'Individual Identity In Sylvia Plath's Initiation'

Millicent is an average girl who no one really notices, when one day, a sorority group decides to allow her to join, but she must past their initiation test first. At first, Millicent is ecstatic, and proud that she can finally be a part of society, but slowing, and in the beginning

It tends to be the trend for women who have had traumatic childhoods to be attracted to men who epitomize their emptiness felt as children. Women who have had unaffectionate or absent fathers, adulterous husbands or boyfriends, or relatives who molested them seem to become involved in relationships with men who, instead of being the opposite of the “monsters” in their lives, are the exact replicas of these ugly men. Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” is a perfect example of this unfortunate trend. In this poem, she speaks directly to her dead father and her husband who has been cheating on her, as the poem so indicates.

Wrapped in gaseous mystique, Sylvia Plath’s poetry has haunted enthusiastic readers since immediately after her death in February, 1963. Like her eyes, her words are sharp, apt tools which brand her message on the brains and hearts of her readers. With each reading, she initiates them forever into the shrouded, vestal clan of her own mind. How is the reader to interpret those singeing, singing words? Her work may be read as a lone monument, with no ties to the world she left behind. But in doing so, the reader merely grazes the surface of her rich poetics. Her poetry is largely autobiographical, particularly Ariel and The Bell Jar, and it is from this frame of mind that the reader interprets the work as a

Firstly, the story introduces Millicent at the end of her grueling initiation about to be granted entry into a very prestige social group. She states “her case would be different” (199) implying that despite getting so far in her initiation, something changes her mind and her ultimate decision to not join the sorority. She is clearly quite proud of herself and is amused at her exclusive position being one of the elect. This sense of pride is further enhanced by her best friend, Tracy’s support and encouragement. It is evident how badly Millicent wants to be part of the sorority considering that “Millicent had waited a long time for acceptance, longer than most” (200). After years of wistfully looking

At the start of the new school year, Millicent Arnold, a typical teenage girl, receives an invitation to join the elite and exclusive girls’ sorority at Lansing High School. Before she becomes an official member however, Millicent must demonstrate she is fit to join the sorority by finishing the initiation process: a series of ridiculous and rigorous tasks that pushes her to her limits. During a mission, Millicent discovers the nasty truth and reality of the “prefect” sorority at her high school, and ultimately decides that being herself is most important and rejects entering the sorority altogether.

In order to express the importance of the theme, the reader is introduced to Millicent’s initial dependence on belonging as a result of her self-conscious character. When she first learns of her invitation to the sorority, Millicent compares her situation to waiting outside a dance floor “looking in through the windows at the golden interior … wistfully watching … couples waltzing to the never-ending music, laughing in pairs and groups together, no one alone” (Plath 200). Millicent emphasizes that in her vision no dancer is left on their own, and that her desire to enter the sorority is driven, as Summer Yasoni states in her essay, “not necessarily

The composition of texts during the post-bomb period are influenced by a chaotic and shifting atmosphere which compelled composer’s to reclaim the self from controlling forces within a patriarchal society. Sylvia Plath’s poetry serves as a manifestation of her feminist expression as a composer and intent desire to reclaim her personal identity and resultantly assert her power in a restrictive and patriarchal society, as witnessed in her captivating poems Fever 103° and Lady Lazarus.

Sylvia Plath was an unusual write during the 1950’s. She uses a giant amount if imagery, and clear diction throughout her poems. She went to Smith College on a scholarship. Then, Plath received the Fulbright Grant which she used to study at the Cambridge University in England. She suffered a major mental breakdown and attempted suicide during her junior and senior year in high school. Furthermore, her parent names were Otto Plath and Aurelia Plath. Her father passed away when Plath was eight years old from gangrene. He was born in Poland and was Germany. On the other hand, her mother supported Plath dreams. Moreover, she married Ted Hughes, who was a writer, and they lived in England. Plath and Hughes had their first child together in 1960

Sylvia came into the world on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Sylvia Plath had been writing since she was a child. She started writing by starting a journal. But when she was eight years her father died. Sylvia and her father did not have the best relationship.

Sylvia Plath was a troubled writer to say the least, not only did she endure the loss of her father a young age but she later on “attempted suicide at her home and was hospitalized, where she underwent psychiatric treatment” for her depression (Dunn). Writing primarily as a poet, she only ever wrote a single novel, The Bell Jar. This fictional autobiography “[chronicles] the circumstances of her mental collapse and subsequent suicide attempt” but from the viewpoint of the fictional protagonist, Esther Greenwood, who suffers the same loss and challenges as Plath (Allen 890). Due to the novel’s strong resemblance to Plath’s own history it was published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath expresses the

Majority of her poems dealt with depression, anxiety and death. Plath has dealt with many

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. She wrote her first poem at the young age of 8 ½. that poem was displayed in The Boston Traveller. When she first began writing, she wrote about general topics, nature, and scenery, but as time went on and with more experience, her poems acclaimed more depth. Plath loved writing, and in an interview with Peter Orr, Plath once said ‘I don 't think I could live without it. It 's like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I 'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn 't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one” (The Poet Speaks).

Plath sometimes finished a poem every day. In her last poems, death is given a

American poet Sylvia Plath once stated “eternity bores me, I never wanted it.” This quote, from her poem, “Years,” expressed that she did not want to live forever. It even suggested a foreshadowing of her suicide in 1963. This quote is also from one of her many poems, which were greatly influenced by her life. To learn how Plath’s life affected her writing, researchers studied main topics on her life and her works, including her early life, career, and literary works.

In the world of poetry, it is a commonly known fact that Sylvia Plath had a tendency to express her fascination with death and various other extremely dark, heavy, and morbid topics in a myriad of her works. The intensely personal and somewhat taboo topics that are found in her poems can sometimes be tremendously challenging for people to face, but Plath’s supreme writing ability allowed her to write about such subjects in a way that made readers unable to look away from the page. This idea is especially true in her persona poem “Lady Lazarus,” which deals with the morose matter of mental illness and suicide. In this poem, Plath has the speaker, Lady Lazarus, describe her previous and future experiences with death and resurrection. Lady Lazarus is unafraid of and seems to completely embrace death, almost to the point where she takes pleasure in it, and she abhors how her resurrection is made into a theatrical show and a science experiment. For most of the poem, themes of suffering and death are present, but as the poem nears the end, a more positive theme of empowerment arises. To express the speaker’s innermost feelings concerning suffering from oppression and depression, Plath utilizes unique form, unorthodox rhythm and rhyme, and unbelievably violent, gory, and horrific images of death associated with the treatment of Jewish people during the time of the Holocaust, and she does so, spectacularly.