Abstract

This paper explores the poetic ways in which Sylvia Plath constructs her textual time-space in her poems. Maurice Merleau Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and the Freudian definition of the (Un)Heimlich constitute the theoretical bases for the demonstration of the fact that the Plathian anxiety and despair could be viewed as the supreme signs of the extra-ordinariness of an existence doomed to endlessly question the linguistic relics of a past that refuses to translate itself. Extra-ordinariness is here synonymous to the uncanniness (the Unheimlich) that turns imagination into a dark mirror which distorts and blurs the signifying process. The two tropes of the stone and of the shadow that circulate throughout Plath’s poetry stand for two dimensions of existence that are never brought together under the sign of the same synthesis. ”Blackness and silence” govern the time-space of the poetic self who ”arranges her mourning” while waiting to be wedded to death, the realm of the father imago.