Image of Woman in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

Essays and graduate workss in the field of literature and English language.
Maturski, maturalni, seminarski, diplomski i master radovi iz engleskog jezika.

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, and she died by her own hand on February 11, 1963. She was an American poet, novelist and short story author. Sylvia was born only three years after the Black Thursday, in the times of economic recovery, on October 27, 1932. Sylvia Plath's father, Otto Emile Plath, was a professor of biology and German at Boston University. He wrote a book about bumblebees. Otto Plath was a first-generation American of Austrian descent. Plath's mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, an immigrant from Grabow, Germany, was approximately twenty-one years younger than her husband. She met him while earning her master's degree in teaching. After Sylvia, in April 1935, her brother Warren was born. The family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts in 1936 and Plath spent much of her childhood on Johnson Avenue. She was raised a Unitarian Christian and had mixed feelings toward religion throughout her life. She was only eight when she published her first poem in the Boston Herald's children section. In addition to writing, she also showed early promise as an artist, winning an award from "The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards" in 1947, for her beautiful paintings.

Otto, her father, died on November 5, 1940, just 10 days after her eighth birthday. Numerous complications followed the amputation of a foot due to diabetes. He's illness came shortly after a close friend died of lung cancer. Comparing the similarities between his friend's symptoms and his own, Otto became convinced he too was ill with lung cancer and did not seek treatment until his diabetes had progressed too far. Visiting her father's grave inspired Sylvia to write the poem "Electra on Azalea Path." After her husband's Aurelia Plath moved her children and parents to the opposite side of the town in 1942.

Sylvia attended Smith College with a great success. During her senior year, she was dating Dick Norton. Many years later, when she wrote "The Bell Jar", character of Buddy was based upon Norton. Norton contracted tuberculosis and was treated at the sanatorium near Saranac Lake. During the summer after her third year of college Plath was awarded a coveted position as guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. The experience was not at all what she had hoped it would be, beginning within her a seemingly downward spiral in her outlook on herself and life in general. Many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel "The Bell Jar".

It was that summer that she made her first medically documented suicide attempt by crawling under her house and taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Details of her attempts at suicide are chronicled in her book. Sylvia seemed to make an acceptable recovery and graduated from Smith with honors in June 1955. She obtained a Fulbright scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge. It seemed that the environment of the Cambridge did her well, she continued actively writing poetry, occasionally publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. And that is where she met the English poet Ted Hughes. After a tempestuous courtship, they were married on June 16, 1956.


DADDY BY SYLVIA PLATH

"Daddy" was written on October the 12th, 1962 , shortly before her suicide. It was published posthumously in "Ariel", three years later. Sylvia used Holocaust as a metaphor, it was her response to her complex relationship with her father, the relationship which in her mind, never got a conclusion, never came to the end. Her father refused the medical treatment, he let himself be beaten by diabetes, and it was the lack of common sense, courage and will for life that she could never forgive him. Otto Plath died when Sylvia was only eight, and in some way, with this poem, she went back to that age, with 5-line stanzas with meter and rhyme scheme resembling the style and structure of a nursery-rhyme. Just hear the sound of:

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Sylvia Plath herself described the poem as "about a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God .". At the age of eight, she felt abandoned and betrayed by her own God, her father. In a way, this poem was a suicide note no one understood at the time. The line "Daddy, I have had to kill you.", shows her will to fight, to try to forgive and forget, but that battle is lost on the end of the poem. The line "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through", decoded itself a few days later when Sylvia died by her own hand.

Sylvia felt abandoned by her father, betrayed by her husband, against the rest of the world she felt like Jews against Nazi, and it created an oppressor-oppressed dynamic in the poem. The two men she refers to are her father and Ted Hughes. "Killed" here means that she has moved on, and forgotten about them. Even though she portrays both of them as vampires, she did spend seven years being married to this 'vampire'. But, as she says in the poem "So Daddy, I'm finally through." I read somewhere she means that she has overcome the memory of her father, and has moved on. I don't think so. I think it means "I give up. I fought, and did my best, but I give up. And Daddy, mu bellowed Daddy, here I come to you. I need the answers, I have so many questions no one can answer but you". Maybe I am wrong, but this is what I hear from this poem.

LADY LAZARUS BY SYLVIA PLATH

Do You hear a scream when reading this poem? I do. In New Testament, he original story of Lazarus is : Lazarus regained his life for the bless of Jesus Christ. Christ loved Lazarus who was ill and died. Jesus came and gave him back his life and he came out of the tomb. Who are they? Lazarus, Nazis, Jews? Lazarus was a victim of illness and Sylvia feels like the victim of male chauvinism. Lazarus resurrected as a phoenix among the Jew and Sylvia reincarnated as a Jew among the Nazi. Here, "Nazi" represents the oppression of male