"Mother of otherness": Exploring the Stakes of Semiotic ‘Madness' within the Poetry of Sylvia Plath
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2021
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Bi-College users only
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Abstract
This thesis presents the ways in which confessional poet Sylvia Plath traversed literary boundaries through her anti-normative poetics and strove to rupture what psychoanalytic critic Julia Kristeva delineates as the conventional linguistic symbolic order. By analyzing Plath's "Poems, Potatoes,""Mirror," "Childless Woman," "Edge," and "Contusion," I reject a strictly biographical reading of her work and advocate for one rooted in Plath's specific, vivid, and often shocking language. By interpreting these five poems through the lens of the Kristevan semiotic, examining Plath's motions toward Kristeva's conception of the abject, and engaging with the work of feminist disability studies, I illustrate the ways in which Plath extended far beyond acritical pathologization of 'madness' in the face of the symbolic limitations of the patriarchal social order.