A Comparative Study Of Dickinson’’s And Plath’’s Poetic Images In The Licht Of Feminist Perspective

Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath are two representative poetesses in their respective ages. Emily Dickinson is regarded as important as Walter Whitman to American poetry, and Sylvia Plath is crucial to confessional school. Although many studies have been done on these two female poets respectively, few researchers make comparative studies. Thus this dissertation will make a comparative study to fulfill the gap. Although Dickinson and Plath live almost a century apart, they are confronted with the same discrimination against female and female writers. This dissertation examines the poetic quests of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath in an overtly male-centered literary tradition. Through analyzing their poetic images in detail, the author finds that both of these two poets notice female’s inferior position in patriarchal society; they try to rebel against it; and they affirm their femininity and poetic talent in their works. Conventional patriarchal values have placed women in an oppressed position and restricted the intellectual cultivation of woman writers. Dickinson and Plath reclaim a voice by poetic writing to break from the social discrimination, double-binding dilemma and the literary restrictions. Given a different biographical and social background of the two poets, Dickinson and Plath speak in a different poetic voice but the focus of their poetics is significantly about the subjugation of their gender. They both have an acute female consciousness. Since each poetics is a self-orientation journey, the author aspires to examine how these two poets, in their distinctive poetic voice, repossess a power to seek liberation from social constrictions and affirm their unconventional poetic “selves” in the male literary tradition.