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coldalbion · 5 years ago

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Good morning. I was wondering how much wisdom Odin produces on his own? A while ago you said he transforms himself according to the new information, like cutting his eye out at the well. I was thinking of American Gods, Wednesday’s last conversation with Vulcan has similarities to Nancy’s conversation with Ibis. Odin is a bastard, this is well known. I wonder if he’s the original cultural appropriation guy. I imagine he validates the new info like the borg, whereas those that cosplay don’t.

Depends what you mean by “produce” I suppose. In my experience, I wouldn’t say he’s a cultural appropriator within the context of taking-from-a-group- and-claiming-as-own/being better than originators. If anything, lore suggest he engages with things and practices on their own terms - he becomes a woman with the witches. He gains the runes through pain and privation. In Grímnismál he allows himself to be put between the two fires and is essentially tortured. He’s a god. He doesn’t have to put up with that, but he does. In a sense, it is less that he takes, and more that he adds-to-himself. That’s to say, Odin is rune magician and seidh-master. These are, at first glance two separate praxes. They require different things, different ways. What unites them in this context is Odin. He is the one who performs them. In this sense, he’s not the Borg because the Borg add to the Collective and in doing so, change themselves but also erase difference. My experience is that the Old Man glories in, and enhances difference. A key point to consider is where the phenomenon of bricolage comes in (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage): “Anthropology In anthropology, the term has been used in several ways. Most notably, Claude Lévi-Strauss invoked the concept of bricolage to refer to the process that leads to the creation of mythical thought, which "expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal" [7]. Later, Hervé Varenne and Jill Koyama used the term when explaining the processual aspect of culture, i.e., education Literature In literature, bricolage is affected by intertextuality, the shaping of a text's meanings by reference to other texts. Cultural studies In cultural studies bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across social divisions to create new cultural identities. In particular, it is a feature of subcultures such as the punk movement. Here, objects that possess one meaning (or no meaning) in the dominant culture are acquired and given a new, often subversive meaning. For example, the safety pin became a form of decoration in punk culture. Social psychology The term "psychological bricolage" is used to explain the mental processes through which an individual develops novel solutions to problems by making use of previously unrelated knowledge or ideas they already possess. The term, introduced by Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Matthew J. Karlesky and Fiona Lee[10]The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship of the University of Michigan, draws from two separate disciplines. The first, “social bricolage,” was introduced by cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1962. Lévi-Strauss was interested in how societies create novel solutions by using resources that already exist in the collective social consciousness. The second, "creative cognition,” is an intra-psychic approach to studying how individuals retrieve and recombine knowledge in new ways. Psychological bricolage, therefore, refers to the cognitive processes that enable individuals to retrieve and recombine previously unrelated knowledge they already possess.[11][12] Psychological bricolage is an intra-individual process akin to Karl E. Weick’s notion of bricolage in organizations, which is akin to Lévi-Strauss' notion of bricolage in societies.[ Philosophy In his book The Savage Mind (1962, English translation 1966), French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used "bricolage" to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought. In his description it is opposed to the engineers' creative thinking, which proceeds from goals to means. Mythical thought, according to Lévi-Strauss, attempts to re-use available materials in order to solve new problems.[14][15][16]Jacques Derrida extends this notion to any discourse. "If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur."[17]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, identify bricolage as the characteristic mode of production of the schizophrenic producer.[18]” So given the above, particularly in reference to the re-use of available materials, we find ourselves presented with a very Odinic situation. It’s my contention that bricolage can be used as a justification for cultural appropriation - but it’s a bad one, because for me the essence of magic is the poiesis; the bringing-forth from something that no-one else can bring-forth from. Ordinary people can do things in ordinary ways but the magician is by definition outside of the ordinary - literally extra-ordinary. Not only that, but because of this position, they are able to re-order the ordinary, and thus, everything they contact can be rendered extra-ordinary. In this sense, one could argue that this ability to take restrained or limited context and proper/achieve one’s goals is literally the “spinning straw into gold” of Rumpelstiltskin, the lead into gold of the alchemists, etc. In another, this places magicians - of which Odin is an exemplar- at root as uncanny, almost Lovecraftian monstrosities. This, in one way, renders the occult in its original context of being hidden. That is, it is imperceptible to those who have not been initiated or reconfigured in order to perceive it. It’s important to note that the etymology of perceive is actually rooted in grasping: perceive (v.)c. 1300, perceiven, "become aware of, gain knowledge of," especially "to come to know by direct experience," via Anglo-French parceif, Old North French *perceivre (Old French perçoivre) "perceive, notice, see; recognize, understand," from Latin percipere "obtain, gather, seize entirely, take possession of," also, figuratively, "to grasp with the mind, learn, comprehend," literally "to take entirely," from per "thoroughly" (see per) + capere "to grasp, take," from PIE root *kap- "to grasp."

seize (v.)mid-13c., from Old French seisir "to take possession of, take by force; put in possession of, bestow upon" (Modern French saisir), from Late Latin sacire, which is generally held to be from a Germanic source, but the exact origin is uncertain. Perhaps from Frankish *sakjan "lay claim to" (compare Gothic sokjan, Old English secan "to seek;" see seek). Or perhaps from Proto-Germanic *satjan "to place" (see set (v.)).

Combine this with the common sense of possession in a spiritual context, and we arrive at something Jung wrote in his essay on Wotan in the 1930′s: Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit — a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler– which has indeed actually happened — he is really the only explanation. It is true that Wotan shares this quality with his cousin Dionysus, but Dionysus seems to have exercised his influence mainly on women. The maenads were a species of female storm-troopers, and, according to mythical reports, were dangerous enough. Wotan confined himself to the berserkers, who found their vocation as the Blackshirts of mythical kings. Leaving aside whether National Socialism was a kind of madness that seized the world (spoiler: the time period was a perfect storm for horrors) and blaming it on Wotan, Jung’s language is important here - particular because it signals a polarity between seizer and seized. Consider Odin’s role as world-creator in Norse myth. He (and his brothers) seize the giant Ymir, kill him, and in supreme butchery, render his corpse into the worlds we know. Taking one thing, they use it to make another - and it is important to note that, according to mythological genealogy, Ymir is Odin’s maternal ancestor - he is not separate from the jotnar. Rather, he re-orders their potencies to make the world, and since those potencies are inside him, re-orders his own ancestral potencies into that which humans might call god as distinct from jotun. In this sense, we all do this - our lives, bodies and minds are recapitulations and reconfigurations of our ancestors in new forms. When we suggest that “We are our deeds” or whatever, it is a mistake to ignore that the faculties to perform those deeds come from faculties bestowed on us by environment and heredity. How we experience things depends on how we are configured - though such configuration is constantly shifting due to constant inputs. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the magician deliberately seeks out that reconfigurative reflex. seek (v.)Old English secan "inquire, search for; pursue; long for, wish for, desire; look for, expect from," influenced by Old Norse soekja, both from Proto-Germanic *sakanan (source also of Old Saxon sokian, Old Frisian seka, Middle Dutch soekan, Old High German suohhan, German suchen, Gothic sokjan), from PIE *sag-yo-, from root *sag- "to track down, seek out" (source also of Latin sagire "to perceive quickly or keenly," sagus "presaging, predicting," Old Irish saigim "seek"). The natural modern form of the Anglo-Saxon word as uninfluenced by Norse is in beseech. This desire, this hunt, can be clearly seen in an Odinic/Dionysiac furor complex - combined with *wen: *wen- (1)Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to desire, strive for."It forms all or part of: vanadium; Vanir; venerate; veneration; venerable; venereal; venery (n.1) "pursuit of sexual pleasure;" venery (n.2) "hunting, the sports of the chase;" venial; venison; venom; Venus; wean; ween; Wend "Slavic people of eastern Germany;" win; winsome; wish; wont; wynn.It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit veti "follows after," vanas- "desire," vanati "desires, loves, wins;" Avestan vanaiti "he wishes, is victorious;" Latin venerari "to worship," venus "love, sexual desire; loveliness, beauty;" Old English wynn "joy," wunian "to dwell," wenian "to accustom, train, wean," wyscan "to wish." Note the reference to Vanir and Vanadis (by way of vanadium) as well as Venus. That there is a polarity betwixt hunter and hunted is obvious, as with sexual partners (regardless of gender or sex it is two -or more - parties conjoined by desire) and also in the notion of veneration, and winning/victory.

So, perhaps more properly, we might argue that the magician goes-into the world in a more intense fashion - not with the principle of union-with, or reduction to Oneness. Rather, towards profusion of difference, of options and room-to-move. A peculiar notion of freedom via absolute restraint ; enhanced negative-capability. In such a context, to culturally appropriate is to defang the numinous, make it more palatable, more ordinary. To commodity it. I do not think Yggr, the Terrible One, would do so for mere “safety’s-sake”. Maybe that’s just me though.

#the old man #odin #furor club #bricolage #enochtopus

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aion-rsa · 5 years ago

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How Dead by Daylight Gave Slasher Horror Icons The Game They Deserved

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If you grew up a gamer in the ‘80s and ‘90s, buying a bad licensed game was a rite of passage. Sure, even young gamers could detect a bomb like Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit! for the SNES from a mile away, but at a time before game reviews were easy to find online, it was natural to hope that the new X-Men game might just be good enough to take a chance on.

The situation was especially rough for horror movie fans. I owned the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th adaptations for the NES and at least tried to finish them. It’s not that I thought they were good, but at a time when licensed horror games (not to mention major console horror games) were few and far between, the opportunity to face off against my favorite movie slasher was too enticing to ignore.

The industry eventually learned to embrace horror in a meaningful way that resulted in some all-time great gaming experiences, but the slasher movie icons of the day remained tragically underutilized. While original horror series like Silent Hill and Resident Evil expanded the storytelling potential of the medium, Chucky was reduced to starring in a Temple Run knock-off.

In the minds of many horror fans, the hope for a great game starring Micheal Myers, Freddy Krueger, or Leatherface lingered even as passable adaptations of those characters eluded us for decades. Where was the disconnect?

“I think it probably extends from the fact that they are two very, very different mediums and two very, very different ways of telling stories,” says Mathieu Coté, director of Behaviour Interactive’s hit slasher multiplayer game Dead by Daylight. “The reasons why slasher movies are so successful, and why they make you feel the way that they do, are extremely difficult to translate into gameplay mechanics. I think that probably that’s the root of it.”

The earliest examples of slasher movie games certainly support that theory. In 1983, adaptations of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween were released for the Atari 2600. They offered wildly different experiences (Texas Chainsaw Massacre saw you mow down victims for points while Halloween was all about evading Michael Myers), but each was so bad that you’d sooner be caught smoking weed while having sex at Camp Crystal Lake than playing either for more than a few minutes.

Even as technology and game design advanced past what was possible on the Atari and NES, slasher icons were still being butchered in ways that would make these killers proud.

“It often felt as if [licenses] were either tacked onto an existing product that didn’t fit or it was just shovelware where the attitude is ‘make a thing and put the name on it,’” Coté says. “Oftentimes the people holding the licenses, and again it’s a matter of those two mediums being so different, but the people holding the licenses to the movies, they know about movies. They don’t know about games. That can make things difficult.”

With Dead by Daylight, Coté’s team sought to capture the essence of the slasher movie and translate that into fun gameplay that actually made sense for the genre. The asymmetrical multiplayer title sees one player assume the role of a killer tasked with eliminating four player-controlled survivors trying to escape the terrifying scenario. Since its release in 2016, Dead by Daylight has been embraced as the definitive horror multiplayer experience.

Given how difficult it has historically been to make a slasher title, much less one featuring licensed characters, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Dead by Daylight’s origins can be traced to a much simpler concept that didn’t even start out as horror.

“There was a designer working in basically a silo somewhere making little prototypes, and one prototype that he made at some point was literally hide and seek,” Coté remembers. “It was one character that’s trying to accomplish a goal and there was another character that was very powerful. If he touched you, you’re dead.”

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An equally simple tweak would reveal the prototype’s incredible horror potential.

“We put cardboard in between [split screens] and went ‘Oh, my God. This is super fun,” Coté recalls. “The idea of creating a game in which you could play the fantasy of being the villain in a horror movie, that’s a longstanding one…if we put that with the fantasy of a villain in a horror movie, we have a winner.”

The idea of pairing the basic structure of hide and seek with a horror movie villain shows team’s vital understanding of what makes the slasher genre so entertaining in the first place.

“A lot of effort is put into these [villains], so of course they’re more appealing,” says Dead by Daylight creative director Dave Richard. “I think that’s why we started rooting for them, and we have this enjoyment and guilty pleasure of rooting for the villain. I think that we all have this inside of us at different levels. We’re embracing this macabre thing.”

The team’s fascination with the macabre would slowly turn their experiment into a fully-fledged horror game.

“The original prototypes showed survivors as literally beheaded silhouettes wearing different colored t-shirts with phrases like virgin, stoner, and jock,” Coté explains. “That’s something that Cabin in the Woods did very, very well, and the early prototype was based on those tropes.”

While Coté and Richard reference meta-horror movies like Cabin in the Woods and mockumentary Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon as early inspirations that helped them contextualize the genre’s key elements, they ultimately turned to foundational films such as Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when crafting the game’s environments, characters, and other design elements. In those early days, though, few believed that Dead by Daylight would eventually host some of the stars of those films.

“There were dreams and ambitions, but I don’t think there were thoughts,” Coté says. “We barely expected it to break even after a couple of months. When it started to really explode in the first month or so, we started looking for opportunities.”

The earliest of those opportunities happened to involve arguably the most important slasher of all-time: Michael Myers.

“We were lucky enough to get in contact with some very nice people who are the owners of the original version of Michael Meyers,” Coté explains. “Being able to get the rights to bring in that character and the original Laurie Strode into Dead by Daylight was kind of a big deal. It set the stage because it legitimized us in a certain way.”

For anyone who has followed the history of licensing rights and copyright law (not to mention the aforementioned history of slashers in games), the fact that the team was able to add Michael Myers as a playable killer must conjure an image of a developer clawing their way out of licensing hell with one hand while holding on to Myers with the other. Yet, it sounds like the process wasn’t all that complicated.

“I wouldn’t call it [licensing] hell,” Coté says. “Most of it is actually super interesting, and most of the licenses that we have…we’re dealing with people who get what we’re trying to do. The people who are, as I was saying earlier, more into movies than into video games, tend to trust us to do the right thing.”

Securing Michael Myers was one thing, but now that they had him, the team was faced with the same dilemma that had ruined even noble attempts at building games around these characters in the past.

“We first had to ask ‘What is the fantasy around that character and what is so interesting and unique about these characters?’” Richard recalls. “Of course, most of them have a weapon and they kill, but what’s their special sauce?”

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As Richard explains, Freddy Krueger has a “dream world” and a “fantasy that’s easier to get.” By comparison, Michael Myers is often portrayed as a guy with a mask and a knife. How do you translate that into a game in a way that makes him feel unique?

The answer to that question came in what Coté rightfully describes as a “stroke of genius.”

“I remember that meeting where we were talking about Halloween and how to make [Michael Myers] unique,” Coté explains. “They pitched us the idea of a killer that would just watch you. We’re like, ‘What?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, he’s just going to stand there and watch you,’ because that’s what Myers does in the movies. That’s what he does, but it’s an action game. People want to chase each other…We all thought, ‘Oh, you’re an idiot.’”

Yet, when Coté got the chance to actually play an early build of Dead By Daylight with Myers as the killer, he immediately understood what the team was aspiring to achieve.

“The very, very first version of the prototype I remember playing and repairing a generator and looking over my shoulder, and I see him standing on a hill and just watching me, and I go, ‘This is the creepiest thing I’ve ever experienced in this game,’” Coté says. “It’s super creepy, especially knowing it’s an actual other player right there. He could attack me right now, but he chooses to just watch me…that kind of thing made me realize the liberties we could take with the gameplay mechanics to really create something that would be unique and special.”

For the next few years, that’s exactly what the team did. They bent the rules of the game to incorporate other famous slashers. Freddy Krueger dragged Dead by Daylight players to dream world while Saw’s Amanda Young turned the game’s traps into a gambling proposition. Leatherface’s devastating attacks impacted a survivor’s ability to carry on and Ghost Face’s playfulness and humor distinguishes him from one of his major inspirations, Michael Myers himself. Through it all, the team’s goal was to stay true to the legacy of these characters and give them a proper home.

“I love Mortal Kombat, but whenever a character gets imported to Mortal Kombat, they all turn into martial artists,” Coté says. “When you put Jason in Mortal Kombat, he becomes a martial artist and he hacks people, and then he does a finishing move and it’s awesome, but that’s it. When you take Michael Myers and put him in Dead by Daylight, he’s Michael Myers.”

Of course, Dead by Daylight’s roster of killers doesn’t just include an array of adaptations. At launch, the game boasted three original killers: The Trapper, The Wraith, and The Hillbilly. The Trapper was, by the team’s admission, based on Jason Vorhees and The Hillbilly certainly resembled Leatherface. It was in The Wraith, a desperate figure whose pursuit of a job saw him become an unwilling executioner, that the team found their first truly great original creation.

“For us, it was important that one of the killers was inspired by more of a cultural idea, and that was The Wraith,” Richard notes. “You don’t see The Wraith archetype in movies. It really comes from horror culture and cultural monsters more than movies.”

That desire to explore every corner of horror rather than just retread film successes is a big part of the reason why Dead by Daylight’s original killers are among its most popular. In fact, the team draws inspiration from such a wide array of sources that it’s possible some players may feel the impact of these original creations more intensely than others.

“The Huntress is heavily inspired by Eastern European folklore and mythology,” Coté says. “For some of our players, especially Russian and Ukrainian players, they were immediately, completely freaked out because she’s humming a song that their mothers sang to them when they were a kid. It was really like it hit way too close for some of them, and it was great. It made them feel things, but for Japanese players or Brazilian players who had no cultural link to that, it was still an impressive and terrifying character because what scares people is visceral and universal”

While Dead by Daylight’s original killers stand tall against horror’s heavyweights, the game’s most impressive contribution to the slasher genre may just be its emphasis on the personalities and attributes of its survivors. Early builds of the premise portrayed survivors as Merrily We Roll Along rejects wearing self-identifying sweaters, but the game eventually began treating survivors with the same reverence as killers.

“Survivors have been the learning experience, to say the least,” Richard confesses. “When we created the original characters, we wanted them to have real stories and personalities, but also to be relatable. I’m going to say a word I don’t like so much, but it’s almost like they’re shells that the players can identify with and easily become.”

Dead by Daylight’s emphasis on the unique qualities of its survivors helped it outlive (pun proudly intended) other asymmetrical multiplayer games, but even Behaviour Interactive found itself having to reckon with some of the stereotypes that plague even the best slasher movies.

“The fact is that a lot of those [early character designs] are stereotypes that convey, let’s say, cultural tropes that don’t need to continue to exist in today’s society,” Coté admits. “For us, it was more interesting to create characters that feel like someone you could stand behind in a coffee shop and not blink because they’re regular people. They’re people you can relate to.”

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While Dead by Daylight’s roster of survivors features a few imports (such as Halloween’s Laurie Strode and Evil Dead’s Ash), the team reveals that “licensed survivors are much harder to find than killers,” largely because they still want the game’s survivor’s to feel overwhelmed by the stalkers. Coté specifically notes that it wouldn’t make sense for someone like John Wick or Arnold Schwarzenegger to be hanging helplessly from a hook. Yet, they also don’t feel like the legacy and value of a horror hero should be defined by their ability to play offense.

“All of them are serial survivors,” Coté says of the game’s characters. “They continue to win, which is impressive, given the challenges they face.”

Besides, as millions of fans who have shouted at the screen at a horror film can attest to, the fates of Dead by Daylight’s survivors really come down to the players themselves.

“We always wanted to make it so that if you die in Dead by Daylight, it’s because you did something dumb or you panicked and didn’t stick to the plan,” Coté says. “Obviously the killers are extremely powerful, but most of the time [survivors lose] because someone panicked or was careless and got cocky and didn’t make good decisions.”

The ability to test your mettle against a slasher legend is one of Dead by Daylight’s more interesting examples of meta brilliance, but its most notable meta mechanic is the presence of The Entity, the invisible hand that pulls characters from different horror universes into the game. It’s a subtle, yet vital, story component inspired by another horror legend.

“The main inspiration for The Entity was actually The Dark Tower,” Richard recalls. “Many of us on the team are fans of the work of Stephen King, and when we deep dove into The Dark Tower, it was a favorite. The way every book in the Stephen King universe links together and is tied up with The Dark Tower was the inception of the idea of The Entity.”

The Entity is the core component of the game’s surprisingly strong lore, which not only offers compelling backstories for nearly every survivor, setting, and killer but even adds a few new chapters for licensed universes like the Scream series.

In many other multiplayer games, that lore would be little more than an easter egg debated over on Wiki pages and fan forums. But in Dead by Daylight, the commitment to meaningful storytelling is a core component of the ambition which defines Behaviour Interactive’s mission.

“Every time we create more of our lore, we solidify what Dead by Daylight is and the universe around it,” Coté explains. “It’s not just to be able to bring in anything, but to be able to create a universe into which all of these things can exist and make sense.”

While the team’s commitment to lore may help bolster their pitches to rights holders, their commitment to ensuring that Dead by Daylight’s growth adheres to an internal logic also speaks to the team’s confidence that they can give nearly any slasher a home.

“I’d say that a few [killers] still elude our grasp, and it’s mostly due to the fact that someone thinks they can make a standalone game for them, or they are working on one,” Coté says. “Anybody who’s got a little bit of experience in video games can tell you that recreating the magic of Dead by Daylight and that sort of balanced chaos is a terrifying prospect. It’s certainly not a simple thing to recreate.”

There’s a sincerity to that statement which encapsulates so many of the reasons why Dead by Daylight was not only able to secure slashers and survivors who could easily star in their own games but do justice to them within the framework of an experience that wasn’t designed to accommodate those legends in the first place.

After all, if the bad old days of slasher games and adaptations were defined by limitations and indifference, then Dead by Daylight succeeds because it takes nothing for granted. Its team carefully crafted a scenario that invoked the pure pleasure of the slasher genre and then spent years studying the ins and outs of these characters and worlds in order to better understand what makes them work beyond the superficial pleasure of their mere presence. It’s an involved process that doesn’t work for everyone.

“We’ve had a couple of cases of people on the development team that, maybe after a year or something, they go, ‘You know what? I think I’ve had enough.’” Coté admits. “Especially 3D artists who keep looking at references of grizzly things all the time, and most of them, they’re just having a blast…but I’m thinking of one or two examples of people who were like ‘You know what? I need to go and work on something with unicorns and kittens.’ That’s fair. That’s absolutely fair.”

The amount of work that goes into a game like Dead by Daylight may ultimately scare off other developers who would dare give legendary slashers their own games, but as long as we have Dead by Daylight, at least a few horror icons will always have a home.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

“It used to be that we were hoping that people who hold the licenses to these legends would allow us to bring them into our world,” Coté says. “Nowadays, the conversations oftentimes revolve around asking them if they’re big enough to make it into the hall of fame that is Dead by Daylight…It’s the place for horror to come by and live.”

The post How Dead by Daylight Gave Slasher Horror Icons The Game They Deserved appeared first on Den of Geek.

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thephilologist-blog · 8 years ago

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Autobiographical motifs in the poetry by Sylvia Plath - Katarzyna Chojnacka

The following article is dedicated to the subject of the autobiographical poetry of Sylvia Plath. The fundamental statement is based on the idea that Plath’s writings cannot be analyzed and understood without taking into consideration her autobiography, due to the fact that the border-lines between lyrical I and the author are blured: Sylvia Plath’s real poetic world is rooted in her own private experience (M. Perloff, 1973, p. 173). On the other hand, as Jerzy Kamionowski claims, the essence of confessional poetry means crossing one’s own bounds through conscious exploitation of the tension between truth, experience and selfcreation, selfproduction(J. Kamionowski, 2003, p. 47). He also noticed that Plath transforms her personal experience into poetic substance which serves a certain purpose – expressing general truths and universal and versatile problems of contemporary world (Ibid, p. 20). Other critics agree that Plath’s poetry is based on experience but it has been transformed:

Nevertheless, her poetry is not primarily literal and confessional… In Plath the personal concerns and everyday role are transformed into something impersonal, by being absorbed into a timeless mythic system (J. Kroll, 1978, p. 2).

Moreover, she fascinates her readers and critics by her inconsistent personality and multi-faced poetry. One of the powers of her writings comes from the tense and ambiguous attitudes towards her life as an individual, a woman (writer, mother, daughter and wife). The attention testified to Plath’s evaluation of herself: Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America(S. Plath, 2000, p. 352). Nevertheless, her poetry has posed myths and cult with diversity of interpretations.

Sylvia Plath’s real poetic world is rooted in her own private experience (M. Perloff, 1973, p. 173) and Plath’s personal life and her writing are inseparable. The above statements point at crucial keys for interpretations which cannot be omitted. Plath’s poems are more evidence when one takes her life fixed in her journals into consideration. Plath scholarship has been focused on the autobiographical correspondences in her poetry and especially on images and themes related to death. These interpretations follow not only her suicide and subsequent popularity in America, but also such interpretations often rely heavily upon The Bell Jar, first published only a month before her death, and afterwards deemed autobiographical by critics. Moreover, they are inclined to the psychoanalytical approaches due to Plath’s mental disorder and psychiatric treatment. That is why, as it was presented it the previous chapter, woman in Plath’s poetry appears not as a single identity but as a woman of ‘many masks’ whose personality appears as inconsistent, dual, conflicted and unstable. As Halbrook claims, Plath’s works draw readers’ attention to the psychological disorder known as the split personality or schizophrenia:

There are… certain poems in her oeuvre… which distort reality and follow such a sick logic that they must be declared pathological. My task must be to try to demonstrate that these are psychotic and why: and try to demonstrate how and why the poet fell victim to these tendencies (D. Halbrook, 1976, p. 239).

Whether it is true or not, the point is that Plath was not sure about who she is and how to present herself which is reflected in her poetry and the picture of a woman. To name a few of these doubts, is should be recalled some of her confessions:

You walked in, laughing, tears, welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl? (K. Moses, 2000, p. 260).

How much of my solitude for other human is real and honest, how much is a feigned painted on by society, I do not know. I am afraid to face myself… I heartily wish that there were some absolute knowledge, some person whom I could trust to evaluate me and tell me the truth (S. Plath, 2000: p. 97).

I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time (Ibid, p. 17).

Plath had a few suicidal attempts and mental breakdowns and therefore in her poems and prose many references to her hospitalization and treatment can be found. Medical imagery includes illness and health, medical environment and anatomic pathology which serve the purpose of her inner monologues (R. Didlake, 2009, p. 135). In the previous chapter, it was discussed how Plath adopts medical environment and hospital scenery when it comes to childbearing as in the poem Three Women. It can be observed that her works are filled with body images which are pathologic and shown with a great precision as the process of vivisection. These images arose from Plath’s personal experiences like recurrent acute sinusitis, a fractured leg, a traumatic sexual encounter, recurrent depression, psychotherapy, electroconvulsive therapy, insulin-induced shock treatment, injuries associated with a suicide attempt, childbirth, miscarriage and an appendectomy. These experiences gave her unique perspective and a great insight into human response to disease and illness (Ibid, p. 139). Perhaps the most haunting example, however, is found in the poem Kindness. Here she selects a medical reference to convey the collapse of all distinction between herself and her work and the world into which both were flowing without hope of control:

The blood jet is poetry,

there is no stopping it (S. Plath, 200, p. 270).

Plath uses her realistic perspective to create surreal and alien landscapes in which isolation, fear and dread are the dominant features as in the poems Tulips or In Plaster. She concludes that she is not able to recover and collect the pieces of her personality. The feeling of split is omnipresent during her hospitalization:

And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was (…)

Without me, she wouldn't exist, so of course she was grateful. (…)

I wasn't in any position to get rid of her.

She'd supported me for so long I was quite limp — (…)

I used to think we might make a go of it together—

After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.

Now I see it must be one or the other of us (Ibid, p. 160).

Tulips links hospital environment with the speaker’s emotions. Plath speaks about the décor which is white and sterile and hospital staff who took her identity:

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses

And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons (Ibid, p. 160).

Surgeons’ attitude towards the patient and her psyche is cold, indifferent and terrifying:

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep (Ibid, p. 160).

After psychiatric treatment, Esther Greenwood from Plath’s novel The Bell Jar seems to be on a good way to recover. Critics are inclined to the fact that she is in some positive sens ‘reborn’ even if her future is uncertain and unknown for the readers (D. Bonds, 1990, p. 53).

The vision of Plath’s treatment is slightly different in the poem Fever 103°. The speaker’s physical condition has an impact on her surreal view of the world.Moreover, her horrifying situation contributes her symptoms.So do the powerfuldrugsshe depends upon to control these symptoms. Fever 103 ̊ refers only to home remedies: Lemon water, chicken / Water, water make me retch (S. Plath, 2000, p. 231). However, in The Jailer the speaker depends upon serious pharmaceuticals:My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin / Drops me from a terrible altitude(Ibid, p. 226). There is an awareness here that the drugs are necessary to the speaker and that she needs the chemicals to survive her nightmare life. However, there is a recognition, also, that they make her vulnerable to other forms of abuse and harm, and impede her ability to fight or escape (T. Brain, 2014, p. 19).

As Jo Gill concludes, the synecdochic representation of the self-split into body parts is a motif common to the work of other women poets and writers and is recurrent in Plath’s writing from this point on and he refers to Vigrina Woolf’s comments of her own writing process:

A shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it . . . it is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps, because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together (J. Gill, 2008, p. 36).

Plath admitted that her poems arose from personal emotional experiences, but also that she was a firm believer in the necessity to manipulating these experiences in order to make them relevant to the larger things. Much of Plath’s first person poetry originates from her own attempts to recognise and reconcile her own paradoxes, the ones she found inside herself and the ones she faced in the world she lived in (P. Annas, 1988, p. 5). To name the most striking, Susan Bassnett emphasized that Plath is called a confessional poet, an extremist poet, a post-romantic poet, a pre-feminist poet, a suicidal poet and associates her with a victim of male brutality, destroyed by a faithless husband, having been undermined by an ambitious mother and obsessed with death from childhood due to her father (S. Bassnett, 2005, p. 117). Taking her attitude toward men and women in contemporary patriarchal society into consideration, critical analysis of Plath’s writing began to shift to the feminist approach underlying socially constructed female gender roles. Plath was aware that not only society but also art was dominated by males and she attempted to fight against the male-established ‘high-art’:

The second half of the 1970s is dramatically defined by the emergence of feminist literary studies which, by adopting a largely biographical/cultural approach, begin to establish Plath at the centre of feminist canon (C. Brennan,1999, p. 53).

As Claire Brennan claims, Plath escapes enclosure and restriction, both in her life and writing by offering myths of transcendence and liberation similar to the strategies employed by many nineteenth-century women writers (C. Brennan, 1999, p. 54).Moreover, the poet (who was a mother of two children) explores metaphors of maternity and creation. Motherhood seems to be the challenge to her writing career and therefore she decides to brave the domestic difficulties which in her poetry appears as transforming ‘maternal self’ into a ‘creative self’. She speaks for herself as if she rises out of the domesticity and becomes a triumphant woman writer. According to Bassnett, Plath prefigures recent trends in feminist criticism because she needs to think through the roles of a woman as daughter to a man,as daughter to a woman, as mother in turn to a female and male child (S. Bassnett, 2005, p. 63).

As it was shown in the previous chapter, Plath deals with her femininity in different ways – showing her isolation, loneliness or fighting for her own voice in society and male-female relationship, demonstrating her own power as a woman and a poet. Pamela Annas suggests that:

Sylvia Plath’s poetry can be characterized as a search not so much for definition of self as for redefinition of self. The dialectic of Plath’s poetry is, first, the tension between a self-denied self and an other-denied self, and second, the tension between the self-image of the poet and the poet’s image of society (P. Annas, 1988, p. 7).

This statement could be the reason for recognizing Plath as schizoid person for other critics but more probably it shows Plath’s intention to deal with male poets by establishing her own identity and her distinctive role so that she could free herself from oppressive male tradition and even her husband who was a poet too:

Plath appropriates a centrally American tradition: the heroic ego confronting the sublime, but she brilliantly revises this tradition by turning Emerson’s ‘great and creative self’ into a heroine instead of a hero. Seizing a mythic power, the Plath of the poems transmutes the domestic and the ordinary into the hallucinatory, the utterly strange. Her revision of the romantic ego dramatizes its tendency toward disproportion and excess, and she is fully capable of both using and mocking this heightened sense of self, as she does in her poem Lady Lazarus (N. Baym, 2003, p. 2967).

Moreover, Plath articulates the polarity between being a mother and her personal ambitions. That is why she associates her creativity and artistic creation with woman’s fertility as in the poem Stillborn. Here biological and artistic creativity are entwined and the meaning of the poem is about intractability of language and even lack of inspiration, vital force when it comes to writing. For Plath as a writer the loss of a creative insight brings the suffering similar to those connected with miscarriage. The speaker confess:

These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.

(…) and their mother near dead with distraction (S. Plath, 2000, p. 142).

Plath, utterly differently presents her artistic powers in Ariel in which the speaker is aware of her own potential. The poem is full of motion and powerful elements:

God's lioness,

How one we grow,

Pivot of heels and knees!

(…)

And I

Am the arrow (…) (Ibid, p. 239).

Plath struggled both in her writing and personal life with the concept of marriage which she both feared as stultifying to her creativity and desired for its sexual and emotional intimacy (K. Moses, 2010, p. 37). Esther Greenwood, the heroine from Plath’s The Bell Jar comments:

That's one of the reasons I never wantedto get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket (S. Plath, 2010, p. 125).

There are no doubts that her negative attitude towards men and even life was caused somehow by her father. Sylvia Plath was obsessed with his image which she recalled many times in her writings. Otto Plath died when Sylvia was a child. When she grew up she admitted that this tragedy ended her childhood. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood says frankly:

I felt happier than I had been since I was about nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father the summer before he died. (…) I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old (S. Plath, 2010, p. 112).

In poems such as Electra on Azalea Path, the daughter seeks absolution; the father’s abandonment of her is now read as a fault of her own. As Ralph Didlake claims, in the poem, the defining borderland between the poet and her father is populated with amputation stumps, physical decay, gangrene, dismemberment and prosthetic limbs. The recurrence of similar images in other poems that relate to her father’s death is nothing less than a horribilisfascinans, or a scene to which she is compelled to return again and again (R. Didlake,2009, p. 141).

Above all, Electra is a woman who is torn between loyalties. The daughter is left with the loss of the father to whom she had given her earliest love and with the words of the mother who explains in her own terms how he died. The ancient and modern Electras are again fused here, asked to trust the mother but seeking to know the father for themselves (S. Bassnett,2005, p. 90).

Probably the most striking image of Plath’s father is presented in highly-emotional poem Daddy which critics are the most interested in. Father-daughter relations in Plath’s poetry was the central obsession from the beginning to the end of her life and career and was also based on ambivalent feelings: love-hate. Judith Kroll claims that Daddy is a love poem but for Margaret Uroff the poem is about revenge. Nonetheless, the poem stands as the most fundamental and crucial element especially as the use of Holocaust imagery. Daddy explores themes of power and powerlessness – the poem opens with the scene of a adult child:

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white (S. Plath, 2000, p. 222).

The daughter searches for a father who both must be killed, and is already dead: Daddy, I have had to kill you. Her father appears as a man in black with a Meinkampf look/And a love of the rack and the scewand the speaker seems to be a victim of his authority by making allusions to feeling like a Jew. Plath declares: I have always been scared of you and tries to deal with her traumatic past at the end of the poem: Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through. In this poem, however, it could be observed how Plath changes her attitude toward her father- from love and admiration which is seen in the verse: And I said I do, I do to the feelings of hate and contempt (J. Gill, 2008, p. 62). Sylvia Plath explains her intentions when it comes to Daddy in this way:

Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by that fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyse each other – she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it (S. Bassnett, 2005, p. 91).

The major problem in Daddy is that the daughter cannot communicate with her father. Plath creates an impression of great speed and furious energy by using broken and incomplete sentences, exclamations, repetitions and German language:

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw . . .

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene (S. Plath, p. 223).

That is why her father is depicted as Nazi, vampire, torturer and devil who she fears. The monstrous male figure of Daddy has its female counterpart inMedusa. Many critics point out at daughter-mother relation in Plath’s works. Medusa (the poem discussed in the previous chapter) has its roots in experiencing mother’s control and interference in the daughter’s life. Daddy and Medusa are strong, bitter poems, capable of being read on many levelssimultaneously. Similar visions of Plath father appear in the Colossus which suggests in the title some gigantic and monolithic totem. The speaker compares colossus to her father talking about her incapability of making him consistent in her mind:

I shall never get you put together entirely,

Pieced, glued, and properly jointed (Ibid, p. 129).

The image of Plath’s father surpasses her all the time. She feels some boundaries when it comes to clarifying his importance and sense in her life. For no doubts, death-centered motifs in Plath’s writing arose from bereavement and unstable psyche. In The Bell Jar she uses sophisticated but captivating metaphor to justifying her obsessions and limitations as a woman and human being which have great impact on her suicide in 1963:

(…)because wherever I sat -- on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok -- I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air (…) The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir (S. Plath, 2010, p. 261).

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream (Ibid, p. 330).

Title bell jar accompanied Plath from the moment of her father’s death till the moment when she killed herself. Apart from the bell jar, Plath also uses a motif of fig tree. She seems to be seduced by the aesthetic qualities of the tree which are solidity and abundance:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide,the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet (Ibid, p. 115-116).

The heroine is unable to make a choice, but in fact ,she is starving to deathas if she wanted everything for herself. This allegorical story shows woman’s life choices in which one choice cancels out another. As a result, the woman stands in a trap which deprives her fulfillment and fullness of femininity (J. Gill, 2008, p. 77).

As Susan Bassnett (2005, p. 136) claims, Plath’s poems are prefiguration of her end and the epitaph. What can any reader conclude from those lines in her last poem, Edge, is that Plath perceives death as a desirable shape of woman’s body and even some kind of release of her soul. Death means perfection and conscious choice.

According to Margaret Uroff, in the image of the rising lioness / Virgin / red comet, she identified a female figure violent enough to triumph in a world that Plath imagined would reduce the woman to a jade statue – but a femalealso with creatively violent powers of her own (M. Uroff, 1979, p. 169).

Although references to Plath’s biography and life are somehow risky when it comes to analyzing her poetry and prose, it is also justified due to the fact that after her death (and even because of her suicide) her writings became more popular. Inquiring readers acclaim Plath as a legend and her works as the sign of the times. Moreover, as in case of this kind of artists, since her death the cult of Sylvia Plath has begun and critics have taken attempts to reveal her true face from behind Plath’s many masks.

Sylvia Plath’s reception has been inspired by many theories. During the 1960s, critics highlighted confessional and post-romantic tendencies in her works. In the 1970s, theories on psychoanalysis and feminism gave crucial keys to analyze Plath’s poetry with regard to her autobiography. The significant number of critics places her among the most influential modern women writers and social, cultural commentators determined by traditional gender roles and patriarchal model of society. Plath’s poetry stands in relation to particular historical, cultural and ideological circumstances. To name a few, it were references to Holocaust or ‘Eisenhower Era’. Plath transformed her personal experiences as a writer, wife, mother, daughter and participant of social and cultural life into her own poetic mythology, collective system of archetypes to present a woman and femininity. In subsequent Plath studies, critics focused on aesthetic functions and language in her poetry taking self-creation, performativity,interactive art, and a renewed interest in spatial form into consideration. In the late 1980s, a feminist critique based on the philosophical, psychoanalytical and poststructuralist positions adopted by French feminist thinkers have proposed new ways of reading Plath’s work. It was the concept l’´ecrituref´eminine, which derives from the work of H´el`eneCixous, Julia Kristevaand Luce Irigaray, among others, proposes a theory of sexual difference:

It suggests that women writers (and indeed some men) challenge or escape the patriarchal ‘symbolic order’ of language by returning to the realm of the semiotic – a language of the body which exists before the symbolic and allows women a space wholly attuned to the natural rhythms and cycles of their bodies (J. Gill, 2008, p. 121).

Numerous studies have discussed the controversy surroundingSylvia Plath, her legacy, and Ted Hughes’s role as her editor. Others haveaccounted for parts of the critical heritage, the archive, the literary estate,and the Plath biographies. Death-centered, extreme poems, suicide, tragic life covered with legend and mystery gave basics to place Sylvia Plath among contemporary ‘The Cursed Poets’ (les poétes maudits).The idea comes from France and explains strong relationship between artist’s biography and writing: life writes and describes poetry and poetry completes life.

Being on unstable ground, it could be concluded that the woman in Plath’s poetry could be identified with the author itself but more probably her writing has tendencies to transform private experiences into collective and general truths.

The paper is based on: Chojnacka Katarzyna, 2013, the BA thesis entitled THE PICTURE OF A WOMAN IN THE POETRY BY SYLVIA PLATH

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