PETALS: The Aestheticisation of Death in Sylvia Plath’s “Edge” and in the Illustrations of Adriaan van de Spiegel’s Frucht in Mutter Leibe

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates the aestheticisation of death in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Edge” in relation to other poems by her and marginally by Seamus Heaney and Charles Baudelaire, and to the short story “The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allan Poe. Such aestheticisation, I contend, partakes of the spirit of the anatomical illustration of early modern tracts such as the joint volume by Giulio Casserio and Adriaan van de Spiegel, and of western culture’s necrophilia.