Abjection and the Formation of Female Subjectivity in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry Collection "Ariel"

Abstract

This paper analyses the function of abjection in Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection Ariel, with particular emphasis on its role in the formation of female subjectivity. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and taking into account Adria­na Cavarero’s relational conception of subjectivity, the paper examines how selected poems establish the boundaries between self and other, purity and impurity, life and death. The analysis shows that abjection in Ariel does not function merely as a the­matic motif, but operates as a structural mechanism in the pro­duction and destabilization of the female subject. Within this framework, four interconnected registers of the abject are con­sidered: the maternal and female body, death and bodily decay, religious motifs, and historically coded otherness. Particular attention is given to the ways in which Plath transforms abject images of the body, food, violence, and the sacred into a poe­tic space of resistance to patriarchal symbolic structures. The paper concludes that the female subject in Ariel is not formed through the simple rejection of the abject, but precisely through its appropriation, performative enactment, and the simultaneous disruption of the boundaries of identity