Women's Space and Silenced Voices during the Cold War in Sylvia Plath's Poetry
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Sylvia Plath wrote “Bitter Strawberries” and “Three Women” at different stages of her life and career, and the form and style of these poems are quite distinct; however, both poems deal with the tension between women’s gendered space and Cold War society. As the disruption of the boundaries between the foreign and the domestic spheres permitted the intrusion of the repercussions of war on foreign soil into U.S. domestic politics, Cold War containment policy and culture served as a force to redefine and reconstitute the meaning of women’s space. Nevertheless, women’s voices responding to these socio-political environments could not cross the boundaries but remained “contained” in their space. Yet, Plath does not simply politicize or publicize women’s rebellious or challenging positions in confronting the national myth and male-oriented Cold War culture. Instead, the reader will find that the women characters’ various stances and struggles, as well as the women themselves, are the main focus in the poems. I argue that these women characters’ silenced voices, including even seemingly capitulating ones, should be interpreted as a meaningful allusion to their unarticulated wish for social change that was eventually concretized in the late 1960s. In these early and mature poems, therefore, Plath invites us to pay more attention to the contemporary cultural and socio-political surroundings that crucially shaped women’s conditions and identity.
Abstract
Sylvia Plath wrote “Bitter Strawberries” and “Three Women” at different stages of her life and career, and the form and style of these poems are quite distinct; however, both poems deal with the tension between women’s gendered space and Cold War society. As the disruption of the boundaries between the foreign and the domestic spheres permitted the intrusion of the repercussions of war on foreign soil into U.S. domestic politics, Cold War containment policy and culture served as a force to redefine and reconstitute the meaning of women’s space. Nevertheless, women’s voices responding to these socio-political environments could not cross the boundaries but remained “contained” in their space. Yet, Plath does not simply politicize or publicize women’s rebellious or challenging positions in confronting the national myth and male-oriented Cold War culture. Instead, the reader will find that the women characters’ various stances and struggles, as well as the women themselves, are the main focus in the poems. I argue that these women characters’ silenced voices, including even seemingly capitulating ones, should be interpreted as a meaningful allusion to their unarticulated wish for social change that was eventually concretized in the late 1960s. In these early and mature poems, therefore, Plath invites us to pay more attention to the contemporary cultural and socio-political surroundings that crucially shaped women’s conditions and identity.
참고문헌 (18)
- "Sylvia Plath: A Biographical Note" (1996), New York: Perennial Classics
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- "The Space of Motherhood: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’ and ‘Three Women'", 4(2), pp.113~120 (2002)
- "Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study" (2001), London: Faber and Faber
- "Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War" (1999), New York: Basic Books
- "Containment Culture" (1995), Durham, Duke UP
- "The Ideological Apprenticeship of Sylvia Plath", 27(4), pp.59~72 (2004)
- "The Bell Jar" (1996), New York: Perennial Classics
- "Cold War 1950s: Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath" (1999), New York: Peter Lang
- "Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II-Cold War View" (2001), New York: Plagrave
- "Post-Nationalist American Studies" (2000), Berkeley: U of California P
- "In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s" (1995), New Haven and London: Yale UP
- "Federation of American Scientists" (2005), NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security