| Sylvia Plath is a literary legend in American literature,whose feverish writings have caused heated discussion among critics.Her being the focus of the literary world lies not only in her suicide in her early thirties but also in numerous death descriptions in her poems.Researches both at home and abroad show that scholars working on Plath’s death poems pay most of their attention to her personal experience,including confessional and psychoanalytic approaches,to interpret the cause and implication of death,which are rather subjective.Thus,probing into Plath’s death poems with a more historical and objective approach is of great significance.Combined with Plath’s poems,this thesis is meant to discuss her death themes by adopting ethical literary criticism.It mainly concerns the embodiment of death themes in ethical situation,ethical identity and ethical selection,three important ethical elements in ethical literary criticism.Through the analysis,this thesis attempts to restore the different historical contexts in which Plath creates her death poems for the sake of avoiding being held in the bondage of personal ethical values and moral principles.In other words,death themes in Plath’s poetry are endowed with quite different ethical implications,depending on the speakers’ relationships with the other.There are three chapters in the thesis besides the introduction and conclusion.The introduction part firstly gives a brief introduction to Plath and her poetry,deals with some basic ideas of ethical literary criticism,and then puts the focus on the studies concerning Plath’s death poems both at home and abroad.The first chapter talks about how death as a figurative art reflects the speakers’ gloomy living state in both the mechanized ethical society and the deformed ethical family environment.The second chapter focuses on the women speakers’ ethical identity shifts among a housewife,a mother and a poet,during which the self-identity has been lost.Under this circumstance,death,without a doubt,is the best manifestation of this ethical confusion coming from identity confusion.The third chapter explores the death implication of the speakers’ final ethical selection,namely,death as either the struggle against the existing ethical social order or the only way to rebirth.The last part is the conclusion of this thesis.In short,with ethical literary criticism,this thesis holds the view that Plath’s death poems could be interpreted from a more objective viewpoint.In general,death description is the best way to reflect Plath’s speakers’ living conditions,including ethical social and family situation.And under this circumstance,the speakers have to adapt to kinds of identities imposed by the society,leading to the ethical confusion.Therefore,the speakers are compelled to make their ethical selection—death as the way to struggle and rebirth.Based on the detailed analysis of the text,readers are further assured that it is feasible to analyze Plath’s death poems from the perspective of ethical literary criticism.Plath’s death poems are not only the portrayal of her personal experience but also of great significance of ethics. |
