Instantly, for the first time, apart from the bombing photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the average American citizen could visualize the results of imperialism and fascism.

4 Every American citizen could hear about all the atrocities performed by the Nazi defendants, in the concentration camps. This tragic feeling of loss and death was immediately after the end of World War II further enhanced in 1950 during the broadcasting of the Nuremberg Trials. 3 This suggests that wives lost their husbands, children lost their fathers, and parents lost their sons. However, that was not the first time when the American mind was traumatized by inhuman barbarity during the World War II June 6th 1944 marks the ‘D-Day’ or ‘Operation Overload’ day when American seaborne and airborne troops along with other Allied forces landed at beaches outside the main communes 2 of Normandy, France, which cost the life to thousands of young male soldiers. Hence, the psychological toll of the destruction became from one-sided, meaning Japan, to two-sided, meaning U.S. Due to the mushroom effect that boomed after the detonation, which has been captured in photographs, U.S citizens could also visualize the eradication of the Japanese lands and lives. 1 One could possibly question the ethical implications of such a massacre being one of the many violent and atrocious acts that took place in the course of World War II. Even though this military action marked the end of the war, the consequences of the bombings scarred both Japanese people’s minds and lives. But, the war scenes do cease there four years later, in August 1945, U.S responds back to Japan with the detonation of two nuclear atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Gill 24).

We, therefore, understand that the hazards arising from the Japanese ambush infiltrated not only the imagination of the average American, but also the imagination of literary practitioners of the time as well. unprecedented sacrifices were necessary for national survival” (qtd. As Robert Lowell, American poet and Sylvia Plath’s mentor, asserts regarding the Pearl Harbor attack “. Being the first time USA-lands were ever blitzed by a foreign country, one can imagine the anxiety that must have pervaded American citizens. Ιn the World War II, USA’s official implication in the war takes place immediately after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor at Hawaii in December 1941 (Gill 23). Further, I will attempt to bridge these contexts with “Lady Lazarus” and “Fever 103°” in order to touch upon the Gothic tropes detected in both poems in an attempt to offer an insight into female subjectivity and anxiety.īorn in 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath belongs to these American generations whose imaginations were imbued with “dark” images of war and death as well as the corruption of the human mind. This paper serves a dual purpose in its analysis first, it aims to build the literary, socio-cultural, and feminist premises in which the elaboration on Plath’s two aforesaid poems is going to be grounded. Her poems “Lady Lazarus” and “Fever 103°” appearing in her poetry collection Ariel, which was published posthumously in 1965 by her husband Ted Hughes, echo Plath’s voice in its most insurgent bravado that has become her trademark. Sylvia Plath, whose writing became more well-known after her suicide in 1963, is considered a dynamic white American female poet who greatly influenced the development of confessional poetry in the American literary scene of the 1960s. Gothic Deflections in Sylvia Plath's “ Lady Lazarus” and “Fever 103 °” The objective of this initiative is to bring this kind of research activity to the attention of the general public in an attempt to further promote the exchange of ideas with regard to the process of reading, understanding and appreciating poetry writing.

The aim of this online space is to host the research work of university students or young scholars as this emerges from larger projects focusing on the American poetry scene.

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