The representation of self in the work of Sylvia Plath - Essay Example

The paper tells that for Sylvia Plath, changing her life was a frequent personal and artistic obligation. The habits of Plath of representing the self in her letters and journals as well as in her poetry and fiction indicate she considered her life as if it were an artistic work that she could create and revise. In her very first journal entry, written when she was seventeen, she already shows a sense of her own identity as an invented character: “I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God’”.

Repetitively, at times of difficulties, she visualizes she can be reborn through rubbing out the writing of personal history, unmarked as a newborn, untouched as a virgin. Plath considers her life as if it were a finished composition, particularly in one of the last poems she wrote, an already completed opus that she has created in her written works: “The woman is perfected./ Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment.” In her Ariel poems which she wrote in 1962, the crevice in her personal life claimed a revision of her self-identity in and through her poems.

In maintaining, as I do, that in outlining and reworking these poems Plath attempted to restructure a self-representation, I am not disputing for a poetics of visibility within which the female author is presumed to be writing openly and genuinely from her own experiences. To a certain extent, what I intend to explore is the production of disguises and presentations that Plath fabricated in her poems.