The sea in the works of Sylvia Plath and Petya Dubarova: A comparison

This article compares the portrayals of the sea in Sylvia Plath’s and Petya Dubarova’s works. Both authors wrote their major poetry and prose during the Cold War, the former in the 1950s, early 1960s, the latter in the 1970s, on both sides of the Atlantic, respectively. They also belonged to opposing political and military camps – the USA and NATO on one side, and the Comecon on the other of which Bulgaria was a member state. The sea as a heterotopic place and space bordering on the human ones in their case will be shown to be a frequently personified natural element that is benevolent to the narrator and that allows a getaway into a phantasmatic world composed of dreamscapes marked by fictional transformations of the body typically contained in the areas around Boston, USA and Burgas, Bulgaria. Strongly present in their childhood, the sea also served as a vital force of the imagination which helped sustain both poets in their adolescence years and whose waning power in terms of its receding literary presence eventually signaled their approaching untimely demise.