Sylvia Plath and Patricia Lockwood both deal with issues of gender and sexuality in their work. Each poet strongly believes in the equal opportunity of both sexes.
Plath uses excessive gender roles in her poems due to the death of her father and her painful divorce from her husband. Plath disagrees with the common idea of womanhood to be strictly reproduction and gratification. She views herself and all other women as entities of individual people. For example, she considers gender and sexuality in her poem “Daddy”. This poem expresses her resentment against the male domination of women and also the many categories of violence in which men are responsible for. Plath expresses her anger towards her “daddy”, although daddy symbolizes the male
Under my feminist reading, I see the poem as an attempt by the poet to exist as an independent autonomist woman by rejecting the traditional patriarchal ideology that women were subjected to at the time. Plath begins the poem with the line ‘stasis in darkness’, symbolic of the fact that women at the time were trapped in the darkness of patriarchal society. She uses the term ‘God’s lioness’ as a reversal of gender expectations to show her support for the rise of feminism.
In fact, most of them are unidentified and the reader may not identify a specific person that speaks in the different chapters. Thus, the audience may understand it is an embodiment of females focusing on structuring the major theme of the book, which is gender inequality. Additionally, the description of the female characters is equivocal such that the reader has to picture the image of the women. Although the author provides various photos in the book, there is absence of an explanation. Before this, the writer only concentrates on telling the story (Kim,165). Additionally, the author uses poetic approach to explain the setting in the book, which gives the novel distinct styles of writing. In fact, the poems are only meant to provide the reader with a description of the mothers and daughters, and this creates a distinction in the narrative. Resultantly, the audience perceives that when a poem appears in the reading, the author is probably narrating the plight of women. Notwithstanding, the novel uses visual art technique to communicate to the audience. in many instances, the author does not provide a description of an individual such that the reader has to imagine the person. In doing so, the readers are in suspense but the author offers a drawing that may be used to demystify the situation. in support of this style, it is apparent that the visual art may have
Plath’s father’s untimely death left her with an unhealthy sort of codependency, resulting in a skewed image of relationships in general. In Plath’s poem “Daddy”, the speaker details their relationship with their father as that between a Jewish person and a Nazi. The speakers describes the fear they experience in junction with their father. The speaker further elaborates on their father’s death when they were young, and that despite the deep resentment the speaker feels for their father, how it affected them deeply. Plath’s own father died when she was eight, and although he was a distant figure in her life due to his illness, she, too, was deeply moved by his death, relating back to the poem (Alexander, 32). What hurt Sylvia most about her father’s
Sexuality has an inherent connection to human nature. Yet, even in regards to something so natural, societies throughout times have imposed expectations and gender roles upon it. Ultimately, these come to oppress women, and confine them within the limits that the world has set for them. However, society is constantly evolving, and within the past 200 years, the role of women has changed. These changes in society can be seen within the intricacies of literature in each era. Specifically, through analyzing The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, one can observe the dynamics of society in regards to the role of women through the lens of the theme of sexuality. In both novels, the confinement and oppression of women can be visibly seen as a result of these gender roles. Yet, from the time The Scarlet Letter was published to the time The Bell Jar was written, the place of women in society ultimately changed as well. Hence when evaluating the gender roles that are derived from sexuality, the difference between the portrayals of women’s oppression in each novel becomes apparent, and shows how the subjugation of women has evolved. The guiding question of this investigation is to what extent does the theme of sexuality reflect the expectations for women in society at the time each novel was written. The essay will explore how the literary elements that form each novel demonstrate each author’s independent vision which questions the
As is inherent within the tradition of confessional poetry, a subgenre of lyric poetry which was most prominent from the fifties to the seventies (Moore), Sylvia Plath uses the events of her own tragic life as the basis of creating a persona in order to examine unusual relationships. An excellent example of this technique is Plath’s poem “Daddy” from 1962, in which she skilfully manipulates both diction, trope and, of course, rhetoric to create a character which, although separate from Plath herself, draws on aspects of her life to illustrate and make points about destructive, interhuman relations. Firstly that of a father and daughter, but later also that of a wife and her unfaithful husband.
While Dorothy Mermin provides a plethora of examples through the inclusion of verse and detailed analysis of poetic texts, she does not provide a solution for the gendering of poetry that is causing both male and female poets to suffer. Her article focuses on detailing the problems arguing that women struggle to be more than just the object and men “[struggle] against the difficulty of a situation in which poetic structures [are] still framed for male subjects but poetry’s qualities were those associated with women.” (165) Her work, much like Victorian gender ideals, largely ignores the suffering of women in favour of the suffering of others (in this case, men). This perhaps stems from the Victorian notion that one must talk about another’s suffering (men’s) to discuss the point at hand (women’s suffering).
Sylvia Plath may not have had the perfect life,but she always stuck to her view on how women should be treated in society. She was a feminist and because she was trapped in a bad marriage, she wanted the world to know women do not have to please a man to be happy. In two of her poems titled “Strumpet Song” and “Tinker Jack and the Tidy Wives” she makes remarks on women wanting to please men. In “Strumpet Song” she writes about prostitution, “ With white frost gone and all dreams not worth much, after a leans day work, times comes round for that foul slut”. Sylvia doesn't like that the man has to be in charge. In her second poem “Tinker Jack and the Tidy Wives” she writes, “Come lady bring that pot,gone black of polish and whatever pans this mending master should trim back to shape”. In this poem Sylvia writes about a women pleasing a man based on her looks. The idea on plastic surgery, a women having to change her body to please a man.
Authors and artists did this to bring attention and personal opinions to the movement. Examples of this are authors by the names of Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath who beautifully used the form of literature to convey their views of the subject they felt so strongly for. Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath fought for themselves and their femininity through opposing the traditional standards a women ‘must’ conform to in America’s society in their literature. For all of Adrienne Rich
Now I intend to turn my attention to concrete examples from Walt Whitman's poetry to provide some evidence of that sexuality played an important role in his poetry, and there are possible readings to find traces for that. Of course, we cannot only rely on selected
The works of Sylvia Plath have always been at least slightly controversial; most of them have themes of feminism, suicide, or depression. Plath was born in 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, and by the age of twelve she was reported to have had an IQ of about 160 (Kelly). Growing up in an age in which women were expected to be nothing more than conservative housemaids, Plath stood defiant against the views of society, choosing to expose any misogynistic prejudices or hateful prospects against mental illness through her writings (Allen).
Sylvia Plath’s poetry is well known for its deeply personal and emotional subject matter. Much of Plath’s poetry is confessional and divulges the most intimate parts of her psyche whether through metaphor or openly, without creating a persona through which to project her feelings, and through the use of intense imagery. Plath’s attempt to purge herself of the oppressive male figures in her life is one such deeply personal and fundamental theme in her poetry. In her poem, “Daddy”, which declares her hatred for her father and husband, this attempt is expressed through language, structure, and tone. (Perkins, 591)
Sylvia Plath had the ability to get emotional responses through her word-pictures and poems. Plath was also able to create a picture from her trip to Spain, tied up ships, or even a beautiful beach setting (Magill 2225). Spring of 1959, Plath randomly wrote “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dream,” a first-person short story that is written in a voice that resembles terror (Hughes 1). Plath later work shows the strong dissatisfaction of her dreams. Plath dreamt of discovering cheerfulness through work, marriage, and family, which was a disappointment, caused by a miscarriage and appendectomy, her divorce, and mood swings. Plath felt defenseless to men and apocalyptic to natural forces, mainly death (Draper 2734). Plath’s post-obituary writings imitate the persisting importance in her work. Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968), originally published on British Radio in 1962, discusses pregnancy of three women (Draper 2735). Plath was inspired to write “The Jailer” which was about her husband who drugged then raped her. Plath eventually became “The Lever of His Wet Dreams.” The exact prodigy occurs in most of her confessional poems, mainly in “Daddy” (Magill 2224). Plath’s tone changes throughout most of her poems (Magill 2228). In “Daddy,” Plath tells about herself being rebellious in her poems (Magill 2229). “No writer has meant more to the current feminist movement.”
• Does her poetry and her personal life reflect the theory of feminism or in another word does Sylvia is a feminist writer ?
In chapter one, also known as ‘the hurting’, the author focuses on trauma that people have dealt with such as sexual abuse from a father or relative, failed relationships with parents, and difficulty with one’s self-expression. One of the poems in chapter one states that the girl’s first kiss was by the age of five and was carried out in an aggressive manner by the young boy, she assumes that he had picked that up from his father’s interactions with the mother. In the poem it says “He had the smell of starvation on his lips which he picked up from his father feasting on his mother at 4 a.m.” It is insinuated that the father uses forceful actions towards the mother during times that should be gentle and affectionate. In that specific poem she felt as if that was when she was taught that her body is only for giving to those who wanted out of satisfaction but she should feel ‘anything less than whole’. In another poem in chapter one, there is a family setting during dinner in which the father orders the mother to hush. This represents how women are constantly oppressed in their own
Sylvia Plath?s poem "Daddy" describes her feelings of oppression from her childhood and conjures the struggle many women face in a male-dominated society. The conflict of this poem is male authority versus the right of a female to control her own life and be free of male domination. Plath?s conflicts begin with her father and continue into the relationship between her and her husband. This conflict is examined in lines 71-80 of "Daddy" in which Plath compares the damage her father caused to that of her husband.