In the first place, Sylvia Plath is describing her dad like a violent suppresor who destroyed her childhood and the life after it. She feels suppressed, she was probably raped by the father, and Sylvias personality is highly marked by the dominance of her dad for the rest of her life. Plath says that his language was obscene, possibly, she was raped by him for real. The Second World War marked the whole world by the marks of the human mockery toward God. How such thing could happen? Millions of people were killed becouse of the will of the few Nazi bosses. Black people were killed, enslaved, raped and assaulted from 1620 in America. How is it that after those centuries of the enslavement the black guy feels completly other emotions than Sylvia …show more content…
To just inspire others? Comparatively, the darker brother is facing the problem of being viewed as something less from his childhood also, but he is feeling that the whole idea of the society structure will surely change one day. Although the Sylvias situation may be true, but let me point out that- we cannot be sure about the assaults, her father -probably- put her throug a hell on earth. She fells like she is something less, she feels like a Jew hunted down by some Nazi …show more content…
In her eyes all men are attacking the full women potential. According to her lines, I must state that Sylvia feels like all of the men are vicious, want to feel power, destroy and conquer anyone anytime. By their stands they do so, without even recognizing they are hurting feminine sex. Furthermore, Sylvia writes quite impressive lines about her true feelings black shoe In which I have lived like a foot. According to my imagination, she feels she was surrounded by darkness and she was the pillar which carried the weight of her father deeds for almost thirty years, she was stepped on, crushed and closed up. Just as she wants to face her father, she wants to face all of the deeply rooted society structure behaviors toward women, she wants to prove she can be at the same level as her father was, able to cause the pain she had experienced herself, be capable of taking away his life like he did it with hers and probably others. By all this she wants to be realized as equal and capable of striking back. She fells no hope being not allowed to kill
Naturally, the narrator feels the pressure of being a minority. At first, he wants to be like everyone else, to be a part of white society. Then, he realizes that such society is not what he imagines it to be. As a result, he wants to reconnect with his family, this time appreciating them as his own. Nevertheless, the narrator is afraid of what his father
Sylvia hated her “nappy hair and proper speech”. She despised the way her parents kissed her ass. But most of all, she hated that Miss Moore had a college education, something her parents did not have. That “nappy-head bitch” had seen parts of the world that Sylvia had not, she had experienced things in life that Sylvia may never see. This is part of the reason Sylvia hated her so much. But Sylvia also did not like Miss Moore because she opened her eyes to the reality that her life is not as perfect as she thought. She thought that life was perfect the way it was, a care free life with no education. She continues to say that she would rather have fun than listen to her.
In Initiation by Sylvia Plath, the author suggests that conformity and having friends is a wonderful idea, yet the idea of having an individual identity and being an individual is stronger. In the excerpt, Millicent is slowly realizing that conforming and being a part of a sorority is not as exciting as it sounds, and being an individual offers more opportunities to become a unique person.
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.
Throughout the short story Sylvia Portrayed as tough hard-shelled individual. As we are first introduced to her we learn that even though she seems like an angry individual, she is in fact very intelligent and observant. For example, Sylvia states, “She was black as hell, cept for her feet, which were fish-white and spooky. And she was always planning these boring-ass things for us to do… Miss Moore always looked like she was going to church, though she never did” (1).
Sylvia Plath uses her poem, Daddy, to express deep emotions toward her father’s life and death. With passionate articulation, she verbally turns over her feelings of rage, abandonment, confusion and grief. Though this work is fraught with ambiguity, a reader can infer Plath’s basic story. Her father was apparently a Nazi soldier killed in World War II while she was young. Her statements about not knowing even remotely where he was while he was in battle, the only photograph she has left of him and how she chose to marry a man that reminded her of him elude to her grief in losing her father and missing his presence. She also expresses a dark anger toward him for his political views and actions
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.
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
Reading the content in this book made me get a picture of what it was like to be a colored person in this time. My eyes were opened to the meaning of the word “nigga”. Nigga is such a derogatory term, yet now-a-days it is used by people so much. Kids in this generation use it as a term of endearment when they see their friends, or they say it when they are shocked by something. Frankly, I don’t believe they know how serious it really is. The fact that white people could look at a person and see less than a human being when they did nothing wrong distresses me. They (white people) treated them as if they were property and below them. Even though we don’t have racism to this extent
Dalton states, “Black folk certainly know what it is like to be favored, disfavored, scrutinized, and ignored all on the basis of our race. Sometimes we are judged on a different scale altogether” (273). Dalton is trying to state that African Americans know what it is like to be judged and because of this it creates a road block. In addition, race has become a universal problem that people tend to cause huge tensions and the way “Horatio Alger’s” essay states it is that everyone is equal would not be true. On the other hand, Sylvia seems to be under the paradox that Dalton has stated about race. Sylvia throughout the story goes on a field trip to a toy store where she sees items that cost a lot of money from the glass window, but when she enters the store an issue occurs. Sylvia states, “Not that I’m scared, what’s there to be afraid of, just a toy store. But I feel funny, shame. But what I got to be shamed about? Got as much right to go in as anybody” (269). Sylvia is afraid to enter the store because the fear of race keeps occurring in her mind. It is a huge issue because African Americans had many different views and it made them feel insecure. Also, Sylvia knows that the toy store is fancy and expensive, which triggers her to back off because she is from a poor background. Race has a huge impact on society, no matter what way it is looked at and Sylvia’s fear expresses that of many at the time.
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.
By just reading Sylvia Plath’s works of writing, it is apparent that she had an infatuation with portraying negative and brutal thoughts. For example, her poem “Daddy,” she clearly expresses her rage towards her deceased father. The poem is full of contradiction and the interpretation is up the reader. Pieces like this gives insight into Sylvia’s mental sanity, which was questioned at times. In her early
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
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