The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath's Poetry

Abstract

Sylvia Plath, in her most ambitious poems, tackles the problem of female selfhood. What is it? Within a world where women are con- tained by rigid scripts and relegated to silence, how can they revolt? On the one hand, she gives us poems like "The Applicant" and "The Munich Mannequins," where women, reduced to nothing more than commodities, appear robbed of their humanity. On the other hand, in poems such as "Lady Lazarus," she presents selves in revolt, resisting assimilation to patriarchal ideals. In both cases, Plath's poetry reacts against the absence, especially for women, of a public space, indeed a language for debate, wherein one might make visi- ble and deconstruct the given order of things. In the following, I argue that Plath deliberately blurs the borders between the public and the private in two of the most celebrated, controversial, and cri- tiqued of her poems: "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus." Transforming the conventional female body of the 1950s into a kind of transgres- sive dialect, Plath makes her personae speak in and to a public realm dominated by male desires. Giving the female construct voice, so to speak, Plath prefigures recent trends in feminist criticism that read the female body as text. Susan Bordo, for example, sees in the emer- gence of agoraphobia in the 1950s and anorexia in the 1980s rebel- lious performances: The public wants to see the woman in the home, so the woman responds by fearing to go out (agoraphobia); the pub- lic wants to see the woman thin, so the woman starves herself (ano- rexia). Bordo summarizes her argument in a language that echoes Plath's poetic desires: