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1 results

  • Chapter 18 - Plath and the Culture of Hygiene

  • from Part IV - Sexual and Gender Contexts
  • Edited by Tracy Brain, Bath Spa University
  • Book:
    Sylvia Plath in Context
    Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    22 August 2019, pp 191-200

  • Summary

    Laura Perry argues that Plath’s concerns with purity and cleanliness take the form of a poetics of hygiene. This poetics engages in conversation with a transatlantic discourse evident in post-war advertisements and government publications that trafficked in mid-century anxieties about biological containment, sexual purity and interracial contact. Perry shows how Plath links hygiene to gender, geopolitics, and poetic form throughout her writings. She reframes Plath’s search for transcendental purity by showing how this purity is embodied and historically located.