“The same bad dream goes on”: Unheimliche and Suburban Gothic in Anne Sexton’s “The House”

Abstract

Anne Sexton's poetry, as is the case with that of Sylvia Plath and other poets representative of the confessional movement from the 20th century, is usually constrained to interpretations focused on her personal life (Gill, 2013a: 10). Although the autobiographical nature of her work is an element to consider when approaching her poems, engaging in a reading that focuses on this aspect alone excludes the possibility of inserting it within a broader social framework. For this reason, I propose to reconcile the problems that arise when approaching her poetry from confessional and psychoanalytical points of view by turning our gaze outwards: no longer towards the author's psyche, but towards the external factors that permeate the terror within some of her poems. By studying “The House”, I am interested in approaching Sexton’s poetry from its social, historical, and geographical context in order to analyze the horror that the poem evokes as a portrait of the upper-class families who resided in the suburbs in postwar America during the late 1940s. To this end, I will resort to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic concept of Unheimliche to explain the uncanny effect that the poem causes by presenting the home and the family as a terrifying setting. Through this, I seek to reject the tendency to perform a psychological interpretation of Sexton and, instead, demonstrate how the Unheimliche in “The House” circumscribes the poem within the subgenre of the suburban gothic.