"Tossed like a Wet Dog" Again: Anne Sexton's Defiance in the Era of Lost Privacy

Abstract: This essay examines Anne Sexton's poetic defiance in the context of Cold War-era privacy loss, focusing on Live or Die (1966) and, in particular, "Imitations of Drowning (1965)." Challenging reductive psychoanalytic readings that equate Sexton's emotional intensity with pathology, I argue that she strategically stages fear, vulnerability, and self-exposure to reclaim feminine sovereignty. By placing Sexton alongside male contemporaries such as André Gide and Robert Lowell, the essay demonstrates how she selflegitimizes emotionality through literary parallels while exposing the gender bias that pathologized women's confessional expression. Sexton's deliberate loss of privacy functions paradoxically as a means of reclaiming it: exposure becomes an assertion of agency rather than a sign of victimhood. Ultimately, Sexton emerges as a willful naysayer who transforms fear and confession into socio-political critique, redefining privacy, authorship, and feminine authority in midcentury American poetry.