Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T16:25:27.921Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Daddy, I Have Had to Kill You”: Plath, Rage, and the Modern Elegy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jahan Ramazani
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Plath makes a major contribution to the development of the elegy with a series of poems mourning her father's death, even though they have seldom been read as elegies. More than any of her forebears, Plath intensifies the mourner's aggression toward the dead, dramatically expanding the boundaries of the genre. She summons a furious anger that most earlier elegists eschew in favor of pathos, reverence, or homosocial rivalry. At first deflecting rage inward in elegies of masochistic self-reproach, Plath dramatizes an ever more explosive grief. Although the “female elegy” has been defined as a “poem of connectedness,” Plath writes elegies of violent separation and rupture, rejecting the prostrate role assigned by literary and gender codes to the female mourner. She helps to remake the elegy for the twentieth century, shifting its psychic work from consolatory mourning to the violent, contradictory, and protracted work of melancholia.

Type
Cluster on the Poetic: From Euripides to Rich
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 5 , October 1993 , pp. 1142 - 1156
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Alvarez, A. “Sylvia Plath.” The Art of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Newman, Charles. London: Faber, 1970. 56–68.Google Scholar
Annas, Pamela J. A Disturbance of Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Greenwood, 1988.Google Scholar
Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Bennett, Paula. My Life a Loaded Gun: Dickinson, Plath, Rich, and Female Creativity. 1986. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.Google Scholar
Berryman, John. The Dream Songs. New York: Farrar, 1969.Google Scholar
Bowlby, John. Loss: Sadness and Depression. 1980. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Pelican-Penguin, 1985. Vol. 3 of Attachment and Loss.Google Scholar
Bradstreet, Anne. “To the Memory of My Dear and Ever Honoured Father Thomas Dudley Esq.” The Works of Anne Bradstreet. Ed. Hensley, Jeannine. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1967. 201–20.Google Scholar
Brontë, Emily. “Remembrance.” Selected Brontë Poems. Ed. Chitham, Edward and Winnifrith, Tom. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. 162–16.Google Scholar
Bundtzen, Lynda K. Plath's Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983.Google Scholar
Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. New York: Continuum-Seabury, 1976.Google Scholar
Cam, Heather. “‘Daddy’: Sylvia Plath's Debt to Anne Sexton.” Sexton: Selected Criticism. Ed. George, Diana Hume. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 223–22.Google Scholar
Culler, Jonathan. “Changes in the Study of the Lyric.” Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ed. Hošek, Chaviva and Parker, Patricia. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 38–54.Google Scholar
Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. “A Father's Prayer, a Daughter's Anger: W. B. Yeats and Sylvia Plath.” Daughters and Fathers. Ed. Boose, Lynda E. and Flowers, Betty S. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 233–23.Google Scholar
de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. 67–81.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. Strachey, James. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1957. 243–58. 24 vols. 1953–19.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Sandra M. “In Yeats' House: The Death and Resurrection of Sylvia Plath.” Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath. Ed. Wagner, Linda W. Boston: Hall, 1984. 204–20.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Ginsberg, Allen. “Kaddish.” “Kaddish” and Other Poems, 1958–1960. San Francisco: City Lights, 1961. 7–36.Google Scholar
Gorer, Geoffrey. Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain. Garden City: Doubleday, 1965.Google Scholar
Guttenberg, Barnett. “Plath's Cosmology and the House of Yeats.” Lane 138–13.Google Scholar
Hemans, Felicia. The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans. Boston: Phillips, 1856.Google Scholar
Holbrook, David. Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. 1968. London: Athlone, 1976.Google Scholar
Jackson, Helen Hunt. “Demeter.” Verses by H. H. Boston: Roberts, 1874. 181.Google Scholar
Jonson, Ben. “On My First Son.” The Complete Poems. By Jonson. Ed. George Parfitt. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975. 48.Google Scholar
Kizer, Carolyn. “Thrall.” An Answering Music: On the Poetry of Carolyn Kizer. Ed. Rigsbee, David. Boston: Ford-Brown, 1990. 118–11.Google Scholar
Klein, Melanie. “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States.” “Love, Guilt and Reparation” and Other Works, 1921–1945. By Klein. Ed. Masud R. Khan. London: Hogarth, 1981. 344–34.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Roudiez, Leon S. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper, 1976.Google Scholar
Kumin, Maxine. “The Nightmare Factory.” The Nightmare Factory. New York: Harper, 1970. 93–94.Google Scholar
Lane, Gary, ed. Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Lindemann, Erich. “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief.” American Journal of Psychiatry 101 (1944–45): 141–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowell, Robert. “Sailing Home from Rapallo.” “Life Studies” and “For the Union Dead. ” New York: Noonday-Farrar, 1964. 77–78.Google Scholar
Marcus, Jane. Art and Anger: Reading like a Woman. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Milton, John. “Lycidas.” Complete Shorter Poems. By Milton. Ed. John Carey. London: Longman, 1971. 239–23.Google Scholar
Olds, Sharon. The Father. New York: Knopf, 1992.Google Scholar
Olds, Sharon. “Of All the Dead That Have Come to Me, This One.” The Dead and the Living. New York: Knopf, 1984. 21.Google Scholar
Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon, 1986.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie. “On the Road to Ariel: The ‘Transitional’ Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work. Ed. Butscher, Edward. New York: Dodd, 1977. 125–12.Google Scholar
Pigman, G. W. Grief and English Renaissance Elegy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Hughes, Ted. New York: Harper, 1981.Google Scholar
Plath, Sylvia. Interview. The Poet Speaks. With Peter Orr. New York: Barnes, 1966. 167–16.Google Scholar
Plath, Sylvia. Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. McCullough, Frances and Hughes, Ted. New York: Dial, 1982.Google Scholar
Rich, Adrienne. “After Dark.” Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974. New York: Norton, 1975. 82–84.Google Scholar
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1976.Google Scholar
Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978. New York: Norton, 1979.Google Scholar
Rich, Adrienne. Sources. Woodside: Heyeck, 1983.Google Scholar
Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Rosenblatt, Jon. Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1979.Google Scholar
Sacks, Peter M. The English Elegy: Readings in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Schenck, Celeste M. “Feminism and Deconstruction: Reconstructing the Elegy.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5 (1986): 13–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, Murray M., and Bollas, Christopher. “The Absence at the Center: Sylvia Plath and Suicide.” Lane 179–202.Google Scholar
Sexton, Anne. “The Art of Poetry: Anne Sexton.” 1968. Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. Ed. McClatchy, J. D. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. 3–29.Google Scholar
Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton, 1981.Google Scholar
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Adonais. Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Reiman, Donald H. and Powers, Sharon B. New York: Norton, 1977. 390–406.Google Scholar
Sigourney, Lydia H. Poems. New York: Leavitt, 1841.Google Scholar
Simmel, Georg. Conflict. Trans. Wolff, Kurt H. Conflict and The Web of Group-Affiliations. New York: Free, 1955. 11–123. Trans, of Der Streit. 1908.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. “Astrophel.” The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. Ed. Smith, J. C. and Selincourt, E. de. New York: Oxford UP, 1912. 547–54.Google Scholar
Steiner, Nancy Hunter. A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper's-Harper, 1973.Google Scholar
Stone, Carole. “Elegy as Political Expression in Women's Poetry: Akhmatova, Levertov, Forche.” College Literature 18 (1991): 84–91.Google Scholar
Tennyson, Alfred Lord. In Memoriam. Ed. Ross, Robert H. New York: Norton, 1973.Google Scholar
Volkan, Vamik D. “The Linking Objects of Pathological Mourners.” Archives of General Psychiatry 27 (1972): 215–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. London: Chatto, 1988.Google Scholar
Wakoski, Diane. “The Father of My Country.” Trilogy. New York: Doubleday, 1974. 139–13.Google Scholar
Walker, Cheryl. The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.Google Scholar