西尔维娅·普拉斯自白诗中的创伤英语书写分析

本文是一篇英语论文，本文在创伤理论的框架下，研究普拉斯自白诗中的创伤书写，包括家庭创伤、女性创伤和政治恐惧创伤。诗人通过创伤书写抒发其个人压抑的情感以达到自我疗伤的目的，同时体现出诗人对于女性弱势群体和政治问题的关注。

I．Writing Familial Trauma to Attain Spiritual Freedom

A. Therapy for Loss and Pain over the Early Dead Father
Losing father during childhood left a great scar on her, which can be seen as the root cause of Sylvia Plath’s trauma. The image of her father haunted her ever since for the rest of her life and greatly influenced her later works. She is obsessed with her father’s death and shows her infinite loss and pain in her confessional poetry. However, resorting to confessional poetry has become a kind of therapy, which is a healing method for Plath to work through her trauma.
It is evident that Otto Plath’s early death was one of the biggest and cruelest blows to young Sylvia Plath, which has become a trauma she could never heal in her life. When Plath was eight years old, her father, Otto Plath died from gangrene infections of leg amputation caused by late-stage diabetes. Her father was a professor who taught both German and biology at Boston University. When Otto’s health condition deteriorated, he thought it was incurable cancer, and refused to seek medical treatment, but later he was diagnosed with diabetes instead of cancer. Having missed the best treatment time, Otto died in November 1940.
After little Sylvia heard her father’s death from her mother, she said she “will never speak to god again” (Simpson 11) as her world was torn apart by her father’s departure. Perhaps it was at this point that Plath’s character changed dramatically. Before Otto’s death, Plath was a young girl who knew how to express herself in order togain others’ admiration. But with the death of her father, Plath’s need for self-affirmation was fueled by a deep sense of insecurity. Since then, she became grumpy and a bit of a loner. Then she used the external self to face the world, eager to confirm her existence, and the inner self was always in the shadow, until she found a way to express her inner world through confessional poetry.
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B. Outlet for Hidden Resentment over the Possessive Mother
Sylvia Plath’s emotion towards her mother is ambivalent for she is both attached toher mother and also wants to gain independence from her. It can be said that Plath’s mother takes a very important position in her short life and has a profound influence on her poetic creation. Her mother, in Sylvia Plath’s eyes, is not only the beloved family member she can seek comfort from, but also the primary cause of her pain. On the surface, Plath has to love this “selfless” mother, but she secretly hates her. Therefore, the resentment towards the mother is hidden somewhere in Plath’s inner mind, only to be occasionally vented through her confessional poetry, which functions as an outlet for the poet to utter her hidden hatred.
Plath’s mother, Aurelia, was a former student of Otto Plath at Boston University. After graduation, she taught at a local school and dreamed of becoming a poet. Plath’s father was attracted by her, which was not expressed because of the teacher-student relationship until Aurelia graduated. Aurelia also admired Otto’s talent for a long time and agreed to marry him. After marriage, Aurelia quit her job and worked as a housewife at home. Meanwhile, she also assisted Otto with his academic career. Their marriage life has been a quite happy one until the year 1935 when Otto’s physical condition went from bad to worse. After the death of Plath’s father, with the family burden falling on Aurelia, she worked hard to support Plath and her brother, which has invisibly brought a lot of pressure on the smart and sensitive Plath and is also part of the reason why Plath has to hide her unpleasant feeling towards her mother even though she thinks her mother is controlling and possessive.
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II. Writing Female Trauma to Regain Female Subjectivity

A. Way of Giving Voice to the Vulnerable Female Body
Plath believes that being a woman is a tragedy for she constantly loses the most precious things in life: during menstruation, they lose blood; when experiencing miscarriage, they lose blood and also the ability to nurture lives; childless women are considered not to be integral women, but nurturing children makes them lose their vitality. Sylvia Plath is dissatisfied and frustrated with the female body, be it the body of the fertility of infertility, productivity or barrenness. Plath details out the privacy such as menstruation, pregnancy and giving birth in her poems, through which she conveys her dissatisfaction and frustration with this restricted body. She resorts to her confessionalpoetry and gives her voice to the vulnerable female body.
In America the 1950s and 1960s, the war just ended and patriarchy returned. The government propagandized women to leave their works and return to families. The images of the holy housewife and mother repeatedly appeared on television. The media encouraged women to seek their happiness through getting married and having children. Sylvia Plath grew up in such social environment. Men were the only social subjects, in order to become which, she had to follow the manly idol because her subjectivity and creativity were all inherited from the male tradition. Plath fell into the paradox that almost all feminists would: being a woman, she advocated women’s equality as men, as well as worshipped male power and avoided female nature. Contradicted by her male mentality and her female body, Plath often struggled with her perception of female body.
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B. Means of Protesting against the Repressive Wifely Duties
Plath is a sensitive woman full of emotions and contradictions. Unlike the feminists in the 1960s, Plath is deeply influenced by tradition. Plath has always tries to be a perfect wife that conforms to social norms of that time. However, the obligations endowed by this socially required role and her thoughts form a sharp conflict. She frankly publicizes her inner trauma and disorder through her confessional poetry, which is a tool to relieve her pain, to release her depression and frustration as well as protest against these repressive wifely duties.
Plath complains about the bitterness of a wife’s traditional duties: married women are not only doing the household chores, but also men’s sexual partner, and eventually will become breeding machines. One of Sylvia Plath’s strongest and feminist poems that focuses on male-female relationship in marriage is “The Applicant.” Introducing this poem for a BBC radio reading in 1962, Plath describes the I-speaker as “an executive, a sort of exacting super salesman,” who wants to be sure that “the applicant for his marvelous product really needs it and will treat it right” (Note to ‘The Applicant’ in Collected Poems, 293). The structure of this poem is based on an eight-verse interview. As the salesman questions the applicant, the reader gradually discovers what they are being offered is actually a “wife.”
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III. Writing Political Trauma to Appeal for Social Stability .................................. 42
A. Release of the World WarⅡ Holocaust Horror .............................................. 42
B. Relief of the Postwar Anxiety over Nuclear and Cold War ............................. 47
C. Denouncement of the Ecological Damage under Political Influence .............. 51

III. Writing Political Trauma to Appeal for Social Stability

A. Release of the World WarⅡ Holocaust Horror
From Sylvia Plath’s confessional poems, especially in Ariel, which is completed in the months before her death, it can be seen that Plath’s strong poetic mentality and her repeated fascination with the connection between poetry and death have surpassed beyond the catharsis and release of her familial or female trauma. These poems relate her personal terror and fear with the suffering of the Holocaust in a way of intensifying her grief. However, she cites the Holocaust less as a means of expressing her personal trauma than as a method of reliving the political anxiety and terror shared by the poet and the people of her age.
In her confessional poem collection Ariel, Plath takes on an intense familiarity with the Holocaust, which aims to reveal the persecution of the Jews, the cruelty of the Nazis and also the brutality of the war. The Holocaust is not only about her personal experience, but also elevated to a historical and social level. In confessional poems, Plath gives vent to her hatred and revenge. The lingering shadow of the war is stillhovering in her mind; she feels that the time she lives in is filled with the evil destructive power that has disintegrated the fragile Plath.
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Conclusion
Sylvia Plath is one of the most important representatives of American confessional poetry in the 20th century. She is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and the most legendary poet in the history of female poetry. Plath associates her personal pain and trauma with collective suffering, which has achieved a marvelous artistic effect. It is her unique life experience that has contributed to her unique poetic style, especially the painful personal experience, which brings her passion and inspiration, as well as accomplishes a perfect self-salvation on the edge of life and death.
In general, trauma refers to the serious injury caused by serious events to the human mind, which makes patients feel threatened and insecure. Chronic post-traumatic stress disorder can persist for years or decades. Suicide, sustained self-denial, and a strong sense of revenge are significant signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Plath was undergone multiple traumas which led to her grief, depression, madness and suicide attempts. Death has become an obsession for her so she tried several suicide attempts throughout her life, and expressed her sense of self-denial and morbid madness by writing poetry. The loss of parental love, the breakdown of marriage, and the turbulence of the times and the society have all together contributed to Plath’s traumatic experiences.
Plath’s confessional poetry is the inevitable result of suffering the repressive life. Her confessional poetry featuring autobiographical contents and abundant emotions can be seen as a way of trauma writing, which is an effective way to face with trauma and get out of trauma. Those poems that are full of suicidal pain and despair have become the embodiment of confessing her extreme pain after suffering the trauma. The pain and trauma make Plath’s poetry achieve a high level of thought and perception of life, the traumatized experience of Plath has become an important part of her poetry, and to speak out these painful experience works as a therapy for reducing her pain.
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