Dreamwork: Sylvia Plath's Cold War Modernism

Abstract

This article proposes that Plath is best understood as a Cold War modernist, notwithstanding her continuing insertion into canonical literary histories as a ‘confessional’ poet. It reassesses the psychoanalytic burden of her writing in terms of its vexed relationship to the ideologies and institutions of the long 1950s, and in particular, to the post-war apparatus of ego psychology. Paying particular attention to the Bee Poems of 1962, I discuss Plath's attempt to retrieve the remnants of the legacy of the Surrealist avant-garde within the dominant register of institutionalized psychiatry. Her privileging in the later poetry of psychical and sensory intensities, I argue, shows the impact of Freud's description, in The Interpretation of Dreams, of the operation of dreams and of the dream image.

Keywords:

• Psychoanalysis
• Cold War
• surrealism
• censorship
• surveillance
• dreamwork
• avant-garde

Notes

1 Recent surveys and anthologies which deploy the ‘confessional’ label include Ashton (2013b), Beach (2003) and Gray (2004).

2 For an early and influential formulation of this paradigm, see Nadel (1995).

3 As early as 1936, the Museum of Modern Art displayed a large number of his works in its path-breaking exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’ (see Britzolakis 2007).