The Silent Woman Struggling To Speak

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and her poems took hold after her suicide. She devoted her life to being a woman poet and artist. As both a woman poet and the wife of a poet, her poems are marked with distinctive female experiences -- "imitation", "protest", and "self-discovery". The poet expressed her distinctive feelings through her own poems. At last, she achieved both the ritual and biological death.The thesis falls into five parts. Chapter one gives a brief introduction to the life experience of Plath, the related efforts made in the research of the poet and the theoretical framework of this thesis. Chapter two, based on the 1950s' American society, during which the poet was deeply oppressed, analyzed the poems of imitation, showing readers powerful male image and submissive female image and presenting the poet's experience of self-losing in this time. Chapter three points out that because of the poet's new recognition of the husband-wife relationship and her introspection, Plath, through the poems of this "protest" period, presents her own female experience of anger at men and pursuit for her own dependence. It is through her identity as a mother and a woman poet who is seeking for her own poetic identity that the poet has achieved this dependence. By the analysis of the poems of self-discovery, together with the analysis of the poems' language and her ever-lasting passion for poetry, Chapter four argues that the poet, through both the ritual and actual death, finally finds her own self. Chapter five draws the conclusion that the poet has strained all her life to write down in her poems her female experience as woman poet and the wife of a poet --- from imitating male writers to protest against the male and seek for independence to the final self-discovery; female, with the help of writing, should also have our own female experience. Though the poet's final turn to suicide is not that desirable to us, her constant effortqw to find her own self through her own poems deserves our attention and learning.