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Table of Contents Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 2 1. Biography ...................................................................................................................... 8 2. Freud – Klein – Lacan: The Psychoanalytic Approach .............................................. 28 3. The Bell Jar ................................................................................................................. 43 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 76 Works cited ..................................................................................................................... 80 1 Introduction I shall perish if I can write about no one but myself. ---Plath, Journals, November 4, 1959 I must lie down where all the ladder start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. ---W.B. Yeats, The Circus Animal’s Desertion Every piece of art, no matter how objective it is, is a form of retranslation. It transforms the picture of the world through the channel of imagination giving birth to a new reality. Art can be based on elaborate techniques following a coherent pattern but what we finally get is always a product of subjective experience. In her book Psychoanalytical Approach to Aesthetics , Hana Segal points out that “Every creative artist produces a world of his own. Even when he believes himself to be a complete realist and sets himself the task of faithfully reproducing the external world, he in fact only uses elements of the existing external world to create with them a reality of his own” (Segal 207). This thesis addresses the subjectivity of the works of Sylvia Plath. Both her poetry and her novel together with the short stories though different in their form are based on a deeply instinctive approach. She stares into the abyss of her soul and tries to transform the revelations into something more tangible. Writing for her was a way of dealing with the demons of her past, a remedy for her soul, she “used raw risk and emotional vulnerability for the sake of vision and sensibility” (Tytell 12). It is through her extreme sensibility she finally reaches the reputation of a great artist. Her work is undoubtedly an expression of her innermost feelings. As I have already stated, every 2 work of art is a retranslation of the original. What one finally gets is just a reflection of the real essence. Jacqueline Rose in the introduction of her work on Sylvia Plath argues that “there is no direct access to the writer, that the only thing available for commentary and analysis is the text. We do not know Plath. What we do know is what she gives us in writing, and what she give us in writing is there to be read” (Rose 5). In his essay The Death of the Author Roland Barthes criticizes the reader’s tendency to distill the meaning of an author’s work from his or her identity: either political, historical, religious, gendered or psychological. Such an approach, he argues, proves to be limited and biased (Barthes 145). Every piece of work contains a multifaceted entity that cannot be put under a tyranny of narrative truth. Barthes sees the essential meaning of the work deriving from the reader’s impression, which is limitless. He raises the question of how we can detect what the author intended to say. One of the major intentions of my thesis is to challenge this concept as I will attempt to analyze the work of Sylvia Plath particularly from the confessional point of view. I am convinced that Plath’s work, though a result of artistic retranslation, cannot be separated from her identity, or for the most part her identity cannot be ignored. If every piece of work is formed by multifaceted layers of meaning, the reader should not be deprived of one of the most essential ones, and if the reader is the one who should be free to choose then let them do it so. In the first chapter of my thesis I will deal with the autobiographical facts of Plath’s life in order to give a glimpse of her life, which is much present in the meaning of her works. I have consulted various biographies – Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath , that is generally considered to be the best biography written with the help of Olwyn Hughes, Plath’s sister-in-law, and one could argue that it maintains a rather biased point of view. In addition, I have used biographies by Edward Butscher 3 Method and Madness , The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath by Ronald Hayman and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm. Nevertheless, one of the most significant sources that helped me in better comprehending the complexity of Plath’s life were her Journals edited by Karen V. Kukil and Letters Home published by Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother. The concept of the ‘death of the author’ is in itself ironically equivocal in connection with Plath. Her actual death is the basic phenomenon standing behind her myth. She became obsessed with this demon and it ran throughout her whole writing in the form of a repetitive use of death images. When she was thirty she deliberately ended her life. Plath’s sensibility was turned deep inside penetrating to the darkest worlds of limitless chaos. James Phillips and James Morley in their study called Imagination and Its Pathologies point out that human existence should be accepted as being ambiguous, always oscillating between the imaginary and the real. Psychopathology from that point of view fails to acknowledge this (22). Its perceptive belief fixes upon a quest for absolute certainties. Searching for something solid, Plath needed a strong image or symbol for her writing and for her living too – she hungered for an object of highest admiration, an authority, a strong element that would be real enough to be dealt with – the demon of death was one of them, because what in life is more definite than death. This subconscious instinct was first defined by Sigmund Freud in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the “death drive”. He observed that people who had some kind of traumatic experience tend to repeat and maximize their terrors indirectly in order to master them. Freud called this tendency “repetition compulsion” (Freud 42). Sylvia Plath experienced the first encounter with death when she was a child. Her father died and behind him he left a hollow gap that she kept trying to fill with words of extreme emotions. All her life she had to struggle with a problematic love-hate relationship to 4 her dead father. She seemed to have never liberated from the Oedipal complex later redefined by Jacques Lacan as the “Name-of-the-Father”. Lacan re-interprets Freud in terms of language that originates in de Saussures’s theory of formal system of differential elements. Lacan’s unconscious is tied to the functions and dynamics of language where “the signifier is irremediably divorced from the signified in a chronic but generative tension of lack” (Homer 65). This lack is the basis of Plath’s narrative. She kept searching for an expression of her personal view of the world and when she thought she had found it, it seemed to be even more incomprehensible for the outside world and that made her even more desperate. Moreover, she felt always bound with some expectations imposed by the people around her. In Passionate Lives , Tytell notes that with her writings, “Plath participated in a process of pushing the limits of the community approval” (Tytell 8). Finding her voice in the confessional narrative was Plath’s biggest breakthrough. In spite of the most expressive presence of Plath’s father in her writings, the central argument of my thesis is the importance of the driving force of Plath’s mother in her life and therefore in her work too. I will discuss the notion that the approval of her own mother was for Plath more important then any other recognition. Plath’s perception of her emotional problems was quite rational. Realizing her sensitive frame of mind she became interested in psychoanalysis. The self-reflection helped her to open up the dimensions of the deeply rooted heaviness, revealing the figure of her lost father whose death she could not cope with and she recognized the roots of her problematic relationship with her mother. Plath had pulled all her energies of herself only to let them out with her reordered artistic expression. In the theoretical part of this thesis, discussed in the second chapter, I will address several more general approaches employed in psychoanalytical criticism that is 5 first and foremost based on Sigmund Freud’s theories. Freud studies the language of the repression and “draws the attention to the effects of desire in language and, indeed, in all forms of symbolic interaction” (Wright 16). In her study called Psychoanalytic Criticism , Elizabeth Wright deals with the relationship of psychoanalytic theory to the theories of literature, and the arts, and she argues that, “the study of an artist’s life to explain his works, or the study of his works to explain his mind, was already established mode in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when pre-Freudian psychology made various attempts to relate genius to madness” (38). In the theoretical part Freud’s dominant patriarchal paradigm of the Oedipus complex will be challenged by some rather mother figure oriented approaches. I would like to pay particular attention to the maternal aspect being a source of the problematic fragmentation discussed in Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein, both being among the most prominent followers of Freud. Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar , is a semi-autobiographical story where Plath tries to cope with her past, facing her first suicidal trip. She was twenty when she decided to die, but she managed to come back. Although, she never forgot the idea and preserved it in her artistic expression; as if she felt more certain now when she had fully experienced her demon.
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