Oliver Twest Short Summary

Voices of Feminism and Schizophrenia

in Plath's Poetry

Clarissa LEE Ai Ling

The woman is seldom seen as determining her own future. Nor has her voice been heard when venting her frustrations at being treated with the lack of respect usually given a child. This is what the women of Plath’s generation had to contend with. Many highly gifted women had emerged from within the American education system of that period, with sterling figures like Betty Friedan (though a highly controversial one), Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton and Germaine Greer, just to name a few. Yet they were faced with the kind of discrimination, social expectations and other obstacles to the development of their talents, despite having the benefits of a quality liberal tertiary education. Cora Kaplan argues that

The consciousness of the taboo and its weight seemed to press heavily on the women who disobey it, and some form of apology, though tinged with irony, occurs in almost all of the women poets, as well as in many prose writers, whether avowed feminists or not, as an urgent perhaps propitiating preface to their speech. In the introduction to the anthology I ascribed this compulsion to an anticipatory response to male prejudice against women writers, and so it was. (Kaplan 68)

Sylvia Plath herself had the raw end of the deal. Being highly ambitious and gifted, while low in self-esteem and self-confidence, led to her psychological problems and manic depressions. Whilst struggling with the ardent feminist within her, she went all out to embrace the ideology of feminineness that has been indoctrinated into the women of her generation. Hence that led to a schizophrenic split within her self. According to Lacan, a child between the ages of 6 months and 18 months goes through an encounter with his or her own mirror image. This is considered particularly significant as it leads to the acquisition of subjectivity. A child is said to watch helplessly the...