Sylvia Plath's Ambivalent Depictions of the Female Identity Poetry

In her survey of Sylvia Plath criticism, Silvianne Blosser notes that "the conflict that arises between literary form and the writer's need to shape the formless and contingent aspects of life has always been a fascinating field of study", a statement which may explain why many critics have emphasised the biographical nature of Plath's intense presentations of existential issues, including striking meditations on gender distinction. Noting that a range of approaches - psychoanalytical, mythical, feminist and confessional - tend to characterise such presentations as symptomatic of a sick and entrapped self (as characterised in Joyce Carol Oate's view of Plath's poems as a "heartbreaking articulation of a - totally passive femininity pathologically suppressed, except in the violence of the poems themselves)," Blosser prefers to focus on the stylistic and formal aspects of the work, looking at how the poetic language generates its effects rather than seeking to unravel the reasons why Plath wrote as she did.