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Plath Profiles : An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies
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This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Online) 2155-8175
Published by Indiana University [24 journals]

Sylvia Plath and the Witch Mother
- Authors: Susan Schwartz
  Abstract: This analysis of Sylvia Plath is based on the concept of the witch, rather than on Plath’s personal interest in the occult and witchcraft. Even more specifically, my analysis is based on her experience of the mother as a witch figure. She wrote: “When I am cured of my witch-belief, I will be able to tell her of writing without a flinch and still feel it is mine” (The Unabridged Journals, 447). Images of witches appear in various forms throughout history. They range from evil, ugly women huddling over a cauldron, like the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, to cackling beings riding through the sky, like the wicked witches of the East and West in The Wizard of Oz. However the witch is portrayed, she is invested with unusual powers; lives on the edge of society; and is equipped with potions and mystical knowledge.
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Patching the Havoc: Fairy-tale Intertexts in "Little Red Riding Hood" and
Sylvia Plath's "Stone Boy with Dolphin"
- Authors: Jane Stringham
  Abstract: Three years after Sylvia Plath bit into Ted Hughes’ cheek at a Cambridge college party, she fictionalized the moment in her short story “Stone Boy with Dolphin.” Sprinkled throughout the story are references to traditionally victimized fairy-tale characters—Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood—women on whom Plath’s protagonist Dody models herself to go about sating her sexual and literary desire. In the moment Dody bites the poet Leonard’s cheek, she tries on the gender-bending role of Charles Perrault’s wolf, complicating and diversifying Plath’s engagement with Little Red Riding Hood. This article reads the oral variant of the Red Riding Hood tale group, “The Grandmother’s Tale,” Charles Perrault’s print “Le petit chaperon rouge,” and the Grimm Brothers’ print “Rotkäppchen,” against “Stone Boy with Dolphin” to reveal how Sylvia Plath engages with her fantastical source material “transgressively,” as defined by Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill in Queering the Grimms. The argument hinges on the little red textile and the oral tale’s striptease scene, two creative and destructive elements which persist through time and narrative permutations of the tale.
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Exploring Satire in "The Bell Jar"
- Authors: Kim Horner
  Abstract: Given its grave subject matter, and author Sylvia Plath’s death a month after the book was published in 1963, it can feel uncomfortable to call The Bell Jar a funny novel. The book is known as a story about protagonist Esther Greenwood’s mental breakdown and the oppressive limitations on women’s potential in America in the 1950s. However, several critics and scholars have noted that, in addition to its devastating exploration of patriarchal oppression and a woman’s mental breakdown, the novel is funny. In her introduction to the novel, Sarah Churchwell calls The Bell Jar “an acidic satire on the madness of 1950s America” and that is “a much funnier book than many may realise [sic].” Few scholars have studied the humor in The Bell Jar in depth. This paper explores Plath’s use of satire in the novel to expose the oppressive, unfair, and absurd expectations of women during the 1950s to remain “pure,” to marry and become mothers rather than have careers, and other limits on women’s potential. The paper demonstrates that Plath’s novel follows a tradition of feminist satire that shifts frames, destabilizes readers, and refuses to settle for a traditional happy ending. Analyzing the novel through the lens reveals The Bell Jar to be an angrier novel than what many have recognized.
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Go to a Dance
- Authors: Joan Hawkins
  Abstract: A poem about the night Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Sylvia
- Authors: Katharyn Machan
  Abstract: A poem
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Sestina for Hiraeth
- Authors: Jane Satterfield
  Abstract: A poem that revisits Plath's connection to the Bronte sisters and the Yorkshire landscape
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
The Other Woman: A Review of "The Collected Writings of Assia
Wevill"
- Authors: Carl Rollyson
  Abstract: Book review of The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
"A Life in Biography" Podcast by Carl Rollyson
- Authors: Carl Rollyson
  Abstract: A QR code link to Carl Rollyson's podcast
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
An Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” from "The Heart of American
Poetry"
- Authors: Edward Hirsch
  Abstract: I recall the first shock and exultation of reading Sylvia Plath’s posthumous book, Ariel (1965). I carried it around for months—it seemed impossible to read dispassionately—and especially focused on the poem “Daddy,” which awed but also scared me. I had been reading Theodore Roethke’s romping nonsense poems and originative sequences, which sometimes sound as if Mother Goose had gone haywire, and I wasn’t totally unprepared for the lively and disconcerting rhythms, the nursery-rhyme quality and warp-like speed of Plath’s poem. It wasn’t hard to see why Plath had responded strongly to the childlike orality and undercurrents of need in Roethke’s poetry. But I was unprepared for the Jewish swerve and Nazi imagery in “Daddy” and had no idea how to respond to a catchy Holocaust lyric, which Plath had casually referred to as “light verse.” Along with “Lady Lazarus,” its companion piece, “Daddy” is a distraught, completely unnerving piece of light verse.
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Sylvia Plath in a White Bathing Suit
- Authors: Charles Safford
  Abstract: A poem
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Realia: "Sylvia's Hair" and "Sibilance"
- Authors: Hiromi Yoshida
  Abstract: A two-part poem based on the author's experience of curating a Sylvia Plath exhibition at the Lilly Library
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Ableist Psychiatric Structures in Sylvia Plath’s "Tongues of
Stone"
- Authors: Iona Murphy
  Abstract: Sylvia Plath’s fiction set in hospitals depicts the experience of ableism directed towards the mentally ill protagonists. In ‘Tongues of Stone’ the unnamed girl experiences trauma from the ableist treatment she receives from psychiatric professionals. Plath challenges the ableist psychiatric system by depicting the way traumatic treatments, particularly insulin shock therapy, are administered to patients. The nurses also use ableist language towards physical disability. Whilst Plath challenges ableism, she also uses ableist metaphors herself. This somewhat weakens Plath’s challenging of societal ableism, as she uses metaphors of physical disability to describe the experience of mental disability.
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Blackbird
- Authors: Garry Franks
  Abstract: Visual art by Garry Franks
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
"You are still in your platinum summer."
- Abstract: -
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
About the Cover Art: "Blackbird"
- Authors: Garry Franks
  Abstract: About the cover art for Volume 14, "Blackbird" by Garry Franks
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Editors' Note
- Authors: Robert Eric Shoemaker, Dolores Batten
  Abstract: Editors' note for Volume 14 of Plath Profiles
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Have You Heard the News'
- Authors: Robert Eric Shoemaker
  Abstract: News from the field of Plath studies by the editors
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Sylvia Plath Conference Summary
- Authors: Robert Eric Shoemaker, Dorka Tamás
  Abstract: Dorka Tamás, Conference Organizer
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Sylvia Plath’s Caduceus acquired by Julia Gordon-Bramer, Tarot
Reader and Plath Scholar
- Authors: Julia Gordon-Bramer
  Abstract: Julia Gordon-Bramer has acquired a wooden Hermetic Caduceus, hand-carved in 1947 or 1948 by then fifteen-year-old Sylvia Plath, as a gift from its previous owner. Plath's tarot cards were auctioned off by Sotheby's last year for over $207,000, emphasizing the importance of this object to Plath’s history. The Hermetic Caduceus is considered an original sculpture and is in the process of being appraised.
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Remembering Zulfikar Ghose, Friend of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
- Authors: Julia Gordon-Bramer
  Abstract: In The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume II is a May 3, 1960 letter to writer Janet Burroway from Plath, inviting Janet and her Indian friend “Zulfi” to a spaghetti dinner at their Chalcot Square flat in London on Saturday, May 7, 1960. A London friend of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Zulfikar Ghose was part of “the Group,” which started with undergraduate poets at Cambridge University and officially moved to London in 1955. Outside the Group, there were many nights drinking pints and talking literature at The Lamb off Rugby Street, across the street from Hughes’s flat.
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)
Biographies
- Authors: Robert Eric Shoemaker
  Abstract: Contributor biographies for Volume 14 of Plath Profiles
  PubDate: 2022-10-27
  Issue No: Vol. 14, No. 1 (2022)

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