Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Abstract

No succès de scandale ever stays truly scandalous for long. Works that ignite critical and public outrage soon lose their power to shock, not least because they tend to exert a powerful influence over the future direction of their medium, resulting in the mass reproduction of diluted replicas. The same can be said of whole cultural movements — one obvious example being punk, which emerged from the underground with the riotous rise to fame of the Sex Pistols in late 1976 and early 1977, thereafter influencing mainstream fashion, youth culture and music in a range of ways. Writing over a decade earlier, Plath might even be regarded as the first bona fide punk poet. Not only did she become a posthumous cultural icon who spawned a host of imitators, but her most scandalous poems, such as ‘Daddy’, contain a number of the hallmarks of British punk and its offshoots, including pervasive Nazi references combined with an irreverent antitheism (‘Not God but a swastika’); an aggressive, violent aesthetic (‘The boot in the face’); a gothic fascination with blood, vampirism and the occult (‘There’s a stake in your fat black heart’); and stylised gestures of provocation deliberately designed to antagonise middle-class sensibilities (‘Every woman adores a Fascist’). ‘Daddy’ also anticipates the bizarre, cartoonish monologues of a song such as ‘Holidays in the Sun’, in which Johnny Rotten finds himself having to climb under and over the Berlin Wall as he faces off an abstract invading army.KeywordsMass ReproductionPublic OutrageNursery RhymeWedding RingPoetic TraditionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.