TREATMENT OF GENDER INEQUALITY IN THE POETRY OF

SYLVIA PLATH

Thesis submitted to the Kumaun University,

Nainital for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN

ENGLISH

KUMAUN UNIVERSITY NAINITAL (UTTRAKHAND)

2014 By

AWANISH PANDEY

SUPERVISOR

Prof. V.R. PANDEYA DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

SSJ CAMPUS, ALMORA (U.K.)

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PREFACE The expression ‘gender inequality’ is antonymous of ‘gender equality’. The

latter explained in proper parlance is likely to explain what the former is.

Historically, the practice of equality of the sexes--- male and female ----was

begun first by the Shakers, a celibate evangelical group founded in America in

1774. It follows as a Corollary that prior to that, gender equality did not exist in

Western societies of Europe and America. To translate the concept of gender

equality, that is to say the sexes, should be equal, the head of the Shakers’ ministry

Joseph Meacham inducted Lucy Wright into the ministry as his female counterpart

trying thereby to restructure society for balancing the rights of the sexes. Each elder,

who dealt with men’s spiritual welfare, was partnered with an eldress and vice vera.

Each deacon was partnered with a deaconess. Men and women had oversight of

their respective sexes. Men lived with men and women lived with women. A

woman did not have to be owned by any man in Shaker society. Meacham died in

1796 and Lucy Wright became the head of the Shaker society until her own death in

1821. Shakers maintained the pattern of gender-balanced leadership for 200 years

promoting equality with women’s rights advocates. Shaker brother William Leonard

had it in 1853 that Shakerism had brought an end to the ‘degradation and oppression

of Woman’. Shakers were the first to “disenthrall woman from the condition of

Vassalage to which all other religious systems consign her, and to secure to her

those just and equal rights with man that, by her similarity to him in organization

and faculties, both God and Nature would seem to demand”. Elder Evans and his

counterpart, eldress Antoinettle Doolittle, joined Women’s rights advocates on

speakers’ platforms throughout the northeastern U.S. in the 1870s. A visitor to the

Shakers wrote in 1875 that. “Each Sex works in its own appropriate sphere of

action, there being a proper subordination, deference and respect of the female to

the male in his order, and of the male to the female in her order, so that in any of

‘women’s rights’ may here find a practical realization of their ideal”. Thus, the

Shakers had put equality of the sexes into practice.

The movement towards gender equality, especially in western

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countries, began with the suffragette movement of the late-19th century. It sought to

allow women to vote and hold elected office. In the 1960s, a more general

movement for gender equality based on women’s liberation and feminism

developed. The core issue of it was that the rights of women should be the same as

that of men. Changes to attitudes to equality in education opportunities for boys and

girls have also undergone a cultural shift since then. But even then, the objective of

gender equality has not been fully achieved, especially in non-Western countries. A

highly contentious issue relating to gender equality is the role of women in

religiously oriented societies. The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights held that

Women have equal dignity, but not equal rights. Even in some Christian churches

the practice of churching of women may still have elements of Ritual of purification

and the Ordination of women to the priesthood may be restricted or forbidden.

Some Christians and Muslims have come forward with the concept of

Complementarianism which holds that men and women have different, but

complementing roles. This view, however, does not accord with the goals of gender

equality.

As mooted by Newman and White, gender equality can be understood in

three different ways: identical treatment, differential treatment, and fair treatment.

Identical treatment assumes that gender differences are entirely socially constructed

concepts. The differentia treatment notion of gender equality claims that biological

(“sex”) differences do exist as tangible and real, and that structuring treatment

around these differences is not unequal, so long as these biological differences are

accurately defined. The third view--- equality as fair treatment-----is in a sense

reaction to both of the previous two claims.

Equality as fair treatment assumes that the criteria used to define human

nature is itself objective, neutral, and fair for each human, and as assumed by

differential treatment---these are inherent, empirical, biological differences that the

binary categories of male-female derive from. However, both of these essentialist

stances have been attacked by some theorists on the basis of the claim that any

claim to an underlying human nature is absurd. This is because what it is to be a

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human is at bottom a product of constructive discursive discourses. The paradox of

human nature is that it is always a manifestation of cultural meanings, social

relationship, and power politics. Thus, being merely a tacit disguise for patriarchal

reinforcement, identical treatment model has eventually failed and differential

treatment model has been shown to merely use male rationality to define and

construct the gender difference. As a result, therefore, true equality stands

precluded. It is the taken-for-granted of such everyday gendered behavior

differences in what women and men do must come from biology. Equality must

take on more than formal equality, and become “fair treatment”. The male paradigm

cannot be seen as natural and objective and therefore bias and preference and

affirmative action to address past discriminations to women should be seen as

furthering equality. The tacit structural underpinning of male dominance is

particularly dangerous for it creates the space for certain instances of female

oppression to be viewed and experienced as the woman’s choice. A woman might

choose not to pursue a job that is not compatible with her domestic obligations,

while ignoring the structure of the patriarchal family in assigning those domestic

roles to her. The fair treatment model of equality addresses of purely formal/ de jure

equality in addressing such tacit structural and systematic inequality for women.

Men and women have a right to equality. Gender equality means that women

and men, and girls and boys, enjoy the same rights, resources, opportunities and

protections. It does not mean that girls and boys, or women and men, be the same,

or that they be treated exactly alike, is the motto of the world body UNICEF.

Gender equality, also known as sex equality, sexual equality or equality of the

genders, implies that men and women should receive equal treatment unless there is

a sound biological reason for different treatment.

So far as treatment of gender inequality in the poetry of Sylvia Plath is

concerned, it peeps out time to time in certain poems of her late phase of fruition. The

poems “The Other”, “Words heard by accident over the phone”, “The Applicant”,

“Lady Lazarus”, “Ariel”, “Death & Co.”, “A Birthday Present”, “The Rival”,

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CONTENTS

Chapter Page No.

I. Introduction 1-42

II. Uncollected Juvenilia : Phase of Juvenescence 43-78

III. The Colossus and Other Poems : Phase of Efflorescence 79-152

IV. Crossing the Water And Winter Trees : Phase of Transition 153-176

V. Ariel : Phase of Fruition 177-210

VI. Conclusion 211-224

Bibliography 225-231

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