Plath, Sylvia - Timothy Materer (essay date 1991)
Timothy Materer (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: Materer, Timothy. “Occultism as Source and Symptom in Sylvia Plath's ‘Dialogue Over a Ouija Board.’” Twentieth Century Literature 37, no. 2 (Summer, 1991): 131-47.
[In the following essay, Materer analyzes the Freudian implications of occultism in Plath's poetry.]
“O Oedipus. O Christ. You use me ill,” are the concluding lines of Sylvia Plath's “The Ravaged Face” (116).1 In this poem, Plath uses a major trope of modern writers, the wholesale rejection of the past, represented here by two symbolic figures from the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions. The historical discontinuity of the modern age with the past is familiar in many modernist writers, as in Yeats's prediction of a violent conclusion to the 2000-year cycle of Christianity and Eliot's less violent but still destructive “dissociation of sensibility.” But the closest we can come to Plath's sense of this...
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