New ways to see ancestral lands: revisionist myth-making in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Muriel Rukeyser, and Adrienne Rich

Abstract

The women poets specific to this dissertation, namely Sylvia Plath, Muriel Rukeyser, and Adrienne Rich exemplify in their work the revisionist approaches to Greek mythology women writers of this century have engaged in as a means of reevaluating traditional assumptions about the nature of womanhood and the structure of male-female relationships. Sylvia Plath's poetic reinterpretations of Greek myths, for example, expose the confining gender stereotypes embodied in these tales and caustically indict modern society's continued adherence to their outdated and oppressive attitudes about women. Like Plath, Muriel Rukeyser dedicated much of her prolific writing career to decrying the inadequacy of Greek mythology as well as other facets of Western cultural ideology to represent human experience; also like Plath, Rukeyser, nonetheless recognized the potency and artistic value of the socially shared images of Greek mythology. Rukeyser "reimagines" the mother goddess as manifested in Greek myth, attempting to reclaim her positive matriarchal aspects. Rich, on the other hand, structures her "re-visioned" myths with an eye toward creating a new feminine mythology, one that offers a new woman, a "lesbian archaeologist" who is both hero and treasure, the antithesis to the passive female figures of historical myth. Studied together the poems of Sylvia Plath, Muriel Rukeyser, and Adrienne Rich reveal a shared awareness of the working apparatuses of ideology embedded in Greek mythology that continue to operate in modernity as restrictive boundaries, limiting feminine experience and its artistic expression.