"Like a Sleepwalker: An Ecofeminist Reading of the Binaries of Death and Desire in Sadaf Raza and Sylvia Plath’s Poetry"

Abstract

Sadaf Raza, a Pakistani poet relates to women's miseries in Like a Sleepwalker, and this process assimilates her with the harsh realities, shared experiences, and minor pleasures of life. Sylvia Plath, an American poet, is known as a "suicidal doll" after committing suicide in 1963. Both write exclusively for women and depict their emotions in a way that brings them into harmony with nature. The study uses Susan Griffin's book, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, as a theoretical framework for ecofeminist reading. Through Krippendorff’s content analysis, the imagery of birds, trees, sun, moon, sky, stars, etc. is gathered from their poetry and the implicit concepts behind them are discussed about woman and nature, as both are considered subservient. The research reads death as a derivative of desire and it is not to be considered a purely biological event. Thus, the attitude concerning death and its meaning for a woman is derived from her suppressed desires. Moreover, the culture and society work in a patriarchal order to deprive women of essential desires. Where the hope for fulfillment and desire ends, the desire for death starts.

Keywords:  Ecofeminism, Griffin, Feminism, Nature, Death, Desire.