A polarising literary figure, Sylvia Plath has her fair share of dissenters and fans. One thing remains clear nonetheless: Her poetry is intimately personal, passionate, intense, and culturally significant.
Introduction to this Article
Many critics and literary students who study Sylvia Plath often discuss the autobiographical significance of her literary works (poetry and prose); and categorise her work as predominantly confessional. Indeed, Plath's works are deeply personal, with the subject matter often influenced by her life experiences: Her fraught marriage with fellow writer Ted Hughes, her parenthood, her suicide attempts, just to name a few.
Yet, her experiences and literary craft resonate beyond the realm of the personal: They often embody the larger sense of alienation, angst and despair of the modern human condition; or, of the modernist. Plath's acute awareness of her contemporary events, historical events, and the literary tradition, shapes her textual practice, broadened the range of critical interpretation of past and present, and finally, enriches the possibilities of the critical interpretations of tomorrow.
Note: This article is rather long and will entail lots of analyses of both the literary contexts and her poetry. Pace yourself!
Biographical Influences on Plath's Poetic Practice
Professor Thomas McClanahan of Idaho State University believes that the poems in Ariel “are personal testaments to the loneliness and insecurity that plagued her, and the desolate images suggest her apparent fixation with self-annihilation. [...] In Ariel, the everyday incidents of living are transformed into the horrifying psychological experiences of the poet.”
A Way With Literature (Coach Ken) agrees with this observation. However, we also argue that it is not only the everyday or present experiences that trouble Plath, but more fundamentally, it is the shadows of her past that lour over (and eclipse) her present.
A. "Daddy Issues" and Men
It is difficult to ignore the parallels between the details of the father-daughter relationships presented in Plath's poetry ("Daddy" of Ariel and "The Colossus" of The Colossus and Other Poems) and Sylvia Plath's troubled relationship with her father, Otto Plath.
In "Daddy", as Plath explains, the persona is "a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other—she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it."
The morbid simile comparing the toe of the father-figure of "Daddy" to a seal, "one grey toe/Big as a Frisco seal" is inspired by Otto Plath's gangrenous leg. Shortly after his amputation, Otto Plath succumbed to illness.
The image of the "[g]hastly statue" in "Daddy" echoes that of Plath's earlier poem, "The Colossus", where the persona's father is likened to a colossal statue (Colossus of Rhodes). In "The Colossus", the persona is obsessed with retrieving her lost father by fixing the broken statue, "Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol/I crawl like an ant in mourning/Over the weedy acres of your brow/To mend the immense skull plates and clear/The bald, white tumuli of your eyes." Plath's simile comparing the persona to an ant foregrounds her insignificance through the ant's minute size, especially in comparison to the giant statue; suggesting the overpowering, persistence presence of the dead father in the persona's life. More significantly, the imagery of adhesives and chemicals "glue pots and pails of lysol" and the kinaesthetic imagery, "mend" and "clean", convey the persona's punctilious preoccupation with repairing the statue, as if desperately reconstructing the father figure.
This desperation with retrieving of a lost or estranged father-daughter relationship is also explored in "Daddy", in a similar image of construction, "I made a model of you,/A man in black with a Meinkampf look". Such an obsession with the absent father figure is clearly informed by Plath's feelings of betrayal and loss when he died.
Yet, Plath's troubled relationship with her authoritarian father also shows clearly in her comparison of Otto Plath with a Nazi, "A man in black with a Meinkampf look". However, this presentation too, has factual basis, as Plath recalls in her 1958 journal entry: "He … heiled Hitler in the privacy of his home."
It is also possible that the second "Daddy" of the poem is Plath's estranged husband, Ted Hughes. Plath's failed marriage is one of the likely sources of inspiration for "Daddy" as well. She adored her husband, observing herself that "[h]e is better than any teacher, even fills somehow that huge, sad hole I feel in having no father". Thus, Hughes's unfaithfulness to Plath informs her intense experiences of betrayal and destructive angst.
B. Mental Health Issues and Suicide Attempts
Sylvia Plath had all the trappings of the conventional high-achiever. Yet, this successful front belied a deeply troubled soul. Plath finished high school with straight As, won a scholarship to college, where she graduated summa cum laude, and at the age of 23 was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Cambridge. It was during her undergraduate years that Plath began to suffer the symptoms of severe depression and bipolar disorder that would ultimately lead to her fatal suicide. In one of her journal entries, dated June 20, 1958, she wrote: “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.” Unfortunately, there was no effective medication during Plath's lifetime to help mollify her mental health troubles. In August of 1953, at the age of 20, Plath attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. She survived the attempt and was hospitalised, receiving treatment with electro-shock therapy. Her experiences of breakdown and recovery were later turned into fiction for her only published novel, The Bell Jar.
This thematisation of suffering extends beyond The Bell Jar, as Plath melds her literary sensibilities with her personal suffering in poetry as well. One of Plath's diary entries read: "I am going to the psychiatrist this week…I feel like Lazarus: that story has such a fascination. Being dead, I rose up again, and even resort to the mere sensation value of being suicidal, of getting so close, of coming out of the grave with the scars and the marring mark on my cheek which (is it my imagination) grows more prominent: paling like a death-spot in the red, wind-blown skin, browning darkly in photographs, against my grave winter-pallor." Lazarus of Bethany eventually finds his way into Plath's poem, "Lady Lazarus", a poem inspired by her multiple suicide attempts. However, Plath appropriates the story of Lazarus' resurrection, injecting a slant of female empowerment and independence: It is a woman who comes back from the dead instead—on her own—without the help of a male/God figure. Not only has she brought herself back from the dead, but she has done it three times.
Throughout her life, it has been observed that Plath is predisposed to emotional instability. To begin with, there was a constant dissonance between the buoyant, high-achievement persona whose ideals of success, social status and domesticity are conveyed in the letters to her mother, and the dark sense of isolation and nihilism that finds expression in her journals and poems. "No matter how enthusiastic you are," she wrote as a young student, "nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room". At times she would impulsively expose herself to physical harm, gashing her legs "to see if [she] had the guts", skiing recklessly and breaking a leg, driving her car off the road. She seemed, in the words of an old college friend, "driven periodically to stage a symbolic salvation [...] almost as though only by being snatched from the brink of death could she confirm her worth".
Such an existence of dangerous volatility teeters between life and death, and in Plath's final depressive episode, she succumbed to her inner demons for good on 11 February 1963. In comparing the first and last drafts of one of her last poems, "Sheep in Fog", the mood of the poem had darkened as the new ending shows:
They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.
In contrast, the concluding stanza of the first draft shows:
Patriarchs till now immobile
In heavenly wools
Row off as stones or clouds with the faces of babies
What accompanied her final brief burst of creativity was an emotional nadir; and ultimately, a fatal impulse for suicide. Critic Al Alvarez believed that:
“The very source of [Plath’s] creative energy was, it turned out, her self-destructiveness. But it was, precisely, a source of living energy, of her imaginative, creative power. So, though death itself may have been a side issue, it was also an unavoidable risk in writing her kind of poem. My own impression of the circumstances surrounding her eventual death is that she gambled, not much caring whether she won or lost; and she lost.”
Modernism and Historicity of Sylvia Plath's Poetry
As noted the introduction to this opinion piece, Sylvia Plath's poetry is not merely confessional or personal, but also cultural. As Plath reflects in a 1962 interview with Peter Orr, "[p]ersonal experience in poetry shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau [World War II] and so on." Hence, we need to examine and appreciate the intellectual climate and zeitgeist in which Plath wrote.
A. Introduction to Modernism
Modernism is a literary and intellectual movement/period. In the realm of the art and literature, it is characterised by a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression.
The era of modernism is characterised by rapid social change and industrialisation. The result was a tremendously altered social vision of progress, technology, mass transportation, new forms of industrialisation, industrial warfare, and a profound doubt about the merits of being “modern.”
Modernism followed the conclusion of World War I, one of the deadliest conflicts in history. At that point in time, it was a period of unprecedented destruction. As with all wars, not to mention one with such shocking magnitude, there was a general displacement of people, sense of loss in both physical and intangible ways, and extensive mortality. The enormity of the war had undermined humanity's faith in the foundations of Western society and culture, and postwar modernist literature reflected a sense of alienation, disillusionment and fragmentation.
World War I was not the only war closely associated with the modernist period. World War II followed, supplanting World War I in its atrocities and casualties. And subsequently, a metaphorical one: The Cold War. It is in this historicity and intellectual climate which Plath wrote, and such traumatic or major global events resonated in her poetry.
B. The Intersections between Modernism, Historical Events of Modernism and Plath's Poetry
In our earlier article explicating the importance of studying literary contexts, (https://www.awaywithliterature.com/post/literary-contexts-what-for) we noted that the writer's craft is often inspired by or influenced by the significant socio-cultural and political events of their lives. Let us explore two contexts surrounding Plath's poetic licence.
Context 1: Nuclear Warfare
Plath lived through in nuclear age and the Cold War, where geopolitcal tensions between America and the Soviet Union risked a nuclear warfare.
Such tensions manifest in Plath's poetry, especially, "Elm". Tracy Brain, the author of The Other Sylvia Plath, argues: ""Elm" is one of many poems in which Plath explores the consequences of isolation, and argues against the impulse to hold oneself as separate from the rest of the world ". Indeed, the poet rejects this impulse of self-imposed alienation by amalgamating two separate entities: woman and tree. These entities unite to protest against the destructive forces that lead to isolation,"A wind of such violence/Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek" (lines 20 and 21), and to relentlessly search for love, a force of communion and unity, despite the pain demanded by such a quest,"Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievable?/Is it for such I agitate my heart?" (lines 35 and 36). Such a concern of alienation is however, not merely personal. It is likely informed by Plath's awareness of the international tensions and distrust between nations during the Cold War.
The environmentalism in "Elm" alludes to nuclear warfare, a concern which likely comes from Plath's conscience appalled by the American use of the atomic bomb in World War II. Plath writes:
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root My red filaments bum and stand, a hand of wires.
Through the metaphor that compares the sun to an atrocity, "atrocity of sunsets", Plath alludes to the atomic bomb's bright explosion circumscribing the horizon. The sun's natural capacity to nurture, encourage growth and sustain life is subverted here: In a perverse fashion, it breeds destruction instead, eliminating all natural beauty and life. For, what remains is artificial and lifeless: Tree limbs, representative of the natural world, are substituted with the synthetic replicas of it as they become "wires". The tree bark is compared to "red filaments" through Plath's use of metaphor, which connotes threads of hot metal; slowly disintegrating, or expending itself, as do lightbulb filaments with each use. As the natural image of the"sunset" is superposed onto the notion of atrocities, the lifelessness threatens to be permanent too, for it is begotten by the apocalyptic force of nuclear weaponry. Further emphasising this permanent state of death, the image of "[s]corched to the root" depicts the damage to the vital part of plant life, "the root", conveying an impossibility of regeneration, or more fundamentally, an absence of life post-nuclear explosion.
Context 2: World War II and the Holocaust
In Ariel, Plath takes on an intense familiarity with the Holocaust – no longer a remote American bystander as in her 1957 poem, "The Thin People"; she becomes a direct witness and, at times, a victim. Though some readers and critics have objected to what they view as Plath’s misappropriation of the Holocaust in a poem about individual suffering, critic Jon Rosenblatt argues that imagining her own psychic drama against the backdrop of Nazism is justified as a means of universalising the personal conflict. Nevertheless, the question of Plath’s direct appropriation of traumatic historical imagery in poems such as “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” remains a troubling one. It raises fundamental questions about the use of historically specific imagery or personae in the service of personal or “confessional” poems. Does the fact that Plath herself was not Jewish, for example, have any bearing on the legitimacy of her use of the holocaust as a defining metaphor for her own struggles?
Perhaps, Plath's allusions to tragic world events can be read more generally; Plath channels her anger over the extreme concentration and paternalistic nature of world power. “Daddy” could be read as an invective against not just a particular patriarchal/father figure, but the entire male-dominated systems of power, while “Lady Lazarus” is Plath’s warning against these pillars of authority: no longer will she suffer their injustices. She will rise out of the "ash" and in destructive vengeance, "eat men like air".
Ultimately, those appreciative of Plath's engagement with the greater socio-cultural environment may posit that in absorbing and personalising the socio-political catastrophes of the century, Plath reminds us that these catastrophes are ultimately metaphors of the terrifying human mind.
The Greater Purpose of Plath's Poetic Practice: Self-Identity and Assertion of Independent Agency (Mind and Self Angle)
(A Level Literature Paper 3 students in Singapore, you're in for a treat. The "mind and self" angle is explored most explicitly in this segment.)
Whilst it is true that on one level, Plath was a strongly autobiographical writer, Plath and Ted Hughes (her ex-husband) have always argued that Plath's poetry was not primarily a conduit for her personal emotions. Rather, as literary critic Harold Bloom suggests, there is a greater purpose to Plath's literary craft. Plath's poetic practice is a "conscious process of crafting through which experience and emotion could be refined in an alchemical sense and transformed into something new." Plath's poetry is a search for, and solidification of, individual identity and agency; a search which enables her to find her voice and control her narrative as a poet through poetic experimentations.
To illustrate this point, let's examine Plath's "Lady Lazarus" from Ariel:
Throughout the "Lady Lazarus", Plath not only portrays her own torment, but parodies her attempts at suicide. This self-parody, however, is mixed with a sense of pride and confidence at her ability to manipulate both herself and her readers. Plath’s persona as a performer in the poem – whether it takes the form of stripper, sideshow freak, or vaudeville comedian – allows her to declare herself a success. The implicit comparison between Plath as poet and as suicide is clear in the following lines, "Dying/Is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well,//I do it so it feels like hell." Plath’s virtuosity as poet – which she displays in her command of voice, image, form, and rhythm throughout the poem – is mapped onto her skill at “dying", as seen in the metaphor comparing suicide/death to an aesthetic self-expression, which she perversely claims to do “exceptionally well.” By creating poetry about her own suicide attempts, Plath is also asserting her identity as a poet to the reader.
Yet, this performance and the public gaze are not entirely welcomed either: While the persona/Lady Lazarus kills herself to escape from her suffering, she is forced to revive; each revival a carnivalesque performance for the "peanut-crunching crowd"; each involuntary revival an opportunity for the publication, commodification and mindless consumption of her private suffering.
Alas, the penultimate and concluding stanzas of the poem present a final (successful attempt at) suicide and successful reclamation of self-control. The poem concludes with an image of resurrection: that of the phoenix myth. The female speaker returns as a fiery spirit whose physical body has been cremated, and who can now enact vengeance on the various male figures who have tortured, oppressed, and humiliated her throughout the poem: doctors, Nazis, and even God himself. This final image can also be read in a more directly biographical way – in the context of her anger toward her now estranged husband Ted Hughes – but it also a more general assertion of liberation from the male-dominated society in which she suffered with great resentment.
The subject matter of the reclamation of agency coincides Plath's inventive use of poetic structure. As critic Jon Rosenblatt notes, Plath’s use of the three-line stanza (tercets) – as in other late poems like “Ariel” and “Fever 103” – carries echoes of the terza rima form of Italian tradition; but Plath’s use of the stanza provides only a general structure for her experimentation with a variable rhyme scheme and metrical pattern. In simultaneously depending on literary traditions/conventions and altering it, Plath allows herself full artistic expression and control over her poetic self-expression. Such a practice is also cultural, as it coheres with the modernist impulse for new ways of expression. (Recall: Modernism and Historicity of Sylvia Plath's Poetry)
Conclusion
In considering one of Plath's journal entires, “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.", the reader must not forget the suffering and creative chaos from which her poetry is born. At the same time, her poetry is universal and culturally significant. For, her poetic practice is not merely a personal affair; but engages with modernist concerns that surround her works. Dismissing Plath's poetry as simply "confessional" or "personal" would thus be doing her, and her works, a great disservice.
I hope this article has helped you gain greater insight into the critical contexts of Sylvia Plath, Ariel and her poetic genius!
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