Troubling the Face: Sylvia Plath's Lyric Masks.

This article examines Sylvia Plath’s “facial poetics,” focusing on how her lyric poetry and visual art use the motif and technique of the face to complicate notions of subjectivity, identity, and self-representation. Drawing on theories of face and mask by Hans Belting and Namwali Serpell, the analysis highlights Plath’s deliberate manipulation of facial imagery to produce ambiguity between subject and object, challenging straightforward autobiographical or confessional readings. Through close readings of poems such as *The Ravaged Face* (1959), *Tulips* (1961), and *The Courage of Shutting-Up* (1962), the article shows how Plath’s faces function as unstable, fragmented figures that resist fixed meaning and reveal the lyric’s capacity to explore emotional and ontological uncertainty. The discussion also situates Plath’s work at the intersection of modernist impersonalism and confessional poetry, arguing that her poetic faces embody a tension between revealing and concealing the self. Finally, the article reflects on contemporary concerns about facial representation amid digital surveillance and synthetic media, suggesting Plath’s poetics offers a critical perspective on the assumed legibility of faces.