Just a thought re Plath - can the hysteria in her
poetry, the sense of isolation, of terrible
alienation, the solipsism - be explained by reference
to the social conditions that obtained in her lifetime
in England and the US? She was really too early to
ride the wave of militant collectivist feminism, yet
in her life she seemed to encounter many of the
problems that drove that movement(maybe Ted Hughes
exemplified the reasons why the world needed, and
still needs, a feminist movement!). Perhaps her
terrible 'existential' isolation can be traced to the
huge and isolating obstacles placed in her way by a
sexist society? I am struck by the similarity between
Plath'
s nihilism and hysteria and the 'theoretical' work of
the 'Radical (separatist) Feminists' - most famously,
of Andrea 'all men are rapists and should be
eliminated' Dworkin - who emerged in the 80s, another
time of conservatism and attacks on womens rights in
the USA and the UK. Have any critics talked up this
parrallel (must admit I'm not much up on the Plath
lit crit )?
Cheers
Scott Hamilton
=====
"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how
could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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