Cruelty V Aestheticism in Plath's Metaphysical Poetry

Chapter 1

Introduction

There are always two dimensions to every vision, two ways to look at a thing, two methods of interpretation for a single idea. Similarly, poetry can be evaluated from multiple magnitudes depending upon the perception of the readers. This evaluation may vary from person to person due to their experiences and preconceived ideas. Sylvia Plath's poetry, in general, is misperceived by most of the readers due to the misconceptions incarnated in the minds of the readers who view her work only by keeping in mind her biography. Her short lived life, her childhood experiences and the broken relationships that she bore, all of these facts doubtlessly led her into the realm of pessimism, making her work look gloomy. But it is a fact that the essence of no work can be fully comprehended if the writer/poet's life experiences are always lurking on the reader's mind. The reader has to be impartial to the external factors affecting the writer's life and should ponder more on the text produced. This would lead to the formation of the indifferent ideas on the part of the readers and would open new dimensions for them on the whole.

Sylvia Plath is a poetess with modest knowledge and beautiful poetry. Her poetry is considered to be subjective and conventional. She wrote two hundred and thirty poems some of which highlight her acute aggression against the society while others, surprisingly, are written in a lighter and more composed mood. Similarly her poetry is emblematic in which she uses different images and symbols in order to explain her ideas to the reader. The readers come across various binary opposites such as life and death, sea and land, nature and culture, health and sickness, son and father daughter and mother etc. While she uses images of death, destruction and sadness etc at one level, the images of happiness, fertility, life and health etc also peep out of her very famous masterpieces on various other levels.

According to Jacques Derrida, the meaning of poetry, drama or novel could be derived from structure of the text and this structure is directly related to readers to derive binary opposites. So if we read poetry of Sylvia Plath with readers' perception, we could get multiple meanings. If we apply the theory of deconstruction on Sylvia Plath's poetry, we can conclude that she has multiple talents through which she creates the verses and entertains the readers. Readers feel comfortable when they think freely and Derrida's theory gives this comfort to the readers according to which Plath's poetry takes another phase which is full of hope, ambition and courage.

In 1979 the literary critic Marjorie Perloff, author of some of the most influential literary articles on Plath, pointed out that Path's perfection in her work was because of her mother who had devoted her life for her two children Sylvia Plath and Warren. No wonder her life and her poetry is full of pathos and sad moments but if we read her poetry shedding off the autobiographical point of view from our minds, we enjoy the real taste of Plath's poetry. She is not only a conventional poetess but also a typical creator who wrote poems on the topic of war, feminism and problems of ordinary people of the society.

The society in which she was living was obviously a male dominant society in which she had to survive as a woman poet, because she was against the accustomed believes of the society according to which the male is always dominant and authoritative towards the female. Negation of these typical notions about the gender difference made her readers consider strongly that she could be labeled as a feminist. The only problem was that she was a female poet and she was supposed to pretend that she had never experienced anger, while male poets on the other hand were permitted to articulate whatever they wanted to say, in whatever mood they preferred.

Another style of Plath is the use of metamorphoses in which she changes herself with shoe and her father as a Nazi and then changes her father also to God. The purpose of metamorphoses is not only to change a person's identity or to change his personality but the actual idea behind metamorphoses is to define the nature of a person with the help of images and similes. Plath also uses metamorphoses in her poem 'Daddy' in which she expresses her anger for her father as well as for her husband with the use of different images and also to compare her father with her husband, both of whom, in her views, are alike.

If her poems are explored in depth, the reader get to know that she uses a particular image which explains further images and this image has multiple meanings. So Plath's poetry, we can say, is full of images in which every word and every line of the same poem contains different and multiple interpretations, such as in 'Daddy' she talks about her father, her husband and the Germans all in one poem, each concept and each image can be understood from multifarious dimensions. By applying Jacques Derrida's theory of deconstruction we can see various sides of simple and yet very appealing images used by Plath.

So it could be concluded that her work is the amalgamation of various feelings, good as well as bad, so some readers deduce her poetry as cruel and some interpret it as full of delight and hope as well as consider her as an optimistic poet. The meaning of the text is completely dependent upon readers' perception.

Research Methodology

This research paper includes qualitative method and analytical approach with reference to cruelty and harshness as well as positivity and happiness in Plath's poetry with the help of the theory of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida.

Chapter 2 throws light on the elements of cruelty with reference to Plath's poetry and the views of critics about her themes.

Chapter 3 is based upon happiness, politeness and positivity with reference to Plath's poetry as well as the poetry of the poets who influenced her.

The main focus in chapter three is to discover the binary operations that govern the text of the poems. Then to reverse and dismantle previously held world views about Sylvia Plath and her work. Accepting the possibilities of various levels of the text based on the new binary inversions, the thesis then allows the meaning of the poems to be un-decidable.

So this research paper is based upon several interpretations of the text of poems written by Sylvia Plath, keeping in mind Derrida's concept that interpretation is only based upon readers' perception. These interpretations can either be negative or positive, depending upon the understanding of the readers.