Edge

“The Crazy Woman” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1960)

In “Edge,” Plath’s speaker portrays the dead woman as a greatly superior being. In “The Crazy Woman,” the 20th-century poet Brooks makes a similar move. Brooks’s speaker, the titular “crazy woman,” stands out because she doesn’t conform. She embraces the disquieting aspects of life by singing in the gloomy atmosphere of November instead of the joyous springtime. While Brooks’s speaker engages with life’s doldrums, she doesn’t romanticize or seek literal death like the woman in Plath’s poem.

“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath (1964)

“Daddy” is one of Plath’s most famous poems. The poem features a woman speaker who kills her oppressive father and husband. Unlike “Edge,” “Daddy,” features a first-person speaker. The woman involved in the violence and the destruction is the “I” narrating the poem. Like the dead woman, the unnamed woman speaker in “Daddy” presents herself as a mythological figure. While “Edge” places the dead woman within the context of tragic Greek heroines and Shakespeare characters, “Daddy” controversially positions the speaker within the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. Plath wasn’t Jewish, and her father, Otto Plath, was a German, but he had no association with Nazism or Nazi Germany.