Strip Teasing the Self in Kamala Das Poetry
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TREND IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, 7 (1):
771-776 (февраля 2023)Аннотация
The outpouring of human emotions which was hitherto considered objectionable acquired a new dignity in Confessional poetry. Revolting against an early tendency to put up an impressive intellectual smoke screen, the sixties’ poets express their feelings of failure, guilt, disappointment, incestuous desire and experience in mental asylums, denying all taboos. Just as Browning probes into the mind and heart of his characters, so do the poets of the sixties try and fathom the complexity of the psyche. The admission of fear, guilt, neurosis and failure voiced in the poems, pertain to the poet’s own life and hence involves a lot of autobiography. The confessional poets of the 1970’s achieve universality through personalization - the self and family history. It is an ‘extremist art’ that has more in common with psychoanalysis. Confessional movement of poetry means objective, analytical or even clinical observation of incident from one’s own life, whether tingled with comedy or irony, self loathing or compassion. One thing that these writers have in common is the conception of the self as passive. Confessional poetry is a struggle to relate the private experiences with the outer world as it is. Such struggle is evident in the poems of Kamala Das from a very early stage. Her chief contribution to modern poetry is not only stunning frankness she betrays in every line she writes but also in making public a vast fund of agonies and information regarding women’s psychic experiences that have laid hidden for ages, in the private female sector. She throws the unholy sanctum open and etches out all caustic detail in full public view. Kamala Das has faced frustration, disillusionment and drabness that she has expressed through her poetry which is known as the confessional poetry of Kamala Das. Her poetry is unconventionally bold and shockingly autobiographical where the confessional mode is fused with a feministic slant. One can establish a link between the two confessional poetesses Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath with all their problems, psychological traumas, frustration and the resultant quest for identity arising from the revolt against male dominated world and so on. Both indulge in self awareness, self exposure and self introspection in order to define her self poetically. These confessional poets write poems that are candid, honest and down to earth. These poets give expression to their hidden thoughts and feelings that would normally not find expression in the social milieu. Kamala Das also develops the confessional mode of poetry. Her dissatisfaction in marriage and life has sharpened her consciousness, and she possibly decided to air out her grievances through the poetic medium, because many unpalatable things can be said in this medium without incurring the wrath of the powerful person. A desperate obsession with love is one prominent feature of Kamala Das’ poetry. The wounded self, which has to struggle hard to achieve its own identity, is the principal theme that runs through her poetry. The alienated self of Das engages in a hectic search for genuine love. Loveless poems are elegies on the death of love, against which even a marriage, often drab and banal to the persona, is no insurance. Humiliated at the boarding school by the Britishers and at home by a brutal husband, she becomes a psycho pathological dwarf. This paper optimizes her bitterness about the sexual politics of female submissiveness and her attempts as a modern Indian woman to free herself sexually and domestically from the role of bondage sanctioned by the society. Pain being the central and all pervading symbol to her existence, Kamala Das makes use of poetry as redemptive and as a metaphor of relief in order to transcend the aches of her lonely soul. Lyrics, thus, are a psychic striptease of a woman poet who is denied the emotional involvement which she hungers after. The sense of nothingness of man woman relationship pervades her poetry. Dr. Paviter Mohan "Strip Teasing the Self in Kamala Das Poetry" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-7 | Issue-1 , February 2023, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd52775.pdf Paper URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/other-scientific-research-area/other/52775/strip-teasing-the-self-in-kamala-das-poetry/dr-paviter-mohan