Her take on "Snow White" refuses to establish heroines or villains. The girl is a lovely virgin, "cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper...lips like Vin du Rhone." The jealous queen, still beautiful at middle age but fearing that time isn't on her side and informed by her mirror she's no longer "the fairest of them all," tries to kill her. For this, she is punished by torture. The twist here is that Sexton makes it clear that some day the virgin girl will meet the queen's fate: "Meanwhile Snow White held court,/ rolling her china-blue eyes open and shut/ and sometimes referring to her mirror/ as women do."

The lesbian implications of "Rapunzel" are brought to the fore, and the transvestite deception of "Little Red Riding Hood" is remarked on. Sexton crashes the dreamy romance of Cinderella with the mundane reality of marriage. "Happily ever after" is contrasted with "diapers...arguing...getting a middle-aged spread." The Freudian power of mother is accented in the poet's take on "Hansel and Gretel"; Sexton brings out dark implications of child murder and pedophilia that the original tale merely glosses.

Twenty years before Robert Bly tackled the "Iron John" fairy tale, Sexton put her spin on it, stressing the main character's cannibalism and outcast status. She compares the hairy wild man to a string of deeply troubled characters from her imagination. It is here where her poetry reaches the peak of its intensity: "A lunatic wearing that strait jacket/ like a sleeveless sweater, singing to the wall like Muzak.../ And if they stripped him bare/ he would fasten his hands around your throat/ After that he would take your corpse/ and deposit his sperm in three orifices./ You know, I know,/ you'd run away."

Sexton's deep-delving into childhood stories, unearthing the very real and plausible taboos they skirt, is refreshing. Her anachronistic use of modern language (Muzak, for instance) is artful and effective. The best thing about this book, however, is that so much madness and sadness is surmised from such timeless and appealing stories. Happy endings are left intact but with a shadow cast over them. Sexton is a poet of the dark--with no one to save her "from the awful babble of that calling."


Sexton's Transforming Take on Grimm is Fascinating   October 24, 1999
 17 out of 22 found this review helpful

I teach Anne Sexton in my freshman College English class and I work specifically from this text because the stories are at once familiar shared traditions and disturbing alterations of those traditions. The 18 year olds I teach, who only know fairy tales from the white-washed Disney versions, are intrigued by these dark and psychological interpretations. For the fairy tale afficianado these poems are a must read.


An interesting twist on fairy tales; a good read.   October 23, 1997
 9 out of 10 found this review helpful

Okay. I really, really like Anne Sexton. But, in particular, I liked this book, though it was certainly a shakeup. The story of Snow White, for instance, is one of those things that has been taken and made into part of our culture: the eeee-vil stepmother, the good dwarves, the prince. But Sexton takes it and twists it around to absolve the mother of some of the traditional jealousy; Snow White, suddenly, isn't just a poor, helpless little girl but a "dumb bunny" who takes poisonous things from the stepmother multiple times, with the same effect. This is one of those books that makes you think.


Interesting; One can tell that this is Sexton at work.   February 21, 1998
 8 out of 14 found this review helpful

Anne Sexton is my favorite poet. This book contains many of the Grimm Brothers tales (virtually all of them), and she rewrote them to say something to us, the readers. For example, "Rumpelstiltskin", my favorite, has a message, which is the fact that many people can be two-faced; seem ugly and cruel and turn out to be beautiful and heart-warming. This book is Sexton very close to her peak!


Sexton as poet-storyteller, retelling dark fairytales with modern details and personal themes   December 28, 2005
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

In this remarkable collection of poems, Anne Sexton offers readers seventeen transformations of classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales. As she makes clear in the first poem "The Gold Key", Sexton assumes the persona of the storyteller for this collection, calling herself a "middle-aged witch" with "my face in a book and my mouth wide, ready to tell you a story or two." This device allows her to write about intensely personal topics, such as a sexually abusive father, through the detached voice of a storyteller. The use of fairy tales also provides Sexton with a shared cultural framework that enables her to communicate her own experiences and perspectives in a universal language that readers already understand intimately.

Fairytales have a power few of us realize. The stories shape many of our fantasies as children; they also condition us to accept traditional gender roles as we grow up. I believe that Anne Sexton understood their power and influence. She brilliantly tapped into that power and transformed the tales in a way that forces the reader to look at them with fresh eyes. Before launching into the tales themselves, Sexton set the themes of the stories in a modern or personal context. These connections, along with the interlacing of 20th century details (like soda pop and jockstraps) and her use of modern syntax in the fairy tales made their subversive commentary on the burdens and fears of women in a society shaped by male dominance startlingly clear.

In her transformed tales, Sexton examines the female archetypes they depict: the docile virgin, the wicked stepmother, the aging witch. She also sheds an illuminating, feminist light on the themes of female competition and the idea of happily ever after which pop up often in fairytales. It is significant that Sexton uses the gritty Grimm versions of the tales, instead of the child-friendly Disney versions we grew up with. Their original form reveals the subversive nature and insightful symbolism of the fairy tales, many of which were crafted by women.

While this collection is a departure from Sexton's typical confessional style, the poems of "Transformations" are unabashedly naked and intimately introspective--a wondrous achievement by one of our greatest poets.