Essays on Sylvia Plath

Literature is the reflection of the contemporary society. Early 20th century was generally known as the modernist era in art and literature. The contemporary society was majorly affected by the fatality of World War I and World War II. During the period, the whole generation had become very pessimistic about everything. They were trying to find the meaning of life and their existence due to the political situations and horrified incidents such as holocaust, concentration camps, and the drop of nuclear bombs on Japan. The feeling of nothingness, futility is very strong in contemporary English literature. The literature of ...

Most of Sylvia Plath’s works are propelled by “inexorable and often terrible forces driving through her mind and bodyThe forces are fears, or nightmarish impulses towards brutality or suicide” (Knickerbocker 346). These dark emotions are present and felt in her works, alluding to the kind of life she lived before her suicide when she was just 30. There was nothing much that can be learned about her personal life which exposed her in the kind of sufferings that her works have alluded to, but her poem “Daddy” talked about a German father who was a Fascist and died ...

In the Victorian period The Woman Question was a widely discussed topic, and engaged many Victorians, both male and female. The ideal woman of that age was associated with tenderness, understanding, innocence, domestic affection and submissiveness. The woman had to maintain the status and integrity of her husband, being always the devoted and pleasing angel in the house. Coventry Patmore supported the idea that women should be extremely pure and selfless in his popular, best-selling long poem “The Angel in the House” (1854). A woman that failed at such responsibilities was labelled either mad or hysterical. During the Victorian ...

Sylvia Plath was an American short-story writer, poet and novelist. Woman was born on 27 October 1932 in the family of Otto and Aurelia Plath who lived in Boston’s suburb Jamaica Plain. Sylvia wrote her first poem at the age of eight, and the work was published in the Boston Herald. The woman started to keep journals from the 1944. This hobby became an important part of her life and helped people to understand Sylvia’s emotions after her death. In 1950 Plath won the scholarship and went to the Smith College. She also started to publish her ...

Sylvia Plath and Marge Piercy can be considered as two outstanding feminist American writers. Plath is famous as a poet, novelist and short story writer who married the famous poet, Ted Hughes. She is the commencer of the conventional poetry and has composed many poems during her life time. Piercy is the novelist and the social campaigner who can be regarded as a significant female voice. “Lady Lazarus” and “Barbie Doll” are the two exceptional poems written by Sylvia Plath and Marge Piercy respectively. “Lady Lazarus”, taken from the collection of poems Ariel, is famously known as the Holocaust ...

“Barbie Doll” and “Lady Lazarus” are two powerful and exceptional poems written by two celebrated poets from America. Marge Piercy and Sylvia Plath excellently portray the position occupied by women in society, but in extremely diverse ways.

A Critical Analysis of “Barbie Doll”

“Barbie Doll” is the outstanding poem by Marge Piercy, the American feminist poet, who excellently depicts the predicament of women and the abuse of women by the patriarchal society. Barbie dolls bring in the image of the cute and attractive toy girls. Every Baby girl child is born like Barbie dolls that have unrealistically perfect blonde hair, body and belongings. But whether ...

“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath

In “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath conveys her strong feelings for her father and his death and her fateful life with her husband. In this poem, the speaker lost her father at the age of ten, as Sylvia Plath lost her father when she was eight. Then she starts realizing the dominant nature of her father, and compares her father to a devil, a Nazi, and a vampire. In this poem, Sylvia Plath discussed about her father and his death, her failure in marriage, and her attempts to commit suicide that are compelling. She used imagery as a support to describe her hatred towards men in ...

ENC 1102

Daddy and Fiesta 1980 Introduction and Thesis Statement Fiesta 1980 by Junot Diaz, and Daddy by Sylvia Plath, are works of literature that focus on the distinct characteristics of fathers. While Fiesta 1980 is a short story, Daddy is a poem and what makes them similar is the theme and style. In Daddy, the poet describes the figurative image of her father and her turbulent relationship with him, while in Fiesta 1980; Yunior describes his relationship with his father. In Daddy, the poet uses a number of metaphors to describe her relationship with her father and even tries to reconcile, ...

Introduction

The two literatures in study are “Fiesta 1980” by Junot Diaz and “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath. The two showcase the struggles and complexities of the relationship between children and their fathers. The similarity outlined in both works is that in both, the main characters have a complex relationship with their fathers. They both struggle to understand their fathers. The difference, however, is curved in the fact that the poem by Sylvia is based upon real hatred of one’s parent. The story by Junor,on the other hand, is not based on hatred, but a struggle by the writer to understand ...

On October 27, 1932, Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1932. Her father was a professor at Boston University and her mother was a student there. Sylvia’s father died when she was a child and this loss was said to have influenced her writing in later years. She was dedicated to writing, began keeping a journal as a child, and began submitting her poetry to magazines when she was in high school. Remarkably, Sylvia graduated summa cum laude from Smith College even though she had attempted suicide at least once and suffered from depression during her college years. Sylvia moved to ...

Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”

Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is a brilliant poem about the relationship of a daughter and a father. It is also a poem of female yieldings and revolt in the world of men who are responsible for sufferings of women and all the disasters in the world. According to Sylvia Plath, masculine priorities subdued and oppressed women in society as she clearly depicted in this poem. The speaker’s father, her husband, teacher, Gestapo officer, vampire, and the statue are the male characters that she considers as they are created as oppressive and leading. Her father seems as a powerful, restrictive, and strong, god-like figure. ...

Introduction

Sylvia Plath is one of the most admired and dynamic poet of the 20th Century. She was mostly known for her book the Bell jar which was a collection of poems. Her poetry represented a self loathing and disturbing stance that could probably have been prompted by the tough life she had led as a child and under the care of her authoritarian father. According to Biography.com (n.p), her poetry was “highly acclaimed” due to its “confessional style,” linking her to other confessional poets like Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. This paper should present facts about Sylvia Plath’s early life, career ...

Evolution of One's Self

It may seem that human life is based on the totality of various situations, which give us only experience and certain knowledge at the moment they take place. Indeed, various situations build our character and contribute to our development. On the other hand, some periods of human life have more implications on further growths and development than the others. In this regard, experiences of childhood are of particular importance, since childhood traumas might have ruinous implications for the adulthood and life path in general. From the psychoanalytical perspective, the most crucial relationship is between children and their parents, since ...

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story which deals with the depression of a married woman and how her husband ignores her silent cries for help. Along with her depression, the theme of struggle to cope with the circumstances and to help oneself is also apparent. At many instances a reader can detect the autobiographical note in the story. Gilman herself suffered from post partum depression and at that time no one could really help her or understand her. This dilemma was also quite apparent in the protagonists’ life. The main aim of this research is to compare ...

Introduction:

Sylvia Plath was definitely a personage of great tragedy yet she was also a person who imbued the feminism of her age and who could not cope with the depression which tormented her life which ended at the young age of 30. She was a poet with a fierce sense of independence and originality but intrinsically very proud of her sexuality and prowess in that area. In fact her poetry can be rather lurid and direct at times showing the way forward for female sexual liberation accordingly. However the situation which really affected her life and eventual suicide was the lack of a father ...

Abstract

This essay deals with the notion and symbolism of death in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus.” She speaks of her suicide attempts in a very intimate way, because for her, the fact that she was revived, that she was the female embodiment of the Biblical Lazarus, was no miracle. For her, it was a return to a bleak existence of the real world, while all she wanted was to disappear and be let go. She alludes to the Nazis, compares her doctor to her enemy, all the while referring to them as Nazis, who stand as a symbol of the death of ...

Confessional poetry represents a deeply personal, autobiographical portrayal of the poet’s inner self, which is characterized by a highly emotional tone of the speaker, whose first person voice does not create a distance between the poet and the speaker, but actually fuses the two into one and the same self. This confessional label was applied to a number of poets creating during the post-war period of 1950s and 1960s, including ground-breaking names in the field of poetry such as Robert Lowell, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman and others. Their personal narratives of their inner turmoil, their secluded, true selves and the ...

Schizophrenia can be described as state of mental disorder that creates difficulty in the identification of a person’s character (Palmer 47) .The characters poses different personalities with one main one which acts as the identity, guard and protector of the other characters. Suicide can be described as the act of committing self murder. It is usually caused by long periods of depression which are accompanied by premeditated thought of the acts of murder. Schizophrenia has for a long time been credited as one of the causes for suicide amongst depressed patients (Botas 4). Schizophrenic patients usually tend to ...