Sylvia Plath’s poems treating her relationship with her husband start from her own painful experience with him: her own sense of crisis due to his betrayal. In most of them the suffering female self reinterprets her own standing and reaches a deep self-awareness. Plath is engaged in demonstrating the way the mind deals with extreme circumstances to which it responds with excessive sensitivity. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate and examine a female self that struggles to achieve her independent and free state and searches for her integrity. Plath’s married life in despair and plight and her endeavor to recover the dignified self in spite of the fear and pain of isolation are dealt with in many of her later poems. In contrast to her earlier ones, such poems as “Purdah,” “Fever 103°,” and “Stings,” depict the speaker’s destruction of her male oppressor and the corresponding recovery of her true self. These poems are charged with high energy to liberate the repressed self performing the triumphal flight over “the mausoleum” of her heart. They evince the movement of a female self from victimization through retaliation toward transformation.
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