오염된 부엌, 불안한 집

Polluted Kitchen, Haunted House: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Paranoia

This paper aims to explore how Sylvia Plath’s poems describe the domestic space, particularly, the kitchen as a metaphor for the Cold War paranoia. Using Marsha Bryant’s term, “the domestic surreal,” it looks into how Plath builds a complex and nuanced poetics of domesticity. Without depicting it as a married woman’s desire for private space, Plath intertwines the domesticity with the Cold War politics and anchors her writing style in a woman’s experiences. For instance, she reveals the Cold War paradox of domestic security by reversing marriage vows for safety into anxieties over her married life. She also blurs the distinction between the public and the private worlds and argues that the home represents as much a place for masks as a theatre of public life. In doing so, Plath overlaps the private space of home over the public sphere of Cold War geopolitics. Staying domestic, literally and poetically, in a woman’s place, and satirically asking for the home to be a place for a woman to locate her authentic selfhood, Plath puts out a strong public critique of the logic of American Cold War. Indeed, Plath is a ‘domestic’ poet who spoke up a woman’s voice of social engagement in the precarious period of war.