실비아 플라스의 「거상」과 「아빠」에 나타난 자아인식의 주제

Abstract

Sylvia Plath reflects in her poems the ambivalent feelings toward her family members: love and hatred, expectation and anxiety. Her poems, as she herself commented on her own method of writing, "immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences," but are changed and transformed in those poems by her informed and intelligent mind. Thus her poems treating her relationship with other family members start from her own experiences with them. But they represent not the family history but the suffering self in the family that reinterprets its own standing and reaches a deep self-awareness. So the main concern of the speaker of the poems is to explore the causes of their baffled relationship and her response to other family members. Plath is engaged in demonstrating the way the mind deals with extreme circumstances to which it responds with excessive sensitivity. Therefore, in the poems on her family, the self constitutes the main theme. Aiming to demonstrate and examine the self that struggles to achieve its independent and free state and searches for its integrity in the family, this paper centers on two major poems of father-daughter relationship: "The Colossus" and "Daddy." In "The Colossus" Plath gives the picture of her father in the shape of a huge, though damaged, statue. In contrast, the ant-like daughter is busy mending and cleaning the colossus, but it turns out to be futile and hopeless. Thus she attempts more eagerly to get rid of his illusion and shadow which dominate over her life. "Daddy," a strong and bitter poem, dramatizes the speaker's feeling for her father, her hatred and fear, by juxtaposing the father as Nazi, torturer, and devil and the daughter herself as a victimized Jew. In those poems she treats her relationship with the dead father and her own complex self in order to overcome and accept the consequences of his death.