Chapter 20 Sylvia Plath
Plath appropriates a centrally American tradition, the heroic ego confronting the sublime, but she brilliantly revises this tradition by turning what the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “great and crescive self” into a heroine instead of a hero. Seizing a mythic power, Plath transmutes the domestic and the ordinary into the hallucinatory, the utterly strange in her poems. Her revision of the romantic ego dramatizes its tendency toward disproportion and excess, and she is fully capable of both using and mocking this heightened sense of self, as she does in her poem Lady Lazarus. For all her courting of excess Plath is a remarkably controlled writer; her lucid stanzas, her clear diction, her dazzling alterations of sound display that control. The imaginative intensity of her poems is her own, triumphant creation out of the difficult circumstances of her life.
Critical Perspectives
1.Psychoanalytical Criticism
Justyna Wierzchowska,in “Love, Attachment and Effacement: Romantic Dimensions in Sylvia Plath’s Children Poems”, examines seventeen children poems by Sylvia Plath written in the years 1960-1963, in relation to the poetics of romantic love. Drawing on motherhood studies, the maternal shift in psychoanalysis, and attachment theory, it reads love as a continuous human disposition, informed by one’s attachment history, and realized at different stages of one’s life. It specifically refers to Daniel Stern’s and Anthony Giddens’s largely overlapping concepts of maternal and romantic love to argue that Plath’s children poems are significantly infused with a poetics of romantic love. This poetics, however, becomes gradually compromised by a poetics of ambivalence, withdrawal, and self-effacement.[1]
Humaira Aslam, in “The Animus in Sylvia Plath’s Poem: Daddy”, argues that Sylvia Plath gives vent to the frustration she feels at the loss of her father, whom she loved dearly. There is a sudden outburst of harsh words of revenge against him, which is a proof of her animus possessed nature as a Jungian would call it. It looks as if, she wants to do away with the control that the memory of her father has on her mind.[2]
Cristina Pipoş, in “An Analysis of Intimacy in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry”, highlights one of the major characteristics of confessional poetry—that of exposure of intimate life and feelings through poetry. The interest in Sylvia Plath’s poems is closely linked to that of her personal life, her marriage to Ted Hughes being one of them. Plath’s poems are confessional in style, expressing the lack of interest in life and the sole desire to die. Cristina analyzes two of the poems that are an extraordinary example of expressing the most intimate thoughts through poetry, in the paper.[3]
Isabelle Travis, in “‘I Have Always Been Scared of You’: Sylvia Plath, Perpetrator Trauma and Threatening Victims”, argues that evil does not exist in isolation. For it to occur, one person must commit an act which is experienced by another person. This would suggest two distinct categories of person in relation to evil: perpetrator and victim. Sylvia Plath’s poetry has often been interpreted in terms of accusations against the biographical figures in the poet’s life or as a denunciation of patriarchal culture. What these readings have in common is that they situate Plath’s speakers in the “victim” position. However, the boundaries between victim and perpetrator are frequently blurred. In Daddy, Plath’s most (in)famous poem the speaker is both second-generation victim and perpetrator. The shame of the relationship to a Nazi perpetrator forms part of the speaker’s definition of herself as a victim. In an earlier poem, The Thin People, Plath’s portrayal of Nazism’s victims is not unambiguous: far from feeling sympathy and pity for concentration camp survivors, her speaker reacts with a mixture of fear and disgust.[4]
Arielle Greenberg and Becca Klaver, in “Mad Girls’ Love Songs: Two Women Poets—a Professor and Graduate Student—Discuss Sylvia Plath, Angst, and the Poetics of Female Adolescence”, argues that the legacy of Sylvia Plath’s poetry and the received notion of the teenage girl writer wallowing in self-pity are discussed in terms of their significance to adolescent female readers and their ramifications for girlhood culture at large. Plath’s legacy endures in part because of the recognition that a fluctuation in moods and personas is often the experience of young women, of writers, of those who struggle with depression or anxiety (and the overlap between these populations), and also because of Plath’s ability to craft the fever of her emotions into poems that rely on bold and rich figurative language. This essay uses memoir, a survey of Plath’s popular and critical reception, and a close reading of Plath poems that take on more adolescent concerns and themes, then concludes by looking at contemporary women poets whose aesthetics, attitudes and themes are relevant to contemporary teenage girl readers.[5]
Peter J. Lowe, in “ Full Fathom Five: The Dead Father in Sylvia Plath’s Seascapes”, presents a study of Sylvia Plath’s use of seascapes in several of her poems. According to the author, such symbolism was her way of capturing her past happiness and dealing with her deep sense of loss over the death of her father. It cites Full Fathom Five and Lorelei where Plath uses suicidal theme as a process of reunion with his father and the beach which arouses in her that suicidal desire.[6]
Patricia Stanley, in “When Scriptotherapy Fails: The Life and Death of Sylvia Plath and Adelheid Duvanel”, focuses on the factors affecting the failure on the application of scrip to therapy to recover psychic pains of American poet Sylvia Plath and Swiss writer Adelheid Duvanel. This assesses on the in effectivity of scrip to therapy or life writing for the two authors to release psychic pains, despite the fact that the method has been proven to work for memories long repressed and resolve fears. In addition, it also examines parental control and expectation as prime factors for such failure.[7]
2.Cultural Study
María Luisa Pascual Garrido, in “Plath’s Spanish Poems and Tropes: Turning Landscape into Mindscape”, argues that although critical attention has focused on Ariel, Sylvia Plath’s earlier poems are also worth examining since they reveal significant details concerning the writer’s evolution towards that final achievement. After getting married in June 1956, Plath and Hughes travelled to Spain and settled in Benidorm for their honeymoon. It is the poems derived from that period and Plath’s response to the alien setting that are analyzed in this paper. The corpus of “Spanish poems” and its most salient motifs are identified and examined to assess the emotional and artistic response of Plath’s encounter with Spain in her work. A rhetorical analysis of these poems are carried out but biographical data from Plath’s journals, correspondence and prose will also be considered. Finally, two later poems are examined to demonstrate that Spain left its imprint in Plath’s mind, supplying suggestive imagery which turned the Spanish landscape into a violent mindscape.[8]
Renée Dowbnia, in “Consuming Appetites: Food, Sex, and Freedom in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar”, presents literary criticism of the book The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Particular focus is given to Plath’s depictions of food in the novel as compared with U.S. women’s magazine advertisements of the 1950s. Details on the character Esther’s bulimia and its relationship to consumer capitalism are presented. Other topics include femininity, sexuality, and freedom.[9]
3.Narratology Study
Esin Kumlu, in “Not the Mad Woman in the Attic but the Cultural Critique: Understanding the Organic Writing of Sylvia Plath through The Bell Jar”, analyzes the organic form of writing of Sylvia Plath that has been ignored by most of the Plath scholars. Although Plath achieved and maintained a unique and evolving style both in her poetry and prose, this unique style has been read under the misleading light of Plath’s biography retold by different Plath scholars. Putting The Bell Jar at the center of the reading process, this study focuses on how Plath built an organic form of writing and also how it has been attempted by the establishment by some literary critics to remove all political connections from her entire body of work.[10]
4.Biographical Study
Selma Asoti
, in “ Sylvia Plath and the Dangers of Biography”,argues that 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath and was commemorated by a flurry of new publications on the life and work of the late poet. The renewed interest in Sylvia Plath also revitalized the decades-old debate on the interdependence of her poems and her biography. This paper investigates and problematizes the way in which poetry in general and the work of Sylvia Plath in particular are read and interpreted. It tries to shed some light on the “biographical fallacy” which has for so long plagued critical approaches to her work and shows ways in which S. Plath’s own poetic method differs from the method of confessional writers such as Robert Lowell, in the hope of revealing why S. Plath’s work cannot and should not be approached through the prism of her biography.[11]
5.Eco-Criticism
Scott Knickerbocker, in “‘Bodied Forth in Words’: Sylvia Plath’s Ecopoetics”, argues that Plath demonstrates a combined interest in the texture of the natural world and the texture of language, which in her poems enacts and does not merely represent that world. Her unfortunate categorization as a “confessional” poet as well as critics’ obsession with her biography have resulted in, on one hand, an underestimation of Plath’s engagement with the “real world” beyond her subjectivity, and on the other hand, an insufficient consideration of the craft and formal properties of her poems. She was, from an early age, drawn to the natural world, although she was equally fascinated by the sounds of language. Plath’s sense of irony and linguistic awareness, that is, puts her in a different category from that of a mere nature lover. Her poetry derives its power from the generative friction between speakers and a nonhuman world that resists figurative appropriation. For Plath, this resistance is itself to be figured forth, creating the formal reverberations with which her poems still startle us.[12](https://www.daowen.com)
6.Feminist Criticism
Lisa Narbeshuber, in “The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath’s Poetry”, criticizes that Sylvia Plath, in her most ambitious poems, tackles the problem of female selfhood. This desire in Plath’s poetry to trace the connection between the private and the public has not been explored in any depth in Plath criticism. Instead, most criticism reads the poems Daddy and Lady Lazarus around the psychology of Plath’s life, if not exclusively as biography, then as the feminist struggles of a victorious woman over a man or men. despite imagery to the contrary. The poems do not bear out the critics’ assumptions. When Plath evokes images of wholeness in Daddy and Lady Lazarus, she inevitably undercuts them, emphasizing the systematic play of elements and the constructedness of meanings. She moves out of the skin of the individual and sketches out the social game, the intersubjective complexes rather than the inner strife that Judith Kroll and other Plath critics focus on. Plath de-emphasizes identity and emphasizes the roles of various systems.[13]
7.New Historicism
Kathleen Spivack, in “Some Thoughts on Sylvia Plath” presents a narrative about her encounters with the poet, Sylvia Plath. During a class shared by Kathleen with Plath, sometimes she seemed restless, agitated beneath her stillness. She hardly interacted with other students. The person in class and the person revealed in Plath’s letters, journals and poems were entirely different. Longing, anger, ambition, and despair appear to have been motivating factors for the poet. As in a Greek tragedy, in which the elements of destruction reside within the character of the protagonist, the elements that led to her suicide had been apparent even in the early stages of her adolescence. Her desperation increased throughout her life. Plath’s favorite poet was Wallace Stevens. Her own poems were tightly controlled, formal, impenetrable, but without the feeling that was later to enter them. They did not have the passion of some of the poetry from her juvenilia; that passion had been replaced by duty and structure. Robert Lowell did not particularly praise Plath as his student, for although her poems were perfect, they had an unborn feeling to them. Plath has been celebrate, since her death, for giving voice to women’s rage.[14]
【注释】
[1]Wierzchowska J. “Love, Attachment and Effacement: Romantic Dimensions in Sylvia Plath’s Children Poems”. International Journal of English Studies, 2018, 18(2):19-33.
[2]Aslam H. “The Animus in Sylvia Plath’s Poem: Daddy”. Putaj Humanities ＆ Social Sciences, 2015, 22(1):215-218.
[3]Pipoş C. “An Analysis of Intimacy in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry”. Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov, Series Ⅳ: Philology and Cultural Studies, 2013, 6(1):15-18.
[4]Travis I. “‘I have always been Scared of You’: Sylvia Plath, Perpetrator Trauma and Threatening Victims”. European Journal of American Culture. 2009, 28(3):277-293.
[5]Greenberg A, Klaver B. “Mad Girls’ Love Songs: Two Women Poets—a Professor and Graduate Student—Discuss Sylvia Plath, Angst, and the Poetics of Female Adolescence”. College Literature, 2009, 36(4):179-207.
[6]Lowe P J. “Full Fathom Five: The Dead Father in Sylvia Plath’s Seascapes”. Texas Studies in Literature ＆ Language, 2007, 49(1):21-44.
[7]Stanley P. “When Scriptotherapy Fails: The Life and Death of Sylvia Plath and Adelheid Duvanel”.Seminar—A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2006, 42(4):395-411.
[8]Garrido M L P. “Plath’s Spanish Poems and Tropes: Turning Landscape into Mindscape”. International Journal of English Studies, 2018, 18(2):1-17.
[9]Dowbnia R. “Consuming Appetites: Food, Sex, and Freedom in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar”. Women’s Studies, 2014, 43(5):567-588.
[10]Kumlu E. “Not the Mad Woman in the Attic but the Cultural Critique: Understanding the Organic Writing of Sylvia Plath through The Bell Jar”. Journal of Graduate School of Social Sciences, 2010, 14(2):133-145.
[11]Asoti
S. “Sylvia Plath and the Dangers of Biography”. Journal of Education, Culture ＆ Society, 2015, 1:55-64.
[12]Knickerbocker S. “‘Bodied Forth in Words’: Sylvia Plath’s Ecopoetics”. College Literature, 2009, 36(3):1-27.
[13]Narbeshuber L. “The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath’s Poetry”. Canadian Review of American Studies, 2004, 34(2):185-203.
[14]Spivack K. “Some Thoughts on Sylvia Plath”.Virginia Quarterly Review, 2004, 80(2):212-218.