Abstract
The main concern of this paper is to examine three of Sylvia Plath's poems, namely, “On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad,” “Stings,” and “The Night Dances” from a feminist point of view. The paper explores how Feminist critic, Elaine Showalter’s three stages of "gynocriticism" are represented in these selected poems. First coined by Showalter, the term "gynocriticism" means understanding female literary works and evaluating them from a female point of view instead of stressing women’s oppression in society, the difference between men and women, as well as women’s rebellion. Showalter suggests that there are three main stages of female literature: the “Feminine stage”, the “Feminist stage” and the “Female stage.” This study proposes that Sylvia Plath’s poetic career can be traced in the light of Showalter’s theory of gynocriticism. Her themes and attitudes towards men differ at three stages of her career according to the time in which she wrote a poem, her psychological state, and the circumstances that surrounded her while writing