Plath’s Triumphant Women Poems

Abstract

Sylvia Plath would have been the first to admit that there were multiple roles for women during the 1960s besides mothering or not mothering. In the age of professionalism, of incipient careerism, a woman would have been expected to have identities other than her status as a bearer of children. Just as so many of Plath’s journal entries dealt with her future work, and the conundrum of which work a talented woman writer, artist, and teacher should take up, so many of her poems deal with the varieties of achieving women. It is also clear in her journals that she was intentionally searching for women writers to emulate. She regularly mentions Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Stevie Smith, Willa Cather, Lillian Hellman, Louise Bogan, Adrienne Cecile Rich (often with some asperity, since Rich was her contemporary and by having won the Yale Younger Poets competition, already headed toward an important career as poet).¹ In fact, Liz Yorke has concluded that the journal entries “make it clear that Plath made a self-conscious decision to study women. Her critique of the ideology of the feminine; her critical consciousnes of women’s emotional, erotic and economic loyalty and their subserviance to men can be shown as developing continuously from this time [1958].”2