Claire Jenns
shelves , / closets , silks , innumerable goods ;’ ( HK , ll . 9-10 ). These pluralised objects progress from the practical , to the artistic , to the aesthetic , before expanding beyond specific description . This activity of filling an empty space can be attributed to the author in the creative process of writing . An authorial trajectory also begins with the practicalities of writing , before moving onto aesthetic expression and ending with expansion into various interpretations of the work by readers . The speaker ’ s action of ‘ rearranging the disaligned ’ ( HK , l . 12 ) verbalises this further in echoing the writer ’ s arrangement of disparate words into a coherent form . Within this focus on creative action through the witch , Sexton appears to be directly echoing Virginia Woolf ’ s assertion that when ‘ one reads of a witch being ducked , of a woman possessed by devils , of a wise woman selling herbs … I think we are on the track of a lost novelist , a suppressed poet ’. Within Sexton ’ s poem , the witch has used her ostracisation to her advantage in creating a bountiful space , illustrating this interrelation between female difference and creativity . Woolf ’ s ‘ suppressed poet ’ correlates directly with Sexton ’ s ‘ misunderstood ’ ( HK , l . 13 ) woman , and we see the consequences of this in the
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final stanza . The speaker , reader and Sexton all unify within the torture of the witch . She is at once isolated but under the intense scrutiny of the ‘ villages going by ’ ( HK , l . 16 ), which mirrors the scrutiny an author undergoes in having their works read and analysed . Within this , the reader is incorporated through the repeated accusatory determiner ‘ your ’ ( HK , ll . 15 , 18 , 19 ) as a complicit witness to the torture . The physicality of the punishment itself is relayed in intimate terms , with the flames that ‘ bite my thigh ’ ( l . 18 ), as well as the ‘ nude arms ’ ( HK , l . 16 ). Additionally , the cacophonous description of her ‘ ribs ’ that ‘ crack ’ ( HK , l . 19 ) is redolent of Eve ’ s formation from a bent rib , through her historical ties with witchcraft , as argued in the late-medieval text The Malleus Maleficarum . In taking Eve as a symbol of all women , the connection between Sexton ’ s witch to womanhood as a collective whole is substantiated . The surrealness of the twelve-fingered witch presented in the first stanza now disappears with these bodily descriptions that elucidate the scene of a witch trial in graphic historical terms . The trajectory of the poem that begins with the fantastical and ends with the historical demonstrates the sense of inexorable time that links the struggles of the witch to the modern female poet . As the past