“Tossed like a Wet Dog” Again: Anne Sexton’s Defiance in the Era of Lost Privacy

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 self-legitimizes 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.