Poetics of Torture Trauma in Sylvia Plath's Poems

Abstract

The research entitled “Poetics of torture: Trauma in Sylvia Plath’s poems” deals with the traumatic issue in Plath’s poems. Through her poetry Plath expresses her personal anguishments, fragmented mentality, pain and suffering, and she universalize them to make representable of the whole female race. She tries to prove that the patriarchy was the cause of trauma in females lives, female are psychologically wounded by the patriarchy. To make her trauma more sensational Plath identifies herself with different traumatic events such as holocaust, delivery case, circumcision, death of someone loved and so on. Plath did so to expose the atrocity of patriarchy upon female. She writes poetry to relieve from the traumatic life memory. So her motif seems to be threauptic but the result is opposite because she becomes sadomachocistic. So she cannot work through her trauma but she is acting out on her trauma, which leads her to death. So in her poems Plath glorifies the death because she thinks that death is better then living in this hellish world, where women are burned alive. But another aspect is her persona is hysterical: to attack on male by performing unacceptable behavior and by pretending of being mad, so her hidden motif is also doing politics.