“Why Am I Cold.” Sylvia Plath’s English Home and the American Refrigerators

Agnieszka Pantuchowicz

Abstract

The paper addresses the theme of coldness in Sylvia Plath’s poetry and other writings as a significant element of the construction of imaginary domestic spaces and their linkage to the reminiscences of her American home and the experience of life in England. English homes, which she finds to be “cool enough to keep butter and milk in,” are transformed in her poems into a natural living space of what she calls hibernaculum. What she expresses in her letters and in her Journal, however, is a wish to have an American size refrigerator, a domestic device whose ambivalent role complicates and defamiliarizes the senses with which she endows places and objects of everyday life.