Re-casting Sylvia Plath, plath's poetry as cultural confession

grantor: University of Toronto"Re-casting Sylvia Plath: Plath's Poetry as Cultural Confession" provides a cultural critique of Plath's poetry, one that shifts focus away from recovering individualism or self-actualization to critiquing the formative fields of the social which rule subjectivity. Her late poems break from her early poems' fairy tale settings and preoccupation with self to a larger symbolic system which situates the self in the social. Most critics, however, fail to take seriously Plath's collective, social, and historical agenda. Instead they limit themselves to psychological, mythological, or biographical readings. It is precisely this refusal of Plath's to find refuge in traditional categories of individualism and the nuclear family which differentiates her from so many of those contemporaries with which she is regularly compared. The "confessional" poets, for example, examine how the psyche shapes our impressions of the world, whereas Plath, inversely, looks at how the outside world shapes the self. The dissertation, then, explores her poems as instances of dialogic process. The various voices in "'Three Women': A Poem for Three Voices" (March 1962) offer dimension and difference to counter the monotony and monologic of the world she inhabits, while "In Plaster" (18 March 1961) enacts a dialogue between the subject as a culturally created artifact and collective fantasies. Among these late poems, and most obviously in "A Birthday Present" (30 September 1962), individual identity is often unstable or shifting, threatening the surrounding illusions of self-containment. In such poems as "Daddy" (12 October 1962), "Lady Lazarus" (23-29 October 1962), and her series of bee poems (3-7 October 1962), Plath shows the invisibility of social forces, and the crushing effect of that invisibility, especially on women. Nevertheless, the poems do less to demonstrate the crushing of the authentic or "real" self by the patriarchal, than show the role of (social) fantasy in the construction of the subject.Ph.D