“Through the Beautiful Red”: the Use of the Color

74 "Through the Beautiful Red": The Use of the Color Red as the Triple- Goddess in Sylvia Plath's Ariel Allison Wilkins, Lynchburg College The color red appears in nineteen of the Ariel poems. These nineteen "red poems" and their placement in the collection create a pattern of purification and rebirth from which a single character emerges.1 The first four red poems deal with the female body. The next eight red poems connect the female body with the body of mother earth, specifically in night or pre-dawn settings. The next six of the nineteen red poems are poems that deal with forgetfulness, the death of the physical body, and purging of personal history in order to be reborn. The last red poem, "Stings," completes the cycle of female rebirth and purification in these Ariel poems. Red is Sylvia Plath's "Triple-Goddess." To understand the Triple-Goddess, we must first look back to Robert Graves's The White Goddess. Despite the controversy surrounding Graves's research, there is no doubt about his influence on Sylvia Plath.2 Susan Bassnett writes in Sylvia Plath: An Introduction to the Poetry that "Graves' book appealed both because of its celebration of poetry and of the idea of the poet but also because of his investigations into the mythical sources of the creation of poetry" (58). While connecting obscure myths, beginning with the legend of Jason, the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece, Graves aims to unite different religious cults through matriarchy. Graves states his thesis: "the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry—'true' in the nostalgic modern sense of 'the unimprovable original, not as a synthetic substitute' (Graves 9-10) and claims the "function of poetry [as] religious invocation of the Muse" (Graves 14). Graves mythologizes all women into the Triple-Goddess 1 The first four red poems are "Lady Lazarus," "Tulips," "The Jailor," and "Cut." The next eight red poems are "Elm," "The Detective," "Ariel," "Death & Co," "Lesbos," "The Other," "Stopped Dead," and "Poppies in October." The next six are "Berck-Plage," "Getting There," "Medusa," "Letter in November," "Amnesiac," and "Daddy." The last red poem is "Stings." 2 As quoted in Graves and the Goddess: Essays on Robert Graves's The White Goddess edited by Ian Firla and Grevel Lindop: "According to Keith Sagar, the single most important influence which Ted Hughes offered to the intellectual development of Sylvia Plath as their relationship began in 1956 was a 'fully worked-out belief in the poetic mythology of Robert Graves's The White Goddess'" (7). Plath Profiles 75 of: Maiden, Mother, and Crone.3 He believes that the Triple Goddess is the source of poetic force. Graves's Triple Goddess is "a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startling blue eyes and long fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid, or loathsome hag"(Graves 24). He claims that the "moon-trinity…[means] the New Moon is the white goddess of birth and growth; the Full Moon, the red goddess of love and battle; the Old Moon, the black goddess of death and divination"(Graves 70). The Maiden is associated with the New Moon, new beginnings, birth and youth. In iconography she is connected to moths, butterflies, bees and frogs which become symbolic of her uterus and her potential for motherhood. She is not the pregnant mother, but the virgin. She is spring, the start of the new cycle of seasons. The Mother is birth and fertility. Ripeness, stability, power, parenthood and life. She is also the Full Moon, the pregnant body. She is summer. The Crone is wisdom, repose, death. The end of cycles. As Graves writes, "The Night Mare is one of the cruellest aspects of the White Goddess. Her nests, when one comes across them in dreams, lodged in rock-clefts or the branches of enormous hollow yews, are built of carefully chosen twigs, lined with white horse- hair and the plumage of prophetic birds and littered with the jaw-bones and entrails of poets… Her young ones also suck up blood" (Graves 26). Her iconography is usually birds of prey and snakes. She is the Old Moon. Susan Bassnett agrees with the appeal of the goddess for Plath that Graves establishes: She is not constant and fixed but fluid and in perpetual movement, symbolized by the phases of the moon. The moon goddess is, simultaneously, goddess of three stages of female existence…Her element is the sea, she controls the tides and all liquids. She rules the Underworld and concerns of birth, procreation and death; she rules the Earth and concerns of the changing seasons; she rules the Sky and concerns of the changing moon. (Bassnett 58) In Ariel, Plath links images of water (the sea), death, hooks, body parts, arrows, and the natural world (bees, trees, flowers) to Graves's concept of the Triple-Goddess in the red poems. 3 From here on out I will use Triple Goddess instead of White Goddess despite the fact that the terms are synonymous. Triple Goddess is more useful to me in the distinctions that I find in Plath's poetry. Graves preferred White Goddess. Wilkins 76 She arranges these poems within the collection in a way that highlights this connection and emphasizes the continual process of rebirth and purification. The first use of the color red, then, fittingly appears in "Lady Lazarus," the ultimate poem of death and rebirth. According to Susan Van Dyne, in this poem Plath "disassociates the speaker from her body" so that the speaker is able to reinvent her body and to be in control of its recreation (89). She mentions no less than 14 different body parts as she is made into a spectacle by the male figures (circus master, doctor, enemy). She prods the "peanut-crunching crowd4" (26) to watch her suffer as she reconstructs herself. This speaker knows that "Dying / Is an art" that she does "exceptionally well" and she dies and is reborn at least three times in the poem (43- 45). Judith Kroll writes in Chapters in a Mythology that "Plath associated the risk of death with the shedding of the past and the achievement of a state of transcendence" (171). So then, each death the speaker undergoes is the death of a false self that must be shed into order to create a true self that is "The pure gold baby" (69). The baby is an image of the Maiden, as the "grave cave" (17) and the action of "pick[ing] the worms off…like sticky pearls" (42) is the Crone. When the speaker claims "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air" (82- 84)5 we know that she has reinvented herself yet again, and is ready to face the world with fierceness.6 The body is equally important in "Tulips," "The Jailor," and "Cut." In "Tulips" we are condemned to the white setting of a hospital room. The speaker is drugged and feels as if "the water went over my head," (27) implying a type of baptism by medication. She claims "I have never been so pure" (28), which links her back to the gold baby of "Lady Lazarus." But the tulips are "too red" (36) and "their redness talks to my wound" (39). The speaker claims they are "dangerous animals" (58), "opening like the mouths of some great African cat" (59). The speaker discovers the tulips to be vibrant and strong. Tulips are flowers that bloom from bulbs, from the dirt ground of Mother earth. As the speaker observes the flowers, they give her their strength. She describes her heart as a blossoming flower, "it opens and closes / Its bowl of red 4 All quotes from the poems are from Plath's Ariel: The Restored Edition, printed in 2004. Each quoted phrase is from the poem discussed in the paragraph unless otherwise stated. 5 Kroll writes, "On the literal level the red hair of the woman is the blazing plumage of the phoenix. But Plath may also have recalled that red-hair victims were often preferred for sacrificial burning because they resembled the spirit of the ruddy grain, the god to whom they were offered, and so the red hair of Lady Lazarus allies her with a type of dying and reviving divinity" (154). 6 Robert Graves says of the Phoenix Age: "The legend was that from the ashes of the Phoenix a little worm was born which presently turned into a real Phoenix" (412- 413). Plath Profiles 77 blooms out of sheer love of me" (60-61). She connects herself to Mother earth and, in the penultimate line of the poem, allows water "like the sea" (62) to wash over her in a purifying rebirth ritual. In "The Jailor" the speaker has also been drugged by a "sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin" (12) given to her by her male captor. Our female speaker again "die[s] with variety— / Hung, starved, burned, hooked" (34-35). Each red and blue pill enters the speaker's body to keep her captive. The last stanza of the poem shows the questioning of the jailor's identity, as the speaker questions "what would he / Do, do, do without me" (44-45).

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