Sylvia Plath as an American  Poets 

One of the major female American voices in the 1950's, Sylvia Plath (1932-63) has been portrayed as a fragile, brilliant immigrant's daughter motivated by an overarching ambition. Her life was brief in conventional terms, but her life of thirty-one years was rich in experiences. Sylvia Plath at an early age fell into the trap of gender discrimination forcing her to submit herself to its repressive measures and tough regulations. She used her creative powers to come out of its trappings. In this connection she was equally influenced by her mother. She felt a deep attachment to her which took its own toll on her life. In those times, the relationship affected her outlook deeply. Her mother wanted to inculcate a sense of ‘womanliness’ in her. She wanted her to behave like a gentle and delicate English girl cherishing the role assigned to her by the patriarchal system of English society. However, Plath took the system as too authoritarian and tyrannical. She felt an inner urge to write against the social and political pressures that snatched a woman’s freedom and acted a barrier in her growth as a poet. Caught up in the vicious process Plath failed to live the dream of normal family life. She participated in social life by getting married to Ted Hughes, and gave birth to children and also remained committed to writing.

Sylvia Plath’s search for the right man to hare her love and life comes to an end, when she meets Ted Hughes and gets married to him in the year 1956. Both being creative writers with similar tastes in life and literature, allow us to predict a happy marriage. Sylvia Plat’s world enlarges when she becomes a mother and she successfully combines her home and career. Children too find their share of love. She did not dream that a day will come that she would confess about her broken marriage to her own son. Sylvia Plath was a young mother of two beautiful children. Marriage was already on the rocks as the clashes have set in, many fields .She played her part well, bravely and heroically. Ted Hughes’s initial fascination started getting worn off and he developed affairs with other women. His affair with another lady made Sylvia Plath heartbroken and she separated from him and that was the end of her love. Ted Hughes takes her for granted and ignores the women in her. He assumes that, as an intellectual, she should overlook such affairs as trivial things of life. She cries and when her cries were in vain she decides to relinquish the role of a heroine in Hughes’ life and she realizes that her spring of love has dried up. Only alternative was to fall in love with death, which seemed to be attractive to her, since a long time.

Sylvia Plath’s writings are marked by thematic relevance, technical excellence and individualism. In an effective manner Plath has vitalized literature. She succeeds in manipulating words in order to achieve striking aesthetic effects and introducing new shades of meaning. Plath is a complex poetic phenomenon whose poems make heavy demands on the reader because they deal with complex issues in an uninhibited manner. Sylvia Plath’s published works include: The Colossus (1960), The Bell Jar (1963), Ariel (1966), Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1971), The Collected Poems (1981), Letters Home (1950-63), Johnny Panic (1977), The Journals of Sylvia Plath ( 1982), The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (1950-62). Within the space of a few years, Plath’s poetry has received considerable critical attention, often becoming the focus of critical and theoretical debates, particularly in relation to feminism. The reception of the first- two collections of Plath’s poetry The Colossus and Ariel bring to the fore the contrast in response to the early and the late work. A. Alvarez, M.L. Rosenthal, George Steiner and other influential critics characterized Plath’s poetry as confessional and biographical. The psychoanalytic and the feminist critics of the 1980s and 1990s also focus on the element of subjectivity inherent in Plath’s poetry.

          Sylvia Plath experienced the world as an arena of various power struggles: life against death, victor against victim, male against female. Her poems as well as the only novel The Bell Jar she wrote can be seen as attempts to mediate these antagonisms. She felt life as a chaos of conflicting oppositions and counter forces and tried to co-ordinate these counter forces by corresponding to her art and life. Thus Plath’s own inner and outer life provided not only form, but also matter for her writing. She wrote about her own emotions and about actual events, places and people. In turn, her writing shaped her life; her fictive metaphors provided temporary states to the “chaos of conflicting oppositions”⁵ and thus structured her experience. A strong feeling of her own independence, rebellion against male domination, resentment and protest against male domination, resentment and protest against women who were passively perpetuating the human values and mindless domesticity are freely expressed in all her works. In a male-dominated society she sought to establish her identity as a woman and an outstanding writer. The quest for identity becomes the main theme in her short novel The Bell Jar, and in almost all her poems. She extends her range to comprehend the social and cultural history of the West in her poems such as Fever 1030, Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Death and Co, Cut, Mary’s Songs, Tulips, The Moon and the Yew Tree, etc.

          Like other woman writers, marriage and family life made it difficult for Plath to realize potential. Although she was conscious that writing and family life do not go together, yet she remained determined to indulge in both. In this connection Judith Kroll’s remark about her is significant:

She was Earth Mother and the fruits of herbody and   fruits of her mind were inextricably interwined.⁶

  Suzanne Juhsaz elaborates this further:

Plath is the women poet of our century who sees the

problem, the situation of trying to be a woman poet

of  our century who sees the problem, the situation of

trying to be a woman poet with the coldest and most

undedredeeming clarity, and who ……finds no

solution.⁷

       During the years of Sylvia Plath’s life she was known as goddess and a heroine because of her excellent writing. Her writing revolved around aspects of her short life. Plath often wrote about her personal experiences with illness, her parents, and her family. Plath’s father died when she was eight years old of a pulmonary embolus. In the poem Daddy, Plath’s only imaginative way of being reunited with her father was to die.⁸ Plath began to face difficulties in her life and her writings were reflecting this. She involved her personal drama in her poetry. Though the tone was not always vulgar, her writing was seen as being horrifying. When looked into, one could notice that her tone was therapy for herself, as if she had nowhere else to go for her help. In some of her work, Plath becomes an active character. She becomes a character that is out to help others. In Nick and the Candlestick, she is protecting a child from lighting by having it hit her instead; her change from being depressed and helpless to happy and helpful showed that this author was suffering from major personal issues. Her life was changing every day, and so was her writing ⁹. She explores what is usually considered forbidden. Her work is loaded with savage brutality leading her to a personal quest for meaning in a chaotic and confusing universe. Under the stress and strain of internal and external drives, she makes herself psychic lands cope. She expresses her own emotional fissures through a language reflective of a violent reality. Her anguish and anxiety over death, decay, hatred, sexual exploitation and violence made her poetry unique. Along with this, her excessive obsession with modern anguish and morbid constitute the theme of her poetry. She completed enough poems indicating her preoccupation with death in the midst of life. Such as All the Dead Dears, Full Fathom Five, Suicide off Egg Rock, The Ghost’s Leave Taking, The Colossus, The Beekeepers Daughter.

A couple of months before Sylvia Plath’s suicide, she wrote Daddy which consisted of eighty lines divided into five stanzas. The poem was told from the first person point of view of a daughter that was seeking for a resolution dealing with the conflicts she had with her father; a man that her husband reminded her of . The beginning of this poem said “you do not do, you do not do/ Anymore” which symbolized her anger that she had towards her father. The poem’s second stanza starts with ‘I have had to kill you’, while comparing with her father to being ‘Marble-heavy, a bag full of God’. Then she compares him to a ‘Ghastly statue’. This was a metaphor introducing her father as godlike, and then progressing him. Being a young child at the time of his death, she experienced many emotions, as would any daughter.

In short, from Plath’s workers it is evident that she was enmeshed in this conflict which Suez Juhsaz aptly termed the ‘double bind’ of the woman poet- the conflict between the requirements of her gender and requirements of her poetic genre. Throughout her inner conflict that never allowed her to establish a stable ego. Engaged with the problem of exorcising the ghost of the ‘double bind’, she could never balance the two. ‘Try she might, she never found a solution to this double bind’. But unlike other feminists who wrote the limiting range of their patriarchal society, the conflict to which she fell a prey inspired her to compose the most enchanting poetry a woman poet could ever attempt in the twentieth century.