The Role of Living and Non-Living Metaphoric Drivers in Selected Works of Sylvia Plath (Essay Sample)

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The Role of Living and Non-Living Metaphoric Drivers in Selected Works of Sylvia Plath
"Writers having had their hell on earth will escape all punishment hereafter" (Kaufman, 37). Writing is a mental process, and poets, like all writers, conceive their works through thinking, extensive thought synthesis, and cognitive processes. A magnitude of psychological studies notes the disturbed and troubled lives of writers. The term 'Sylvia Plath effect' has generally been accepted to represent the propensity of writers and other creative minds to suffer from affective disorders. Kaufman (37) indicates that female poets are more likely to suffer from mental disorders than other creative writers. However, the writer's reference to Sylvia Plath subject Plath's work to excessive scrutiny to determine the stylistic patterns present in the poet's work to understand the creative mind. According to the philosophies of St Augustine of Hippo, language is the only way humans present their ideas and the way through which humans interpret ideas (Ando, 46). Therefore, language is the only way creative writers express the self and present the disordered mind.
Nonetheless, "the phenomenological experience of highly subjective phenomena such as emotions, perceptions, or sensations are difficult to describe using plain language" (Demjen, 7). Poets and other creative writers often find elaborative ways to describe their sensations, emotions, and perceptions. According to Demjen (8), writers often use metaphors instead of plain emotional words. Metaphors are essential for communication because they create a distinction between the directness of plain emotion words and the discreteness of symbols and fluidity of the experienced emotion; therefore, they tend to express emotions or convey information more vividly and elicit a comprehensive understanding that could not be objectively obtained through plain emotion words. Therefore, this paper seeks to determine how metaphorical expressions convey the experience of highly subjective phenomena – emotions, perceptions, and sensation – among creative writers.
In most studies, Sylvia Plath's work serves as a base for research because of the poet's history that makes the poems serve as a manifestation of Plath's inner thoughts and emotions. This paper, however, does not focus on the entire works of Sylvia Plath; it examines the metaphorical manifestation in three selected poems, the Colossus, daddy, mad girl love song, and edge. The paper examines the use of living and non-living metaphoric drivers in the selected poems and how they help the poet manifest their emotions. Metaphoric drivers are the things or elements attached to a metaphor and acts to inform the meaning of the metaphor; it is the discrete symbol in a metaphor that expresses the fluidity of the emotional experience. For instance, in the metaphor 'my life is a roller coaster,' the roller coaster is the non-living metaphoric driver that informs the meaning of the metaphor and helps the reader understand the poet's emotions. This study seeks to explain the distinction between living and non-living metaphoric drivers in Sylvia Plath's selected poems.
The research objectives include determining the use of metaphoric expressions in Sylvia Plath's selected works; to explore how living and non-living metaphoric drivers aid the manifestation of the self, and explaining the distinction between living and non-living metaphoric drivers. The research question is how living and non-living metaphoric drivers manifest subjective phenomena (emotions, perceptions, and sensations).
Literature Review
In parallel and un-parallel research on mental disorders among creative writers, researchers reveal an interplay between mental illness and creative writing (Thomas and Duke, 205). Poets and writers suffer the highest rates of depressive disorders and have shorter life spans than members of other artistic groups. Kaufman (39) notes that although most studies represent the poet as a mad genius, some researchers present a less dramatic image. However, the studies are consistent because they indicate that creative individuals tend to vigorously engage in intense tasks with perseverance, flexibility, openness to experience, impulsivity, emotional sensitivity, and curiosity (Kaufman, 39-40). These qualities do not present a consistent or vivid picture of the writer; they present the writer as more susceptible to mental disorders.
The poetic domain is chosen because of the documented characteristics of poets. In comparison, different writers and poets may present liable and eligible bases for research. This research chooses Sylvia Plath because of the extensive reference and documentation available on the poet's life. Sylvia Plath is painted as the epitome of all depressive disordered poets; Kaufman (37-50) coins the term the Sylvia Plath effect to generalize all poets with a depressive disorder. Therefore, it is correct and more efficient to analyze the works of Sylvia Plath as the basis of objective manifestations. According to Hamdan and Saadoon (1), Plath's poetry occupies a distinct place in society because of its nature, imagery, topics, and treatment. These qualities are often consolidated with the unfortunate experiences that marred the poet's life. Plath was married to an English Poet, had two children, and committed suicide in 1963. Her family life precipitated her suicide, her relationship with her husband, and the father. Although Plath's works are beautiful and consist of an array of stylistic devices, her works cannot be separated from her life's tragedy. The events of her death make her works confessions of her sufferings, and these confessions are best understood through metaphoric expressions.
Metaphors occur in everyday life and serve to enhance the meanings of objective phenomena. Davidson (31) cites that metaphors are the dream works of a language and its interpretation reflects much on the originator as on the interpreter. A metaphor is an inventive construal and construction that uses ordinary sematic resources to achieve what the ordinary plain words do not achieve. There are no set definitive rules for deciding how to construct a metaphor. There is no manual to determine its meaning; however, on most occasions and in every interpretation, metaphors mean what the words contained in the metaphor mean in their most literal forms (Davidson, 32). Davidson (32) indicates that some investigators of metaphoric expressions argue that there exist literal paraphrases for metaphors; however, some indicate that no typical paraphrase can be found for some metaphors. Literal paraphrases cannot realize the special insight inspired by a metaphor. The metaphor "conveys truths or falsehoods about the world much as plainer language does, though the message may be considered more exotic, profound, or cunningly garbed" (Davidson, 32). The metaphor becomes the vehicle that conveys the usual idea in an inventive and creative way.
Ordinary utterances have an unconditional priority, and their meanings are not defective; the hearer or reader always generates the sentence meaning. In ordinary utterances, the audience takes the author's meaning and checks the plausibility of the meaning in the intended context. On the other hand, the author's standard meaning is insufficient when interpreting metaphors. Interpreting the metaphor includes what triggers the search for non-linear meanings and what triggers the search for metaphorical meanings (Glucksberg and Keysar, 403). According to the conceptual metaphor theory, a metaphor is omnipresent, non-literary, and shapes the way people act, think and communicate (Rasse, Onysko, and Citron, 311). For instance, the conceptual metaphor' Time is Money' guides individual's thoughts and helps them map the knowledge about a concrete domain (time) onto an abstract domain (money). Therefore, individuals unconsciously and automatically use these conceptual domain mappings to understand better what they encounter in everyday life.
Metaphoric expressions in poetry are used inventively and conceptually; Rasse et al. (330) indicate that metaphors are not static and do not have one linguistic meaning; therefore, it is necessary when interpreting the metaphoric expressions in poems to analyses the conceptual understandings and inventive forms. The conceptualization of metaphors determines the distinctive features of metaphoric drivers. Both the author and audience harbor some structured concepts that inform their use or choice of metaphors. "Living things and nonliving things tend to have different internal structures; that is, correlational strength and degrees of distinctiveness have different patterns in living things and nonliving things" (Khatin-Zadeh, Banaruee, and Yazdani-Fazlabadi, 2). More so, the use of living or non-living things aims to suppress some aspects of the metaphoric expression. The metaphoric driver enables the interpreter to factor in relevant information and factors out irrelevant information (Khatin-Zadeh, 2). For instance, Khatin-Zadeh et al. (2) give an example of the metaphor 'my job is a jail.' In this example, the interpreter considers the structure of the semantic space and excludes the literal features of the jail. Therefore, when investigating living and non-living metaphoric drivers, the researcher must consider the visual and functional features and the correlation among distinctive features.
Poems contain mental representations illuminated through the conceptual domains elaborated by metaphors. The conceptual domains are created at a cognitive level and are evident in the poet's metaphors. Árpád (1) investigates cognitive mechanisms that contribute to the reader'...