Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2017

and never questions why she is doing it, she just does as if it were ‘ her job.’ Sexton,

controversially doesn’t view committing suicide as death, as in fact some people were “still-

born, they don’t always die” figuratively taking the definition of a still-born baby, and making

it imply a person who is born and lives but is dead inside. The final stanza, shows how the

speaker longs for death and will take that course, one day, for her sake, hopefully soon. Despite

this, the speaker doesn’t want to go unnoticed. She wants to be missed as described, “leaving

the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook”. She wants

someone ‘on the other line’ waiting for her, missing her. However, these connections aren’t

enough to keep her, she doesn’t want their attention while alive, but she wants them to notice

what they have done.

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton

Both Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are indistinguishable in their childhood setting, growing

up in Massachusetts in the 1930’s. Their upbringing cemented the foundations for their fragile

mental states. Plath feeling the suppression of men due to the patriarchal society and her

father’s death during her childhood and Sexton living in an abusive and lonely state due to the

lack of attention from male figures in her life both, are alike in their perceived or real

oppression by men. These belittling emotions hampered their sense of confidence and security

from a young age, which was never again able to be replenished. Throughout their adult lives

both Plath and Sexton suffered from extreme anxiety due to insecurity; Sexton afraid of

judgement and what people might think of her poems, and Plath, afraid of rejection and unable

to resolve it in a healthy manner. The fear of judgement caused both Plath and Sexton to

“switch off” from the world and emotion. In Plath’s poem Tulips , and Sexton’s poem, Again

and Again and Again , both speakers, who can be identified as Plath and Sexton themselves,

disclose the desire to stay in their depressive state due to it being more comfortable and