In Plath's poems, the woman speaking is frequently talking to a man about their relationship. This relationship has almost always failed, and the cause of its failure is the women's concern. Those critics who see Plath's women as self-enclosed, narcissistically fascinated with their own torment, gratuitously hateful and enraged beyond any cause, fail to consider this basic situation of the poems. To be sure, the women are voicing their own reaction; but it is a reaction and not an unmotivated outburst. In the course of Plath's poems, the women assume attitudes of increasing intensity toward their failed relationships with men; but they are consistent in identifying men and women with two different orders of being…. In Plath's poetry, the division is not between ideal and real, spiritual and physical beings but between women who are intellectual and pure and men who are brutish and physical. The men are...