The Life Of Sylvia Path

Jane’s childhood struggle of losing her mother prepared her for her future struggles. She constantly had a church family to rely on growing up to strengthen her faith. Jane worked hard and had a good education; it was all preparing her for her later work. God strengthened her love and faith while she worked as a girls’ matron, and she displayed this love in her sacrificial death. God used Jane Haining’s life for His glory, and He prepared her for it through each stage of her life.

Joan D. Vinge once said, “We are all born with a unique genetic blueprint, which lays out the basic characteristics of our personality as well as our physical health and appearance... And yet, we all know that life experiences do change us.” In the short story, “Initiation,” by Sylvia Plath, Millicent, a teenage girl whom is being initiated into a high school sorority must go five days doing what their sorority big sister commands them to do. While being initiated, Millicent starts to realize that while being part of a group that she’s been longing to be apart of is great, being an individual and creating yourself makes you more unique than those who are part of a group. Having individuality allows you to be more free, and makes you more memorable to those around you.

Mr. Cranton is the principal of Lansing High School who believes the girls’ sorority to be “undemocratic” which ultimately “disturb[s] the routine of school work” (241). He is a static, flat, and direct character.

In the short story “Initiation” by Sylvia Plath, Millicent Arnold is a narcissistic teenager undergoing her initiation into the most prestige social group at Lansing High. Despite being aware of the risk at losing her best friend, Tracy, Millicent eagerly seeks the opportunity to be part of a close-knit group and as a result, she is mistreated and forced to conform to the group’s narrow standards. Plath explains how being part of a social group does not necessarily help one grow individually, but rather assimilates them into what is portrayed as esteemed social status. As Millicent goes through the downgrading initiation process, she discovers the value of friendship and realizes that being associated with a certain group will not help her achieve confidence in her true self.

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.

Thesis: Eudora Welty paints the picture of a life journey in the short story “A Worn Path” through the use of symbolism, imagery, and tone.

By the time World War II ended, Sylvia was ten years old. Because of this she was unable to attend school until she was eleven. Itka and Hava were her best friends, but unfortunately both were killed by the Nazis. In 1959, she married a Holocaust survivor from Poland. Her husband’s name was David Rozine (United States

Theresa was a good catholic girl. Her faith was important to her. She went to mass on Sundays, her mom was very involved in the community and her dad had a very important job. Her family was the normal American family. Her dad’s job required them to move around a lot and because of that she never had true friendships. One day her family moved to Birmingham and her life changed dramatically.

wanted to do with her life. "You'll never get anywhere like that." (Sylvia Plath page 27)

Imagine going to the mall with all of your best friends on a Saturday, you go to all of your favorite stores. You walk into PacSun because you saw the cutest pair of jeans, so you went to try them on. Once you’re in the dressing room, you pick up the jeans, then immediately feel dizzy, you are about to faint. Every time you touch something you have a great chance of fainting. Once you witness a murder, what do you do? Do you tell the authorities and family or keep it a secret? This is what goes on in Sylvia’s life in the book Slide by Jill Hathaway.

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.

Plath met her lover, fellow poet, Ted Hughes, in 1965 in Cambridge while she was attending the university. As shown in the film adaptation of her life, their relationship can be described as love at first site. From the moment they locked eyes at the party they both attended, they felt the intense connection. Only moments later in the night, while Plath and Hughes were dancing together, Sylvia had already declared her love for Ted. The couple married in 1956 but their love wasn’t always in the highest place as it was the night they met; their relationship with a turbulent one. Two children later, the couple still hadn’t met a common ground and their relationship was falling apart. After the birth of their second child in 1962, Hughes left Plath for another woman, which led her to fall deeper into depression. Soon after, she committed suicide by inhaling gas from a kitchen oven. Plath’s tragic death at just 30 years old, led to Hughes releasing her collection of poems, Ariel, which is one of her greatest works to this day.

Sylvia Plath was influenced to write poems early on in her life. One of the biggest influences within her writing include her father, Otto Plath. Otto Plath had died from an illness caused by diabetes in 1940. After this traumatizing event, Plath had written very vivid poems explaining her problematic relationship with her father, and her feelings after he had died. She wrote a poem named Daddy (“Sylvia Plath” Poetry). Daddy is a poem including a characteristic person representing Plath’s father in real life. Her father in the poem is a dark person that Sylvia Plath has to “kill” (Ardagh, Emily). Plath was very upset about this sudden death of her father, so she thought the perfect idea was to write a poem about him. Another important person

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.

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)