Plath, Sylvia - Jacqueline Shea Murphy (essay date 1995)
Jacqueline Shea Murphy (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: Murphy, Jacqueline Shea. “‘This Holocaust I Walk In:’ Consuming Violence in Sylvia Plath's Poetry.” Bucknell Review 39, no. 1 (1995): 104-17.
[In the following essay, Murphy attempts to locate sources for the imagery of violence and destruction in Plath's poetry.]
Bodies melt, voices shriek; hooks pierce; human flesh is chopped, like meat, wrapped and unwrapped. People eat and get eaten:
My night sweats grease his breakfast plate .....My ribs show. What have I eaten?
(“The Jailer,” 185)1
People wait to be eaten:
I am red meat. His beak Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
(“Death & Co.,” 205)
Mothers beg for their babies to be saved from becoming food for others' cravings:
And my baby a nail Driven, driven in. He shrieks in his grease
O You who eat
People like light rays, leave...
[The entire page is 5381 words long]
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