Sylvia Plath’s Morbid, Macabre, and Grotesque Imagery

The following is a Dissertation that I wrote in my Second Year of University. It acheived a First Grade (1:1)

Sylvia Plath’s poetry has been celebrated for conveying and exploring the difficulties of the female experience. Some celebrate Plath as a feminist writer, such as Elisabeth Bronfen, who described Plath’s work ‘as a feminist manifesto Avant la Lettre…praised for the way it relentlessly uncovers the double standard of rules of chastity imposed on women growing up in the nineteen-fifties.’[1] Conversely, some critics have argued that Plath’s work should be considered outside of the gender context. Linda Anderson states that Plath ‘used the mobility and power of voice and performance to move between masculine and feminine positions…escaping her fixing in the muted or deathly place of the feminine.’[2] It will be argued in this essay that Plath does write about the difficulties of the female experience and this 'deathly place of the feminine' is what forms the central basis of Plath's poetry. Focusing primarily on two of Plath’s most important poems, ‘The Applicant’ (1963) and ‘Lady Lazarus’ (1965), I argue that the morbid, macabre, and grotesque imagery of these poems are used to explore and represent specific pains and difficulties within the female experience. This analysis will also draw upon the connections Plath’s work has with Ellen Moers’s seminal critical text the Female Gothic in her collection Literary Women (1976) and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Resulting in a greater understanding of how exactly Plath’s use of morbid, macabre, and grotesque imagery deals with the difficulties of the female experience in the mid-twentieth century, by illuminating how Plath's use of imagery conveys the strict bonds of societal rules and expectations of gender that women are forced to fill and the requirement of bodily and psychological trauma to fulfil those roles.

Bodily and Societal Entrapment:

Sylvia Plath and The Female Gothic

Sylvia Plath’s morbid, macabre, and grotesque imagery has important, significant similarities to the argument of Ellen Moers’s the Female Gothic which also explores representations of pain in literature written by women. Moers gives us a simple definition of her theory: ‘What I mean by Female Gothic is easily defined: the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic.’[3] Moers does go further in her definition by including what specific characteristics are included in the Female Gothic. It is the ‘drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences.’[4] The Female Gothic is grappling with issues and anxieties around domestic, maternal, bodily and social entrapment and how those forms of restriction are bound up within one another. The depiction of female pain and harm signifies greater fears of childbirth and social restriction due to bodily difference. A Female Gothic text can be read as an exploration of anxiety surrounding the female body because its very form and construction are being altered, destroyed and damaged by such entrapment; the body is dissected to see what processes are truly affecting it. Moers’s theory of the Female Gothic can allow us to appreciate the extent to which the morbid, macabre, and grotesque imagery of Plath’s poetry is inherently linked with her depiction of female pain, suffering and entrapment.

Using Moers's criticism of Plath’s work, Plath’s use of the Female Gothic mode is further identified: ‘[I]t was Plath herself…who renewed for poets… the grotesque traditions of the Female Gothic. Her terror was not the monster, the goblin or the freak, but the living corpse.’[5] ‘Grotesque traditions’ include depictions of female entrapment and death and the mutilation of the female body, such as Medusa ‘squeezing the breath from the blood cells/Of the fuchsia’ in Plath’s poem ‘Medusa’ (1962) and the death of the Russian dancer Isadora, ‘one scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel’, that Plath draws upon in ‘Fever 103°’ (1963). Moers’s identification of Plath’s ‘living corpse’ rings somewhat true in that the women in Plath’s poetry do not experience lives of freedom or independence, rather they have experiences that are so entrenched in pain they may not be termed living at all. However, a ‘corpse’ is a reductive term to use because Plath explores the psychological aspects of women’s experiences of pain. The female persona in Plath’s ‘The Applicant’ while being consistently verbally attacked by the masculine, authoritative voice of the poem’s narration shows psychological reactions to her entrapment as she is ‘crying’, demonstrating her psychological reaction to the situation.[6] She is still explicitly human, and that makes the situation far more compelling, in terms of personalising the pain in the poem. Thus, these women cannot simply be ‘living corpses’ like the undead, as they are mentally aware of their situations.

We know Plath is discussing the experiences of women in the Female Gothic mode but she is doing this in a very specific way: through the use of morbid, macabre and grotesque imagery or 'traditions' as Moers describes.[7] In ‘Cut’ (1965), for example, Plath describes in acute detail the ‘dead white…hinge’ of a cut on a woman’s thumb which implies both something irrecoverably damaged as its ‘dead white’ but also something in constant movement by the ‘hinge’ connoting a restlessness that denies comfort, in effect expressing painful excesses of female bodily entrapment and restriction.[8] 'Lady Lazarus' uses morbid imagery to demonstrate entrapment. The poem describes the constant death and regeneration of a woman, ‘Lady Lazarus’. She states ‘I do it (dying) so it feels like Hell/ I do it so it feels real.’[9] The commanding and stressed importance on the 'it' and the feelings of pain, 'Hell', demonstrates a great, sever pain. The biblical allusion to a space of pain and suffering, 'the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone’ that is ‘the second death’ demonstrates the significance of this pain due to the amplification through the allusion to Hell.[10] This language and framing reflect the language of self-harm and with that language comes a suggestion of psychological pain, centred around self-hatred and a lack of self-confidence; supported as well in the rest of the poem in that ‘Lady Lazarus’ ‘Rocked shut as a seashell’ (39 - 40) suggesting the psychological fears of enclosure and isolation. This psychological pain is amplified by how the wider world must ‘call and call’ to communicate with ‘Lady Lazarus’, further developing this sense of loneliness and isolation.

Plath’s use of morbid, macabre, and grotesque imagery not only explores the physical and mental entrapment of women, but the institutionalised societal constrictions and restrictions placed upon women. For example, in ‘The Applicant’ (1962) the institution of marriage restricts the agency and independence of the female ‘Applicant’, and is exemplified through painful imagery functioning as an exploration of the difficulties of marriage and the societal expectations around the role of a wife, and the psychological issues generated from that position. The narrator is constantly associated with the idea of marriage: 'will you marry it, marry it, marry it' (40) they repeat. Therefore, this narrator might serve as the voice of marriage, either as the father of a groom or as an actualised version of the concept. The singular ‘Applicant’ is trapped in this power dynamic with a marriage that they have no control over, they are consistently patronised while the voice of marriage, the narrator, has the diction of power and agency. This power dynamic is underpinned by how the narrator repeatedly asks about ‘The Applicant’s’ body: does she wear 'a glass eye, false teeth or a crutch' (3). These injuries coupled with the theme of marriage brings with it a connotation of violence, ‘false teeth’ suggests that they have been knocked out, and so does ‘a crutch’ which suggests being attacked. Also, this morbid image also connotes some vulnerability in that the ‘Applicant’ has afflicted senses from the ‘glass eye’ and restricted movement and entrapment from a ‘crutch.’ For the ‘Applicant’ to fulfil her role in this power dynamic, she must be injured or vulnerable. That vulnerability, and thereby lack of autonomy, is what the narrator requires for the ‘Applicant’ to be accepted into her role as ‘wife’, she must be injured, vulnerable and ultimately docile to fit into that role. Plath, in this use of this imagery, is protesting experiences of domestic abuse within marriages and feelings of entrapment that women can experience within marriages of convenience or out of social expectations.

Also, within ‘The Applicant’ morbid, macabre, and grotesque imagery explores psychological entrapment as well as bodily entrapment and demonstrates the impact of institutionalised restrictions placed on women. The narrator continually objectifies the female 'Applicant' by relating her existence to that of objects, verbally restricting her body and her agency, which leads to her mental anguish. By relating the ‘Applicant’ to a ‘hand’ (10) that exists only for domesticated duties, ‘to bring teacups and roll away headaches/and do whatever you tell it’ (12-13), the narrator manipulates the woman by offering some sense of authority and independence but only over domestic objects. The woman only gains her worth in her conjunction with household chores, which demonstrates a morbid fear of failed autonomy and objectification. Because of her perceived lack of autonomy, the ‘Applicant’ then becomes an object: ‘it can sew, it can cook, it can talk talk talk’ (33-34). She becomes a domesticated appliance. The objectification demonstrates female mental anguish through a form of cruel assumptions of inadequacy and non-sentience and a morbid objectification into a mindless appliance rather than a woman. Indeed, this was even echoed in the title of the poem: ‘Applicant’ connoting appliance. The woman is applying for the role of wife and to be fully actualised into a wife she must be morbidly objectified into nonsentience; a protest against experiences of marriages that ascribe by power dynamics that must be fulfilled. This obsession with bodily pain that demonstrates a woman’s vulnerability is tied up with male-dominated psychosexual desires of power. Elisabeth Bronfen explores the connection between beauty and vulnerability in patriarchal narratives and concludes that ‘as a corpse the feminine… becomes the site where the gazed-at object and the object desired by the gazing subject merge perfectly into indistinction.’[11] The vulnerability demonstrates that the desired outcome of the 'gazer', the narrator, and indeed the 'boy' that appears at the end of the poem, is to completely envelope and destroy the female body and then control it. The systematic questioning of this woman and the imagery of pain surrounding her demonstrates a consistent male-orientated gaze directed at women that demands them to be injured, docile and even dead so they can be controlled within the role of 'wife' within the institution of marriage.

Another of Plath's poems, 'Lady Lazarus' (1965), exemplifies the issues of the perceived lack of autonomy that has been placed upon women and begins to fight against that constriction through the morbid methods of death and resurrection. The female narrator of the poem explains their experiences of death: 'Dying/ Is an art, like everything else. /I do it exceptionally well. /I do it so it feels like hell’ (42 - 44). ‘Lady Lazarus’ takes an authoritative stance on their demise by the repetition of ‘I’ at the beginning of the lines. The deaths of ‘Lady Lazarus’ suggest some authoritative power through the demonstration of individualism in the feminine ‘I’, however that power is only created by her death, her demise is in some sense more powerful than her life. The depiction of purposeful death and resurrection has thematic links to the idea of suicide. Bronfen states that a woman’s suicide is a form of female authorship: ‘[a] woman’s self-disintegration also becomes an act of self-construction.’[12] The deaths of ‘Lady Lazarus’ give her a great deal of creative power. Her ‘art’ is her ability of ‘self-construction’ and ultimately power as she ‘rise[s] with my [her] red hair/And I eat men like air’ (83 - 84). However, this is all underscored by the fact that this woman can only achieve this position because of her death, she only gains the autonomy that the ‘Applicant’ fails to achieve because she dies, implying that the female experience is wholly difficult and powerless and, unfortunately, to choose to die, and not be a part of the larger social system, is the only way to retain that autonomy. Plath protests the necessity of this self-destruction and conceptualises this protest as suicide to further develop the harrowing difficulty of the female experience.

Plath expresses the restrictions and the entrapment of women as morbid objectification and grotesque bonds that represent such entrapment. The ‘Applicant’ is nameless and becomes a domestic appliance and ‘Lady Lazarus’ must die to recover her autonomy. Both women become automated creations of the morbid, the applicant having agency stolen from her and becoming an automated object in the household and ‘Lady Lazarus’ continuously and repeatedly going over the same actions of death and regeneration like an automated being. Although both figures attempt to retain their agency the grotesque bonds of death and objectification tie them down and restrict their autonomy. This can all be read as lamentations and protests on the lives of women, tied down by institutions of the nineteen fifties and the mid-twentieth century. Plath does not necessarily offer alternatives to these issues, but we can see that the subject is clearly of great importance and significance to Plath’s work in her constant protesting against the suffering of women within society.

The pain depicted in these poems, both physical and bodily pain has a greater depth for a modern reader in that there is a strong Confessional element in Plath’s poetry which invites the reader to read metatextually and view the speaker’s pain as both a literary construction and coming from Plath herself, as an individual and a woman writer in the mid-twentieth century. As Lucy Collins states ‘only in her poetry, and then only late in her career, could Plath allow the extremity of her troubled feelings to surface.’[13] The Confessional aspect of Plath’s poetry allows for the interpretation of the pain in her work as being about the experiences of pain and entrapment in Plath’s own experience. By her use of Confessionalism, Plath simultaneously elaborates on her own experiences but also the female experience more broadly through the exploration of women as self. As Moers states, the Female Gothic is ‘where woman is examined with a woman’s eye, woman as girl, as sister, as mother, as self.”[14] In ‘Lady Lazarus’ for example, that exploration of ‘self’ has significance as the poem likely uses Plath's personal experiences of psychological trauma. Trauma that is expressed as frustration and protests against the monstrously constricting and difficult experiences of the morbid objectification and grotesque bonds on the lives of women in patriarchally dominated societies. Because of Plath's writing has autobiographical influences, as readers, we must be aware of the position Plath inhabits, as a woman in the mid-twentieth century and thus the voice of a mid-twentieth-century woman is present in all of Plath's work.

Plath’s poems show the difficulty of the female experience through morbid, macabre, and grotesque imagery. This literary construction is related to the Female Gothic by its focus on bodies, women’s pain and the creation and reaction to fear. But Plath uses this genre in a personal way, using her own experiences to develop those found in her poems. This form of interpretation can allow us to see the importance of morbid, macabre and grotesque imagery in the work of Plath and can help us understand how it is that Plath constructs women and how she explores the female experience.

Bodily Manipulation and the Theatre of Pain:

Sylvia Plath and Gender Performativity

Just as Moer's 'Female Gothic' illuminates Plath's use of pain regarding female entrapement, Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity illuminates Plath's use of morbid imagery concerning the construction of gender. Butler defines the theory of gender performativity as ‘an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’ that constitute gender.[15] Butler states that gender is not something inherent to the body or something that naturally occurs, rather it is a performance, a role that is fulfilled by performing the acts that create a gender identity. As Butler goes on to state, ‘gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self’ meaning that the tool of this performance is the body itself, how it is used, manipulated and even injured.[16] This idea of gender and bodies brings with it connections to Moers’s Female Gothic because both theories incorporate the use of the female body to express the experiences of women: how femininity is expressed through the manipulation of the female body according to Butler and the painful experiences of femininity are expressed through bodily trauma according to Moers.

There are many instances in which the performance of a body, and more specifically a performance fraught with physical and mental pain, reoccurs in Plath’s poems, as Susan Bohandy states ‘the voices in these poems speak vividly of bodies bleeding, floating, eating, touching, retching, rubbing, shoving, dying, and being dead. Such depictions of the body in action are part and parcel of the mental picture that one constructs…in a [Plath] poem.’[17] This manipulation can be found in ‘Two Views of a Cadaver Room’ (1960) where a young woman studies ‘the head of [a] cadaver…caved in’ and ‘that rubble of skull plates and old leather’ and describes the various injuries of a dead body. [18] Plath’s ‘Daddy’ (1965) includes the manipulation of the body, the 'snare stuck in [the] jaw' of the narrator and the final image of a ‘steak in the fat black heart’ (81) of the narrator’s father also perpetuating the importance of bodies in Plath’s work as Bohandy describes.[19] But when we take Butler’s theory further and apply it to morbid, macabre and grotesque imagery we uncover the idea that the body in Plath’s poetry is being manipulated through such imagery to articulate the fact that female bodies are required to experience pain and trauma on account of them being female.

For example, morbid imagery is used in the creation of a body in Plath’s ‘The Colossus’ (1960) to express the idea athar bodily manipulation and performance lis fraught with bodily pain. Using the Colossus, the statue by the Italian sculptor Giambologna, Plath creates a metaphor for the physical construction of a body but a body that is not perfect:'I shall never get you soput together entirely/Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.’[20] The ‘great lips’ (4), ‘throat’ (9) and the ‘skull plates’ (14) of the Colossus suggest a flesh-like body and thus turns this stone statue into something more biologically human. However, this body is still constructed as a piece of art, being built with ‘gluepots and pails of Lysol’ (11) which retains the idea of construction and creation. Thus the flesh of the Colossus is as real as a human body and is physically constructed like art, much like the construction and use of the body to express gender outlined by Butler: as ‘a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief.’[21] Where the 'actor' is here, in Plath's poem, the sculptor. In the creation of this body, there is some frustration towards the difficulty of its construction. The persona 'shall never' (1) create the perfect statute, they ‘laboured’ (8) and became ‘none the wiser’ (10) from the experience. This semantic field of imperfection expresses a failed enterprise and a sense of inadequacy; the impossibility of creating the perfect body and therefore being a perfect version of the bodily self creates feelings of failure and a lack of self-worth. Not only does the performativity of the body involve physical pain but also psychological pain. Although ‘The Colossus’ is not about the female body explicitly, the poem nevertheless demonstrates how Plath is grappling with the idea of the construction of the body. Not only figuratively, in building the Colossus, but also subconsciously, relating that creation to childbirth through the word ‘laboured.’ As we have seen through Plath’s Confessionalism we must be acutely aware of the presence of the mid-twentieth century female experience in Plath’s poetry. Taking this awareness and Butler’s theory it is seen that Plath’s poetry involves the construction of the body through pain to criticise the expectations of society that demands the female body be used and manipulated through pain to fulfil the feminine gender role. Plath is expressing a protest towards the demand on women to perform, act and manipulate their bodies, in ways that men do not have to do, in processes such as childbirth and the bodily impact of sexual intercourse. All of which are tools of a patriarchal society used to define a woman as ‘mother’, ‘wife’, ‘virgin’, and ‘whore’ all at the same time and all at once. Azra Ghandeharion, as a critic, attempts ‘to shed light on the issue of traditional gender roles as an inseparable part of any patriarchal society’ and states how feminist writers, that being Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her essay, do this.[22] Plath's explores gender roles for the same reason. Just as Ghandeharion highlights these societal inconsistencies in the nineteenth century, so does Plath about her contemporary society of the mid-twentieth century; as Bronfen describes, highlighting ‘the double standard of rules of chastity.’[23] However, Gilman uses methods of psychological degradation to highlight these gender roles, Plath uses the imagery of psychological and physical anguish to express similar ideas.

The idea of being defined by one’s body can be seen in ‘The Applicant’ in which the ‘Applicant’ is questioned about her bodily pain to assess her ability to fulfil the gender role of a wife. The narrator is very accusatory when assessing the Applicant's body:

‘First, are you our sort of person?

Do you wear

A glass eye, false teeth, or a crutch

A brace or a hook’ (1-4)

These lines carrying a heavy emotional weight through where the stresses land, on 'you' and 'wear' and the harsh sounding 'hook.' This weight creates an emphasis on what the narrator then asks: if the Applicant has 'stitches to show something's missing' (6). These 'stitches' invariably connotes a manipulation and injury to the body and the 'something' that is 'missing' is a morbid suggestion of an operation, and possibly a C-Section, linking again to the exploration of childbirth as both bodily trauma and performance. The requirement of losing something from within the body, even more so if that was a baby, is certainly a very disturbing requirement of being a wife and suggests that a woman must lose something of her body, that of virginity, or of some sort of bodily attribute to fill the role, losing a feminine identity found in the body to fulfil a patriarchal definition of feminine identity. Because the loss of something inside the body is a requirement here, for this woman to be given 'a thing' that we can link to marriage, that morbidity and the loss of something are very performative. Just as a woman is required to alter and change her actions to be feminine, according to Butler, Plath states that in a patriarchy a woman must have experienced bodily pain and trauma to be a wife. Indeed, this pain as well as being a requirement is also the perpetuation of marriage, the thing that keeps it going. The narrator describes how there is a 'dissolve of sorrow' where 'we make new stock from the salt' (17-18). The ‘Applicant’ has to essentially 'dissolve' in her pain, her 'sorrow', to become entirely enveloped by it to become this 'new stock' of married women; 'stock' also being an ingredient for a larger meal, suggesting that a woman must be a part of a wider meal, or body, in her relation to men and marriage to be considered complete. The control of the female body in its incorporation into a larger model seen here has been identified in the wider work of Plath by Kathleen M. Lant who states that ‘the female body cannot stand in as a representative for the assertive female self; the female body is, rather, read or experienced as an emblem of another's, a male's, pleasure, not as a proclamation of self-identity.’[24] Taking this interpretation, not only does the male domination of the female body create a sense of male control of female gender roles, but it also suggests the deeply disturbing idea that even in her own body and her own bodily experience, the ‘Applicant’ cannot even be identified as herself. The body that she has which gives her the identity of wife takes away her own identity as a person. Paradoxically her performance both creates her feminine identity but also destroys it.

The idea of the neccessity of the destruction of the female body to be defined as a feminine body is also found in the destruction and reconstruction of the female body in 'Lady Lazarus.' ‘Lady Lazarus’ destroys and reconstructs her body to be defined and recognised as female. The deconstruction of the body is expressed in very morbid and even violent imagery, the 'grave cave' (17) connoting both an actual grave and the foreboding sense of peril associated with it, and how ‘Lady Lazarus’ will 'turn and burn' into 'ash' (71-73) expressing a deeply painful bodily deconstruction. All to be reconstituted again as something specifically feminine, the 'same identical woman' (34) ironically referencing the homogeneous roles of women, all being defined as a collective rather than as individuals. This process is the subject of public attention and public performance. How the ‘the peanut crunching crowd/shoves in see them/ unwrap me hand and foot’ (26-29). The whole process being debased to a kind of circus performance or entertainment and connoting how the gazing viewer of a woman is a consuming force in their 'peanut crunching.' Furthermore, likened to an act or performance, the death and resurrection of ‘Lady Lazarus’ is a ‘theatrical comeback (51-52), sharing a metaphor with Butler who consistently refers to all gendered beings as actors in the theatrical performance that is gender.[25] ‘Lady Lazarus’ is performing her death and making that death entertaining and attention-grabbing in its theatrical nature, to be recognised as a perfect, respectable woman: 'I am your opus/ I am your valuable/the pure gold baby' (67-69). This last image suggesting the infantilization and patronisation of women into the virgin and maiden figures, ‘pure gold’ conveying both a virginal purity and a worth to that purity. The mix between pain and the performance of pain was identified by Sally Bayley who states ‘the wounded body is a theatrical scene where an authentic exploration of pain is harnessed into a manipulative performance that allows the poet to reassert her power over her audience.’[26]What is true for the poet is true for the character, but just as ‘Lady Lazarus’ has to die to have power as a woman, as seen in the previous chapter, she has to be noticed dying to have that power. ‘Lady Lazarus’ is required to die to be noticed as female. But furthermore, she is required to perform her deaths to be recognised as a sexual being. The whole process of the regenerations constituting a ‘big strip tease’ (32) which both implies a sexual arousal from such destruction, and has similarities to the semantic field of undressing: ‘peel off the napkin’(10), ‘unwrap me hand and foot’(28) and ‘a piece of my hair or my clothes’ (64). The ‘pure gold baby’ becoming more ironic when this idea of sexuality is considered, highlighting the conflicting nature of the female bodily performance in the expectation of purity and sexuality in the same instance.

Death, pain, and sex are bound up together here, and Plath connects these to suggest that the role of pain in sex is a performative aspect of it. A requirement and expectation of it. Considering the link between death and sex in ‘Lady Lazarus’, The Bell Jar (1963) can be read as expressing the very same protests against the difficulty of the female experience. Ester Greenwood, Plath’s protagonist, describes the impact of sex as a ‘sharp, startingly bad pain’ and then develops a haemorrhage.[27] And because of this painful experience, Ester recalls other instances of the female gender performance being bound up within pain and death: ‘the stories of blood stained bridal sheets’ bringing back the link between trauma, bodily loss and marriage explored in ‘The Applicant’ and the ‘worrisome course in the Victorian novel where woman after woman died…after a difficult childbirth’ both perpetuating the idea of the repetition of death in the female experience expressed in ‘Lady Lazarus’ and the mortal danger of childbirth seen in ‘The Colossus.’[28]

All of these examples detail how Plath is grappling with and expressing the fear towards the expectations of the female performance. The performances of feminine gender roles and the impact these performances have on the body and mind and how they require women to lose and give up a part of themselves to this performance. To be considered female, women perform the roles that patriarchal societies set out for them to exist within that society, but the price paid for such recognition is the pain and trauma of being a woman and the loss of true womanhood which has been completely enveloped by the performance.

Conclusions: Gothic Performances

Throughout the poems explored in this dissertation, there are prevailing images of the destruction of the female body or the sense of frustration towards it. This theme, when considered, with both Moers and Butler respectively, expresses the difficulties of the female experience but when brought together, with the genre of Confessionalism writing, there is also the sense that Plath expresses a deep-seated hatred for what the institutions, roles and requirements of the mid-twentieth century have done to women. Moers states that ‘the self-disgust, the self-hatred, and the impetus self-destruction that have been increasingly prominent themes in the writing of women in the twentieth century.’[29] Plath’s poetry alleges that this is because of what the twentieth century has done to women. It has manipulated, controlled, trapped and alienated women, as we have seen in Plath’s poetry, and hence the destruction of the female body and mind demonstrates not only the gross inequality that women experience but the impact of that inequality which leads to issues of self-destruction within the female experience.

Through the presence of a female voice and perspective found in Plath’s Confessionalism, the morbid, macabre, and grotesque imagery in Sylvia Plath’s poetry expresses the deeply entrenched difficulties of the female experience. This imagery, when considered through Ellen Moers’s theory of the genre of the Female Gothic expresses the difficulties of the restrictions and constrictions placed upon women and protests against the patronizing assumptions of inadequacy and the grotesque bonds that social institutions create. However, when taken in conjunction with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, Plath’s imagery expresses the destructive nature of these restrictions and the cruel necessities of pain and trauma that women must endure to be considered female by patriarchal standards. In other words, when considered with the Female Gothic, Plath’s poems criticise the difficulties of a woman’s societal existence and when considered through the theory of gender performativity, while expressing very similar ideas of the female experinace within society, Plath protests the difficulty of a woman’s physical existence in the processes of childbirth and sex. Morbid, macabre, grotesque imagery in the poetry of Sylvia Plath demonstrates the terrible experiences of trauma women must endure within society and protests against the pervading presence and indeed the necessity of pain in the female experience.

[1] Elisabeth Bronfen, Sylvia Plath (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2004) p. 125. [2] Linda Anderson, ‘Gender, Feminism and Poetry’, The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry, ed. Neil, Corcoran, 173-186 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) p. 180.

[3] Ellen Moers, ‘The Female Gothic’, Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1978)p. 90. [4] Moers, p.83. [5] Moers, p.110. [6] Sylvia Plath, ‘The Applicant’, Ariel (London: Faber, 2010) pp. 6 – 7, ll. 8. [7] Moers, p.110. [8] Plath ‘Cut’, Ariel p. 15 – 16, ll. 4 -7. [9] Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’, Ariel, pp. 8 – 11, ll. 46 – 47. [10]The Bible, ‘Revelation 21:7’ King James Version, retrieved at <https://www.biblestudytools.com/kjv/revelation/21.html> [Last accessed 15/02/2020]. [11] Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘From Animate Body to Inanimate Text’, Over Her Dead Body (Manchester: Manchester University Press) p. 98. [12] Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, p. 141. [13] Lucy Collins ‘Confessionalism’ Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry, ed. Neil Roberts (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001) p. 205. [14] Moers, p. 109. [15] Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’ Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, p. 519. [16] Butler, p. 519. [17] Susan Bohandy, ‘Defining the Self through the Body in Four Poems by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke and Sylvia Plath’ Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 1994, p. 1. [18]Sylvia Plath, ‘Two Views of a Cadaver Room’, The Colossus (New York: Random House, 1998) p. 5 - 6, ll. 6-8. [19] Plath, ‘Daddy’, Ariel p.48 - 50, l. 26. [20] Plath, ‘The Colossus’, The Colossus p. 20 – 21, ll. 1 -2. [21]Butler, p. 520. [22]Azra Ghandeharion, ‘Women Entrapment and Flight in Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper’ Revista Alicantina De Estudios Ingleses, vol. 29, 2016, p. 113. [23] Bronfen, Sylvia Plath, p. 125. [24] Kathleen M. Lant, ‘The Big Strip Tease: Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath’ Contemporary Literature, vol. 34, no. 4, 1993, p. 623. [25] Butler, p.526. [26] Sally Bayley and Tracy Brain, Representing Sylvia Plath (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011) p. 125. [27]Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber, 1963) p. 218. [28] Plath, The Bell Jar p. 219-.221. [29] Moers, p.107.

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