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Home Imprisonment and Escape in Sylvia Plath's Poetry

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Imprisonment and Escape in Sylvia Plath's Poetry

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Identifier	Thesis 1772
Author	Russman, Christel C.
Title	Imprisonment and Escape in Sylvia Plath's Poetry
Publisher	Central Connecticut State University
Date	2004
Resource Type	Master's Thesis
Notes	The purpose of this thesis is to explore images of imprisonment and escape within selected poems by Sylvia Plath. The causes of imprisonment are complex, and it is my intention to relate imprisoning features in Plath's poetry to Plath's family, career, and gender. Imprisoning features create a suppressed state that inspires a desire for escape, which becomes evident in Plath's poetry as well. I will move through poems featuring imprisonment, to speakers who attempt escape, ending with poems that exhibit a more forceful attempt at escape from imprisoning features. Imprisonment and escape images are engaging because they relate to Plath on a personal level, yet can also be conceived on a universal level. Universal refers to the impact of Plath's poems on women in general. I use a confessional approach, which affirms Plath's use of the personal in connection with her poems. Many of Plath's poems have the ability to be traced back to a corresponding source of despair in her life and result in her working through the upsetting event marking their therapeutic nature. Plath's poetry allowed her to define personal conditions that disturbed her and to write about them candidly. The personal conditions are her relationships with family; the focus in this thesis will be relationships between Plath and her father and Plath and her husband for the ways in which father and husband are at times entwined. While earlier poems showcase these relationships as suffocating, later poems will allow an escape from their oppression. Plath's transition from themes of imprisonment to escape is also consistent with gender and its impact on her career. Plath's struggle with her standing as a woman poet and her desire to work outside the female writer ideal associated with her era is apparent in her poems. At times Plath's frustration with finding creative material manifests itself within her poems to suggest a sense of imprisonment. The form of her early poems aligns with this state by using regulated rhyme schemes and a structure that indicates an enclosure. In contrast are later poems that veer from regular rhyme and structure suggesting an escape from imprisoning features. Early Plath poems in this thesis depict women in subjugated states, and later poems allow women aggressive and sometimes brutal roles to attack their oppressors. Animals are employed to personify the nature of the poems' speakers. Animals fit into discussions of both states because they are subjected to people's force upon them such as being hunted or caged, yet their natures are free. Plath becomes part of the animal(s) within the poem to assert her own feelings of imprisonment and potential power in relation to the issues of family, career, and gender. I will also discuss how certain animal poems fit into Plath's earlier writing style marking a sense of imprisonment. The animals in these poems are by nature more passive or are depicted as dead. In contrast are animals that symbolize a sense of freedom because of their depiction as wild or predatory. Plath's purposes within my analysis of imprisonment and escape reveal her poetry's therapeutic nature and connect to a confessional style. The poems I first discuss emphasize feelings of vulnerability and frustration with gender and husband/father relationships and progress to feelings of confidence and power within these situations. Perhaps critics believing Plath's later poems were her best sensed her growing confidence in the spheres of gender and relationship. This growing confidence manifests itself in Plath's ability to move outside of structured forms. Plath's poems coalesce into a story of change and overcoming obstacles that appeals to Plath's female audience.
Subject	Plath, Sylvia -- Criticism and interpretation
Department	Department of English
Advisor	Gilmore, Susan
Type	Text
Digital Format	application/pdf
Language	eng
OCLC number	713735126
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