Title:
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Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath through psychoanalysis
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This thesis reads Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath for their poetic engagement
psychoanalysis. This reading nuances their relation to confessional poetry. By
'confessional' I mean the term first used to describe Robert Lowell's 'Life Studies' (1959),
and later to describe the poets that were influenced by him. My main intervention is that
what makes Bishop and Plath's poetry appear confessional owes to their engagement with
psychoanalysis. Confessional poetry provokes psychoanalytic interpretation, but these two
poets are not the passive object of psychoanalytic interpretation. Instead they used poetic
form to motivate a transference with psychoanalysis.
Plath and Bishop's poetry often diverges from or produces a critique of
psychoanalysis where it is most compromising for women. I focus on Freud and Lacan as
two of the most difficult yet influential figures in the relationship between psychoanalysis
and feminism.
Plath's poetry is not pathological and inevitably suicidal, and Bishop develops a
more problematic relationship with the other than is sometimes suggested. Both poets also
give form to a maternal relation of the kind that Freud and Lacan's work suppresses. The
confessional poem is also read as a formation of the ego.
Although Bishop is not normally included under the term confessional poetry, she
influenced Lowell, and when the confessional poem is read as an ego, rather than centred
on the 'I', her writing can be seen to share some of the most essential features of
confessional poetry. The main difference is her use of secretive tactics very different from
the deliberate self-centredness of confessional poetry proper. Whereas the archconfessional
Plath made the 'I' the centre of her poetry and her gender overt, Bishop hid
both of these behind various surfaces. The parallels I draw between these two poets reveal
the different ways that as writers they brought women's writing and feminine subjectivity
on the literary scene.
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