Sylvia Plath Duality

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Sylvia Plath wants to travel back in time and walk through a journey of what life was like before today’s generation by describing how men and women lived and how each of them were treated. Plath is extremely descriptive with the specific words she picks and her descriptive appearances. Women were looked at as people who offered “red silk flares of pedaled blood”, and men offered “sun’s blade”. When you look at what is thought to be two different women, but in a different universe, can most likely be just one person who suffers from some kind of disease. Duality describes this ability. Given how it is never proven to be two different women, it could very easily be the same character, except with two different personalities. Whether an …show more content…

Looking at duality enables us to questions the moral of the poem. Are the characters sisters, or is it one character with two different personalities? It’s something that will make us question the poem as others might have already done. While looking at the poem carefully, the sisters are almost described to be about the same. The only thing to differentiate from them, is their choice of lifestyle and how they handled life. What if the characters were really just the same person but with different personalities? It sure is a possibility to consider. Both sisters died alone, even with one turning bitter and cruel and the other one already being sad and unhappy, what was to come out of dying alone? "Two sisters” can be depicted as two dualities-dual personalities existing in one individual. The Greek goddess Persephone is the Queen of the Underworld, and certain details of the poem relate to her myth which is a symbol of the revolving cycle of life. The spirit of these two sisters of Persephone, perhaps, struggled in light and shadow within Plath's mind. Plath, likewise, must have struggled just like the characters between the world of Hades and six months of darkness, or light with Hyperion making his way across the heavens. It is easy to accept happiness in your life, but it is rather much harder to push out the evil and

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