Sylvia Plath's Poetry: Feminine Perfection

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

to treat), Plath was only eight years old, this was the crucial event of her childhood. In her poem "Daddy" we see Plath's imaginative transformations of experience into myths where the figure of her Prussian father is transformed into an emblem for masculine authority.

"Every woman adores a fascist,
The boot in the face the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you." (48-50)

Sylvia Plath wanted to become a writer at a time when women were expected to devote their lives to homemaking and mothering; this added to Sylvia Plath's self-doubt in her choice of a career. By the time she entered college on a scholarship in 1950 she already had an impressive list of publications, and while at college she wrote over four hundred poems. During the summer following her junior year at college, Plath nearly succeeded in killing herself by swallowing sleeping pills. In her poem "Daddy" she states, "At twenty I tried to die" (58).
After a period of recovery involving electroshock and ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

CITE THIS PAGE: