the identity of the poets Essays - Sylvia Plath, Guggenheim Fellows

The Identity of the Woman Poet: Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton God, who am I? [?] I sit here without identity: faceless [?] someone believes I am a human being, not a name merely. And these are the only indications that I am a whole person, not merely a knot of nerves, without identity. I?m lost. (Plath, Journals 26) Tasting the Time The identities of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton as female writers were doomed before these two women were even conceived within their mothers? wombs. Society had already carved a mold for these two women?s lives, including the roles of wife, mother, and nurturer. These man-made roles were not a choice of fate, were not a choice of their own; rather, they were a choice and a command spoken from a society that did not allow a woman?s role to move beyond the home. As Freud, an innovative and domineering psychoanalyst during the twentieth century, stated: ?anatomy is destiny? (Freud). Similarly, Plath and Sexton?s female anatomy would be their destinies. Their destinies suffered from a loss of identity created by being women and poets. Plath and Sexton were simply two creative female geniuses thrown into the same poetic category of Confessionalism. They were women writing, making a distinct mark Bienhoff 2 on the poetry scene, resulting in the ultimate: two Pulitzer Prizes (Sexton: 1967; Plath: 1982). They both existed in the same era and even knew each other; their lives collided at a center point: a poetry course at Boston University. They became friendly and regular bar-goers after the course, uniting in conversation about their fascination with death. As Sexton stated in her essay on Plath, ?The Bar Fly Ought to Sing?: ?We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it! [?] We talked death and this was life for us [?]? (No Evil Star 7). Plath and Sexton are further and foremost known for their deaths. They were two women who took life into their own hands and made their own choices about their ends. Plath in 1963 was first to venture off into death, when she swallowed sleeping pills and placed her head in an oven and breathed in the gas, sparing her two children who were sleeping peacefully in a sealed-off room close to their mother?s own doom (Wagner- Martin, ?Two Views?). Sexton was left behind in life and wrote two poems on her friend?s departure into death: ?Sylvia?s Death? and ?Wanting to Die;? as Sexton spoke of in ?Sylvia?s Death?: ?Thief! ? / how did you crawl down alone / into the death I wanted so badly and for so long, / [?] the one we talked of so often each time / we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston? (Complete Poems 126). Yet, Sexton proved that she was not too far behind, following her acquaintance in 1974 when she entered her garage, turned on her car, and slowly went into death that friend she had tried to meet several times before her final end (Wagner-Martin, ?Anne Sexton?). There is another world beyond these cardboard fact similarities of poetry, mental illnesses, and suicides in relation to Plath and Sexton. During their lives, the conservatism and ideals of the nuclear family had been reinforced with the conclusion of Bienhoff 3 World War II. During wartime, women had entered the workforce while the men were absent fighting; however, no one intended women to continue working when the men returned home after winning the war. Instead a woman was expected to return to the home with a relieved and thankful smile planted upon her face. Women were kicked out of the same factories that so desperately needed them during wartime, and they were supposed to be joyous about being demoted or even fired. A woman?s personal fulfillment would not lie within a job, a woman?s personal fulfillment lay within her daily household duties?including the washing and the dusting, the cleaning and the cooking, the slave-like submissive behavior to her husband and the constant conception and birthing of babies. These images of the perfect woman and her unmistakable identity flooded magazines, billboards, and sitcoms on television; they acted as ?woman propaganda.? A woman?s identity was transcribed before she even had time to use her ?useless? brain and choose a path of her own liking. As Naomi Weisstein declared in her article that became a part of the women?s liberation movement when she presented it in 1968, ?Psychology Constructs the Female?: ?A woman has