“I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—”
The line that opens Lady Lazarus, the poem for which Sylvia Plath is most famous, is disarming for a number of reasons: is it really suicide that is being addressed with such flippancy, such irony, such self-consciousness? And to us — whom we must recognise as voyeurs to this ‘striptease’ — that by reading are already complicit in the act? Affronting as these may be, the central question that has seemed to perplex critics and have consequently resulted in countless acts of epistemic violence unto the work of Plath is: who exactly is speaking?
Sylvia Plath is not primarily a poet in the eyes of many, but a depressed female poet who eventually committed suicide. Anyone faced with the tremendous task of interrogating her work must first grapple with the relationship between the author and her poetry, a dilemma which has produced a polarisation between formalist approaches, which tend to exclude biographical data altogether, thereby artificially divorcing key themes from their origins, and biographical or psychoanalytic approaches. The latter type, manifest in pieces such as Murray Schwartz and Christopher Bollas’s, The Absence at the Center: Sylvia Plath, speak for the delicious temptation of conflating the poet Plath with the speakers of her poems.
Indeed, poems like Daddy and Lady Lazarus present us with information that seems to affirm this approach: we are well-aware of her fraught and problematic relationship with her father, that moves the speaker to enact a ritual murder in the poem, as well as of her three suicide attempts. However, it is this very identification of Plath with her poetic personas that has ironically exacerbated the epistemological problems it superficially promises to solve. Even in a single poem, Plath’s speakers are deliberately slippery and manipulative, adopting shades of heightened self-awareness, mock childishness, solemn interiority and wicked humour at a rate that would shame a chameleon. As Margaret Dickie writes, to read the poet in the voice of her poems is to “[obliterate] the distance Plath has consciously created between herself and her persona by the literary techniques of parody, caricature, hyperbole” — it is hence no surprise that biographical readings often disregard the local incongruities in her poems which indicate a disunified subject, and consequently do a disservice to her poetic genius.
Another issue less endemic to Plath in particular is whether or not one should interpret her poems on a discrete, individualised basis, or as a collective body of work. Can we cross-reference the Blue Madonna effigy in The Moon and The Yew Tree “bending” on her with its “mild eyes” with that of the “ghastly statue” of her father in Daddy, and make a legitimate comparison between the two while respecting the integrity of the non-unitary personas in each poem? How else can we track a progression of the poet’s ideas throughout her writing, and her life?
I raise these issues because I would like to avoid the fallacies associated with the aforementioned critical approaches, and hope that I will be held accountable to doing so. My orientation respects the distinction between Plath and her speakers, so as not to read ‘Ariel’ retroactively, as a collection which furthers an inevitable line of progress toward the poet’s suicide, not least because the edition of ‘Ariel’ that is well-known to the world was assembled by Plath’s husband. In my discussion, I would like to posit a teleology of ‘Ariel’ based on the progression in symbols and imagery encountered in its poems — a teleology of style — within the local limits of Plath’s final collection.
Ariel’s Thematic Presets
To many, the most touching impulse in ‘Ariel’ is the speakers’ will to transcend the limits of the self through death so that they may achieve re-birth. However, after Axelrod’s ‘Poetics of Self-Doubt’, it cannot be ignored that this occurs against a backdrop of intense anxiety about their inadequacies and the fear of failing in this project. This duality of anxiety and accomplishment is realised upon the female body, which bears both the marks of failure and the potential for self-regeneration; in Plath’s ‘poetics of cruelty’, the body is the central locus of violence, pleasure, and language/discourse.
“The blood jet is poetry. There is no stopping it.”
— Kindness
“Mother you are the one mouth
I would be a tongue to”
— Who
“What a thrill—
My thumb instead of an onion.”
— Cut
However, the body is not a simple, bounded entity but only as graphically corporeal as it is diffuse and enigmatic. In Fever and Lady Lazarus, the speakers must achieve self-actualisation with and through their bodies, which are baptised by fire but ultimately restored (“Soon, soon, the flesh / the grave cave ate will be at home on me / And I a smiling woman.”); in fact, the animated body itself is the necessary proof of Lady Lazarus’s regenerative success. But, elsewhere in Plath, we witness the shedding of the body or its attributes onto various objects, particularly nature, where it finds symbols ‘amenable’ to identification.
“And now I
Foam to a wheat, a glitter of seas…
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.”
The strategy of abstraction witnessed in Ariel allows the speaker to experiment transformation by sublimating herself into the ill-defined “substanceless”-ness of symbolic nature, which reveals itself to her in elusive forms but vivid colours, and merge into the very “drive” that compels the creation of the day, or the world. However, the word “suicidal” suggest a conscious awareness that such a method of identity-formation treads dangerously close to the obliteration of the self.
As Susan Suleiman has written, “the cultural significance of the female body is not only…that of a flesh-and-blood entity, but that of a symbolic construct.” These two registers of bodily existence map onto the strands of Plath’s poetry which address corporeal and diffuse bodies respectively. In contrast to the former category, represented by Lady Lazarus, Fever 103 and Cut, Plath’s more introspective poems present the female body as an utterly symbol-ic construct. A body in crisis, it struggles to constitute itself of austere and inappropriate feminine symbols, the inability to do so being the cause of the speaker’s anxiety and projected failure as a subject. The poems I have chosen elaborate upon the relationship between Plath’s speakers and their self-defined symbols of femininity, in a sequence which shows a progression in the meanings of these symbols themselves and increasingly reveals their full depths. These poems are: Elm, The Moon and The Yew Tree, The Munich Mannequins, and Edge.
The yew tree points up…The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The affiliation of women and trees, as symbols of life and creation, goes back to prehistorical times according to many cultures. In Genesis, Eve eats the fruit of the tree of knowledge and is punished by God with the pain of childbirth; a North American creation myth tells of a pregnant woman who falls from the heavens, and, landing on a giant turtle, plants a tree on its back that will grow the world; closer to home, banana trees are said to contain the souls of Pontianaks. In Plath’s lexicon of symbols, trees are typically identified as female-gendered and act as symbols of femininity — albeit ones which hold the female subject in tense alliance.
Elm explicates the complex relationship between a tree and its female interlocutor by its Protean quality of narrative voice, and the ambiguous sharing of language and identity between the two subjects. The opening expression of the poem: “I know the bottom” is given invisible quotation marks by the following “she says”, two words which instantly clarify three separate identities in the reading of the poem: the elm, her interlocutor-persona, and the reader. The distinction between the interlocutor and the envoiced elm compels us to read the rest of the poem in third-person, understanding that we are hearing the elm speak to and through its interlocutor; however the elm’s repeated addresses of “you” overwhelmingly evoke a second-person perspective, and we cannot help but identify with the persona, whose act of interlocution (to us) is far less significant than her position as the true addressee of the elm’s speech. Because the persona has projected identification with the elm, she can only see and address herself by means of this reflection, thus depending on the tree for the articulation of her identity to which we are witnesses.
The elm is personified to be a knowledgeable feminine essence, whose “great tap root” connects her intimately with the life source of the earth. Her relationship to other aspects of nature is hostile, however: she has suffered scorching by the sun and scathing by the moon, and reacts to attacks by the wind in ways that would characterise female hysteria in 19th-century imagination. Like the tree of knowledge itself, the fruit she presents the persona is “tin-white, like arsenic” — instead of possessing life-giving qualities, the elm is anti-fertile, home to a festering “malignity” and hissing acids that warn the persona of its ability to “kill”, “kill”, “kill.”
In this poem, the woman-and-tree identification is intensely confused and problematic as neither can properly decipher each other:
“Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Rich as the elm is with sound (and auditory imagery), this stanza shows us that either her message is inscrutable to the persona, or the agenda of the persona inscrutable to the elm — which is why her questions are left unanswered. Perhaps this is because, as is our problem with the narrative perspective, the boundary between the self and the other, and also the speaker and the symbol is revealed by the final confrontation between the two subjects to be totally unstable:
“I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?”
Confronted directly with the other/the self, at the limits of understanding, who here is looking into whose face?
An aberration in Plath’s tree symbolism, the yew tree in The Moon and The Yew Tree is a phallic symbol that appears to counterbalance the feminine symbol of the moon. Its characteristics are “blackness and silence”, and in this the yew tree is a natural analogue to the black phones in Daddy and The Munich Mannequins, which stand for an inability to communicate. Plath paints in intense primary colours like a proper surrealist; the separateness, and even diametrical opposition of the moon and the yew tree in this poem is partially constructed by the polarity of black and white, which are projected onto the masculine and the feminine respectively. The third symbol here is that of the Madonna, which like the figures of the saints, is affiliated with blue, a colour evoking her life-giving associations but in this context overwhelmed by resonances of coldness and austerity. The speaker stands to these symbols as a painter to her palette, trying to find conciliatory shades with which to compose her identity.
In contrast to the brevity of description accorded to the tree, the speaker takes care to characterise the moon. Subverting conventional associations of romance and illumination, Plath clarifies that ‘she’ is no source of comfort; as in Elm, in which the moon was “merciless”, “cruel” and like the anti-fertile tree, “barren”, she is here also a malevolent entity. She says “the moon is no door”, as both the poetic entity and the symbol itself resist becoming a vehicle for the excavation of meaning or the formation of the speaker’s identity. As the poem develops, she to project attributes of a valourised criminal, mother, and a despairing and hysterical female subject upon her, thus creating an icon of femininity characterised primarily by terror. After “the moon is my mother / she is not sweet like Mary”, she momentarily diverts attention to the counter mother-icon of the Madonna, but this is tinged by her own awareness (“How I would like to believe…”) that the tenderness of the effigy is illusionary, and that in her stiff blueness, the mother that is to be found in religion is no source of comfort either. While Elm ends auditorily in all senses, with the tree speaking to the persona, and with the sonically-rich repetition of “that kill”, The Moon and The Yew Tree ends in debilitating silence from all gendered symbols.
Toward Integration
As we progress through Elm and The Moon and the Yew Tree to The Munich Mannequins, the symbols of the tree and the moon become increasingly interiorised — from the external landscape, to the psychological one, and finally to the inside of the body itself. The womb is now the setting “where the yew trees blow like hydras” and around which the “the tree of life and the tree of life” unloose their “moons.” It takes no genius in anatomy to refer these trees to ovaries and moons to the female’s unfertilised eggs. When read in the context of the two aforementioned poems, Plath’s metaphor here is surprising: in the former, the elm tree struggled to grasp at the moon and eventually had to “let her go / diminished and flat, as if after radical surgery.” That this is portrayed as a severing which leaves the moon “diminished” suggests the original symbiosis of these two elements, albeit one that the elm was not able to recover; in the latter, these symbols are polarised by gender and decisively irreconcilable. Here, miraculously, they are integrated to form the reproductive system, upon which the category of the female sex has traditionally been founded. Indeed, the speakers’ fixation on the reproductive failure of her feminine symbols — the “barren” moon and the elm of poisonous fruit (called “murderous”) — show that this is a crucial term upon which they measure female identity.
“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb…”
However, the poetic resolution of the previously-divorced symbols of the moon and tree in this poem is undermined because their object — the reproductive system — is “to no purpose” once again; the female’s quest to attain perfection prevents them from functioning.
As alternative and non-natural feminine symbols which from the outset reject the female’s reproductive role, the mannequins present the speaker with undeniable allure. They smile their unnerving, distilled-lifelessness-smiles, and appear to turn toward her directly to assert their likeness with her in the lines:
“It means: no more idols but me,
Me and you.”
The confrontation between the speaker and the mannequins here resembles that of the speaker and the tree in the penultimate stanza of Elm; in this case she is so jolted by their toxic loveliness that she has to immediately enforce distance between them by dehumanising the mannequins into “silver” lolly “sticks” which dwell in the “morgue”. The anxiety awakened by this confrontation pervades the rest of the poem, as every following scene is impersonal and anonymous, as if the mannequins are symptomatic of a wider effacement of identity. As such, the new symbol of the mannequins is the apotheosis of the silent “O-gape” of the moon and the “voice of nothing” of the elm, in an inanimate but human form. The perfection they exemplify leaves them with no personality, “no voice” to articulate identity, and no identity to speak of once the master narrative of the female’s role has been cast off. Taking these three poems as a collective, we can see that by the end of The Munich Mannequins, Plath has rejected all the main symbols of femininity she has created.
This poem thus exemplifies a central tension in the poems of ‘Ariel’ which address both physical and elemental bodies: speakers aim to transcend themselves through re-generation, but return to “the same place, the same face, the same brute”, and if they attempt to shed personal histories and cultural narratives by merging with the elements, they are dissolved in the process. Hence, any notion of a blank slate in Plath’s work is fraught with anxiety, as it always stands ambivalently between a tabula rasa and debilitating blankness—blankness and silence.
At the Edge (of?)
The final poem I would like to discuss was the last poem Sylvia Plath is known to have written, in 1963, the year of her death. It was not included in her original manuscript of ‘Ariel’ but added by Ted Hughes. In the enquiry into ‘late style’, this information is perhaps less significant than the knowledge that ‘Ariel’ was her final poetry collection; however, as with Mozart’s Requiem and Tchaikovsky’s final Symphony (No. 6), Plath’s last written poem Edge possesses a quality of premonition of her own death which can doubtlessly be identified in ‘Ariel’ on a whole, but which is absent in the last poem of Plath’s arrangement of the collection, Wintering, and that of Hughes’s arrangement, Words.
In this, we begin to sense a tension between the integrity of the original manuscript, as it was intended to be presented by Plath, and the ‘Ariel’ arranged by Hughes, which has become the exemplary ‘late-style work’ of Plath to countless of readers and literary critics today. Hughes sacrificed eleven poems from the original manuscript, added nine, and changed the collection’s thematic structure. Plath’s ‘Ariel’ would have, emerging from the transformational Bee Sequence, ended on a note of optimism with the final line: “The bees are flying. They taste the spring.” In contrast, Hughes ends the collection with a sequence of death-related poems leading up to Words, implicitly placing the poet “beyond rage”, and as “someone who no longer blames anyone for her condition”.
While respecting the fact that Edge was not meant to conclude the collection, I note that it is an objectively late (the latest) work in Plath’s life, and thus deserving of consideration as the necessary endpoint of her literary style. Furthering the strand of female symbolism from The Munich Mannequins, this poem’s central subject is a mummified dead woman — Cleopatra perhaps — a woman ‘mannequinised’.
“The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity.”
Both the theme and the ‘act’ of poem is consolidation, and indeed it consolidates imagery encountered earlier in ‘Ariel’ — the subject’s smile is the self-satisfied smile of Lady Lazarus preserved, and the state of “accomplishment” achieved here fulfils the desire of the tortured speaker of Fever 103 to come to rest in “paradise.”
In death, the subject “[folds]” her two children “back into her body as petals / Of a rose”, in doing so staking a degree of ownership of, and unity with children that was hitherto unconfessed. The opening poem Morning Song sees its speaker disavow her role as her child’s mother practically at the moment of birth, with: “I’m no more your mother / Than the cloud…” In the poems previously discussed, the fruit of feminine symbols have been “arsenic” and mere “idols”, and in The Moon and The Yew Tree, the speaker is the alienated daughter of the entities around her, in which cannot find solace or identification. Although the notion of children, likened to serpents, in Edge is still tinged with ambivalence, they are accepted by their mother and the composite unit they create becomes a rose, the quintessential icon of natural organicism and beauty.
The relationship between the female subject and nature that Stanza 7 opens up is where the most significant of Plath’s poetic consolidations can be found. The garden, though entirely figurative, is the site upon which the conflicts of the compact body is played out. Leaving the immaculate, “perfected” body behind, the speaker leads us into a sensory digression in Stanzas 7-8 which details the violent decay of the garden to which the woman’s body is likened.
“Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odours bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.”
In an earlier poem Tulips, the redness of the speaker’s wounds “corresponds” with the flowers’ intensity, but here there is no wound to bear testimony of pain; the transference of the female subject onto nature is total, such that it is only through the strangulation or cutting of the “deep throats” of the night flower that we glimpse the subject’s suspected suffering. Here, the unity of the subject and her children also raises a sinister implication: was the death of her children as necessary and inevitable as the closing of a rose in a decaying garden, or is the sudden digression to metaphor here made in order to excuse the violence potentially enacted by the speaker onto her children? What if she is not a Cleopatra after all, but a Medea?
The interpretive complexity of these lines lies in the dilemma of whether to understand the subject as being sentient through nature, and thus in some capacity harmonious with it, or to treat these stanzas as a purely narrative device (of pathetic fallacy) on the level of the poet, rather than the speaker, that is used to evade the confession of violence. Either way, the bodies of the woman and her children are unaffected, leaving no trace of life or death. This is the erasure which the perfect mannequin state represents, and the woman has been “perfected”. Having expanded from the scene of the woman’s body to the garden, poem ends by zooming out and directing attention toward the moon, which looks on but has “nothing to be sad about.”
The last two stanzas have little to do with the rest of the poem and stand apart from them just as the moon which is being described stares detachedly at the mummified bodies/ sculptured memorials. The poem thus ends holding these three elements — the dead bodies, the metaphorical garden, and the overhanging moon — in tension. It resists working through either corporeal or diffuse, elemental bodies but manages to finally identify the female with nature while simultaneously asserting the integrity of the moon as an austere, remote, and lasting element. Is it death she is “used to”, or the violence done unto women that has to be suppressed in language, as the displacement of cruelty onto the garden has shown? Alas, it does not seem to matter, for as surely as the moon has preceded the subject, she has also outlived her.
Questioning the conception of late style as being the harmonious apotheosis of an artist’s work, Edward Said asks: “but what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction?” It is this very aspect of Beethoven’s late works — their “apparent disregard for [their] own continuities” — that magnetised and agonised the cultural theorist Theodor Adorno in equal measure, and the aspect which confronts us as we read Plath’s Edge. This conundrum led Adorno to presume that the only law of subjectivity governing Beethoven’s late aesthetic was “the thought of death”, which caused the composer to break the “bonds” (the presumption of logic) of the work, and dissociate elements that want continuity in order “to preserve them for the eternal.”
This is more a philosophical argument than a phenomenological one, as a listener rarely privileges the fragments abandoned in the course of a piece over themes that are more sophisticatedly developed. However, in the consideration of late style, it is an attractive idea as it brings the critic closer to the artist under the presumption of self-consciousness — if we can assume that the artist sensed their own mortality and that this had a bearing on their late work, this means that we are not looking each other from the other side of history: we can not only put ourselves in their shoes, but them in ours. So who or what really is the moon in Plath’s work? Ending Edge with the omniscient moon’s presiding over the dead bodies of the woman and her children is thoroughly unexpected, suggesting that even the private event is shared by many: the subject stands for monumental Classical figures as she does for the next effaced woman, and even her plight is known to the universe at large. The moon, to be sure, is no door. But could she be the eye of history observing the subject, and even the work?
Bibliography (in order)
Sylvia Plath, Ariel (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999).
Ann Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (N.Y: Houghton, 1998), Margaret Dickie Uroff, “On Reading Sylvia Plath.” College Literature 6 (1979): pp. 121-28 (p. 125).
Susan Rubin Suleiman, The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 2.
Marjorie G. Perloff, ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)making of the Sylvia Plath Canon,’ American Poetry Review 13.6 (1984): pp. 10—18 (p. 11).
Edward W. Said, On Late Style: the Evolution of the Creative Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 7, p. 9, p. 12.
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