“Cut” Sylvia Plath
Persona
In terms of content the persona in “Cut” is Sylvia Plath herself. Plath was one of the first American women writers to refuse to conceal her true emotions. In articulating her aggression, hostility and despair in her art, she effectively challenged the traditional literary prioritization of female experience. Plath has experienced much melancholy and depression in her life.
Scenario
The scenario of the poem starts off in a seemingly domestic scene, perhaps preparing for dinner and develops into this amazing association and blurring of the physical and emotional senses, where a great joy has been found in an ‘accident’. Plath dedicates “Cut” to her new au pair (nanny), Susan O’Neill Roe as a “welcome to the family” gesture. It is most likely the au pairs thumb, which has been cut however Plath refers to it as her own thumb as a sign of empathy/psychosis. In the poem, Plath describes the feelings and sensations of deliberate self mutilation and the emotional release it brings. The cutting of the thumb can be viewed in a Freudian manner in which the incident occurred accidentally “on purpose” a parapraxis, having the effect of building up tension.
Context
The context in which the poem is taking place is in England, isolated away from all her family and friends, during the 1950's where Plath was the victim of a male-orientated sexist society and her poetry a choreography of female wounds. Values portrayed through “Cut” are Plath’s life of hardships from separation, divorce and as a single mother and poet. Through the remarkable consistent images that all “flow” from her very ordinary “accident” it is evident that this poem showcases a history of bloodshed through war, death, injury and maiming in the Western world and Plath’s family history
Story
The story of “Cut” is a rapid succession/conglomeration off sensations and images of violence and bloodshed throught history and its emotional relief. Plath chooses to use an ongoing metaphor of a battle between two armies. She is possibly one soldier who has lost much, while fighting the depression battle. This poem demonstrates Plath’s disconnection from humanity as for example she disassociates the thumb as being part of the body. The fact that she relates her cut to onions, with cooking as a household duty displaying her discontentment with her role as a housewife and mot...
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...rill-“ creates a colloquial level of language, where in this case an exclamation mark could have been used.
Sounds
A variety of language devices are employed to create tone for the poem. Sounds such as assonance is used in the line “a flap like a hat” with an emphasis on ‘t’ and taken off on ‘a’ coupled with dental ‘t’ and plosive ‘p’ evoking and mirroring the on/off nature of a hat, in reference to the skin that has been cut on her thumb. Internal assonance and consonance appear and disappear with unpredictability. This demonstrates signs of Plath’s mental illness. Also there is assonance in “little pilgrim, the Indian’s axed your scalp” where the chopping sounds evoke the movement.
In conclusion, there is more than one implication of the word alone “cut” [hurt,injured,rejected,excluded]these are to mean: physically injured, rejected or wounded by people, excluded by living on own and bleeding in all senses and self mutilation. In the poem “Cut” by Sylvia Plath there is more to the poem than moods and feelings through the use of context and technique. For instance images,sounds,tones,rhythm,rhyme and form which all add up to an effective poem with textual integrity.
In “The Colossus” Plath expresses her personal and emotions struggles she faced resulting from her father’s death. Plath’s father, Otto Plath was nonexistent. “Plath’s relationship with her father has proven to be one of the more troublesome of her recurrent themes in this respect. By all accounts, including her own, Otto Plath was a kind, loving father, if formal and somewhat remote, and there was little outward evidence that their relationship was troubled” (John Rietz 417). Plath yearned for the everlasting love that she never received from her father growing up. It’s almost as if she was constantly trying to force building a relationship that she never had with her father. “Otto Plath was her muse” (417). This notion is best represented in Plath’s poem, “The Colossus” by the speaker’s constant efforts to reconstruct the fallen Colossus of Rhodes representing her relationship with her...
Poetry is the wind for a trapped and wounded soul. A great example of a wounded soul is, Sylvia Plath. She was an immaculate poet, who expressed her personal troubles through writing. As Plath’s life smouldered into a heap of dust at the age of 30, her poetry grew and bloomed. In the years before her death, her most troubled period, Plath penned three of her most well-known poems, “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus” and “Tulips”—all three illustrating the horrors of despair with strong, expressive literary devices. Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, has been hailed ubiquitously as one of the most acclaimed and preeminent poets of the 21st century. Plath’s poetry was influenced by tragic events in her life and her prolonged battle against her deep depression and obsession with death. Plath’s personal issues made her the definition of a confessional poet. In the poems, “Daddy”, “Tulips”, and “Lady Lazarus”, Plath confesses her emotional and nervous breakdowns during her endless depression.
...connection to Sylvia Plath is so strong that her story has become a means of coming to terms with elements of my own life. Her unflagging spirit and perseverant frame of mind have inspired me to define for myself my own inner worth, as opposed to allowing others’ approval to be responsible for characterizing who I am.
Sylvia Plath, a great American author, focuses mostly on actual experiences. Plath’s poetry displays feelings and emotions. Plath had the ability to transform everyday happenings into poems or diary entries. Plath had a passion for poetry and her work was valued. She was inspired by novelists and her own skills. Her poetry was also very important to readers and critics. Sylvia Plath’s work shows change throughout her lifetime, relates to feelings and emotions, and focuses on day to day experiences.
When Sylvia Plath was told her father died at the tender age of nine, she bitterly said, “I’ll never speak to God again.” In her brief but indispensable writing career, Plath distinguished herself in the poetical realm with her body of work that includes but is not limited to poems, short stories, and one semi-autobiographical novel. Her legacy lives on through her dark themes laden with powerful images such as the moon and skulls, while a father-type figure acts as a significant force either as a central antagonistic power or an influential shadow looming in the background. Brooding thoughts and despondent emotion overcome the reader when faced with one of Plath’s numerous works such as “Daddy,” “The Colossus,” and “Lady Lazarus.” Sometimes straightforward in understanding, Plath’s works contain intermittently placed, unique choices in diction like “mule bray, pig-grunt” throughout her works. On February 11, 1963, Plath was found with her head placed in her kitchen oven (death by carbon monoxide), yet she continues to resonate with people to this day; is it because we are able to relate to her melancholy and heartache? Or because of our sickening-interest in her suicide and the events that led to it? Maybe it is both. Because of her father’s death at a young age, Sylvia Plath’s poems underlies a theme regarding her suicidal demise and victimization at the hands of a patriarchal society, particularly from her husband, Ted Hughes, and late father, Otto Plath.
Throughout the poem, Plath contradicts herself, saying, ‘I was seven, I knew nothing’ yet she constantly talks of the past, remembering. Her tone is very dark and imposing, she uses many images of blindness, deafness and a severe lack of communication, ‘So the deaf and dumb/signal the blind, and are ignored’. Her use of enjambment shows her feelings and pain in some places, in other places it covers up her emotional state. She talks of her father being a German, a Nazi. Whilst her father may have originated from Germany, he was in no way a Nazi, or a fascist. He was a simple man who made sausages. ‘Lopping the sausages!’ However she used this against her father, who died when she was but eight, saying that she still had night mares, ‘They color1 my sleep,’ she also brings her father’s supposed Nazism up again, ‘Red, mottled, like cut necks./There was a silence!’. Plath also talks of her father being somewhat of a general in the militia, ‘A yew hedge of orders,’ also with this image she brings back her supposed vulnerability as a child, talking as if her father was going to send her away, ‘I am guilty of nothing.’ For all her claims of being vul...
While at Smith, Plath received many awards in regard to the poetry that she had written. After winning the Mademoiselle fiction contest, the popular magazine offered Plath a place on their editorial board. While working with Mademoiselle, Pla...
Sylvia Plath may be one of the most remarkable and idolized modern poets of the twentieth century. Sylvia Plath had an emotional life, and a troublesome past with her father's death, insecurities because of self-doubt, a tragic break up with her husband and severe depression, leading to her suicide in 1963. These tragic events in Plath’s life played a vast part in her career as a poet and novelist, by inspiring her to create her melancholy and notorious masterpieces.
Plath and Sexton's lifetimes spanned a period of remarkable change in the social role of women in America, and both are obviously feminist poets caught somewhere between the submissive pasts of their mothers and the liberated futures awaiting their daughters. With few established female poets to emulate, Plath and Sexton broke new ground with their intensely personal, confessional poetry. Their anger and frustration with female subjugation, as well as their agonizing personal struggles and triumphs appear undisguised in their works, but the fact that both Sexton and Plath committed suicide inevitably colors what the reader gleans from their poems. However, although their poems, such as Plath's "Daddy" and Sexton's "Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman," deal with the authors' private experiences, they retain elements of universality; their language cuts through a layer of individual perspective to reach a current of raw emotion common to all human, but especially female, understanding.
Other stylistic elements that Plath uses include imagery and symbolism. She is very vivid in describing the way the bee looks in the last two stanzas: ”With her lion-red body, her wings of glass.....red scar in the sky, red comet.” The words create a clear picture in of what she must have looks like, escaping the “mausoleum,” a symbol of the beehive and, therefore, of the speaker's entrapment. It “killed her,” or rather, killed her spirit.
Sylvia Plath’s jarring poem ‘Daddy’, is not only the exploration of her bitter and tumultuous relationship with her father, husband and perhaps the male species in general but is also a strong expression of resentment against the oppression of women by men and the violence and tyranny men can and have been held accountable for. Within the piece, the speaker creates a figurative image of her father by using metaphors to describe her relationship with him: “Not God but a Swastika” , he is a “… brute” , even likening him to leader of the Nazi Party; Adolf Hitler: “A man in black with a Meinkampf look .” Overall, the text is a telling recount of her hatred towards her father and her husband of “Seven years” and the tolling affect it has had on
Sylvia Plath’s life was full of disappointment, gloominess and resentment. Her relationship status with her parents was hostile and spiteful, especially with her father. Growing up during World War II did not help the mood of the nation either, which was dark and dreary. At age 8 Plath’s father of German ancestry died of diabetes and even though their relationship was never established nor secure, his death took a toll on her. “For Sylvia, who had been his favorite, it was an emotional holocaust and an experience from which she never fully recovered” (Kehoe 90). Since she was so young she never got to work out her unsettled feelings with him. Even at age eight, she hid when he was around because she was fearful of him. When she was in his presence his strict and authoritarian figure had left an overpowering barrier between their relationship. Sadly enough by age eight Plath instead of making memories with her dad playing in the yard she resented him and wanted nothing to do with him (Kehoe). These deep-seated feelings played a major role in Plath’s poetry writings. Along with his “hilterian figure,” her father’s attitude towards women was egotistical and dismissive, uncondemning. This behavior infuriated Plath; she was enraged about the double standard behavior towards women. Plath felt controlled in male-dominated world (Lant). “Because Plath associates power so exclusively with men, her conviction that femininity is suffocating and inhibiting comes as no surprise” (Lant 631). This idea of a male-dominated world also influenced Plath’s writing. Unfortunately, Plath married a man just like her father Ted Hughes. “Hughes abandonment apparently stirred in her the memories and feelings she had struggled with when her ...
As the tone changes the perspective of the reader changes as well. There is no clear way to determine whether the speaker is responding to her situation with the appropriate amount of madness or is actually going mad and escaping into her own mind. Plath’s poem shows how a woman 's happiness was defined by her relationship to a man, which is enough to infuriate or drive any woman insane. The speaker struggles to continue her very existence because of her lost love. It is true that the speaker is very emotional and feels things very deeply, but that is not enough to prove that she had lost her mind. By the end of the poem the speaker seems to realize that she is wasting her time waiting on a man. She would rather have a present love that is completely unfathomable than a real love that is not around. The repetition in this poem makes the reader believe this loss is actually causing the speaker to lose her mind, but through changing tones that mirror the emotions anyone would go through in a situation of loss like this the speaker’s response is completely
Throughout the poem, the character compares her father to different people and labels him. However, the character specifically compares her father to a German and states that she “thought every German was [him]” (29). This line is a metaphor and also shows how by being able to create her father into different people it allowed her the ability to escape from what she was feeling and going through. It is a metaphor because in her mind she is creating her father a German but in reality, he is not actually a German. Most importantly, we also find out that she tried to commit suicide as a way to escape from her pain. She states that “[a]t twenty [she] tried to die/ [a]nd get back, back, back to [him]” (58-59). This shows the characters urge to escape from her feelings and, therefore, tried to commit suicide but didn’t succeed. Plath has portrayed death as an exit and a way to solve one 's problems by escaping rather than confronting them.
The poetry of Sylvia Plath can be interpreted psychoanalytically. Sigmund Freud believed that the majority of all art was a controlled expression of the unconscious. However, this does not mean that the creation of art is effortless; on the contrary it requires a high degree of sophistication. Works of art like dreams have both a manifest content (what is on the surface) and latent content (the true meaning). Both dreams and art use symbolism and metaphor and thus need to be interpreted to understand the latent content. It is important to maintain that analyzing Plaths poetry is not the same as analyzing Plath; her works stand by themselves and create their own fictional world. In the poems Lady Lazarus, Daddy and Electra on Azalea Path the psychoanalytic motifs of sadomasochism, regression and oral fixation, reperesnet the desire to return to the incestuous love object.