“I/ have a self to recover”: Undoing coercive control in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel

This chapter recasts Sylvia Plath’s Ariel (1965) as a poetics of survival, tracing how the collection transforms the experience of domestic violence into a process of psychological and poetic undoing. Drawing on Evan Stark’s theory of coercive control (2007) and newly published correspondence between Plath and her psychiatrist Dr Ruth Barnhouse Buescher, I examine how Ariel articulates the nature of abuse, exploring entrapment, gendered submission, and interrogation. Attending to poems excised by Ted Hughes, including ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ and ‘The Courage of Shutting-Up,’ I expose how Hughes editorial interventions echoed the silencing practices Plath’s poetry sought to articulate. Situating Plath’s poetic forms within frameworks of trauma theory, this chapter interprets her imagery of ‘snares,’ ‘cages,’ and ‘shut mouths’ as articulations of both subjugation and resistance, transforming personal suffering into public testimony. Plath’s assertion that she has ‘a self to recover’ embodies this movement toward self-reconstitution in the collection, challenging patriarchal erasure and restoring her agency within literary and cultural history. In exposing coercive control’s abusive patterning poetically, I argue that the Ariel collection offers an early and radical articulation of the intersection between domestic violence, trauma, and artistic resistance.