Mostri e meraviglie. Echi dall’ antico nelle opere di Sylvia Plath

Abstract

In Sylvia Plath’s visionary universe there are several images, fantasies and ghosts infesting – and at the same time – feeding her poety and soul. Many of them reemerge from a more or less remote past, and also from the patrimony of classical mythology, to branch off into more recent monsters, which are therefore much more dangerous. This is the case of the Gorgon Medusa, coming to the surface from literary and artistic Greek, Roman and Etruscan ancient cultures, tragically reembodying itself in the (real) figure of the godmother Aurelia – as evident in passages in her prose and poetry and, even more so, in the vibrant pages of her Journals. Since the American poet’s early production, the eternal and unresolved conflict with the mother figure determines a series of restless drives, desires, anxieties, rejections, uncertainties, in an endless and painful alternation of victories and defeats. Those obsessions and motifs find further – though different – echoes in the pages concerning the marriage experience with Hughes, doomed to end tragically, for Plath, with her disappointment at his adultery and her later suicide at the age of 30.