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The Dark Is Melting: Narrative Persona, Trauma And Communication In Sylvia Plath's Poetry, Jessica J. Feuerstein

ETD Archive

This thesis examines the poetry of Sylvia Plath to identify a new perspective that looks at the function of narrative voice in her poetry. This perspective identifies the ways Plath's narrator is given a distinct voice, separate from that of the poet herself. The narrative voice interacts with a listener, the audience, to express a traumatic experience and explores how Plath's narrators share their horrific internal worlds with the audience to make a direct connection to the audience. In past scholarship, Plath is figured as a confessional poet, and the speaker in her poems are treated as the personal confessions …