Oppressed Women’s Voices and Female Writing in Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips” and “Daddy”
Those authors contributed equally.
- DOI
- 10.2991/assehr.k.220706.048How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Sylvia Plath; Hélène Cixous; The Laugh of the Medusa; Postmodern Feminism
- Abstract
Twentieth-century American poet Sylvia Plath combined her social, physical and spiritual condition with a display of femininity to express her opposition to patriarchy. Her poems contain an abundance of imagery related to death. In general, many analyses of death imagery have focused more on Plath’s autobiographical trauma. In contrast, this essay applies Hélène Cixous’s theory of women’s writing to explain how the death imagery in “Daddy” and “Tulips” is a medium of opposition to patriarchy rather than an autobiographical presentation of personal trauma and vulnerability. Using an applied-theoretical approach, this essay applies the concept of feminine writing proposed by Hélène Cixous to explain how Sylvia Plath opposes patriarchy by writing about her feminine self in “Tulips” and “Daddy”. Plath ultimately achieves her protest against patriarchy by examining her weaknesses and building a new identity, which is parallel to two dimensions of Cixous’s feminine writing. This essay examines how the imagery of death in Plath’s Tulips and Daddy subverts rather than succumbs to the markers of male oppression and therefore contributes to an understanding of how Plath, as a celebrated poet of concessions, expresses her rebirth of female identity rather than merely showing autobiographical vulnerability.
- Copyright
- © 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Shiyun Tang AU - Wanqi Zhang AU - Zehui Zhang PY - 2022 DA - 2022/07/14 TI - Oppressed Women’s Voices and Female Writing in Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips” and “Daddy” BT - Proceedings of the 2022 3rd International Conference on Language, Art and Cultural Exchange（ICLACE 2022) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 235 EP - 239 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220706.048 DO - 10.2991/assehr.k.220706.048 ID - Tang2022 ER -