A Comparison Between King Lear and Oedipus - 1649 Words

King Lear Comparison A tragedy is not only an imitation of life in general but an imitation of an action, as Aristotle defined his ideas in the Poetics, which presents Oedipus as an ultimate tragic hero. There is a obvious link between the two characters in that blindness – both literal and metaphorical – is a strong theme in the stories. Issues of self-recognition and self-knowledge are significant for Oedipus as well as King Lear. For Aristotle, Reversal, Recognition and Suffering are key elements in a complex tragedy. The human instinct to seek knowledge of and to know an individual’s character is essential to understand their actions (Aristotle, 1-49). King Lear and King Oedipus find that self recognition and self-knowledge†¦show more content†¦Thebes high esteem for Oedipus is shown through the Chorus until the bitter end of the play. In the beginning of the play King Oedipus is a person of vast self-assurance. This character attribute is demonstrated in his willingness to take the full responsibility for dealing with the crisis, the plague. King Oedipus feels certain that he will also manage this crisis as he has done before with the riddle of the sphinx. He feels so self-assure that he even thinks he is able to trick the oracle and the gods by simply fleeing Corinth. But this is a big miscalcu lation as the play shows. The outline in the story of Oedipus’s self discovery begins when he starts to solve the second riddle, the riddle of Laius death. During this solving Oedipus character changes from an honour man to a fearful, condemned man by his tragic fate in the end. The changing of the character is accompanied by the changing of the riddle: the question â€Å"Who is the murderer of Laius?† changes to â€Å"Who am I?† Aristotle in his Poetics discusses this reversal when he speaks of â€Å"a change of the action into the opposite† (Aristotle, 18). As the tragedy moves on, finding the truth for Oedipus becomes an obsession. The dispute between Teiresias and Oedipus demonstrates that Oedipus does not even take the possibility of involvement in something bad into consideration. Teiresias, after he has been provoked,Show MoreRelatedWilliam Shakespeare s King Lear Essay2262 Words   |  10 PagesShakespeare s King Lear is regarded to be one of hi s most successful piece of literature, published in the 17th century, in which he depicts a dramatic adaptation of relationships between parents and their children. Preceding the twentieth century, several critics have deemed King Lear as a classic tragedy and therefore labelling the character of Lear as a tragic hero. This is because much-like the ancient Greek legend of Oedipus, Lear s sense of pride is what consequently leads to his demiseRead MoreEssay about Kate Chopins Awakening is Not a Tragedy1321 Words   |  6 Pagesmust captivate the audience. They must create an atmosphere that is shrouded in irony, suspense and mystery. These figures must also make the audience love them, feel for them and experience the anguish and pain they will undergo. King Lear is a great example of a tragic figure. He appeals to the reader, and captures their attention. The reader ends up sympathizing for him, and wanting him to overcome the obstacles which block his path. He motivates the emotion of the audienceRead MoreEssay Prompts4057 Words   |  17 Pageswork as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary. You may select a work from the list below or another novel or play of comparable literary merit. Alias Grace Middlemarch All the King’s Men Moby-Dick Candide Obasan Death of a Salesman Oedipus Rex Doctor Faustus Orlando Don Quixote A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man A Gesture Life Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Ghosts The Scarlet Letter GreatRead MoreAnalysis Of Shakespeare s The Tempest 2603 Words   |  11 Pagesof Shakespeare?s plays is The Tempest. This work was and still is influential in both America, Britain and around the world. Although William Shakespeare was an influential writer in American and British literature, The Tempest reaches beyond a comparison to the new world- America and points to an autobiographical drama that is a reflection of the life of Shakespeare and his relationships with characters, family and himself. William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford on Avon

The Birth Of The Pregnancy - 1524 Words

Many women who have ever been pregnant know that when the onset of labor hits that the time that they have been waiting for has arrived, and the end is inevitable there will be a baby in an undetermined amount of time. Labor and delivery is the signaling the end of a pregnancy with the delivery of newborn infant(s) from a woman s uterus. A normal childbirth can be categorized into three levels of labor they are: the dilation of the cervix, birth of the infant, and the delivery of the placenta or afterbirth. There is a trend that has been rising where the mother consumes the placenta after the birth. This is supposed to retain the vitamins and minerals that were present while the woman was pregnant and is a way to continue to give the†¦show more content†¦Trends in labor and delivery has played a huge role in America’s Culture. Many people can often be seen taking part in various activities associated with trends in labor and delivery. This is mainly because people of most ages can be involved and families are brought closer together by the miracle of birth. Generally speaking, a person who displays their dislike for trends in labor and delivery may be considered an outcast by society. The most recognized sign of labor is the strong contractions that help move the infant down the birth canal. The pain levels reported by laboring women vary widely. They can be influenced by fear and anxiety levels that can change for various reasons such as; experiences with any prior childbirths, different cultural ideas of childbirth plans and pain levels, mobility during labor, and support the mother received during labor. Personal expectations play a role as well, the amount of support from caregivers, quality of the caregiver-patient relationship, and the involvement in decision-making are more important in the women s overall satisfaction with the experience of childbirth. Then other factors such as age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, preparation, physical environment, or medical interventions play a part in the woman’s happiness of the event. Childbirth can be an intense event and strong emotions, both positive and negative, can be brought to the surface. Some women have an ongoing fear

How to Stay Calm free essay sample

Sometimes situations do not go as expected. A good day may turn bad, everything may suddenly go wrong. Needless to say, its difficult to stay calm in such situations. We tend to become confused, panic or even heated by anger. That wont help you much to get out of the situation though. Handling a bad situation in such condition will just make it worse; you are more likely to make mistakes. Thats why Its Important to stay calm. By staying calm, you will be able to Judge the situation wisely and take the appropriate actions.But how do you stay calm when the situation goes bad? How do you calm your nerves while the world around you Is falling down? I believe there are some simple things you can do. Here are 26 tips ; pick the ones that work for you: Take a deep breath. Do nothing for 5 minutes. We will write a custom essay sample on How to Stay Calm or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Take a nap. Take a shower. Listen to comforting music. Listen to natural sounds. Play music. Share to a positive friend. Meditate. Ask Whats the next action? and focus on only that one thing. Go to nature (mountain, beach, etc. ). Ride a bike.Talk about other topics. Drink a bottle of water. Play games Oust for a while! ). Go eat with someone who is not part of the situation. Exercise. Read spiritual texts. Listen to spiritual audio programs. Unplug the Internet. Take a cup of coffee. Say to yourself, This situation is not as bad as It looks. Many people have handled situations worse than this successfully. Be grateful for what you still have (Instead of looking at what you dont have). Be grateful for what you can learn from the situation. Take a walk around a park.Smile. How to Stay Calm By vividness will Just make it worse; you are more likely to make mistakes. Thats why its important do you calm your nerves while the world around you is falling down? I believe there Share too positive friend. Unplug the Internet. Say to yourself, This situation is not as bad as it looks. Many people have handled situations worse than this successfully. Be grateful for what you still have (instead of looking at what you dont have). Be grateful for what you can learn from the situation.

The Self in the World the Social Context of Sylvia Plaths Late Poems Essay Example

The Self in the World: the Social Context of Sylvia Plaths Late Poems Essay The Self in the World: The Social Context of Sylvia Plaths Late Poems, [(essay date 1980) In the following essay, Annas offers analysis of depersonalization in Plaths poetry which, according to Annas, embodies Plaths response to oppressive modern society and her dual consciousness of self as both subject and object. ] For surely it is time that the effect of disencouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy company measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat. They set two rats in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and small, and the other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women as artists upon? Virginia Woolf, A Room of Ones Own The dialectical tension between self and world is the location of meaning in Sylvia Plaths late poems. Characterized by a conflict between stasis and movement, isolation and engagement, these poems are largely about what stands in the way of the possibility of rebirth for the self. In Totem, she writes: There is no terminus, only suitcases / Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit / Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes / Notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors. While in the early poems the self was often imaged in terms of its own possibilities for transformation, in the post-Colossus poems the self is more often seen as trapped within a closed cycle. One movesbut only in a circle and continuously back to the same starting point. Rather than the self and the world, the Ariel poems record the self in the world. We will write a custom essay sample on The Self in the World: the Social Context of Sylvia Plaths Late Poems specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on The Self in the World: the Social Context of Sylvia Plaths Late Poems specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on The Self in the World: the Social Context of Sylvia Plaths Late Poems specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer The self can change and develop, transform and be reborn, only if the world in which it exists does; the possibilities of the self are intimately and inextricably bound up with those of the world. Sylvia Plaths sense of entrapment, her sense that her choices are profoundly limited, is directly connected to the particular time and place in which she wrote her poetry. Betty Friedan describes the late fifties and early sixties for American women as a comfortable concentration campphysically luxurious, mentally oppressive and impoverished. The recurring metaphors of fragmentation and reificationthe abstraction of the individualin Plaths late poetry are socially and historically based. They are images of Nazi concentration camps, of fire and bombs through the roof (The Applicant), of cannons, of trains, of wars, wars, wars (Daddy). And they are images of kitchens, iceboxes, adding machines, typewriters, and the depersonalization of hospitals. The sea and the moon are still important images for Plath, but in the Ariel poems they have taken on a harsher quality. The moon, also, is merciless, she writes in Elm. While a painfully acute sense of the depersonalization and fragmentation of 1950s America is characteristic of Ariel, three poems describe particularly well the social landscape within which the I of Sylvia Plaths poems is trapped: The Applicant, Cut, and The Munich Mannequins. The Applicant is explicitly a portrait of marriage in contemporary Western culture. However, the courtship and wedding in the poem represe nt not only male/female relations but human relations in general. That job seeking is the central metaphor in The Applicant suggests a close connection between the capitalist economic system, the patriarchal family structure, and the general depersonalization of human relations. Somehow all interaction between people, and especially that between men and women, given the history of the use of women as items of barter, seems here to be conditioned by the ideology of a bureaucratized market place. However this system got started, both men and women are implicated in its perpetuation. As in many of Plaths poems, one feels in reading The Applicant that Plath sees herself and her imaged personae as not merely caught invictims ofthis situation, but in some sense culpable as well. In The Applicant, the poet is speaking directly to the reader, addressed as you throughout. We too are implicated, for we too are potential applicants. People are described as crippled and as dismembered pieces of bodies in the first stanza of The Applicant. Thus imagery of dehumanization begins the poem. Moreover, the pieces described here are not even flesh, but a glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, / A brace or a hook, / Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch. We are already so involved in a sterile and machine-dominated culture that we are likely part artifact and sterile ourselves. One is reminded not only of the imagery of other Plath poems, but also of the controlling metaphor of Ken Keseys One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, written at about the same time as The Applicantin 1962, and Chief Bromdens conviction that those people who are integrated into society are just collections of wheels and cogs, smaller replicas of a smoothly functioning larger social machine. The ward is a factory for the Combine, Bromden thinks. Something that came all twisted different is now a functioning, adjusted component, a credit to the whole outfit and a marvel to behold. Watch him sliding across the land with a welded grin . . . In stanza two of The Applicant, Plath describes the emptiness which characterizes the applicant and which is a variant on the roboticized activity of Keseys Adjusted Man. Are there stitches to show somethings missing? she asks. The applicants hand is empty, so she provides a hand To fill it and willing To bring teacups and roll away headaches And do whatever you tell it Will you marry it? Throughout the poem, people are talked about as parts and surfaces. The suit introduced in stanza three is at least as alive as the hollow man and me chanical doll woman of the poem. In fact, the suit, an artifact, has more substance and certainly more durability than the person to whom it is offered in marriage. Ultimately, it is the suit which gives shape to the applicant where before he was shapeless, a junk heap of fragmented parts. I notice you are stark naked. How about this suit Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. Will you marry it? It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof Against fire and bombs through the roof. Believe me, theyll bury you in it. The man in the poem is finally defined by the black suit he puts on, but the definition of the woman shows her to be even more alienated and dehumanized. While the man is a junk heap of miscellaneous parts given shape by a suit of clothes, the woman is a wind-up toy, a puppet of that black suit. She doesnt even exist unless the black suit needs and wills her to. Will you marry it? It is guaranteed To thumb shut your eyes at the end And dissolve of sorrow. We make new stock from the salt. The woman in the poem is referred to as it. Like the man, she has no individuality, but where his suit gives him form, standing for the role he plays in a bureaucratic society, for the work he does, the only thing that gives the woman form is the institution of marriage. She does not exist before it and dissolves back into nothingness after it. In The Applicant there is at least an implication that something exists underneath the mans black suit; that however fragmented he is, he at least marries the suit and he at least has a choice. In contrast, the woman is the role she plays; she does not exist apart from it. Naked as paper to start, Plath writes, But in twenty-five years shell be silver, In fifty, gold. A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook. It can talk, talk, talk. The man, the type of a standard issue corporation junior executive, is also alienated. He has freedom of choice only in comparison to the much more limited situation of the woman. That is to say, he has relative freedom of choice in direct proportion to his role as recognized worker in the economic structure of his society. This should not imply, however, that this man is in any kind of satisfying and meaningful relation to his work. The emphasis in The Applicant upon the mans surfacehis black suittogether with the opening question of the poem (First, are you our sort of person? ) suggests that even his relationship to his work is not going to be in any sense direct or satisfying. It will be filtered first through the suit of clothes, then through the glass eye and rubber crotch before it can reach the real human being, assuming there is anything left of him. The woman in the poem is seen as an appendage; she works, but she works in a realm outside socially recognized labor. She works for the man in the black suit. She is seen as making contact with the world only through the medium of the man, who is already twice removed. This buffering effect is exacerbated by the fact that the man is probably not engaged in work that would allow him to feel a relationship to the product of his labor. He is probably a bureaucrat of some kind, and therefore his relationship is to pieces of paper, successive and fragmented paradigms of the product (whatever it is, chamberpots or wooden tables) rather than to the product itself. And of course, the more buffered the man is, the more buffered the woman is, for in a sense her real relationship to the world of labor is that of consumer rather than producer. Therefore, her only relationship to socially acceptable productionas opposed to consumptionis through the man. In another sense, however, the woman is not a consumer, but a commodity. Certainly she is seen as a commodity in this poem, as a reward only slightly less important than his black suit, which the man receives for being our sort of person. It can be argued that the man is to some extent also a commodity; yet just as he is in a sense more a laborer and less a consumer than the womanat least in terms of the social recognition of his positionso in a second sense he is more a consumer and less a commodity than the woman. And when we move out from the particularly flat, paper-like image of the woman in the poem to the consciousness which speaks the poem in a tone of bitter irony, then the situation of the woman as unrecognized worker/recognized commodity becomes clearer. The man in The Applicant, because of the middle class bureaucratic nature of his work (one does not wear a new black suit to work in a steel mill or to handcraft a cabinet) and because of his position vis-a-vis the woman (her social existence depends upon his recognition), is more a member of an exploiting class than one which is exploited. There are some parts of his world, specifically those involving the woman, in which he can feel himself relatively in control and therefore able to understand his relationship to this world in a contemplative way. Thus, whatever we may think of the system he has bought into, he himself can see it as comparatively stable, a paradigm with certain static features which nevertheless allows him to move upward in an orderly fashion. Within the context of this poem, then, and within the context of the womans relationship to the man in the black suit, she is finally both worker and commodity while he is consumer. Her position is close to that of the Marxist conception of the proletariat. Fredric Jameson, in Marxism and Form, defines the perception of external objects and events which arises naturally in the consciousness of an individual who is simultaneously worker and commodity. Even before [the worker] posits elements of the outside world as objects of his thought, he feels himself to be an object, and this initial alienation within himself takes precedence over everything else. Yet precisely in this terrible alienation lies the strength of the workers position: his first movement is not toward knowledge of the work but toward knowledge of himself as an object, toward self-consciousness. Yet this self-consciousness, because it is initially knowledge of an object (himself, his own labor as a commodity, his life force which he is under obligation to sell), permits him more genuine knowledge of the commodity nature of the outside world than is granted to middle-class objectivity. For [and here Jameson quotes Georg Lukacs in The History of Class Consciousness] his consciousness is the self-consciousness of merchandise itself . . . This dual consciousness of self as both subject and object is characteristic of the literature of minority and/or oppressed classes. It is characteristic of the proletarian writer in his (admittedly often dogmatic) perception of his relation to a decadent past, a dispossessed present, and a utopian future. It is characteristic of black American writers; W. E. B. Du Bois makes a statement very similar in substance to Jamesons in The Souls of Black Folk, and certainly the basic existential condition of Ellisons invisible man is his dual consciousness which only toward the end of that novel becomes a means to freedom of action rather than paralysis. It is true of contemporary women writers, of novelists like Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Rita Mae Brown, and of poets like Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, and Marge Piercy. In a sense, it is more characteristic of American literature than of any other major world literature, for each immigrant group, however great its desire for assimilation into the American power structure, initially possessed this dual consciousness. Finally, a dialectical perception of self as both subject and object, both worker and commodity, in relation to past and future as well as present, is characteristic of revolutionary literature, whether the revolution is political or cultural. Sylvia Plath has this dialectical awareness of self as both subject and object in particular relation to the society in which she lived. The problem for her, and perhaps the main problem of Cold War America, is in the second aspect of a dialectical consciousnessan awareness of oneself in significant relation to past and future. The first person narrator of what is probably Plaths best short story, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, is a clerk/typist in a psychiatric clinic, a self-described dream connoisseur who keeps her own personal record of all the dreams which pass through her office, and who longs to look at the oldest record book the Psychoanalytic Institute possesses. This dream book was spanking new the day I was born, she says, and elsewhere makes the connection even clearer: The clinic started thirty-three years agothe year of my birth, oddly enough. This connection suggests the way in which Plath uses history and views herself in relation to it. The landscape of her late work is a contemporary social landscape. It goes back in time to encompass such significant historical events as the Rosenberg trial and executionthe opening chapter of The Bell Jar alludes dramatically to these eventsand of course it encompasses, is perhaps obsessed with, the major historical event of Plaths time, the second world war. But social history seems to stop for Plath where her own life starts, and it is replaced at that point by a mythic timeless past populated by creatures from folk tale and classical mythology. This is not surprising, since as a woman this poet had little part in shaping history. Why should she feel any relation to it? But more crucially, there is no imagination of the future in Sylvia Plaths work, no utopian or even antiutopian consciousness. In her poetry there is a dialectical consciousness of the self as simultaneously object and subject, but in her particular social context she was unable to develop a consciousness of herself in relation to a past and future beyond her own lifetime. This foreshortening of a historical consciousness affects in turn the dual consciousness of self in relation to itself (as subject) and in relation to the world (as object). It raises the question of how one accounts objectively for oneself. For instance, if I am involved in everything I see, can I still be objective and empirical in my perception, free from myth and language? Finally, this foreshortening of historical consciousness affects the question of whether the subject is a function of the object or vice versa. Since the two seem to have equal possibilities, this last question is never resolved. As a result, the individual feels trapped; and in Sylvia Plaths poetry one senses a continual struggle to be reborn into some new present which causes the perceiving consciousness, when it opens its eyes, to discover that it has instead (as in Lady Lazarus) made a theatrical / Comeback in broad day / To the same place, the same face, the same brute / Amused shout: A miracle! This difficulty in locating the self and the concomitant suspicion that as a result the self may be unreal are clear in poems like Cut, which describe the self-image of the poet as paper. The ostensible occasion of Cut is slicing ones finger instead of an onion; the first two stanzas of the poem describe the cut finger in minute and almost naturalistic detail. There is a suppressed hyst eria here which is only discernible in the poems curious mixture of surrealism and objectivity. The images of the poem are predominantly images of terrorism and war, immediately suggested to the poet by the sight of her bleeding finger: out of a gap / A million soldiers run, Saboteur / Kamikaze man, and finally, trepanne d veteran. The metaphors of war are extensive, and, though suggested by the actual experience, they are removed from it. In the one place in the poem where the speaker mentions her own feelings as a complete entity (apart from but including her cut finger) the image is of paper. She says, O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling. Paper often stands for the self-image of the poet in the post-Colossus poems. It is used in the title poem of Crossing the Water, where the two black cut-paper people appear less substantial and less real than the solidity and immensity of the natural world surrounding them. In the play Three Women, the Secretary says of the men in her office: there was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it. She sees her own infertility as directly related to her complicity in a bureaucratic, impersonal, male-dominated society. Paper is symbolic of our particular socioeconomic condition and its characteristic bureaucratic labor. It stands for insubstantiality; the paper model of something is clearly less real than the thing itself, even though in developed economies the machines, accoutrements, and objects appear to have vitality, purpose, and emotion, while the people are literally colorless, objectified, and atrophied. The paper self is therefore part of Plaths portrait of a depersonalized society, a bureaucracy, a paper world. In A Life (Crossing the Water), she writes: A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle / About a bald hospital saucer. / It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper / And appears to have suffered a private blitzkrieg. In Tulips the speaker of the poem, also a hospital patient, describes herself as flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow / Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips. In The Applicant, the woman is again described as paper: Naked as paper to start / But in twenty-five years shell be silver, / In fifty, gold. Here in Cut, the thin, / Papery feeling juxtaposes her emotional dissociation from the wound to the horrific detail of the cut and the bloody images of conflict it suggests. It stands for her sense of depersonalization, for the separation of self from self, and is juxtaposed to that devaluation of human life which is a necessary precondition to war, the separation of society from itself. In this context, it is significant that one would take a pill to kill a feeling of substancelessness and depersonalization. Writing about American women in the 1950s, Betty Friedan asks, Just what was the problem that had no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say, I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete. Or she would say, I feel as if I dont exist. Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. A papery world is a sterile world; this equation recurs throughout the Ariel poems. For Sylvia Plath, stasis and perfection are always associated with sterility, while fertility is associated with movement and process. The opening lines of The Munich Mannequins introduce this equation. Perfection is terrible, Plath writes, it cannot have children. / Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb / Where the yew trees blow like hydras. The setting of The Munich Mannequins is a city in winter. Often, Plaths poems have imaged winter as a time of rest preceding rebirth (Wintering, Frog Autumn), but only when the reference point is nature. The natural world is characterized in Sylvia Plaths poems by process, by the ebb and flow of months and seasons, by a continu al dying and rebirth. The moon is a symbol for the monthly ebb and flow of the tides and of a womans body. The social world, however, the world of the city, is both male defined and separated from this process. In the city, winter has more sinister connotations; it suggests death rather than hibernation. Here the cold is equated with the perfection and sterility to which the poems opening lines refer. Perfection stands in The Munich Mannequins for something artificially created and part of the social world. The poem follows the male quest for perfection to its logical endmannequins in a store windowlifeless and mindless in their sulphur loveliness, in their smiles. The mannequins contrast with the real woman in the same way that the city contrasts with the moon. The real woman is not static but complicated: The tree of life and the tree of life Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose. The blood flood is the flood of love, The absolute sacrifice However, in Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome, the artificial has somehow triumphed. Women have become mannequins or have been replaced by mannequins, or at least mannequins seem to have a greater reality because they are more ordered and comprehensible than real women. It is appropriate that Plath should focus on the middle class of a German city, in a country where fascism was a middle class movement and women allowed themselves to be idealized, to be perfected, to be made, essentially, into mannequins. In The Munich Mannequins, as in The Applicant, Plath points out the deadening of human beings, their disappearance and fragmentation and accretion into the objects that surround them. In The Applicant the woman is a paper doll; here she has been replaced by a store window dummy. In The Applicant all that is left of her at the end is a kind of saline solution; in The Munich Mannequins the only remaining sign of her presence is the domesticity of these windows / The baby lace, the green-leaved confectionery. And where the man in The Applicant is described in terms of his black suit, here the men are described in terms of their shoes, present in the anonymity of hotel corridors, where Hands will be opening doors and setting Down shoes for a polish of carbon Into which broad toes will go tomorrow. People accrete to their things, are absorbed into their artifacts. Finally, they lose all sense of a whole self and become atomized. Parts of them connect to their shoes, parts to their suits, parts to their lace curtains, parts to their iceboxes, and so on. There is nothing left; people have become reified and dispersed into a cluttered artificial landscape of their own production. Because the world she describes is a place created by men rather than women (since men are in control of the forces of production), Plath sees men as having ultimate culpability for this state of affairs which affects both men and women. But men have gone further than this in their desire to change and control the world around them. In The Munich Mannequins man has finally transformed woman into a puppet, a mannequin, something that reflects both his disgust with and his fear of women. A mannequin cannot have children, but neither does it have that messy, terrifying, and incomprehensible blood flow each month. Mannequins entirely do away with the problems of female creativity and self-determination. Trapped inside this vision, therefore, the speaker of the Ariel poems sees herself caught between nature and society, biology and intellect, Dionysus and Apollo, her self definition and the expectations of others, as between two mirrors. Discussion of the Ariel poems has often centered around Sylvia Plaths most shocking images. Yet her images of wars and concentration camps, of mass and individual violence, are only the end result of an underlying depersonalization, an abdication of people to their artifacts, and an economic and social structure that equates people and objects. Like the paper doll woman in The Applicant, Sylvia Plath was doubly alienated from such a world, doubly objectified by it, and as a woman artist, doubly isolated within it. Isolated both from a past tradition and a present community, she found it difficult to structure new alternatives for the future. No wonder her individual quest for rebirth failed as it led her continuously in a circle back to the same self in the