Transgressing Gender Normativity in Sylvia Plath\'s Ariel Poems

This paper aims to question gender roles in the light of feminist theories of the body in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Through close reading and the intertwining of feminist phenomenology and queer theory, I will demonstrate how the body can be a site for transgression via the analysis of some of Plath’s finest late poems.  Moreover, Sylvia Plath’s texts are also the ones of a transitional poet, insofar as they were produced before the beginning of feminism in both the US and Britain, and the emergence of post-structuralism and postmodernism. I will demonstrate that in some of her Ariel poems, Plath not only questions the gender-marked body but she also pushes the boundaries of language. By doing so, her poetry can be read as a breakthrough,  in which the poet writes the body, whilst flouting gender norms as regards what meant being a woman in the early 1960s. At a time when married women’s proper role was the one of the ‘wife’, expecting to conform to domesticity, motherhood and conceal sexual desire, Plath’s late writing portrays the female body in a way which dares to transgress the realm of middle-class womanhood.  Thus my paper intends to shed some light on the writing of a poet, whose work has been thoroughly read and widely interpreted, but regrettably overlooked from the angle of Body Studies.