Redefining Femininity: The Unique Voice of Sylvia Plath

Authors

  • Yajnaseni Mukherjee Lecturer, School of Humanities KIIT University, Patia, Orissa, India.

Keywords:

Femininity, Sylvia Plath, Feminist perspectives

Abstract

This paper would like to focus on a reinterpretation of Sylvia Plath’s poetry from the feminist perspective. As a woman, she was unique-seeking approval of the menfolk yet at the same time subtly striving to prove her superiority and excellence. Insecure she might have been in her personal domain but she did not put up a façade for the world at large. Though her poems reflect her inner turmoils yet she was a trendsetter who cannot be confined to a particular age. Somewhere in the innermost recesses of her heart, however, she was lonely – still, the small girl betrayed and hurt by her father’s untimely death. Her unique brand of feminism presents a novel way of looking at her and her works – virulent yet seeking completion in her works and her children. Both her children and her poems are expressions of the Woman and Wit combined in her persona. It is often the social and cultural constructions of masculinities and femininities that restrict Women, not the state of being male or female in its entirety.

References

Plath, Sylvia, and Ted Hughes. The Collected Poems. Harper and Row Publishers, New York, 1981. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix – Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Jackson, Laura (Riding) – The Word Woman and other related writings. Ed. By Elizabeth Friedman and Alan J. Clark. Persea Books, New York, 1993.

Kinsey-Clinton, Michelle – The Willing Domesticity of Sylvia Plath: A Rebuttal of the “Feminist” Label. www.sapphireblue.com, 1997.

Rosenthal, Lucy – Modern American Literature: A Library of Literary Criticism. Ed. By Elaine Fialka Kramer, Maurice Kramer, and Dorothy Nyren. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1976.

Stevenson, Anne – Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. A Peter Davison Book Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1989.

Vendler, Helen ed. - Voices and Visions: The Poet in America. New York: Vintage for New York Center for Visual History, 1987.

Wagner, Linda W. ed. – Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath. Boston: G.K. Hall and Company, 1984.

www.nietzsche.edu.com

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Published

01.07.2010

How to Cite

Yajnaseni Mukherjee. (2010). Redefining Femininity: The Unique Voice of Sylvia Plath. Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature, 2(1), 25–29. Retrieved from https://journals.eltai.in/index.php/jtrel/article/view/JTREL020106

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 1 (2010): July

Section

Research Articles

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