The Haunting Of Sylvia Plath

Download or read book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath written by Jacqueline Rose and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since her death in 1963 at the age of thirty, Sylvia Plath has become a strange icon--an object of intense speculation, of fantasy, repulsion, and desire. Few twentieth-century Western writers have inspired such a range of deeply felt responses: not even her tombstone is allowed to rest in peace. Admirers exalt Plath as a priestess of high art in a degenerate culture, or see her work as an indictment of patriarchal society, as she painfully experienced it in her relationships with her family, her analysts, and her husband, poet Ted Hughes. Detractors, however, see Plath as a seductive, destructive death figure whose solipsistic, negative rantings offend conventional mores and values. In both popular and scholarly circles, there seem to be no middle ground. Jacqueline Rose stands back from the debates, and looks instead at the swirl of controversy, recognizing it as a phenomenon in itself--one with much to tell us about how a culture selects and judges writers; how we hear women's voices; and how we receive messages from, to, and about our unconscious selves. Rose frees Plath from the rigid opposition between psychoanalytic and feminist agendas and offers a new way of understanding Plath and ourselves. --jacket.