Poet Sylvia Plath lived from 1932 to 1963, and ever since she has been the patron saint of a certain type of person. Melancholic, introspective, attracted to the sublime, and keenly aware of the barbs of a chauvinistic culture: these are the characteristics of a well-known archetype and subculture, “Goth”. And yet surprisingly little has been written about Plath’s place in gothic literary tradition. This analysis will entertain both arguments for and against the description of Plath’s work as “gothic”, but it will ultimately conclude that while her work shares much in common with gothic culture, there are good reasons the label is unfitting.
First, what is “Goth”? Like all genre categorizations, the label is broad, subjective, and constantly evolving. The term “gothic” was coined in 1550 to describe the architecture of newer cathedrals, but it would not be until 1764, when those cathedrals had become old, that the term would be applied to literature. The tradition emerged as a sort of backlash to the Enlightenment era. It cast its thoughts back to the superstition of the dark ages, and created an offshoot of Romanticism which was uniquely focused on the macabre. Some would say it is reductive to describe goth as “obsessed with death and the color black”, but as one of the earliest horror movements in literature, and as a tradition which has transcended multiple mediums, themes of death, the supernatural, madness, and dreams really are its most distinguishing traits. When the layman thinks of gothic literature, they most likely think of Edgar Allan Poe, or failing that Bram Stoker, but other authors include Emily Bronte, Lord George Gordon Byron, and Ann Radcliffe. Even authors like Charles Dickens and Emily Dickinson have been called gothic. The aesthetic was perfected through film movements, and starting in the 1970’s, psychedelic rock and punk culture blended to form “goth rock”, with bands like the Bauhaus, Joy Division, and The Cure (Adams).
Second, who was Sylvia Plath? Born to a stern German father in Boston, 1932, Plath was a child prodigy as a writer. At eight years old, she was already having her work praised in many literary contests and magazines. She was a prolific poet through young adulthood, but as she got older, the outlook on life reflected in her writing became more bleak. It would be inappropriate to posthumously diagnose Plath with a depressive disorder, but it can at least be said that those who suffer with depression or other mental health issues identify strongly with her work. Critics have argued against reducing Plath’s legacy to her struggles with mental health, but the fact remains that her writing is impossible to discuss without the context of her multiple suicide attempts. When studying the frenetic, raw verbiage of the poems in Ariel she drafted right before her death in 1963, it is difficult to imagine these words from the pen of someone who wasn’t, to put it mildly, agitated. Her husband, contemporary poet Ted Hughes, is remembered as somewhat of a villainous figure in Plath’s legacy, due to her portrayal of him as authoritarian in her poems, the fact that he made edits to Plath’s work when publishing Ariel for her posthumously, and the notes sent to Plath’s therapist which accused Hughes of abuse. “Sylvia Plath wasn’t a good writer because she committed suicide. In fact, her career was cut short, and I mourn all the many wonderful books we might have had,” remarks author John Green (Green).
Death has its fingerprints in almost every work of fiction ever written, so what makes goth culture special? It’s the familiarity, the congeniality with an ending. Death and nature are part of the same cycle, and as one of the few animals able to agonize about the future, humans create rituals to personify and have a relationship with the concept. In her poem “Lady Lazarus”, Plath expresses her frustration with her second attempt on her life being thwarted, and characterizes her resurrection as both miraculous, but also something unnatural worthy of a freakshow. “Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well,” she famously wrote (“Lady Lazarus”). This shows the kind of ironic sense of humor about death that has become an underpinning in goth communities. Death is a specter that walks alongside her even in her more optimistic writings like “Letter in November”: the trees on her property are a “wall of the odd corpses. I love them.” (Wisker).
Of course anyone concerned with death to the point it interferes with their productivity is going to be called mad, and those extremes of human emotion are also a staple of the goth genre. On that front, Plath’s body of work gives almost too many examples to choose just one; her novel The Bell Jar helped to stigmatize electroconvulsive therapy as an unhelpful treatment in the public consciousness. Edward Butscher characterizes her as monstrous in his book Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness, but as any goth will tell you, the monster is a two-sided symbol. Calling Sylvia Plath a madwoman doesn’t necessarily belittle her into a victim. The way Ariel casts off the structuralism of her early work challenges the expectations of sanism and rationality imposed on disabled women. When she concluded “Lady Lazarus” with “I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air,” it can’t be said she intended this as a non-threatening image. Lastly, gothic traditions tend to have a fascination with the supernatural, the occult, and the sublime, as an extension of its reverence for death. Plath satisfies this requirement too, as she shared an interest in the supernatural and the occult with Ted Hughes, and the supernatural makes appearances throughout her work. For example, she compares her late father to a vampire for a full stanza in “Daddy” (Rovito 320).
The golden age of gothic literature spanned the early 1800’s; Wuthering Heights was written in 1847, “Annabel Lee” was published in 1849, and Dracula was first published in 1897. Therefore, a person might argue Plath emerged too late on the literary scene to be gothic. However, gothic literature is not constrained to a singular time period. Shirley Jackson and Stephen King are two examples of recent authors who have utilized gothic tropes and structures to great effect. The most important characteristic of gothic culture, after its macabre motifs, is its ability to build on the existing tradition of its precursors. According to Dan Adams writing on the subject of goth, the style celebrates a “tendency for civilization to reach into its past to reshape its present.” (Adams). Dickinson and the Bronte sisters can be identified among the dozens of poets which inspired Plath, but she took just as much inspiration from other writers who were decidedly not gothic.
Likely, the strongest argument in favor of Plath having a place in gothic canon is her contributions as a feminist writer. Ever since Horace Walpole penned The Castle of Otranto in 1764, a story about a cruel lord who attempts to marry his son’s betrothed, the trope of supernatural forces lashing out against patriarchal control has been a classic motif in the genre. Not every piece of gothic fiction is a feminist work, but because Romanticism was a dismissal of the finality of the empiricism of Victorian-era science, the genre became a tool of empowerment for social minorities who risked being explained out of existence by that empiricism. This included women who were pathologized as mad for not conforming to social standards, and so gothic art has always had a special kinship with feminist issues, a special role in centering the female perspective. Shirley Jackson may be a more pronounced example, in how she exposed the dark underbelly of suburban domesticity, but Plath similarly was able to mine existential horror from everyday life, such as her short poem “Cut”.
Plath is, however, missing one important ingredient of gothic fiction: architecture. For all the iterations and different mediums “goth” has had, it never escaped its connotation as an architectural term. Not every work of gothic art needs a haunted house, but the gothic style emphasizes the sacredness of buildings as spaces which shape the thought processes of those residing inside. Even when gothic authors like Poe wrote autobiographical content, it was typically cloaked in the perspective of a third-party character. Plath, by contrast, popularized the style of Confessional writing, and with the exception of The Bell Jar, almost all her poems were written from her subjective, first-person perspective. Plath had a love for her home in London, where she practiced beekeeping and wrote her Ariel poems before she died, and that setting is highlighted in her “Letter in November”, but Plath’s writing puts nowhere near as much focus on architecture as Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
Confessional style has become a norm in poetry and song lyrics since the 1960’s, and there are examples of this style being used by The Cure and Joy Division, however these examples would be cherrypicked. Plath’s legacy includes inspiring poets such as Sharon Olds, Lena Dunham, and Jerico Brown, but very few current goth writers credit Sylvia Plath as an inspiration (Ostberg, “Sylvia Plath”). Plath’s rise to literary prominence coincides with goth culture’s transition to more socially conscious punk movements, but no direct link between Plath’s feminism and this change was found. Confessional poetry emerged as a reaction to Modernism. Modernism used direct, sparse, experimental language to express the alienation felt by the masses following the industrial revolution and World War I, and was typified by the poetry of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. Plath credited Joyce as an inspiration, but Confessional poetry represented a return to subjective, emotional writing. In this way, Confessional writing has a relationship to Modernism analogous to Romanticism’s relationship to Enlightenment Era thinking. When all is said and done, though, these are two different branches of evolving literary tradition (Ostberg, “Confessional Poetry”).
Almost no work of fiction fits exclusively in one genre. Each work of art is unique, and attempting to categorize a piece of text is more an academic exercise than a question with a fixed answer. Goth culture has changed wildly since the term was coined in the 1500’s, and what is and isn’t “goth” ultimately comes down to how the word is used. That being said, while many goths may hold the works of Sylvia Plath dear to their hearts, if little has been written about understanding her as a gothic poet, then Sylvia Plath is not goth. Plath’s writing may explore many ideas which are the hallmarks of gothic literature: death, decay, illness, the sublime, patriarchy, and general despair. However Plath’s work is unapologetically confrontational, where the gothic style is usually more baroque, detached, and puts more emphasis on vivid settings. Plath’s confessional writing may be interpreted as a reaction against Modernist literature, but it nevertheless takes its pedigree more from Modernism than Romanticism, with its sparse, experimental use of language. Not every work of fiction which revels in anxiety was intended as horror in the conventional sense, and even so not every entry into horror canon is automatically gothic. The line must be drawn somewhere, even if it is a somewhat arbitrary distinction.
Adams, Dan. “A brief history of goths.” YouTube, uploaded by TED-Ed, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STOJftffOqs. Accessed 26 July 2025.
Green, John. “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: Crash Course Literature 216.” YouTube, uploaded by CrashCourse, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJn0ZPd6mYo. Accessed 26 July 2025.
Ostberg, René. "confessional poetry". Encyclopedia Britannica, 6 Mar. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/art/confessional-poetry. Accessed 26 July 2025.
Ostberg, René. "Sylvia Plath". Encyclopedia Britannica, 22 Jul. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sylvia-Plath. Accessed 26 July 2025.
Plath, Sylvia. “Lady Lazarus.” Poetry Foundation, 1965, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus. Accessed 26 July 2025.
Rovito, Maria. “Toward a New Madwoman Theory: Reckoning the Pathologization of Sylvia Plath.” Journal of literary & cultural disability studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 2020, pp. 317–332.
Wisker, Gina. “Women Writers, Madness, Death, and Sylvia Plath’s Gothic.” Atmosfear Entertainment, Aug. 2020, https://www.atmostfear-entertainment.com/literature/books/women-writers-madness-death-sylvia-plath-gothic. Accessed 22 July 2025.
