women. The woman accused of being witches in the seventeenth century were women who were different, often because they were modern women who were ahead of their time. Anne Sexton was alive during the 1950s and being the modern and creative woman that she was, she probably had some feelings of exclusion from society, very similar to women who were outcasts during the Salem witch trials.
The speaker’s motivations are typical in the sense that she does not feel accepted. That is nothing new. What is atypical about her feelings is that she is very accepting of the fact that she is an outcast, she expresses no desire to fit in. Typical poems about feeling like an outcast are expressing a desire to fit in, and the fact that this one does not is what makes it different.
In the first stanza she introduces the metaphor comparing feeling like an outcast to being accused of witchcraft. She describes herself as “lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite,” conveying that she feels extremely out of place, to the point of feeling inhuman. The “out of mind” comment makes me wonder if Anne Sexton suffered from some sort of mental disorder like depression, bipolar disorder, or an anxiety disorder that made her feel even more out of place.
In the second stanza Sexton says that she has “found the warm caves in the woods,” expressing that she has expelled herself from society. The fact that she describes her escape as “warm” conveys the fact that she finds comfort and solace in her hideaway. She also said that she “fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves,” which probably refers to her friends. By comparing them to worms and elves means that she keeps company with out of the ordinary characters.
In the third and final stanza she describes a woman being tortured and then burned at the stake. She then goes on to say “a woman like that is not ashamed to die.” I interpreted this as Sexton saying she does not regret being different. She was persecuted and outcast, but she was herself and that is worth it, no matter what the cost.