Occultism as Source and Symptom in Sylvia Plath's "Dialogue over a Ouija Board". Winner of the 1991 TCL Prize in Literary Criticism

Abstract

Oedipus. O Christ. You use me ill, are the concluding lines of Sylvia Plath's Ravaged Face (116).1 In this poem, Plath uses major trope of modern writers, the wholesale rejection of the past, represented here by two symbolic figures from the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions. The historical discontinuity of the modern age with the past is familiar in many modernist writers, as in Yeats's prediction of violent conclusion to the 2000-year cycle of Christianity and Eliot's less violent but still destructive dissociation of sensibility. But the closest we can come to Plath's sense of this discontinuity is probably Ted Hughes's statement about contemporary writers who gone beyond the modernist state of belonging spiritually to the last phase of Christian civilization. The world of these contemporary writers is a continuation or re-emergence of the pre-Christian world ... it is the world of the little pagan religions and cults, the primitive religions from which of course Christianity itself grew.2 Plath shares with Hughes an attempt to find new ground for writers beyond the traditions represented by Oedipus and Christ. Hughes sees such an attempt, for example, in East European writers like Vasko Popa who have in way cut their losses and cut the hopelessness of that civilization off.... At its most profound, such an attitude is a shifting