Here Be Monsters: Body Imagery in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath
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Daddy, Daddy/Mammy, Mammy: Sylvia Plath and Thomas Kinsella Andrew Browne, National University of Ireland, Galway
Plath Profiles 50 Daddy, Daddy/Mammy, Mammy: Sylvia Plath and Thomas Kinsella Andrew Browne, National University of Ireland, Galway In his memoir The Kick: a Life among Writers , Richard Murphy recalls Thomas and Eleanor Kinsella joining Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and himself in Ireland (Murphy, 226-27). Kinsella softens any profound inferences from this meeting in a 1989 interview with Dennis O’Driscoll. In response to O’Driscoll’s comment on the ‘torrid atmosphere’ of the meeting Kinsella says: It doesn’t strike me in retrospect as having been very torrid. It was just a couple of people having trouble. It didn’t have the heavy implications that her subsequent suicide gave it. We went out fishing and, as far as I am concerned, those fish coming up on the hooks were the exciting thing. But we did enjoy her company, and we did drive her back to Dublin; and that’s as much as I remember of it. (O’Driscoll, 59) This remark does not support any spectacular influence between Kinsella and Plath, and this critic is in no position to infer a direct impact upon Kinsella’s work from Plath’s, yet this essay will show connections between Plath’s and Kinsella’s poetry in their psychological imagery. I will also highlight differences while making certain assumptions about the way images of the masculine and feminine are interrogated, and how they impact their personal lives. There is a significant influence from Lowell’s work and there are resonances between the confessional style and parts of Kinsella’s oeuvre. -
"Lady Lazarus" and Lady Chatterley
Plath Profiles 51 "Lady Lazarus" and Lady Chatterley W. K. Buckley, Indiana University Northwest For the October Conference on Plath at IUB, 2012 and Plath Profiles, Volume 5 Supplement, 20121 I. I remember my first reading of Plath, in college, at San Diego State University. We read, of course, all her famous poems from Ariel, as well as "The Jailor" ("I am myself. That is enough"[23]), "The Night Dances" ("So your gestures flake off" [29]). In my youth, on the beaches of Southern California, around a campfire, a group of us read to each other one night the poems of Plath, Ginsberg, Wilfred Owen, and D.H. Lawrence—seeing ourselves as prophets against war, despite that a few of us had been drafted to another oil adventure, including me. (Some of our friends had returned with no eyes or feet). We thought such famous poets could change America. They did not. (Despite Shelley's famous proclamation). Plath said in "Getting There": "Legs, arms, piled outside/The tent of unending cries—" (Ariel 57). Same old, same old historical mistakes: America, our 20th Century Roman Empire, we thought then. On the homefront, sexual activity in public places was then, as is now, monitored by our police, given our rape, murder, and "missing women" statistics, first or second in the world for such. Yet on that night, on that particular night, there was something "warmer" in the air on La Jolla Shores, as if we thought the world had calmed down for a moment. When the police arrived at our campfire, we all invited them to take it easy, since we saw ourselves as ordinary people, having ordinary activities in our ordinary bodies. -
Revulsion, Restlessness, and Rage Through the Body in Pain: Radical Affects and Political Consciousness in the Ariel Poems
City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works School of Arts & Sciences Theses Hunter College Summer 9-1-2018 Revulsion, Restlessness, and Rage Through the Body in Pain: Radical Affects and Political Consciousness in the Ariel Poems Erin P. Beach CUNY Hunter College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/369 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Revulsion, Restlessness, and Rage Through the Body in Pain: Radical Affects and Political Consciousness in the Ariel Poems by Erin Beach Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English, Hunter College, The City University of New York 2018 Thesis Sponsor: Dr. Amy M. Robbins August 8, 2018 Amy M. Robbins Date Signature August 8, 2018 Jeremy Glick Date Signature of Second Reader Although Sylvia Plath’s literary career pre-dates the second-wave feminist movement’s acknowledgement and use of poetry as a means to effect political change, Ariel makes a prescient cry for the dismantling of the patriarchy by creating agency and resistance through presentation of grotesquely bloodied and injured female bodies that have historically been on view only as eroticized objects of desire. Plath embeds Ariel with motifs of hospitals, medicine, disfigured anatomy, or the body otherwise in crisis, creating an affective field for the grotesque that makes female trauma a collective – and politically activating – experience. -
Reviving the Journals of Sylvia Plath
Plath Profiles 15 Reviving the Journals of Sylvia Plath Karen Kukil, Smith College Editor's note: The following essay was excerpted from talks given in 2000 by Karen Kukil at the International Writers' Day program of English PEN in London, as well as at Williams College, Emory University, Smith College, Boston Public Library, and New York Public Library. Quotations are from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), by permission of Random House, Inc. Page numbers appear in parentheses following quotations. The essay is appeared in a slightly different version in the Smith Alumnae Quarterly (Spring 2001) and it reprinted with their permission. On February 13, 1921, Virginia Woolf wrote Katherine Mansfield: "It seems to me very important that women should learn to write" (128). I would add: It is also important that women should learn to speak. Nearly forty years after her death, Sylvia Plath, one of the most interpreted poets of the past century, is finally being allowed to speak for herself, in her own voice. The unabridged edition of her journals, which I have just edited for the Hughes family, is as faithful as possible to the original manuscripts at Smith College. As an editor, I did not tidy up Plath's words or make her behave. She is a real human being, as feisty and fresh and alive to the reader in the published journals as she is when one has the luxury to read her original manuscripts in the Mortimer Rare Book Room. By giving the world direct access to her exact words, a reassessment of Plath will undoubtedly take place. -
Mixed-Method Research on Bhutanese
GURUNG, ANUJ, Ph. D., August 2019 POLITICAL SCIENCE ANATOMY OF RESETTLEMENT: MIXED-METHOD RESEARCH ON BHUTANESE REFUGEES (410 PP.) Dissertation Advisor: Landon E. Hancock This dissertation is a much-needed study of how resettlement impacts refugees. I found the ‘solution’ of resettlement to be promising for some refugees yet restrictive for others. Based on my analysis, Bhutanese refugees interpret their past and present differently in negotiating their place and identity in resettlement. In Akron, many have found stable jobs, started businesses, and are pursuing higher education aspirations. Opportunities in resettlement and their positive self-perception allows these individuals to expand and ‘own’ their new revised identities (e.g. Bhutanese-Nepali), in contrast to the primary socialized identity preferences (i.e. the Bhutanese label) of refugees who find themselves marginalized and dependent in their new environment. At a broader level, I have found the US resettlement policy to be exclusively invested in economic output of refugees with little regard for their socio-cultural adaptation. Given the diversity of refugee experiences and their reasons behind ‘choosing’ resettlement, resettlement policy merits further critical examination and likely a structural revision. Scholars of refugee and immigrant behavior, as well as interested policy makers will find this work highly pertinent. In this study, I used ethnographic research—interviews and field observations—centered on Bhutanese refugees; I also employed a limited statistical examination of refugee migration patterns in the US. i ANATOMY OF RESETTLEMENT: MIXED-METHOD RESEARCH ON BHUTANESE REFUGEES A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Anuj Gurung August 2019 © Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials ii Dissertation written by Anuj Gurung B.A. -
Anna Journey, University of Southern California
Plath Profiles 83 After Ariel: An Argument for Sylvia Plath's Phantom Third Poetry Collection Anna Journey, University of Southern California Phantoms abound in the Sylvia Plath canon. Plath burned her second novel, meant as a gift for her husband, the British poet Ted Hughes, on his birthday in August 1962. Doubletake, Plath's unfinished third novel, "disappeared somewhere around 1970"—long after Plath's suicide in February 1963—Hughes suggests in his introduction to Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1). According to Diane Middlebrook's biography of the Hughes/Plath marriage, Her Husband, Plath wrote her patroness, Olive Higgins Prouty, that "[Doubletake's] plot was 'semiautobiographical about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer'" (198). Hughes's mistress, Assia Wevill, after reading the nascent novel, grew offended by the manner in which Plath caricatured the Wevills, as "a 'detestable and contemptible' couple called 'The Goos-Hoppers'"; Wevill openly hoped Hughes would destroy the unfinished novel (Middlebrook 220). More disturbingly, Wevill absconded with some of Plath's valuable manuscripts, which she sent to her sister, intending the stolen literary relics as a "nest egg" for Shura (the daughter Wevill had with Hughes; the daughter she later murdered during her own suicide via a gas oven) (Middlebrook 232). One is left wondering, "What happened to Doubletake?" Even The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000), edited by Karen Kukil, remain incomplete, as a total of two bound journals that Plath used during the last three years of her life are missing from the oeuvre. Hughes, in his foreword to Frances McCullough's 1982 abridged edition of Plath's journals, claims that one of the journals simply "disappeared," much like the draft of Doubletake, while he deliberately destroyed his wife's other "maroon-backed ledger," in order to spare their children from reading about the darkness of their mother's final days (xiv). -
Works by Sylvia Plath
About This Volume William K. Buckley I. It is the intention of this volume to introduce students to the works of Sylvia Plath, as other volumes have over the years (see bibliography). Yet this edition of Critical Insights seeks to present not only introduc- tory ways of interpreting Plath’s works, but also new ways of looking at her writing in order to give students a historical look at Plath’s work. Before we look at the essays in this book, let us begin with consid- HUDWLRQVRIZRPDQKRRGDQGZRUNVE\ZRPHQ7KHIROORZLQJSURYRFD- tive statement from the essay “Women Poets” by Sandra M. Gilbert DQG6XVDQ*XEDUUHPDLQVLPSRUWDQW³7KHUHLVHYLGHQWO\VRPHWKLQJ DERXWO\ULFSRHWU\E\ZRPHQWKDWLQYLWHVPHGLWDWLRQVRQIHPDOHIXO¿OO- ment or, alternatively, a female insanity” (xx). Hélène Cixous, in her HVVD\³7KH/DXJKRIWKH0HGXVD´VD\V When I say “woman,” I’m speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man, and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history. In women, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history. (291, 298) As Plath scholar Steven Gould Axelrod has noted, Plath criticism has ³ODUJHO\ZRUNHGEH\RQGLWVLQLWLDOLPDJHRI6\OYLD3ODWKDVDÀDZHG victim or a hopeless confessor. Instead . commentary has revealed the originality and insight with which Plath’s texts explore a range of psychological, historical, cultural and literary issues.” Our goal in our classrooms, then, is to explore those observations, as do the essays in this book, especially since, as Lisa Narbeshuber says, Plath’s poetry is more a “cultural critique, rather than as self- actualization or individual psychological critique” (86). -
Nepali Times Welcomes All Mechanisms Also Prevent WFP One Objective and That Is to Who Are Open to Ideas, Who Can Portrays and in No Way Can We Feedback
#256 15 - 21 July 2005 16 pages Rs 30 UPSIDE DOWN WORLD: Pedestrians reflected in a Weekly Internet Poll # 256 puddle at Basantapur after Q. How confident are you that the new rains on Wednesday afternoon. budget will help Nepal make an economic turnaround? Total votes:413 Weekly Internet Poll # 257. To vote go to: www.nepalitimes.com Q... Should the ban on news on FM radios be lifted? Comrades-in-armsKIRAN PANDAY Looking at Nepal’s Maoist revolution through Indian Naxalite eyes CK LAL in BIHAR open dasgaja strip too is now going to Panditji’s paan shop Naxalite attack on the town of under close security watch. India’s down the road. Madhuban in which 21 people ere in the densely paramilitary Seema Suraksha Bal On the Nepal side, every were killed and six government populated Ganga plains, the (SSB) now pull up rickshaw shopkeeper is up to date on the buildings razed (see: ‘Spillover’, H10-yard strip separating wallas if they park their tricycles latest Maoist exploits. In Bihar, #254), there is a surprising lack of Nepal and India has never been on no-man’s land. despite media hype about the concern about Maoist activity treated like a national frontier. Security is stricter than before Naxalite ‘menace’ engulfing 160 along the border. Land is too precious to leave and there is talk here of introduc- districts in 12 Indian states, If the local people it as a no-man’s land. Nepali and ing identity cards and barbed-wire people along the border seem aren’t the least bit Editorial p2 fences to regulate crossborder barely aware of the activities of interested, we Democracy in Press Freedom for Indian farmers use it for grazing installments livestock, playing cricket or even movement. -
I Have a Self to Recover: Sylvia Plath and the Literary Success of the Failed Suicide Clare Emily Clifford, Birmingham-Southern College
Plath Profiles 285 I Have a Self to Recover: Sylvia Plath and the Literary Success of the Failed Suicide Clare Emily Clifford, Birmingham-Southern College How shall I age into that state of mind? I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, My own blue razor rusting in my throat. Sylvia Plath, "Electra on Azalea Path" For most people, Sylvia Plath's work represents the epitome of suicidal poetry. The corpus of her poetic oeuvre forever captures the exhumation and resurrection of the material corpses it recomposes through figuration—fragments of bone from the colossal father, the "rubble of skull plates" in the cadaver room, Lady Lazarus' perpetual suicide strip-tease (Collected Poems 114). Plath's poetry is virtually a playground of decomposition; her speakers inhabit a "cramped necropolis," piecing together a ferocious love gathered among the graves (117). By collecting the force of this energy, Plath's work evidences a honed, disciplined voice of controlled extremity. This leads many critics, and often my students, to read into Plath's poetic intensity that she is an angry poet—considering her characters and poetic speakers' fierce energy as evidence of Plath's own anger. But as Plath's speakers wrestle with their anger on the page, they reveal the pain they feel and peace they fiercely and desperately wish for. This anger derives from their frustrated desire to find a lasting peace by recovering language from the constriction of suicidal thinking. Her speakers' rage represents the voice of anger turned against the self. Scavenging the ruins of the suicide's inner landscape—their inscape—Plath's speakers piece themselves together, death after self-inflicted death, becoming virtual experts at trying to recover from failed suicides.1 1 The field of Suicidology uses the term "completed suicide" to distinguish "individuals who have died by their own hand; have been sent to a morgue, funeral home, burial plot, or crematory; and are beyond any therapy" (Maris 15). -
THE GAZE JOURNAL of TOURISM and HOSPITALITY Vol
ISSN 2467-933X THE GAZE JOURNAL OF TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY Vol. 10 No.1 Year 2019 Editor-in-Chief Prof. Ramesh Raj Kunwar International School of Tourism and Hotel Management (Affi liated to Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, Austria) Editorial Policy Th e Gaze is multi-interdisciplinary journal which welcomes original research articles, research notes and book reviews. Articles should be original and unpublished, based on both primary and secondary sources refl ecting new interpretations, written in English. Th e research article should have more than 6,000 words; 3,000 words for research notes; 3,000 words for book review; and 300 words for abstract including fi ve keywords. Th e research work should be based on global research methodology in which the researcher will be required to use parentheses or author date system or in text citation. Aft er receiving the research papers, it will be fi rst consulted by the editor-in-chief on behalf of editorial board. If it is required it will be sent to the author for revising the paper. Th e last date of paper submission will be by the end of June of the following year. Th e authors will not be charged any fee for publishing their articles. Manuscripts should be typed double-space on A4sized paper with a 4 cm margin on all four sides. Th e author should underline nothing except words which are to be italicized. Notes and references should be typed double-space on separate pages which should be included at the end of the articles. In case, if it is required, the text should refer to notes numbered consecutively throughout the article using raised numbers which should be mentioned at the end of the text before references. -
Grave Exclamations: an Analysis of Tombstones and Their Seu As Narrative of Self Lacey Jae Ritter Minnesota State University - Mankato
Minnesota State University, Mankato Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects 2012 Grave Exclamations: An Analysis of Tombstones and Their seU as Narrative of Self Lacey Jae Ritter Minnesota State University - Mankato Follow this and additional works at: http://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/etds Part of the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Ritter, Lacey Jae, "Grave Exclamations: An Analysis of Tombstones and Their sU e as Narrative of Self" (2012). Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects. Paper 242. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects by an authorized administrator of Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato. Grave Exclamations: An Analysis of Tombstones and Their Use as Narrative of Self By Lacey J. Ritter A Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology: Teaching Emphasis at Minnesota State University, Mankato May, 2012 April 3, 2012 This thesis paper has been examined and approved. Examining Committee: Dr. Leah Rogne, Chairperson Dr. Emily Boyd Dr. Kathryn Elliot i Ritter, Lacey. 2012. Grave Exclamations: An Analysis of Tombstones and their Use as Narrative of Self. Master’s Thesis. Minnesota State University, Mankato. PP.69. We establish our selves through narratives—with others and by ourselves— during life. What happens, however, when a person dies? The following paper looks at the way narratives about the deceased’s selves are created by the bereaved after their loved ones have died. -
Double Image : the Hughes-Plath Relationship As Told in Birthday Letters
Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and private study only. The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the Author. Double Image: The Hughes-Plath Relationship As Told in Birthday Letters. .A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English at Massey University Helen Jacqueline Cain 2002 II CONTENTS Abstract................................................ .iii Acknowledgements ....................................... .iv Introduction.............................................. 1 Chapter One -Ted Hughes on Trial. ......................... 10 Chapter Two - The Structure of Birthday Letters. ...............22 Chapter Three - Delivered of Yourself........................ .40 Chapter Four - The Man in Black. .................... 53 Chapter Five - Daddy Coming Up From Out of the Well......... 69 Chapter Six - Fixed Stars Govern a Life ........................74 Conclusion............................................... 80 Works Cited.............................................. 83 Works Consulted......................................... 87 iii ABSTRACT Proceeding from a close reading of both Birthdqy Letters and the poems of Sylvia Plath, and also from a consideration of secondary and biographical works, I argue that implicit within Birthdqy Letters is an explanation for Sylvia Plath's death and Ted Hughes's role in it. Birthdqy Letters is a collection of 88 poems written by Ted Hughes to his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, in the years following her death. There are two aspects to the explanation Ted Hughes provides. Both are connected to Sylvia Plath's poetry. Her development as a poet not only causes her death as told in Birthdqy Letters, but it also renders Ted Hughes incapable of helping her, because through her poetry he is made to adopt the role of Plath's father.