Surrealist Mutation of a Self-Portrait: An Existentialist Approach to the Surrealist Visions of Sylvia Plath

The capricious shadow of confessional writing overarching Sylvia Plath’s literary reputation, a myriad of biographical readings and feminist studies has targeted Plath’s life and poetry. In cases that critics have moved beyond the trodden realms, their focus has largely remained at verbal level of style, disregarding the rich visual ground of her poetry with the aesthetic experience it promises. The present study, however, by adopting the surrealist designs of André Breton as well as the existential philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, attempts to open up a poetic space in which the unstable self of poetic personas comes to the fore in its constant denial to take for granted the reductive picture of reality as offered in the settings of the poems. Discarding sight in favor of insight, the de-familiarizing eye of the speakers picks poetic images out of everyday objects and transforms them so drastically that the resultant view verges on surrealist sphere; hence paving the ground for the speaker’s transcendence. Through close reading of Plath’s 1956-63 poems, the paper hopes to show that the persona’s continual self-fabrication and self-destruction belie the persona’s existential concerns which, ultimately, can offer an authentic self-portrait of Plath’s persona in the persistent mutation of its self.

Keywords:

authenticity , bad faith , existential anxiety , eye , surrealist images , Sylvia Plath