Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Confession and Development in Sylvia Plath's Poetry and Prose
    Confession and Development in Sylvia Plath's Poetry and Prose
    Confession and Development in Sylvia Plath's Poetry and Prose
    Ebook72 pages1 hour

    Confession and Development in Sylvia Plath's Poetry and Prose

    By Simona Mauna

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Sylvia Path was one of the most dynamic and admired American poets of the 20th century. Her work attracted the attention of many readers who saw in her singular verse an attempt to catalog despair, violent emotion and obsession with death.
    Plath's poems and prose explore her own mental anguish, her troubled marriage to poet Ted Hughes, her unresolved conflicts with her parents and her own vision of herself.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimona Mauna
    Release dateJun 27, 2014
    ISBN9781310318689
    Confession and Development in Sylvia Plath's Poetry and Prose
    Author

    Simona Mauna

    English teacherBA in Modern Languages and Literature, Dunarea de Jos Galati University, RomaniaMA in Anglo-American Studies, Constanta Ovidius University, Romania

    Related to Confession and Development in Sylvia Plath's Poetry and Prose

    Related ebooks

    Composition & Creative Writing For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      No One Gets Sylvia Plath

      Nov 6, 2020

      No One Gets Sylvia Plath
      16 min read

    • Article

      A Mad Woman on Fire: On Sylvia Plath and Female Rage

      Jul 12, 2018

      “You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe…” The poet’s voice is strong, piercing. Her tone arch, sly. A few lines later, as she proclaims, “Daddy, I have had to kill you,” she sounds like she’s about to burble into a mean, delicious laugh.

      5 min read

    • Article

      What Poetry Can Predict

      Oct 9, 2019

      What Poetry Can Predict
      4 min read

    • Article

      Graphic Adaptation Of 'Heart Of Darkness' Takes On Canonical Racism, Artfully

      Nov 10, 2019

      Artist Peter Kuper has adapted Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness in a way that undercuts Conrad's depiction of Africa as a place of existential horror, and centers the African characters.

      3 min read

    • Article

      U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón

      Dec 14, 2022

      U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón
      2 min read

    • Article

      Picture A Poem

      Sep 1, 2022

      Picture A Poem
      3 min read

    • Article

      My Past And Future Assassin

      Jun 13, 2018

      My Past And Future Assassin
      16 min read

    • Article

      Reenvisioning theWriters Group

      Feb 16, 2022

      IF YOU’RE like me, the only thing more difficult than struggling to revise a draft that’s stalled is struggling to revise someone else’s draft that’s stalled. Let’s face it: Reading other people’s writing for the sole purpose of giving them feedback

      7 min read

    • Article

      Transfiguration(s)

      Jun 11, 2019

      Transfiguration(s)
      4 min read

    • Article

      Lavender Legend

      Jul 21, 2020

      Lavender Legend
      10 min read

    • Article

      Remembering Toni

      Aug 6, 2019

      Remembering Toni
      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Confession and Development in Sylvia Plath's Poetry and Prose

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Confession and Development in Sylvia Plath's Poetry and Prose - Simona Mauna

      Confession and Development in Sylvia Plath's Poetry and Prose

      SIMONA MAUNA

      Copyright Simona Mauna 2014

      Published by CoolCats Publishing at Smashwords

      CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      CHAPTER 1 Whose Poetess?

      1.1 Plath and American confessional poetry

      1.2. Plath, America, Femininity and The Age of Consensus

      1.3. Plath’s Identity: Her Truth and Her Multiplicity Of Voices

      CHAPTER 2 The Bell Jar

      2.1. ‘Bildungsroman’ and Confession

      2.2 The Separate and The Separative Self

      CHAPTER 3 The impact of biography

      3.1. The Electra Complex and The Haunting Father

      3.2. Mother and Her Marks

      CONCLUSION

      BIBLIOGRAPHY

      INTRODUCTION

      Although Sylvia Plath became famous on the strength of one collection of poems, Ariel, seen by most critics as one of the best illustrations of confessional poetry (together with Robert Lowell’s Life Studies), in order to better understand her as an artist rather than as a member of a poetic school, I have chosen to see the ways in which she combines the modes provided by confessional poetry and the ways in which her novel can be linked to the tradition of the Bildungsroman. This is meant to examine growth and development (what the Bildungroman does), as well as the introspection and self-analysis associated with confessional poetry.

      In her book on Sylvia Plath, Jo Gill quotes critic Sandra M. Gilbert who says, Though I never met Sylvia Plath, I can honestly say that I have known her most of my life.¹ I have felt the same, as many of the poet’s private fears and concerns appear to be shared by many young women. The familiarity that Gilbert reports is one that many female readers of Plath recognize as theirs.

      Many readers accepting the label of confessional poetry realize that in order to understand Plath’s poetry one has to learn more about the poet’s life, that is why I have combined in this paper an examination of biographical information with her poetry and fiction.

      The bare facts of her existence come to us from multiple sources – from her Journals and Letters Home, her stories and prose essays, her novel, The Bell Jar, and of course from the poems themselves. Beyond this, we pick up clues and information from biographies and memoirs, from critical commentaries and, of late, from other people’s poems (notably Ted Hughes’s 1998 Birthday Letters) or film ( Sylvia, 2003, starring Gwyneth Paltrow).

      Paul Alexander, in his biography, Rough Magic, claims that he was not bewitched by Sylvia Plath’s physical charm as by the quality of her art:

      My connection with Plath did not result from any psychological identification. I was not then, nor have I been suicidal. I am not a woman. My father did not die when I was eight years old. I simply fell in love with the beauty of the language of her poems.²

      I myself must recognize that I was impressed by the incredible passion and boldness encountered in her writings, qualities of her art that grip the reader from the very beginning. But the main attraction I found was the transition and development that can be traced is her way of living, in concordance with her way of writing, her controversial life taken to the extreme of perfection, obsession and ruthless pursuit of success, the painful journey of self discovery and artistic achievement.

      Many years after her death, her biography has become the centre of an extensive effort to turn her life into myth and legend. It is her life in combination with her literary achievement that has created the myth of Sylvia Plath, both as a kind of goddess of contemporary English poetry, and as an angry young woman worshipped by the feminist movement. She has become a symbol for a number of different cultural and ideological phenomena, representing both high art and popular culture.

      Her personal magnetism is also reflected in her physical appearance. Edward Butcher quotes Mallory Woeber, one of the many boys who came into her life during the first six months at Cambridge, who writes of Sylvia:

      Her physical presence was tangible- I swear that on one occasion I entered King’s College Dining Hall with her, it was arranged for a concert, full of people turned around to see who entered. Not me, of course. Her eyes, a medium brown color, really burned. I very soon came to feel that I had been privileged to encounter a genius, and never desisted from that view. She was, however, at least at that time, possessed by a total determination to serve - perhaps control and master ( here perhaps hits a found of conflict, with its creative as well as destructive aspects) her muse. This presented her as self-centered, with its selfish and hence sometimes personally insensitive behavior, depending upon circumstances.³

      Woeber was struck by Sylvia’s personal magnetism, especially her piercing, intelligent eyes, but also by an impression of determination and control, that many people would not expect from a sensitive young woman who would become famous for exploring her vulnerability, in the fashion of the confessional school.

      Nancy Hunter, a good friend of Sylvia’s, describes her first impression when seeing the poetess as marked by the same outstanding eyes, in addition to her majestic height:

      She was impressively tall, almost statuesque, and she carried the weight with an air of easy assurance. Her eyes were very dark, deeply set under heavy lids that give them a brooding quality in many of her photographs, the face was angular and its feature strong…⁴

      In the preface of his biography, Method and Madness, Edward Butcher explains his occasionally appellation bitch goddess, addressed to Sylvia:

      The bitch, of course, is a familiar enough figure – a discontented, tense, frequently brilliant woman goaded

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1