The Inner Conflicts of Women in Meena Keshwar Kamal's

T.C.

SELCUK ÜNIVERS İTES İ

SOSYAL B İLİMLER ENST İTÜSÜ

İNG İLİZ D İLİ VE EDEB İYATI ANAB İLİM DALI

İNG İLİZ D İLİ VE EDEB İYATI B İLİM DALI

THE INNER CONFLICTS OF WOMEN IN MEENA KESHWAR KAMAL’S AND SYLVIA PLATH’S POEMS

AHMAD RESHAD JAMALYAR

YÜKSEK L İSANS TEZ İ

Danı şman

Yrd Doc. Dr. SEMA ZAFER SÜMER

KONYA- 2011

T.C. SELÇUK ÜN İVERS İTES İ Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Müdürlü ğü

Adı Soyadı Ahmad Reshad JAMALYAR

Numarası 094208001002 Ana Bilim / Bilim Dalı Ingiliz Dili ve Edebiyat Programı Tezli Yüksek Lisans Doktora Tez Danışmanı Yrd. Doc. Dr. Sema Zafer SÜMER

MEENA KESHWAR KAMAL VE SYLVIA PLATH ŞİİRLERİNDE Tezin Adı KADINLAR IN IÇ ÇATIŞMALARI Öğrencinin Öğrencinin

ÖZET

Bu çalı şma iki kadın şair Meena Keshwar Kmala ve Sylvia Plath açisından, İngiliz ve

Farsça dillerindeki farklılıkları da gözeterek kadınnın iç çatı şmasını incelemektedir. Bu

çalı şmada, iç çati şma, duygu, özgürlük, kadınlar ve şiirlerin analizleri detaylı bir şekilde incelenmektedir.

Meena Keshwar Kamal ve Sylvia Plath’ın şiir seçkılerınde hayatlarındaki duygu ve problemleri ifade etme hususunda neredeyse ayn ı duygular vardır. Bu şairlerin şiirlerine baktı ğımız zaman, özgürlük ve çatı şmayı duygularında ifade etmekte benzer bir üsluba sahip olduklarını görürüz. Yazdıkları şiirler gerçe ği aydınlatma noktasında ortak görü şü payla ştıkları için, şiir sanatı açısınd an ba şkalarının daha derin bir şekilde takdirini kazanmak için psikolojik açıdan göz önüne alınmı ştır.

Hem Kamal hem de Plath’ın nazmında, ruha tekabül eden güçlü kaynaklar olarak kadın çatı şmasının, özgürlü ğün ve ayrımcılı ğın yararlı i şlevler vardır. Daha sı, dilleri oldukça yalın ve anlamlı, ve her birinin şiirinde, şiirlerini çalı şırken temel korku olarak hizmet eden hayat ve insan arzuları arasında bir ili şki bulunmaktadır.

Bu tezin amacı, şairlerin nasıl gerçek hayatlarında aynı dü şüncelere sahip olduklarını ve seçilen şiirlerde aynı duyguları ifade ettiklerini ke şfetmektir. Bu tez giri ş ve sonuç bölümleri dı şında dört bölümden olu şmaktadır. Birinci bölüm Afganistan ve farklı rejimler sırasında kadının karanlık ça ğı hakkındadır. İkinci bölümde McCarthycilik Dönemi ve

American Kadınının ya şamı incelenecektir. Üçüncü bölüm her iki yazarın yaşam öyküleri ve edebi çalı şmalarını açıklayacaktır.

Sonuç olarak, ula ştı ğım derleme neticesinde, iki yazar farklı kültürlerden olmalarına ra ğmen, bran şları ve duyguları aynıdır. Yanılsama, özgürlük, ayrımcılık ve toplumdan

çatı şma gibi benzer duygulara i şaret etmektedirler. Tezi yazma sürecinde kullanmı ş oldu ğum yöntem ve analizlerin okuyucunun şiir sanatını takdir etmesine ve zevk almasına yardım etmesini temenni etmekteyim.

T.C. SELÇUK ÜN İVERS İTES İ Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Müdürlü ğü

Adı Soyadı Ahmad Reshad JAMALYAR

Numarası 094208001002 Ana Bilim / Bilim Dalı Ingiliz Dili ve Edebiyat Programı Tezli Yüksek Lisans Doktora Tez Danışmanı Yrd. Doc. Dr. Sema Zafer SÜMER

THE INNER CONFLICTS OF WOMEN IN MEENA KESHWAR Tezin Adı KAMAL’S AND SYLVIA PLATH’S POMES Öğrencinin Öğrencinin

ABSTRACT

This study examines the inner conflict of women from the aspect of two female poets

Meena Keshwar Kamal, and Sylvia Plath, considering the varieties of English and Persian languages. In this work, different elements such as inner conflict, emotion, freedom , women and critical analyses of the poems are studied in detail.

Meena Keshwar Kamal’s and Sylvia Plath’s collection of poems are almost have the same essence in expressing their feeling and problems from their life. These poets have a similar style in e xpressing their feeling about freedom and conflict by referring to poetry.

Since the poems that they wrote share common point of view in enlightening the truth, they have been considered from psychological angle to enable others in order to have a deeper appreciation for their poetry.

In both Kamal’s and Plath’s poetry, there are useful functions of women conflict, freedom, and discrimination as a powerful sources which refers to the soul. Moreover, their

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language is very simple and meaningful and in each of their poetry there has been found a relation between life and human aspiration which served as the main fear in studying their poetry.

The main aim of this thesis is to discover how the two poets have similar thoughts in their own life and by stating the same feelings in the selected poems. This thesis consists of four chapters apart from the Introduction and Conclusion. This first chapter is about

Afghanistan and dark era of women during different regime. In second chapter McCarthyism period and life of American women will be studied. The third chapter will explain the biography and literary works of both poets.

Finally, in the conclusion, I have reached a blend that although the two poets are from different culture and come from different religion; their major and feelings are the same. They point to a similar sense of experience such as illusion, freedom, discrimination and conflict from their society. I hope the methods and analysis that I have used during writing this thesis will help the reader in order to appreciate and enjoy the poetry.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTON………………………………………………………….…………………....1

CHPATER ONE- THE DARK ERA OF WOMEN IN AFGHANISTAN………………....4

1.1.THE IDEOLOGY OF TALIBAN………………………………………………9 1.2.WOMEN IN TALIBAN REGIME…………………………………………….15

CHAPTER TWO- MCCARTHYISM PERIOD AND THE SITUATION OF WOMEN IN AMERICA……………………………………………………………………………..……...27

2.1. THE LEGACY OF MCCARTHYISM…………………………………………….41

2.2. VICTIMS OF MCCARTHYISM AND CRITICAL REACTIONS……………….45

CHAPTER THREE- BACKGROUND TO POETS……………………………………...…50

3.1. MEENA KESHWAR KAMAL AS A SOCIAL ACTIVIST AND POET………....50

3.2. SYLIVA PLATH AS A SOCIAL ACTIVIST AND POET………………………..54

CHAPTER FOUR- THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN MEENA KESHWAR KAMAL’S AND SYLVIA PLATH’S POEMS………………………………………….…...64

4.1. The Women’s Issue in Meena Keshwar Kamal’s Poem………………………….....64

4.1.1 “I Will Never Return”…………………………………………………..……...64

4.1.2. “Freedom and Democracy”……………………………………………..……..66

4.1.3. “For Women of Afghanistan”…………………………………………..……..68

4.1.4 “Arise Oh Women”……………………………………………………..…...…70

4.1.5. “How Would It Feel”…………………………………………….……..….….73

4.2. The Women’s Issue in Sylvia Plath’s Poems…………….…………...……………..76

4.2.1. “Lady Lazarus”……………………………………………………..………...76

4.2.2. “Daddy”…………………………………………………………………..…..80

4.2.3. “Mirror”…………………………………………………………………...….86 v

4.2.4. “Mystic”……………………………………………….………………….…..94

4.2.5. “The Moon and The Yew Tree”…………………………………………….100

CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………..106

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………...……………………………………………..….……108

INTRODUCTION

Sylvia Plath’s and Meena Keshwar Kamal’s poetry have had a far reaching influence on both readers and writers since their premature death. It is valuable for its stylistic accomplishment, bringing together as it does traditional poetic forms with experimental. Both of them concern with problems such as gender conflicts, sexual inequality, inner conflict of women and discrimination against women are expressed, particularly in the remarkable poems which were written shortly before their death. This thesis examines the inner conflict of women by focusing and analyzing Plath’s and

Kamal’s poem and how they are victimized by the social standards which established by their male counterpart.

Although Plath’s and Kamal’s personal experiences of marriage and being a female artist in a world dominated by men made them feel both betrayed and powerless, the poetry is not about themselves. Rather, it expresses universal values and concerns on behalf of their fellow human. The anger and pain that comes through in their work is for the benefit of those of us who suffer dispossession, or battle against established mores that leave us feeling both importent and vulnerable. We must not, however, mistake their outspokenness on issues that affect women as a platform for feminist ideals. Kamal predates the women’s revolution of the late 1970s and 1980s under her concerns are much more inclusive than such a limited application would suggest.

This thesis is divided into four chapters, the first chapter gives information about the history and the dark situation of women in Afghanistan and how they suffered during different regime. As it’s clear that nowhere else has a war on women been witnessed as starkly as in Afghanistan. Flagrant abuses of Afghan women’s most basic human rights the sectors of education, health, civil and political participation have been widely documented. The Taliban have been the perpetrators of these injustices, but violence against both men and women in Afghanistan has been ongoing for over two decades.

Chapter two examined the period of McCarthyism and women in America by refereeing to the theory of John McCarthy. This term has its origins in the United States and known as the Second Red Scare, and characterized by heightened fears of communist influence on American institutions and espionage by Soviet agents. During the McCarthy era, thousands of Americans were accused of being communists or communist sympathizers and became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies. The substantive chapter three analyzed the life story and literary works of Sylvia Plath, and Meena Keshwar Kamal.

This part of thesis will point out the similarity of both poets that how they suffer from being women in their society.

The final section will give the answer of cerebral, inner conflict of the love and hate of women in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, and Meena Keshwar Kamal. This chapter shows that these women find themselves in a unique crossroads of pleasure and pain outside of the symbolic, and they are capable of a particular kind of action through their poetry. Their work is not just a shapeless expression or effusion, but the outpouring is

essentially structured in one way or another. The paper will show how the supposedly emotional and inner conflict deluge has in fact quite a complex structure and therefore it should be judged positively. The main thrust of the argument in this thesis will be the above mentioned issues and I will be looking specifically at inner conflict and emotions which demonstrated in particular poems of Plath, and Kamal, by examining them in this way the thesis will sheds a new light on the motivation and form of their confessional poetry.

CHAPTER ONE: THE DARK ERA OF WOMEN IN

AFGHANISTAN

Afghanistan is a traditional country with deep patriarchal roots and a tribal-based family structure. In Afghanistan, family is at the heart of the society. Often times, the balance of tradition, family, and Islam has collided with women’s rights. In Afghan society, some view women as half of men, which is a common phrase within the country.

In the tribal-based family structure, society deems women as the receptacle of honor.

Much of this cultural role originated from the Pashtunwali code, which is an ancient ethnic custom and a tribal code of the Pashtuns. According to Women for Women

International (2009), Pashtunwali code is the absolute duty of men to protect the respectability of women and the integrity of the homeland. Throughout history, the preservation of women’s honor through tribal laws often superseded any constitutional law or progressive reform that would have benefited Afghan women. Most Afghans place their primary values as community and group identity. Often, women view their identity as central to their family’s identity and not in separate individual spheres. To rural women, the value of individual identity is a foreign concept (Ewan, Dupree, 1990: 354).

Afghanistan is making strides toward repairing the devastating effects of 25 years of sustained conflict. During this period of redefining national identity, efforts have been made to help ensure that voices of women are heard. On center stage, under intense international scrutiny, was building of Afghanistan’s national Constitution. Embedding women’s rights in the Constitution was thought to be a pillar in the struggle for women’s

rights. As such, women were included in the process and helped to shape the outcome of the constitution. Though it is still soon to tell what ultimate impact the Constitution will have, there is significant potential for the Constitutional text to help women overcome challenges with respect to key areas of concern such as repressive customary laws, political participation and violence.

Historically, Afghan monarchs and politicians, warlords, and foreign powers have used Afghan women as political pawns. Even as early as the 1920’s, there have been attempts to create equality for Afghan women. In addition, there is a deep divide between rural Afghanistan and urban Afghanistan. Urban women often experienced reform while in the rural areas patriarchal tradition precluded any changes. Even in modern times, there is a clear cultural divide between rural Afghanistan and urban Afghanistan. In 2008,

75 percent of the population resided in rural areas. Most of political, civil, and social gains experienced by women occurred in Kabul or other urban setting, not the rural areas.

As stated in the Parliamentary Information, the reality of a nomad woman is different from that of a village woman, and both are different from an urban university graduate woman. Many western governments and organizations categorize women’s rights in

Afghanistan as either before the Taliban or after the Taliban. It is important to realize that oppression did not start with the Taliban, and oftentimes, oppression was a partial result of the patriarchal and tribal-based family structure. This patriarchal family structure does not mean that all Afghan men are oppressive or women-haters. On the contrary, many

Afghan men and women believe that the oppression of women, especially in education, violates Islam. Some Afghan believes that in Islam men and women have the right to

knowledge, that it is their duty as human beings to educate and to be educated. According to Anne Brodsky (2004), author of “With all our strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan”, many Afghan men understand the negative consequences of women’s oppression in society. In fact, many Afghan women view Afghan men as part of the solution, not a part of the problem. It is also important to realize that while women’s equality never existed in Afghanistan, progressive reforms and attempts were made at different times (Ewan, Dupree, 1990: 305).

Afghanistan may be the only country in the world where during the last century kings and politicians have been made and undone by struggles relating to women status.

Recently, the situation of women under the Taliban rule has been center stage. The situation of women came to symbolize to Western military powers a justification of war in the name of freedom of women. But the situation of women in Afghanistan today is not only the result of the Taliban’s policies. There is a history over the centuries of women subjugation. Thus, one must approach the analysis of women’s situation in

Afghanistan, not through the ideological formulation of before and after the Taliban, but within the larger historical context of Afghanistan. Only such a perspective can ensure that women will be seen as integral to the rebuilding of the Afghan nation (Tariq, 2002:

198).

While Afghanistan has historically struggled with balancing Islam and women’s rights, the early twentieth century actually included rather progressive movements towards democracy and modernization. In fact, at one time, people considered

Afghanistan as a model of progress and reform in Muslim states. From 1919 to 1929,

King Amanullah ruled Afghanistan. After the country won independence from the

British, progressive reform started to take place. In 1920, Afghan received the right to vote. Additional reforms included the opening of schools for girls, an increase in the minimum age to marry, and the elimination of the bridal dowry. With these modern changes also came opposition from conservative Islam clerics and rural tribes. This political unrest ultimately forced King Amanuuallah into exile in 1929. The next King favored the conservatives and overturned many modernizations, including revoking women’s right to vote (Tariq, 2002: 87).

The impact on women has been especially harsh, since women lives have often been used as the raw material with which to establish ethnic prominence. Tribal laws and sanctions have routinely taken precedence over Islamic and constitutional laws in deciding gender roles, especially through kinship hierarchies in the rural regions. Tribal power plays, institutions of honor, and inter-tribal shows of patriarchal control have put women’s position in jeopardy. Tribal laws view marriages as alliances between groups; women are pawned into marriages and not allowed to divorce, total obedience to the husband and his family is expected, and women are prevented from getting any education. Women are perceived as the receptacles of honor; hence they stay in the

domestic sphere, observe the veil and are voiceless. The honor of the family, the tribe, and ultimately the nation is invested in women (Hegland C, 2005: 208).

Women’s meaningful participation in politics affects both the range of policy issues that are considered and the types of solutions that are proposed. Research shows that a legislator’s gender has a distinct impact on policy priorities, making it critical that women are present in politics to represent the concerns of women and other marginalized citizens and help improve the responsiveness of policy making and governance. And as more women reach leadership positions within their political parties, these parties tend to prioritize issues that impact health, education and other quality of life issues. There is strong evidence that as more women are elected to office, there is also a corollary increase in policy making that reflects the priorities of family, women, ethnic and racial minorities. Women’s political participation has profound positive and democratic impacts on communities, legislatures, political parties, and citizens’ lives (Leila, 1992: 76).

Women are deeply committed to peace-building and post conflict reconstruction and have a unique and powerful perspective to bring to the negotiating table. Women often suffer disproportionately during armed conflict and often advocate most strongly for stabilization, reconstruction and the prevention of further conflict. Peace agreement, post-conflict reconstruction and governance have a better chance of long-term success when women are involved. Furthermore, establishing sustainable peace requires transforming power relationship, including achieving more equitable gender relations.

Women’s peace groups in Afghanistan, for example, have used conflict resolution

training to successfully reduce the level of violence in community (Hafizullah, 2002:

146).

1.1. THE IDEOLOGY OF TALIBAN

Religion is one of the most powerful forces in the world. It profoundly influences our world view, and gives meaning to our life experiences. At its best, religion captures the imagination and inspires persons of good faith to work for justice. At its worst, extreme interpretations of religious teaching foster fear and breed irrational hatred as the world witnessed on September 11. Religious fundamentalism is a reaction to people’s worst fears of modernization. As women increasingly gain human and civil rights, this fear is increasingly directed at controlling women. One manifestation is attempts to control women’s sexual and reproductive lives. Although the core principles and values of most religions uphold women’s human and reproductive rights, these universal rights are becoming more and more difficult to express, assist and defend due to fundamentalist pressures (Sima, 2002: 97).

The western vision of Islam is firmly anchored in the crusades, with images of holy warriors, fired with the passion of martyrs, storming the battlements of some crusader castle. Within the Western psyche there appears to be almost paranoid fear of

Islam as something wild, mindless and potentially overwhelming. The Western media has created simplistic image of Muslims as terrorists and oppressors through the catch all term ‘Islamic fundamentalists’. Therefore it is a difficult task to analyze ideology of

Taliban’s objectively as there is a great fear to be entrapped by the negative stereotypes created and propagated by the West (Sima, 2002: 101).

The word “Taliban” literally mean “student” in Arabic. However, in Persian this plural form of “talib” means “religious student”. The word is merely applied to those who seek religious scholarship in traditional circles of learning, namely madrrasahs. The students enrolled in the theological and Islamic studies in modern universities are not called “talib”. The elementary school for Muslim boys and in some cases girls is called the Kattab (Arabic for “school”). Another term for it is maktab. The earliest of these schools used simple been various in maktabs depending on historical stages and geographical locations, yet there has always been a strong emphasis on reading and memorizing the Qur’an, as well as traditions transmitted from the prophet and eminent pioneers of Islam (Hafizullah , 2002: 38).

In October 1997, the Taliban changed the name of the country to the Islamic

Emirate of Afghanistan with Mullah Omar, who had previously assumed the religious title of Amir of the Faithful as the supreme head of state. Taliban officials rule but decrees and the central decision- making body is the Supreme Council in Kandahar and its head, Mullah Mohammed Omar. A six member ruling council in Kabul, headed by

Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, has announced, “The new Taliban government would be neither parliamentary nor presidential, but Islamic.” Departments of a number of ministries exist in each province but the implementation policy is generally characterized by inconsistency since there is no efficient administrative structure (Jeannette E, 2004:

81).

Under the Taliban, there remains no constitution, rule of law, or independent judiciary in Afghanistan. In the absence of an independent judiciary, many municipal and provincial authorities use the Taliban’s interpretation of Shari’a (Islamic Law) and traditional Tribal codes of justice. The Taliban reportedly has economic courts in areas under their control to judge criminal cases and resolve disputes. These courts met out punishments including execution and amputations. In cases involving murder and rape, convicted prisoners generally are sentenced to execution by relatives of the victim, who may instead choose to accept other forms of restitution. Decisions of the courts are reportedly final. In 1999 the Taliban claimed that it was drafting a new constitution based on Islamic law, but during the year there were no further announcements regarding such a document.

The Taliban had set out as an Islamic reform movement. Throughout Muslim history, Islamic reform movements have transformed both the nature of belief and political and social life, as Muslim nomadic tribes destroyed other Muslim empires, transformed them, and then were themselves urbanized and later destroyed. These political changes have always been made possible through the concept of Jihad. The

Taliban were thus acting in the spirit of the Prophet’s Jihad when they attacked the rapacious warlords around them. Yet Jihad does to sanction the killing of fellow Muslims on the basis of ethnicity or sect and is this, the Taliban interpretation of Jihad, which appalls the non- Pahshtuns. While the Taliban claim they are fighting a Jihad against corrupt, evil Muslims, the ethnic minorities see them as using Islam as a cover to exterminate non- Pashtuns (Sima, 2002: 327).

It is accepted that culture and religion influence each other and their mutual relationship are quite explicit in the development of Taliban’s ideology. It has been observed that Islam too incorporated aspects of the cultures and encountered in its forward march. For example, the extremely strict ideology of Taliban’s is considered to be emerged from a combination of Deobandi radical interpretation of Islam. The Taliban theological ideology is derived from Hanafite School and the methodological approach of the Taliban to this school is a matter of political as well as academic concern. The

Hanafite School of Hanafyah is also called Madhhab Hanifi in Islam and is one of the four main Sunni schools of religious law, incorporating the legal opinions of the ancient

Iraqi school of Al- Kufah and Basra. The Hanafite legal system developed from the teaching of the theologian and jurisprudent Imm Abu Hanifah (700-767) by such disciples as Abu Yusuf (d.798) and became the official system of Islamic legal interpretation for the Abbaside, Seljugs, and Ottomans. In spite of the fact that the

Hanafite acknowledge the Qur’an and Hadith (narratives concerning the Prophet’s life and sayings) as primary sources of law, they are noted for the acceptance of personal opinion (ra’y) in the absence of precedent. Presently the school predominated in Central

Asia, India, Pakistan, Turkey and the countries of the former Ottoman Empire. The

Deobandis took a restrictive view of the role of women, opposed all forms of hierarchy in the Muslim community an rejected the Shia-but the Taliban were to take these belies to an extreme which the original Deobandis would never have recognized (Brooke, 2000:

428).

Interestingly, Taliban‘s ideology is not only influenced by Deobandi’s school of

Islam but it is also ingrained with Pushton code of conduct (pushtoonwali). The main components of Pushonwali include malmastia (hospitality), nanavata (to apologize), panawarkawal (to give shelter), purdah (seclusion), tor (blame for guilty). Badal (to take revenge). Badal is an important component of Pushtoonwali which is directly related to nong (honor). It traditionally spells the right of every man of take the revenge for the harm he received. Factors that call for badal can range from more severe crimes as murder or adultery to a lesser degree of crimes such as abuse and humiliation. This tradition when becomes chronic might bring negative consequences such as the removal of most young members of Pashtun society on the name of badal. But the practice of badal is socially appreciated as it is done with the intention of safeguarding family’s honor.

Peter Marsden suggests that because Taliban originated in Pushtun heartland, their philosophy owns much to Pushoonwali, whereby Ulema used to call on men to disregard Pushtunwali for a period in favor of Sharia in order to engage in Jihad against a common enemy. However, the Taliban originated in the Pushun areas rather than the north where the religious traditions were relatively more difficult and perhaps more open to the Islamic ideologies than the impassioned response to the call of the Jihad in defense of social values present in the south. There are a range of influences in the creed of

Taliban, drawn from Islamic movements in Middle East, Iran, India sub-continent and

Afghanistan (Marsden, 1998: 267).

The requirements that men should pray five times per day, ideally in a mosque, grow their beards, keep un-styled hairs and wearing of turban and shalwar qameez

(traditional dress), is demanded by Taliban’s to ensure a high degree of religious observance. Taliban also claim that their prime objective is achieved social justice, stability and law and order through Islamic doctrine and principals. For that they laid the foundations of an institution which they believe to have its roots in the Holy Qur’an.

The Taliban and their supporters present the Muslim world and the West with a new style of Islamic extremist, which rejects all accommodation with Muslim moderation and the West. The Taliban’s refusal to compromise with the UN humanitarian agencies, foreign donor countries or to compromise their principles in exchange for international recognition and their rejection of all Muslim ruling elites as corrupt has inflamed the debate in the Muslim world and inspired a younger generation of Islamic militants. The

Taliban have given Islamic fundamentalism a new face and a new identity for the next millennium- one that refuses to accept any compromise or political system except their own. Whatever Taliban’s believed and practice is according to the teachings of Islam.

They follow the path of Allah and Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Taliban did not practice ethnic Jihad as Islam does not believe on ethnicity. Jihad is an obligation for all

Muslims according to certain conditions and situation. It is not a culturally created phenomenon. Allah says: “Those who struggle in the way of Allah, opens way for them”.

According to the Prophet’s saying “every time there will be a group standing for the right and will be fighting till the last” (Ewan, Dupree, 1990: 198-9).

The Taliban also banned every conceivable form of entertainment, which in a poor, deprived country such as Afghanistan was always in short supply anyway. Afghan were ardent movie- goers but movies, TV, videos, music and dancing were all banned.

Mullah Mohammed Hassan says “Of course we realize that people need some entertainment they can go to the parks and see the flowers, and from this they will learn about Islam.” Taliban oppose music because it creates a strain in the mind and hampers study of Islam. Singing and dancing were banned at weddings which for centuries had been major social occasions from which hundreds of musicians and dancers made a living and most of them fled to Pakistan (Tapper, 1991: 65 ).

1.2. WOMEN IN TALIBAN REGIME

The topic of gender relations in Afghanistan is complex and difficult, since social roles for some but not all Afghan women changed significantly as a result of wider processes of social development in urban areas, and particularly Kabul, over the last four decades. From 1959 onwards, women in Kabul had opportunities to access higher education and employment on a scale which earlier would have been unthinkable.

Following the 1978 communist coup, and with the backing of coercive threats, the new regime sought to extend its ideology of gender roles into unreceptive rural areas. The results were catastrophic: the regime not only faced intense opposition to its policies from affronted rural dwellers, but the entire exercise set back the cause of laudable objectives such as female literacy by linking them, in the minds of conservative village clergy, with atheism and propaganda. Furthermore, with the flight of millions of Afghan refugees to Pakistan, the resulting disempowerment of Afghan males in many cases the

few exercises on which they could still embark with much hope of success. As a result of these experiences, the social roles of women became increasingly salient benchmarks for distinguishing different types of sociopolitical order (Leila, 1992: 128).

Women’s lives up to this time had been influenced by Islamic law and Sharia law in particular. Accordingly, women have inferior status to men in terms of marriage, inheritance and the law. Legally women had half the rights of a man. For example, women needed two witnesses while a man needed only one in a court of law. Within such frames of reference, people used the word woman (meaning ‘coward’) to insult opponents. Women were the bearers of the family honor, and a man’s reputation was measured through the behavior of the females in his household.

Violence against women is a global phenomenon. In recent years there has been an alarming spread of fundamentalism as witnessed. At present twenty two years of conflict in Afghanistan. It is now well established that fundamentalism uses women’s bodies as a battlefield and its struggle to appropriate institutional power.

Sexual violence is a ritualized part of war. The war never stops in women’s lives whether they are on the frontline or at home. Neither patriarchal violence nor genocidal colonialism is termed as war in mainstream accounts, as the power to name war is the prerogative of dominant nations and groups. Violence has many forms on women by men and women of the other community and women in close familial relationship. Its own community perpetuates violence against women during wars members who were

neighbors and known faces and for women nothing changes, expect that the situation intensifies (Jayawardena, Alwis, 1996: 247-9).

Starting in 1923, women were given rights equal to men in Afghanistan’s

Constitution. Valentine Moghadam contended that gender plays an especially strong political role and in fact becomes politicized when patriarchal societies undergo a restructuring process because different factions within the culture clash and made it a point to say that the events in Afghanistan exemplify this idea. Even the pro-communist government of the 1970’s made provisions for women’s rights; the 1977 Constitution according to Soba Gul Khattak, said “the entire people of Afghanistan, women and men without discrimination have equal rights and obligations before the law. khattak also reported that the Communists wanted to “remove the unjust patriarchal feudalistic relations between husband and wife.” In the early 1990’s before Taliban, women accounted for 70% of the countries teachers, 50% of government employees, and held

40% of medical jobs. All of this forward- thinking legislation ended when the Taliban assumed absolute control of the government. One of the very first orders the Taliban enacted when the regime assumed control of Kabul was regarding women; girls were removed from schools, women not allowed to be employed outside of their homes and mandated they wear the full length veil whenever they were outside of their homes

(Hegland C, 2005: 231).

One of the earliest attempts at emancipation and social reform for women in the twentieth century took place in Afghanistan. Afghan leaders located women’s emancipation as central to its nationalist ideology of modernization. In 1883, Amir Abd al- Rahman Khan at ruler of Afghanistan, among other things, allowed widow remarriage, and registration of marriages was made compulsory. His son, Amir

Habibullah introduced the concept of women as contributing members of society and not simply as mothers. However, the emancipation process was not linear, and at the same times as progressive change was introduced, Habibullah proclaimed that men were entitled to full control of their women, as the honor of the people of Afghanistan prevailed in the honor of their women. (Hans, 2001: 58)

Attacks on women began in 1989, when Mujahideen leaders based in Peshwar,

Pakistan, issued a fatwa (a religious decree) ordering the assassination of women who worked for humanitarian organization. Shortly after this, women were ordered to wear the Hijab, a black garment that covers the entire body with a veil on the head. In 1990, women were forbidden from attending school. To underscore the point, a Peshawar girls’ school was sprayed with bullets. The US, more or less responsible for the situation in

Afghanistan, chose not to act. Rather than redirect resources from funding insurgents to rebuilding the ravaged country’s infrastructure, the US abandoned the people who had fought their proxy war with the USSR. A power struggle among the various misogynistic factions of the Mujahideen ensued, which exacerbated already dire condition of seven mujahideen parties (Marsden, 1998). Its president, Burhannudin Rabbani, suspended the

Constitution and issued religious decrees that prevented women from holing government

jobs or jobs in broadcasting, and required them to wear a veil (Goodwin and Neuwirth,

2001). The ascendance of the mujahideen government in 1992, who would later form the

Northern Alliance, meant that women’s rights were severely curtailed. What rights remained would be summarily denied when the Taliban came to power in 1996

(Goodwin, Neuwirth, 2001: 172).

The Taliban implemented four central policies regarding women. First, women were forbidden to hold jobs. Second, they could not attend schools until the Taliban had come up with a curriculum appropriate for their primary role of bringing up the next generation of Muslims. Third, women were forced to wear burqas, while men had to wear shalwar kameez (a long tunic and pants), maintain beards and were not permitted to style their hair. Finally, women were denied freedom of movement. They could only leave their homes if escorted by male relatives and had to avoid contact with male strangers. If these rules were transgressed, the religious police would mete out punishments like public beatings and sometimes even death (Marsden, 1998: 93).

Prior to the rise of the Taliban, women in Afghanistan were protected under law and increasingly afforded rights in Afghan society. Women received the right to vote in the 1920s; and as early as the 1960s, the Afghan constitution provided equality for women. There was a mood of tolerance and openness as the country began moving toward democracy. Women were making important contributions to national development. In 1977, women comprised over 15% of Afghanistan’s highest legislative body. Afghan women had been active in humanitarian relief organizations until the

Taliban imposed a pool of talent and expertise that will be needed in the reconstruction of post- Taliban Afghanistan. Islam has a tradition of protecting the rights of women and children. In fact, Islam has specific provisions which define the rights of women in areas such as marriage, divorce, and property rights. The Taliban’s version of Islam is not supported by the world’s Muslims. Although the Taliban claimed that it was acting the best interest to women, the truth is that the Taliban regime cruelly reduced women and girls to poverty, worsened their health, and deprived them of their right to an education, and many times the right to practice their religion. The Taliban is out of step with the

Muslim world and with Islam. Afghanistan under the Taliban had one of the worst human rights records in the world. The regime systematically repressed all sectors of the population and denied even the most basic individual rights. Yet the Taliban’s war against women as particularly appalling, women are imprisoned in their homes, and are denied access to health care and education. Food sent to help starving people is stolen by their leaders. The religious monuments of other faiths are destroyed (Hafizullah, 2002 :

45-7).

Nowhere else has a war on women been witnessed so starkly as in Afghanistan.

Flagrant abuses of Afghan women’s most basic human rights the sectors of education, health, and civil and political participation have been widely documented. The Taliban have been the perpetrators of these injustices, but violence against both men and women in Afghanistan has been ongoing for over two decades. The constant condition of war during the last twenty years has adversely affected Afghan women’s lives forcing millions to leave their homes and seek refuge in countries across the globe.

The Taliban could charitably be described as the least feminist group in the world.

This became clear once they reached Kabul, although the policies which they sought to impose in Kabul differed little from those which they had forcibly implemented in

Kandahar from late 1994 and Heart from September 1995. In rural areas, in which the

Taliban found themselves in potential competition with an existing tribal authority structure, they had far less scope to impose tier puritanical visions, and as a result, there are areas nominally under Taliban control in which girls’ schools continue to function. In cities, there were far fewer centers of countervailing power, and the Taliban religious police, known as the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice

(Amr bil- Maroof wa Nahi An il- Munkir), had a free hand, that hand was directed against women, with a fierce paternalism (Wali, 2002: 61).

The Taliban regime is more an extremist militia than a religion. The Taliban, whose name derives from a term referring to Islamic students, claims to follow an imposed, but pure, fundamentalist Islamic theology. However, its harsh treatment of women, which many consider “gender apartheid,” has no basis in Islam. When it seized control in 1996, the Taliban imposed strict edicts that have had serious health consequences for Afghan women: Women, except those working in the health professions, have been forbidden to work outside the home, attend school, or leave their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative. In public women must wear a Burqa, which covers those head to foot, and where women are present in houses or other building in public view (Mehta, 2002: 87).

The Taliban in Afghanistan and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church provide examples of how two very different degrees of religious fundamentalists present obstacles to women in need of reproductive health services. The Taliban example illustrates how difficult it is to reach women living under a particularly severe fundamentalist regime. Both situations illustrate that women’s reproductive health needs are the most susceptible to harm from fundamentalisms and also that meaningful dialogue on religion and reproductive health is imperative for women to gain and maintain their reproductive rights.

It was in this context that women’s rights became a principal battleground between the Taliban and the international community. The Taliban viewed their treatment of women in a very different way from outside observers, they rightly pointed to the grim experience of Afghan women during the brutal division of Kabul between warring militias from mid 1992 to March 1995. And credited themselves with eliminating such insecurity although in late March 1998, a Voice of America correspondent laconically reported that while a Taliban spokesman had said in a statement that there was complete peace and security in the provinces controlled by the Taliban, at the same time, he told reporters that a lack of adequate security is another serious problem in providing education to female students. Earlier, the Chair of the Taliban ‘s ‘Caretaker Council in

Kabul’, Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, had expressed himself perplexed at the silence of the western media regarding the tragedies and miseries that prevailed when previous governments were in power in Afghanistan, and went on to blame the bad publicity received by Taliban on ‘world Zionism fighting Islam’. Raising an argument for cultural

relativism, another Taliban spokesman complained that in the United States, they want to impose their American culture on us (Jeannette E, 2004: 186).

Although, women in Afghanistan have never had a good life, but by the time

Taliban entered to the capital city of Afghanistan (Kabul); women started to feel like a wild animal behind the bars as a result of the strict laws of Taliban. For instance, women had no life by the time Taliban came. “Education from kindergarten through graduate school was banned. Employment for women was banned. It was illegal to wear makeup, nail polish, jewellery, pluck one’s eyebrows, cut one’s hair short, wear colorful or stylish cloths, sheer stockings, white socks and shoes, high- heel shoes, walk loudly, talk loudly or laugh loudly in public. In fact, the government didn’t believe women should go out at all. “Women, you should not step outside your residence” reads one of the Taliban dictates. There were many cases that women were whipped and killed by Taliban because of disobeying the laws of their regime. For instance, it was announced over the airwaves that 225 women had been rounded up and sentenced to a lashing for violating the dress code. One woman had the top of her thumb amputated for the crime of wearing nail polish. According to Taliban’s minister of education, women are like having a flower, or rose, you water it and keep it at home for you, to look at it and smell it. It is not supposed to be taken out of the house to be smelled. From the quotation, it sounds that for Taliban women worth nothing. Although flower has a positive connotation but according to the question that is asked and answered by such a response it appears to be very negative as if females are not human being but an object (Brooke, 2000: 214).

According to a report by the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations

Commission on Human Rights in 1999, there was only one maternity hospital in the entire country of Afghanistan. As a result, Afghan women of childbearing age constitute the most vulnerable group of women. Almost two years later, the Special Rapporteur reported that each day in Afghanistan 45 women die of pregnancy related causes and there are over 16,000 maternal deaths each year. Only about 15 percent of deliveries are attended by trained health workers and more than 90 percent of births take place at home.

Pregnant women in need of medical care are not only underserved, but are vulnerable to the Taliban’s extreme brutality. Women who may have to leave their homes to go to the hospital but are unaccompanied by a male relative are frequently attacked and beaten by Taliban guards. They order the women not to enter the streets again under threat of dire penalties. In addition, trafficking of women and girls, forced prostitution and non- consensual marriage are on the rise and have increased the heed for STD/HIV- testing a service that is virtually unavailable. Afghan women who are in refugee camps in neighboring Pakistan are continuously vulnerable to rape and therefore are in constant need of reproductive health care. But their needs are not being met (Ewan, Dupree, 1990:

238).

Under the Taliban regime most women who could no more tolerate committed suicide because of having no other solution. “Many burned themselves and many other were swallowing battery acid. On the other hand, many other women risked their safety to keep teaching in secrete places like basement or hidden places.” Afghan women

continue to fear physical violence and insecurity even after the end of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan because the way some women were punish by Taliban; reminds other women about wearing Burqa especially when they remember that “Taliban carry wire rods and beat women who don’t wear burqas or wear them in the wrong way.” Even though the right of women is better know after the US attack in Afghanistan but many women cannot work as a result of the illiteracy. Only Afghan females who came back from neighboring countries where they got better education can have a good job. Many educated women started to make organizations to help the unfortunate women inside the country. In general, not only women but all Afghan people have suffered a lot mostly because of bad punishments, mental chastisement and because of the poverty and loss of family members (Hegland C, 2005: 63-5).

Afghanistan has always had elite and middle-class women who asserted their rights and marched towards modernization. But despite these examples, most of Afghan women in rural areas have been under the oppression and pressure of the tribal customs and dictates. Those women who were publicly visible throughout the history of

Afghanistan belonged to the royalty or elite and represented a very tiny population of the country. They do act as role models and provide a window into the possibility that social change can occur and illustrate the potential that women from different strata of society can attempt change in their lives. Magnus and Naby (1998) claim that, the internalization of democracy based on western individualism rather than traditional Afghan Islamic communalism, gender-blind social interaction, and the elevation of the individual above society, does not appear to be part of the emerging regional or Afghan worldview. I

agree, especially in light of the non-deliverance of rights and promised goods by western democracies to their own populations. In Afghanistan, democracy and an assertion of women rights can occur when the state is in an economically and politically stable condition, assisted by men and women inside and outside of Afghanistan. Democracy will occur as a process of social change that the whole nation needs to undergo. When this happens, a society built on democratic-oriented ideology will regard women as equal partners in the social, political, and economic reconstruction of Afghanistan. As in other traditional societies, women do not exist outside the family and community. Yet, family and kinship networks do not necessarily have to be destroyed in order to improve women’s status through education, employment and access to resources. But they must be rearranged.

In conclusion, Afghanistan is in such a desperate state that without external help and financial aid its future will be further jeopardized. It is against this political backdrop that one has to understand women situation in Afghanistan. Major dilemmas will always exist as to the most appropriate path to follow. There will always be debates about so- called western model, urban elite model, Islamic model, and fundamentalist model. The basic (I would say fundamental) need is to ensure that women, like men, have access to resources for survival like education, jobs, mobility and public visibility. The situation of women in the future of Afghanistan might challenge the dominant discourse on citizenship and feminism as defined by the West and provide to non-western nations and minorities in western nations an alternative that can bring social justice and economic equality to all.

CHAPTER TWO: MCCARTHYISM PERIOD AND THE

SITUATION OF WOMEN IN AMERICA

McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the

United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from late 1950s and characterized by heightened fears of communist influence on American institutions and espionage by Soviet agents. Originally coined to criticize the anti-communist pursuits of

U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, "McCarthyism" soon took on a broader meaning, describing the excesses of similar efforts. The term is also now used more generally to describe, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries (Bailey, 1981: 197).

During the McCarthy era, thousands of Americans were accused of being

Communists or communist sympathizers and became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, educators and union activists. Suspicions were often given credence despite inconclusive or questionable evidence, and the level of threat posed by a person's real or supposed leftist associations or beliefs was often greatly exaggerated.

Many people suffered loss of employment, destruction of their careers, and even imprisonment. Most of these punishments came about through trial verdicts later overturned, laws that would be declared unconstitutional, dismissals for reasons later

declared illegal or actionable,or extra-legal procedures that would come into general disrepute ( Bell, 1955: 132).

The John Birch Society and Nationalism in the Uinted States The paranoia and suspicion of the Cold War perpetuated an extreme form of nationalist sentiment that exists even today in the United States. In the 1950s, many Americans began to feel a hightened sense of vulnerablity and fear, as the United States, becoming further enmeshed in its conflict with the Communist Soviet Union, seemed to be losing the war.

At a time when most were seeking answers, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconisn provided an explanation. İn February 1950, McCarthy named Communist infiltration and espionage in the U.S. as the culprits of the failing struggle. The transcript of this speech at Wheeling, West Virginia points out the need to preserve Amercian “national identity” by weeding out “suspicious” aspects of American society. Although McCarthy would later lose momuntum, similar efforts to preserve “Amercian ideals” would prove more successful and long lasting. Less ruinous and calculating than McCarthy, the John Birch

Society and its publication, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, play on the xenophobic sentiments that still exist today by placing them in a language that defends and seeks to protect American “freedoms”. Essentially, both Joseph McCarthy and the

John Birch Society represent radiacal expressions of nationalism in the United States

(Davis, 1975: 246).

American national identity can often be defined by a strong pride an appreciation for the security and democractic liberties of the United States. In fact, many Americans believe that they live in the greatest nation in the world. This optimistic view was none

the more evident than in the years following World War II. The U.S. victory overseas and second peaceful wartime alliance with the Soviet Union afforded Americans with a strong sense of confidence in the safety of thier future. By the 1950s, however, great uncertainty and anxiety had replaced this post-war optimism, as relations between the

U.S. and the Soviet Union truned hostile. Unlike past enemies, the United States could not quickly overtake the large Soviet Union and the Cold War emerged as an armed struggle between two superpowers. As time went on, Communist fears materialized in the

U.S. as did suspicions about the Soviet aspects in American society. Moverever, the presence of a Communist Party of the U.S.A. (C.P.U.S.A) made the Soviet threat all the more real. Soon, many Americans began seeking answers as to why the “greatest nation in the world” was not conquering this enemy. Senator Joseph McCarthy called on nationalism in providing his answer. “I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either cardcarrying members or certianly loyal to the Communist

Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy”, Joseph

McCarthy told an audience at Wheeling, West Virginia (Erskine, and Richard, 1975, p.52-4).

McCarthyism spread into Hollywood “in June 1950 with the publication of a 213- page compilation of the alleged Communist affiliations of 151 actors, writers, musicians, and other radio and television entertainers” (Schrecker, 1992). Once their name was on a list, it was practically impossible for them to get cleared in time to save their careers.

Often, the accused had to resort to whatever means they could in order to survive the scrutiny. “The show business people who couldn't or wouldn't clear themselves soon

became unemployable and ostracized. Some left the country – if they could get passports” (Schrecker, 1992). In fact, some of the most notable and popular actors of this time period had to make public fools of themselves in order to get back into the good graces of their fans. Humphrey Bogart’s rehabilitation required an article in a fan magazine confessing, “I'm not Communist, just an American dope”. Some blacklisted writers began writing under pseudonyms in order to continue working. However, writers who used pseudonyms or other people operating as “fronts” to represent their writing were no longer able to command their previous salaries.

During the period of the McCarthyism era, both the television and the film industry suffered quite a bit. Citizens were taught, through watching the examples of others, to be cautious in their personal and professional lives. As a result, “the blacklist contributed to the reluctance of the film industry to grapple with controversial social or political issues” (Schrecker, 1992). The industry, and its professionals, were dealt an extreme blow during the pivotal paranoid persecutions of individuals thought to have ties with the Red Scare.

Arthur Miller wrote his play The Crucible in direct response to the events he witnessed as a result of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s desire to eradicate Communism from our country. In 2000, Arthur Miller directly addressed the motivation he had to write his play as a mirror to the events of McCarthyism. He describes the frustration of resisting the notion-based war of the Red Scare because an “ideological war is like guerrilla war, since the enemy is an idea whose proponents are not in uniform but are disguised as ordinary citizens”. During the persecution of his friends and colleagues, as well as his

own experiences in resisting the contagion of paranoia, Miller chose to write the play as a way of both keeping himself grounded and sending a message to the public. It was an acceptable outlet for Miller’s creative energy and personal social commentary to be received by an audience. One of the aspects that Miller fought against was the social paralysis that American citizens felt in their everyday lives. It wasn’t enough to worry about what your friends and family thought about you, now you had to worry what strangers in your community were thinking about you (Miller, 2000: 248).

In spite of the freedom from any invasive and baseless persecution (such as religion-based) guaranteed by founding fathers, almost instantaneously the country was turned on its side by the implication that Communists could be anyone, anywhere.

Senator McCarthy brought the suspicion of others into our midst, and it was a cloud of hypercognitive awareness that our country could not shake. It is the domino-effect of fingers pointing at fingers, bringing the routine operation of our government under intense scrutiny. Senator McCarthy was successful in achieving an immortal name for himself in the history books as the term “McCarthyism” has become integrated into everyday language as synonymous for a tyrant-breeding hysteria with the baseless persecution of innocent individuals. During the era of McCarthyism, even the most routine event could cause everyday citizens to go out of their way to avoid speculation:

In the late 1950s a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago wanted to have a coffee vending machine installed outside the Physics Department for the convenience of people who worked there late at night. They started to circulate a petition to the Buildings and Grounds Department, but their colleagues refused to sign. They did

not want to be associated with the allegedly radical students whose names were already on the document. (Schrecker,1992: 46).

This event was representative of many of its kind. Citizens were driven to avoid any social interaction or association that might provoke allegations of allegiance to the Communist party. During the height of the McCarthyism era unemployment was not only happening at the hands of the government. “Major corporations like General Electric and U.S. Steel announced that they would discharge any worker who took the Fifth

Amendment, and other employers made it equally clear that they would do the same”

(Schrecker, 1992). Additionally, “the New York Times justified its firing of a copyreader in the foreign news department as a matter of national security; had he worked on the sports desk, the Times explained, he could have kept his job”. The darkest hours of the

“Red Scare” pitted family members, friends, and neighbors against each other. With the cloak of suspicion descending into every corner of society, it is only natural that the movie industry would reflect the plight of the country because no one was immune to

McCarthyism.

McCarthyism was supported by a variety of groups, including the American

Legion and various other anti-communist organizations. One core element of support was a variety of militantly anti-communist women's groups such as the American Public

Relations Forum and the Minute Women of the U.S.A.. These organized tens of thousands of housewives into study groups, letter-writing networks, and patriotic clubs that coordinated efforts to identify and eradicate what they saw as subversion (Gibson,

1988: 78).

Although far-right radicals were the bedrock of support for McCarthyism, they were not alone. A broad "coalition of the aggrieved" found McCarthyism attractive, or at least politically useful. Common themes uniting the coalition were opposition to internationalism, particularly the United Nations; opposition to social welfare provisions, particularly the various programs established by the New Deal; and opposition to efforts to reduce inequalities in the social structure of the United States.

One focus of popular McCarthyism concerned the provision of public health services, particularly vaccination, mental health care services and fluoridation, all of which were deemed by some to be communist plots to poison or brainwash the American people. Oftentimes, the anti-internationalist aspect of McCarthyist literature took on an anti-Jewish tone. (Hebrew, 1946) "American Jews must come to grips with our contemporary anti-Semites; we must fill our insane asylums with anti-Semitic lunatics”.

Such viewpoints led to major collisions between McCarthyite radicals and supporters of public health programs, most notably in the case of the Alaska Mental Health Bill controversy of 1956.

Joe McCarthy died over half a century ago, but McCarthyism survived his alcohol-induced death. Politically motivated accusations of disloyalty or subversion remain the stock-in-trade of right-wing jesters such as Fox News’ Glenn Beck and political opportunists like Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann. But, such inquisitorial attacks also take place away from the media spotlight and, most unpleasantly, often occur in university campuses, where tawdry political gamesmanship

that could put Washington to shame has had an enduring effect: shining voices silenced, worthy books unwritten, unpublished or unread.

For Joe McCarthy, the struggle with Soviet communism was a matter of victory or defeat. There could be no middle ground. Fulbright, like so many fellow liberals, could not and would not see it in such forthright terms. Fulbright himself nourished secret doubts about whether the United States could really resist what seemed to him an inevitable tide of historical decline, of which the rise of communism was only one part.

Those doubts about America's ability to fulfill its self-imposed global mission would eventually spill over into his opposition to the Vietnam War, and filled the pages of his book on American foreign policy, “The Arrogance of Power”. Both McCarthy and

Fulbright agreed that the fate of civilization hung in the balance in the cold war (Herson,

1975: 234).

In the period running from roughly 1947 to 1956, “Great Fear” gripped citizens of the United States. At its core was a deep apprehension about Communism which was embodied by the nation’s former World War II ally, the Soviet Union. Spurred by the threat of Soviet aggression during the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican of Wisconsin, continuously dominated the nation’s headlines as a tireless crusader for vigilance against internal subversion by homegrown Communists who, he said, had infiltrated key areas of the federal government and the armed services. They threatened not only to render the nation’s foreign policy and its military impotent, but to assist in the

Communists’ ultimate goal of weakening and finally dominating, if not destroying, the

United States from within. His obsession was shared by other political figures such as

Richard Nixon, elements within Congress like the members of the House Committee on

Un-American Activities (HUAC), powerful publishers, editors, and columnists, as well as others who strongly believed that the nation was, indeed, locked in a death struggle with an enemy capable of any deceit in order to destroy democracy and capitalism. While the broad public was deeply concerned about the Communist threat, it was also ambivalent about the tactics of McCarthy and his allies, and often apathetic toward politics in general. Thus, he was opposed largely by a small band of politicians, civil libertarians, commentators, and academics. They denounced him for what they said were his persecutions of innocent people caught up in his opportunism and demagoguery

(McClosky, 1964: 82).

During World War II, and McCarthyism millions of women entered the labor force. They were encouraged to work in industrial factories to help the war effort. The

United States government even created a propaganda campaign to convince women they should now work in what were considered "men's jobs," because the same skills they used doing housework would allow them to work in factories. During the war years, millions of women discovered that they could do "men's work" and could earn the higher salaries usually associated with that work. After discovering that they could work in high- paying factory jobs, the majority of women did not want to give these jobs up after World

War II. This worried American leaders, business leaders, and returning American veterans, who wanted to return to their traditional high-paying factory jobs.

Faced with the resistance of many women to voluntarily give up their jobs to men, and return to their traditional, low-status sales and clerical jobs, government and business leaders created a campaign to convince women that they should be patriotic and give their men their jobs back. Television and radio ads told women that they would be much happier if they went back home and had children and gave men their jobs back. Women were told that now that the war was over they should return to their more traditional roles as housewives and mothers. Women didn't really need these jobs, but men did. In fact, from the late 1940s and throughout the 1960s there was tremendous pressure on women to accept their more traditional roles as wives and mothers, dependent on their husbands, and committed to living their lives for their families, children, and husbands (Srole, 1956:

268).

The answer lies in the dramatic changes women experienced in World War II.

Many married women discovered that they could work in men's jobs, could earn a good salary, and could do much of the work that men were traditionally responsible for in the family. During the war, many married women were not only forced to work to support the war effort, they were also forced to do most of the tasks that men had done around the house. With their husbands gone to war, many women discovered that they were smart enough to balance a check book, maintain the car, and run the household as their husbands had always done. When their husbands came back from the war, they discovered that their wives were more assertive, confident, and less dependent on them.

This troubled many American men, who did not like the changes they saw in American women and their wives (Dennis H. 1954: 86).

Faced with the threat from changing women's roles, American men, government, and business went on a campaign to convince women that they should go back to the way they were before the war, they should forget all their experiences and changes that took place during the war. They argued that it was women's patriotic duty to give their jobs back to men. If women didn't stop working, then there would be an economic depression.

Just as women were scapegoated for the Great Depression, with many men charging that there wouldn't have been a depression if women had not taken the jobs that rightfully belonged to men. But, in addition to giving up their jobs, American women and wives should also respect the wishes of their men who sacrificed so much during the war and return to their more traditional roles as wives and mothers, dependent on their husbands.

Ironically, despite the increasing success of this campaign to convince women to return to their more traditional roles, millions of married women in the 1950s continued to work, and millions more entered the workforce in the 1950s and 1960s. Why were white, middle-class women, married and with children, entering the labor force in record numbers in the 1950s if the larger society was telling them that they should stay home and be traditional wives and let their husbands support them? More middle-class wives were entering the workforce than working-class wives, who might need to work to support their families. Why, if their husbands were earning good salaries, did middle- class wives begin to enter the laborforce in record numbers? After World War II, these very same women were told to give up their jobs to men. But now they were rushing into the workforce (Rosenthal, 2001: 291).

In the 1950s, middle-class married women were taking jobs soon after their children started school and worked for the rest of their lives. Despite working, these women were still responsible for doing all their traditional work as wives and mother in the home. Despite the pressure to stay at home and be good wives and mothers, American women were increasingly forced to work in order to keep their families middle class, and allow them to have big homes, nice cars, send their children to college, and take long vacation. Thus, at the very moment when women were told that they should ignore the changes they were experiencing as a result of World War II and their increased presence in the workforce, women were struggling to reconcile their traditional roles with their expanding confidence and independence as working wives. Studies in the 1950s and

1960s demonstrated that women who worked have a greater say in the finances, in the marriage, and in the family that women who didn't work.

Despite these growing changes in women's roles in the 1950s, Americans were told that while some wives might be working, their work wasn't important and it shouldn't get in the way of their responsibilities as wives and mothers. Many Americans were thus trying to benefit from women's increasing participation in the workforce while at the same time denying the social and cultural changes that women's expanding roles were creating. It is this contradiction, I believe, that explains the excesses of the campaign to convince women to be happy in their traditional roles in the 1950s. This campaign for traditional women became more determined and visible as more and more women entered the workforce in 1950s. It was as if Americans were trying to convince themselves that despite the growing changes in women's roles and lives nothing was

changing, those women were still content being traditional wives and mothers (Chen,

2008: 63).

In the early 1960s, many married women were increasingly unhappy with the burdens and the contradictions they faced. They were being bombarded with cultural messages that said that good mothers and wives did not work and dedicated their lives to supporting their husbands and children, but at the same time they were increasingly forced to work to make ends meet. Some women also felt the increased burden of now having two jobs, working outside the home and trying to still do all the work that they used to do inside the home. Many women refer to this as the "double shift." By the early

1960s, feeling guilty and confused about their new roles and responsibilities, many women began to question what Betty Friedan called the feminine mystique, which told women that "they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity."

In her 1963 book, “The Feminine Mystique”, Friedan challenged women to question the social and cultural messages that told women they should accept their traditional roles as wives and mothers. She challenged women to discover who they were, and develop their individual selves as human being, and not just accept what society called their destiny as women to be wives and mothers (Beaman, 2007: 183).

The women's movement in the 1960s grew out of this increasing contradiction between the growing changes in women's lives and society's efforts to convince women that these changes weren't occurring. But the demand by women that they play larger roles in their families and societies also grew out of another contradiction. At the same time that Americans were told that it was a women's destiny to be a wife and mother,

society did not value women's work raising children and supporting their husbands and families. Many women came to feel that they weren't doing anything of value with their lives if they were just wives and mothers. Only by getting education, good jobs, and earning high salaries could many women gain the social respect they felt they deserved.

This, of course, is a real tragedy. If society more highly valued women's traditional work as wives and mothers, then many women would not feel that, as Friedan charged, the home was "a comfortable concentration camp." (1994: 157).

But the rise of the women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s, as we will see, led to the growth of a backlash and a movement by conservative men and women in the

1980s. In early 1990s to once again convince women that it is their destiny to be wives and mothers, dependent on their husbands, living their lives through their children and family. This backlash in response to the gains of the women's movement in the 1960s and

1970s once again demonstrates that American society, especially men, fear changing women's roles and will work hard to try to keep women in their traditional places as wives and mothers. It was, in fact, a similar backlash after World War II that tried to convince women that their changing roles and lives weren't in fact changing at all, they were still happy being traditional wives and mothers. Why, then, does America tend to be so obsessed with limiting women's roles? What is it about women's traditional roles that is so important to the workings of American society and culture? We will look at the struggle over the women's movement and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the

1960s and 1970s to get a better understanding of this (Powley, 2007: 274).

2.1. The Legacy of McCarthyism

This incident and it is not unique exemplifies the kind of timidity that came to be seen, even at the time, as the most damaging consequence of the anti-Communist furor.

Since political activities could get you in trouble, prudent folk avoided them. Instead, to the despair of intellectuals, middle- class Americans became social conformists. A silent generation of students populated the nation's campuses, while their professors shrank from teaching anything that might be construed as controversial. "The Black Silence of

Fear" that Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas deplores in Document 22 seemingly blanketed the nation, and meaningful political dissent had all but withered away.

Was McCarthyism to blame? Obviously the congressional hearings, loyalty programs, and blacklists affected the lives of the men and women caught up in them. But beyond that, it is hard to tell. The statistics are imprecise that ten thousand people may have lost their jobs. (Stone, 2004).

Quantification aside, it may be helpful to look at the specific sectors of American society that McCarthyism touched. Such an appraisal, tentative though it must be, may offer some insight into the extent of the damage and into the ways in which the anti-

Communist crusade influenced American society, politics, and culture. We should keep in mind, however, that McCarthyism's main impact may well have been in what did not happen rather than in what did the social reforms that were never adopted. The diplomatic initiatives that were not pursued, the workers who were not organized into unions, the books that were not written, and the movies that were never filmed.

The most obvious casualty was the American left. The institutional toll is clear.

The Communist party, already damaged by internal problems, dwindled into insignificance and all the organizations associated with it disappeared. The destruction of the front groups and the left-led unions may well have had a more deleterious impact on

American politics than the decline of the party itself. With their demise, the nation lost the institutional network that had created a public space where serious alternatives to the status quo could be presented. Moreover, with the disappearance of a vigorous movement on their left, moderate reform groups were more exposed to right-wing attacks and thus rendered less effective.

In the realm of social policy, for example, McCarthyism may have aborted much- needed reforms. As the nation's politics swung to the right after World War II, the federal government abandoned the unfinished agenda of the New Deal. Measures like national health insurance, a social reform embraced by the rest of the industrialized world, simply fell by the wayside. The left liberal political coalition that might have supported health

reforms and similar projects was torn apart by the anti-Communist crusade. Moderates feared being identified with anything that seemed too radical, and people to the left of them were either unheard or under attack. McCarthyism further contributed to the attenuation of the reform impulse by helping to divert the attention of the labor movement, the strongest institution within the old New Deal coalition, from external organizing to internal politicking (Schrecker, 2002).

The impact of the McCarthy era was equally apparent in international affairs.

Opposition to the cold war had been so thoroughly identified with communism that it was no longer possible to challenge the basic assumptions of American foreign policy without incurring suspicions of disloyalty. As a result, from the defeat of third-party presidential candidate Henry Wallace in the fall of 1948 until the early 1960s, effective public criticism of America's role in the world was essentially nonexistent. Within the government, the insecurities that McCarthyism inflicted on the State Department lingered for years, especially with regard to East Asia. Thus, for example, the campaign against the "loss" of China left such long-lasting scars that American policymakers feared to acknowledge the official existence of the People's Republic of China. İt was in part to avoid a replay of the loss-of-China scenario that Nixon's Democratic predecessors,

Kennedy and Johnson, dragged the United States so deeply into the quagmire of Vietnam

(Griffith, 1970).

The nation's cultural and intellectual life suffered as well. While there were other reasons that TV offered a bland menu of quiz shows and westerns during the late 1950s,

McCarthy-era anxieties clearly played a role. Similarly, the blacklist contributed to the

reluctance of the film industry to grapple with controversial social or political issues. In the intellectual world, cold war liberals also avoided controversy. They celebrated the

"end of ideology," claiming that the United States' uniquely pragmatic approach to politics made the problems that had once concerned left- wing ideologists irrelevant.

Consensus historians pushed that formulation into the past and described a nation that had supposedly never experienced serious internal conflict. It took the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War to end this complacency and bring reality back in (Fried,

1990).

Ironically, just as these social commentators were lauding the resilience of

American democracy, the anti-Communist crusade was undermining it. The political repression of the McCarthy era fostered the growth of the national security state and facilitated its expansion into the rest of civil society. On the pretext of protecting the nation from Communist infiltration, federal agents attacked individual rights and extended state power into movie studios, universities, labor unions, and many other ostensibly independent institutions. The near universal deference to the federal government's formulation of the Communist threat abetted the process and muted opposition to what was going on.

Moreover, even after the anti-Communist furor receded, the antidemocratic practices associated with it continued. We can trace the legacy of McCarthyism in the

FBI's secret COINTELPRO program of harassing political dissenters in the 1960s and

1970s, the Watergate-related felonies of the Nixon White House in the 1970s, and the

Iran-Contra scandals in the 1980s. The pervasiveness of such wrongdoing reveals how

seriously the nation's defenses against official illegalities had eroded in the face of claims that national security took precedence over ordinary law. McCarthyism alone did not cause these outrages; but the assault on democracy that began during the 1940s and 1950s with the collaboration of private institutions and public agencies in suppressing the alleged threat of domestic communism was an important early contribution (Doherty,

2005).

2.2. Victims of McCarthysim and Critical Reactions

It is difficult to estimate the number of victims of McCarthyism. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs. In many cases simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired. Many of those who were imprisoned, lost their jobs or were questioned by committees did in fact have a past or present connection of some kind with the

Communist Party. But for the vast majority, both the potential for them to do harm to the nation and the nature of their communist affiliation were tenuous. Suspected homosexuality was also a common cause for being targeted by McCarthyism. The hunt for "sexual perverts", who were presumed to be subversive by nature, resulted in thousands being harassed and denied employment (Bailey,1981: 67).

In the film industry, over 300 actors, authors and directors were denied work in the U.S. through the unofficial Hollywood blacklist. Blacklists were at work throughout the entertainment industry, in universities and schools at all levels, in the legal profession, and in many other fields. A port security program initiated by the Coast Guard shortly after the start of the Korean War required a review of every maritime worker who loaded

or worked aboard any American ship, regardless of cargo or destination. As with other loyalty-security reviews of McCarthyism, the identities of any accusers and even the nature of any accusations were typically kept secret from the accused. Nearly 3,000 seamen and longshoremen lost their jobs due to this program alone (Davis,1975: 61)

The nation was by no means united behind the policies and activities that have come to be identified as McCarthyism. There were many critics of various aspects of

McCarthyism, including many figures not generally noted for their liberalism. For example, in his overridden veto of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, President

Truman wrote, "In a free country, we punish men for the crimes they commit, but never for the opinions they have.” Truman also unsuccessfully vetoed the Taft-Hartley Act, which among other provisions denied trade unions National Labor Relations Board protection unless union leaders signed affidavits swearing they were not and had never been Communists. In 1953, after he had left office, Truman criticized the current

Eisenhower administration (Miller,2000: 189).

It is now evident that the present administration has fully embraced, for political advantage, McCarthyism. I am not referring to the Senator from Wisconsin. He is only important in that his name has taken on the dictionary meaning of the word. It is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of the due process law. It is the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism or security.

It is the rise to power of the demagogue who lives on untruth; it is the spreading of fear and the destruction of faith in every level of society.

In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision in “Alder v. Board of

Education of New York”, thus approving a law that allowed state loyalty review boards to fire teachers deemed "subversive." In his dissenting opinion, Justice William O.

Douglas wrote: "The present law proceeds on a principle repugnant to our society - guilt by association. What happens under this law is typical of what happens in a police state.

Teachers are under constant surveillance; their pasts are combed for signs of disloyalty; their utterances are watched for clues to dangerous thoughts." (Schrecker,1992: 193).

One of the most influential opponents of McCarthyism was the famed CBS newscaster and analyst Edward R. Murrow. On October 20, 1953, Murrow's show See It

Now aired an episode about the dismissal of Milo Radulovich, a former reserve Air Force lieutenant who was accused of associating with Communists. The show was strongly critical of the Air Force's methods, which included presenting evidence in a sealed envelope that Radulovich and his attorney were not allowed to open. On March 9, 1954,

See It Now aired another episode on the issue of McCarthyism, this one attacking Joseph

McCarthy himself. Titled "A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy," it used footage of

McCarthy speeches to portray him as dishonest, reckless and abusive toward witnesses and prominent Americans. In his concluding comment (Gibson,1988: 139).

The excesses of the Red Scare and McCarthyism did not go unnoticed. The

Army–McCarthy hearings in 1954 marked the apex of Cold War fears, with Joseph

McCarthy discredited in the full glare of TV lights. The release of the VENONA transcripts and material from Eastern Bloc intelligence archives after the collapse of the

Soviet Union in 1992, added more material for the discussion of what had been going on

during the 1950s. The Soviet records show that Western anti-communists grossly overestimated the actual capacity of the Soviets to do harm through military and economic means - long believing, for example, that Soviet nuclear missile technology was vastly superior to that of the U.S., and also grossly overestimating other measures of

Soviet strength such as annual GNP. Records show that the Eastern Bloc did some spying on the West in the same manner the West was spying on the Eastern Bloc. On the other hand, many of the specific people investigated by the McCarthy hearings (such as playwright Arthur Miller) turned out not to have played any part whatsoever in Soviet activities. Likewise, the Soviets typically did not use the methods suspected by McCarthy and his ilk, who often engaged in fantastic witch hunts unrelated to Soviet efforts at infiltration, espionage and subversion (Herson, 1975: 67).

Many acknowledge the crimes of stalinist regimes, but also point out that the

American government has supported dictatorships of their own, which were notorious for their brutality, such as the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran] and Pinochet of

Chile.They state that while the death tolls may be different, the fact that there were so many US-supported anti-democratic governments reveals a troubling hypocrisy of bragging about democracy at home while crushing it abroad and using anti-communist rhetoric to justify it.

Though the interpretation of the Red Scare might seem to be of only historical interest following the end of the Cold War, the political divisions it created in the United

States continue to manifest themselves, and the politics and history of anti-communism in the United States are still contentious. One source of controversy is that illegal actions

taken against the radical left during the Palmer and McCarthy periods are viewed as providing a historical template for similar actions against Muslim following the

September 11th terrorist attacks, an analogy made explicit both by left-wing opponents of such actions such as the American Civil Liberties Union and right-wing proponents

(McClosky,1964:137).

CHAPTER THREE: BACKGROUND TO POETS

3.1. MEENA KESHWAR KAMAL AS A SOCIAL ACTIVIST

AND POET

Meena was born in Kabul in 1957 into a comfortably middle-class family. Meena was one of ten children, with pleasures and privileges unknown to the vast majority of

Afghan women. She was privileged, too, as part of the Pashtun ethnic majority, since many other ethnic groups, such as the Tajiks and the Hazara, faced several discrimination. During her school days, students in Kabul and other Afghan cities were deeply engaged in social activism and rising mass movements. She left the university to devote herself as a social activist to organize and educate women. In pursuit of her cause for gaining the right of freedom of expression and conducting political activities, Meena laid the foundation of RAWA in 1977. This organization was meant to give voice to the deprived and silenced women of Afghanistan. She started a campaign against the Russian

forces and their puppet regime in 1979 and organized numerous processions and meetings in schools, colleges and at Kabul University to raise public consciousness.

Another great service rendered by her for the Afghan women is the launching of a bilingual magazine, Payam-e-Zan (Women's Message) in 1981. Through this magazine

RAWA has been projecting the cause of Afghan women boldly and effectively. Payam-e-

Zan has constantly exposed the criminal nature of fundamentalist groups. Meena also established Watan Schools for refugee children, a hospital and handicraft centers for refugee women in Pakistan to support Afghan women financially.

At the end of 1981 by invitation of the French Government, Meena represented the Afghan resistance movement at the French Socialist Party Congress. The Soviet delegation at the Congress, headed by Boris Ponamaryev, shamefacedly left the hall as participants cheered when Meena started waving a victory sign. Besides France, she also visited several other European countries and met their prominent personalities. Her active social work and effective advocacy against the views of the fundamentalists and the puppet regime provoked the wrath of the Russians and the fundamentalist forces alike and she was assassinated by agents of KHAD (Afghanistan branch of KGB) and their fundamentalist accomplices in Quetta, Pakistan, on 4 February 1987 (Chavis, 2003: 19-

20).

Topically, Meena focus on the struggles of Afghan culture, particularly women, and she witness against societies that are racist, sexist, and violent. Her writings also focus on the role of women of color in culture and history. Kamal is a respected figure in the liberal political community for her support of unconventional and unpopular views as

a matter of principle. She is an open bisexual, and sympathetic of people of all sexualities, ethnicities, and races.

As a poet, Meena Keshwar Kamal deals with many issues, most of which concern historical and modern race problems in Afghanistan. She brings to national attention the cruelty and inhumane abuse that Afghan women have endured. She pointed lots of issues about female situation in Afghanistan. One of these issues is her seemingly contrasting treatment of males and females. She is capable of writing the life stories of Afghan women who have struggled within themselves to discover who they are.

Meena Keshwar Kamal began her work to empower the women of Afghanistan.

She founded the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan to provide education, shelter, and healthcare. She launched the feminist magazine Payam-e- Zan

(Women’s Message) Attaining international recognition for her work, she made several trips to Western Europe to testify of the plight of women in Afghanistan and surrounding refugee camps.

Her legacy lives on through RAWA, whose existence became more essential with the institution of the extreme fundamentalist rule of the Taliban. Although she was only

30 years old when she died, Meena had already planted the seeds of an Afghan women’s rights movement based on the power of knowledge. As an Afghan woman Meena was faced with a conundrum and she was a writer’s disposition (Chavis, 2003: 68).

She needed to read, to learn and to put pen to paper and translate her impressions into words. She needed to do these things to breathe. As she explained in one of her poems, “From this cup of my lips comes a song”; it captures my singing soul, my song.

Sima states that Meena seems almost to anticipate her own fate and posthumous fame, while more generally wishing for a peace. She continues this line of questioning by asking if this utterance and these memories could provide a mirror of hope for those watching the deadly wave of oppression. She uses more straightforward language to express her compassion for the poorest women of her country, who appear almost like specters. Her poems always begin and end with a metaphor, hopeful in its promise of life in the desert. Kamal’s story is bittersweet; her death cannot take away the fact that she overcame these exceptional challenges to become a published Afghan women poet. Her poems have been translated into several languages, including English, French and Italian.

Though she was very young, Meena was gaining increasing notice as a Persian poet of importance. One of her admirers includes literature expert Leili Anvar, who has translated a selection of Meena’s poems in to French said that she is still alive in the heart of many people because of her poem and her braveness against enemy (2002: 46).

3.2. SYLVIA PLATH AS A SOCIAL ACTIVIST AND POET

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 27 October 1932, the first of child of Otto Plath and his second wife, Aurelia Schober Plath. Otto Plath was forty- seven at the time of his daughter’s birth, twenty-one years older than his wife, and a dominant patriarchal presence in the household. He had immigrated to the United States from Grabow, a town in the “Polish Corridor” (later called by Plath a “manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia”) in 1901. Estranged from his devoutly Lutheran family because of his conversion to Darwinism, Otto Plath independently pursued advanced studies in languages, biology, zoology, and entomology, eventually receiving a doctorate from Harvard in 1928 for research into the life cycle of the bumblebee. Aurelia

Schober had been born in the United States to Austrian parents, and had worked as a high-school teacher of languages before her marriage at the age of twenty-two. From both parents, Plath seems to have inherited her strong idealism and drive toward self- improvement, and perhaps also an immigrant’s sense of the precariousness of worldly success, a sense of its having to be continually renewed and bolstered. Otto Plath died

following an operation to amputate a gangrenous leg in 1940, when Sylvia was eight and her brother, Warren, five (Beauvior,1997: 163).

Following Otto Plath’s death, the family moved inland from Winthrop to

Wellesley, Massachusetts. At this early stage in her life, Sylvia Plath was already embarked on a brilliant academic career, aspiring with immense discipline and hard work to become the ideal all round students. She won a scholarship to study at Smith College, where she maintained her high grade average while enjoying an active social life, serving as an editor of the Smith Review, and publishing stories in “Seventeen, the Christian

Science Monitor”, and Mademoiselle. Plath was later to find the transition from her initial success as a precocious student, publishing in the “slicks,” as she called them, to becoming a more mature and considered writer a difficult one. As a teenager she had mastered the art of tailoring her writing to meet the perceived requirements of the magazines in which she wanted to publish, and finding her own independent voice was to a gradual and often painful process.

In June 1953, at the end of her second year at Smith, Plath embarked on a guest editorship for Mademoiselle in New York City, together with nineteen other young high achievers from college all over the country. She later satirized this period in her strongly autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar”, and from her descriptions of the overwhelming summer heat of the city, he exhausting routine of hard work and socializing, and the competitive cattiness of the young women with whom she was thrown, it is clear that

Plath did not enjoy her stint on Mademoiselle as much as she felt she ought to have, but was left drained by the experience. On returning home to Wellesley, she was dismayed to

discover that she had not been accepted for Frank O’Connor’s summer writing class at insomnia, and panicking at her inability to impose a disciplined routine on herself, Plath began to slip into depression. The family doctor prescribed sleeping pills and referred her to a psychiatrist, who recommended electroconvulsive therapy after a brief consultation.

The ECT was ineptly administered, and the resulting pain and terror that Plath suffered apparently propelled her toward suicide (Phillips, 1977: 237).

On 24 August she hid herself in the family basement and took a massive overdose of sleeping pills. Having vomited up a large quantity of pills, she lay undiscovered in a comatose state for two days, while police searched the surrounding area for her. She was eventually discovered and brought to the psychiatric wing of Massachusetts General

Hospital. Her physical health was recovered, but the severity of her mental condition became clear, and she was transferred to Mclean Hospital in Belmont, Olive Higgins

Prouty. Plath remained at Mclean (whose other illustrious literary patients had included

Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton) until February 1954, when she was judged fit to return to Smith. The Freudian analysis she underwent as part of her treatment at Mclean was to have a profound influence on her writing. In 1958, while living in Boston with her husband, Ted Hughes, Plath voluntarily reentered analysis with her Mclean psychiatrist

Dr. Ruth Beuscher, and “family romance.” Plath’s artistic debt to her analysis, and the rather programmatic narrative version of the traumatic events of her life with which it seemed to furnish her, remains one of the more controversial aspects of her biography

(Lameyer, 1977: 92).

Plath returned to Smith in February 1954, and resumed her challenging work and social schedule, graduating summa cum laude in 1955. In the autumn of that year, she embarked on a master’s degree course at Newnham College, Cambridge. At a party in

Cambridge in February 1956, she met the young English poet Ted Hughes. The couple married within four months of their first meeting, in a ceremony that took place in

London on 16 June 1956. They spent their honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain, and then returned to Cambridge, where Plath completed her studies, graduating with a master’s degree in 1957. The couple moved back to the United States in the summer of that year,

Plath to take up a teaching job at Smith College, and Hughes to teach and write. Her journals testify to Plath’s difficulties with teaching and her frustration with the lack of time it afforded her to concentrate on her poetry and prose. As Margaret mentioned that during the difficult year of 1957-1958 Plath and Hughes resolved to try and live by their writing. They spent the following year in Boston, where they met many writers, including

Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, and Adrienne Rich. Plath participated in

Robert Lowell’s writing workshop at Boston University for a time, and in December

1958 reentered psychotherapy with Dr. Ruth Beuscher (1982:170).

Plath and her husband spent the summer of 1958 traveling across the United

States by car, returning home in late August. The autumn of 1959 saw them at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Spring, New York. Her stay there was to be a productive time for Plath. She was by this time pregnant with her first child, and many of the poems she wrote at Yaddo, including the breakthrough sequence “Poem for a Birthday” posits a connection between pregnancy and her personal reemergence after the nightmare of

psychological disintegration and “electrocution” by ECT. As well as this important poems, Plath also wrote several successful lyrics at Yaddo, including “Mushrooms” and “

The Colossus,” which was to become the title poem of her first collection.

According Ronald, in 1959, Plath and Hughes left the United States for England, where they intended to settle and raise a family. Until August 1961 they lived in London, thereafter they moved to Court Green, a former rectory in the village of North Tawton in

Devon. While in Devon, Plath began work on the poems that would eventually be gathered into the Ariel volum. Between September and December 1962, she produced as many as forty lyric poems of immense power, often writing two in a day (1977: 217).

In December, tired of her enforced isolation in Devon, but exultant at her creative breakthrough, Plath moved back to London with her children. She continued to write poems, but with less ferocity than the initial outburst of the autumn. It seems she was also working on a second novel, which dealt with the subject of her marriage. The manuscript of this work, if it still exists, has never been released by Plath’s estate. “The Bell Jar” (a work Plath dismissed to friends as “a potboiler,” probably because of the extremely unfavorable biographical portraits it contained) was published pseudonymously by

Heinemann in January 1963. However, difficulties with her new flat and with finding a nanny for her children, as well as ill health and the harshest winter England had seen for many years, combined to make her seriously depressed. Despite the ministrations of concerned friends and of her doctor, Plath was clearly unable to cope, and she gassed herself in the kitchen of her flat in the early hours of 11 February, having first taken steps

to ensure the safety of her two children, who were asleep in an upstairs bedroom. She was thirty years of age (Majumdar, 2002: 267).

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is a poet whose troubled life and powerful work remains a source of controversy. She was precociously intelligent, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. The same year her German father, Otto, died suddenly, a trauma which surfaces in her poetry repeatedly. Plath suffered from bouts of severe depression throughout her life, her first serious breakdown occurring in 1953 and later remembered in her autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar” (1963). This episode led to her first suicide attempt, but she recovered and graduated from Smith College, Massachusetts before winning a Fullbright Scholarship to Cambridge University. By this time Hughes was established as a significant new voice in British poetry, but now Plath's own first collection The Colossus was published and began to receive attention. After the birth of their son in 1962 their marriage became increasingly fraught with Plath's mental instability and Hughes' infidelity both likely contributing factors. The couple separated and Plath took the children to live with her in London. Debate has raged ever since over who was to blame for Plath's early death, the feminist movement adopting her as an icon and interpreting Hughes' role as her literary executor, particularly his destruction of her final journal, as continuing a patriarchal oppression she had experienced in life. More recently this interpretation has been challenged, not least by Hughes himself in his collection “Birthday Letters”, which give his view of their marriage in a series of tender and searing poems. Plath's own work, with its intense sometimes shocking use of metaphor and her exploration of extreme states of mind, refuses to be overshadowed by

her tragic biography: in 1982 she became the first poet to be posthumously awarded the

Pulitzer Prize (Butscher, 1977: 137).

Her two Archive poems are fine examples of her arresting style and fearless examination of self and society. 'Parliament Hill Fields' was written after she had experienced a miscarriage in February 1961 and shows her ability to invest external landscape with the urgency of psychic disturbance. In her introduction to this poem,

Plath's comments suggest that the poem's narrator is a third party, not herself. This is revealing: whilst considered a leading "confessional" poet, Plath often uses dramatic monologue, as in her famous poem “The Applicant”. In this devastating satire on the conventional marriage, she uses the sales-speak of modern commerce to expose society's de-humanizing expectations. Both poems show Plath's skill in manipulating the sound of language: the rich alliteration and assonance of Parliament Hill Fields creating a palpable sense of place, whilst the short lines of “The Applicant” contribute to its aggressive tone, as encapsulated in her repeated use of the pronoun "it".

Even despite such absences, however, the totality of Plath’s published work indicates what a remarkably precocious and multifaceted talent she possessed. Many of the early stories contained in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams are somewhat stilted, and amply illustrate what Plath wrote about so eloquently in the journals, her struggle to imbue her material with convincing life and psychological insight. An early success was

“Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit,” written when Plath was twenty-three.

This semiautobiographical story is set in Plath’s childhood during World War II, and deals subtly with the theme of discrimination against German- Americans in this period.

However, such success in prose before 1960 was the exception for Plath. It is in the later, more directly autobiographical pieces, such as “America! America!” or “Ocean 1212 W”

(Kopp, 1977: 361).

Sylvia Plath is a writer with a life that generated a lot of interest. The interest that followed Plath was a result of her highly personal writings that eventually lead into her suicide. Her works closely reflect her life, and by understanding the events in Plath’s life her poetry and prose becomes clearer to the reader. Sylvia Plath became a sort of a martyr for women’s rights. Since the Bell Jar had a female character that wanted more than her set female role, it is considered an early feminist text. She struggled to reach a professional goal and her main character, Esther sees herself as something other than a housewife. Her character endures struggle and criticism, similar struggles that Plath endures. Plath faces the balance of career, family, marriage, and her female position.

Happiness is a description of Plath’s life that flickers altogether too much, and from magnificent explosions of light to the somber absence of flame. Her candle burnt solidly throughout her earlier years, but as her experiences brought her to more intimate exploration of life, Sylvia found herself spiraling into vicious cycles of depression involving sickness, and instability.

Sylvia Plath's life and poetry are strongly and clearly related. But critical focus on the biographical element in her work tends to diminish the standing of her poetry. Those who attempt to read the life through the poems are proceeding contrary to what Plath intended and what she deserves. This does not mean, of course, that knowledge of Plath's life is valueless or that it will not sometimes enhance some readings of the poems. It only

means that the poems in Ariel, for instance, were written to be read by readers who knew little about the lives of Plath, Hughes, or anyone they knew. In the wake of Plath's death, of course, it is nearly impossible to become the ideal reader for whom the poems were planned. But critics of all kinds have gradually come to see that it is the work rather than the life that matters or, at least, that while both may matter they cannot be judged by each other. Feminist critics, for example, have been easily distracted by the facts of Plath's life.

But a review of essays by a number of feminist critics shows how the criticism has progressed from lamenting that Plath died too soon to be saved by feminism to analyzing the poetry in terms of gender issues raised by her work. If biographical questions have only extremely limited relevance to understanding Plath's poetry then it should be possible to read the works without such information. Ironically it is a poem such as

"Daddy," where biographical information is often seen as very important (Rajani, 2000:

38-40).

Plath has been so strong that questions about autobiography and poetry have dominated discussions of her work to the detriment of literary analysis. As Marsack describes this long-term trend, generally women readers and critics "have felt that if

[Plath] had been able to hang on--with the help of good female friends--she might have discovered an identity she could live with as the women's movement gained strength in the decade that followed her death" (1975: 208). Needless to say, had feminist criticism remained mired in this kind of approach there would be little to say about it. But it is important to note that such criticism was not really distinct from that of any other practitioners of "the convention of reading her poems, at face value, as autobiographical

or confessional" and as constituting a type of discourse which "'owns up to' the truth of the author's life and personality" (Phillips, 1977:91).

CHAPTER FOUR: THE REPRESENTATOIN OF WOMEN IN MEENA KESHWAR KAMAL’S AND SYLVIA PLATH’S POEMS

4.1. The Women’s Issue in Meena Keshwar Kamal’s Poems

4.1.1 “I Will Never Return”

I’m the woman who has awoken

I’ve arisen and become a tempest through the ashes of my burnt children

I’ve arisen from the rivulets of my brother’s blood

My nation’s wrath has empowered me

My ruined and burnt villages fill me with hatred against the enemy

Meena’s poem “I Will Never Return” is a poem that encourages women to fight for their freedom. Throughout the poem, Meena repeats the words “women”, “awaken”, and

“never return” very skillfully in order to raise women’s consciousness and tell them that it is not the time to sleep. It is the time to stand up and struggle for their rights. Almost all of the lines in the poem begins with the pronoun “I” and “My” to state that she is an ordinary one like all other men and women. She wants to stand like Himalaya Mountain and call out the word freedom to all human beings in the world. She is very proud of herself that she has been awaken, and she tries to awaken others as well. Nothing can enslave Meena. She says goodbye to “golden bracelets”. She doesn’t care about a luxurious life, but she cares about a free life. She wants to put away all the things that tie

her up and prevent her from flying. She says that she has found the right way, and she will go a head in this path. She seems very brave in this poem. She resembles to Rostam, hero of Shahnamah by Ferdowsy or Achillis, hero of Iliad by Homer. Courageously, she claims that she is as brave as his martyred brothers, and she wants to take revenge. She cannot tolerate to see her country burnt and destroyed. She cannot see the children of her country barefoot and homeless. She doesn’t want to see a bride with mourning clothes.

All these sad things make her like a lion that fears from nothing and nothing can stop her from reaching freedom.

I’m the woman who has awoken

I’ve found my path and will never return.

I’ve seen barefoot, wandering and homeless children

I’ve seen henna-handed brides with mourning clothes

I’ve been reborn amidst epics of resistance and courage

Alice Walker (2003) explained how women of Afghanistan suffer from enemy and they lost their rights and image in the society, as she wrote in her book “Meena

Heroine of Afghanistan” the power of patriarchy, which women have no choice of husband. They couldn’t choose their husbands and they had no choice of having children, so they gave birth, but these children are doomed to live under bad conditions. Meena uses conflicting words to give the sense of irony, brides should be happy of marriage, but they are not in fact, she likens this situation to a funeral and said that women have no right of speech before or after marriage and they are like death people (45).

I’m the woman, who has awoken,

I’ve found my path and will never return.

I’ve opened closed doors of ignorance

I’ve said farewell to all golden bracelets

Oh compatriot, I’m not what I was

According to Ellis Meena makes a reference again to patriarchy in the other part of her poem and resembles it to a monster that can never be fed. At the end of her poem she tries to give the message that, the path that she has chosen is full of cruelty and therefore, she can die, but she would never give up for freedom and women rights. She believes that this war will end in victory, and she is ready to sacrifice her life for this ideal (2000:198).

4.1.2. “Freedom and Democracy”

O’ freedom sun,

Thrust in darkness,

Democracy will cure the wounds,

Which emerge from your blood-stained soil

O’ saddened nation,

In “Freedom and Democracy” the words and phrases that are consciously chosen are all impressive. She starts with the sentence “O’ freedom sun, thrust in darkness. She likens freedom to the sun that can illuminate slavery and ignorance. Walker mentioned in the introduction of his book that this is a story the world must learn by heart. Afghanistan

clearly demonstrates our future as a planet if we do not immediately make the decision to honor the feminine. He adds that Meena, having bravely taken word of her people’s desperate plight to the ears of the world, and having accepted exile as the price for doing so, continued her endless work to help her war-devoured country. People have always struggled for democracy throughout the history. These wars have casted to the blood of millions of people. Meena in the third line of her poem says that it worth’s people’s blood to run for democracy. All revolutions have occurred for democracy and a better life

(2003:45).

O’ saddened nation, fight your antagonists. This is the other line of the poem that persuades people to wake up and resist against enemies. It seems that this line is linked to the next two lines as she says “Take revenge for your martyrs, on the enemy of democracy and women” (Meena). As Meena was an Afghan human right defender, she opposed both the communist regime and Mujahedeen. According to RAWA organization

Meena asks people to stand and take revenge from the communist regime of that time. In the same way, she blames Mujahedeen for their thoughts and bad behavior toward women. All these slogans lead to her death. In the remaining part of poem, we can see that Meena states that she and her followers will bring democracy to both men and women, even if it costs to their lives.

4.1.3. “For Women of Afghanistan”

As I walk in the streets of Kabul,

Behind the painted windows,

There are broken hearts, broken women.

There are different kinds of people in the world, and with so many people there are many ways to respond to different problems. For example, when some people lose somebody close to them they act as if nothing has happened, while others seem to stop their lives altogether. The poem “For Women of Afghanistan” is mostly about the self conflict of women who are suffering from the civil war which was existing. According to

Ansary what Meena wants to focus on in her poem is that the Afghan women and the innocent women’s life condition are very painful and sorrow. Afghan women in these years of war live as humans with hearts broken and hopeless about their future. As she states in the line “ As I walk in the streets of Kabul behind the painted windows” The main reason is that the male family like husbands and elder sons who were responsible for providing meal and sanitation are killed by the stray bullets in the war. In the following lines she states that once there were teacher, doctor or professors, but at this moment there are no such people in the society (2002:97).

Upon all these matters psychology, even in its present conjectural states, has a direct bearing. The critic is, throughout, judging of experiences of states of mind and these feelings she harbors are very powerful, and she picks a powerful topic to compare them with. Rashid states the terrible regime of that time seems appropriate for her, to

emphasize the power of what she feels. However, she does not come right out and state this. It is alluded to very slowly and she begins by placing a few words into the poem, then moving on to talking about women situation. She transitions into the next step of her story so smoothly, that you will not notice her clues unless you watch carefully. As

Meena explains in the poem that in each family the woman is a widow surrounded by her hungry children asking for food and these are their own male family covered in blood in veils. One can see nothing on streets and roads, but human blood. To talk about children, they cannot smell any food around, but only blood. Their bodies are exposed having no clothing to cover them. They don’t hear properly due to hunger; they only sound they hear is the voice of their hungry stomachs. Children cry for food inside the house, but outside there is shooting of rockets and missiles by the warriors, who don’t care about women or children (2001: 158).

They are the stones in the back of line,

Their voices not allowed to come out of their dried mouths.

Butterflies flying by have no color in Afghan women’s eyes

For they cant see nothing but blood shaded streets

The symbols that used by Meena to set the tone for the poem is found in recurring references to the “blood” and “shooting” as well as other images relating to these, such as

“terror”, “bodies” and “women”. It is with this image of the words that she gives the reader an image of it as an overpowering force, indicating the significance that this event has played in her life and thousands of other women. In Meena’s poem, metaphors are existing and the speaker describes a negative event in which she is experiencing pain. For

example, the line about "As the voices break away not coming out but pressing hard" represents the pain and hopeless. Her choice of words and phrases express her feelings about the inner problem of women as well as the children and society. Wahab indicate that Afghan woman’s hearts are full of sorrows and sadness; they want to rescue themselves from this situation, but there is no one to hear their yelling for help. The only survivals for these Afghan women are to be killed in this bloody war.

In Conclusion, as you can see this poem was a question that how women are facing problem in the society and how it just hits you so suddenly. The poem is showing the darker side which was usually held inside her and other women. The way she would let out her emotions was through her poems that’s why it happens to be that she wrote most of her work right before she killed (2007: 129).

4.1.4. “Arise Oh Women”

With the poem’s title “Arise Oh Women” we can assume immediately that the poet feels a strong affection to injustices and prejudices. This poem is written for two clear and strong messages. First the image of enemy in Afghanistan during the, Soviet Union time, and second it gives the idea of suffering women in the male dominance society.

Benard pointed out that how the brutal male dominance has raised the hatred of women.

Meena used very simple language in her poem but the words are so meaningful and strong. As she said in the second line of the poem “As a flood of wrath and hatred” here she tries to give the image of women as a flood that once come and take everything with itself so women are very strong and they can achieve their rights and wishes. In the

following of the poem she explains that women are extremely provoked against the men and the regime of that time that enslaves them. It invites women to follow democracy and insist that it is their way to freedom as she said in the line “The flag of our freedom.” In additions, the poet says if women remain silent their problems will increase and they will have to struggle more. Therefore, hear your conscience and care for your honor and in the name of Afghan dignity don’t be silent, stand up for your right and free yourselves from the slavery of men (2002:169).

In the coming lines Meena encourage women to be strong and don’t put limit on themselves and there are so many dreams, are waiting to be realized. She states that reach for your peak and your goal the longer you carry a problem, the heavier it gets. So remember that a little love goes a long way and you all should arise and fight for your country and your freedom.

Breaking the chains of slavery

Kindle your shining struggle

Do not delay

Call on the land of blood

In this era

Against the enemies

She indicates in these lines that women are dangerous and they can do men harm.

Because women suffer in a patriarchal society, Meena declares war by calling on all women to be merciless towards those who threaten them. Throughout Meena’s poetry

one of the messages she sends out to her readers is that a man’s world is different from a woman’s world, just as their emotions are different from one another’s. The cycle of poem on the world of bees implies women imagining life in a world without men, because these bees are independent and strong without their drones. She intends to show that women are the ones who produce the honey or (art) and the drones. As Belk states that she writes stillborn poetry with feeling of freedom and is able to speak her own voice by using some words in the poem like “burning, injured heart, slavery, etc.” to represents the force, emotion, and subconscious of the inner conflict of women and all of which are separated from the active, daily personality of women (1992:87).

Finally with references male influence are forthcoming and direct, she also portrays her desperate need for domination from the male, and this sets her aside from the stereotypical, strong and independent feminist, with no need for any kind of male involvement. Meena not only exploring the ideological transformation but also she addressed younger women’s attitudes towards women’s place and roles in society. She suggests that the next generation, feeling that the choices are there, chooses to throw these choices away assuming that they are going to stay. If each generation does not keep fighting, in another twenty years time one will be back at the fifties, and that is a danger.

4.1.5. “How Would It Feel”

How would it feel

To walk down the streets of your country and not be known

How would it feel

To be enslaved by your own husband….

The poet expresses her complete hopelessness in a low spirited tone and her

“disillusionment” is stated effectively in the poem. In the first line, she starts with the sense that she does not belong to anywhere in this world by saying “How would it feel” as if she has no place to go. In other words, she wants to give us the feelings as if the world does not want her, when announces that the line “To walk down the streets of your country and not be known” she means that the meaning of her life is extinguished.

Brodsky declares that Meena feels, she doesn’t have a soul and does not exist. In other words, how much she values poetry is actually her only concern. Life has no meaning for her because her heart is exhausted and her dreams cannot come true. As we know illusions differ from reality so she learns that there is no hope to be a women and society will always ignore her for being a women. The second line starts with a disappointment on her present condition because no joy left in her life as she used the words which has strong image of hopeless. Once life had an aesthetic meaning with joy and it gave her a sense of belonging and appreciation but right now she experience that joy is all dead and it will never enliven again in to her life. She pointed out the image of stars to refer to the hope and light that once existed in her life. She longs for her past but it would never be the same again. The poem as it implies that the poet is tied with a hard metal chain that

she cannot set herself free. She is questioning those who daringly had the courage to disrupt her own dreams as she says in line “with meaningless cries for help”, stole her innocent and precious hopes and made her life miserable. She states her pain by using the word “beaten, enslaved, raped and death.” By reading these lines one can easily understand that how men dominate exist in our society and women are used only as second class and image of sex and torture. According to Walker the image of “women” which discuss in the poem is that she cannot see her future clearly as she explained in the coming line of poems that she does not want to be questioned about her muse and inspiration which is “love”. She wants to say that she is a poet and knows what “love” is and without it she will not be able to be creative. Although, she point out her disillusionment that nothing encourages her life, she informs the reader that, women are strong and they can fight in order to be accepted in the society by men (2003: 209).

How would it feel

To be imprisoned from the outside

Forbidden to work

To have an education

Feeling life is not worth living for

In the following lines of poem she states that she cannot feel free to express what she wants for instance, the word “imprisoned” is indicating her discouragement which is highlighted. In the two final lines of the poem, she used very strong words which clearly show the image of slave, identity and discrimination against women in the society by

saying the line “To feel unworthy of your own name.” Here she is not able to speak out as a woman but she feels that in the future, people would understand how she is oppressed.

Finally, the poet figuratively likens herself to a “caged” bird that is deprived of flight or in other words, she does not feel free to sing her songs in the way she wants as if she is in a prison and cannot get out of it. We are aware of her complete “melancholy” and her distress that as a reader we can imagine that she misses her previous days when she again likens herself to a bird that had wings to fly, but now the wings are closed and do not let her move. So in a way she means that although physically she is alive, but she is not in spirit. As her statement is very direct and severe when she says, this is the fate of an Afghan woman. She wants to underline that all Afghan women suffer like her. In other words, she announces that in order to understand her; one must be an Afghan woman.

4.2. The Women’s Issue in Sylvia Plath’s Poems

4.2.1. “Lady Lazarus”

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it-----

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

The twenty-eight lines that comprise the form of “Lady Lazarus” whether consciously or unconsciously chosen by Plath, convey the significance of the number three inherent in elementary number symbolism, the number three representing the sierra, fold nature of life, death and rebirth; beginning, middle and end; male, female, child; heaven; There are also a lot of “trios of women represented in mythology and art-triple goddess, three fates, three sirens, three witches, three furies and three graces (Calter,

1975: 6). Since Plath was encouraged by Hughes to read Robert Graves’s book, “The

White Goddess”, (McNeil, 1968: 477). She may have found Grave’s references to the

“Goddess of Birth, Love and Death” (Calter 5) to be inspirational. Regardless of Plath’s original intention for selecting this specific poetic form, her choice of it enhances the archetypal elements and mood of the work.

According to Thomas Sylvia suffers greatly, as much as the Jews did in the holocaust, which is expressed though the various representations of Nazi torment techqunices and devices. The lamp shade, starvation causing the eye pits to show for example, gaunt. She is comparing herself to a Jew and she has made various attempts at dying, but is still here. Then next day, she'll be okay, after such suffering which she pointed in this line: "The sweet sour breath will vanish in a day." and "Soon, soon the flesh, the grave cave ate will be at home." It is showing the constant struggle and back and forth battle of the bipolar. "Ash Ash, you poke and stir, Flesh bone there is nothing there." is a line to her mother. She is implying that she is dead inside with emotions too abused to stir up by a concerned mother. The wedding ring symbolizes her marriage which didn't do much good also to make her happy. Most bipolar have many suicide attempts before the final one, they struggle between normalness depression, and hopelessness. I really do think that is what this poem is mostly about. Sylvia has managed to turn her misery into art, poetry, and her various ways of suicide and artist expression.

In Lady Lazarus she discusses about her fascination with killing herself, but immediately sets herself up as the victim with comparing the oppressed Jews. The poem isn't really telling a story, but it is one representative image after another. Plath seems out to destroy what she doesn't like about herself and it tells about sadism, masochism, character renewal (2001: 98).

As a result of analyzing a propulsive quality, the poem is contributed by the assonances (all, call, well, hell, real, call, cell, theatrical) and the tercets, succinctness adding to an inevitable motion towards the end. The repetitions also give her speech an

incantatory quality. Lady Lazarus, as she remembers her first death, is given a choice between life and death, who had to call and call, and deaths vocation, I guess you could say I have a call. The latter call to dying compels her in a way that the other does not. The process of renewal is exhilirating, a childish, triumphant shriek accompanies as she immolates herself. She rises out of the ashes, rejoicing in the power that she has over mere mortal men: I eat men like air.

A paperweight,

My featureless, fine

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.

Do I terrify?

Plath's resentment of those who care for her has always been evident in this piece, her frustration at their inability to understand her despair and unwillingness to carry on with her life, or indeed begin another one each time she 'rises' from a kind of death (her suicide attempts). She is overwhelmed by people pressuring her as she returns wearily to the same place, the same place and tries to start again. I do feel that a great deal of it is autobiographical but it also has inspiration from disparate sources. Axelrods, argues that there was so much more to her than her suicide attempts; there was so much more to her than being married to Ted Hughes; there was so much more to her than being a mother; there was so much more to her than being a poet. This is what those last two lines indicate that in her world, in her lifetime, it was fine even normal expected for a man to

have multiple facets of his character, but a woman was to the public one dimensional, and she was not, in fact she has risen, to overcome that dominate male perpetuation of what a woman is in her lifetime, because she goes on after her lifetime (1990: 198).

It is true that this poem is about death, and her love-hate relationship. The fact that Lazarus is now crowned "Lady" says something, that she associates with female power. Lazarus was someone in the Bible raised by God, but at the end, it seemed like she has gained power and now she has risen on her own out of the ash, from the dead without help from God or the doctor, like a pheonix with her red hair. Critics likening

Plath to a feminist writer would definitely cite her "eating men like air" to their advantage, and also the abovementioned point of her naming the poem "Lady Lazarus"

(Belk, 1973: 47).

Sylvia Plath doesn't only relate her poem to the Holocaust. She relates her poem to many different things. Rosenthal states that she changes throughout the poem so various types of audiences can relate to her and how she feels tortured. She indicates her poem to the Bible, to the Holocaust, to medical view points; she also relates her poem to things that were most likely lying on the desk while she wrote the poem. She knows how worried they are but she burns like a phoenix, and although she is ash, leaving little to remember her she warns both God and the Devil, which could merely represent faith. She refers to them as "Herr", oppressors, her enemy and warns them that she will rise again and will eat men like air. She will go on living and wreaking just as before, because although she may try to die, or she may get close like a cat but still she has nine times to die (1965: 69).

Finally, Lady Lazarus has a voice of courage, sarcasm, and wit. A voice coming from a place of strength, not emotional defeat and Sylvia Plath has proved to be one of the most acclaimed and appreciated works of poetry of all time. This is very strange, being as the poem, as well as most of Plath's work, became famous after the poet's death.

The poem, which displays a barrage of themes, can be taken many different ways. The speaker could be a creature, a person, or even some sort of spirit. In terms of a creature, it is definitely well-emphasized that the speaker could be a mythical phoenix or the speaker could be a survivor of some horrible experience.

4.2.2. “Daddy”

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

This incredibly powerful, angry poem speaks of the poet’s feeling towards her father. Plath’s father died when she was only a child and her troubled relationship with him was not allowed any resolution. Daddy marks the last stage in this devolution of discursive integrity; accroding to “Every woman adores a Fascist” the poem hopes from nursery rhyme to ritual exorcism, from enraged curse to adoring supplication, from

English to German. Plath directs the violence of melancholia at discourse itself, turing aganist the traditional elegiac use off the sign as restorer of the dead. Melancholic

mourners resist language, in Julia Kristeva’s view, because they are unwilling to accept substitutes for what they lost and the original loss is the child’s loss of the mother on entering into the father’s symbolic order (1971: 66- 68).

"Daddy I have had to kill you," recalls as the Zen pointed that if you meet the

Buddha on the road, kill him. It is a metaphorical killing. In the case of the Buddha, we are freeing ourselves from our mental image of who he should be. In the case of Daddy,

Sylvia is declaring herself free of the oppression and repression which, after his death, she continued to enforce on herself to perpetuate his memory.

Murphy explains that maybe he was so cold because she was really a Jew and he was Nazi. How could Daddy not love me, set me on his lap, make much of me? She hates him and wants to punish him for the pain she feels. She would like to tell him to his face, but cannot. The villagers punish him in a way she will never be able to do. At the same time, loving, and wanting to know and be close to him, she did what most of us do who have unresolved and paradoxical feelings of pain, love, and abandonment about a parent.

She found a man who would treat her the same way and married him (2003:263).

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Frazer demonstrated that Sylvia Plath's poem is fascinating. Not only because she manage to comment on both father and husband through clever metaphors of Hilter and vampire, but she also presents ambiguity in her anger. The first half (8 stanzas) of the poem seems to be directed at her father and the last half (also 8 stanzas) attacks her husband. Although Plath uses the “Hilter” metaphor with her father, she does not seem to attack him as she does her husband. On the contrary, she seems to be afraid of him.

Yet, she is still willing to embrace him "I used to pray to recover you". On the other hand, her comments towards her husband are more aggressive she uses fierce words to attack him: "brute," "devil," "vampire," and "bastard." (1969: 259)

The reseach shows that she seems to merge both into one at certain times

(ambiguity). She describes her husband as someone who resembles her father and even calls him "daddy" towards at the end of the poem. Also, could it possibly be that in the second stanza of the poem ("Daddy, I have had to kill you") she could be referring to her husband. After all, it seems that she wants to meet her father and no doubt, eliminate her husband. For me, the poem reeks of Freudian influence. The connection between Hughes and her father was discerned only after the collapse of her relationship with the former.

It's sort of her last word to Hughes, she's killing him off simultaneously with her dad "If

I've killed one man, I've killed two," she asserts.

As Martin indicates that, however, that much of the poem references Hughes to the black man or vampire, the red being Sylvia. She moves from the initial disintegration of losing her father, to searching for him, to creating him new Hughes. Once again, she is

powerless over his premature exit and in this instance she is able to control the rage, that is allow to come for boiling (1984: 231).

Within the poem, Plath undertakes an imaginative journey aimed at highlighting the flaws in her own life and the causes of them. An example of how the narrator travels on this imaginative journey is seen through her gradual acceptance of her father's death, and the fact that, although she idolized him, her father was neither flawless nor pivotal in her own development as a person. Plath alludes to the search of goodness in people and describes her own imaginative journey in attempting to fill the void of her father and realize her ideology that there is indeed goodness and perfection in the people around her.

As Rank pointed out that Plath's narrator comes to terms with reality that perfection doesn't exist, and didn't in her father by experiencing an epiphany, where she is awakened to the reality and shameful dynamics of society (1969: 524).

Plath is not only comparing her suffering to the Jews, I believe that deeper down she is trying to sort out her emotions concerning her father's ethnic race. How would a child feel to hear about the horrific actions of the Nazis and know that her father is

German. It is easy, for young people, to group all German's together need, I remind you of the line "I thought every German was you." Wallace assumes that even if her father wasn't involved with the Nazis, ask the majority of the people in Germany during the

Holocaust if they were Nazis and they most likely will say, of course not. But, it can be an action as well and the passivity of those people shows something. Her father probably wasn't even around then, I am by no means well versed in her biography, but to have her father connected to Germany, especially through language and appearance which she

mentions several times throughout the poem, and watching Eichmann's trial, must have given her a lot to think of (1979: 204).

Watts suggests that the poet's main vein of thought is the conflict between hating her dead father and worshipping him. In biographical terms, several of the events described can be eluded to Plath’s own life. Her father died when she was ten, an event which she did not come to terms with until much later. Spoken from the viewpoint of someone who seems to have never come to terms with her father’s death, the imagery throughout the poem appears almost volcanic and the impression given by the flood of emotion running throughout is that such feelings have been suppressed for a long time.

This impression is, I think, best shown by the imagery in the first stanza (1977:218).

Upon the surface, the uselessness of the single shoe is a reference to her fathers amputated leg it is no longer needed. Looking deeper the black shoe, Bustscher believe, that alludes to the repression of grief for her father and denial of the hatred which she has for him. Having never mourned him, the memories of past hurt is being let loose. The black shoe is a bind claustrophobic, suffocating. The use of black connotes death and darkness. The poet has hidden away in this shoe, this cage of suppressed emotion, which unsurprisingly builds up to become a lot of pressure. The foot, the bearer of weight in the carriage of the body, becomes a metaphor for the feelings weighing the poet down in all her years of being unable to express her anxieties. This is destructive, which is illustrated by the use of poor and white hidden away from the relief of coming to terms with his death, which the poet begins to shrivel emotionally. Barely daring to breathe or Achoo may in some ways illustrate the fear the poet has for her father. However I believe it

alludes to her fear of opening the floodgates of grief, of letting go the security that comes with ignoring her own feelings. In this stanza confusion is shown through the poet’s indecision, between staying in the shoe in obvious discomfort and letting out her anguish by daring to breathe. (1977: 79–81).

I believe that Sylvia Plath is stuck between seeing her father in the eyes of a child and the eyes of an adult. The way she writes using words such as "gobbledygoo" and

"Achoo" makes references towards her life as a child. She is still a daughter, who never grew out of the stage that all daughters go through, thinking their fathers are the closest thing to God there is. She is mad at her father for leaving (dying). She expresses her anger by comparing him to a Nazi, a vampire, a devil and a brute. This is evident in line when she says "Not God but a swastika." She marries a man who reminds her of her father, but after seven years the marriage fails. This poem has many underlying themes and is truly a work of art.

In conclusion, to appreciate this poem, one must distance oneself from the biographical reading and search for a deeper underlying theme rather than simply confessional poetry. While it may be true that Plath had a rather unstable emotional life, it is imperative that her poetry be recognised as painstakingly, briliantlly crafted art and not simply the rantings of a psychotic, delusional chronic depressant harbouring extreme rage towards her father. The use of holocaustic imagery is intended to both shock and engage the audience with strong associations and connotations of extreme horror and disgust. Plath did not intend to undermine the suffering of the Jews or create a direct comparison of her own suffering as compared to their incomprehensible torment, Plath

uses these images as vehicles for creating an atmosphere of horror and evil. Plath's depiction of her father as an evil Nazi, "Herr Lucifer", is used to distance herself from his god like presence (Roche, 1977: 305). Plath values and loves her father, but in order to deal with the extreme grief of his absence she transforms him into a monster which is more easily shunned and whose painful haunting memories can be exorcised by sticking

"a fat stake in his heart." Plath does not hate her father, she is expressing, through the speaker of the poem, her resentment of being unable to get through to him. This poem is not strictly autobiographical, although quite strongly influenced by Plath's tragic loss of her father, and it is essential poem about grief and the transitions from life to death. The speaker concludes the poem on a victorious note, "Daddy, you bastard, I'm through" which suggests that the speaker has overcome or suppressed their grief by disowning and disconnecting themselves by "bastardisation".

4.2.3. “Mirror”

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful-

The eye of the little god, four cornered.

Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Mirror,” symbolizes the troubled self of the woman, especially the woman artist who has to reject the given masks imposed on her by the patriarchal society and see herself as an artist and an individual. The mirror imagery in

Plath’s poetry, therefore, signifies the consciousness of the woman-speaker who verbalizes the creative process of a woman artist in the domain of male-dominated literature. The woman artist has to resist the critical and judgmental male gaze to arrive at her own autonomous self-expression.

Freedman believes that, Plath uses mirror as a symbol of female passivity, subjection, and Plath’s own conflicted self-identity caused by social pressures to reconcile the competing obligations of artistic and domestic life. The mirror represents the unfeeling male view of a woman and what is socially expected of her; possessing an idealized beauty and ever-lasting youth. As the persona ages over the years, the mirror cruelly reflects the changes in her appearance. Age becomes the persona’s and shortcoming and thus her source of anxiety and dismay. It claims to reflect the truth, and by implication, the representation of the patriarchal perception of a woman’s existence, her worth only as a beautiful object, and her worthlessness when she is no longer young and beautiful. Against the male’s definition of womanhood, which idealizes beauty and youth, the persona looks inside to discover the true self, what she was as a person and what she has become, maturing by age. The woman’s autonomous identity and perception of self are, therefore, in conflict with the stereotype of the dominant male society. The tension increases as the persona is perplexed by this identity crisis. If she chooses her inner self and her own independent definition of identity, when looking in the mirror, she no longer sees the beautiful girl, but the terrible fish (1993:152).

Research shows that personification is used in the poem creatively and effectively. This technique makes the poem more intriguing and original and it is which

makes the poem successful. The poet gives life to an object, which is the mirror, this creates perspective. It is effective in communicating the circumstances because it enables the poet to reflect the mood precisely amd simply. As mirror has no emotion and cannot depict events with prejudice the reader is able to get a description free of bias, to the situation, as opposed to the candle and the moon. The poet uses this device because it enables her to present her ideas and emotions in an interesting way.

The mirror is an object which reflects both the persona’s subordinate role and the urgency of her repressed speech. Freedman maintains that, “when the mirror announces its identity, it shoes an active speaker and it is not a passive reflector anymore and is rebellious to the traditionally assigned roles of woman” (1993: 157). It is, indeed, the persona, the woman in the mirror, who rebels against the established image of idealized womanhood. The terrible fish is the persona’s demon, the critical gaze which views her as aging and ugly. As Freedman states, “The fish is the woman as autonomous person and author. It is the role rejecting woman/mother who, even as she proclaims her acceptance of the task, refuses passivity to mirror, man, infant or whatever else is set before it” (1993: 166). The persona confesses the bitter reality of her present existence;

“In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me and old woman/ Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” The terrible fish, then, is the projection of the woman’s multi-dimensional identity; the socially imposed identity in conflict with a confused, self- perception by insisting that it is truthful and discreet, “Whatever I see I swallow immediately.” This conflict and the woman’s anxious demand for a true reflection of her very self are further silenced by the mirror.

The outcome of this search is the persona’s passive presence and her inability to confirm her own identity as Donna Richardson asserts; “the final image of the poem reinforces he dehumanizing effect of committing one’s identity to the shallow truth of physical appearance” .This indicates the complete erasure of the woman’s true identity and the confirmation of an imposed identity, a dehumanized version of self, a suppressed recognition of the male gaze. It denies the woman any degree of self-awareness to face her natural again process realistically. So, the mirror not only shoes the woman’s loss o youth and beauty, but it also indicates her loss of the power to express her identity in her own terms against a dictated perception of physical appearance (1991: 194).

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia, through her poem, tries to raise women's awareness towards their status, and thus, prepares them for rebellion against women's silence, submission and inferiority.

The phrase "like a terrible fish" further reinforces the idea of rebellion. Women's psyche doesn't merely consist in beauty, fairness and gentleness; it can turn out to terrible when women's rights are violated with no consideration.

While the mirror is insistent on its faithful refection of the woman’s appearance, the woman is searching for her inner self, a search coldly dismissed by the mirror which boats of its power over her, “I am important to her.” The woman’s helpless dependence on the mirror’s definition of her identity generates the source of complication for the persona’s quest for autonomy. However, the woman is acutely conscious of her current state of being: “In me and old woman/Rises toward her day after day like a terrible fish.”

Susan R. Van Dyne points out that, “In the dichotomizing of that body between the drowned but desirable young girl and the hideous spectre of death in the terrible fish we detect the bias of the male gaze, the flaw in the mirror that would represent itself as God”

.Only by moving past the critical gaze of the masculine perception can the woman progress towards the development of an autonomous self (1993: 87).

The first six lines of this poem are factual and generally free of emotions in reference to the mirror. They provide images of the exactness and sharp edges of the mirror. The last few lines of this stanza indicate that the mirror has formed some sort of relationship with the pink-speckled wall that it must face day after day. The line that says

"Now I am a lake" expresses some sort of change, because a lake is much more fluid and impermanent than a mirror. This change is the vanishing of youth in the woman, who now depends on the light of liars like a candle and the moon. The tears and the agitation of hands symbolize the frustration the woman feels when she sees herself in the mirror.

The reference to the fish is a metaphor for the youth that has slipped through her fingers, like a fish might do when you try to hold it. I really don't think this poem has any

underlying religious meaning to it like some people have said, that sounds like overanalyzing to me.

The reflection in the mirror is like her sub consciousness which is freed by the mirror's purity and speaks out through the mirror's point of view. This shows the power of the mirror, symbol of truth; even if one does not want to reveal the facts the truth is obvious and speaks for itself. Phillips, states that the mirror is not a God nor has some magical powers; it is just truthful and does not have preconceptions; unlike humans who are biased and superstitious. Telling or admitting the reality even to your self is not easy.

People tend to deny the truth and live in imaginary world where they are young and beautiful, that is the way she looks to the candles and the moon turning her back to the mirror who is reflecting it "faithfully" (1977: 198).

The issue of confirmation of self against the threat of erasure presents itself for the persona of “In Plaster” where she ties to confront her division into two selves; “This new absolutely white person and the yellow one” .The persona’s struggle culminates in her eventual rejection of the white and beautiful masks which covers her true self and threatens to annihilate the yellow and ugly body with its fallibilities and imperfection. As

Elisabeth Bronfen suggests, the tension accelerates because these two selves cannot coexist peacefully: “while the old self realized she is so dependent on this external role of perfection that she has quite forgotten how to walk and sit without her, she also realizes that her immaculately refashioned self functions like her own coffin, threatening to cover her up entirely, fully to encase her and take her place”. Eventually, the persona, in order to break the perfect image of purity and beauty, and to become her true self, needs to

“avenge herself by escaping from this casement, allowing it to Perish with emptiness”

(1998: 89).

Brennan pointed out that, mirror has the uncanny ability to show who we are not only on the surface but on the inside as well. Our true self is reflected on our faces and how we present ourselves daily; "only truthful". “The Eye of a Little God" should not be interpreted as a higher being. But more of a puppet-master, dictating how we should change our appearance to suit the rest of our daily lives; if we are going out and look a bit tired, we change our face coloring or brush our hair. We accessorize to suit the occasion. The mirror may be all knowing and truthful but it is ultimately ourselves who make the changes to appease the vision before us. As the mirror triggers conscious and unconscious memories of her life faithfully. On line thirteen it reads "I see her back, and reflect it faithfully" once again shows that truthful character of the mirror. Regardless of the fact she hates her reflection the women becomes dependent in the mirror, and on line fifteen you can see that relationship were it saws "I am important to her. She comes and goes." the phase "I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions." Shows that a mirror is not capable of showing anything else, and then what is put in front of it. The mirror shows no color and has no preference (1999: 202).

The phase "Now I am a lake" reveals the transformation of the mirror. The women then realize even outside of her home she can't escape the truth. It is obvious that she is unhappy with her reflection. On line fourteen it states "She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands," which implies that she is ageing, and it is difficult for her to except the ageing process with open arms. While she is crying the mirror sees it was a

reward and has no sympathy. The woman misses the youth and beauty of the young girl she was. On line seventeen it states "In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman." It is very difficult for the women to go though the aging process because she feels depressed and insignificant.

The last line of the poem "Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish," indicates that she feels insecure about her reflection. It is interesting that Plath chose a fish instead of any other animal. When Plath used a lake in place of a mirror she may have needed a creature that lived in a lake to compare her feeling of living in the mirror.

Freud accurately summarized that she is trying to point that a fish depends on water the same way the woman depends on the mirror. Usually fish are very glamorous animals because they come in all different shapes and sizes, but the women in the poem contradicts that stereotype. She sees herself as a something terrible because of her fading beauty. Sylvia Plath suffered from depression and had very little compassion for herself.

This poem shows how she was scared from the truth the mirror was showing her.

Throughout this poem there is a theme of the truth and lies. The poem "Mirror" is about a women torn between the true picture of herself and the distorted image others see of her

(1971: 399).

Finally, this story of the woman ends as the mirror narrates in a triumphal way declaring that it is important to her, she can not resist standing in front of it to find what she really is as suggested previously in. And each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness, here is another relationship that exist between the mirror and the woman; this relation portrays how it sees her, and so romantically its darkness is altered by the

woman's face. This may also suggest the regularity and the monotony of the process in which she appear. An additional illustration would be the similarity of the woman's days in the mirror and an old woman in it. So it can conclude that the mirror has watched her from the beginning of her life, observing her as she grows to a young woman and observing her as she withers and languishes to an old one.

4.2.4. “Mystic”

The air is a mill of hooks -

Questions without answer,

Glittering and drunk as flies

Whose kiss stings unbearably

In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.

The value of psychoanalytic criticism, when tactfully carried out, is atteseted by

Schwartz and Bollas eassy, states that the mind of Sylvia Plath was a disturbing array of accomplishment and work ethic frequently spiked with overpowering and amazingly strong bouts of depression and hatred. As she grew older, she began to see the goal of life as death, and discarded all notions of love and relationships. Her poems, mostly in the groundbreaking style of her time, confessional, bewilder their readers with their pessimism and obsession with death. On occasion, however, the bleak horizon of the sky that is Sylvia's world clears, and within poems that initially seem to be filled with visions of death and doom, flames of light and small glimmers of hope appear. Ever inquisitive,

Sylvia's work is always full of questions, although not always apparent. These questions are ones that she herself struggled with throughout her short life and, with no better answer, decided that death was ultimately the best way out. Through stunning imagery,

Sylvia Plath tells of the return to hope from suffocating despair in her poem “Mystic.”(1968: 305)

The opening line, “Mystic” is a poem about something that Sylvia was unable to grasp, something that she was possibly trying to sort out in the writing of the poem itself.

The hooks in the air in the first line open the poem with a broad range of possible interpretations. According to Eliot hooks are sharp, glimmering tricks in the case of fishing when the fishermen bait them to fool the fish. The hooks are question marks, symbols of the unknown, with the ability to scar the curious (1962:256).

Yeats believes that first stanza is also a possible allusion to her childhood; her love of the seashore and marine life and her father, the bee expert, is remembered in whose kiss stings unbearably, possibly a wry remark on the bitterness of his death and its effects on her. The whole stanza seems to be an image of a summer home that is supposed to be a place for relaxation and rejuvenation, but for the speaker it is a place of treacherous hooks and unbearable stings. The hot, sticky ground beneath the pine trees is harshly described, proving just how uncomfortable the speaker is. In the next stanza, the speaker continues in her description of the summer place (1950: 280).

I remember

The dead smell of sun on wood cabins,

The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets.

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?

Once one has been seized up

In these stanza memory is the key; all of these things she remembers, and none of it remember in the conventional way. The dead smell of wood on cabins gives a feeling of suffocation and confinement, not physical but mental captivity. She flashes from land to sea in the next line, describing a boat by its salty stiffness. The poem then gets into its real action, the backdrop having been set, and tells us of a meeting with God. Sylvia describes her experience as being seized up. She completes this image in the third stanza, saying that she was taken:"Without a toe left over, Not a toe, not a finger, and used," This sentiment seems to describe being taken by force, overpowered, some analyzers have even said it describes rape (Wood, 1992: 205).

Faulkner argues that seeing God is a life altering experience, something that shakes the seer to the core. Sylvia feels swallowed up and confined by her revelation, more trapped than freed, more stifled than invigorated. The summer getaway is a metaphor for the vision of god. Both things are commonly and at first seen as great, but actually, especially to her, are great burdens. She likens the pain that comes with it to the suns conflagration. The seemingly solid sun is, in actuality, a raging and destructive star, a mutant of a sort, run wild and powerful over all known existing light (1991: 45).

As Simon and Schuster make clear that the summer she was twenty-one, Sylvia tried to heal herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. Is there a subliminal message in this chilling relationship? In the next line, she again refers to Christianity, this time,

Psalm twenty-three, perhaps the most well know of all the psalms, with a direct quote, walking beside still water. This line can be seen in two ways. Finding peace in the solitude of nature is one, or on a more religious note, finding the answer in the scriptures, the teachings of God himself. Memory is the next possible remedy. Memories of bliss, childhood, the seashore, and innocence all come to mind here and perhaps the most disturbing set of lines of all. “ The tame flower-nibblers," These last lines of the fourth stanza speak of Jesus amongst rats. The savior, light of the world, is surrounded by dark dankness that swallows up the flowers, the beauty of the humanity. This is truly the low point of the poem, a time when everything seems utterly whooshed away in a never- ending downward spiral of darkness (1987: 282).

The pill of the Communion tablet,

The walking beside still water? Memory?

Or picking up the bright pieces

of Christ in the faces of rodents,

The tame flower- nibblers, the ones

Eliot indicates that however, the poem slowly seems to take on a positive spin.

The rodents from the previous stanza are now revealed to be symbolic of people who are satisfied with what they have found in their lives and whose hopes are so low they are

comfortable. Sylvia, however, refused to be fulfilled and found no satisfaction and only saw the greater evil of the world. Christ was thrown to these ignorant to show them that their small lives would be broadened in death, a journey to the kingdom of God, a concept that Sylvia seems to agree with. Death is an accomplishment to her; it is the only true accomplishment worthy of recognition. The humpback man is satisfied with the small cottage he has. In this line there is a turning point, and the man's cottage is described as small and washed, which he is satisfied with his life despite his physical handicap. This image is placed Under the spokes of the clematis, a beautiful image, and one of serenity and new growth. The white blossoms cannot be thought of with out a picture of early spring and new growth coming to mind. It is implied that the humpback cares for his cottage and flowers with tenderness (1962: 58).

Sylvia poses a question to the reader and the world, possibly that seized her up. Is there no great love, only tenderness? The question of tenderness shows that Sylvia long pondered. Sylvia believed that tenderness was the strongest positive emotional feeling in the world, and after an array of semi disastrous sexual experiences and a failed marriage, it is easy to see why Sylvia has given up on men. Love is what Sylvia believes that is the driving force behind the actions that keep people from asking the questions that she asks and becoming totally cynical in nature. Sylvia seems to be fighting with her inner self, possibly, only ten days before her death. She was trying to convince herself that there was a reason to live; death was not the only answer for her. She goes into her final stanza in a whirl of thoughts of a more upbeat nature.

The final section of the poem is the conclusion of a long stream of thoughts of the metaphysical concepts, importance and significance of life. "Does the sea/ Remember the walker upon it?" is yet another Biblical reference, this time alluding to Jesus' miraculous walk over the water. This miracle was the one that truly made the disciples believe that

Jesus was the Son of God, and Jesus tells Peter, who at first doubts him to have faith.

Sylvia in a sense is remembering to have faith, remembering to not give up hope.

According to Belk vivid imagery closes the poem. She is back in the city now, with breathing chimneys and sweating windows, children jumping joyfully on beds. A cozy scene overall, although if only given a brief glace a scene that can seen as a winter complimenting the horrendous summer. Putting the poem into a real life perspective,

Sylvia moved, a single mother now, from their country home in Devon to the city of

London for the winter, perhaps this return rejuvenated her spirits. The most hopeful line of the entire poem, The sun blooms, it is a geranium. It shows the blossoming of light and new hope in her life, the clouds of old have faded and been replaced with the exuberantly bright petals of a flower. Finally, the last line, as chilling as it is satisfying:"The heart has not stopped." Through it all, the heart was not totally stifled, and is now beating strongly again, renewed with faith and the hope for her children. The wording of the last line must be looked at, however, it must be noted that instead of saying something like the heart beats on, with a positive air to it she uses a somber sentence that seems to be seeping with images of death and eternal end. Through the twists and turns of her mind process, Sylvia found peace, and if only her attitude had remained the way it is at the end of this poem and not swung back to the ideas her opening thoughts about mystic (1981: 507).

4.2.5. “The Moon And The Yew Tree”

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” begins from an objective rather than a subjective vantage point. This is an interior landscape, and no doubt, but one that the poet is viewing. I think what the poet is presenting us from the outset is the need to make something, to assign meaning or form which is initially perceived as indeterminate and initially. The landscape is amenable only to the simplest physical description: "the trees are black. The light is blue." She begins in this place of indeterminacy: "I simply cannot see where there is to get to," implying that movement beyond this place is desired, expected, and required. God and the Moon are faulty vehicles; they take her nowhere.

Axelrod argues that it is God's absence that is a factor here, and the moon is no door. The environment impinges on her individual self but does not subsume her "I live here" merely. The speaker offers a very particular voice that, it can be argued, in objectifying and landscape, in naming. The poem is thus an acknowledgment of separateness and the threat posed by a desacralized universe. The task for the poet is to find where there is to get to in a place that seems to admit to no way out. It is ultimately the speaker's claim of dominion, through language, that will achieve for her this necessary transport. I think

Jack Folsom is right to call this poem a "manifesto." It is the credo out of which the Ariel poems are written (1990: 257).

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God

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Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility

Fumy, spirituous mists inhabit this place.

Separated from my house by a row of headstones

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

Lameyer assumes that it's an estoteric cryptic poem and it unviels that the Divine

Masculine and Feminine co-exist tangibly in her physical reality, the Moon and the Yew tree. The energies of God/Goddess and Mother/Father permeate and reveal themselves.

There is holiness and divinity here whether it's more pagan or orthodox both are represented. An opportunity for a Resurrection and purification is presented, but Sylvia cannot bring herself to cleanse and she's fallen a long way. (1977: 62).

Sylvia is really using her intuition and higher sense of self here in this poem. She takes inventory of her surroundings at Court Green and soon begins to notice the symbolic impact her environment has on her entire mood and state of mind. Rowrhke discusses that what she sees outwardly is a manifestation of what is occuring on the inside of her being. It's a message to her personally and to universal truth in a way. The subjective and objective collide and reveal a message to her. One would wish it was something comforting and helpful (blessed guidance), but Sylvia sees nothing of this and interprets the entire situation in desolate, grief-stricken terms. The fact that these two elements of nature make their presence known to her on religious grounds (the church) truly solidifies the presence of a miraculous event in her mist. She takes advantage of the situation with the outpouring of this mystical spiritual poem, but then cannot go the entire way with a shift or change in perspective and mood (1966: 239).

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The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.

The eyes lift after it and find the moon.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

Yeats (1950) believes that the moon is her mother, and the yew tree is her father.

In the moon she sees a coldness, and finds that it is without tenderness, as a mother should be, as Mary was. Plath was fascinated by the classical concept of the moon as a feminine metaphor; indeed, early on her journals she recalls waking in the night and trying to get some fresh air on the porch outside. She tries the door handle and it is locked. Looking through the pane glass at the sky, she sees the moon. She suddenly feels trapped and panicked, and still cannot open the door. In the end, she capitulates and goes back to bed. Belk argues that if the moon represents her mother, and her mother represents the sexist atmosphere of the 1950s, this incident is highly relevant and enlightening on her representation of her mother in her work. The point of the poem is to illustrate the different relationship which Plath had with the three most important and influential people in her life; her dead father, her mother who offered her little, if any support, and the elusive Hughues. Plath subtly portrays herself as a victim, not accusing her mother of neglecting her, just suggesting and implying that one of the reasons for her complete despair is this women "Medusa." (1973:409).

She leaves most of the poems behind, and out in order to tells us what we need to know. Most people see the moon as an amourus sight, yet she sees it as a dark force working against her and her mother. The statement seems clouded in mystery, but you

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can take this for what it is "the moon is my mother". Her colors add to the poem, sending raw emotion at us. The Blacks, blues, and whites depict different images such as a sky on a clear day, and the sky black as a moonless night. Many things are refered to as cold, which can be said to be lacking in all emotion or warmth.

I see her struggling with an attempt to break her identification with her father, with patriarchal institutions, with her mother as a source of weakness derived from those institutions and with a desire to have motherhood herself without the oppressions implicit in that state within patriarchal institutions. Andersen insists that Plath seems ultimately to have been unable to come to terms with the blackness and silence and the utter lack of attention whether she alludes to “The Father” or her father or something compounded of the two. An inability to mourn and let go. This ironic tone increases as we are at last introduced to the yew tree. The yew "points up", directing the poet's attention from the church back to the moon. Here, black humor kicks in with full force as the poet's voice, batting its eyes, becomes almost childlike: "The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like

Mary." (1881: 493).

Accroding to Watts, hecate symbolised by the Moon is the aspect of the Triple

Goddess who represents the Crone, age and death. Although she is frightening and changeable "It is quiet with the O-gape of complete despair." Plath identifies with Hecate because she present an image of activity, strength and power. The Christian religion clearly still holds attractions "How I would like to believe in tenderness" and she is aware of the traditional Christian interpretation of her plight: "I have fallen a long way" as a descent into a form of devil worship. However, in imagistic terms it is forcefully rejected.

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All the Christian images are associated with darkness, damp and boredom whilst the images of the Goddess are invigorating and inspiring (1977: 297).

The bells which affirm the resurrection are described as "sober", the virgin is a mere "effigy" while the Christian saints look down on cold pews and have hands and faces stiff with holiness. For all the terror which Hecate can evoke, she is far more exciting and powerful than the Christian virgin "Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls." and "she is bald and wild". As a deity who is in harmony with, rather than above nature, offers Plath tremendous creative powers for under her influence: 'The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God."

In 'The Moon and Yew Tree,' a woman observes two Disquieting Muses, dimensioned both externally in the sky, in the churchyard and internally in the conscious mind, in the dreaming mind. These Muses are disquieting because, like their predecessors, the ladies with the darning-egg heads, they inhabit a wasteland of virtual blankness. They offer no enlightenment but the light of the mind, which the woman declares is cold and planetary, and the tree of the mind, which she declares is black and

Gothic-shaped. Mothered by the moon's O-gape of complete despair, the woman recognizes the falseness of belief in the sweet-Mary effigy and the promise of resurrection. Instead, says the woman, blackness and silence are the eternal message

(Kineslla,2001: 90).

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Brian argues that the moon sees nothing, and the message of the yew tree is blackness and silence, but the message of the woman in the poem is neither black nor silent. The witch-artist can play God and create artificial sprites, animating the inanimate.

As long as the artist's eyes can see, imagination continues to flourish. Sylvia feared the death of her imagination more than anything else. The locus of her true belief, therefore, is in the power of imagination, either to transform or to destroy. To paraphrase Milton's

Satan, the mind of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. One could say that this poem is a manifesto of sorts a gauntlet thrown down before some blank-eyed statue or other (1996: 358).

In conclusion, there is so much wealth under the surface of this horrifying, wonderful poem, completely in the heritage of Coleridge romanticism and yet managing to use mythic code to write a confessional poem as well. Sylvia is pointing out for us what many of her poems tell us that she'd love to believe that there is a deity that watches over us and we'll all meet our dead relatives and pets again in a harp-plucking paradise.

Badin suggests that the moon is the blind eye of the universe here, looking down but not seeing. The yew tree may represent humankind reaching up toward the blackness like a desperate hand (1996: 107).

Finally, this study comes to a conclusion that although the culture and language of these two poets are not precisely the same, their truthful character, inner conflict and their love of mankind are very alike. The use of language with functiong of images shows the same way of feelings in their poetry. Moreover, this thesis will lead the readers of poetry to understand the situation of women in two different countries.

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CONCLUSION

This thesis points out that the women in around the world are oppressed and victimized by their male counterparts, especially those of the middle class are expected to be virtuous and obedient to their husbands and society. This obedience requires women to repress their desires, or suffer calamity for example, Meena and Sylvia stand today as classic illustrations of what will happen when women dare to break patriarchal or male- dominated society.

In this study I found that Meena and Sylvia both refuse to be constructed according to society’s principles and the outset of their extra-marital love affair, undergo the process of inner conflicts. These inner conflicts results from two opposing forces: their inner self and society. What they want are the simple freedom and right that their counterparts have. In brief, men and women are human beings, therefore, both need to find a place to release their desire. Men can bury their desires in work, but women cannot because they are locked in the houses, and instead suffer endless boredom.

Throughout the writing of this thesis the possibility that such kind of study could be extended to other poets and their poetry was a consideration. While I want to know and understand the systems in place that make us who we are, it is the poetry that keeps me moving. It is the words themselves, the water moments of my existence that bring me to my work day after day. In this thesis as a whole, I have explored Afghan and American women’s poetry. I hope that I open up new ways to read poetry; it seems that many of my choices are driven by my own idiosyncratic interests. I am obsessed with studying the

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ways that gender functions in our culture, with understanding the ways that women construct their genders in public arenas, and with understanding how poetry engages language. With this thesis I explore how women have used poetic language to create, reinforce, and inner conflict from men dominant and society.

The study illustrates how Kamal’s and Plath’s poems provide the reader with an understanding of their style in general. For instance, their uses of repetition, parallelism, and plain language are some of the markers of their work. They also repeat certain words, phrases, in order to emphasize what is necessary for them. Inner conflict and freedom images functions for similar purposes. They both believe that women were ignored by men dominant and they have used only as an object. This thesis attempted to prove that although Kamal and Plath are from different countries but their feelings and experience are very similar in enlightening the human life.

To sum up, we come to this conclusion that to be a woman poet in our society is a double-bind situation and strain conflict. For the words woman and poet denote opposite and contradictory qualities and roles. Traditionally, the poet is a man, and poetry is the poems that men write. The long history of Western literature makes this point painfully clear that it is men who make art, who make books, and women are only make babies and house keeper.

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Ahmed, Leila. (1992), “Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern

Debate.” New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press.

Ackerly, Brooke (2000), “Women’s Rights are Human Rights”, Women’s human rights

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Alvarez, A. (1971) “Prologue: Sylvia Plath.” In his The Savage God: A Study of Suicide.

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Ansary, Tamin. (2002). “An Afghan-American Story”, An Afghan-American’s loving

memories of the country of his birth: West of Kabul, East of New York.

Brain, Tracy. (2001), “The Other Sylvia Plath” Harlow, UK. An interesting examination

of the social and environmental concerns of Plath’s writing.

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