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Book Review: Stepanka Neumann’s Sylvia Plath’s Ambivalent Depictions of the Female Identity Poetry

Review of Stepanka Neumann's Sylvia Plath's Ambivalent Depictions of the Female Identity Poetry (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac, 2009) 177 pp. ISBN: 978-3-8300-4748-3

Stepanka Neumann's Sylvia Plath's Ambivalent Depictions of the Female Identity Poetry is an English translation of her originally titled Weibliche Identität und ihre literarischen Ausdrucksformen in den Werken von Sylvia Plath (Gender Studies - Interdisziplinäre Schriftenreihe zur Geschlechterforschung, Band 13 Hamburg 2009, 194 Seiten, ISBN 978-3-8300-4618-9).  I have no idea how the German original title reads, but imagine it might read better than the translation, which I find awkward. For example, I typed in the German title into Google Translate and it returned "Female identity and Its Literary Expression in the Works of Sylvia Plath," which I think is a far more successful title than the one it was ultimately given. And so this is a problem with translation...But before anyone thinks I am being eine Hündin, let me say I appreciate having had the opportunity to read this title, which I feel does fill the authors' thesis which is to attempt "to examine how images of the female (and, necessarily, of its 'contrary', the male) are productively viewed, not simply as manifestations of a romantic will to express an 'authentic' self, but a a series of projections and displacements resulting from what Toni Saldivar terms the 'Gnostic' mode, whereby the imagination rejects all existing forms and metaphors as inadequate to the need for self-realization" (1). And, I appreciate that they translated it into English at all, thus opening up a market to a potential large readership.

The book seems to directly battle Silvianne Blosser's A Poetics on Edge: The Poetry and Prose of Sylvia Plath while at the same time supporting and building upon Toni Salidvar's Sylvia Plath: Confessing the Fictive Self. Directly challenging Blosser and those other critics that read Plath and focus on the biographical elements within her writing, Neumann herself comes close adopting a biographical reading, particularly in her survey of "The Threatening Male in Plath's Poetry" (3.1.2), which examines "Event," "Burning the Letters," "Ode for Ted," and "The Other" among others. The danger here is that each of the poems is based either on biographical events and/or real people. No one can deny that Plath takes these occasions and does make art out of them, but to basically disapprove of critics who approach Plath's works from the biographical perspective and then to do it yourself leads this reviewer to have difficulty with aspects of the work.

The translation and editing of this English version leaves a lot to be desired. Especially to one who is distracted and frustrated by typographical errors. One must be forgiving because this is a work in a secondary language (though I do wonder how it reads in the original and am a little envious of those that can read German because I feel like they will have the upper hand). Negative aspects aired, I liked this book and though only 79 pages (there are 98 pages of Plath's poems as an appendix) it is a good study and one that will provide value to Plath’s readers more interested in scholarly criticism than biographical considerations.

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