Father-daughter Relationships In Sylvia Plath's and Anne Sexton's Selected Poems: A Critical Stylistic Analysis

This thesis reports on a critical stylistic analysis of ideology in the selected ten poems of Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and Anne Sexton (1928-1974). Utilising the tools of Critical Stylistic analysis (Jeffries, 2007, 2010a), including Naming and Describing, Transitivity, Equating and Contrasting, Exemplifying and Enumerating, Prioritizing, Implying and Assuming, Negating, Hypothesizing, Presenting Other's Speech and Thought, and Representing time, space and society, I will analyse the poems to show the different father-daughter relationships through the female speakers' viewpoints.

The aim of this thesis is to show that to what extent the Critical Stylistic model can contribute to the critical analysis of the poems, to investigate the father-daughter relationships and reveal the ideologies behind them. Together, the tools can work as an objective package to indicate three main themes (father-daughter relationships) including praise, condemnation and elegy, and two minor themes of the Electra complex and sexual abuse, and reveal the social, religious and political ideologies.

What the tools of Critical Stylistics add to the interpretation of the poems is to find that the female speaker and her father have different roles in the clauses and to indicate how she presents her father using positive and negative connotations, which further reveal her different viewpoints towards him.