In the following two sections of the paper, two different approaches to working with mythological themes by two contemporary poets will be elaborated and discussed. Starting with the American poet and author Sylvia Plath, a poet who saw her battle with her intersecting identities as wife, mother, daughter and poet reflected in classical figures such as Electra, Medea and Clytemnestra and used mythology to frame personal experiences in her poetry while also being able to dissociate from them, which will be analysed with reference to her poem “Electra on Azalea Path”, where she explores her relationship with her father and his early death. In contrast to Plath, the British poet Carol Ann Duffy and her work The World’s Wife published in 1999 provide an excellent example of a different method on how to incorporate ancient myths in contemporary poetry called “revisionist mythmaking”. Written from perspectives outside the focus of power, this particular collection of poems features the stories of wives and partners of iconic men in mythology, fiction, and history and rewrites myths and history from a female perspective). Last, the findings will be concluded at the end of the paper.
The literary reception of Greco-Roman myths began as soon as they were written down. They are intricate tales about memorable characters and events which are well-known across the world, archetypally significant and often viewed as the prototype of every following Western mythology and therefore a suitable starting point when discussing mythology in contemporary poetry. Homer’s Iliad and Ovid’s Metamorphoses are especially popular as they comprise a manifold collection of tales about familial and romantic relationships which poets can draw inspiration from. Poetic strategies range from literal translations to modern adaptations of familiar stories which challenge and question classical texts.
A Comparison of Classical Greek Mythology in Contemporary Women’s Poetry
Introduction
The literary reception of Greco-Roman myths began as soon as they were written down. They are intricate tales about memorable characters and events which are well-known across the world, archetypally significant and often viewed as the prototype of every following Western mythology and therefore a suitable starting point when discussing mythology in contemporary poetry (Nischik 257; Martiny 404). Homer’sIliadand Ovid’sMetamorphosesare especially popular as they comprise a manifold collection of tales about familial and romantic relationships which poets can draw inspiration from (Martiny 406). Poetic strategies range from literal translations to modern adaptations of familiar stories which challenge and question classical texts (Hurst 276).
In the following two sections of the paper, two different approaches to working with mythological themes by two contemporary poets will be elaborated and discussed. Starting with the American poet and author Sylvia Plath, a poet who saw her battle with her intersecting identities as wife, mother, daughter and poet reflected in classical figures such as Electra, Medea and Clytemnestra and used mythology to frame personal experiences in her poetry while also being able to dissociate from them (Hurst 278), which will be analysed with reference to her poem “Electra on Azalea Path”, where she explores her relationship with her father and his early death. In contrast to Plath, the British poet Carol Ann Duffy and her workThe World’s Wifepublished in 1999 provide an excellent example of a different method on how to incorporate ancient myths in contemporary poetry called “revisionist mythmaking”. Written from perspectives outside the focus of power, this particular collection of poems features the stories of wives and partners of iconic men in mythology, fiction, and history and rewrites myths and history from a female perspective (Bourne 81; O’Brien 580; Braund 196). Last, the findings will be concluded at the end of the paper.
Identification and Dissociation in Sylvia Plath‘s “Electra on Azalea Path”
And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.
— Sylvia Plath (Johnny Panic, 124)
In the beginning of November 1940, shortly after Sylvia Plath’s eighth birthday, her father Dr. Otto Plath died from diabetes. The poet idealized her father and her memories of him haunted as well as greatly influenced her and her poetry (Bakogianni 196; Gill 3). Her meticulously kept journals reveal that it was only nineteen years later that she started to process and reflect on the early death of her father and the consequent negative feelings Plath harboured towards her mother, Aurelia Plath, after resuming her therapy sessions with psychiatrist Dr Ruth Beuscher in December 1958 during a temporary return to the United States with her husband Ted Hughes. Three months later, Plath decided to visit her father’s grave for the first time as her mother did not allow her to attend the funeral as a child. That meaningful event serves as inspiration for the poem “Electra on Azalea Path” and journal entries mark the completion of the poem only a week later in March 1959 (Bakogianni 195, 198, 199; Gill 37). The aforementioned influences and Plath’s particular interest in Freud’s psychoanalytic theories of the Electra complex, which describe a daughter’s possessive relationship to her father and jealous hatred to her mother (Bakogiann 196) all come together in the creation of the Electra persona, who is also the speaker of the poem and refers to the mythological figure of Electra, the daughter of the Mycenaean king Agamemnon. In the ancient Greek tragedies and plays of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, Electra’s defining characteristic is her unwavering love and devotion to her father. After his murder by her mother Clytemnestra, she assists her brother Orestes in committing matricide and therefore avenges her father’s death (Bakogianni 197-198).
Starting with a reference to the loss of her father “The day you died I went into the dirt”, the speaker also describes that she buried her emotions instead of dealing with them: “It was good for twenty years, that wintering / As if you had never existed, as if I came”. She creates and cherishes an illusion of her father being a mythical god based on Agamemnon: “God-fathered into the world from my mother’s belly: / Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity” (Bakogianni 200; Plath,Collected Poems, 116). In the second stanza, the speaker visits her father’s graveside and discovers it in a neglected and dreadful condition:
The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill.
I found your name, I found your bones and all
Enlisted in a cramped necropolis,
Your speckled stone askew by an iron fence.
In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead
Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower..
The speaker is confronted with the reality of her father’s mortality and death and starts to acknowledge it as the hard truth. Her fantasy of her divine father is destroyed, and she experiences severe disappointment and anger, something that Electra in Greek mythology does not as she only thirsts for revenge (Bakogianni 202, 204; Plath,Collected Poems, 116).
In the fourth and fifth stanzas, the speaker is making her mother responsible for her father’s death:
The day your slack sail drank my sister’s breath
The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth
My mother unrolled at your last homecoming.
I borrow the silts of an old tragedy.
The three only italicised lines in the poem directly refer to the classical myth of Electra. King Agamemnon sacrifices his oldest daughter, Electra’s sister, Iphigenia and consequently ignites Clytemnestra desire to avenge her daughter’s death by murdering her husband. Similarly, the persona in the poem thinks that her mother is guilty of killing her father and sees herself, and her father reflected in the figures of Electra and Agamemnon. In the last stanza, she is sceptical of the mother’s description of her father’s death, “It was the gangrene ate you to the bone”, and has a hard time accepting this: “My mother said; you died like any man. / How shall I age into that state of mind?” (Bakogianni 200, 204, 206; Plath,Collected Poems, 116).
Plath integrates the classical myth of Electra in a personal way. Instead of imitating a specific version of the tale, she strays and combines several different versions, selecting appropriate elements in order to create her own individual response to the figure and myth of Electra and adapt it to her own family history and experience (Bakogianni 194, 198). Plath was able to identify with Electra’s tale to a great extent, especially regarding their similar relationships with their fathers. Yet, she wanted to universalize her personal experiences and by framing the personal biographical elements of the story with the myth of Electra, creating an emotional distance between herself and the narrator of the poem and therefore dissociating from her own experience, Plath attempted to achieve that (Bakogianni 195, 199, 209, 214; Gill 118; Vice 500).
Revisionist Mythmaking in Carol Ann Duffy‘s The World's Wife
At first thought, mythology seems an inhospitable terrain for a woman writer. There we find the conquering gods and heroes [...]; there we find the sexually wicked Venus, Circe, Pandora, Helen, Medea, Eve, and the virtuously passive Iphigenia, Alcestis, Mary, Cinderella. It is thanks to myth we believe that woman must be either “angel” or “monster”.
— Alicia Ostriker (71)
The World’s Wifeis a collection of monologues and contains Christian and Greco-Roman myths as well as fairytales told from a woman’s perspective, often of the ones behind iconic men (Martiny 411). In the poem “Pygmalion’s Bride”, Duffy retells Ovid’s myth of the sculptor Pygmalion, who, disgusted by women’s promiscuous behaviour, lives a celibate life and crafts a woman’s statue from ivory. “Pymalion’s Bride” begins by following Ovid’s story closely. Pygmalion starts treating the statue as if she is a living woman, kisses her, talks to her and takes her to bed, “propped . . . up on the pillows”. However, the girl is only “play[ing] statue” and in her monologue she expresses that she does not welcome his actions and tries to get rid of him by responding to his advances:
So I changed tack,
grew warm like candle wax, kissed back,
was soft, was pliable,
began to moan, got hot, got wild, arched, coiled, writhed, begged for his child,
and at the climax
screamed my head off - all an act.
Pygmalion bolts and the girl is successful. Her tale mocks the men who prefer passive women, but are frightened of women taking the sexual initiative (Braund 196-197). Another poem imitating classical mythology is “Eurydice”, a monologue told by the woman of the same name who did not wish to be freed from the Underworld by her husband Orpheus. She explains that she does not want to be in his shadow anymore and would “rather speak for [herself]” (Duffy 59). Yet, she is not given a choice:
Like it or not,
I must follow him back to our life -
Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife -
to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles,
histories, myths ... (Duffy 60)
On their way out of the Underworld, Eurydice is doing “everything in my power / to make him look back” so she will be able to remain dead. By complimenting his poetry, she succeeds and “waved once and was gone” (Braund 197-198). Duffy’s poem twists the common assumption of woman being the passive part in marital dynamics and by finding her own voice, Eurydice is able to escape her suffocating marriage (Kavisci Akkoyun 568-569).
Duffy’sThe World’s Wifereworks history and mythology with the method of giving silenced groups, such as women, a voice by making them the central character in her poetry. She corrects and adjusts history and literary works and makes them more inclusive by addressing the demands of modern readers (Hardwick 346; Martiny 422). Additionally, her use of first-person narration is an attempt to prompt sympathetic feelings in the reader regarding the women speaking and by openly displaying the unpleasant aspects of classical mythology, she can focus on contemporary issues and correct gender stereotypes represented in myths, such as the outdated concept of “woman as man’s accessory” (Braund 206; Kavisci Akkoyun 568; Ostriker 72 - 74).
Conclusion
Both Sylvia Plath and Carol Ann Duffy demonstrate their very own, individual interpretations of mythology from the period of Classical Antiquity and methods of engaging with mythological themes in order to support their poetry and poetic or personal objectives. While Plath, influenced by the movement of confessional poetry, processes her own struggles and experiences with herself and her relationships, Duffy’sThe World’s Wifeis concerned with giving other women the voice to tell their story and the space to be heard. Both women write in first person narration to make the stories being portrayed more relatable to the reader and elicit emotions. Additionally, Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of women’s monologues imitates the classical myths more closely, even though they are told from the female perspective, but only up to the point where the female speaker informs of the altered, supposedly correct version of the myth. On the other hand, Sylvia Plath does not strictly adopt one particular myth, much less adheres to the plot. Instead, she picks them apart and only incorporates mythological elements that serve her poetic strategy, such as specific figures or themes.
Works Cited
Bakogianni, Anastasia. “Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: A Case of Identification.”Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English, edited by S. J. Harrison, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 194-217.
Bourne, Daniel. “Minding the Trench: The Reception of British and Irish Poetry in America, 1960-2015.”A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015, edited by Wolfgang Gortschacher and David Malcolm, Wiley-Blackwell, 2021, pp. 71-86.
Braund, Susanna. “‘We’re Here Too, the Ones without Names.’ A Study of Female Voices as Imagined by Margaret Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, and Marguerite Yourcenar.”Classical Receptions Journal, vol. 4, no. 2, 2012, pp. 190-208, doi:10.1093/crj/cls019.
Duffy, Carol Ann.The World’s Wife. London, Picador, 1999.
Gill, Jo.The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Hardwick, Lorna. “‘Shards and Suckers’: Contemporary Receptions of Homer.”The Cambridge Companion to Homer, edited by Robert Fowler, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 344-62, doi:10.1017/CCOL0521813026.
Hurst, Isobel. “‘We’ll All Be Penelopes Then’: Art and Domesticity in American Women’s Poetry, 1958-1996.”Living Classics : Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English, edited by S. J. Harrison, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 275-94.
Kavisci Akkoyun, Burcu. “Rewriting ‘That Story:’ Anne Sexton, Carol Ann Duffy, and Margaret Atwood.”Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 20, no. 2, 2021, pp. 56273, doi:10.21547/jss.816169.
Martiny, Erik. “Coincidentia Oppositorum: Myth in Contemporary Poetry.”A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015, edited by Wolfgang Gortschacher and David Malcolm, Wiley-Blackwell, 2021, pp. 403-13.
Nischik, Reingard M. “Myth and Intersections of Myth and Gender in Canadian Culture: Margaret Atwood’s Revision of the Odyssey in The Penelopiad.”ZeitschriftFür Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, vol. 68, no. 3, 2020, pp. 251-72, doi:10.1515/zaa-2020- 2003.
O’Brien, Sean. “Contemporary British Poetry.”A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, edited by Neil Roberts, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003, pp. 571-84, doi:10.1002/9780470998670.
Ostriker, Alicia. “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking.”Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 8, no. 1, 1982, pp. 68-90.JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3173482.
Plath, Sylvia.Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: And Other Prose Writings. London, Faber & Faber, 1979.
.The Collected Poems. London, Faber and Faber, 1981.
Vice, Sue. “Sylvia Plath: Ariel.”A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, edited by Neil Roberts, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003, pp. 500-12, doi:10.1002/9780470998670.
Frequently asked questions about "A Comparison of Classical Greek Mythology in Contemporary Women’s Poetry"
What is the main topic of the paper?
The paper compares how classical Greek mythology is used in contemporary women's poetry, specifically focusing on Sylvia Plath and Carol Ann Duffy.
How does Sylvia Plath use mythology in her poetry?
Sylvia Plath uses mythology, particularly figures like Electra, Medea, and Clytemnestra, to frame her personal experiences and explore themes related to her identity as a wife, mother, daughter, and poet. She identifies with these figures to universalize her experiences while also creating emotional distance.
Which poem by Sylvia Plath is analyzed in detail?
The poem "Electra on Azalea Path" is analyzed to demonstrate how Plath uses the Electra myth to explore her relationship with her deceased father and her feelings towards her mother.
What is "revisionist mythmaking" and how does Carol Ann Duffy employ it?
"Revisionist mythmaking" is a method of incorporating ancient myths into contemporary poetry by rewriting them from perspectives outside the focus of power, often from a female perspective. Carol Ann Duffy, in her collection *The World's Wife*, uses this approach to give voice to the wives and partners of iconic men in mythology, fiction, and history.
What is *The World's Wife*?
*The World's Wife* is a collection of poems by Carol Ann Duffy that retells myths and historical events from the perspective of women, often the wives and partners of famous men.
How are Pygmalion and Eurydice portrayed in Duffy's poems?
In "Pygmalion's Bride," the statue, brought to life by Pygmalion, mocks men who prefer passive women but are afraid of female sexual initiative. In "Eurydice," Eurydice does not want to be rescued from the Underworld and reclaims her voice, escaping her husband Orpheus's shadow.
What are some of the key themes explored in Duffy's work?
Duffy's work explores themes of female empowerment, challenging gender stereotypes, giving voice to silenced groups, and correcting historical and literary inaccuracies by providing female perspectives.
What is the conclusion of the paper?
The paper concludes that both Plath and Duffy offer individual interpretations of mythology. Plath uses mythology to process her own personal struggles, while Duffy aims to give other women the voice to tell their stories. Both use first-person narration to create relatable narratives, but Plath adapts and integrates the classical myths for her poetic strategy, whereas Duffy’s imitates more closely and alters them at the point of the female speaker providing the “correct” version.
What are some of the key words associated with this topic?
Classical Greek Mythology, Contemporary Poetry, Women's Poetry, Sylvia Plath, Carol Ann Duffy, Electra, The World's Wife, Revisionist Mythmaking, Identity, Dissociation, Myth, Feminism, Gender Stereotypes, Mythological Figures.
What works are cited in the paper?
The paper cites works by various scholars and the poets themselves (Plath and Duffy), focusing on their interpretations and uses of classical mythology, including articles and books that discuss confessional poetry, women's voices in literature, and the reception of classical works in contemporary poetry.
- Quote paper
- Josephine Grun (Author), 2021, A Comparison of Classical Greek Mythology in Contemporary Women’s Poetry, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1434180
