While traditional scholarship has long associated Sylvia Plath’s poetry with psychological frameworks, analyzing her complex outpourings of trauma and grief through a strictly confessional lens; recent critical turns demand an interrogation of her structural and sociopolitical dimensions. This project intervenes in the ongoing debate by offering a feminist, necropolitical reading of Plath’s corpus, investigating how her speakers navigate and subvert patriarchal systems. Analyzing the structural and thematic trajectory across an expanded selection of poems— “The Colossus” (1960), “Electra on Azalea Path” (1960), “Daddy” (1965), and “Lady Lazarus” (1965)—this study argues that Plath constructs rigid, localized architectures of death that operate as profound spaces of political subjugation and, ultimately, ritual transformation. This study draws upon Achille Mbembé´s theory of necropolitics, demonstrating how in Plath’s work, male authority figures are elevated to monumental sovereigns who enforce a state of “social death.” Through patriarchal obligation and personal fragmentation, these “death-worlds” compel the female subject into destructive and ritualistic behaviors. However, a close reading with this framework suggests that Plath’s speakers do not remain as passive victims of this living entombment. By tracing the “death-worlds” these speakers inhabit, this study illustrates how the speaker strategically inhabits and weaponizes the very ruins of the sovereign to stage an initiatory drama of psychological reformation and rebirth. Ultimately, this research carries significant implications for feminist literary theory, reframing Plath’s poetic legacy not as a chronicle of self-destruction, but as a purposeful and resilient corpus of resistance against patriarchal erasure.

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Luis Cortes

Department of Arts, Communication, and Literature