期刊名称：Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
电子版ISSN：0975-2935
出版年度：2019
卷号：11
期号：3
页码：1-19
DOI：10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.01
出版社：Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
摘要：Writing confessional lyrics, which are highly subjective and intensely personal, needs an extraordinarilysensitive mind that tends to break down while systematically probing that narrow and violent area ofexperience between the viable and the impossible, transmuted into poetry. This was Plath’s “way ofordering and reordering the chaos of experience.” Plath’s neurosis led her to commit suicide at the age ofthirty-one, and since then critics have not been able to study her poetry away from her tempestuous life.The article studies a probable link between creativity and mental illness that Dean Keath Simonton calls‘Mad-Genius Paradox,’ thereby floating a hypothesis that either it was Sylvia Plath’s writing that made herdepressed and eventually influenced her decision to commit suicide or it was her depression andpsychopathology that influenced her poetry, which resulted in her best collection Ariel. The article alsostudies her poem ‘Daddy,’ which is included in Ariel, hailed as “the Guernica of Modern Poetry,” more of adying statement in a “controlled hallucination,” and concludes that Plath’s confessional mode, herpsychosis, and her creative genius finds a zenith in the poem. ‘Daddy’ is a Freudian exercise where Plathfinds her muse in her father while rejecting him and her ex-husband Ted Hughes as Fascists, who sheadored as every woman does. The poem shows how the fall of the paternal ideal at the age of eight,resurrected in her matrimony with Ted Hughes, repeats itself, and therefore she should kill them both to bethrough.
