“Dying is an Art”: Catharsis and the Purifying Making of the Self in Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103º”, “Lady Lazarus”, and “Ariel”

[EN]When asked about the possible autobiographical origin of her poems during an interview a year prior to her death, Sylvia Plath answered that they emerged from a kind of non-narcissistic emotional experience purposely manipulated to come as “relevant to the larger things” (Orr 1966, 170). In the decades after Plath’s passing, her poems came to acquire several new, quite narcissistic interpretations that enhanced her status as a poet of death and suicide. As a result, the true nature of her writings was greatly misread and the emphasis on these “larger things” has been since then chiefly obliterated. This note aims at the revalorization of the intensely philosophical depth that her poetry entails, and thus focuses on Plath’s initiatory process of the making of the self in her poems “Fever 103º”, “Lady Lazarus”, and “Ariel”. Following Kroll (1976), Rosenblatt (1979) and Patea’s (1989, 2007) theorizations on Plath’s philosophy of cathartic death and rebirth, the aim of this paper is to analyze such mythic process of initiation in said three poems. Written in 1962 amid a creativity burst, these poems follow a similar structure regarding mythic rebirth, and Plath masterfully evokes in them the self’s emotional experience against a deeply oppressive background. The making of the poetic self in these texts serves Plath to explore her metaphysical concerns on the larger things of life and death. Therefore, this note concludes that, in a progression that is highly influenced by archaic rites of initiation as well as historical, literary, mythological, and biblical texts, the poetic persona faces her enemies and is made anew after purgation as she overcomes the oppressive hindrances caused by earthly life.Ministerio de Universidade

Sexual Violence in Native American Communities: Louise Erdrich’s The Round House

Trabajo de fin de Grado. Grado en Estudios Ingleses. Curso académico 2020-2021Partiendo de los datos proporcionados por el informe de Amnistía Internacional EEUU Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women From Sexual Violence in the USA, este Trabajo se centra en las mujeres nativo-americanas como víctimas de un tipo de violencia sexual profundamente arraigada en las secuelas del colonialismo y en las prácticas discriminatorias aún presentes en el sistema legal de los Estados Unidos. A través del análisis de Geraldine Coutts, madre Ojibwe, víctima de violación y protagonista de la novela de Louise Erdrich The Round House, el presente proyecto explora la impunidad de los violadores derivada de la falta de soberanía y jurisdicción tribales sobre los casos de agresión sexual, y revela cómo tales agresiones a menudo conducen a la traumática transformación del individuo, la familia y la comunidad indígenas.By means of the data provided by the Amnesty International USA’s report Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women From Sexual Violence in the USA, this essay focuses on Native American women as victims of a kind of sexual violence deeply rooted not only in the aftermath of colonialism, but also in the discriminatory practices still present in the legal system of the United States of America. Through an analysis of the character of Ojibwe mother and rape survivor Geraldine Coutts in Louise Erdrich’s novel The Round House, I will explore the impunity of the perpetrators of the crime, the result of a lack of tribal sovereignty and jurisdiction over cases of sexual assault. I will also explore how such aggression often leads to the traumatic disruption of the indigenous individual, family, and community