“I Am a Garden of Black and Red Agonies”: The Image of Maternity in Sylvia Plath's Poetry
| Thesis title in Czech: | "Jsem zahrada černých a červených muk": Obraz mateřství v poezii Sylvie Plathové |
|---|---|
| Thesis title in English: | “I Am a Garden of Black and Red Agonies”: The Image of Maternity in Sylvia Plath's Poetry |
| Key words: | Sylvia Plath|poezie|mateřství|konfesionální poezie|domesticita |
| English key words: | Sylvia Plath|poetry|motherhood|confessional poetry|domesticity |
| Academic year of topic announcement: | 2022/2023 |
| Thesis type: | diploma thesis |
| Thesis language: | angličtina |
| Department: | Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK) |
| Supervisor: | Mgr. Pavla Veselá, Ph.D. |
| Author: | hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept. |
| Date of registration: | 28.02.2023 |
| Date of assignment: | 01.03.2023 |
| Administrator's approval: | approved |
| Confirmed by Study dept. on: | 02.03.2023 |
| Date and time of defence: | 07.02.2024 00:00 |
| Date of electronic submission: | 24.07.2023 |
| Date of proceeded defence: | 07.02.2024 |
| Submitted/finalized: | committed by student and finalized |
| Opponents: | doc. PhDr. Mariana Machová, Ph.D. |
| Guidelines |
| The main objective of this thesis is to provide a critical analysis of Sylvia Plath’s poems which deal with the subject of maternity, and identify and study recurring images. I shall explore how pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood and the maternal body are understood by Plath in her poetry and how she addressed her own thoughts and experiences of maternity in it. The poetry will be studied and read from a sociocultural and feminist standpoint, as studies of motherhood and domesticity in the United States by Matthews (1989), Johnson and Lloyd (2004) as well as selected media from the era will be analyzed in order to offer a general context within which Plath created her poetry and demonstrate how she contested the idealized perception of motherhood at the time. The thesis will include a brief biography of Sylvia Plath, covering known life events recorded in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000) and Letters Home (1999) as well as an introduction to confessional poetry. |
| References |
| Primary Source: Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1981. Secondary Sources: Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007. Johnson, Lesley, and Justine Lloyd. Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004. Lane, Gary. Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Lopes, Elisabete. “Bats Flying off My Womb: Monstrous Maternity in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry.” Re-Told Feminine Memoirs: Our Collective Past and Present. Ed. Gabriela Mádlo. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013. Matthews, Gleena. Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963. London: Faber & Faber, 1999. Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Newman, Charles. The Art of Sylvia Plath. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Van Dyne, Susan. Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. |