Resistance to Patriarchy: Interpreting the Poetry of Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath

The chapter discusses resistance to patriarchy in the poetry of Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath from the perspective of feminist literary criticism. Resistance to patriarchy is a feminist’s dialogic engagement with patriarchy through feminist insights and precision. Women, still suffer  due to the existing patriarchal order and its  stereotype notions. The women writers of the twentieth century have therefore recourse to the discourse of resistance in their writings for a crusade against patriarchy. Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath also suffered from this hegemonic suppressive functioning towards women in the Indian and Western context respectively. They have questioned the relevance of the existing ideologies in the patriarchal symbolic order. They made efforts to liberate women from the traps of patriarchal culture by raising feminist sensibility and consciousness through their poetry with their feminist stances. They have been interacting with patriarchy with intense seriousness through their works. These two poets recorded their resistance in the form of memoirs, autobiographical writings, personal diaries, and letters, and published verses or prose to expose, and protest against the oppressive society. By probing into their lives, we understand how they have referred to the patriarchal orders of Indian and American societies. This chapter interprets a few poems of Plath and Das drawing on the insights from feminism to expose the patriarchal ideology.