Chapter Four: Sylvia Plath’s Poetry as Dreams
Dreaming is involuntary poetry,…
poetry is voluntary dreaming.1
Bert O. States
4.1 Dreams And Poetry
Dreams carry on daily lives. It is a common feature that the elements of dream content are more or less relevant to the dreamer’s personal experience of the waking hours. Freud asserts:
All the material making up the content of a dream is in some way derived from experience, that is to say, has been reproduced or remembered in the dream—so much at least we may regard as an undisputed fact. (Interpretation 44)
In the meantime, Freud emphasizes that the reproduced events in the dream are “no more than fragments of reproductions” (54, emphases mine). More often than not, these extracted fragments are barely related to one another. Notably, they are
associated with the daily activities which have taken place at different periods and in different places. Due to this peculiar phenomenon, the dream content would mostly appear unintelligible and illogical.
In Plath’s poetry, we can always notice that its content reflects her experience in daily life. As is asserted by Perloff, “Sylvia Plath’s real poetic world is rooted in her own private experience” (173). To put it another way, Plath’s “private experience” has been “reproduced” in her poetry. Take her poem “Cut” for example. According to Ronald Hayman, this poem is completed right after Plath accidentally “cuts” her finger—“Sylvia had an accident in the kitchen, cutting off the tip of her thumb…She
1 States 77.
immediately turned the experience into a poem” (184). This peculiar reproduction of daily experience in poetry can be associated with the dream feature pointed out by Freud that “the instigation to a dream is always to be found in the events of the previous day” (Interpretation 180). To illustrate this dream feature, I will present the specimen dream in Interpretation of Dreams. The dream at issue is about a lady who wants to give a supper-party in the dream. But she has to abandon her wish because she could not get sufficient food for the party. She complains to Freud: it is “a dream in which one of my wishes was not fulfilled” (ibid). To the lady’s complaint, Freud replies with a different viewpoint. He tells the lady that her dream is instigated by the remark her husband made “the day before”— “he was getting too stout and therefore intended to start on a course of weight-reduction” (180, emphases mine). Here, the
“weight-reduction” is associated with a skinny woman whom the lady’s husband visited the day before. This skinny woman, according to Freud’s narration, appeals to the lady’s husband “who was constantly singing her praises” (181). The husband’s praises make the lady jealous and afraid that if the woman gets plumper, she would be more appealing to the lady’s husband. Based on his thorough analysis, Freud assures his patient that: “[w]hat the dream was saying to you was that you were unable to give any supper-parties, and it was thus fulfilling your wish not to help your friend to grow plumper” (182). In short, the lady’s true wish is to abandon the supper-party lest her woman friend “may get stout and attract [her] husband still more” (ibid).
In the above-mentioned specimen dream, the wish fulfillment has been distortedly transformed. In a like manner, Plath’s poem, “Cut,” has also undergone a subtle transformation so that the wish fulfillment can be faithfully completed. In “The Self in the World,” Pamela Annas elaborates on the transformation as follows:
Here in “Cut,” the “thin, / Papery feeling” juxtaposes her emotional
dissociation from the wound to the horrific detail of the cut and the
bloody images of conflict it suggests. It stands for her sense of
depersonalization, for the separation of self from self…the separation of society from itself. (Critical Essays 137)
In other words, the corporal “cut” has been profoundly replaced with an invisible
“gap” between human relations. A physical cut in real life has been converted into the cutting edge between friend and foe, between native and alien, and even between the many selves of the persona. The poem at issue betrays Plath’s unconscious attempt to separate herself from the others, and to be free from the unpleasant dross in real life.
To conclude, the accident of cutting herself has served as the instigator to the poem,
“Cut.” Moreover, through this dream-like poem, Plath’s desire for an independent identity is fulfilled.
There are times when the reproduced experience in Plath’s poetry may not appear as intelligible as that in the poem “Cut.” Instead, they become “disconnected [and] confused,” another dream feature asserted by Freud (On Dreams 19). Take, for example, Plath’s poem “Words” which is made up of many “fragments.” The poem consists of four short stanzas. The first one begins with “Axes / After whose stroke the wood rings.” Afterwards, it abruptly jumps to “The sap / Wells like tears” in the second, and then moves to the “weedy greens. / Years later / I encounter” in the third.
Finally it ends with the “Words dry and riderless” (Poems 270). Each stanza deals with a different image which is barely related to those of the other stanzas. The gaps among the images render Plath’s poetry unintelligible and lead to a variety of readings among the critics. Moreover, this particular phenomenon also makes Plath’s verse
“often enigmatic” as Ronald Hayman asserts (xiv).
In addition to the dream features analyzed above, there is another one which is
equally noteworthy; that is, Plath’s poetry is much shorter than its analysis. According
to Freud, “[t]he content of the dream is very much shorter than the thoughts of which
I regard it as a substitute” (On Dreams 15 ). This dream feature can be illustrated by Plath’s poem, “Stopped Dead,” The poem consists of five stanzas, taking up roughly two thirds of a page (Poems 230). Nevertheless, its analysis offered by Judith Kroll turns out to be a lengthy one which covers two pages and a half, almost three times as much in size. In fact, this distinctive feature is not limited to a few but a lot of Plath’s poems. A further discussion will be conducted in the sections to come.
4.1.1 Floating in Dreams & Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”
Before proceeding with the analysis of Plath’s poetry as dreams, I will, first of all, introduce a well-known dream poem in English poetry, namely Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Coleridge has declared that this poem is the spontaneous product of his dream. Indeed, the subtitle of the poem, “Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment,” assures us that “Kubla Khan” is no less than a dream poem. As a matter of fact, this poem is completed immediately after Coleridge wakes up from the dream.
Part of the poem still retains the dream content. Coleridge elaborates on the relation between the poem and his dream in the introduction to poem:
The author continued for about three hours in a profound
sleep…during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines…On waking he appeared to himself to have a distinct
recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly
and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. (439)
At first, Coleridge intends to record all the dream content in the poem. However,
owing to a certain person’s interruption, he only manages to retain eight or ten
scattered lines and images. Afterwards, he annexes “a fragment of a very different
character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease” (ibid). Hereby,
what Coleridge refers to as “a fragment” has a twofold meaning—first, the “Kubla
Khan” is only a part of the “distinct recollection of the whole” dream Coleridge has had; second, it represents only a composite of unrelated unconscious images and waking thoughts. Whatever the meaning could be, for hundreds of years, this dream poem has proved a challenge to numerous readers who are interested in searching for the hidden significance behind the “fragment.” For instance, in The Road to Xanadu, John Lowes states: “And Coleridge himself has told enough to raise a host of
questions which he has left unanswered, and which, from then till now, have piqued legitimate curiosity” (313). Interestingly, this particular phenomenon of indecision is also seen in Plath’s poetry—“there will always be room for argument about whether it’s more enjoyable when the mysteries remain unsolved” (Hayman xiv). In a sense, like “Kubla Khan,” the fragments in Plath’s poetry pose as “a psychological
curiosity.”
2In the light of this similarity, I present Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” with an aim to making a comparison between Coleridge’s neat dream poem and Sylvia Plath’s dream-like poetry. It is my belief that this comparison will further reveal the
resemblance between Plath’s poetry and the dream poetry it terms of the dream features, thus further contributing to the treatment of Plath’s poetry as dreams.
There are statements which, based on Coleridge’s own words, tend to hint at a connection between the production of “Kubla Khan” and the usage of opium:
“Coleridge stated that he had taken opium before dreaming the poem” (Day 362). And Professor Meyer Abrams straightforwardly emphasizes “the opium character of the dream” (qtd. in Schneider 45). Nevertheless, Elisabeth Schneider is skeptical about this suggestion/assertion. She contends that “we cannot suppose that opium created the particular character of the dream” (90). To justify herself, Schneider gives a few features which are all actually quite common among the “nonopium dreamers.” Of
2 The term “psychological curiosity” is Coleridge’s word in depiction of his “Kubla Khan” (qtd. in Lowes 313n.).
these features, she especially singles out the activity of floating:
The illusion of floating or flying occurs often in dreams not influenced by drugs. Long before Coleridge’s day, David Hartley had noted as a commonplace of dreams the illusion of being transported from place to place “by a kind of sailing or flying motion.” (50)
Indeed, the act of floating/flying yields a pleasant sensation on the part of the dreamer.
It is not uncommon to see flying movement appearing or implied in dreams.
Schneider’s viewpoint is testified by the modern observations of dreams. In The Dreaming Brain, Allan Hobson explicates the phenomenon in a scientific way:
“natural laws are disobeyed, and sometimes pleasantly so: gravity can be overcome in the sensational flying dream” (212-3). Here, the idea of “pleasantly so” is particularly noteworthy. Human beings have no wings. Therefore, to fly in the air would bring forth a completely different experience, not to mention a pleasant sensation. Since ancient times, it has proved a strong desire for humans to fly in the air. This strong desire is betrayed in the mythology of various cultures. As we can see in Greek mythology, Daedalus makes two pairs of wings out of feathers and wax for himself and his son Icarus so that they could fly in the air to escape. Likewise, in Chinese mythology, a famous story narrates how a woman, Chang-e, takes an elixir and flies to the moon. It is interesting to notice that in both stories, the act of flying serves as the most efficient means to escape the present plight—Daedalus and Icarus are escaping Minos whereas Chang-e is running from her unfaithful husband, Ho-yi.
3In real life, no one can build himself a pair of wings to fly in the air, much less taking an elixir as Chang-e does. The most efficient and safest way available for the subject to
3 There are a variety of accounts with regards to the cause of Chang-e’s flying to the moon. To leave the unfaithful husband is the narration given by a famous Chinese poet, Qu-yuan
(http://www.nongli.com/Doc/0409/2495715.htm). Nevertheless, a close analysis of the major accounts will reveal the fact that Cnang-e’s flying to the moon relieves her of either the present unpleasant situation or an immediate danger.
fly or to float is through dreams. In this kind of flying/floating dreams, not only can
the dreamer “experience” the unusual and exciting sensation of flying/floating, but also he can symbolically “run away from” the present distress and dross in daily life.
Analogically speaking, the unpleasant reality of life “drags” and “confines” the dreamer as much as the gravity “keeps” all human beings on the ground. Thus, a dream of flying/floating will enable the dreamer to achieve the wishes which would never be accomplished otherwise. In this respect, the dream at issue represents a wish fulfillment.
According to Freud, “[d]reams of flying or floating in the air (as a rule, pleasurably toned) require the most various interpretations” (Interpretation 429). To name a few, a short woman’s floating dream can mean to lift “her head into a higher stratum of air” (ibid), enabling her to enjoy a better view in a higher position. For another woman, flying dreams express her “desire ‘to be like a bird’” (ibid). And yet, for the male, flying in the dream bears a completely different meaning—“a good number of these flying dreams are dreams of erection” (430). Whatever meanings the flying dreams might represent, Freud assigns them the same unique characteristic; that is, the flying dreams begin in one’s childhood:
There can not be a single uncle who has not shown a child how to fly by rushing across the room with him in his outstretched arms…In after years they repeat these experiences in dreams; but in the dreams they leave out the hands which held them up, so that they float or fall unsupported. (305-6)
The child repeats the act of flying “unsupported” in the dream because it is a
pleasurably-toned experience. Indeed, in “Kubla Khan,” we can read lines in which
Coleridge, too, emphasizes the pleasant sensation of floating: “The shadow of the
dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves,” and he “would build that dome in
air” (440, emphasis mine). Moreover, the very word “pleasure” has been repeatedly mentioned three times in the poem. In the meantime, there is another expression related to the sense of pleasure, i.e. “a deep delight” (441). And, most noteworthy of all, Coleridge ends the poem with the word “Paradise,” a symbol of the ultimate blessing (ibid). All these phenomena testify that the sensation of “pleasure” plays a significant role in “Kubla Khan.” Arguably, this pleasant feeling in the poem is
produced particularly to counterbalance Coleridge’s distressing “ill health.” As we can see, Coleridge’s “ill health” is recorded in the prefatory passage to “Kubla Khan:” “In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton” (439, emphases mine). In a sense, the “ill health” which has troubled Coleridge in the “previous day” can be referred to as the instigator to “Kubla Khan.” In this dream poem, the “dome of pleasure” yields a sensation of pleasure to assuage Coleridge’s distress. Moreover, this pleasure will also avail Coleridge to forget his unpleasant “ill health” for the time being.
Hereby, I will give another reading presented by Kenneth Burke concerning
“Kubla Khan.” Burke’s reading is much more subtle in terms of treating “Kubla Khan” as a pleasure-yielding wish fulfillment. For Burke, “Kubla Khan” stands as “a beatific vision,” an expression paralleling to Freud’s “pleasurably toned” sensation of feeling. Burke draws on the Hegelian dialectic to justify his statement:
Stanza one (thesis) amplifies the theme of the beatific vision. Stanza two (antithesis) introduces and develops the sinister, turbulent
countertheme (plus, at the close, a recall of the contrasting first theme).
And the third stanza fuses the two motives in terms of a beatific vision
(the “damsel with a dulcimer”) seen by a poetic “I,” the mention of
whom…in a sinister fashion is felt to befit the idealistic building of this
particular air castle. (452)
In short, Burke treats the three stanzas as the steps moving toward “a beatific vision.”
The whole process is more like a self debate inside Coleridge. As the “poetic I,”
Coleridge goes through the three essential steps in the debate and eventually achieves to “build the dome [of pleasure] in air” and drink “the milk of Paradise.” Undoubtedly, there is a great pleasure yielded when this “beatific vision” has been realized. By then, the persona will be “happily enclosed [in] Edenic innocence” (Burke 478).
4.1.2 Sylvia Plath’s Poetry as Dreams
A close review of Plath’s poetry will indicate that her poetry bears the
identical dream features as does Coleridge’s dream poem, “Kubla Khan.” One of the noticeable characteristics is the floating movement. In Plath’s much-discussed “The Disquieting Muses,” we can read the following lines: “I woke one day to see you, mother, / Floating above me in bluest air” (Poems 75). Another instance of floating is recorded in “Lorelie” in a much detailed way:
All stillness. Yet these shapes [massive castle turrets] float Up toward me, troubling the face
Of quiet. From the nadir
They rise, their limbs ponderous With richness, hair heavier Than sculpted marble. (94)
In these two poems, the floating movement is described in a manifest way.
Nevertheless, not all Plath’s poetry follows this manifest expression. In some poems, the flying movement is only subtly implied. Take “Ariel” for example. The line, “I / Am the arrow” (239), is a metaphor which insinuates that the persona can fly through the air like an arrow. On the other hand, the term “Ariel” is a word of multiple
allusions. Among the allusions, one is particularly related to the act of flying. Harold
Bloom says in “Thematic Analysis of ‘Ariel’” that “Ariel” is “the name of a character,
a spritely embodiment of poetic imagination who eventually is set free by his master”
(58). Bloom is referring to Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. The sprite in the play is known for his capability of flying around to carry out his master’s orders. In the light of these two levels of implications, we may infer that the poetic self in “Ariel” is a combination of two images. One of them shows that the persona of the poem could fly as fast as the arrow, and the other manifests that she could move in the air as freely as the sprite does. In the final analysis, like that of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the act of floating/flying in Plath’s poetry will also provide the persona with a sensation of pleasure. Thanks to this pleasure, Plath is elevated above the present distressing situation.
In addition to the flying/floating movement, Plath’s poetry also exhibits another extraordinary activity which often takes place in dreams as a wish fulfillment, i.e. the meeting with the dead dears. In Freudian theory, this unusual meeting is regarded as “another kind of absurdity, which occurs in dreams of dead relatives”
(Interpretation 465). Hereby, I will present another statement from Allen Hobson’s The Dreaming Brain to further illustrate the nature of the “absurdity” in dreams:
There are discontinuities of all aspects of the orientational domain.
Persons, places, and time change suddenly, without notice. There may be abrupt jumps, cuts, and interpolations. There may be fusions:
impossible combinations of people, places, times, and activities abound. (212)
Indeed, dreams make possible the “impossible combinations of people,” regardless of
the absurdity that people who have lived in different ages and places could gather
together. Not surprisingly, this absurdity at issue would appear in Plath’s dream-like
poetry as well. For example, in “All the Dead Dears,” there is the fusion in which “all
the dead dears” gather together:
From the mercury-backed glass
Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother Reach hag hands to haul me in. (Poems 70)
Here, as if she were in a dream, Plath meets her dead “grandmother, [and]
greatgrandmother.” Having surmounted the temporal and spatial barriers, these dead relatives manage to return and appear in the one single “mercury-backed glass.” In this “impossible” meeting, Plath feels that she is being hauled from her own world into theirs in the mirror. And, as she gets in, Plath “suddenly” sees another diseased person, i.e. her “dead” father:
And an image looms under the fishpond surface Where the daft father went down
With orange duck-feet winnowing his hair—. (71)
What is more, Plath also meets “[a]ll these long gone darlings: they / Get back, though,” having “a family barbecue” all together (ibid). Like the movement of flying, this combination of all the “dead dears” can never be achieved in real life. It is only in her dream-like poetry that Plath could have the impossible activity accomplished; that is, she could walk out of the living world into the dead one. After all, no wish
fulfillment is too absurd to be carried out in dreams.
So far, I have cited two specific cases which illustrate the resemblance between Plath’s poetry and dreams. Presently, I will give another example to reveal the unintelligibility of Plath’s poetry which consists of diverse unrelated elements. For instance, the poem, “Poppies in October,” is full of abrupt jumps, cuts and swift shifts among barely-related objects. It begins with certain “skirts” in the first line: “Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts” (240). Here, the expression,
“sun-clouds,” brings forth an image of a rather soothing atmosphere in the open area.
However, in the next line, this image is abruptly replaced by another one which
reflects the suffocation in an enclosed space: “Nor the woman in the ambulance / Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly—” (ibid). Furthermore, in the follow-up stanzas, there arise some other cuts, and interpolations between images and scenes:
A gift, a love gift Utterly unasked for
………
Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes Dulled to a halt under bowler.
………
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers. (ibid)
As is shown in these stanzas, the images keep shifting from a “love gift” to a
flammable “carbon monoxides,” to the many unnamed crying “mouths” and finally to the “cornflowers.” In Kroll’s viewpoint, there is “the absence of any true process in the poem, which does not, in any clear-cut way, begin with objectivity and then travel inward” (15). This “absence of any true process” is so perplexing that it even
contributes to an ever-existing confusion on the part of Plath herself. Thus, in the last stanza, Plath depicts herself as a lost being “[i]n a forest of frost, in a dawn of
cornflowers” (Poems 240). Here, the “frost” appears as thick as an unpenetrable
“forest.” Meanwhile, the word “dawn” hints at the juncture when the visibility is still very poor—that is, when the first light just emerges and the sun has not yet risen.
Subtly, the imagery of murkiness illustrates that Plath is being caught between the
daylight and the darkness. Analogically speaking, this subtle imagery also depicts
Plath as a dreamer who is wandering between the reality and the illusion. Thus
bewildered, Plath cries: “O my God, what am I” (ibid). She gets lost in her own
poetry as the dreamer does in his own dream.
Lastly, I will point out one particular difference between the attitudes of Coleridge and Plath towards their respective poetry. Coleridge clearly recognizes that his “Kubla Khan” is a dream poem and, in fact, part of it still retains his fragmented dream content. Nevertheless, very rarely does Plath mention that her poetry is a record of her dream content as she does in “The Eye-mote”—“I dream that I am Oedipus” (Poems 109). Ostensibly, Plath’s attitude toward her own poetry seems to challenge the association of her poetry with dreams. Yet, in essence, it is this very attitude that functions to further reinforce the resemblance between her poetry and dreams. My argument is that no dreamer would ever be aware that he is right in the dream which he is now having. The knowledge that he has been in a dream only comes to the dreamer upon the waking hours. In the light of this unique dream phenomenon, we may infer that, paradoxically, Plath’s failure to recognize her poetry as dreams would render her poetry more like a dream work than is Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” In other words, when proceeding with poetry writing, Sylvia Plath falls deeply into the poetic world as if she were weaving the world of dreams. She is assuaged by her poetry content as much as a dreamer is guarded by the dream content. At this juncture, for Plath, the world in her dream-like poetry resembles the realistic world.
4.2 The Freudian Dream Mechanisms in Plath’s Poetry
Having fashioned the linkage between Plath’s poetry and dreams, hereby, I
will apply the four Freudian dream mechanisms to her poetry. This analysis will
reveal how the four mechanisms work on Plath’s latent thoughts, and transform them
into the manifest content of her poetry disguisedly. To put it another way, with the
assistance of Freudian dream mechanisms, we may restore the intelligible messages
from the unintelligible content of Plath’s poetic work. My analysis will begin with the
work of condensation.
4.2.1 The Work of Condensation
Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree” is one of the poems which best testify to the work of condensation. As is revealed in the title, this poem centers on the
surroundings under the moonlight. According to Kirkham, it is “interpreting a moonlit pre-dawn scene, churchyard and yew, visible from her window” (281). Literarily speaking, the moon is the planet which revolves around the earth and shines at night.
Nevertheless, in the four-stanza poem, the moon stands out as a condensed icon which consists of at least three distinct images. The first one is a person’s mind—“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary;” the second one refers to a person’s face—“It is a face in its own right, / White as a knuckle;” and the last one becomes Plath’s
mother—“The moon is my mother” (Poems 172-3, emphases mine). With so many identities condensed in itself, the moon becomes “bald and wild.” (173). Again, this expression represents another condensation of meanings. First, the word “bald” brings to our mind the bright surface of the moon around which there is “blackness—
blackness and silence” (ibid). In a way, this image symbolizes a situation in which Plath is caught. Second, the word “wild” reflects the capability of the moon to change its own shapes. That is to say, at times, a moon may appear as a round circle; at other times, it becomes a half one; and still, it will reveal only a fourth or even less of the original size. In the light of this peculiar nature of the moon, we may argue that the word “moon” itself is a condensed image because it possesses a great variety of shapes.
The moon also appears as a combination of the good and the bad forces at the same time. As Rebecca Warren indicates that
the moon is not specifically designated a goddess, but she has godlike
power, and is associated with religious imagery (“her blue garments
unloose small bats and owls”: here she sounds like a combination of
Mary and a witch, another powerful, if destructive, icon). (36) True, Plath’s mother is mixed icon of the good Mary and the bad witch. On the one hand, she is a very devoted mother but she “is not so sweet like Mary” on the other (Poems 173). This good-and-bad image of Aurelia Plath, in a way, results from her husband’s death. To be more specific, her husband’s death makes her the key figure in the family. She holds the full responsibility to look after the children affectionately.
Yet, at the same time, she replaces Otto Plath and assumes his patriarchal authority in the family. Her omnipresent dominancy over Sylvia Plath is testified in “Medusa:” “In any case, you are always there” (225). Like the moon whose light presides over the outdoor panorama, Plath’s mother’s authority “shines” in all directions. Hardly can Plath lead a life without being affected by the mother. That is why Plath complains that “I simply cannot see where there is to get to” (173). Indeed, Plath’s complaint is reinforced by Aurelia Plath’s own depiction of the mother-daughter relation in Letters Home: “a sort of psychic osmosis which…at other times [is] unwelcome invasion of
privacy” (32). Oftentimes, this “invasion of privacy” makes Sylvia Plath feel that she
“has been under the spell of a malevolent maternal force” (Kroll 241). For Plath, her mother is “a deadly disease” she has to fight against (Letters 112).
In addition to the word moon, there is another condensed element in the poem,
“The Moon and the Yew Tree,” namely the color blue. It has appeared four times. At
each time, it is given a distinct meaning. The first one reads: “The light is blue” which
plainly refers to the light of the moon. Next we see it in the line: “Her blue garments
unloose small bats and owls.” Here, the colour “blue” signifies a wicked power which
is able to control the “bats and owls.” Both these two animals are considered the evil
creatures of the darkness. Meanwhile, the word “unloose” presupposes an uncanny
power which is able to keep the evil creatures restrained. The third one is read in the
lines: “Clouds are flowering / Blue and mystical over the face of the stars” (Poems
173). Here, the colour “blue” appears as the attribute of the flowering “clouds.” It does not have the power to control; nevertheless, it represents an overcastting veil which could blur the stars and mystifies them. Finally, the last “blue” appears in the line: “Inside the church, the saints will be all blue.” This “blue” is associated with a religious meaning—“Their hands and faces stiff with holiness” (ibid). Unlike the
“blue garments” which bear a negative connotation, the religiously-toned “blue”
represents a serene atmosphere inside the church. Arguably, the soothing effect of the religious blue is intended to compensate for the disquieting emotions provoked by the other blues. This compensation could be regarded as Plath’s propensity to juxtapose two opposite meanings in one condensed icon. In the previous discussion of the condensed moon icon, this juxtaposition has also appeared in the combination of
“Mary and witch.” Here, “Mary” symbolizes the good mother who whole-heartedly takes good care of the children whereas the “witch” represents the bad mother who can deal out an uncanny power with her “blue garments.” All in all, there exist many significant icons and a variety of condensed images in Plath’s poetry. When the condensed images are “de-condensed,” they will yield a wide range of identities and meanings. These multiple identities and meanings, in turn, will add to the complexity of Plath’s poetry.
4.2.2 The Work of Displacement
The second mechanism is the work of displacement whose major task is to
replace the center of the dream thoughts with an object of less significance. As is
exhibited in the poem previously discussed, the center has been shifted from the
mother to the moon. At present, I will examine another poem in which the mother
figure is likewise de-centered. The poem “Medusa” is a work concerning Plath’s
mother. According to Kroll, it “presents the exorcism of an oppressive parent—in this
case the speaker’s mother” (126). Nevertheless, throughout the poem, the word
“mother” has never appeared once. Instead, it is replaced with many other disguised images of less significance. Among them, the most conspicuous replacement is the icon “Medusa,” a condensed symbol of many images. The first image is related to the witch figure in Greek mythology, namely Medusa. In Edith Hamilton’s Mythology:
Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, Medusa is depicted as one of the “fearsome
monsters called the Gorgons:”
And they are three, the gorgons, each with wings And snaky hair, most horrible to mortals
Whom no man shall behold and draw again The breath of life. (143, emphases mine)
These Gorgons, whose evil eyes possess the power of killing or turning onlookers into stone, are particularly known for their “snaky hair.” True, in Plath’s “Medusa,” there is indeed the image of “snaky hair.” But it has been disguised as “Jesus hair.” As is pointed out by Bernetta Quinn, “[h]ere, in ‘Medusa,’ the image ‘Jesus hair’ finds its complement in ‘Communion wafer’ as metaphor for the medusa” (106). Through the medusa image, Plath manages to present her mother as an oppressive figure who constantly watches over Plath. In a sense, this surveillance-like activity differs little from the “evil eyes” of the monstrous Medusa. It is “like an X-ray,” and makes Plath
“overexposed” (Poems 225).
The second image of “Medusa” is related to a jellyfish. Again, the image of jellyfish is also closely connected to Plath’s mother. The key point concerns her mother’s name, namely Aurelia Plath:
Several scholars have called attention to another name for the common medusa, Aurelia aulita—moon jellyfish—the first element suggesting Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, and the second lunar
symbolism. (Quinn 98)
In short, the word “Aurelia” is part of the name of “moon jellyfish.” In the light of this association, we will come to realize that the line “Off, off, eely tentacle!” can be particularly meaningful (Poems 226). For one thing, the “eely tentacle” is a
replacement of the mother’s full control over Sylvia Plath. The controlling power is especially augmented by the image of the “tentacle” which is long, sticky and full of numerous suckers. Thus, the tentacle can hold its victims fast and tight. To exorcise this tight hold, Plath utters “Off, off.” Ostensibly, these are shouts against the “eely tentacle.” Yet, in reality, they represent Plath’s suppressed desire to exorcise her mother’s control. It is through the work of displacement that Plath replaces her mother with the less significant jelly fish in her poetry, and thus has her wish fulfilled in a disguised and less conspicuous way.
In addition to the displaced mother figures, there are inescapably the
displacement of the father figure in Plath’s poetry as well. As Ferrier maintains, Otto Plath “variously appears as colossus, drowned man, assorted historical imperialists and tyrants from Napoleon to the Nazis, man in black” (204). Of all the diverse displaced father figures, the bee is perhaps the most conspicuous one. For one thing, Plath has written a series of poems concerning her experience with the bees. In these poems, the bee appears as the centered element as does the Medusa in “Medusa.” The only difference is that the tiny insect is associated with Plath’s father. Two
autobiography-based evidences testify to the association at issue. First, “Otto Plath was an entomologist and author of a book on bumblebees” (Sambrook 34); second,
“Sylvia Plath’s father as a boy was called the Bee King” (Simpson 124). Owing to the close link between Plath’s father and the bee, the father image of Otto Plath is notably displaced by the insignificant tiny insects. Together, the psychical dynamics with regard to the father image is equally lowered.
As we study the displacements concerning Plath’s father, we will notice that
one sexually-toned displacement is achieved in a very subtle way. To be more specific, this displacement has successfully disguised Plath’s wish to have an intimate
relationship with her father. As is pointed out by Kroll, Plath “expresses her
relationship with her dead father as ‘marriage’” (82). In fact, the wish at issue is also betrayed in Plath’s Journals: “Dream, shards of which remain: my father come to life again.
4My mother having a little son: my confusion: this son of mine is a twin to her son” (325). By all means, the idea to have a son with her father is a crime of incest and should remain suppressed. But it is fulfilled in Plath’s dream anyhow. What is more, this wish is also fulfilled disguisedly in Plath’s “The Beekeeper’s Daughter:”
“Here is a queenship no mother can contest—” (Poems 118). According to Carole Ferrier, “[t]he ‘queenship no mother can contest’ involves a relationship with the father that has sexual undertones” (208, emphases mine). By associating her father with the bee, and “frequently identif[ying] herself also with the queen bee” (ibid), Plath has subtly transformed the crime of incest into the act of copulation between male and female insects, i.e. the bee king and queen bee. Thus, the forbidden wish of having sex with the father is accomplished in the most unnoticeable way in Plath’s dream-like poem.
4.2.3 The Visual Representation
The third mechanism, “visual representation,” is responsible for transforming the abstract thoughts to concrete and substantial visual materials. To see the way it works, we may begin with Plath’s poem, “The Colossus.” The Colossus is a giant statue in Rhodes, Greece, which is one of the wonders of the ancient world. The term
“colossus” is also used to refer to the sculptures of great size in general. Indeed, throughout “The Colossus,” the idea of immensity is recurrently emphasized as the segmented parts of the broken colossus appear one after another. For instance, the
4 The original text is “come” instead of “comes.”
giant statue’s “great lips” are associated with “a barnyard” from which come the loud sounds, such as the “mule-bray” and “pig-grunt;” the persona looks relatively tiny as she “crawl[s] like an ant in mourning / Over the weedy acres of your brow;” and “The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue” (Poems 129-30). The broken colossus to whom the poetic self keeps talking is no less than Plath’s father because halfway through the poem she addresses the colossus as “O father.” In the final analysis, Plath resorts to a variety of ways to associate her father with the gigantic colossus. This association avails her to “catch this sense of the father as an unattainable sphinx-like statue” (Wagner-Martin, Literary 12). Meanwhile, it will also enable Plath to set off Otto Plath’s greatness and powerfulness, rendering these abstract characteristics of her father into tangible and solid items. As a result, Otto Plath’s patriarchal significance is materialized into a concrete article which can actually be “seen” in the visual
representation.
On the other hand, the depiction of the huge colossus as divided fragments serves to visualize Plath’s broken impression of her father. In the poem, the body of the colossus consists of eight pieces, namely lips, throat, brow, skull-plates, eyes, hair, ear, and tongue. They are the ruins of the giant statue, and they will always remain in
such a state: “I shall never get you put together entirely, / Pieced, glued, and properly jointed” (Poems 129). No matter how hard Plath may have tried, she simply could not make a whole out of the separate fragments. As McClatchy asserts, “[i]n ‘The
Colossus,’ the girl clambers in helpless self-absorption over the mammoth ruins of her father” (88). For Plath, these numerous “mammoth ruins” are no better than a vision of vanity. Thus, in the end of the poem, Plath complains that “[m]y hours are married to shadow” (Poems 130). Here, the idea of an abstract image of the father is
reinforced by the word “shadow.” Through the word, we “feel” in person the concept
that Plath does not have a clear image of her father any more than we know what a
“shadow” really stands for.
In Plath’s “The Tulips,” we will notice another kind of visual representation which is essentially concerned with the connoted meanings of colours. This
representation at issue is illustrated in Marjorie Perloff’s comparing “The Tulips” with a prose letter which Plath writes to her mother concurrently. According to Perloff, there is a conspicuous shift of colours between the letter and the poem. To be more specific, the colours Plath adopts in the letter differ from what she emphasizes in the poem. Perloff states: “The ‘freshly painted pink walls’ and ‘pink and green flowered bed curtains’ [in the letter] become deathly white [in the poem]: ‘Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in’” (171). In Perloff’s viewpoint, this change betrays Plath’s inner emotions. The “pink” and “green” in the letter are lively colours, connoting that Plath is leading a bright and cheerful life. But in the poem, the lively colours are replaced by the “deathly white.” As a result of the change of colors, the cheerful atmosphere yields to a lifeless depression in the poem accordingly. This depression is testified by the last couplet of “Tulips:” “The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, / And comes form a country far away as health” (Poems 162). That is, Plath is tasting her own “warm and salt” tears;
5and “health” is still a territory too far away to reach. This couplet also betrays that Plath is trapped in the unsettling plight as a helpless patient in the hospital wherein everything is “deathly white.” All these manifestations of the abstract inner emotions are achieved through the exhibition of colours. To put it another way, Plath resorts to colours to transform her ideational concept to a visual representation of vivid colours.
4.2.4 The Secondary Revision
The secondary revision is the final mechanism which the dream work will go through. It is known for the capability of adding new contributions to the dream
5 In “Medusa,” Plath also refers to tears as “hot salt:” “I am sick to death of hot salt” (Poems 225).
productions with an aim to making the dream intelligible. Ironically, it oftentimes ends up with more bewilderment and confusion. This extraordinary dream feature can be studied in Plath’s “The Disquieting Muses.” This poem is a work that “she derived from a particular de Chirico painting” (Kroll 22). The painting, too, is named as “The Disquieting Muses.” We can see the painting as follows:
6Fig. 1. “The Disquieting Muses”
In her poem, Plath has described the figures in the painting as “[m]outhless, eyeless, with stitched bald head” (Poems 75). Plath does not feel comfortable with the company of these “disquieting muses.” She complains about their intrusion into her life:
Mother, mother, what illbred aunt Or what disfigured and unsightly Cousin did you so unwisely keep Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead. (74, emphasis mine)
The word “christening” reminds us of the three good-hearted godmothers in The Sleeping Beauty, who come to mitigate the spell on the innocent baby daughter.
However, in this poem, the good godmothers are replaced with “the disquieting
6 Xoomer: 3 Sep. 2005 <http://xoomer.virgilio.it/amasoni2002/lucabutipittore/dechirico/09.htm>.
muses.” According to Kroll, “their presence at the left side of the crib indicates the
‘sinister’ fate of the godchild” (29). And Plath is no less than the unfortunate child who is “dominated by a ‘muse’ who is the genius loci” (ibid). Here, the dominating
“muse” is the mother in disguise. To her, Plath protests and casts a “reproach directed against the poet’s mother whom she blames for the terrors that lurk in her own mind”
(Sambrook 33). We can actually read the “reproach” in the following lines:
Mother, whose witches always, always Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder Whether you saw them, whether you said Words to rid me of those ladies. (Poems 75)
The expression, “Mother, whose witches,” indicates that the witches are a part of the mother. What is worse, they are actually inseparable, “baked into gingerbread.”
Unnerved by these distressing beings, Plath grumbles in the end of the poem: “Mother, mother. But no frown of mine / Will betray the company I keep” (Poems 76).
In addition to the disquieting attribute of the mother, there is, however, one stanza which presents a completely different depiction of the mother. In this stanza, Plath’s mother emerges in a comforting and soothing scene rather than “[i]n the shadow cast by my dismal-headed / Godmothers” (75). The pleasant scene appears as follows:
I woke one day to see you, mother, Floating above me in bluest air
On a green balloon bright with a million Flowers and bluebirds that never were Never, never, found anywhere. (Poems 75-6)
Here, the mother is seen arising in a wonder land where numerous “flowers” and
“birds” grow and live. So rare are their appearances that they are never to be found in
any other place. This peculiar serene atmosphere contrasts strikingly to that of the
“dismal-headed Godmothers.” Previously, when the disquieting muses are present, the
“shadow stretched, [and] the lights went out” (75). Right now, with the emergence of the new mother figure, the lights are “on” again because Plath can see the “bluest air”
and a “green bloom.” Apparently, Plath’s mother has been given a different image which, in a sense, parallels that of the fairy godmothers in The Sleeping Beauty. For one thing, like the godmothers, she is able to fly. Seemingly, she is floating above her daughter to guard the mortal child from any pending dangers the way the fairy
godmothers do the Sleeping Beauty. Plath’s mother is now a symbol of the kind fairy muses rather than the disquieting ones. It can be argued that this newly-arising mother image is produced by the secondary revision. Due to the working of the revision, a new contribution has been introduced to “revise” the disquieting mother figure so that the reshaped mother will intelligibly conform to the good-hearted fairy muses.
Nevertheless, this interpolation only leads to an unexpected perplexing bewilderment because there co-exist two distinct mother figures in the poem, namely the disquieting muse and the good-hearted fairy mother. They are hardly compatible to each other. To conclude, though the secondary revision means to make the poem content intelligible,
“its efforts are not always crowned with success” (Freud, Interpretation 528).
4.3 Plath’s Poetry as Wish Fulfillment
In his discussion of dreams as the wish fulfillment, Freud gives an interesting narration about the dream content which geese might have. The narration reads as follows:
I do not myself know what animals dream of. But a proverb, to which my attention was drawn by one of my students, does claim to know.
“What,” asks the proverb, “do geese dream of?” And it replies: “Of
maize.” (Interpretation 165)
The proverb appeals to Freud because it touches on a significant feature of
dreams—“a dream is the fulfillment of a wish.” Freud does not hesitate to stress that
“[t]he whole theory that dreams are wish-fulfillments is contained in these two phrases” regardless of the fact that the proverb is by no means a credible result of a direct communication with geese (ibid). Nevertheless, when it comes to the discussion of the interpretation of human dreams, Freud becomes more cautious. He especially emphasizes the need of a direct contact with the dreamer. For Freud, a direct contact is the foremost step in the interpretation of dreams. He maintains that
working on dreams without being able to obtain from the dreamer himself any indications on the relations which might link them to one another or attach them to the external world…gives, as general rule, only a meager result. (qtd. in Pick & Roper 13).
A direct contact with the dreamers enables the interpreter to collect the first-hand messages. These messages function as the crucial elements in the analysis of the dream content. Without them, the final result of the interpretation would very likely be an unreliable inference, if not a wild guess.
On a practical level, whoever wants to interpret Plath’s poetry will face the same problem. There is simply no way of any kind to exchange opinions with the dead poetess, much less to learn the first-hand messages from her. The best a critic can do is to study Plath’s autobiographical work which contains many of the reliable personal experiences. For instance, in a note written for a BBC radio programme, Plath gives her personal impression toward her father: “Her father died while she thought he was God” (Plath qtd. in Hawthorn 127).
7Years later, this idea of treating Otto Plath as God is faithfully “fulfilled” in her poem “Daddy:” “Marble heavy, a bag
7 Plath introduces herself as the third person singular: “a girl with an Electra complex” (qtd. in Hawthorn 127).
full of God” (Poems 222). For those who are studying “Daddy,” this note for BBC would definitely be a reliable first-hand information though it is by no means the result of a direct contact with Sylvia Plath. In the following two sub-sections, I will explore the relations between Plath’s wishes and her daily experiences based on the information recorded in her own work; and to examine how the wish fulfillments are carried out in Plath’s dream-like poetry.
4.3.1 The Wish to Kill the Father
Sylvia Plath’s unhappy life is closely related to her father’s untimely death. As Alvarez asserts, “the root of her suffering was the death of her father, whom she loved, who abandoned her and who dragged her after him into death” (45). Indeed, Plath associates her father’s death with an act of desertion: “My father, who deserted me forever” (Journals 280). To his father’s “deserting” her, Plath responds violently:
“Felt cheated. My temptation to dig him up. To prove he existed and really was dead”
(299). In a sense, the “temptation” to dig her father up betrays Plath unconscious intention to revenge herself. Symbolically speaking, to dig the dead father up means to disturb him because it will deprive him of the peaceful rest under the ground. In this respect, this digging-up temptation is no less than a tit-for-tat one because Plath has been bereft of happiness by her father’s death—“I have never been really happy again” (Plath, Bell Jar 78).
In addition to the father’s betrayal, there is another cause which would provoke Plath’s resentment against her father as well. Plath manifests the cause in
“Daddy.” In the poem, she refers to him as “an engine, an engine / Chuffing me off
like a Jew” (Poems 223). Thinking of herself as a Jew, Plath is oppressed by the
German father, a Nazi persecutor. This analogy is echoed by the note she gives to
BBC radio programme: “Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a
Nazi and her mother very possibly part of Jewish” (Plath qtd. in Hawthorn 127). This
peculiar analogy renders the father-daughter relation a hostile one between the
oppressor and the oppressed. In many aspects, the oppressed Plath is tempted to take a revenge against the father oppressor. As David Wood asserts, Plath is “rearming for revenge in the kind of verbal reversal from victim to potential victor that is
better…attempted in ‘Daddy’” (111). True, as the “potential victor,” Plath triumphantly claims her victory in the last stanza of the poem:
There’s a stake in our fat black heart And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you. (Poems 224)
The “stake” in the heart reminds the readers of the mahogany stick which is a well-known weapon to destroy the vampire effectively. Arguably, this
vampire-destroying stake enables Plath to secure two “victories” in one strike: 1) to kill the Nazi who chuffs the Jew; 2) to destroy the vampire who persecutes the innocent woman. Being both a persecuted “Jew” and a woman victim, Plath is much steeped in the phenomenal and sensational victory. Her sense of triumph is
expressively revealed in the last line of the poem: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (ibid). This acclamation represents Plath’s final victory that she has accomplished the wish to revenge herself on her father.
Finally, I would like to apply a dream specimen narrated by Freud to explicate that Plath’s temptation to kill her father is in nature a postponed wish. The dream at issue concerns a woman’s wish which has been put off for 15 years before it is fulfilled in her dream at last:
In the course of a longish dream, this lady imagined that she saw her
only, fifteen-year-old daughter lying dead ‘in a case’… the child lying
in the case meant an embryo in the womb. After being enlightened up
to this point, she no longer denied that the dream-picture corresponded to a wish of hers…Thus the dead child was in fact the fulfillment of a wish, but of a wish that had been put aside fifteen years earlier.
(Interpretation 186-7)
The suspended wish fulfillment of the woman is duplicated in Plath’s dream-like poetry as well. As a college student, she confides in her roommate Nancy Steiner that
“I probably wished many times that he were dead. When he obliged me and died, I imagined that I had killed him” (qtd. in Steiner 21). This passage betrays that, as a little girl, Plath has already harboured the idea to kill her father. Nevertheless, the wish at issue has been postponed for twenty years before it is eventually fulfilled in
“Daddy.”
8As is exhibited in the poem, the wish to kill her father is accomplished in a very dreadful and violent way—“There’s a stake in your fat black heart” (Poems 224).
And in a victorious tone, Plath speaks to her daddy as if she were over his dead body:
“Daddy, you can lie back now” (ibid). This is a long-suspended wish fulfillment of Plath; she has waited for this triumphant moment since her childhood.
4.3.2 The Wish to Reconstruct the Father
Having discussed Plath’s hatred against her father, I will now examine the other half of her ambivalent feeling toward her father, namely the love of him. Plath’s affection toward her father is especially exemplified in the attempt to reconstruct him.
In “The Absence at the Center,” Schwartz and Bollas assert that “[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). Though it is a “doomed effort,” Plath has never given up the intention to “reconstruct father.” In general, Plath has resorted to two distinct ways to reconstruct her father. The first one is to identify with him. In this identification, Plath is seen undertaking what Otto Plath has been doing when alive,
8 The poem “Daddy” was completed in 12 Oct 1962.
i.e. the beekeeping. For instance, Plath engages herself with the beekeeping when she lives in Devon. Fascinated by the work of keeping bees, Plath writes a letter to her mother describing her experience as a beekeeper: “Today, guess what, we became beekeepers!... We all wore masks and it was thrilling” (Letters 457). Four months later,
Plath completes a series of five bee poems in roughly a week, namely “The Bee Meeting,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” “Stings,” “The Swarm,” and “Wintering.”
9All these poems are centered on Plath’s experience with beekeeping. Undoubtedly, the purpose of keeping bees is more than just to “make up for the honey” (Poems 218).
The foremost goal is pointed out by Carole Ferrier: “In keeping bees, she seems to have at once identified with her father and assumed his former role” (208). Hereby, based on Freud’s statement, I will explicate how the identification is achieved through beekeeping:
Accordingly, identification…serves various purposes in dreams: firstly, to represent an element common to two persons, secondly to represent a displaced common element, and thirdly, too, to express a merely wishful common element. Since wishing that two persons had a
common element frequently coincides with exchanging one for the other, this latter relation is also expressed in dream by means of identification. (Interpretation 357, emphases mine)
In short, it is the common element that enables a person to proceed with the exchange of identity with the other person. In Plath’s case, the bee-keeping is the common element because “bee is her family emblem” (Kroll 138). Since her childhood, she has had plenty of opportunities to enjoy the thrilling contact with bees. As is depicted by Hayman, “[o]nce he [Otto Plath] caught a bee in his fist and held it in her ear; in one of the lines she cut from her 1957 poem ‘All the Dead Dears’ he was ‘a man who used
9 It was from 3 through 9 October 1962.
to clench bees in his fist and out rant the thundercrack’” (26). On the other hand, keeping bees would avail Plath to experience what her father used to practice. In a symbolical sense, during the process of beekeeping, Sylvia Plath assumes her father’s identity rather than her own. This shifting of identity is testified in “Stings:” “I / Have a self to recover, a queen” (Poems 215). This line betrays that Plath has lost her own identity. Though Plath does not specify whom she represents, we may, however, infer that she represents her father, the bee King.
10It is the common element between her and her father, i.e. the beekeeping, that has facilitated the identification with him.
What is more, this identification at issue would also contribute to the reconstruction of the father simultaneously.
The second way of reconstruction is accomplished through the process of death. To a certain degree, the death-occasioned reconstruction also involves the activity of identification. As is pointed out by Schwartz and Bollas, “[t]o try to die every ten years is to identify with a father who died after the first nine years of her life” (186). To be more specific, death would make Plath as “dead” as her father.
Death, in this respect, becomes another common element between the father and the daughter. What is more, it would then bring Plath to meet her father in the world of the dead. There, like Dante, who has met numerous figures in history, Plath would likewise be reunited with the long-lost father. And the process of reunification through death is recorded in “Daddy:”
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tired to die
And get back, back, back to you. (Poems 224)
No dead man can ever make it back to life again. To fulfill the wish of reconstructing her father, Plath cannot but choose to give up her own life. Practically, there is no
10 “Bee King” is the nickname of Otto Plath.
other way which proves shorter and speedier than death with regard to the reconstruction of her father.
4.3.3 The Wish to Exorcise the Mother
11Sylvia Plath bears a similar ambivalence toward her mother as she does her father. The letter to her brother, Warren Plath, indicates to us how much love and hate can be intertwined in Plath:
You know, as I do, and it is a frightening thing, that mother would actually Kill herself for us if we calmly accepted all she wanted to do for us. She is an abnormally altruistic person, and I have realized lately that we have to fight against her selflessness as we would fight against a deadly disease. (Letters 112)
That is, Aurelia Plath loves her family so dearly that she is willing to do everything for the children even at the expense of her own life. Sylvia Plath, in turn, loves her mother because of the latter’s unreserved and whole-hearted devotion to the family.
Yet, ironically, this very devotion is also held responsible for Plath’s hatred against the mother. To be more specific, it is not for “a lack but an excess of gratitude” that Plath develops the emotional aversion toward Aurelia Plath (Kroll 253). In Kroll’s
viewpoint, the “excess of gratitude” is no less than “the intolerable burden of
gratitude” (ibid). This peculiar aspect of Plath’s attitude accounts for her associating the mother’s “selflessness” with “a deadly disease,” and her treating her mother as
“the one person [she] could not bear to see” (Bennett 101). Anne Stevenson gives an incidence which reveals how subtle Plath’s “hatred” against her mother can be:
One sentence spoken by Dr. Beuscher in the course of Wednesday’s
11 Unlike Otto Plath, Aurelia Plath is a mother who has kept in constant touch with Sylvia Plath. At times, her company would even be “an unwelcome invasion of privacy” (Letters 32). Therefore, very rarely can we read a poem in which Plath exhibits the wish to welcome her mother as she does in reconstructing her father.
