Gothic Elements in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry
Gothic Elements in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

Summary/Abstract: Gothic fiction and its preoccupations with the terrifying continued to hold sway over the collective imagination, inspiring writers well beyond the age of Romanticism. American writers, in particular, found the Gothic genre a fertile ground for psychological exploration. This paper argues that Sylvia Plath deployed Gothic themes and motifs in some of her late poems to explore the constraints and fears attached to women’s condition in the early 1960s. This paper offers close readings of three poems – “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” “Little Fugue” and “Death and Co.” – in which images of churchyards and corpses, the threatening return of the past, the terror of approaching madness, a sense of isolation and a fear of entrapment within the female body constitute the Plathian Gothic. Despite their Romantic sensibilities, the poems still remain relevant to their era through their accessible language and the psychological states of mind they conjure up through their images.

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