I have your head on my wall: Sylvia Plath and the Rhetoric of Cold War America

Sylvia Plath's work has been consistently situated in the realm of the personal, subsuming such related categories as the psychological, the feminine and the nature of illness. However, Plath's use of the first person pronoun is never as straightforwardly personal as we might like to believe. An important context for the nature of the Plathean I is an awareness of the nature of observation, being observed and the powers of rhetoric. I argue that this comes from the cultural context in which Plath wrote and it is the purpose of this paper to situate the Plathean I of The Bell Jar and Ariel within that context; namely, the terrifying and mad cultural phenomenon of the paranoid style of American cold war politics, in order to link cultural context to poetics.