"'And I a smiling woman.' Sylvia Plath’s Unheimlich Domesticity"

Abstract

Doppelgängers, living dolls, monstered speakers, and alien landscapes populate the corpus of Sylvia Plath’s writing from her juvenilia to her posthumously published Ariel poems. This article examines Plath’s use of uncanny affects from a Kristevian perspective in order to argue that the poet uses the unheimlich as a tool to interrogate cultural constructs regarding “femininity,” particularly in relation to the domestic sphere, motherhood, and objectification of the female body.