Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), a representative of American confessional poets who is regarded as the youngest and most talented female poet, became the most influential poetess since Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop. This essay is a feminine-center study, employing the “anxiety of authorship” which derives from The madwoman in the Attic, “the Bible of feminist critical theory in the twentieth century”, to explore Sylvia Plath’s writing. In The madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar put forward a feminist term -- the “anxiety of authorship”, on the basis of a patriarchal Bloomian model, the “anxiety of influence”. Both of the models illustrate writers’ creative mindset. In this essay, Lacanian psychoanalysis is used to study creative mindset of writers. Divergent from Freudian psychoanalysis which is based on biology, Lacan emphasizes the linguistic aspect. Moreover, Freud crystallizes a poet’s “anxiety of influence” over the his precursor into Oedipus complex of a “family history”, while Harold Bloom points out that it is Hamlet complex rather than Oedipus complex that represents the literary genealogy; Lacan argues that “phallus worship” could account for the influence from precursors. The absence of subjectivity is at the core of the “anxiety of authorship” of female writers, like Sylvia Plath. In this essay, the construction of female subjectivity is unfolded by means of Lacanian psychoanalysis which functions linguistically. To tackle the “anxiety of authorship”, Sylvia Plath employs four corrective strategies: explicit-implicit/dual narrative, parody, “madwoman”/substitute, and death. In the analysis of the strategy of “madwoman”/substitute, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization helps clarify this strategy; Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death is used to explain the death strategy.

Plath's revisionist strategy is accomplished through her portrayal of the female body in her literary creations. In her literary creations, Plath expresses her own life, her own existence in its original form. Unlike her literary predecessors, most of whose mothers hid the self-image of the agonized “madwoman” in the attic of their novels, Plath becomes the “madwoman” herself, both in the ironic sense of a female author playing the role of the “madwoman” in a male-centered society, and in the sense of a female author playing the role of the “madwoman” in a male-centered society. She becomes a “madwoman” herself, both in the sense of a female author playing the role of a “madwoman” in the ironic sense of a male-centered society, and in the true sense of a real-life hysteric. She expresses herself as an imaginary person, and her poetry is so dramatic that it can be understood as an elaborate set of dramatic monologues. The female bodies in Plath's work, all of which are her props, are full of dramatic performance. For example, the ceramic head of a woman is brought to life in the poem with a “brick gray face” and “eyes under fat eyelids,” as if she were an “ape full of malice but with her face. In appearance, the head is ugly, angry, and cool like the poet. The poem can be a fight to the death around the ceramic head of the lady, as well as the squid-like body in Plath's work, the more angry the more she has to undergo electroshock therapy, just like the crazy, death-loving her ...... Plath's style of work is confessional and gothic, and she often finds the equivalent of her own life in her own work, using a lot of metaphors. metaphors, and she uses a great deal of female body imagery to express her desires, showing a female writer madly subverting and indicting the male world.

This study examines how war has culturally racialized the bodies and identities of Asian women, focusing on Korea and China. Following World War II, the Korean War, and the Chinese Civil War, Asian women experienced military, economic, and social oppression, which led to specific forms of cultural racialization.

By analyzing Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999) and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), this study explores how war and migration shape women’s subjectivity at the intersection of gender, race, and class. Both novels depict women’s bodies as sites of historical memory and collective trauma, revealing how war and colonial legacies inscribe racial and gendered identities onto Asian women. The cultural racialization of women in wartime and postwar contexts differs from Western frameworks, as it is shaped by historical violence, national identity, and postcolonial conditions. War and migration further redefine gender roles and social positions, imposing constraints while also creating spaces for resistance and agency.

Drawing on cultural racialization theory, intersectionality, and historical/collective memory, this study critiques the exclusion of Asian women’s experiences from dominant Western war narratives. Through a comparative analysis of A Gesture Life and The Woman Warrior, this research offers a new theoretical approach to understanding how war and its aftermath construct Asian women’s identities in sociocultural and historical contexts.