PAPER
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As far as I am concerned and after
having read information about the topic, I come out with the idea that feminism
is not a literary movement and is not attached only to women. Feminism is a way
of thinking, a life’s point of view which is based on the fight for equality
between men and women. Feminism is a social, a political and literary movement.
Since it is a way of thinking it can be applied to all the spheres of human
life. Therefore, in literary criticism, feminism is a mode of discourse
that emphasizes and analyzes the gender relationships in text.[1]
The
basic idea of feminists is the condemnation of male attitudes towards women,
which had been pointing at women throughout the history as an inferior sex. As
in all the movements, in feminism there are big names, writers or theorists such
as Hélène Cixous or Betty Friedan. But
probably the most significant text is Simone de Beauvoir's, The Second Sex (1949), since
the modern flourishing of this movement has been traced by some to the
publication of this book.[2]
However, another interesting poet which
has been qualified as a feminist writer is Sylvia Plath. She wrote The Bell
Jar, an autobiographical novel, at the time when the second wave feminism
took place; during the 1960s. So, the context of her novel and also the society
in which Sylvia Plath lived was surrounded by the feminist thought of greater
independence and rights for women.
Basically
all the work of Plath is tinged with feminist aspects, but in The Bell
Jar all this hatred towards the patriarchal society clearly comes to light
with examples of the author’s life. In this novel, Plath shows us the ways
in which women were discriminated, through the eyes of a sensitive young
artist. Clearly the feminist point of view is the central purpose of The Bell
Jar. The main character, Esther, who represents Sylvia Plath self, unlike many
women of her time, refuses to be controlled by society's gender-based
constraints.[3]
Another
poem in which Plath shows her pride of being a woman is "Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices,"
which appears in Winter Trees,one of her last works.[4] The poem is set in a maternity ward and the
poet seems to celebrate pregnancy and motherhood. Nevertheless, she lets the
reader know, in a sad way, about the injustices of genre that women have to
face in her society. According to Wendy Martin[5],
Sylvia Plath is echoing Virginia Woolf in this poem, as she does in many
others. It is important to mention that
Virginia Woolf was a writer who suffered some break downs during her lifetime
and ended commiting suicide, so her life parallels in a way Sylvia Plath’s
life. Even though Virginia Woolf is more known by ‘the stream of
consciousness’, she also felt constraint by the figure of her father and
struggled with the social ideals of her time.
In
the poem ‘Daddy’ Plath writes about her feelings towards her father. He died
when she was only eight years old, and she will never forgive him. The death of
her father seems to be a constant in Plath’s work, it is like a sad and
terrible fact that she cannot forget. This loss hurt her at an early age and
all along her life, but it was even worst the loss of her husband. Therefore,
after having analised the relations with her beloved men, her repuls to the
male sex does not turn out to be so strange. But, to be able to fully
understand this poet, we have to know that appart from being ‘psychologically
ill’, because she was in mental hospitals several times and she tried to kill
herself three times in her life, she was deeply hurt by this loss of her
husband. Furthermore, before leaving her she had already suffered because she
suspected he had an affair with an acquaintance. Because of that some accuse
Ted Hughes, her husband, of being guilty for the suicide of Sylvia Plath, but
this is a very subjective and debatable question. Zsuzsa Fulop and Manju Jaidka said about this feminist poet that: Plath's poems begin with a fairly conventional woman protagonist living
in the shadow of a male figure, but gradually there is a change of persona. In
the last few months of her life she presented a totally different woman who is
no longer docile but violent: a Fury raging for revenge.[6]
What means that Sylvia was actually constraint by male
figures and this was reflected in her work. But, with no doubt, and like the
vast majority of feminist writers, her work helped women in a high degree to
fight agains male domination and to open new ways towards sexual equality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=9445,
Feminism Feminist Women Criticism- Feminism in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, 123helpme.com,
(21-05-06).
http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/martin.html,
Gale literary databases, Wendy Martin, 1999, (21-05-06).
http://www.salzburgseminar.org/ASC/csacl/progs/amlit/poetry.htm, Feminism and the Muse, Zsuzsa Fulop and Manju Jaidka, (22-05-06).
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/headerindex.html,
Glossary of Literary Theory, Greig E. Henderson and Christopher Brown,
(21-05-06).
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/splath.htm,
‘Sylvia Plath’,1997 (09-05-06)
http://www.sylviaplath.de/ , ‘Sylvia
Plath’,Anja Beckmann, Leipzig (Germany), 2006 (10-05-06)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath, ‘Sylvia Plath-
Wikipedia’, board@wikipedia.org, 2006, (10-05-06).