Gender Roles Flashcards
(7 cards)
Introduction
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, though bound by marriage and poetic legacy, articulate profoundly divergent visions of gender through their work. Plath, writing within the oppressive structures of 1950s and early 60s femininity, consistently exposes the psychological, cultural and bodily expectations placed on women- often rendering gender not as identity but as a kind of spiritual and corporeal wound. Hughes, on the other hand, constructs masculinity through elemental forces, animal instinct and mythic self-sufficiency, often situating the male voice outside social containment altogether. Yet within these apparent polarities lies an intricate poetic dialogue: where Plath’s femininity is performed and dissected, Hughes;s masculinity is mythologised and elevated- both poets interrogating the cost, illusion and seduction of gendered roles. Through poems such as The Moon and the Yew Tree, Face Lift and Morning Song, Plath critiques the feminine role as spiritually vacant, bodily fragmented and socially imposed; while Hughes, in Hawk Roosting, The Jaguar and Full Moon and Little Frieda, constructs masculine identity as sovereign, instinctive, yet subtly performative. Together, they offer not resolution but resistance- to confinement, to silence and to the binaries that shape gender itself.
Paragraph 1: Voice, Power and Transcendence
The Moon and the Yew Tree
Plath dramatises the feminine voice as fractured and excluded from symbolic power, while Hughes constructs a masculine identity rooted in dominance and certainty. While Plath’s speaker is exiled from spiritual authority, yearning toward an inaccessible maternal or divine presence, Hughes’s hawk inhabits a self-assured, almost godlike position- fully inhabiting the power that Plath’s speaker is denied.
-Plath’s The Moon and the Yew Tree stages the feminine voice in a world where both spiritual and maternal authority are inaccessible. The poem’s speaker, reaching toward transcendence, encounters only cosmic indifference: ”the moon is no door. It is a face in its own right”. The blunt negation denies transcendental access severing the traditional Romantic link between nature and revelation. The moon, often coded as a feminine symbol of creativity and intuition, is here expressionless, autonomous and unyielding- not an oracle, but a silent witness.
-structurally, the poem uses heavy enjambement and protracted broken syntax to mirror the speaker’s internal fragmentation.
-the landscape is laden with unfulfilled maternal characteristics: ”the moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary” (archetype of motherhood). Final reference to the masculine symbol of the “yew tree” where men have the last say while the moon is characterised as being “bare and wild”- the moon is ripped bare and vulnerable and its madness is exposed for all to see/ insanity.
-last word of the poem is “silence”.
-Christina Britzolakis, the poem exemplifies Plath’s “aesthetic of estrangement” where both nature and divinity are “defamiliarised” and “coded as absent and hollowed”. The speaker, positioned within a traditionally receptive feminine posture- gazing, yearning- finds only emotional and ontological vacancy.
Paragraph 1: Voice, Power and Transcendence
Hawk Roosting
-Hughes’s Hawk Roosting exalts a masculine voice that is singular, centralised and omnipotent: ”i kill where i please because it is all mine”. The Hawk’s voice fuses poet and predator, enacting what Seamus Heaney terms “a naturalised violence of vision”- the voice is not merely controlling, but born to control. The syntax is clipped, declarative, constructed in end-stopped iambic phrases that mimic military cadence. The lack of emotional texture- no uncertainty- elevates the hawk to a Nietzschean archetype, a symbol of amoral power and individual will. Where plath’s speaker is denied access to the sacred, hughes’s hawk claims authorship over the sacred: “my eye has permitted no change” (strophic form controlled nature of the poem).
-proprietorial hawk: “my inspection”, “now i hold creation in my foot”, “revolve it all slowly”. A sense of superiority (foot often a lowly symbol and Miranda in the Tempest described as a foot).
-Hawk can be seen as an ironic critique, a parody of male hubris so extreme it verges on grotesque.
Paragraph 2: the body as test
Face Lift
Where Plath anatomises the violence of gender conformity through the surgical reconstruction of the female body, Hughes romanticises masculine liberation through animalistic rebellion, making male identity synonymous with instinctive freedom.
In both poems, the body becomes a battleground for gender roles- but while Plath’s speaker is carved into compliance, Hughes’s jaguar erupts from constraint, revealing how femininity is culturally scripted and dissected, while masculinity is mythologised as untamed.
-in Face Lift, Plath unflinchingly exposes the violence of femininity as performance. The poem chronicles a woman undergoing cosmetic surgery- but the literal surgery becomes a metaphor first the reconstruction to fit male-centric ideals.
-**”Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard…”- sedation period signalled by elipsis, destruction (both her body and personality are easily erased, re-created a new).
-”Pink and smooth as a baby”. The surgery disrupts the natural agency process itself. In fact, the speaker begins to ”grow backward”. She does not create the new generation by having children, but neither does she grow old and die. She literally reproduces herself (clown).
-”they’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar”- the older self occupies a separate realm of time. Trapped in a repetitive loop like a bizarre specimen. Disowns and dissociates from their alternative self. Ultimate stanza shifts to 3rd person and is dehumanised and detached.
-”skin doesnt have roots it peels away easy as paper”. A chilling metaphor for the fragility of female identity, exposing the way societal constructions of femininity demand the removal, erasure and rewriting of the self. The simile “easy as paper” reduces skin- a symbol of the body’s integrity and protection- to something thin, disposable and textual, suggesting that the woman’s physical appearance is not organic but edited, like a manuscript subjected to external revision. The lack of roots compounds this sense of disembodiment; skin, once thought to anchor the self, is revealed as rootless- disconnected from permanence or authenticity. Sibilance offers a quiet violence- soft yet sinister- echoing whispered internalisation of beauty standards. The horror lies not in the surgery itself, but in how effortless it becomes to sever woman from her own embodiment.
-Sandra Gilbert argues that the female body here becomes a “text rewritten by patriarchal editors”- the woman is not healed, but overwritten (much like this poetry anthology).
Paragraph 2: the body as text
Jaguar
-in contrast, The Jaguar presents masculine energy as uncontainable, pre-linguistic force. The poem’s titular animal rejects stasis: ”The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel”. The line is dense with power: “thrust” implies sexual potency; “rolls under” suggests the jaguar- and by extension, masculine energy- dictates motion itself.
-Hughes structures the poem around the contrast between caged animals and the jaguar’s dynamic vision. While the other creatures are docile, symbolic of domestication, the Jaguar’s movement is described in present tense, active verbs, with assonance and spondees propelling rhythm.
-here the male body is not reformed, but revered- the jaguar’s power becomes metaphor for poetic vision, masculine resistance even prophetic insight.
-”the parrots shriek […] or strut/ like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut”. Lack of dignity/ prostitution. Parrots on the show and trying to sell themselves (all about performance akin to the feminine identity portrayed in Face Lift).
-“hurrying”, “spins”
-”but there’s no cage to him/ More than to the visionary his cell:”. Sees beyond its physical domain (potentiality). Enjambement emphasises the potency of the jaguar’s mental and physical movement. The Jaguar is in charge of his own world unlike the other animals. Marvels on the fact that the Jaguar is seen to be so unaware of their enclosure. The Jaguar can be seen as an allegory for the way in which a determined or creative mind can never be constrained by physical boundaries.
-Hughes’s jaguar embodies an ideal of masculine liberty that seems disconnected from social reality- it operates within a mythic register, unlike Plath’s painfully intimate realism. Yet one might ask: is Hughes’s vision of masculine power inherently unproblematic? Does it glorify aggression as artistry? Meanwhile, Plath’s woman in Face Lift may be undergoing violence, but her voice remains critically aware of the proceedings. Her pain becomes poetic clarity- she speaks from within the wound.
-Terry Gifford argues that The Jaguar presents a “celebration of raw, untamed energy” as a counterpoint to the emasculating effects of modern confinement. The jaguar’s relentless movement resists domestication, embodying a primal masculinity that defies control or passivity.
Paragraph 3: gendered creation
Morning Song
Plath’s maternal speaker dissolves under the emotional and existential demands of motherhood, while Hughes’s paternal gaze remains distant yet reverent- witnessing creation without bearing its psychic or physical weight.
Here, plath exposes the erasure of female selfhood through embodied motherhood, while Hughes aestheticises fatherhood as wonder without cost, highlighting the deep asymmetry in how creation and care are gendered within poetic form and emotional experience.
-plath confronts the alienation of maternity, dismantling the myth of maternal instinct. The child is born not into warmth but into distance. ”im no more your mother/ than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own/ Slow effacement”. This extended metaphor renders motherhood as abstract, detached- the speaker is not nurturer but vaporous observer. The fluidity of “cloud” and “mirror” evokes a loss of self, a slow disappearance into role. The poem’s shifting metre and disjointed lineation reflect the emotional dissonance of a woman caught between awe and absence. (Betty Friedan “Women no longer has a private image to tell her who she is, or can be, or wants to be”. Lost at her reflection, her understanding of herself, fades away”)
-the droplets of the effaced identity form the product of the process which erased her: the child. The mother and child cannot exist simultaneously so the mother’s identity leaks away as a result.
-Plath’s use of auditory imagery ”a far sea moves in my ear” disconnects sound from source reinforcing the dreamlike unreality of maternal presence. Transcontinental move from US to England, prior to be a mother (career driven).
-”the window/ Whitens and swallows its dull stars”. Shift to morning and swallowed inspiration. The shift from night to morning indicates a major change in perception of the surroundings and time.
-Jacqueline Rose argues that Plath’s motherhood poems often “expose the split between cultural narrative and lived psychic experience”- here the self is subsumed by the myth.
Paragraph : gendered creation
Full Moon and Little Frieda
-”a pail lifted, still and brimming- mirror/ to tempt a first star to a tremor”. The image is delicately poised between the domestic and the cosmic, embodying a sense of equilibrium and stability. The soft alliteration of “t” sounds mimics the delicacy of the scene, while the slant rhyme between “brimming” and “tremor” subtly links fullness to movement. The line elevates the pail to a ritualistic object, turning a rural domestic moment into a miniature creation myth- a harmony between human stillness and celestial awakening.
-”the moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work/ that points at him amazed”. In this line, Hughes reimagines fatherhood not through intimacy or physical involvement, but through reverent observation. It positions the father as a creator standing back from his creation- struck not by ownership but by awe. The moon, typically a feminine symbol, here becomes a detached yet admiring witness, echoing the father’s role in this moment: distant, silent, but overwhelmed by the significance of the child’s voice calling “Moon”. The mirroring structure of awe constructs a mutual gaze- child and father, work and artist- suggesting that in recognising his child, the father also recognises himself anew. This moment of wonder is mutually constitutive, but notably free from physicality or sacrifice.
-The cyclical wonder of creation and recognition, framing fatherhood not as burden or transformation, but as sacred as sacred astonishment. It is a deeply gendered contrast: the male creator steps back and is affirmed; the female creator, in Plath’s poems, steps in and dissolves.
-unlike Plath’s speaker in Morning song who experience motherhood as dislocation, Hughes’s paternal figure remains intact and elevated by his role as onlooker.
Neil Roberts notes that Hughes’s portrayal of the child is “imbued with sacred awe, without emotional weight”. Unlike Plath’s mother, who dissolves into motherhood, Hughes’s speaker remains intact, separate, safe in his artistry.
-here lies the core gendered tension: Plath’s speaker creates life and loses herself; Hughes’s speaker observes life and is elevated by it. The maternal is physical, consuming, dislocating; the paternal is symbolic, aesthetic and safe. Plath’s maternity is a confrontation with identity, while Hughe’s paternity is a celebration of wonder without cost. This contrast reveals the gendered asymmetry of creative experience- one is endured; the other, admired.
