With the twentieth century now in decline, students and scholars will return again and again to contribute to this century's literary canon. In the realm of poetry, there are several candidates to consider, but a strong contender for the list of notable American poets of this era is certainly Sylvia Plath. Writing in the post-World War II 1950s and 1960s, Plath's often disturbing, macabre and dark works, which typically featured images such as the moon, blood, hospitals, fetuses and skulls, contrast with the universal image of optimism of his era. Plath's work coincides with the era of the baby boomer generation, and Plath appears to be distinctly the reluctant, independent wife and mother, who instead proved to have an unwavering commitment to writing and an ambivalent commitment to domesticity. Furthermore, she wrote before women traditionally had jobs, and was the first to address the conflict between domestic and professional balance. “Plath often explores what it means to be a woman in terms of the traditional conflict between family and career. Plath’s life and writings are filled with anxiety and desperation over her refusal to choose and instead seek to have…both” (Dobbs, 11). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayThe young woman Sylvia Plath "experienced the social conventions of the 1950s as a murderous repressive force....Plath saw herself entering a society in which marriage and childbearing were irreconcilable with career" (McNeil 476). From no one Elsewhere but in the lines of her poetry these two selves are at odds. Plath's sense of conflict between literary vocation and conventional sexual role makes femininity a central issue for much of postwar American poetry explicitly addresses the issues of the self. Plath's poetic voice, however, draws the reader towards a hidden self and at the same time turns outward. This doubling is the source of Plath's power for the invention of the confessional poem, Plath introduces “private humiliations, sufferings, and psychological problems into the poems… usually developed in the first person and undoubtedly intended to point to the author herself” (McNeil 485 ). Her poems "describe an immediately recognizable subjectivity to the feminine and feminist consciousness that constitutes much of contemporary sensibility; indeed, Plath is one of the creators of that sensibility (McNeil, 469). The following close readings and research will work to uncover this subjectivity and sensibilities that mark Plath as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century In exploring two themes that Plath develops from their conventional meanings, this article will show Plath's voice as moving beyond the pages on which they are written towards installation. of the universal female voice. Plath's ironic and unconventional uses of the moon in her poems are symbols of female passivity, submission, denial. Furthermore, the use of the mirror in her poetry represents Plath's conflicted identity caused by pressure socially to reconcile the obligations of his professional, artistic and personal domestic life. Of MoonsPlath was fascinated by the classical concept of the moon as a feminine metaphor, yet in her poetry this metaphor functions in the opposite way. Plath’s poem “Moonrise” uses ominous imagery and allusions to the death of Christ in relation to pregnancy: “The berries turn red. A white body/Rots and smells of putrefaction under its tombstone/Even if the body comes out dressed inclean linen./…Death bleaches in the egg and out of it” (13-15, 18). It is evident here that for Plath, childbirth is a form of death for the mother, or loss of herself. The poem ends with a speech to Lucina, the goddess of childbirth, in which Plath transforms into a woman the moon: “Lucina, bony mother, labor / Among the castellated / white stars, your face / Of whiteness shortens white flesh to bone white” (24-26). The ironic image of Lucina, the moon, representing the denial of pregnancy instead of the menstrual cycle so closely associated with life and nourishment, reveals Plath's controversial and reformist thoughts on childbirth. If the moon is mother, the symbol evolves in Plath's poem “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” to Plath's vision of the mother as someone who rejects and isolates her. Personified, the moon is “white as a knuckle and terribly distraught” (9). The moonlight becomes a mortal “mother,” his mother. In the moon, Plath sees coldness and distance; she is not the romantic and caring symbol she should be, and she finds that the moon is devoid of tenderness, as a mother should be. Instead the moon seems to be angry with her and rejects her. “The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary./Her blue robes unleash bats and owls./How I would like to believe in tenderness ----” (17-19). The mother does not raise her; instead he unleashes gothic parasites, bats and owls, who are cold and uncomfortable. The conclusion of the poem: “The moon sees none of this. She is bald and wild” (27) shows that the mother ignores the presence of her daughter and is independent of her son. Further irony in Plath's use of the moon as a symbol is prevalent in her poem “The Rival”: “If the moon smiled, it would look like you./You leave the same impression/Of something beautiful, but annihilating./You are both great light borrowers./His O-mouth grieves for the world; yours is not affected… (1-5). Here Plath extends the metaphor of the rivalry with her husband with her relationship with her mother, as someone who will destroy her and take away her light, her life. The moon is now the symbol of a threat to Plath and her work. No longer the source of support that her mother and husband should be, Plath sees the moon, the woman, as an annihilator of her life's work. She notices that the threat of women's social and domestic obligations is closing in on her. “Even the moon mistreats its subjects,/but during the day it is ridiculous” (11-12). The moon is “white and empty, expansive like carbon monoxide” (15) or in other words it is deadly to her. If the moon in her poetry was a source of indifference and abandonment, in Plath's last poem before her death, "Edge", it is her quietus. Plath comments that woman is perfected and fulfilled only by death, and coldly concludes: "The moon has nothing to be sad about, / Staring at her from her bony hood. / She is used to this sort of thing. / Her blacks crackle and drag” (19-22). Plath imagines the moon observing the macabre scene of the corpses of mother and children with cruelty and indifference: “She is used to this kind of thing.” Furthermore, the poem ends with the hint that the moon bears some responsibility for deaths. The “black crackles and drags” of the moon could represent the curtains, which obscure the light, and symbolize the end of life that the moon grants again and again." Crackle", however, suggests interference and static in the atmosphere that disturbs people. Indeed, man's relationships with the moon derive from our vocabulary; the word madness from the Latin root “lun-” suggests that the moon is maddening. So to speak, the moon has a direct effect on the woman's life cycle: her menstrual cycle is twenty-eight days, depending on the moon. Therefore it is implied that the moon may have influenced the horrendous events that followedobserve. If the lunar images refer to the woman as a fertile woman who waxes and wanes in her monthly cycle, Plath's images, by contrast, come to signify inconsistency, sterility, and death. From the symbol of the distant mother moon to the assassin, Plath sees motherhood as something that threatens, if not kills, her. These poems reveal the degrees of mental stress related to maternal condition and pregnancy. Plath herself gave birth to two sons, yet it is clear that for Plath motherhood makes you the other, monstrous. The idea of ​​the divided self, or the self without identity, was further developed in Plath's use of mirror images in her works.II. Of Mirrors “For many women writers, the search in the mirror is ultimately a search for the self, often for the self as an artist” (Freedman 152). Plath's notable use of mirrors in her poetry reveals her anxiety and obsession with reclaiming an identity, both as a writer and in reclaiming her identity after giving birth. Going well beyond vanity, femininity, and the male gaze, it seems that Plath's primary interest in reflection was the reflection of herself and who she was, as well as her meaning not only as a woman, but as a human being. Plath was married to the eminent poet Ted Hughes until his death, and sought to identify herself outside of being "the poet's wife." “To look in the mirror is to seek oneself in or as a reflection on the surface of the mirror and to seek or discover oneself in the person (or non-person) of the mirror” (Freedman 152). Plath's use of the mirror in her poem represents her conflicted identity caused by the social pressure that all women face when balancing their domestic life and professional career. It is therefore relevant to address the poem "Mirror" by Plath, because it so largely and entirely encompasses the search for the female self in the mirror or lake. The “She” of the poem seeks in the reflected lake the flattering distortion of herself, the woman as the ideal “young maiden” (Plath, 17) forever and who “turns to those liars, to the candles or to the moon” (12) for the confirmation of the “men-pleasing myth of perpetual youth, docility, and sexual allure” (Freedman, 152). The image that finally emerges in the lake, or in the mirror, is the old woman, or the “terrible fish” (18) something monstrous that results in Plath's compromise or acceptance of old age as a substitute for beauty. The replacement of the young woman with the old one can go further and explore Plath's concern with having children, something expected and considered normative but which can also compromise beauty and youth. The choice for Plath, and for all women, is between obliterating the self to have children and essentially being replaced in body and identity. After having children, a woman risks her autonomous identity. To further address the symbol, Plath identifies it, in the poem, with looking in the mirror and no longer seeing one's reflection but seeing the terrible fish, bloated and no longer identifiable. While “Mirror” is a commentary on the compromise of youth and beauty. after giving birth, “Three Women” expands on Plath’s anxieties about compromising her professional identity after having children. The poem is divided into three different voices of women giving birth in a hospital. The Third Voice begins by referring to itself as a reflection: "I remember the moment I was sure./The willows were terrifying,/The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine--/It had a consequential look, like everything else,/And I saw nothing but dangers: doves and words” (43-47). The Third Voice may be that of Sylvia, who fears meeting her double in the water or in the mirrorsa daughter who is not ready to give birth, leaving her in the hospital for adoption and re-establishes herself in her old life, which is university life, intellectual life. “I should have killed this, that kills me” (126). For the Third Voice, the delivery room is “a place of screams” where the lights are “flat red moons… opaque with blood”. Once born, the small and mischievous baby claims her mother with "hooks"; his weeping face is “carved in wood”; his cries scratch the sleep “like arrows”. This is the diction of rejection, a rejection of motherhood and an acceptance of intellectual stimulation. In contrast, the Second Voice belongs to a woman who has an abortion and who in turn regains her identity. After an abortion, the Second Voice exclaims, “The mirror returns a woman without deformity./The nurses give me back my clothes and an identity” (238-40). Later: “I'm not hopeless./I'm beautiful as a statistic. Here is my lipstick./I draw on the old mouth./The red mouth that I place next to my identity” (243-46). And finally: “Today I can go to work./I can love my husband, who will understand./Who will love me despite my deformity/As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue” (248 -51). These two women are freed from motherhood, either by abandonment in the case of the Third Voice, or by accident in the case of the Second Voice. The reflection of the self in the Third Voice is one of terror, for the reflection will no longer resemble the mother if the child is born. Alternatively, the reflection of the Second Voice is that of the advantageous relief of having "dodged a bullet" so to speak and not having been "deformed", of being "worthy" of a husband's love and, above all, of being able to return to her work where she is appreciated. “The mirror image that [Plath] uses in her poem seems to be a dangerously shifting area of ​​uncertainty and intense tension. The reflective surfaces used in his poetry become transparent and reveal a menacing world behind them” (Ekmekcioglu, 100). If Plath's anxieties over the loss of her identity were just a thought, in her poem “Tale of a Tub” the mood changes to find reconciliation. The poem describes the strange sensation of looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger: "The stranger in the bathroom mirror/Smiles publicly, repeats our name/But carefully reflects the usual terror" (5-9). In this work, Plath is the object in the mirror that signifies death, that smiles and calls our name. In the conclusion of the poem, only death gives it an identity or “makes us real” because the corpse is no longer part of the world of reflected images. Plath's comments that woman is perfected and fulfilled only by death echoes her poem "The Edge". Her idea of ​​finding an identity after the end of her life may have been a commentary on the life she had with her husband and children. Feeling trapped in her domestic life, she may have felt that, as a form of poetic justice, ending her life would give her final freedom. Like “Edge,” which addresses the final symbol of the moon as quietus, “Contusion” was one of Plath's last poems, where the self is indistinguishable from the rest of the world, is overwhelmed by life; everything is wounded: “The color pours there, dull purple./The rest of the body is all faded,/The color of pearl” (1-3). The body is "washed out", devoid of color, which implies the absence of means of subsistence. The physically drained body is a physical manifestation and representative of Plath's destroyed sense of life and being. Furthermore, the different images used in the poem have comparative differences in size which shows how Plath relates to her surroundings. In the second verse: “The sea sucks obsessively (4). The sea is enormous and she is devoured by it..