Published Paper Details:

Abstract: This paper provides a reinterpretation of Anne Sexton's poems "Menstruation at Forty" and "Housewife" through the theoretical lens of Julia Kristeva's seminal essay "Women's Time" (1981), which distinguishes between cyclical, monumental, and generational modes of feminine temporality. Anne Sexton's poetic language transforms menstruation and domesticity, which are often portrayed as confinement into rhythmic, semiotic acts of resistance against the linear, teleological, masculine temporality of patriarchal culture. Sexton's verses use rhythm, repetition, and corporeal imagery to stage the female body and household as temporal and linguistic sites where the symbolic order of progress collapses into recurrence and endurance. This paper situates Sexton's confessional poetics within Kristeva's framework to show how her language enacts rather than merely reflects theory: her menstruating and domestic speakers embody cyclical recurrence and monumental stillness as forms of revolt. This study argues that by merging Kristeva's psychoanalytic temporality with Sexton's confessional form, feminine time survives within poetic rhythm itself, where bleeding, cleaning, and enduring become modes of linguistic and ontological creation.