Sylvia Plath’s ‘Tulips’: On the Hostile Nature of Things

Abstract

By fusing key incongruities between New Materialism and OOO, this chapter offers a re-reading of the lyrical subject in Sylvia Plath’s poetry, showing the life of Plath’s subject to be in various ways entwined with the life of things. More specifically, the chapter offers a close reading of Plath’s late poem “Tulips”, which is selected as a prime example of how nonhuman things – for Plath – are cast as hostile and intrusive, intervening with egotistical notions of subjecthood, but at the same time are shown to be the very thing that sustains and grounds the subject. To appreciate this paradoxical nature of things in Plath’s poetry, the chapter mixes the thing-ontology of Martin Heidegger, New Materialism and OOO in order to show that nonhuman things exist in a tension between the relational and non-relational. As such, the chapter vouches for the use of literature to challenge and complicate theoretical assumptions, especially when it comes to thinking human-nonhuman-relations.