A Study Of Life, Death And Rebirth Archetypes In Sylvia Plath’s And Anne Sexton’s Poems

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are the only two female poets in the ConfessionalSchool of Poetry. Both were the students of Robert Lowell, who is now regarded asthe spokesman of the Confessional School. Both won the Pulitzer Prize. They sharemany things in common, such as, their sufferings from the mental disorder, theirbroken marriages and self-denial as women, which have a great impact on theirwritings. They ended their lives in the same way as they had planed. As great poetsand great losers in life, love and marriage, Plath and Sexton wrote and publishedmany poems. Plath’s collections of poems include Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water(1971), and Winter Trees (1972). And Sexton’s poem collections include To Bedlamand Part Way Back (1960), The Starry Night (1961), All My Pretty Ones (1962), Liveor Die (1966), The Death Notebooks (1974) and The Awful Rowing Toward God(1975).Both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton dare to expose their innermost feelings tothe reader, express their tearful and silent cries as women, wives and mothers, andshare the process of finding the self. They hope that through the endless pains theycan thoroughly understand the world, men and themselves as women. Sylvia Plath’spoems possess some popular elegance and an irony style, and are full of “glass”,“moon”,“hospital”,“frog”,“head” and other images, with simple, clear words andsyntactic structures. For Anne Sexton, her early poems are almost about herself, herlove and hope for her children, while her later poems are shrouded in a deadatmosphere and despair. The core of the theoretical basis of the thesis is archetype, which is the contentof the collective unconscious and shared by all the human beings. According to CarlJung, it can be passed down from generation to generation biologically and cannotalways be felt by the conscious. However, people would unconsciously follow thecharm and power of archetype. There are three features of archetype: binary,transformational and structural. The original concept of archetype is mentioned byPlato in the name of “eidos”. Then this concept is further explained by the Frenchanthropologist, Levy Bruhl, the psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, and literary critic, N. Frye,who developed Archetypal Criticism. The Archetypal Criticism is to study thearchetypes in literary works with aims to explore the common human experiencesexpressed in literature so as to understand man and literature as well.Based upon the studies of Plath’s and Sexton’s personal experiences, socialsurroundings and emotional changes, this thesis attempts to explore the archetypes oflife, death and rebirth in Plath’s and Sexton’s poems, and their roots in order to verifythe possibility and feasibility of the Archetypal Criticism.The thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter one is an introduction to SylviaPlath, Anne Sexton, their poems, Archetype, including the definitions, origins,features of Archetype, and Archetypal Criticism. There is also a brief introduction tothe previous studies of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton at home and abroad. Chaptertwo is an exploration of life, death and rebirth archetypes in Sylvia Plath’s and AnneSexton’s poems. Through the analysis and classification of archetypes in their poems,this chapter lists the life, death and rebirth archetypes embodied in the two poets’ poems, such as water, moon, animal, color, female and flower archetypes in SylviaPlath’s poems and child, sun, snake and sea archetypes in Anne Sexton’s poems.Chapter three is about comparison and contrast among life, death and rebirtharchetypes in Sylvia Plath’s and Anne Sexton’s poems. The archetypes are classifiedinto four representative archetypes: the Great Mother, water, tree and Mandala.Chapter four is the conclusion. Through the above analysis and comparison, it is canbe accordingly concluded that Plath’s and Sexton’s poems embody some commonexperiences of humans and express the shared hope for life and rebirth.