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The Bee & the Crown

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The Bee & the Crown The Bee & the Crown The Road to Ascension in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath Biet & Kronan – Vägen till upphöjning i Emily Dickinsons och Sylvia Plaths poesi Eva Stenskär Estetisk-filosofiska fakulteten Litteraturvetenskap 30 p Sofia Wijkmark Morten Feldtfos Thomsen 21-06-11 Abstract Though born a century apart, American poets Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath share several similarities: Both were born in New England, both fought for their rights by writing, and both broke new poetic ground. In this thesis, I look at their poetry through a movement in space, which begins with the poets’ precarious position as societal outliers and ends with ascension. I examine what crossing the threshold meant to them, physically and metaphorically, and how it is mirrored in their poems, I look at how the physical space in which they wrote color their poetry, I examine windows as a space of transit, and finally I take a closer look at the shape ascension takes in selected poems. I propose this road, this movement in space, is mirrored in both Dickinson’s and Plath’s poetry. I use as my method deconstruction, to uncover hints and possibilities. I scan letters and journals, biographies and memoirs. As my theoretical framework, I use Walter Benjamin’s ideas about the threshold as a place of transit, as well as his thoughts about the flaneur as the observer of the crowd, both of which are presented in The Arcades Project. To further examine the threshold as a space for pause, reconsideration, retreat, or advance, I rely on Subha Mukheriji and her book Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces. I further use Gaston Bachelard’s seminal The Poetics of Space to investigate the poets’ response to the physical space in which they wrote. I look at ascension through the prism offered by the ideas of Mircea Eliade as presented in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. Key words: Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Outsiders, Threshold, Space, Ascension, Windows, Performativity, Violence, Divine, Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard, Subha Mukheriji, Mircea Eliade, Suzanne Juhasz, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Interiors, Pathology, Ecstasy, Fear 2 Table of Contents 1. Introduction: Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath 4 1.2 Previous Research and Theoretical Outline 7 2. Outliers: Are You a Nobody Too? 17 3. On the Threshold: The Bravest Grope a Little 30 4. At the Heart of the House: I Dwell in Possibility 40 5. At the Window: The Frost Makes a Flower 49 6. Performativity/Violence: The Piston in Motion 58 7. Title Divine: The Cauldron of Morning 66 8. Conclusion 74 9. References 76 3 1. Introduction: Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath American poets Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) and Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) continue to fascinate. A few years ago, Dickinson was the subject for a major feature film titled A Quiet Passion (2016)1, starring Cynthia Nixon, and in 2019 Apple TV+ created a TV-series about her, the eponymous Dickinson (2019–)2. In 2003 Gwyneth Paltrow portrayed Plath in the biopic Sylvia (2003)3. One website has featured Plath-inspired fashion items.4 Both Dickinson and Plath have inspired composers and musicians: There is the 1950 Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, Aaron Copland’s song cycle for voice and piano, as well as several songs mentioning Plath either in the title or in the lyrics, among them songs by Lana del Rey5 and Ryan Adams6. Books on such diverse topics as Emily Dickinson’s relationship with her dog7 and Sylvia Plath’s lipstick color have been published, the recipes the poets used for baking can easily be found online8 and are discussed in forums and zoom seminars along rumors of their love lives. What all this signifies is that both Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath are not just relevant today but have become part and parcel of our public consciousness. Emily Dickinson’s poetic output is considerable; she was a prolific writer who composed close to 1,800 poems, although few were published in her lifetime. Most of her poems are undated, others have tried dating them by looking at what happened in her life, and by connecting them to letters she wrote. Dickinson’s themes varied from death and religion, to love and nature. She wrote extensively about poetry, and the gift of poetry. She also wrote about her home, which is not surprising. The Emily Dickinson we think of today, may be Emily Dickinson the recluse, and it is true that she spent most of the latter part of her life not only in her house but 1 A Quiet Passion, Directed by Terence Davies, Hurricane Films, 2016 2 Dickinson, Created by Alena Smith, Apple TV+, 2019 – 3 Sylvia, Directed by Christine Jeffs, BBC Films, 2003 4 Christie Drozdowski “How To Dress Like Sylvia Plath”, Bustle, June 1, 2015, https://www.bustle.com/articles/85992-sylvia-plath-inspired-outfits-so-you-can-learn-how-to-dress-like-your- own-inner-poet, Retrieved May 18, 2021 5 Lana Del Rey’s “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but I have it”, Norman Fucking Rockwell, Polydor Records, 2019 6 Ryan Adams’ “Sylvia Plath”, Gold, Lost Highway Records, 2001 7 Marty Rhodes Figley, Emily and Carlo (Charlesbridge, 2012) 8 Emily Walhout and Christine Jacobson, “Baking with Emily D.”, Houghton Library Blog, September 30, 2020, http://blogs.harvard.edu/houghton/baking-with-emily-d/ and Kate Moses, “Baking with Sylvia”, The Guardian, February 15, 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/fiction.sylviaplath Retrieved May 18, 2021 4 inside her bedroom. Thus, her home and her bedroom, as well as the door and window that provided her with contact with the rest of the world, were important to her. Sylvia Plath did not find her true voice until the last year of her life. Her feelings of being different and her sense of standing on the brink is reflected in her poetry. At the time of her death, she had struggled for years to find her footing not only in poetry, but also in short stories and a novel. Her one novel, The Bell Jar (1963), was published only a month before her death. Plath, who saw herself first and foremost as a poet, called it a potboiler. It is on her last, posthumous collection of poetry, Ariel (1965), that her reputation rests. Ariel tackles father-hate, suicide, hospital visits, fevers, paralysis, and the Holocaust, with a fierce, controlled rage. But there are also tender poems, like “Nick and the Candlestick” (AR 47), about a mother nursing an infant and “You’re” (AR 77) a poem spoken by an expecting mother. Although Dickinson was born a hundred years before Plath, the two are often linked. They share a set of similarities: Both were born and grew up in New England, both were women in a male-dominated world, they both had complex parental issues, they both fought for their rights by writing, they have both become feminist icons, both “were gifted students who came to their vocations early and as a result suffered increasing isolation from their peers”9, as Paula Bennett puts it in My Life a Loaded Gun: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1986), a textual analysis of the poetry of Dickinson, Plath, and Adrienne Rich. Perhaps most importantly, they both broke poetic ground. Dickinson’s poetry is innovative in that her poems are disjointed and grammatically incorrect, with, as Dickinson scholar Cristanne Miller points out in Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (1987), “metaphors so densely compacted that literal components of meaning fade”10, a few of her poems must certainly have appeared racy at the time she wrote them, such as poem 269 – “Wild nights, wild nights” – with its erotic hints. Plath, meanwhile, broke ground because she wrote about topics that had been considered taboo to write about until then, such as masturbation, wanting to die, and female rage. Some of her poems “were regarded as dangerously extreme,”11 writes Plath scholar Gail Crowther in the recently published Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (2021). In both Dickinson’s as well as Plath’s case, 9 Paula Bennett, My Life a Loaded Gun (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 97 10 Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Harvard University, 1987), 1 11 Gail Crowther, Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (New York: Gallery Books, 2021) 7 5 their poetry was initially fiddled with by editors before their posthumous publication. Emily Dickinson had sewn her poems into forty fascicles and put them in a chest of drawers in her bedroom, which is where her sister Lavinia found them after Dickinson had died. Lavinia handed the poems over to Mabel Loomis Todd, a family friend, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a friend and correspondent of Dickinson’s and asked them to prepare the poems for publication. Todd and Higginson regularized Dickinson’s very particular punctuation, they also titled a few poems, and made word changes in attempts to improve on the rhythm of the poems – all to make Dickinson’s poetry appealing to as wide an audience as possible. It wasn’t until 1955, sixty-nine years after her death, that Dickinson’s poems were published the way she had originally written them. Sylvia Plath’s collection Ariel met a similar fate. Plath had collected and numbered her poems in a binder and left it on her desk. After her death this is where her estranged husband poet Ted Hughes discovered them.
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