METAPHORICAL CONSTRUCTION OF FEMALE IDENTITY IN SYLVIA PLATH’S POETRY: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF SELECTED POEMS

Аннотация

Sylvia Plath’s poetry has traditionally been interpreted through autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and feminist perspectives. Comparatively less attention, however, has been devoted to the stylistic mechanisms through which metaphor constructs female identity. The present study investigates the metaphorical representation of femininity in Sylvia Plath’s poems Mirror, The Applicant, and Tulips. Drawing upon cognitive stylistics and feminist literary criticism, the research examines conceptual metaphor as the principal stylistic device organizing poetic meaning.

The analysis combines close reading with comparative stylistic interpretation to demonstrate how metaphor functions through reflection, reification, and reconstruction. Rather than treating female identity as biologically determined, Plath represents it as a linguistic and cultural construct produced through metaphorical mappings between concrete objects and abstract experience. The findings indicate that metaphor operates not merely as a rhetorical ornament but as the principal stylistic mechanism through which Plath critiques patriarchal representations of womanhood while simultaneously reconstructing alternative models of feminine subjectivity.