Ideology in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

Ikram Hili

doi:10.5771/9781683932642

Summary

With its distinctive poetic forms and themes, Sylvia Plath’s poetry patently epitomizes her personal and artistic struggle as a woman writer to be part of a largely male-dominated canon. In Ideology in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath: From Manuscript to Published Poem, Ikram Hili examines the difficulties that Plath encountered while drafting her poems, as she wrestled with what to reveal to, or conceal from, the reading public—a literary exertion that is even more visible when studying the poet’s manuscripts of published and unpublished poems. While examining the influence of ideology on Plath’s poetics, Hili traces different stages of the poet’s literary journey, as she moves from restriction, repression, and containment towards a liberating phase during which she carves out her own body of writing. Detaching herself from the rigid, crippling formalism of her earlier years, Plath confronts her own indecisiveness as a poet, cleans up her messy drafts, and embarks on an aesthetic healing process. The literary body that she aims to construct is no longer confined within the “great” writing tradition that she once perceived as predominantly male; nor is it perfect. It is a “perfected” body, the result of a process into which Plath’s captivated readers have also entered.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2021
ISBN-Print: 978-1-68393-263-5
ISBN-Online: 978-1-68393-264-2
Publisher: University Press Copublishing, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 178
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
2. Abbreviations No access
3. 1. Text Credits No access
  2. Illustrations Credits No access
1. Personal and Political Readings of Plath No access
2. Notes No access
1. The Archive and Modern Manuscript Studies No access
2. Archival and Textual Scholarships No access
3. Plath’s Archival Materials No access
4. Plath’s Writing Practice: An Ungraspable Experience or a Fully Conscious Process? No access
5. Parsing Sylvia Plath’s Manuscripts No access
6. Boxed-Up within the Great Male Tradition of Writing: A Reading of “The Colossus” No access
7. “How Can I Let Them Out?” No access
8. Examining the Drafts of “The Arrival of the Bee Box” No access
9. Notes No access
1. Cold War Zeitgeist as Revealed in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry No access
2. Domesticity in Cold War America: A Legendary “At-Homeness” No access
3. Domesticity in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry No access
4. Ideology in the Jettisoned Lines of Drafts of “The Babysitters” No access
5. Notes No access
1. Control, Conformity, and the Notion of Whiteness No access
2. Female Subjectivity and Cultural Dictates No access
3. The Hospital Metaphor and the “Clinical Gaze” No access
4. The Patient-Victim Position: A Reading of “Face Lift” and “In Plaster” No access
5. It “Comes from a Country Far Away as Health”: A Reading of “Tulips” No access
6. From the Abraded Female Skin to the Impervious Page of the Poem: A Reading of “The Surgeon at 2 A.M.”—Drafts and Finished Poem No access
7. Notes No access
1. “The Smile of Accomplishment” of Plath’s Later Poetry No access
2. Notes No access
1. Notes No access
1. Primary Sources No access
2. Secondary Sources No access
Key Words Index No access Pages 167 - 168
Authors Index No access Pages 169 - 172
Plath’s Poems Cited Index No access Pages 173 - 174
Other Works Index No access Pages 175 - 176
About the Author No access Pages 177 - 178