“Possessed”: A Poet’s Heart in a Woman’s Body

In 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman intentionally overdosed on chloroform. In 1941, Virginia Woolf filled the pockets of her overcoat with stones and walked into a river near her home. Thirty-three years later, in 1974, Anne Sexton put on her mother’s old fur coat, poured herself a glass of vodka and started the engine of her car in her locked garage. Within a span of less than fifty years, at least three prominent women writers were dead by their own hand. As time goes on, others will undoubtedly follow suit. As with any suicide, the question of “why” remains. The answer can be found in the works of Gilman, Woolf, and Sexton, which explore the consequences of “the heat and violence of a poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body”. (Woolf 416)

In her lengthy essay, A Room of One’s Own, Woolf invents a fictional sister for William Shakespeare, named Judith. Woolf describes Judith’s life, the life of a talented writer in a time where women were scarcely allowed to be literate. Judith, trapped by the expectations of women and compelled by creative genius she cannot express, eventually commits suicide. While Judith’s case, ending in suicide, may be a bit extreme, Woolf acknowledges that little good will come to a talented writer, especially if they are a woman, even more so in the sixteenth century:

“This may be true or it may be false – who can say? – but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.” (Woolf 417)

Anne Sexton echoes a sim...

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...talented female writers have died by their own hand, victims of their own contrary instincts. They have fallen prey to a madness that also plagued their literary sisters, a madness caused by a stifled passion, a passion that eventually finds its outlet through the means of a tragic and untimely death. By examining the lives and works attributed to Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, it is easy to see the price a woman must pay from possessing a poet’s heart.

Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia. "Shakespeare's Sister." 1929. Criticism: Major Statements. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000. 411-21. Print.

Sexton, Anne. "Her Kind." 1958. The Seagull Reader: Poems. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2008. 273-74. Print.

Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. "The Yellow Wallpaper." 1892. The Seagull Reader: Stories. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 172-89. Print