Marital Suffering in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: A Feminist Reading

IF 0.1 0 LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM American, British and Canadian Studies Pub Date : 2020-06-01 DOI:10.2478/abcsj-2020-0008

Subrata Chandra Mozumder

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses marital suffering, as portrayed by Sylvia Plath from a feminist viewpoint, and claims that her delineation of marital afflictions is a tool of protest against patriarchal oppression. In a convention-ridden patriarchal society, a woman usually cannot express her voice and remains suffocated by her personal agony and ache. However, Plath tries to break the conventions in her poetry, by representing the unjust institution of patriarchal marriage, which treats women as commodities. Many critics have noted that Plath’s marital sufferings are responsible for her suicidal death, which is a means of protest against, and resistance to, patriarchy. Since her poetry represents both her psycho-social suffering and her fight against the margins set by patriarchal society, one may consider her poetry to be a weapon of setting her “self,” as well as other women’s, free from male-dominated psychological imprisonment. The article explores how Plath’s poetic persona emerges as the Phoenix, the libertarian spirit, by deliberately exposing her marital sufferings, psycho-sexual torture, husband’s infidelity, and the ultimate death resulting from conjugal unhappiness, which is interpreted as a protest against all kinds of patriarchal discriminations.

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西尔维娅·普拉斯诗歌中的婚姻苦难:女性主义解读

本文从女性主义的角度探讨了西尔维娅·普拉斯对婚姻苦难的描绘，并认为普拉斯对婚姻苦难的描绘是一种反抗父权压迫的工具。在一个充满传统的父权社会中，女性通常无法表达自己的声音，并被个人的痛苦和痛苦所窒息。然而，普拉斯试图在她的诗歌中打破常规，通过表现男权婚姻的不公正制度，将女性视为商品。许多评论家指出，普拉斯的婚姻痛苦是她自杀死亡的原因，这是对父权制的一种抗议和抵抗。由于她的诗歌既代表了她的社会心理痛苦，也代表了她对父权社会所设定的边缘的斗争，人们可以把她的诗歌看作是一种武器，使她的“自我”以及其他女性从男性主导的心理禁锢中解脱出来。本文通过刻意揭露普拉斯的婚姻痛苦、性心理折磨、丈夫的不忠以及婚姻不幸福导致的最终死亡，以此作为对各种父权歧视的抗议，探讨了普拉斯作为自由意志主义精神凤凰的诗歌人格是如何出现的。

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来源期刊

American, British and Canadian Studies Arts and Humanities-Literature and Literary Theory

CiteScore

0.20

自引率

0.00%

发文量

审稿时长

10 weeks

期刊介绍： Founded in 1999, American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, is currently published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Re-launched in refashioned, biannual format, American, British and Canadian Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, ABC Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.