Feminist Readings of Sexton's Briar Rose and Hitchcock's Psycho

Introduction

Both "Briar Rose: Sleeping Beauty" by Anne Sexton and Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho were constructed during relatively similar moments in American history. Yet in terms of their feminist construction, these two works of art seem to come from completely different eras. Sexton's poem takes the myth of Briar Rose — another name for Sleeping Beauty — and articulates an initial subjugated childhood female silence that must be resolved through active female empowerment in marital adulthood. Psycho, by contrast, begins with a journey of female empowerment that ends in the female's demise. The heroine of Hitchcock's film is brought under subjugation and control by a knife wielded by a kind of phallic mother figure: a man named Norman Bates wearing an elderly, desexualized woman's guise and holding a sharp, thrusting weapon.

In short, Sexton's Sleeping Beauty moves from an initial anti-feminist slumber of childhood toward a later, mature feminist awakening. Hitchcock's Marion Crane moves from initial feminist empowerment and sexual awakening to anti-feminist slumber and death, as the film is ultimately more interested in the masculine conflict and the self-divided journey of a male psyche.

Briar Rose: Feminine Silence and Subjugation

The narrative and thematic arc of Sexton's poem tells the tale of a young girl's awakening from the slumber of feminine subjugation, learned at the knee of her father. The initial image of the poem is striking in that it fuses castration with silence:

Consider the girl who keeps slipping off, arms limp as old carrots, into the hypnotist's trance, into a spirit world speaking with the gift of tongues. She is stuck in the time machine, suddenly two years old sucking her thumb, as inward as a snail, learning to talk again. She's on a voyage. She is swimming further and further back, up like a salmon, struggling into her mother's pocketbook. Little doll child, come here to Papa. Sit on my knee. I have kisses for the back of your neck. A penny for your thoughts, Princess. I will hunt them like an emerald.

Like Marion Crane's final image lying silent and prostrate in the shower, this girl is reduced to the sum of her body parts — but from the beginning of the poem, not at the end of a film like Marion. In the viewer's imagination, Marion Crane is last seen as an eye and a swirl of blood. Yet Marion begins her identity in the film's context as a fully depicted woman. She is not merely a body or a child like Briar Rose; rather, she is seen engaging actively in her job (albeit unethically) and engaging sexually and physically with the world. Only at the end of her journey is Crane reduced to a series of camera-fragmented body parts.

Sexton's heroine, by contrast, begins as a passive child seated on her father's knee — a sum of her childlike body parts: arms, necks, thumbs. Briar Rose is a child of silence, sucking her thumb rather than engaged in acts of speech. Sexually, Sleeping Beauty does not act; she is merely acted upon. She is kissed on the neck by her father and lives inside the world of her father's desires:

Come be my snooky and I will give you a root.

The father speaks to the child in baby talk. Even the kisses upon the girl's neck carry a phallic gloss, and the word "root" refers both to the girl's splayed arms mentioned at the beginning of the poem and to the sexual innuendo in the father's infantile banter with the daughter on his lap. The young woman begins, thus, in a world of the father — where sexuality is thrusting and pointed, like carrots and the needles of spinning wheels — a world where she is a princess of silence and thumb-sucking.

Marion Crane: Empowerment and Erasure in Psycho

Marion Crane, in contrast, begins in a world of speech. Only after she leaves the world of the bank — cloaked in the feminine images of secrecy and vaults — does silence come to the foreground. Crane steals money to help her lover and herself begin a new life. Even though this is a bad decision, it is at least an active one: an expression of female sexual and economic empowerment. Even after entering the Bates Motel, unlike the sleeping child of Sexton's poem, Crane engages in the active, physical act of showering rather than passively going to sleep or taking a doctor's draught as Briar Rose does when she is married.

This desire to cleanse herself of guilt renders Crane unintentionally naked and vulnerable. She inadvertently lays herself open to being watched by the voyeuristic eye of Norman Bates through a peephole — a scene in which the viewer involuntarily participates. Crane becomes the target of his hidden sexual rage. She then enters the final sleep of death at the end of her journey in the film, while Briar Rose ends Sexton's poem with the desire to awaken from the limits of her feminine existence — the curtailing influence of marriage and domestic life.

Conclusion: Feminist vs. Anti-Feminist Texts

The men of Sexton's poem are not simultaneously father and mother. There are no mothers in "Briar Rose." Instead, the father is both husband and father to the woman — all males are essentially interchangeable. The split identity that must be resolved in Sexton's poem is not that of the male but that of the woman. Society has demanded that the woman assume a false female persona before her father, then before her husband, then before the world — a kind of slumber of identity. Hitchcock's film not only reduces its heroine to the slumber of death but does so relatively early in its narrative, treating the male's divided psyche in relation to feminine subjectivity as the more compelling subject.

Perhaps it is this last fact that makes Sexton's poem a feminist statement and Hitchcock's film an anti-feminist one. Psycho needs no women — even the 'mother' is a male in the form of Norman. It is assumed that the male journey deserves the film's full attention, and the female journey of love and romance is something to be disposed of as quickly as possible, a mere diversionary tactic to horrify the audience early on. Sexton, however, gives the female journey of subjectivity the reader's full attention and commands cultural relevance for the female story of childhood, love, and marriage — with all of its frustrations and the sense of a divided self unfulfilled.

Works Cited

Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 1960.

Sexton, Anne. "Briar Rose." Transformations. americanpoems.com.