Sylvia Plath The Electra Complex Analysis

The Electra complex in the confessional poetry of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath which “results from childhood repression or from frustrated experience” (Chung 91) is an index of gender politics, for the Electra complex expressed in their poetry “is not marked by Freud’s notion of physical, sexual desires but rather by a longing for a father’s approval and social power or influence (Kriel 23). A female child appears at her psychic complex at the Phallic stage when she feels the attraction to her opposite gender and replaces her attachments from mother to father. This unconsciously felt emotion for father is mentioned by Simon de Beauvoir in this way:

If the father shows tenderness for his daughter, she feels her existence magnificently justified;

Generation after generation she is regarded as a least important member in the family and is suppressed. Cultural biases keep her passive and deprive her of her rights. In a patriarchal cultural, every decision of a girl’s life is dictated by her father, brother or her husband. So, her position in this society is just like a doll; a girl has to fulfill “his requirements, his expectations, his needs, his desires” and undergo “his threats, his power, his laws, his religion, his gods,” (Schwartz 4) and thus she survives and ends her life. Hence, the father becomes “mirror images of security, consistence and presence” (5) to her. She thinks that her father can provide her a doorway to the world and help her establish her individuality. Both Sexton and Plath are from a patriarchal culture. Like any other daughter of the 1950s, Sexton and Plath could discover the dominant position of the father and the submissive, mute state of the mother; mother is the symbol of subservience and her status in the family is not better than that of a ‘Dasi’, a servant. The position of a father i.e. a male figure in patriarchy is clearly defined by Adrienne Rich:

Patriarchy is the power of the fathers: a familial, social, ideological, political system in which men – by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, laws and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division of labor, determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male. . . . The power of the fathers has been difficult to grasp because it permeates everything, even the language in which we try to describe it.