Reply to comment

Anne Sexton's Briar Rose was much blunter and visceral than I expected. I'd never read anything written by her before and found the works we read to be on a higher level of disturbing than the Brother's Grimm version. In particular, Briar Rose's repeated plea of 'Daddy, Daddy' immediately brought the first few lines of Sylvia Plath's poem Daddy to mind:

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years...

I found it quite shocking just how much the two poems were similar in their perspectives on the father's role as well as the father's replacement- 'the knight in shining armor' for Briar Rose and the narrator's husband in Daddy. A further parallel can be made between Briar Rose's inevitable maturation into an adult and the narrator's realization that her father is not enough in Plath's poem.

I never expected to have such an association pop up at me while reading a revised fairy tale.