Privacy and Exposure in Sylvia Plath's Late Poems (original) (raw)

The rhetoric of the cold war idealized the home as the sacred precinct of individual privacy, yet the intrusions into citizens’ private lives increased in frequency and severity in the 1950s. Confessional poetry was high culture’s ambivalent response to this phenomenon: while confessional poets resented the infringement of personal space, they also revealed private family matters. As a woman, Plath experienced the patriarchal nature of privacy: it was the man’s private life that enjoyed protection from scrutiny, while the woman’s position as an autonomous individual remained precarious. Thus, by exposing the private tensions in her marriage, Plath was voicing concerns about the validity of the doctrine that the home is the right place for women to locate their autonomy. This paper offers close readings of Sylvia Plath’s late poems that show an acute sensitivity to violations of privacy and venture to redress the injuries of female dignity, reclaiming personhood through the imaginative realm of transgressive poetry.