Portrayal of Gender Roles in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath is one of the most powerful confessional poets. She wrote in a time when women were still dominated by men. Within the patriarchal society women had to play set roles, they were to remain in the kitchen and were never to speak an unwanted opinion. Hence, Plath and the woman she portrays in her poems felt suffocated within these domestic prisons and were desperate to create a role for themselves outside the dominating misogynist role. Gender roles are portrayed in most of the poems of Sylvia Plath. Plath’s extensive assessment of gender-roles is based on her father’s death and her divorce from Ted Hughes. Bawer has correctly acclaimed that “Plath was the mouthpiece of a movement embodying an independent woman oppressed by man in her whole life” (Quoted in Wagner Martin 20). Gender roles in her writing focus not her position as single mother, forced into a domestic setting to care for her children alone. The suffocation that Plath experienced can easily be rooted the historical context of women’s right at that time.