Plath as a Scattered Self Based on Kristevan Theory of Abject

As a complicated literary personality whose biography is almost impossible to disentangle from her writing, Plath has often been regarded as a confessional poet, though her deeply personal lamentations achieve universality through mythic allusion and archetypal symbolism. The present study tries to show how Plath is unable to express herself in the space of abjection. Kristeva’s notion of abjection encompasses not only the physical but also the maternal wish to blur the boundaries between self and a child; the struggle to liberate the self from maternal hold. Plath’s poetry is combined with the concept of self. Her experiences of loss and suicide are depicted in the poems through fragmented self which cannot be unified. In most lines, the speaker exists but the distinction between self and other disappears. Despite the fact that the poet’s character lacks unity in her poems, she tries to recreate herself and introduce new selves - at times quite contradictory ones. However, it fails to identify with newly reborn selves. Therefore, the mind and the body are disconnected. Since her tragic death, Plath has inspired a generation of women writers and feminist critics as a leading voice against female subordination and passivity in modern society. The present study uses Kristeva’s psychoanalytical approach to show that Plath is an abject writing self. The ambivalence between self and other, between what is internal and external, is essentially the split of self that Kristeva identified. The abject self is both a manner of identifying and defining the self and of debasing the self to the point of un-selfing. The process by which one’s intellectual self is separated from her physical self leading to consider an other within one’s identity fulfills Kristeva’s formula for abjection. The inconsistency in Plath’s work is a result of her being split self. Plath finds the borders between self and other blurred. She attempts to glue herself together to create poetry out of her fragmented self and the multiple voices in her mind. Being unable to see herself as a whole and as a unified self, she fails to connect her own consciousness to the intentional objects of her perception in order to achieve meaning. The present study will show how the poet attempts to overcome the multiplicity of selves struggles to develop self-identity in opposition to female roles.

Keywords:

Abjection , Subjectivity , Multiple identities , Self