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A Passage to "": and the Evolution of Self Author(s): GREG JOHNSON Source: Southwest Review, Vol. 65, No. 1 (WINTER 1980), pp. 1-11 Published by: Southern Methodist University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43469198 Accessed: 21-05-2016 12:24 UTC

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This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms A Passage to ' 'Ariel " Sylvia Plath and the Evolution of Self

GREG JOHNSON

Sylvia plath's poetry has been misinterpreted as "confessional" per- haps in an attempt to grant her - both as woman and as poet - a measure of the compassion she seemingly would not grant herself. This kind of compassionate acceptance has been offered, quite understandably, by poets such as , Anne Sexton, and A. Alvarez, yet their individual assessments of Plath's work are disappointing because of their insistence upon the intimate connection between Plath's life and her poetry; this connection has been emphasized to such an extent that other, more meaningful connections have been ignored - or worse, made to seem irrelevant - and the result has been to exaggerate the significance of Plath's life while minimizing the importance of her art. Combining with this view of Plath as a confessional poet has developed the ten- dency to view her latest poems, those posthumously collected in Ariel, as distinctly apart from those written earlier in her career. In Robert Lowell's hyperbolic phrasing, Sylvia Plath in Ariel "becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created - hardly a person at all."1 This emphasis upon the newness of the poet rather than that of the poetry typifies an attitude which improperly deflects atten- tion from Plath's artistic achievement: in order to come to terms with the poems it will ultimately prove morę fruitful to view Sylvia Plath not as myth but as mythmaker, and to trace not the tragic patterns of her life but the careful progression of her poetic myth. That Plath's life and art have been so often considered side by side is understandable, of course, since the evolution of self is her major theme and since autobiographical details appear with such frequency in the poems. What remains to be seen, however, is Plath's skill in trans- lating her own personal development into a poetry which is controlled, intelligent, accessible, the artistic quality never declining into what she southwest Review 1

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms contemptuously termed "cries from the heart." In an interview for the British Council, Plath defined her own method of transforming personal experience into a relevant, coherent work of art:

1 believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experi- ence, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an in- formed and an intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it 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.2

From the earliest poems of The Colossus to those written in the last days of her life, Plath's emphasis is therefore upon artistic transformation rather than personal confession; as has remarked, Plath uses her "informed and intelligent mind" to create her own mythology, and in this way she is able to give her private experience a broad cultural relevance:

Her poetic strategies, the poetic events she draws out of her experience of disintegration and renewal, the radiant, visionary light in which she en- counters her family and the realities of her daily life, are quite different in kind from anything one finds in Robert Lowell's poetry, or Anne Sexton's. Their work is truly autobiographical and personal. . . . The autobiographical details in Sylvia Plath's poetry work differently. She sets them out like masks, which are then lifted up by dramatis personae of nearly supernatural quali- ties. The world of her poetry is one of emblematic visionary events.3

Drawing upon classical tradition, received conventions, and an ac- cumulated store of private images, Plath eventually is able to combine the tortured, rasping voice of Ariel with a language and technique which lend that voice its authority and control - an achievement for which the carefully crafted Colossus poems laid essential groundwork. Readers may find Plath's "disintegration and renewal" frightening, distasteful, even perverted - since the only possible renewal is in death - but what must be recognized is her success in manipulating painful experience toward the expression of a broadly relevant, deeply moving tragic vision.4 Despite the shift in style and tone which marks the transition from The Colossus to Plath's later work, there is a remarkable coherence to

2 winter 1980

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms this vision as it develops through her four published volumes; collec- tively and sequentially the poems display a continuity in her concept of identity as she begins to give increased attention to this theme in and , and a constant recurrence of specific images links even the earliest poems in The Colossus to poems in Ariel such as "Edge," written in the last week of Plath's life. With the advantage of hindsight, in fact, we may see that Plath's acceptance of her vision - and her awareness of its probable direction - came early. In "The Dis- quieting Muses," written in 1957, she dramatizes her perception that fate has singled her out for a special, dark achievement: her muses are "bald," "in gowns of stone, /Faces blank as the day I was born," and at the close of the poem she accepts them grimly: "no frown of mine/Will betray the company I keep."* Although most of the poems in The Colossus have a studied formality and are self-conscious in their use of conventional poetic techniques, elaborate stanza structures, and a highly stylized rhetoric, they nonetheless seem informed by this sense of mis- sion, and few are mere exercises by a precocious craftsman: these early poems are a necessary preparation, in fact, for the achievement of the wholly distinct voice that emerges in the later work, and a few intro- duce images which recur throughout all of Plath's poetry. For the most part, however, Plath's poems of identity in The Colossus approach her subject only in oblique ways, and a certain poetic caginess keeps the experience of transformation at a distance. Her primary method of achieving this distance is writing in the third person, disclaiming the experience from her stance as poet: in "Spinster," a "particular girl" suddenly perceives a chaos all about her ("the birds' irregular babel," "the leaves' litter," "petals in disarray, /The whole season, sloven") which makes love seem meaningless and causes her to create a new life which is in fact the enactment of a death wish:

How she longed for winter then! - Scrupulously austere in its order Of white and black Ice and rock, each sentiment within border, And hearts frosty discipline Exact as a snowflake.

Death is actually achieved in "Suicide Off Egg Rock," though again the experience is distanced through use of a protagonist. In "Hardcastle southwest Review 3

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Crags" a young woman walks out into the bleak deathscape of the English moors to discover "pastures bordered by black stone set/On black stone," realizes that the landscape is "enough to snuff the quick/Of her small heat out," and decides to turn back. This basic confrontation will recur in a later poem ("Wuthering Heights"), but with a different result. Two poems in The Colossus may further serve as a bridge to the more explicit handling of the identity theme in later poems. In "The Burnt-Out Spa" the speaker glimpses her future self as she leans out over a pool of water:

O she is gracious and austere, Seated beneath the toneless water! It is not I, it is not I.

And in "The Stones" the process of transformation seems already be- gun, the imagery of actual physical metamorphosis anticipating that of several key identity poems in Crossing the Water and Ariel. She finds herself in "the city where men are mended"; sucking at "the paps of darkness," she prepares for the new self predicted in "The Disquieting Muses," and her bald muses are replaced by a "bald nurse." Again there is a retreat from love ("Love is the bone and sinew of my curse") coin- ciding with a progress toward death, "a quarry of silences." In the transitional volumes, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees , Plath's obsession with both identity and death becomes intense, urgent - the mounting excitement of her voice suggests that she is closing the gap between the two. By now almost all the poems are written in first person, and rhyme is largely abandoned. Love becomes even more in- consequential in these volumes, mentioned ironically if at all. The split identity becomes a persistent theme, creating a conflict stated succinctly in Crossing the Water in "Two Sisters of Persephone":

Two girls there are: within the house One sits; the other, without. Daylong a duet of shade and light Plays between these.

As always, the choice is between love and death - yet in this poem both lives end miserably. The sister of light chooses love, but ends "bitter/ And

4 winter 1980

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms sallow as any lemon," and though the other remains a "wry virgin," she ends by being "Worm-husbanded, yet no woman." This poem represents the symbolic center of Plath's myth: the choice is still to be made, and this tension causes the poet to project unsatisfactory endings for both alternatives. But the poetry quickly moves away from this impasse, toy- ing with what comes to seem the inevitable choice of death. "In Plaster" also dramatizes the divided self - "This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one" - and although the speaker's feel- ings remain mixed concerning the white person's "advantages," she feels that "the white person is certainly the superior one"; moreover, the meta- morphosis by now seems irreversible: "I shall never get out of this!" In "Face Lift" the speaker does attempt to regress from the frightening new self of "tight white/Mummy-cloths" back toward infancy, where she will wake "swaddled in gauze/Pink and smooth as a baby." But this exaggerated "face lift" is only wishful thinking, and she seems trapped within her "old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg," again identifying herself with her disquieting muses, who also had "heads like darning- eggs." Her verdict upon the appalling self she desires to escape in "Face Lift" is simply, "Let her die . . . ," and the death wish recurs in "I Am Vertical":

But I would rather be horizontal. . . . It is more natural to me, lying down. Then the sky and I are in open conversation And I shall be more useful when I lie down finally. . . .

Plath continues to enlarge her myth by placing her speakers within natural landscapes, which themselves tend to objectify the basic tension between love, community, regeneration, and the hopeless isolation of death. "Wuthering Heights" continues the confrontation with the fam- ous Brontë deathscape begun in "Hardcastle Crags," again placing the speaker at the symbolic border between the bleak moors and the village lights. By now the speaker is more daring, however, and does not turn back; rather she notices the horizons "dissolve and dissolve/Like a series of promises, as I step forward." Specific images link the two poems: in "Wuthering Heights" the wind remembers only "a few odd syllables" about life and living beings, and "It rehearses them moaningly: Black stone, black stone." The sheep also reappear (in "their dirty wool-clouds") southwest Review 5

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms but now they seem more sinister: "The black slots of their pupils take me in./It is like being mailed into space, /A thin, silly message." Again she can feel the wind "trying/To funnel my heat away." And most im- portantly, the speaker does not return to the village in this later poem but only looks back toward it, as toward something she has irrevocably lost:

Now, in valleys narrow And black as purses, the house lights Gleam like small change.

The "house lights" seem both distant and unreal, and "small change" of course works as a pun to indicate that the valley "life" is in fact negli- gible, effecting little change within the cast intimation of death repre- sented by the moors. Although Winter Trees is on the whole a much slighter volume than Crossing the W ater , it does contain the long poem "Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices," another important transitional work in view- ing Plath's changing concept of self-identity. The poem is a conversa- tion among three disembodied voices about an unnamed "lack," some- thing "missing," which gradually comes to be equated with death - a death which creates "perfection" from the fragmentary, chaotic, imperfect forces of life:

I feel a lack. I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets. See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

Toward the end of the poem the metamorphosis which will result in the perfected self seems complete, and the imagery unites the poem thematically to "In Plaster" and "Face Lift" while anticipating both the imagery and tone of "":

She is a small island, asleep and peaceful, And I am a white ship hooting: Goodbye, goodbye. The day is blazing. It is very mournful. The flowers in this room are red and tropical. They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for tenderly.

6 WINTER 1980

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces. There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know. There is my comb and brush. There is an emptiness. I am so vulnerable suddenly. I am a wound walking out of hospital. I am a wound that they are letting go. I leave my health behind. I leave someone Who would adhere to me. I undo her fingers like bandages: I go.

"Three Women" also marks a turning point from the stance represented in "The Burnt-Out Spa," where Plath's speaker caught a glimpse of a "gracious and austere" self she could not quite acknowledge and insisted, "It is not I, it is not I."

This woman who meets me in windows - she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit. How shyly she superimposes her neat self On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs. She is deferring to reality. It is I. It is I -

"Tulips," written in March, 1961, one of the earliest Ariel poems, forms an important link between the earlier poems of identity - in which Plath's speaker often rebels against (if only rhetorically), or at least seems uncomfortable with, her new, inevitable, "perfected" self - and the final lyrics which show her reveling in that self, accepting it fully, recklessly. "Tulips" is deceptive in its forced calmness of tone, but the poem's description of peace ("I am learning peacefulness") is that of death rather than of a resolution of tensions in life; death imagery, especially that of the sea, pervades the poem. As in the earlier poem "The Stones," the speaker is "a pebble," but now there is no indication that she will become "as good as new." Rather, she has given up her home, her clothes, her history, her body, surrendering entirely to the death-self, and the tone of passive acquiescence gives the poem a chill- ing, macabre effect quite different from anything else in Plath's work. The tulips "hurt" her because they are red, excitable, breathing, alive - they remind her of life and of the pain which is inextricable from life.

SOUTHWEST Review 1

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Her reaction to her own tears in the poem's closing lines indicates how far she has come from any concept of her living self as healthy or de- sirable:6

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health.

It should also be pointed out that with the composition of "Tulips," according to Ted Hughes, Plath abandoned her usual studies over the thesaurus and wrote her poems out swiftly, "as one might write an urgent letter." Clearly, Plath felt from this time onward that she was writing a new poetry - not a poetry in which she begins suddenly to "confess" her experiences, but one in which the increased intensity of the experience is matched by her carefully developed skill at manipulat- ing private anguish into her poetic myth. The poem "Stillborn," in Crossing the Water , in which Plath looks at her past work and declares, "These poems do not live," shows an artistic regeneration coinciding with the startling personal metamorphosis described in the poems themselves. Yet the very lack of energy in a poem like "Tulips," the tone of helpless drifting melancholy, indicates that the transformation is not yet complete. By contrast, the later Ariel poems examine the achieved self with a driving, remorseless fervor which shows Plath reveling in a new and fiercely imagined consciousness, one which must view the old self of motherhood and love and carefully shaped poems with sarcastic detachment. The new self even breaks free of the lifelong obsession with "," hissing between her teeth in a mock nursery rhyme, "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through." In "Fever 103°" she rejects her hus- band with similar abruptness - "I am too pure for you or anyone" - and feels her "selves dissolving, old whore petticoats." Even her children cannot easily inspire tenderness from this new, austere self which had been predicted with such remarkable prescience in The Colossus. In "Lesbos" she notes coldly that "The baby smiles, fat snail, /From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum," and in "Medusa" the child is addressed directly: "off, off, eely tentacle! /There is nothing between us." But the very force and intensity of these asser- tions would seem to substantiate Ted Hughes's opinion that they are more than simply the record of personal feelings, a set of autobio-

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This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms graphical notations. Rather, they are the earned culmination of a potent mythmaking, through which Sylvia Plath has created a world of "vision- ary events" with a carefully developed, 'emblematic" vision of self at its dynamic center. Most of the Ariel poems, in fact, appropriately deal with the speaker's identity rather than with the now peripheral concerns of father, lover, children. In "The Moon and the Yew Tree" she notes that "I have fallen a long way," and this poem is an interesting continuation of the series of confrontations with deathscapes seen in previous volumes. By now the moon has become symbolic of the muses and nurses found in the earlier work, as well as an emblem of the new self: "She is bald and wild." And the deathliness of what she sees in the landscape is here made even more explicit than in the past: "the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence." Ted Hughes's remarks about the composition of "The Moon and the Yew Tree" are revealing in re- gard to Plath's deepening involvement with her vision:

Opposite the front of our house stands a church. Early one morning, in the dark, I saw the full moon setting onto a large yew that grows in the churchyard, and I suggested she make a poem of it. By midday, she had written it. It depressed me greatly. It's my suspicion that no poem can be a poem that is not a statement from the powers in control of our life, the ultimate suffering and decision in us. It seems to me that this is poetry's only real distinction from the literary forms that we call "not poetry." And I had no doubt that this was a poem, and perhaps a great poem. She insisted that it was an exercise on the theme.

Plath's denial of an emotional engagement with her material perhaps testified to an absorption so great that it could not be shared personally, even with her husband, but only through the myth created in the poems themselves. The heroic stance taken in the startling, wholly successful "Ariel" surely points to such an absorption; the unusually rapid, inexorable movement of the poem not only captures the sensation of a wild ride on horseback, but also exemplifies the rushing movement toward that ex- hilarating (if "suicidal") freedom found in the Ariel poems as a whole:

Something else Hauls me through air -

SOUTHWEST Review 9

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Thighs, hair; Flakes from my heels.

White Godiva, I unpeel - Dead hands, dead stringencies. And now I Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas. The child's cry

Melts in the wall. And I Am the arrow,

The dew that flies Suicidal, at one with the drive Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

The voice of "" is similarly triumphant, yet here the chor- tling, rather vicious speaker seems to gloat over the successful reenact- ment of her death wish throughout life; she speaks with the smugness of one already dead, perfected, with only contempt for the "peanut-crunching crowd" she leaves behind. Despite an occasional "theatrical comeback," she is really nothing but "Ash, ash - /You poke and stir./Flesh, bone, there is nothing there" - nothing, that is, but the consciousness which has been liberated through death and which can easily return to destroy her former tormentors:

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.

Six days before her death, Plath wrote "Edge," thereby completing her myth of the evolving self begun years before in The Colossus - in fact begun, according to the myth, when the disquieting muses took up their station at "the left side" of her crib. Now her children, relics of an abandoned past, are "folded" back into her body; father and lover are not even mentioned.

The woman is perfected. Her dead

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This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare

Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over.

It is interesting that in "Edge" Plath should return to the calm, detached tone of her early work, abandoning the lyric "I" which dominates most of the Ariel poems so tyrannically. She seems to reassert once again her crucial, manipulative role in giving to fleeting experience the permanence of myth: like the woman in the myth, the art is complete, "perfected." The final lines of "Edge" appropriately leave the woman to focus on the moon - her muse, nurse, soul-mate - and come full circle toward "black- ness and silence," toward the completion of Sylvia Plath's nihilistic vision:

The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.

Notes 1. Robert Lowell, Introduction to Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. vii. 2. Sylvia Plath in The Poet Speaks , ed. Peter Orr (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 169-70. 3. Ted Hughes, "Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems," Tri-Quarterly 7 (Fall 1966) : 81. 4. For a thorough and incisive discussion of the cultural implications of Plath's vision, see Joyce Carol Oates, "The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath," in New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (New York: Vanguard Press, 1974), pp. 111-41. 5. Sylvia Plath, The Colossus (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 60. Quotations from the posthumous volumes are from the following editions: Crossing the Water (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Winter Trees (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 6. Barbara Hardy, in an otherwise cogent discussion of Plath's work as "enlarge- ment" rather than "derangement," seems overly optimistic in her reading of "Tulips": "The poem enacts the movement from the peace and purity of anaesthesia and feebleness to the calls of life." But in fact the speaker states that she is "learning peacefulness," not moving away from it, and if her peace and purity are that of "anaesthesia," they are certainly also symbolic of the larger and more permanent anaesthesia, death - as the poem's pattern of imagery makes clear. See Barbara Hardy, "The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: Enlargement or Derangement?" in The Survival of Poetry y ed. Martin Dodsworth (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), p. 178. southwest Review 11

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms