The Confessional Poetry Of Anne Sexton And Sylvia Plath

It [penis envy] is to be interpreted as a defensive protecting the woman from the political, economic, social, and cultural condition that is hers at the same time that it prevents from contributing effectively to the transformation of allotted fate. “Penis envy” translates woman’s resentment and jealousy at being deprived the advantages …“autonomy”, “freedom”, “power”, and so on; … it also expresses her resentment at having been largely excluded, as she has been for centuries, from political, social, and cultural responsibilities. (51)
Penis envy usually occurs in the phallic phase of the psycho-sexual development of a child. A girl sees her father’s authoritarian figure in the family and she can connect this totalitarian image with the

Confessional poetry of women poets of the then 1950s and 1960s opens a new vista for them to express their ‘self’ and to foreground their identity. These poets feel the need for self-affirmation because of their experience of marginalization in society. They found all the experiences are gendered in the 1950s and 1960s patriarchal society and so they also develop a gendered image of their ‘self’ in their confessional poetry. At the time when Sexton and Plath were children, the authoritarian figure within the nuclear family was the father and so he was the representative of society’s rule. Hence, the delineation of the Electra complex in their confessional poetry is one of the approaches of scratching their gendered ‘self’ because through the Electra complex the poets inscribe the female sexuality into the text. So, “with their autobiographical works, they write themselves into the canon and represent and deconstruct cultural images and linguistic codes of ‘woman’ and suggest alternative modes of self and identity” (Carmen

The term Electra complex which according to Freud is ‘feminine Oedipus attitude’ is for the first time coined by C. G. Jung as ‘Electra complex’. This term refers to “a type of arrested development in an older female child or woman, in which the daughter adulates the father and scorns the mother” (Swiontkowski 31) for she lacks a penis which is a phallus, a symbol of power and authority. While Freud sees the complex from anatomical and sexual point of view, Jung sees it from symbolic point of view where biological father is often absent. If we read the poems identified with the Electra complex written by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, we will notice that both the poets represent an imaginary image of the fathers to symbolize patriarchal power what they want to gain not to see their position as victim in the patriarchal social structure any more. Gale Swiontkowski clearly points out why a daughter shows her excessive psychological attachment towards her father and denying her mother. She