With the twentieth century now behind us, students and scholars will return time and again to the contributors to that century's literary canon . In the field of poetry, there are several candidates to consider, but Sylvia Plath is certainly a strong contender for the list of important American poets of this era. Writing in the 1950s and 1960s after World War II, Plath's often haunting, macabre and dark works, which characteristically featured images such as the moon, blood, hospitals, fetuses and skulls, contrast with the universal image of his optimism. era. Plath's work coincides with the era of the baby boomer generation, and Plath distinctly appears to be the self-reliant, reluctant bride and mother, who instead turned out to have an unwavering commitment to writing and an ambivalent commitment to the domestic life. Additionally, she wrote before women traditionally had jobs and was the first to address the conflict between domestic and professional balance. “Plath frequently explores what it means to be a woman in terms of the traditional conflict between family and career. Plath’s life and writings are filled with anxiety and despair over her refusal to choose and instead trying to have…both” (Dobbs, 11). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayThe young woman Sylvia Plath “experienced the social conventions of the 1950s as a murderous repressive force....Plath saw herself entering in a society in which marriage and procreation were irreconcilable with a career” (McNeil 476). Nowhere other than in the lines of his poetry are these two selves in contradiction. Plath's sense of conflict between literary vocation and conventional gender role makes femininity a central issue in her poetry. Much postwar American poetry explicitly addresses issues of the self. Plath's poetic voice, however, draws the reader back to a hidden self while at the same time speaking outward. This doubling is the source of Plath’s power. Known for her contributions and perhaps her invention of the confessional poem, Plath brings "private humiliations, sufferings, and psychological problems into the poems...usually developed in the first person and undoubtedly intended to denote the author herself” (McNeil 485). ). Her poems “depict a subjectivity immediately recognizable by the feminine – and feminist – consciousness that constitutes much of contemporary sensibility; in fact, Plath is one of the creators of this sensibility (McNeil, 469). The following in-depth readings and research will endeavor to uncover this subjectivity and sensitivity that make Plath one of the most important female poets of the 20th century. In exploring two themes that Plath develops from their conventional meanings, this article will present Plath's voice as a movement beyond the pages on which they are written toward the installation of the universal female voice. Plath's ironic and unconventional uses of the moon in her poems are symbols of female passivity, subjugation, and negation. Additionally, the use of the mirror in her poetry represents Plath's conflicted identity, brought on by social pressure to balance the obligations of her professional, artistic, and personal lives. Of MoonsPlath was fascinated by the classic concept of the moon as a feminine metaphor, but in her poetry this metaphor functions in the opposite way. THEPlath's poem "Moonrise" uses disturbing imagery and allusions to the death of Christ in relation to pregnancy: "The berries blush. A white body/Rots and smells of decay beneath its tombstone/Though the body comes out with clean linen./…Death whitens in the bud and out of it” (13-15, 18). It is evident here that for Plath, childbirth is a form of death of the mother or loss of herself. The poem ends with an address to Lucina, the goddess of childbirth, whom Plath transforms into a woman in the moon: "Lucina, bony mother, who works/Among the orbiting/white stars, your face/With candor cuts the white flesh to the white bone” (24-26). The ironic imagery of Lucina, the moon, representing the negation of pregnancy instead of the menstrual cycle so closely associated with life and education, reveals Plath's controversial and reformist thoughts on childbirth. If the moon is the mother, the symbol evolves in Plath's poem "The Moon". and the yew,” to Plath’s view of the mother as someone who rejects and isolates her. Personified, the moon is “white as a knuckle and terribly upset” (9). Moonlight becomes a mortal “mother,” his mother. In the moon, Plath sees cold and distance; it is not the romantic, nurturing symbol it should be, and she finds the moon to be without tenderness, as a mother should be. Instead, the moon seems to be angry with her and rejects her. “The moon is my mother. She is not gentle like Mary./Her blue clothes release little bats and owls./How I would like to believe in tenderness ----” (17-19). The mother does not feed her; instead, she releases gothic parasites, bats and owls, cold and uncomfortable. The conclusion of the poem: “The moon sees none of this. She is bald and wild” (27) shows that the mother is unaware of her daughter’s presence and is independent of her child. Further irony in Plath's use of the moon as a symbol is prevalent in her poem "The Rival": "If the moon smiled, it would look like you./You leave the same impression/Of something beautiful, but of annihilating./You are both great borrowers of light./His O-mouth grieves for the world; yours is not affected… (1-5). Plath here extends the metaphor of a rivalry with her husband with her relationship to the mother, as someone who will destroy her and take away her light, her life. The moon is now a symbol of a threat to Plath and her work. No longer the source of support that mother and husband should be, Plath views the moon, the woman, as undoing her life's work. She feels threatened by women's social and domestic obligations. “The moon also abuses its subjects,/But during the day it is ridiculous” (11-12). The moon is “white and virgin, expansive like carbon monoxide” (15), or in other words it is mortal to him. If the moon in her poetry was a source of indifference and abandonment, in Plath's last poem before her death, "Edge", it is her silence. Plath comments that woman is only perfected and fulfilled by death, and she coolly concludes: "There is nothing sad about the moon,/Looking out from her bone hood./She is accustomed to such things." /Its blacks crackle and drag” (19-22). Plath imagines the moon observing the macabre scene of the corpses of the mother and children with cruelty and indifference: “She is used to this sort of thing. » Furthermore, the poem ends by implying that the moon bears some responsibility for the deaths. The “blacks crackle and drag” of the moon. The trailing of blacks could represent curtains that obscure the light and symbolize the end of life that the moon grants again and again. "Crackle", however, suggests interference and electricitystatic in the atmosphere that disturbs individuals. Indeed, man's relationships with the moon arise from our vocabulary; the word madness from the Latin root “mon-” suggests that the moon is maddening. The moon has, so to speak, a direct effect on the woman's life cycle: her menstrual cycle is twenty-eight days, depending on the moon. Therefore, it is implied that the moon may have influenced the horrific events she then observes. If lunar imagery refers to the woman as a fertile whole waxing and waning during her monthly cycle, Plath's imagery, in contrast, has come to signify inconsistency, sterility, and death. From the symbol of the distant mother moon to the murderess, Plath's sees motherhood as something that threatens, even kills, her. These poems reveal degrees of mental stress linked to maternal condition and pregnancy. Plath herself had two children, yet it is obvious that for Plath, motherhood makes you someone else, a monstrous. The idea of ​​the divided self, or the self without identity, was further developed in Plath's use of mirror imagery in her works.II. Mirrors “For many writers, the search in the mirror is ultimately a search for the self, often for the self as an artist” (Freedman 152). Plath's notable use of mirrors in her poetry reveals her anxiety and obsession with claiming an identity, both as a writer, and reclaiming her identity after childbirth. Far beyond vanity, femininity, and the male gaze, it seems that Plath's primary concern for reflection was the reflection of herself and who she was, and her significance not only as as a woman, but as a human being. Plath was married to the prominent poet Ted Hughes until his death, and she sought to identify herself outside of being "the poet's wife". “To look in the glass is to look at oneself within or as reflected on the surface of the mirror and to seek or discover oneself in the person (or non-person) of the mirror” (Freedman 152) . Plath's use of the mirror in her poetry represents her own conflicted identity caused by the social pressure that all women face when balancing family life and professional careers. It is relevant then to address Plath's poem "Mirror", because it so broadly and completely encompasses the search for the female self in the mirror or lake. The “She” of the poem seeks in the reflecting lake the flattering distortion of herself, the woman as an ideal “maiden” (Plath, 17) forever and who “turns to these liars, the candles or the moon” (12). for confirmation of the “man-pleasing myth of perpetual youth, docility, and sexual attractiveness” (Freedman, 152). The image that finally surfaces in the lake, or in the mirror, is the old woman, or "terrible fish" (18), something monstrous that results from Plath compromising or accepting that old age replaces beauty. The replacement of the young woman with the old woman may go further and explore Plath's concern with procreation, something expected and considered normative but which can also compromise beauty and youth. The choice for Plath, and for all women, is between self-effacement to have children and essential replacement in her body and identity. After having children, the woman risks her own autonomous identity. To further address the symbol, Plath equates this, in the poem, to looking in the mirror and no longer seeing one's own reflection but seeing the terrible fish, bloated and no longer identifiable. While “Mirror” is a commentary on the compromise of youth and beauty. after childbirth,Three Women” expands on Plath’s anxieties about compromising her professional identity after having children. The poem is divided into three different voices of women giving birth in a hospital. The Third Voice begins by referring to itself as a reflection: "I remember the moment I knew for sure./The willows were frightening,/The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine- -/He had a consistent air, like everything else,/And I only saw dangers: doves and words” (43-47). The Third Voice may be that of Sylvia, dreading meeting her double in water or mirrors. She gives birth to a daughter that she is not ready to bear, leaves her in the hospital for adoption and settles back into her old life, which is the academic life, the intellectual life. “I should have murdered this, it murders me” (126). For the Third Voice, the delivery room is “a place of screams” where the lights are “flat red moons… dull with blood.” Once born, the little and naughty girl asks for her mother with “hooks”; his little crying face is “carved in wood”; her cries scratch sleep “like arrows”. It is the language of rejection, of rejection of motherhood and acceptance of intellectual stimulation. On the other hand, the Second Voice belongs to a woman who has a miscarriage and in turn regains her identity. After a miscarriage, the Second Voice exclaims: "The mirror makes a woman without deformity./The nurses give me back my clothes and an identity" (238-40). Later, “I'm not desperate./I'm beautiful like a statistic.” Here is my lipstick./I draw on the old mouth./The red mouth that I leave with my identity” (243-46). And finally: “I can go to work today./I can love my husband, who will understand./Who will love me through the blur of my deformity/As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue” (248 -51). These two women are freed from motherhood, either by abandonment in the case of the Third Voice, or by accident in the case of the Second Voice. The reflection of self in the Third Voice is a reflection of fear, for the reflection will no longer resemble the mother if the child is born. Alternatively, the reflection of the Second Voice is one of beneficial relief at having "dodged a bullet" so to speak and not having been "distorted", at being "worthy" of the love of a husband and, more importantly, to be able to return. at her job where she is valued. “The mirror imagery that [Plath] uses in her poetry seems to be a dangerously shifting zone of uncertainty and intense tension. The reflective surfaces used in his poetry become transparent and reveal a threatening world behind them” (Ekmekcioglu, 100). If Plath's anxieties about loss of identity were a mere thought, in her poem "Tale of a Tub" the mood shifts to finding reconciliation. The poem describes the strange sensation of looking in a mirror and seeing a stranger: "The stranger in the toilet mirror/Smiles publicly, repeats our name/But scrupulously reflects the usual terror" (5-9). In this work, Plath is the object in the mirror signifying death, smiling and calling our name. In the poem's conclusion, only death gives it an identity or "makes us real" because the corpse is no longer part of the world of reflected images. Plath's comments that woman is only perfected and fulfilled through death echo her poem "The Edge." Her idea of ​​finding an identity after the end of her life was perhaps a comment on the life she had with her husband and children. Feeling trapped in her domestic life, she may have felt that, as a form of poetic justice, ending her life would have given her freedom.