I Have a Violence in Me: Gender, Violence, and The Unreal in Maggie Nelson and Sylvia Plath

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dc.contributor.advisorPowell, Alison
dc.contributor.authorBrown, Olivia
dc.date.accessioned2020-07-16T20:11:29Z
dc.date.available2020-07-16T20:11:29Z
dc.description.abstractMaggie Nelson and Sylvia Plath are female writers with commendable careers. Their work explores similar themes of physical violence and gender, and their confessional writing styles are each marked by a frank narrative voice. Nelson and Plath’s propensity to participate in similar literary habits, and the fact that Nelson wrote her undergraduate thesis on Plath, illustrates how these writers are prime for scholarly comparison (Rowbottom). This paper will examine Nelson’s nonfiction piece, The Red Parts, and her prose-poetry collection, Jane: a Murder (and to a lesser degree her essay, The Art of Cruelty). It will also examine Plath’s poetry collections The Colossus and Ariel. Because it is more contemporary, Nelson’s work has received less attention from scholars than Plath. This paper will spend more time addressing her writing as a result. By conducting a literary analysis of the primary texts, this paper investigates manifestations of violence in the male and female figures in the works of Nelson and Plath. Comparing these authors allows connections to be drawn between the themes of gendered violence in their work: specific violence (violence that seeks a specific object) and general violence (violence that seeks a nonspecific object). A close reading shows that female expressions of violence in the primary texts occur in non-real frameworks (i.e. non-realities such as the imagination, dreams, fantasies, etc.). It also clarifies how Nelson and Plath combat this dynamic with instances of female violence that resist the limitations of frameworks.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10323/8037
dc.subjectViolenceen_US
dc.subjectNelson, Maggieen_US
dc.subjectPlath, Sylviaen_US
dc.subjectGenderen_US
dc.subjectWritingen_US
dc.subjectPoetryen_US
dc.subjectProseen_US
dc.subjectAutobiographyen_US
dc.subjectFreedomen_US
dc.subjectThe Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trialen_US
dc.subjectJane: a Murderen_US
dc.subjectThe Art of Cruelty: A Reckoningen_US
dc.subjectThe Colossusen_US
dc.subjectArielen_US
dc.subjectBrutalityen_US
dc.subjectMale violenceen_US
dc.subjectSpecific violenceen_US
dc.subjectGeneral violenceen_US
dc.subjectFemale violenceen_US
dc.subjectGendered violenceen_US
dc.subjectFrameworksen_US
dc.subjectFantasyen_US
dc.subjectUnrealityen_US
dc.subjectImagined violenceen_US
dc.subjectUnreal violenceen_US
dc.subjectMurderen_US
dc.subjectResearch Subject Categories::HUMANITIES and RELIGION::Aesthetic subjectsen_US
dc.titleI Have a Violence in Me: Gender, Violence, and The Unreal in Maggie Nelson and Sylvia Plathen_US
dc.typeThesiseng

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