| Description |
This study addresses the unsung fairy-tale intertext between Alejandra Pizarnik and Sylvia Plath. As it does so, this project steps away from psychic considerations of their creative work as suicide poets and creates an international intertextual fairy-tale dialogue that fills a gap in the critical tradition of fairy-tale scholarship--a gap that has been addressed by leading scholars in the field. More specifically, the intertextual landscape of this study hinges on reworkings of the classic Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard tales and their echoes found in Plath and Pizarnik. The present study creates a constellation that does not imply influence, but rather juxtaposes Plath and Pizarnik against one another and comparatively reads Plath and Pizarnik against the classic print fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. This study also highlights Plath and Pizarnik's creative pieces as meditations on feminine agency as it relates to appetite, which encompasses desire and creativity; and feminine endurance, which involves intrepidness and curiosity. These meditations on the feminine, which ultimately laud multidesirous female subjects and their marvelously shifting identities, contribute a strategy for reading Perrault and the Grimms that would be otherwise inaccessible to the field of fairy-tale scholarship. |
