Plath was in many ways a victim of the fifties and its ideology of the family…. Plath, in common with women grappling then with the problems of developing feminist theory, was fighting her way in those poems of the early sixties toward a definition of what life within the middle-class nuclear family does to its members. Her distinctive mediation of the ideology of the family and of love in the fifties and early sixties can tell us a great deal about patriarchal attitudes and how women in general, and women writers in particular, can find ways to resist and triumph over them.

It is not that Plath presents blueprints or role models; indeed, often what she portrays is the false directions into which her search led her. But her intellectual grasp of both crosscurrents and contradictions in the hegemonic ideology of this period and the new rising tide...