Thursday, April 23, 2015
Plath as a "No Name Woman"
Charles' post on Sylvia Plath got me thinking about Kingston's "No Name Woman" and the parallels between them. Plath was known for writing poems about the miserable experiences of pregnancy and birth, and as Charles pointed out in "Metaphors", her feeling like nothing more than a vessel to reproduce. That led me to wonder how the aunt in Kingston's story must have felt. Was she overjoyed to be pregnant by someone she loved rather than the man she was forced to marry in "hurry up weddings" (Kingston 2744) or was she raped and left to deal with the consequences. Did they both think life would turn out differently if they did what someone else wanted only to find out that this world was not for them or were they just misguided self-centered people destroying the lives around them. Regardless of the circumstances the parallels are inevitable. You have two miserable women who feel they have no escape but suicide leaving families who are devastated in a myriad of ways behind to wonder what happened.
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Nice connection, Leah. And, of course, there are the starkly different cultural values for both women to contend with.
ReplyDeleteAmazing close reading. I would have never made this connection. I can completely see how this works, though. I feel that the No Name Woman wanted her child, though, and that is why she took such a fatal leap to save them both. Plath, on the other hand only seems to dread the responsibilities and results of pregnancy on the female anatomy all together. I'm not sure if they had the same views and reasoning, but it is evident that they both had somewhat of the same mindset.
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