In this dissertation, I extend existing acknowledgments of the impact of Sylvia Plath’s visual arts training on her writing in order to argue that her painterly sensibilities are central to her character construction. Specifically, I contend that Plath draws upon a set of visual techniques, which I categorise as hallucinations, mental images, dreams, blurriness, and visual-to-verbal re-inscription. The ability to control subjective experience through the imagination, a philosophy Plath discusses in her journals, acts as a framework for her narratives, and visual techniques become, for Plath’s personae, a method of manipulating their experiences through a blurring of the divide between individual imagination and subjective reality. Plath’s visual techniques further function to represent her personae’s psychic interiority in ways that not only illustrate the limits to expression of the traditionally literary but also offer a means of overcoming these limits through an alternative system of meaning-making. Thus, her personae’s agency exists at the level of form, through selfrepresentation that is not stymied by the limitations of the written word, as well as at the level of narrative, through her personae’s control of experience. Moreover, because these visual techniques appear frequently in narratives that are preoccupied with a gendered power dynamic, I contend that we should understand Plath’s moments of resistance to textual tradition as enabling her personae’s escape from patriarchal limitations to freedom and selfexpression. While this recognition of the significance of Plath’s visual techniques should not necessarily constitute a panacea to the constraints of traditional language, it does offer a new way of reading Plath which acknowledges her painterly sensibilities as crucial to the way in which she gives her personae agency and writes back to her literary forefathers.

“Brightly Colored Magic and Weird Worlds”: Sylvia Plath’s Creation of Personae Through Her Visual Poetics

Plath and Fashion

Plath’s Teaching and the Shaping of Her Work

‘Sincerely Yours’: Plath andThe New Yorker

The Dominant Trends in British Poetry of the 1950s and Early 1960s

Sylvia Plath’s torture texts are the eye of the needle though which pass various chronological and tropological threads: World War II and the ‘war on terror’, political trauma and familial abuse. In order to expose the presence of those threads in some of Plath’s most intense poems, I begin this essay in the post-9/11 era and move backwards to World War II, situating Plath’s Cold War texts, especially ‘The Jailer’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’, between the two. My examination suggests that Plath’s poems echo and swerve from the World War II torture texts that inspired them, set guidelines for interpreting the renewed torture discourse of the twenty-first century and crucially connect the representation of torture to that of domesticity. The attacks of 9/11 precipitated in the United States an era of torture. The zeitgeist propelled a new ruthlessness. It was not so much that Christianity was endangered as that our masculinity was on trial – female masculinity as well as male, as we see in the case of Lynndie England and other women soldiers convicted of abuse at Abu Ghraib. We did not want to be ‘pansies’ or sitting ducks. We fought aggression with torture, or perhaps we decided that the shock of 9/11 permitted us to explore for ourselves what Dick Cheney famously called ‘the dark side’.

Steven Gould Axelrod

Papers

Representing Sylvia Plath: Plath and torture: cultural contexts for Plath’s imagery of the Holocaust