Sylvia Plath

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Is it accurate to label Sylvia Plath as a feminist?

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Sylvia Plath can be considered a feminist due to her exploration of female oppression and identity in works like The Bell Jar and her poetry collection Ariel. Her writing often highlights the victimization and objectification of women, as seen in poems like "Daddy" and "The Applicant." While Plath's feminism is not overtly explicit, her themes of limited choices for women and personal alienation align with feminist perspectives on gender and societal roles.

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Plath's feminism is probably most visible in her novel The Bell Jar.

The men she presents throughout the story are largely clueless and insensitive to women. In some cases, their behavior would be comical were it not for the grim tone that pervades the narrative as well as the knowledge many of us have about Plath's own life. Buddy methodically strips in front of Esther and then dispassionately asks her to do the same thing. "No thanks," is her answer.

Later, a man she's set up on a blind date with, Marco, thinks himself God's gift to women and tries to rape her. Near the end of the story when Esther is bleeding uncontrollably, the ER doctor seems to be amused when he tells her he can fix the problem. Esther's own troubled mindset is, or appears to be, the result of the limited choices available to women at that...

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Nevertheless, one could argue that her perspective is more an existentialist or absurdist one in which life in general simply makes no sense. Plath does not make her feminism explicit, and most of Esther's difficulty navigating the world is due to her mother (though this itself could relate to a feminist perspective, because Mrs. Greenwood is a product of the same male-dominated system).

Plath's poetry often conveys similar themes. In the background of "Daddy" and other poems is the figure of an abusive (and probably sexually abusive) father. The same is true of "Lady Lazarus." In some ways, more trenchant and obviously related to the issue of the exploitation of women is "Strumpet Song." The speaker, evidently a sex worker, speaks of her mouth "made to do violence on," and asks if:

stalks there not some such wild man
as can find ruth [mercy]
to patch with brand of love this rank grimace.

Plath's theme here and elsewhere is the victimization of women. As indicated, much of it is autobiographical. (Things became worse than ever for her in her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes, ending in her suicide.) In "Two Sisters of Persephone," the speaker describes the women in contrasting terms but seems to indicate that the fates of both were constricted into meaninglessness. Both are emblematic of a specifically female alienation and sorrow.

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To answer this question, we first need to define "feminist." As a look into the history of feminism shows, what defines "feminist" changes according to time and place. Feminist can refer to a type of thought—liberal feminism, radical feminism, marxist feminism, etc. It can also refer to a type of politics, or it can more broadly refer to anything that offers insight into the feminine experience.

In this last regard, Sylvia Plath is without doubt a feminist. The collection of poems Ariel (1965), published two years after her suicide, contains various poems that are feminist in their insights and purview. The opening poem, "Morning Song," offers a unique take on the experience of motherhood, one which complicates the presumption that for all women motherhood is a "natural" experience, or the idea that all women have a "natural" affinity for being mothers. Rather than feeling bonded to her child at a visceral, preconscious level, the speaker in the poem speaks of her child as a foreign, alien thing, going so far as to say "I'm no more your mother/Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect is own slow/Effacement at the wind's hand." In the same vein, she compares her daughter to a statue for dispassionate observation, and then to a cat, another species altogether.

Another poem in Ariel that is feminist in its subject matter is "The Applicant." The conceit of the poem is that a man is being presented with a woman who is "applying" to be his future wife. In order to pass this inspection and be fit for marriage, she has to fulfill requirements on physical and behavioral levels. She is asked whether she has a "glass eye, false teeth or a crutch," which would presumably show her to be unfit for marriage, and she must also prove herself able to "bring teacups and roll away headaches." The true extent of this dehumanizing, humiliating procedure, akin to that of a buyer examining a horse, is expressed in the use of the pronoun "it" to refer to the woman. Ultimately, this poem shows that to think of women only as future wives is to cruelly objectify and quantify them.

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In certain poems of Sylvia Plath there are suggestions of the oppression of women and of the poet's struggle to find her voice. These poems suggest that Sylvia Path is feminist in her viewpoint.

One such poem is "Mushrooms" in which feminism is suggested in Plath's extended metaphor of mushrooms as representative of an repressed group. The personification of the mushrooms as having toes and noses points to this extended metaphor of women being compared to mushrooms throughout the poem as they begin to "acquire the air" of freedom. And, with their numbers--"So many of us!"--they will soon be no longer oppressed as they will "inherit the earth": 

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air....

So many of us!
So many of us!....

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

In this poem Plath likens women's emergence to a mushroom's growth, and expansion with women's fight for recognition. As she sees it, there is an inevitable viability and a clear sense of assertion for women.

Another poem that expresses a break from patriarchal suppression is Plath's "Daddy." In this poem, Plath suggests a powerful victim/subject dynamic likened to the Nazi regime, symbolic of her oppressive father, Otto Plath, a German emigré. While this figure of speech is certainly controversial, there can be no doubt about the suggestion of male dominance. Also, by means of disturbing imagery, Plath connotes her subjugation. She is the "foot" of thirty years within the "shoe"; alluding to her father as "Panzer-man," Plath declares that he is less like God than he is like a black swastika through which there in nothing that can pass.  Certainly, her diction is brutal as she refers to her father as a victimizer/vampire from whom she has broken:

The vampire who said he was you   
And drank my blood for a year....
There’s a stake in your fat black heart    And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you.    They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
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