The Farmer's Wife Analysis

The ultimate purpose of this chapter is to discern the experience of motherhood, the leap from domesticity to creativity and writing the body parts in poems such as “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward”, “The Double Image”, “Her Kind”, “the Division of Parts”, “the Exorcists”, and “the Farmer’s Wife”. The maternal experience, along with the exaltation of the female body, is at the heart of the analysis of a number of poems. Sexton’s poems reveal the quest for the female identity through motherhood and writing the body parts which do converge with the construction of the body of words. They are produced to mark the female awakening: women are no longer submissive. A woman is able to transcend the atrocities of the male dominance by moving from a housewife to a poet and transcending the confinement
Janet Todd argues that the “[s]eventeenth-century England patriarchal society” has turned Behn “into a distinctly unique and ‘freethinking writer’” (qtd. in Temmerman 3). In fact, she starts her poetic revolution as early as the Twentieth century. She even “rebels against these conventions and openly writes about topics such as desire and sex” (Temmerman 6). In her well-known poem “The Disappointment,” she evokes themes of love, sex and passion in an overt, yet provocative way. By so doing, she sabotages the void meaning of “virtue”, purity and chastity which has remained the cornerstone of English society. This violation of basic societal and literary norms is manifested in the decision made by the female persona Cloris to voice “her sexuality and [pour out] her desire for Lysander” (Temmerman 14). Behn “wants to give voice to the female character” (Temmerman 15) the same way Sexton strives to bespeak the personal issues through the abundant use of the first person pronoun