Privacy and Exposure in Sylvia Plath's Late Poems (original) (raw)
Related papers
European Scientific Journal, 2014
Sylvia Plath's poems mirror the ideological aspirations of its social context, and the construction of identity in her works falls under the impact of their specific contemporary historical context. The bulk of her aesthetic production reflects the ideologies of the Civil Rights Movement and its aim to elevate the cultural autonomy of American women. One of the major characteristics of this era roughly the 1960's and 1970's, is women's endeavor to break out from the dominant patriarchal appropriation. This study purports to investigate some selected poems by Sylvia Plath and how these poems represented Plath as a relentless feminist writer and activist until her death. The study follows the development of the poet's identity from a helpless object into a fighter who tried to win all her wars against the male sex. A large number of Plath's poems deals with the feeling of women, treated as an object, a commodity, not allowed to be an independent person.
Marital Suffering in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: A Feminist Reading
2020
This article discusses marital suffering, as portrayed by Sylvia Plath from a feminist viewpoint, and claims that her delineation of marital afflictions is a tool of protest against patriarchal oppression. In a convention-ridden patriarchal society, a woman usually cannot express her voice and remains suffocated by her personal agony and ache. However, Plath tries to break the conventions in her poetry, by representing the unjust institution of patriarchal marriage, which treats women as commodities. Many critics have noted that Plath’s marital sufferings are responsible for her suicidal death, which is a means of protest against, and resistance to, patriarchy. Since her poetry represents both her psycho-social suffering and her fight against the margins set by patriarchal society, one may consider her poetry to be a weapon of setting her “self,” as well as other women’s, free from male-dominated psychological imprisonment. The article explores how Plath’s poetic persona emerges as ...
Social Status of Women in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath
2013
Sylvia Plath, a name that could never be forgotten. She is remembered as a brilliant American poet for the bulk of touching poetry she had left drawing most out of her own tragic life. Up to the very last moment, she led an unfulfilled life. She disliked of being a woman specifically due to the constraints the society imposed on her gender. Her soul thrived to leap far beyond this uncultured patriarchal system. As a young and growing poet, she strongly believed in the capacities in terms of what women could achieve. Her powerful, sometimes violent verses transparently express her anger towards social injustice caused to women. Her poems bring to light the defects of the patriarchal society in which she had lived. Poems like Daddy, Ariel, Jailer and Pursuit echo her struggles against the male-dominated society. In this way, her verses express the need for emancipation of her gender socially and politically. This paper aims at finding how Plath has successfully incorporated the social...
"Must you kill what you can?": Criminality and Control in Sylvia Plath's Poems
Első Század, 2015
This paper discusses the way in which Sylvia Plath’s poems apply the discourse of criminality to depicting how personal relationships work in the context of power relations. The individual’s desire to control the partner, in Plath’s poems, is placed within the larger context of a consumer society manipulated by power politics. Plath’s poems portray the body as the locus of both desire and control. Hence the desiring subject can be easily turned into the object of control, and this cause and effect relationship between urge and restraint is captured the most succinctly by the discourse of criminality. Through the criminalization of the failure to fulfil arbitrary expectations, the domineering partner in a relationship ultimately subjects the other person to a similar process of control and punishment which is exercised by state suzerainty– thus re-enacting the legal drama of law-enforcement on a lower level, within the private sphere. Conversely, social surveillance is practised through such arbitrary imposition of individual will inasmuch as it reinforces social norms. Although the speakers in Plath’s poems recognize the failure of interpersonal relationships based on power, they are nevertheless remain trapped within the discourse of criminality. Their attempt to break free of a discourse which they see as deceitful and emotionally destructive, associated with the soulless machinery of consumerism and warfare, proves futile because no viable alternative presents itself. Drawing on Foucauldian theories, this paper aims to demonstrate that, in Plath’s poems, the criminalization of a desire for intimacy outside the realm of power relations leads to the punishment, and ultimately, the annihilation of the individual.
Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: Feminism and the reclamation of self-portraits
New Man Publication, 2016
This paper aims to focus on two most celebrated American poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath's poetry, how both of them talk about their own personal suffering through the poetry in a time when American women were not allowed to practise all the right as males and the women were bound to some social constructs. Sexton and Plath are called the confessional poets of twentieth century and they spoke on behalf of American ordinary women.
What Sylvia Plath Said about History and Women's Lives
Sylvia Plath is generally seen as writing about herself, even when World War II and the Holocaust are sources of her figurative language; many critics assume there must be a disjunction between her personal life and her historical context (1932-1963). I will show that, contrary to the dominant view, Plath is not merely publicizing her own life; rather, she historicizes women’s lives, broadly construed, as representative American lives of her time. I suggest that it is Plath’s persistent border-crossing -- the transgression of gendered spaces in her eager appropriation of public poetic power – which may be causing the critical insistence on a psychologically-based analysis of her work.
Finding Sylvia: A Journey to Uncover the Woman within Plath's Confessional Poetry
2017
The life and work of Sylvia Plath has been of great interest since her suicide in 1963. While her poems and short stories had been published in a variety of journals and magazines before her death, it was not until the posthumous release of Ariel that Plath's true depths were discovered by a large audience and she gained popular acclaim. Critics now claim that The Colossus and Other Poems was Plath's discovery of her own voice and her taking on of "the world of what is important to her" (Kendall 9), but that it is Ariel that unrepentantly reveals Plath's true emotions (Butscher 341). The "Sylvia 1 " identity that arose from the ashes of Plath's suicide was someone new to critics and friends alike-as Bere says, there are "obvious discrepancies between the [public] Sivvy of the letters 'singing' her 'native joy of life' and the violent, destructive poet of Ariel" (Wagner-Martin 61); however, there is something undeniably real about the "Sylvia" that appears in Ariel. The Ariel Sylvia was not the put-together Sylvia that would have tea in one's living room nor the doting daughter who would write letters home from England nor Hughes's Sylvia who "had a great capacity for happiness" (Becker 48). Instead, Ariel's "Cut," "Edge," and "Daddy" focus on death, hatred, and pain-not topics someone "remorselessly bright and energetic" (Butscher 341) would fixate on. While some artists have placed their identity farther from their work, Plath is known for her confessional style poetrya form of poetry which, according to Steven Gould Axelrod, consists of three essential elements: "an undisguised exposure of painful personal event. .. a dialectic of private matter with public matter. .. and an intimate, unornamented style" (Axelrod 98). Unlike other styles of poetry that are set apart by form or specific themes, confessional poetry is defined by the author's "expression of personal pain" such as "destructive family relationships; traumatic childhoods; broken marriages; recurring mental breakdowns; alcoholism 1 "Sylvia" refers specifically to Plath's identity, whether that be a false or true identity. It does not speak to Plath's work or legacy, but rather, who she was as a person. Daly 3 or drug abuse" (Collins 197). Born out of feelings of lost individuality that arose in the 1950s and 60s, confessional poetry aimed to "embody the individual perception in direct ways," setting itself apart from previous forms because "rather than creating masks or different personae, they [confessional poets] began to speak from a position which was unambiguously their own" (Collins 199). For these reasons, writing confessional poetry requires an understanding of one's own suffering, along with an ability and willingness to capture that personal pain in an honest and vulnerable form of poetry-after all, it has been coined "confessional poetry" because it requires that the author "confess" painful truths regarding him or herself. A single glance at poems such as "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" shows that Plath was a textbook example of the confessional poether writing (especially at the end of her life) focused on her own painful struggles with loss, a dying marriage, mental illness, and other challenging areas of her life. One such autobiographical poems is "Words heard, by accident, over the phone," a poem that discusses Plath's actual experience of answering the phone and having her husband's lover ask to speak to him. The poem describes the speaker receiving a call from an unnamed individual who asks, "Is he here?" It is a seemingly harmless question, but the poems describes the words as "plopping like mud," implyingin a heavy-handed fashionthat there is something about these words in this context that is dirty and sullies the speaker's home. The speaker then asks, "how shall I ever clean the phone table?" (Plath, Collected Poems, 202), bringing to light the speaker's desire to clean her household of the incident, which she considers to be filthy and unhealthy. It also demonstrates a hopelessness that this stain could ever be removed from them, as the speaker finds no answer for how to clean the phone table. As is typical of confessional poems, there is very little masking of the real-life event in this poem, and the speaker is not invented, but rather is interchangeable with Plath herself. Just like the speaker Daly 4 in the poem, Plath historically answered the phone in 1962 only to have Assia, Hughes' lover, ask her "Is he here?" about Plath's husband. As demonstrated by "Words heard, by accident, over the phone" above, Plath adopted a very personal style of poetry, tying her poems to her identity in a way that many authors would not dare, and bringing her identity into the spotlight with the success of Ariel. Like "Words heard, by accident, over the phone," countless other poems by Sylvia Plath including "Suicide off Egg Rock," "Edge," and "Cut" are inspired by her experiences. For this reason, it can become easy to view her poems as biography or fact, when they are actually creative works. While it is true that Plath's poems are often emotionally relevant to her, the emotions that she conveys were never meant to be expressed as singularly her own. Rather, she intended to write poetry that would echo both her own emotions and the emotions of her audience. The sheer number of drafts
Sylvia Plath's War Poems and the Gendering of Cultural Space
War and Words : Representations of Military Conflict in Literature and the Media , 2016
Sylvia Plath’s political commitment is beginning to gain wider recognition among critics, replacing earlier dismissals of ”Daddy” and ”Lady Lazarus” as histrionic appropriations of the Holocaust. However, the questioning of Plath’s right to use such imagery for her own artistic purposes unwittingly betrays the persistence of the tacit assumption that warfare belongs to the public space, and therefore, to men, whereas women should confine themselves to the private realm. For Plath, this gendered division of cultural space is the ideological basis on which a history of warfare and violence formed itself. Writing in an era of exacerbating Cold War tensions and after Hiroshima, Plath thought that war profoundly affected women’s lives: from their silencing by the authoritarian father figure in childhood to the trafficking in their bodies in adulthood, which makes them complicit in male violence, women are enmeshed in power relations. Even the supposedly sacrosanct aspects of life: the home as property or the mother-child relationship become fraught with anxieties about a violent future presaged by a murderous past. This paper argues that Plath saw warfare as a form of domesticated violence that made a dignified retreat into the private sphere impossible for the woman poet.
Transgressing Gender Normativity in Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems
This paper aims to question gender roles in the light of feminist theories of the body in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Through close reading and the intertwining of feminist phenomenology and queer theory, I will demonstrate how the body can be a site for transgression via the analysis of some of Plath’s finest late poems. Moreover, Sylvia Plath’s texts are also the ones of a transitional poet, insofar as they were produced before the beginning of feminism in both the US and Britain, and the emergence of post-structuralism and postmodernism. I will demonstrate that in some of her Ariel poems, Plath not only questions the gender-marked body but she also pushes the boundaries of language. By doing so, her poetry can be read as a breakthrough, in which the poet writes the body, whilst flouting gender norms as regards what meant being a woman in the early 1960s. At a time when married women’s proper role was the one of the ‘wife’, expecting to conform to domesticity, motherhood and conceal sexual desire, Plath’s late writing portrays the female body in a way which dares to transgress the realm of middle-class womanhood. Thus my paper intends to shed some light on the writing of a poet, whose work has been thoroughly read and widely interpreted, but regrettably overlooked from the angle of Body Studies.