An Exploration of Self in Sylvia Plath’s Poems

Abstract

The thesis entitled 'An Exploration of Self in Sylvia Plath's Poems’ relates the poems by Sylvia Plath, a prominent figure among the poets of the twentieth century. Plath wants to seek her identity in the world as an independent, female self through her poems. The dialectical tension between self and world is the location of meaning in Plath’s poems characterized by a conflict between isolation and engagement. Her poems are largely about what stands in the way of the possibility of rebirth for the self. Plath’s rebellion against culture allegorizes the story of suffering of women with fragmented identity that is relevant even today. The poet frequently explores what it means to be a woman in terms of traditional conflict between family and career. Her writing is filled with anxiety and despair over her refusal to choose the society constructed by men where females like her are considered to be nobody. Most of her poems are concerned at one level or another with suffering, sickness, injury, torture, madness, death. She shows her anger and frustration by the necessity of defining herself as a woman. The poet demonstrates her anger at patriarchal construction in her culture that marginalizes feminist concerns. She is radically rebellious against her suppressed and submerged personality.