« I’ve boarded the train there’s no getting off » : the Body as Metaphor in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

Abstract

Throughout the work of Sylvia Plath, bodily experience is intimately connected to the experience of language. In Plath's highly reflexive early writing, the « I » conies to consciousness of herself as doomed, negatively contingent on the body on which her description depends and the language in which her thoughts are formed. This restriction is expressed as an insupportable containment in language and the body, and Plath's work develops as an attempt to break through the silence, sterility and "stasis" to which she feels herself « destined ». Her later work defies categories and literary taboos of every kind in a highly metaphorical poetry of process which constantly challenges the limits of language and the body and hence the concept of identity.