Chapter Two: The Many-Masked Sylvia Plath
God, who am I?...I am a whole person…
without identity. I’m lost.1
Sylvia Plath
2.1 The Cult of Sylvia Plath
Plath starts writing poetry at a very early age. Her first published poem was completed when she was an eight-and-a-half years old—“It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I’ve been a bit of a professional” (Plath qtd. in
Brennan 15). In the summer of 1951, Plath revealed her ambition to outshine the others in her career: “It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me” (Journals 33). In March 1958, she claimed that she had “written lines which qualify [her] to be The Poetess of America” (211). Two years later, Plath received the long-expected major recognition of her talents through her poetry book, The Colossus—“Critics responded enthusiastically to Plath’s technical skill, variously
enjoying her ‘cleverness’, ‘complex but beautifully clear syntax’ and ‘verbal precision’” (Brennan 15). Unfortunately, Plath’s brilliant career as “The Poetess of America” does not last long. It comes to its tragic end on 11February 1963 when Plath committed suicide in London.
The attentions to Sylvia Plath, however, do not dwindle because of her suicide.
Two years after the tragedy, Plath’s another major work, Ariel, was published by her husband, Ted Hughes. It is also the year that “the cult of Sylvia Plath begins”
(Wagner-Martin, Literary x). Since then, the criticisms on Plath’s poetry have proliferated. According to Sandra M. Gilbert,
Plath in that year [1979] got more attention than any other poets treated
1 Journals 17.
in my section of the book, as a significant phenomenon, since my section surveyed writings on such major artists [such] as Lowell, Roethke, Levertov, Rich, Ginsberg, and Ashbery. (206)
Furthermore, in 1981, another significant poetry work of Plath was published posthumously, i.e. The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath. In the next year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. It has been referred to by the reviewers as “‘the most important book of poetry this year’ and ‘a triumph of hard work and artifice’”
(Brennan 65). Afterwards, far from fading away, Sylvia Plath has kept engaging the attentions of the public. Even in the early 21
stcentury, critical studies on Sylvia Plath continue to be published. To name a few, there are Andrea Gerbig and Anja
Muller-Wood’s “Trapped in Language: Aspects of Ambiguity and Intersexuality in Selected Poetry and Prose by Sylvia Plath” (2002), and Lisa Narbeshuber’s “The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath’s Poetry” (2004). In view of this development, it is not too risky to assume that there will be more critical works on Sylvia Plath to come in the future.
2.2 The Criticisms on Sylvia Plath
Nancy Hunter Steiner is Plath’s room mate from 1954 to 1955. Based on her own personal experience with Sylvia Plath in this period, she makes a comment on Plath studies by the critics:
Contemporary accounts often described her as cool, aloof, or distant, but they were describing only the façade—the barricade that Sylvia Plath erected so that she herself could decide the quality and duration of her relationships. (18)
To a certain degree, Steiner’s viewpoint is echoed by that of Ted Hughes: “I never saw
her show her real self to anybody—except, perhaps, in the last three months of her
life” (qtd. in Plath, Journals xii). These two comments presuppose that there is a real
Sylvia Plath who is lurking behind the “barricade.” And due to the “barricade,” Plath has remained “aloof” and “distant” from the public. Arguably, this peculiar aspect of Plath has more or less contributed to the various and controversial “accounts” of her and her work. In the rest of the section, I will review the diverse “contemporary accounts” of Sylvia Plath. As is revealed in these accounts, Plath appears not as a single identity but as a woman of “many masks.” To our surprise, some of the
“masks” are incompatible with one another. This incompatibility among the masks of Plath, indeed, parallels the contradiction and discrepancy among the various criticisms on Sylvia Plath. In every way, these ambiguity and incongruity at issue are reflected by Plath’s passage in The Journals: “My face I know not” (181), and by the line in The Collected Poems: “O my God, what am I” (240).
2.2.1 A Schizophrenic Girl
On 24 August 1953, Plath was reported missing by her mother. The incident appeared in the headlines of the Boston papers—“‘TOP RANKING STUDENT AT SMITH MISSING FROM WELLESLEY HOME’” (qtd. in Stevenson 46). Anxiously, her family and the neighbours combed the woods around Wellesley in vain. This is because Plath did not leave home at all. The whole incident is narrated by Anne Stevenson in her book, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath:
With the pills and a glass of water, Sylvia crept down to the basement;
she knew there was a narrow crawlspace under the porch…Stealthily she…hoisted herself into the womblike cave with the bottle and the water…and proceeded to swallow as many pills as she could. (45) Plath survived the first suicide attempt. Having taken too many pills, she vomited them up in her coma. Two days later, her groan led her brother, Warren Plath, to the basement, finding “his sister struggling to raise herself in the crawlspace” (46).
Ambulance came and rushed her to the Newton-Wellesley Hospital. In the hospital,
Plath regained consciousness and received medical treatment:
Psychiatrists found “no trace of psychosis” and no schizophrenia;
several of her doctors predicted that she would recover “completely”…
In fact, she was soon taken from Framingham Hospital to the locked psychiatric wing of Massachusetts General Hospital I Boston, where insulin shock treatments were begun. (Wagner-Martin, Biography 107) Plath’s treatment is afterwards taken over by Dr. Ruth Beuscher. The process of her recovery does not proceed as smoothly as it is expected. As a matter of fact, contrary to doctors’ prediction, Plath has never made a full recovery. The need of psychiatrist treatment has kept troubling Plath for the rest of her life. On December 10, 1959, “she went to see her former McLean psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Beuscher, without telling either her husband or her mother of the appointment” (Stevenson 144). In the meantime, the correspondence between Plath and her doctor continues to last until the final stage of her life:
A November [1962] letter from Sylvia to Ruth Beuscher prompted Dr.
Beuscher to consider whether she should ask Sylvia to come to America and stay with her…Sylvia needed a confidante.
(Wagner-Martin, Biography 230)
Apart from the treatment of Dr. Beuscher, Plath is also seeking for the care of Dr.
Horder as well. Stevenson records:
Dr. Horder believed Sylvia had reached the danger point that weekend.
Horder had indeed tried to arrange for a hospital bed for Sylvia after he
had seen her condition on the Friday. He had also arranged for an
appointment with a psychiatrist for the day after her death. (297)
The efforts these many doctors have undertaken to look after Sylvia Plath as a patient
indicate that Plath has been struggling against the mental illness since her first
breakdown. The previous prediction that “Plath would recover ‘completely’” proves an optimistic diagnosis. After all, “[i]t became clear that Sylvia did not want to recover” (Wagner-Martin, Biography 107).
The mental status is one of the recurrent themes in the study of Sylvia Plath.
There are critics engaged themselves in searching for the causes of her breakdown.
For instance, in The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, Ronald Hayman maintains that
“Sylvia Plath was eight when her father died, but the seed of her neurosis had already been planted” (18). The “neurosis” is particularly reflected on Plath’s love-and-hate ambivalence toward her father, Otto Plath. Plath’s love for him is such deep that not even death could deprive her of the beloved father. According to Hayman, “[s]he still thought of him as present inside her, ‘interwoven in the cellular system of your long body’” (19, emphases mine). This ever-present affection testifies to “the intensity of her longing for male company derived from the absence of an older man in the household” (ibid). Yet, on the other hand, this very father “inside her” also appears as a “hostile self” (Hayman 46). One incident recorded in Plath’s autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, reveals that Plath is intending to “kill” the “hostile” foreigner through
cutting open her own skin with a razor:
It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.
It would take two motions. One wrist, then the other wrist. Three motions, if you counted changing the razor from hand to hand. (Bell Jar 156)
In the above-quoted passages, Plath does not articulate the exact person she wants to
kill. Nevertheless, years later, she makes it manifest in the poem, “Daddy:” “Daddy, I
have had to kill you” (Poems 222). Meanwhile, Plath’s intention to kill her daddy is
also profoundly revealed in her Journals: “the temptation to dig him up. To prove he existed and really was dead” (299). In short, Plath’s father “died before [she] had time” to proceed with the killing. Therefore, to satiate her desire, Plath longs to “dig him up” because “even the bones would do” (Poems 224). This vehement hatred against the father “inside her” contrasts sharply with the deep affection for the lost beloved father. Throughout her life, Plath has vacillated between these two emotional extremes. She suffers greatly from the ambivalent feeling for which her father is to blame.
Marjorie Perloff, on the other hand, plainly refers to Plath as a “schizophrenic girl” who “had a schizoid personality, a divided self” (156). However, Perloff differs from Hayman with regard to the cause of the mental illness. Perloff associates Plath’s schizophrenia with the mother rather than with the father. In her essay, “Sylvia Plath’s
‘Sivvy’ Poem,” Perloff points out the complex and complicated relations between the mother and the daughter:
But by that summer she [Plath] had become, in what seems to me an especially sad irony, a “widowed” young mother with very slender financial means—in short, she [Plath] had become her mother. Even the sex of her two children—first a girl, then a boy—repeated the Sylvia-Warren pattern…And so she had to destroy the “Aurelia” in herself; she now rejected all notions of home, family, marriage, love, hard work…But having “killed” her mother, whose identity was so closely bound up with her own, it was inevitable that she would now kill herself. (162-3, emphases mine)
In short, after the separation with Ted Hughes, Plath is somewhat frightened by the
fact that her life has indeed echoed that of her mother in many aspects. To begin with,
they both have two children, one girl and one boy. Moreover, they are likewise
“deserted” by their husbands at a very young age. This resemblance would certainly provoke an unpleasant feeling in Plath. Previously, Plath has referred to her mother as
“a deadly disease” (Letters 112). And now, this “deadly disease” has become an inseparable part of herself. It is, therefore, her desire “to destroy the ‘Aurelia’ in herself.” In every way, this hatred against her mother contradicts Plath’s ambition “to earn enough so that she [Aurelia] won’t have to work summers in the future and can rest, vacation, sun, relax” (ibid). As a result, Plath finds herself struggling between these two emotional extremes, i.e. the love toward the warm-hearted mother and the hatred toward the deadly-diseased mother in her life. In this respect, it is Aurelia Plath, rather than Otto Plath, that is held responsible for the inner disturbance of Sylvia Plath.
Not surprisingly, there are critics who defend Sylvia Plath as a gifted poetess.
They refrain from thinking Plath as a “schizophrenic girl.” Take Helen Vendler for example:
Helen Vendler, for example, in a New York Times Book Review essay on Crossing the Water, denies that Plath is “schizophrenic,” claiming that “her sense of being several people at once never here goes beyond what everyone must at some time feel”…Plath is seldom out of control.
(qtd. in Wagner, Critical Essays 9)
However, to assert that Plath has never been troubled by “schizophrenia,” or “seldom out of control,” is too risky a viewpoint to prove a reliable statement. After all, it fails to go along with Plath’s history as a patient of mental illness. For years, Plath has received psychiatrist treatments from Dr. Ruth Beuscher and many others, which would render Vendler’s assertion a problematic one.
2.2.2 A Confessional Poet
In general, critics have few disagreements over whether Sylvia Plath suffers
from “a schizoid personality.” It is not uncommon to see a fashionable tendency of resorting to psychiatric terms in the analysis of Plath’s poetry. In comparison, the disputes as to whether Plath is a confessional poet are much more fierce. For one thing, the notable autobiographical elements in Plath’s poems have convinced many critics that she is a confessional poet. In her book, Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath, Wagner points out:
Critics’ writing as recently as the 1980s echoed the convenient term,
“confessional,” whenever they discussed Plath’s writing…In 1967, M.
L. Rosenthal first used “confessional poetry” to describe Robert Lowell’s later poems…Rosenthal paired Plath with Lowell. (2)
In short, Rosenthal compares Plath with the confessional poet, Robert Lowell. To this comparison, Lowell consents. In the “Foreword” to the U.S. edition of Ariel, Lowell says: “Everything in these poems is personal, confessional, felt” (qtd. in Kroll 255).
Indeed, the phenomenon that every poem in Ariel is written in the first person makes a few critics argue with the assumption: “Among the current classifications in literary criticism, Plath is usually assigned the category of ‘confessional’ poet” (Kroll 1). To give another example, in A Glossary of Literary Terms, M. H. Abrams defines
“Confessional Poetry” as “a type of narrative and lyric verse, given impetus by Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), which deals with the facts and intimate mental and physical experiences of the poet’s own life” (45). In Abrams’ viewpoint, Sylvia Plath is one of the poets who have written confessional poetry: “Confessional poems were written by Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and other American poets” (45-6).
Irving Howe, however, proffers a distinct point of view which, to a certain
degree, challenges the associating Sylvia Plath with the confessional poet. True, Howe
does not deny that “[a]t times Sylvia Plath also wrote confessional poetry, as in the
much-praised ‘Lady Lazarus,’ a poem about her recurrent suicide attempts” (9).
Nevertheless, he stresses that there is a major difference between Plath poetry and the confessional writing:
The sense of direct speech addressed to an audience is central to confessional writing. But the most striking poems Sylvia Plath wrote are quite different. They are poems written out of an extreme condition, a state of being in which the speaker, for all practical purposes Sylvia Plath herself, has abandoned the sense of audience and cares nothing about—indeed, is hardly aware of—the presence of anyone but herself.
She writes with a hallucinatory, self-contained fervor. She addresses herself to the air, to the walls. (13)
For Howe, in a confessional poetry, there should be an “audience” to whom the poetry is addressed. But in Plath’s poetry, the audience has been “abandoned.” In this respect, Plath’s “hallucinatory, self-contained” poetry is more like the dream in which the dreamer is both the actor and the audience. In other words, as the dreamer, Plath watches herself playing the role(s) she allocates to herself in her dream-like poetry.
No one is invited to the world established in her poetry; neither is it possible for any other to join her in whatever active ways. Plath has built the poetic world solely for herself.
Another group of critics assign Sylvia Plath the quality which transcends a confessional poet. Judith Kroll maintains:
Nevertheless, her poetry is not primarily literal and confessional…In Plath the personal concerns and everyday role are transmuted into something impersonal, by being absorbed into a timeless mythic system. (2)
What Kroll means by the “impersonal” and the “timeless mythic system” is echoed by
Andrea Gerbig and Anja Muller-Wood: “we amend the image of Plath as a confessional poet and connect her personal tragedy to larger area of tension, that between language user and language system” (77). That is, Plath’s poetry has been elevated above her personal experiences. It reflects the emotions of the “language user and language system” as a whole. In this respect, the content of Plath’s poetry has survived her turbulences in life. To be more specific, her poetry “is trying to broaden her frame of reference beyond the staple material of ‘confessional’ poetry…to its wider historical and societal context” (Ferrier 212).
2.2.3 A Feminist/Woman Writer
Many of Plath’s poems, according to Pamela Annas, exhibit her struggles against the “much longer and more established tradition of poetry as a high art shaped primarily by male poets” in the middle of twentieth century (7). For instance, “The Colossus” represents Plath’s protest against the patriarchal oppression. As is pointed out by Lynda Bundtzen, there is a challenging attitude in the first two stanzas: “In these lines, she appears to be challenging the colossus-father to give her wisdom and comically implies that he has nothing oracular, only animal sounds to utter” (24).
Meanwhile, in her attempt to fight against the male-established “high art,” Plath has also demonstrated her ambition to outshine the male counterparts: “I want someone to mouth me” (Journals 33). This ambitious attempt in writing inescapably makes critics associate Plath with feminism. As the passage in the “Introduction” of the book, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, indicates, “[o]ne of the most important directions
Plath criticism took after the publication of Letters Home in the mid-seventies was toward defining and assessing Plath as a woman writer” (Wagner 16). In the meantime, this assertion is also echoed by Claire Brennan:
The second half of the 1970s is dramatically defined by the emergence
of feminist literary studies which, by adopting a largely biographical/
cultural approach, begin to establish Plath at the centre of a feminist canon. (5)
To justify herself, Brennan presents the viewpoint of Gilbert who proceeds with the study of Plath’s writing in accordance with “a feminist discourse:”
Gilbert proceeds to explore these disguises and evasions in Plath’s writing, suggesting that she escapes enclosure and restriction, both in her life and writing by offering myths of transcendence and liberation similar to the strategies employed by many nineteenth-century women writers. Within a feminist discourse, Gilbert centrally explores
metaphors of maternity and creation, suggesting ways in which the creative self is determined through the maternal self. (54, emphases mine)
Gilbert emphasizes the “maternal self” of Sylvia Plath who is a mother of two children. This particular role of Plath, according to Wagner-Martin, has proved a challenge to her writing career--“[w]riting within a family household was possible, if difficult” (Literary 106). Nevertheless, Plath chooses to brave the domestic
difficulties and overcome the plights. She successfully manages to transform the
“maternal self” into a “creative self.” One way or another, these unusual achievements account for Wagner-Martin’s devoting a whole chapter to Plath in her book, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life, and names the chapter “Plath’s Triumphant Women Poems.” In
this very chapter, Wagner-Martin asserts:
[Plath] finally sings out in the triumph she has been working toward: “I / Am a pure acetylene / Virgin” and, as such, unattended and
surprisingly cavalier about who or what is no longer necessary in her
existence, the woman persona overcomes all odds. Amazingly, she
rises—and “To Paradise.” (118)
In short, Plath has succeeded in demonstrating to the world that “there were multiple roles for women during the 1960s besides mothering or not mothering” (106). She has broadened the horizons and made possible that more women could emerge as writers and speak for themselves.
It can be imagined hat in her attempt to rise out of the domesticity as a triumphant woman writer, Plath has more predicaments to confront than do the
ordinary housewives. She needs to “think through the roles of a woman as daughter to a man, as daughter to a woman, as mother in turn to a female and a male child”
(Bassnett 63). Thus, Bassnett considers Plath an “exceptional” woman writer
“because she was trying to confront those problems ahead of their time” (64).
Bassnett’s assertion is reinforced by Lisa Narbeshuber’s more concise and
straightforward compliment: “Plath prefigures recent trends in feminist criticism”
(185).
Another feminist perspective of Plath is proffered by Pamela J. Annas in A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. This book, according to Claire
Brennan, is “one of the first full-length studies devoted to exploring the relationship between self and society in Plath’s poetry from a feminist perspective” (82). That is to say, Anna sees Plath extending her concern beyond that of any individual woman and dealing with the need of all the female as a whole. Annas explicates her observations in her book:
Sylvia Plath’s poetry can be characterized as a search not so much for definition of self as for redefinition of self. The dialectic of Plath’s poetry is, first, the tension between a self-defined self and an
other-defined self, and second, the tension between the self-image of the poet and the poet’s image of society. (6)
By juxtaposing the “self-defined self” with “the other-defined self,” Plath examines
and exhibits the awkward situations in which the female is vulnerably exposed to the ill influences in the male-centered society.
2Plath herself acknowledges the
unfavorable plight in which the female individual is caught up. Nevertheless, she manages to render the unfavourable into the content of her poetry, accusing the male dominancy. By so doing, Plath is demonstrating her “own power as a woman and a poet” (Anna 7).
Finally, I will apply Mari Jo Buhle’s definition of feminism to Plath’s poetry with an aim to further revealing the close relation between feminist writing and Plath’s work.
3Buhle’s definition of feminism reads as follows:
In the broadest sense, though, the definitional axis of feminism swings between difference, meaning an emphasis on the qualities that
distinguish “woman” from “man” and determine the distinctive roles, rights, and identities of each; and equality, meaning a claim to
autonomy and justice based on the common humanity of men and women. (14)
Plath has the intention to be “different” from the male poets and to be “equal” in footing. This ambitious intention of Plath is betrayed in the passage: “I will be stronger: I will write until I begin to speak my deep self” (Journals 165). The
“stronger” “deep self” should differ from the culturally-constructed feminine role in the male-centered society; that is, the “passive, acquiescent, timid, emotional, and
2 “The position of a woman poet in the middle of the twentieth century was perhaps more problematic, for she faced a much longer and more established tradition of poetry as a high art shaped primarily by male poets” (Annas 7).
3 It is a risky task to adopt a particular definition as the meaning of feminism. As is pointed out by Abrams, the “current [feminist] criticism, in America, England, France, and other countries, is not a unitray theory or procedure” (89). I have adopted Buhle’s definition because it can reflect what Abrams refers to as the “certain assumptions and concepts that underlie the diverse ways that individual critics explore the factor of sexual difference” (ibid). For instance, Buhle’s emphasis of the “difference”
challenges the assumption that “the female tends to be defined by negative reference to the male as the human norm” (Abrams 89); and Buhle’s “equality” fights against the phenomenon that “the masculine in our culture has come to be widely identified as active, dominating…; the female, by systematic opposition to such traits, has come to be identified as passive, acquiescent” (ibid).
conventional” women (Abrams 89). Plath is urgent to establish her own identity and her distinctive role so that she could free herself from the ill influence of the male tradition. For Plath, this move serves as the essential step to become “The Poetess of America.” It can be argued that only by being “The Poetess of America” can Plath attain the ambition to have someone to “mouth” her rather than to mouth other poets, especially the male ones (Plath, Journals 33).
2.2.4 The Death-Centered Sylvia Plath
The concept of death has appealed to Sylvia Plath significantly throughout her adulthood. As we examine her work, we may immediately notice that the idea of death stands as a recurrent theme. In fact, the recurrence is so intense that “[t]he death and the work fuse into one another and achieve the authority of a naked fact”
(Feldman 84). Feldman’s observation is substantiated by that of Hugh Kenner:
it’s been contrived that the manner of her death cannot but haunt any discussion of her work, and read in that knowledge the poems of The Colossus offer us the spectacle of someone accustoming herself to the
necessity of a speedy death…So, poem by poem, the universe was fitted with a bleak vocabulary. (39-40)
In the meantime, Robert Phillips also presents another more straightforward remark:
“Freud believed that the aim of all life is death, and for Plath life was poetry. So by extension, poetry for her now becomes death, both conditions inseparable” (qtd. in Quinn 114, emphases mine). True, deeply immersed in the idea of death, Plath appears as good as dead even before the tragic suicide finally puts an end to her life.
At the end of Plath’s Journals, the editor commends that “it almost gives the
impression that Plath died long before she actually did end her life—on February 11,
1963, in her thirtieth year” (357). In view of this phenomenon, we are more ready to
appreciate Alvarez’s statement “that death was the unavoidable consequence of
Plath’s poetic interest” (qtd. in Wood 2).
The most conspicuous occurrence of the death theme is found in “Lady Lazarus.” In this poem, Plath unreservedly articulates: “Dying / Is an art” (Poems 245). In the eye of many critics, the “art of dying” represents Plath’s attempt to achieve a rebirth every now and then. For instance, Alvarez mentions that she
“sardonically felt herself fated to undergo [death] once every decade;” and death is
“an initiation rite qualifying her for a life of her own” (qtd. in Kroll 154). That is,
“dying” is no less than a reincarnation device which promises Plath “a life of her own” and a new identity as well. Alvarez’s opinion is further emphasized by Kroll:
“The involvement with survival, both in her life and in her poetry, is necessarily also an involvement with rebirth. In ‘Lady Lazarus,’ confronting death purges away the
‘trash’ of the past” (ibid). In a sense, the above-quoted statements are justified by Plath’s own words in her Journals: “You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected…How many futures—(how many different deaths I can die?)” (Journals 66). To conclude, for Plath, “dying” does not necessarily mean the end of life but it represents the “many futures” ahead. She is by no means terrified by the ritual of death. On the contrary, Plath has demonstrated her ability to “manage it” (Poems 244) and “do it exceptionally well” (245).
2.2.5 The Father-Obsessed Daughter
In the study of Sylvia Plath, her attitude towards her father stands as the most
fundamental and crucial element. As is pointed out by Schwartz and Bollas, “[t]he
persistent, doomed effort to reconstruct father, to deny the vacant space left by his
death, is a central theme in Plath’s work” (185). This “persistent, doomed effort” can
be traced back to 5 November 1940. On that particular day, Otto Plath died, and it
happened to be nine days after Plath’s eight-year-old birthday. Inescapably, her
father’s death has had a tremendous impact upon Plath, which is clearly expressed in
the autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. Esther Greenwood, the narrator of the novel, says: “I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old” (78). Otto Plath’s death deprives his daughter of the
“pure happiness.” Worse, it also hollows out Plath’s world of faith—“Her father died while she thought he was God” (qtd. in Hawthorn 127). For the rest of her life, Plath has endeavoured to retrieve and reconstruct the lost God-like father. This effort has been transformed into the attempt to search for the ideal man as a replacement of her father. To put it another way, her father serves as the role model against whom Plath compares her male acquaintances. She would respond drastically when they fail to meet the standard. And the response is recorded in her Journals: “I hated men because they didn’t stay around and love me like a father: I could prick holes in them & show they were no father-material” (Journals 268). Evidently, Plath’s attempt to restore the dead father is doomed; neither is possible for her to find the “father-material” in any other men. In the end, Plath cannot but resort to the most dramatic way to satiate the need of a father, i.e. to commit suicide. As is pointed out by Ted Hughes, “[s]he would describe her suicide attempt [of 1953] as a bid to get back to her father” (qtd. in Stevenson 136). Indeed, nothing brings an alive person closer to the dead than the state of death. When Otto Plath fails to be recalled, Plath follows him to the world of the dead. In the final analysis, Plath has never succeeded in recovering from the trauma occasioned by Otto Plath’s untimely death. “It is clear from many of her works that his memory continued to exert enormous power over her throughout her adult life” (Warren 16).
The previous paragraph indicates that Plath bears a deep affection for her
father and the strong desire to win him back. Nevertheless, Plath, at the same time,
also harbours a fierce hatred against the father as well. For instance, in the visit to his
grave on 9 March 1959, Plath clearly revealed the feeling of resentment: “Felt cheated.
My temptation to dig him up. To prove he existed and really was dead” (Journals 299). It is apparent that Plath does not refrain from exhibiting her ambivalence toward her father. Her room-mate Steiner recalls:
She talked freely about her father’s death when she was nine and her reactions to it. “He was an autocrat,” she recalled. “I adored and despised him, and I probably wished many times that he were dead.
When he obliged me and died, I imagined that I had killed him.” (21, emphases mine)
Some critics interpret the imagined killing as Plath’s intended revenge on her father’s
“desertion” of her as a young girl. Take Wagner-Martin for example. She contends:
“The triumphant woman is, of course, also the murderer of the “Daddy” persona, whoever (or how many whoevers) that figure is interpreted to represent” (Literary 119). David John Wood, on the other hand, is more reserved in tone with regard to Plath’s triumphant role as a father murderer. He only thinks of the announcement of killing as a fight in words: “the persecuted persona is depicted as rearming for
revenge in the kind of verbal reversal from victim to potential victor that is better, but still not wholly successfully, attempted in ‘Daddy’” (111). In the meantime, Lisa Narbeshuber assigns a profound meaning to this verbal revenge: “‘Daddy’ makes the invisible visible, the private public, cracking open the interior spaces traditionally designated for women” (188). Narbeshuber is paying more attention to the
accomplishments achieved in the poem than the act of killing. That is, the blatant announcement of the wish to kill her father is meant to announce Plath’s capability to
“perform a sort of ‘talk back’ or ‘back talk,’ a rudely public, counter-discourse that
rejects the family code of silence” (191). One way or another, Plath has succeeded in
making herself heard in the public realm. Undoubtedly, this serves Plath as a distinct
way of vengeance.
2.2.6 The Mother-Concerned Daughter
It can be expected that Plath’s mother has played a no less significant role in both her life and her poetry. The mother and the daughter are bound together by a strong relationship after the death of Plath’s father. These strong ties have been depicted by Aurelia Plath herself:
Between Sylvia and me there existed—as between my own mother and me—a sort of psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and comforting; at other times an unwelcome invasion of privacy. (qtd.
in Plath, Letters 32)
The mother’s own words inform us that the mother-daughter relationship also involves the unpleasant “invasion of privacy.” Indeed, in My Life: A Loaded Gun, Paula Bennett has touched upon the mother’s invasion of Plath’s life:
Sylvia Plath’s relationship with her mother, an extraordinary woman in her own right, was unusually, even disconcertingly, close. Not only did Aurelia Plath have virtually complete charge of her daughter during most of Plath’s childhood, but even after the poet had grown up, left home, and married, the two women remained tightly bonded. (99) The relationship which “tightly” bonds the mother and the daughter together is a
“disconcerting” one. On many occasions, Plath has exhibited her aversion to mother’s company. Take “The Disquieting Muses” for example:
And this is the kingdom you bore me to, Mother, mother. But no frown of mine Will betray the company I keep. (Poems 76)
Here, Plath is complaining about her mother’s constant “company.” The close
mother-daughter relationship only contributes to the unnerving feeling on the part of
Plath. In Sylvia Plath, Revised, Caroline Hall sheds light on this peculiar relationship:
“Generally, the poet expresses here the familiar you-don’t-understand-me theme of the nearly every child to a parent, of every daughter to a mother” (62). That is, though Aurelia Plath is concerned with her daughter, she fails to truly “understand” the much-disturbed daughter. As a result, the daughter proceeds with defining her own landscape “by rejecting those of her mother” (Kroll 36). For Plath, the intruding mother represents the most unwelcome figure. We can read her grumbles in
“Medusa:”
In any case, you are always there, Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
………
I didn’t call you.
I didn’t call you at all. (Poems 225)
In these lines, Plath has frankly and unreservedly revealed her aversion to the mother’s intrusion of her life. Though Aurelia Plath is confident that “[b]etween Sylvia and me there existed…a sort of psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and comforting” (Plath, Letters 32), she is, in the meantime, “precisely the one person Plath could not bear to see” (Bennett 101).
The ambivalent feeling toward her mother, according to Marjorie Perloff, is subtly revealed in Plath’s letters to her mother. It is accomplished through the adoption of two different signatures, i.e. “Sivvy” and “Sylvia.” Marjorie points out that the “Sivvy” signifies the “loving daughter who writes so solicitously to her mother” (156) whereas the “Sylvia” represents Esther, the protagonist in The Bell Jar, who mercilessly portrays her mother as “the interfering rigid, and wholly
uncomprehending Mrs. Greenwood” (ibid). In short, Marjorie believes that “Plath had
a schizoid personality, a divided self” (ibid). To justify her assertion, Perloff makes a
comparison between the content of “Tulips” and those of the letters written
concurrently when “Tulips” was being produced around the middle of March 1960:
The poem “Tulips,” written concurrently about the same event, is not just different…it virtually turns the prose account inside out. The
“freshly painted pink walls” and “pink and green flowered bed curtains” become deathly white: “Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. (171)
That is, what Sivvy refrains from saying in the letters is disguisedly expressed in her poetry. Plath sticks to this subtle way of expression until she writes the
23-September-1962 letter to her mother. In this very letter, she first adopts the signature “Sylvia” rather than “Sivvy,” symbolizing that Sivvy has transformed to Sylvia in a dramatic and determined way (156). Roughly, three weeks later,
4Sylvia Plath completed the “Medusa” in which she emerged as a grown-up daughter and demanded an independent life. This “new Sylvia” utters: “Off, off, eely tentacle! / There is nothing between us” (Poems 226). By then, the submissive Sivvy has finally given way to the grown-up Sylvia. She steps out of the “eely tentacle” of her mother and moves toward a carefree life of her own.
2.2.7 The Domesticity-Concerned Woman
Housewife is another significant role Plath has played in her brief life.
Apparently, this is by no means an amusing experience. Plath’s grumbles are recorded in “Lesbos:” “Viciousness in the kitchen! / The potatoes hiss” (227). The
life-sustaining food is transformed into a life-threatening element, thus making the kitchen a vicious place. Inevitably, this disconcerting part of Plath’s life would appeal to many a critic. In her essay, “‘Viciousness in the Kitchen’: Sylvia Plath’s Domestic Poetry,” Jeannine Dobbs asserts: “For Sylvia Plath, domesticity is an ultimate
4 “Medusa” was completed in 16 Oct. 1962.
concern.”
5Meanwhile, Dobbs also examines the allusions to marriage and
motherhood in Plath’s poetry. She points out the distressing situation in which Plath grudgingly acts as a career woman trapped in the dross of the domestic life:
Plath's life and her writing are filled with anxiety and despair over her refusal to choose and instead to try to have—what most males consider their birthright—both [i.e. “family and career”]. It is apparent from her life and letters that her commitment to writing was total and
unwavering and that her commitment to domesticity, especially motherhood, was ambivalent. Paradoxically, it is out of her domestic
relationships and experiences, which she came to feel were stifling, even killing her that the majority of her most powerful, most successful work was created.
6(emphases mine)
Again, Plath is haunted by another peculiar ambivalent feeling. Instead of vacillating between love and hate, she is caught between a housewife and a career woman.
According to Jeannine, many of Plath’s “successful” poems have betrayed Plath’s
“anxiety and despair” occasioned by the ambivalence at issue. To name a few, the
“Poem for a Birthday” deals with “pregnancy;” “The Snowman on the Moor”
concerns the dilemma the spinster confronts; and finally in “Tulips,” “she uses a personal experience as a setting to express the complexities that the idea of
childlessness has for her.”
7To conclude, Jeannine has noticed a variety of grotesque feelings which are subtly transformed into Plath’s poetry, such as the loss of identity as a kitchen housewife, and a sense of insignificance and slightness in daily lives.
5 The page numbers are not available. Dobbs’ essay is published on Modern Language Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1977, 11-25. Unable to get a copy in print, I use a document from the Internet Site instead:
<http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/dobbs.html>.
6 The page numbers are not available.
7 The page numbers are not available.
Indeed, for Plath, “[m]otherhood may be something monstrous, as the child may be.”
8In another essay, “Viciousness in the Kitchen: Sylvia Plath’s Gothic,” Gina Wisker asserts that “Plath develops the domestic Gothic, expressing the
home-confined life of the housewife/mother” (104).
9By regarding Plath’s work as
“domestic Gothic,” Wisker insinuates that Plath appears as an innocent female figure who suffers in the male-dominated society. In the meantime, Wisker also mentions Plath’s continuous struggling against the domestic life for the sake of a preferable career. During the struggling process, though being referred to as the oppressed female victim, Plath manages to act as a heroine who is able to speak and fight for women with great courage:
Writing from the recesses of our dark imaginings, Plath brings us haunted terrible figures of our shared fears. Freud and Jung underlie her perfectly poised revelations. This is the stuff of horror, Gothic language and imagery. But, like all good Gothic horror writers—Poe, King, Stoker, Carter, Rice—Plath slices open, exposes, dramatizes those terrors in order to face them, refuse their power. (104, emphases
mine)
In Wisker’s opinion, Plath has demonstrated her undaunted perseverance in utilizing
“the strategies, images and tropes of the literary Gothic and horror as metaphors to express hidden secrets” (ibid). Consequently, “Plath, and her readers, [can] explore, dramatise and confront personal and cultural contradictions, accepting nothing at face value…Sylvia Plath is a consummate Gothic writer” (115). In the final analysis, Plath’s work indicates that she can brave the adversities in the home-confined
8 The page numbers are not available.
9 Like Feminism, the word, Gothic, has diverse definitions. Hereby, I will adopt the one given by M. H.
Abram—“Critics have recently drawn attention to the many women writers of Gothic fiction, and have explained the features of the mode as a result of the suppression of female sexuality, also as a challenge to the gender hierarchy and values of a male-dominated culture” (111).
