| The life and work of Sylvia Plath is examined in this thesis. Plath lived from 1932--1963, suiciding at the age of 30. She was an American poet, earning the Pulitzer Prize for her collected works posthumously in 1982. Plath's poetry is evocative for a woman of her time; it has been the subject of university study, literary criticism, and psychoanalytic discourse. The present study examines Plath's poetry from 1956 through her death in 1963, as well as journal entries, correspondence to family and friends, and her novel and short stories. Utilizing relational psychoanalytic theory and contemporary feminist theory, Plath's work is examined from multiple perspectives in parallel to the myriad voices Plath herself reflects in her work. Incorporated here is the effort to reveal the paradoxes present in Sylvia Plath's life and work and how the dialectical tension within these polarities succeeds or fails. |
