Graduation Year
2026
Document Type
Campus Only Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
Reader 1
Professor Jesslyn Whittell
Reader 2
Professor Suzanne Keen
Abstract
Contributing to Plath scholarship on racial issues, my thesis employs an intersectional approach by reading Plath at the nexus of critical race studies and psychoanalytic feminism. Plath employs racial tropes, i.e, the white/non-white binary in three later Ariel poems, to illustrate the bodily sufferings induced by her marginalized identity as a woman afflicted with mental illness in a patriarchal society. I argue that while extracting the symbolic power of the racialized Other’s trauma through the Holocaust and other imagery of historical atrocities remains disputable, Plath’s poetry extends beyond rhetorical concerns to underline a radically personal discourse against surveillance and repression of the Cold War era, by recentering the disabled, dismembered gendered body as a site of both oppression and resistance.
Recommended Citation
Cheng, Liyi (Erin), "ABJECTION AND THE WHITE/NON-WHITE BINARY IN SYLVIA PLATH’S “CUT,” “FEVER 103º,” AND “LADY LAZARUS ”" (2026). Scripps Senior Theses. 2814.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2814
This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.
