Title: Children in the blood jet of poetry : Sylvia Plath's poetic tale of infanticide
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2020, vol. 46, iss. 1, pp. 153-174
Extent
153-174
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2020-1-7
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/142605
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
The following article presents an analysis of Sylvia Plath's mature poetry (1959-1962) concerned with the themes of motherhood and children. The analysis rejects the biographical context and instead reads the individual poems through the prism of Plath's body of work. The poems concerned with motherhood and children are also treated as a chronologically structured poetic cycle, connected by the presence of recurring characters, plots, settings, and imagery. Moreover, it is argued that Plath's whole oeuvre is characterized by the constant re-employment of key plots and "dramatis personae" and as such, the poetic cycle in question is a mere installment in a greater tale of troubled family dynamics. Precisely speaking, they represent a mirror image of the (in)famous parent-child conflicts of Plath's writings, yet this time with the Plathian persona accepting the ambiguous role of a mother, rather than that of a struggling daughter.
References
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[2] Bassnett, Susan (1987) Sylvia Plath. Hong Kong: MacMillan.
[3] Butscher, Edward (1976) Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. Tucson: Schaffner Press.
[4] Ciobanu, Elena (2009) Sylvia Plath's Poetry: The Metamorphoses of the Poetic Self. Iasi: Casa Editoriala Demiurg.
[5] Dobbs, Jeannine (1977) Viciousness in the kitchen: Sylvia Plath's domestic poetry. Modern Language Studies 7 (2), 11–25. | DOI 10.2307/3194361
[6] Gill, Jo (2008) The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[7] Hughes, Frieda (2004) Foreword. Ariel: The Restored Edition. By Sylvia Plath. New York: HarperCollins, xi-xxi.
[8] "Indian Pipe". Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. Accessed on 6 May 2015.
[9] Katz, Lisa (2002) The space of motherhood: Sylvia Plath's "Morning song" and "Three women." Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering. 4 (2), 113–120.
[10] Kroll, Judith (1976) Chapters in Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: HarperCollins.
[11] Lavers, Annette (1971) The world as icon: On Sylvia Plath's themes. In: Newman, Charles (ed.) The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 100–135.
[12] Lowell, Robert (1965) Introduction. Ariel. By Sylvia Plath. 1st ed. New York: Harper and Row, vii–ix.
[13] "Marry, to." Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press. Accessed on 5 May, 2015.
[14] McClave, Heather (1980) Sylvia Plath: Troubled bones. New England Review 2 (3), 447–465.
[15] Plath, Sylvia (1981) Collected Poems. 1981. London: Faber.
[16] Plath, Sylvia (1979) Among the bumblebees. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. London: Faber, 259–266.
[17] Perloff, Marjorie (1984) The (re)making of the Sylvia Plath canon. The American Poetry Review 13 (6), 10–18.
[18] Stevenson, Anne (1990) Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Penguin Books.
[19] Van Dyne, Susan R. (1993) Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems. University of North Carolina Press.
[20] Vendler, Helen (2003) Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath. Harvard University Press.