Death Imagery In Sylvia Plath’s Late Poetry:a Psychoanalytical Interpretation

Sylvia Plath was one of the most important Confessional poets of contemporary American literature. With a depressed tone and a delicate touch, her poems record the abnormal state of mind of the western people, especially their suicidal psyche, and eulogize death as an art. Her poetry sympathizes with the hardships of women in the modern world, and one of the thematic concerns is that although the western people often enjoy material abundance their spiritual world is more often than not a wasteland.This thesis adopts the perspective of psychoanalytic criticism, especially the theories of Sigmund=, Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan, and intends to have a textual interpretation of Plath’s late poems, with focus on their death imagery. The thesis first classifies the death images and identifies their organic patterns, then analyzes their aesthetic effect and different layers of meanings or significance. The thesis holds that these death images, with a tone of unique melancholy and tranquility, express the poet’s strong desire for death as well as for rebirth through death, and that the poet’s suicide shortly afterwards not only made her desire come true but made the poet live forever in her poetry.