Reading Sylvia Plath's poetry through contemporary literary theory

This dissertation reads Sylvia Plath's poetry through contemporary theories that have all been predicted as a field of literary and poetic criticism. The study will not centralize around one theory excusively as Plath's breadth of poems are well rounded in terms of touching upon different matters. Sylvia's relevant poems will thus be analyzed through three theories: psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism. Although the relationship between her life and her poetry has always been seen as a complexity, her poems have been of interest to many critics and researchers. Her success in writing comes from the gradual disintegration of her life, with her sharp pencil being a product of her experiences. My intenton in this study is to analyze Sylvia Plath's poetry in light of contemporary literary theory and correlate her age and her life with her art. The first chapter will deal with a psychoanalytic examination of Plath's 'Daddy', 'Medusa', 'Edge', and 'Contusion' as a part of confessional poetry, a 1950's and 60's American trend within poetry. It was a collapse of taboos against conservative attitudes at that time, and Sylvia appears to have been one of the main represantatives of that trend. I will try to express how Sylvia was affected by her parents and childhood, and reflected this onto her poetry. The second chapter will be a feminist reading of Plath's poetry. We will see how she used mytical allusions in the aim of expressing the soul of a woman in her mythological allegory of a poem, 'Two Sisters of Persephone'. The poem creates a relevant composition telling the role of woman during Plath's time. I will then examine Sylvia's famous suicidal poem 'Lady Lazarus' as an example of her late poetry. Through this, she looks for her strong role in society alongside deep metaphoric reference to suicidal metaphors. She perceives Ted Hughes, her husband, as a mentor but through attempting suicide, she wishes to become a new woman and vanquish man. 'The Jailer', which focuses on Ted Hughes is the last poem of the feminist reading chapter. In this poem, the writer indicates her husband as a jailer who is the prominent figure in handicaping her freedom. The postmodern undertones in Plath's poetry will be studied in the third chapter. Holocaust imagery that have a great impact on Sylvia Plath's poetry will be the centre of analysis in this section. Her two well-regarded poems 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' will re-emerge in this chapter again, for they are the best examples of Plath's Holocaust writing. Finally, 'Mary's Song', which expresses how World War II had effected people negatively, will be the final poem studied in this chapter. In the conclusion part of the study, Plath's authorship and what inspired her her writing will be examined in more detail. Keywords: Plath, Poetry, English Literature, Literary Theory.