The Gothic Writings of Sylvia Plath

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Sylvia Plath has been one of the literary world’s most controversial figures in the past century, celebrated as well as panned by literati for her enigmatic work. She is well known for the brutality and suffering apparent in the morbid world of her poetry. The prominent poet and critic, Al Alvarez, claimed that the Ariel poems “manage to make death and poetry inseparable” and Charles Newton described Plath as “courting experience that kills.”1 However, in spite of the immense scholarship dedicated to her, the examination of the gothic features in her work has been neglected and as such, this essay will focus on the gothic world of Sylvia Plath.

According to Fred Botting, the Gothic represents a trend towards an aesthetic which is based on emotional response primarily associated with the sublime. It represents the triumph of chaos over order and is typically distinguished by the broad categories of Gothic Excess and Transgression.2

Gothic Excesses are signified by an “over-abundance of imaginative frenzy”, untamed by reason and unrestrained by “neoclassical demands for simplicity, r...

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