PARTISAN REVIEW
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headquarters," princesses who "danced like taxi girls at Roseland,"
or who "fussed around like a Miss America contest." These images
are so external to the development of the stories that Sexton must
resort to scotch tape to make them stick, tagging them with neat
comparatives: "like," seasoned occasionally with "as," or "in the
manner oL"
Instead of
Transformations,
"Reductions" would be a better
title, for that is the effect Anne Sexton achieves with her litany of
"now" images. Instead of updating, she impoverishes Grimm's marve–
lous stories, giving us not more, but painfully less.
