Double Losses and the Possibility of Recovery in Anne Sexton’s “The Double Image”

This paper investigates double losses and the possibility of recovery in “The Double Image,” a representative work of Anne Sexton’s early poetry. The poem is her inner monologue, in which she makes a silent but dramatic confession of her pain and guilt in front of two portraits, that is, her mother’s and hers. Sexton was afflicted with mental illness for a long time, attempting suicide two times. This led to damage the mother-daughter relationship between her and her mother, and also her and her daughter. She expresses her double losses as a mother and as a daughter and blames herself for the losses in the poem. However, this paper suggests that the possibility of recovery comes from another image, that is the joyful presence of her daughter, in the last section of the poem. Moreover, the image of her daughter is a sign of Sexton’s incessant quest for her own self and identity, in particular, after the outbreak of her mental illness. (Kyungnam University)