Rhetorical Strategies

Blog Entry #1: Rhetorical Strategies

• Personification—“Lights and voices spilled from the ballroom window, but a few yards beyond the darkness drew up a barricade and sealed them off” (107) As Marco draws Esther outside with the prerogative of raping her, darkness’s “barricade” embodies Esther’s isolation from the party, and thus, represents the feeble power of women during Esther’s time, one of Plath’s recurrent themes.
• Allusion—“‘A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line’”(221). In making an allusion to Theodore Roosevelt’s “Big Stick” foreign affairs policy, Esther is emphasizing the pressure to succumb to motherhood. Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” This is especially relevant, as while women were encouraged to follow careers, motherhood was deemed a much more suitable role for them. Esther sees the unspoken pressure to reproduce as a “baby hanging over [her] head”.
• Personification/Metaphor—“(I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo)” (3). Clearly, by comparing herself to the eye of a storm, Esther is referring to her position in society. As society moves in mayhem all around her, she finds herself “moving dully along”. While still a limb of society, (as the eye of the storm is still part of the storm) Esther finds herself alone in a stagnant state, unable to comprehend the chaos around her, portraying Plath’s tendencies to form a paradox between calmness and destruction.
• Polysendeton—“Joan’s room, with its closet an bureau and table and chair and white blanket...was a mirror image of my own” (195). Joan, I believe, is a symbol for Esther’s mind, separated from body, as Esther is never completely sure that Joan is real. Because Esther’s body refuses to let go, Joan’s death represents the feebleness of the mind in relation to body. Esther’s body refuses to let go, despite her minds’ determination, suggesting that her body and mind are isolated from one another, a life-saving characteristic, as Plath emphasizes with this symbol.