Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

domingo, 24 de noviembre de 2013

Lady Lazarus

Sylvia Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus" is a clear example of confessional poetry. Through the use of allusions, she narrates her various suicide attempts.








The themes of death and rebirth are exposed since the title with the Biblical allusion of Lazarus, a man Jesus raises from the dead. 

These images depict the theme of death by describing a corpse. Thus, the imagery of death establishes that in order to be born again, she need suffer and die before.
"She enacts her death repeatedly in order to cleanse herself of the "million filaments" of guilt and anguish that torment her. After she has returned to the womblike state of being trapped in her cave, like the biblical Lazarus, or of being rocked "shut as a seashell," she expects to emerge reborn in a new form. These attempts at rebirth are unsuccessful until the end of the poem. Only when the Lady undergoes total immolation of self and body does she truly emerge in a demonic form. The doctor burns her down to ash, and then she achieves her rebirth: " (Rosenblatt.)

Moreover, the images from the Holocaust demonstrate the objectification of herself (a Nazi lampshade, a paperweight, fine Jew linen) which makes her another victim, a martyr who has been suffering and has been trying to liberate herself. Rebirth, for the persona, is a means to take revenge from life, for the ones who have used and damaged her. 

To convey the theme of rebirth, Plath uses the myth of the Phoenix; the mythological creature that is born out of its ashes. 

About confessional poetry, it can be said that this poem foreshadows her final and successful suicide attempt. The grave cave she mentions in the poem is like the oven she used to kill herself. Also, throughout the poem, the tone and images depict her depression and suffering.

Finally, the period she belonged to is reflected by the use of images from the Holocaust. Her feminist ideas are depicted by the transformation of the biblical allusion of Lazarus to a Lady Lazarus.

History in Plath's Period of Writing

During the Second World War, women proved that they could do "men's" work, and do it well. With men away to serve in the military and demands for war material increasing, manufacturing jobs opened up to women and upped their earning power. Yet women's employment was only encouraged as long as the war was on. Once the war was over, federal and civilian policies replaced women workers with men.

The Post-Modernist Period

The Post-Modernist period, stretching from 1945 to present, was known for its opportunity and change. Poetry during the time period was influenced by the many events occurring in society. The Second World War had just ended and it was a prosperous time for most of the world. Sylvia Plath was a female poet during this time period. Some of Plath's work is directly related to issues developing in society, while others were influenced by her truly troubled life. Being a woman, Plath was always interested in the constant fight for women's rights. After the war, women's liberation was one of the many issues that demanded change.

Women's liberation was such a big issue because once the war was over, federal and civilian policies replaced women workers with men. Advertisements, educational films, and television shows, post-war Americans saw feminine, stay-at-home moms cleaning, cooking, and taking care of children while masculine dads left home early and returned late each weekday. In More Work for Mother, Ruth Schwartz Cowan wrote that psychiatrists, psychologists, and popular writers of the era critiqued women who wished to pursue a career, and even women who wished to have a job, referring to such "unlovely women."

Societal roles were standard, but slowly changing in favor of women as they began to uphold a greater standing in the labor workforce following World War II. Simply put,they were bored weaving, mending, and maintaining in the household and many sought something more intellectually stimulating. Sylvia Plath was one such women, whose achievements as a successful poet and writer accentuated by the times that harbored her growth and development.

For more images of women during the Second World War go to http://www.history.com/topics/us-home-front-during-world-war-ii/photos






Sources: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/tupperware-work/
http://www.history.com/topics/american-women-in-world-war-ii


sábado, 23 de noviembre de 2013

Feminism



Sylvia Plath founded a style of feminist poetry that has almost completely receded. Arriving as she did at the head of the women's rights movement, Plath's poetry partly set the stage for the feverish experiments in consciousness that followed soon; it was comparable to, say, Malcolm X's militancy auguring the civil rights movement. Today one finds little poetry that stands up well to Plath's urgent retort to patriarchy, militarism and domesticity.

Consider "Lady Lazarus," where Plath writes, "Soon, soon the flesh / the grave cave ate will be / At home on me // And I a smiling woman. / I am only thirty. / And like the cat I have nine times to die." And later in the same poem, "Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well. // I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real. / I guess you could say I've a call." The words are often monosyllabic, direct ripostes to the over-elaborate doubletalk of politics and domesticity, which obfuscates injustice.

"Lady Lazarus" is a direct assault on time as well, which melts people into defined characters, reduces women to instruments of pleasure or pain. Fearlessness, in Ariel, does not come across as posture or imposture. So in "Elm" she says: "I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. / Scorched to the root / My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires." Everywhere there is a conflagration in progress, a wild fire, eviscerating necessary distinctions between observer and observed, nature and humankind, fact and interpretation. The malign thing within her is within all of us as well, if only we had the courage to articulate real pain: "I am terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me; / All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity."

Source:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/sylvia-plath-death-anniversary_b_2672685.html

Major Themes in Plath`s works



Death

Death is an ever-present reality in Plath's poetry, and manifests in several different ways.
Death is dealt with in terms of suicide, which eerily corresponds to her own suicide attempts and eventual death by suicide. In "Lady Lazarus," she claims that she has mastered the art of dying after trying to kill herself multiple times. She sneers that everyone is used to crowding in and watching her self-destruct. 

Suicide, though, is presented as a desirable alternative in many of these works. The poems suggest it would release her from the difficulties of life, and bring her transcendence wherein her mind could free itself from its corporeal cage. This desire is exhilaratingly expressed in "Ariel," and bleakly and resignedly expressed in "Edge." Death is an immensely vivid aspect of Plath's work, both in metaphorical and literal representations.

Victimization

Plath felt like a victim to the men in her life, including her father, her husband, and the great male-dominated literary world. Her poetry can often be understood as response to these feelings of victimization, and many of the poems with a male figure can be interpreted as referring to any or all of these male forces in her life.
In regards to her father, she realized she could never escape his terrible hold over her; she expressed her sense of victimhood in "The Colossus" and "Daddy," using powerful metaphors and comparisons to limn a man who figured heavily in her psyche. 

Her husband also victimized her through the power he exerted as a man, both by assuming he should have the literary career and through his infidelity. Plath felt relegated to a subordinate, "feminine" position which stripped from her any autonomy or power. Her poems from the "Colossus" era express her frustration over the strictures under which she operated. For instance, "A Life" evokes a menacing and bleak future for Plath. However, in her later poems, she seems finally able to transcend her status as victim by fully embracing her creative gifts ("Ariel"), metaphorically killing her father ("Daddy"), and committing suicide ("Lady Lazarus", "Edge").

Patriarchy

Plath lived and worked in 1950s/1960s England and America, societies characterized by very strict gender norms. Women were expected to remain safely ensconced in the house, with motherhood as their ultimate joy and goal. Women who ventured into the arts found it difficult to attain much attention for their work, and were often subject to marginalization and disdain. Plath explored and challenged this reductionist tendency through her work, offering poems of intense vitality and stunning language. She depicted the bleakness of the domestic scene, the disappointment of pregnancy, the despair over her husband's infidelity, her tortured relationship with her father, and her attempts to find her own creative voice amidst the crushing weight of patriarchy. She shied away from using genteel language and avoided writing only of traditionally "female" topics. Most impressively, the work remains poetic and artistic - rather than political - because of her willing to admit ambivalence over all these expectations, admitting that both perspectives can prove a trap. 

Nature

Images and allusions to nature permeate Plath's poetry. She often evokes the sea and the fields to great effect. The sea is usually associated with her father; it is powerful, unpredictable, mesmerizing, and dangerous. In "Full Fathom Five," her father is depicted as a sea god. An image of the sea is also used in "Contusion," there suggesting a terrible sense of loss and loneliness. 

Nature is also manifested in the bright red tulips which jolt the listless Plath from her post-operation stupor, insisting that she return to the world of the living. Here, nature is a provoker, an instigator - it does not want her to give up. Nature is a ubiquitous theme in Plath's work; it is a potent force that is sometimes unpredictable, but usually works to encourage her creative output.

The self

Plath has often been grouped into the confessional movement of poetry. One of the reasons for this classification is that she wrote extensively of her own life, her own thoughts, her own worries. Any great artist both creates his or her art and is created by it, and Plath was always endeavoring to know herself better through her writing. She tried to come to terms with her personal demons, and tried to work through her problematic relationships. For instance, she tried to understand her ambivalence about motherhood, and tried to vent her rage at her failed marriage.

However, her exploration of herself can also be understood as an exploration of the idea of the self, as it stands opposed to society as a whole and to other people, whom she did not particularly like. Joyce Carol Oates wrote that even Plath's children seemed to be merely the objects of her perception, rather than subjective extensions of herself. The specifics of Plath's work were drawn from her life, but endeavored to transcend those to ask more universal questions. Most infamously, Plath imagined herself as a Jew, another wounded and persecuted victim. She also tried to engage with the idea of self in terms of the mind and body dialectic. "Edge" and "Sheep in Fog" explore her desire to leave the earthly life, but express some ambivalence about what is to come after. "Ariel" suggests it is glory and oneness with nature, but the other two poems do not seem to know what will happen to the mind/soul once the body is eradicated. This conflict - between the self and the world outside - can be used to understand almost all of Plath's poems.

Motherhood

Motherhood is a major theme in Plath's work. She was profoundly ambivalent about this prescribed role for women, writing in "Metaphors" about how she felt insignificant as a pregnant woman, a mere "means" to an end. She lamented how grotesque she looked, and expressed her resignation over a perceived lack of options. However, in "Child," she delights in her child's perception of and engagement with the world. Of course, "Child" ends with the suggestions that she knows her child will someday see the harsh reality of life. Plath did not want her children to be contaminated by her own despair. This fear may also have manifested itself in her last poem, "Edge," in which some critics have discerned a desire to kill her children and take them with her far from the terrors of life. Other poems in her oeuvre express the same tension. Overall, Plath clearly loved her children, but was not completely content in either pregnancy or motherhood.

Source: http://www.gradesaver.com/sylvia-plath-poems/study-guide/major-themes/

Confessional Poetry



Though her work in many ways confounds the designation, Sylvia Plath can be better appreciated when one understands the genre of confessional poetry, in which she is often grouped.

Confessional poetry is a genre of poetry first identified in the decades immediately following the Second World War. It was initiated with the publication of Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959); other poets whose work typifies this style include Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, and Anne Sexton. With its origins in the British romantic poets of the 19th century, confessional poetry of the modern era focused on inward expressions of conflict and emotion through the use extremely personal details from the poet's life. 

Confessional poetry was a reaction to the depersonalized, academic poetry of writers like T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, who wrote in the 1920s and 1930s. These paragons of modernism believed poetry was a thing apart from its creator, and that there was no room for the self in poetry. The confessional poets did not adhere to this perspective, instead writing from a deeply personal perspective and filling their work with intimate and controversial details from their private lives.

Sylvia Plath is commonly seen as a confessional poet, although some critics dispute her placement within this movement, arguing that her work is more universal than commonly assumed. Nevertheless, Ariel, published posthumously in 1965, deals with the very personal issues of suicide, sex, her children, and, most dramatically, her complicated relationship with her deceased father. Poems like "Daddy," "Ariel," and "Lady Lazarus" are stunning in their originality, wit, and brutality. 

The confessional poets have garnered a lot of critical interest, but there is a tendency to conflate their art and lives too fully - the usage of a personal pronoun in their work is not an unequivocal invitation to assume that the subject of the poem is always the poet. They use the sharply defined sensory prompts and the everyday language of the common person learned from the imagist school.

The confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s pioneered a type of writing that forever changed the landscape of American poetry. The tradition of confessional poetry has been a major influence on generations of writers and continues to this day.

Sources:
http://www.gradesaver.com/sylvia-plath-poems/study-guide/section16/