your youth? Those dances so like a drunkard lighting a fire in the belly?", Sexton explicitly compares women's sexual response to music with the response of the animals whom the Wonderful Musician enchants and then cruelly entraps. The scene can be read as a cautionary tale about the demonic power of music, but on a deeper level about women cooperating in their own victimization. Scene 9. Hansel and Gretel – The Grimms' Hansel and Gretel is one of their darkest tales. Two young children repeatedly abandoned in a forest by their father and stepmother, narrowly escape from a cannibal witch by burning her alive in her own oven. Sexton follows the story quite closely but makes it even more disturbing by an introduction in which a mother affectionately pretends to "eat up" her little boy (sung in the opera as "The Witch's Lullaby"). The conflation of mother love with cannibalism becomes explicit as the mother's language becomes increasingly sadistic. "I want to bite, I want to chew [...] I have a pan that will fit you. Just pull up your knees like a game hen." Scene 10. Briar Rose (The Grimms' variant of Sleeping Beauty) – Sexton eliminates Briar Rose's mother from the narrative and changes the ending of the tale considerably. As in the original, the Prince awakens Briar Rose from her 100-year sleep with a kiss, and the couple marry. However, her first words on being awakened are "Daddy! Daddy!", and for the rest of her life Briar Rose suffers from insomnia. The tale itself is fairly short, preceded and followed by lengthy autobiographical stanzas in which Sexton explicitly alludes to her own psychiatric history involving controversial "recovered memories" of sexual abuse by her father and dissociative trance states. Notes and references Sources Adams, Byron, "Susa, Conrad (1935)" in Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, George E. Haggerty (ed.), London: Taylor & Francis, 2000, p. 851. American Psychiatric Association, "Dissociative Trance Disorder" in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), American Psychiatric Publications, 2000. Brunyate, Roger, A Feminist Far from Grimm: Anne Sexton and her Transformations, Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, 1999 (accessed 6 June 2010) Del George, Dana, The Supernatural in Short Fiction of the Americas: The Other World in the New World, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001. ECS Publishing, Conrad Susa: Transformations, Opera Catalogue 2010, p. 40 Henahan, Donal, "Opera Repertory Stages Transformations", New