Oppressed Women’s Voices and Female Writing in Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips” and “Daddy”

Twentieth-century American poet Sylvia Plath combined her social, physical and spiritual condition with a display of femininity to express her opposition to patriarchy. Her poems contain an abundance of imagery related to death. In general, many analyses of death imagery have focused more on Plath's autobiographical trauma. In contrast, this essay applies Hélène Cixous's theory of women's writing to explain how the death imagery in “Daddy” and “Tulips” is a medium of opposition to patriarchy rather than an autobiographical presentation of personal trauma and vulnerability. Using an applied-theoretical approach, this essay applies the concept of feminine writing proposed by Hélène Cixous to explain how Sylvia Plath opposes patriarchy by writing about her feminine self in “Tulips” and “Daddy”. Plath ultimately achieves her protest against patriarchy by examining her weaknesses and building a new identity, which is parallel to two dimensions of Cixous’s feminine writing. This essay examines how the imagery of death in Plath's Tulips and Daddy subverts rather than succumbs to the markers of male oppression and therefore contributes to an understanding of how Plath, as a celebrated poet of concessions, expresses her rebirth of female identity rather than merely showing autobiographical vulnerability.