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Poet, Persona and Performance in Sylvia Plath's Ariel

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Poet, Persona and Performance in Sylvia Plath's Ariel Aspects of Identity: Poet, Persona and Performance in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel By Leigh Caron Esterhuizen Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Howard College. Durban 2010 DECLARATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, in the Graduate Programme in English Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. I declare that this dissertation is my own unaided work. All citations, references and borrowed ideas have been duly acknowledged. I confirm that an external editor was not used. It is being submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Humanities, Development and Social Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. None of the present work has been submitted previously for any degree or examination in any other university. Leigh Caron Esterhuizen 16 February 2011 I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Sally-Ann Murray, for her invaluable input and encouragement; Barbara Barkhuizen, for her assistance; my family, for enduring my drama; and finally, Denise Garforth – a very special person whose kindness knew no limits. ABSTRACT Female identity in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel collection (first published in 1965) is a complex site of being and becoming within a 1950s culture of performance. From a twenty-first century perspective, this dissertation bridges traditional and contemporary readings of Plath and the Plath archive through a referencing of motifs such as celebrity, ‘the gaze’, ventriloquism and clothing. The inter-discursive approach used – literary, psychoanalytic, cultural – attempts to underline the ongoing significance of Plath’s place as a woman poet in literary studies. Keywords: 1950s; identity; performance; women’s poetry; confessional poetry; the archive CONTENTS Introduction 1-8 Chapter One: Celebrity 9-31 Chapter Two: Assuming the Position 32-60 Chapter Three: Body, Voice and Ventriloquism 61-90 Chapter Four: Clothing 91-112 Conclusion 113-117 References INTRODUCTION It is the unflinching bravado of Sylvia Plath’s writing that first caught my attention. Distinct for its ability to cross cultural genres, Plath’s poetry has influenced the work of playwrights, filmmakers, composers, choreographers and musicians, as well as a spectrum of other writers. There has been a major revitalisation of Plath studies since the publication, in 2000, of Plath’s journals and, in 2004, of the restored Ariel. One consequence, as Anita Helle observes, is that “Plath scholars have recently been finding their way around the impasse of woman as death by returning to the archive to consider an abundance of new material from fresh critical perspectives” (2005:633). Further, these “preoccupations with ‘evidence’ are not solely a return to the ‘thing’, the artefact as object, as much as a turn towards a consciousness of history and method, a critical awareness of the politics of knowledge that have materially and discursively framed Plath’s legacy” (Helle 2005:633). In conjunction with selected poems from her other collections – The Colossus (1967), Crossing the Water (1971), and Winter Trees (1975) – I have chosen to focus on Plath’s (in)famous Ariel (originally published in 1965), so as to deconstruct the ‘Plath myth’ from what could be construed as the site of its creation1. In Ariel, as in her earlier collections, Plath probes the topoi of history, introspection and self-reflexivity, yet employs a heightened theatricality “that seems new and indeed unprecedented” (Axelrod 2006:80) and extremely unsettling. It is this that I intend to consider. My work on Ariel will not rehearse the scope (or the judgmental moralising) of Lynda K. Bundtzen’s The Other Ariel (2001), which is at any rate a book-length comparison of the two versions of Plath’s final poetry manuscript. Instead, I will be guided by the recognition that “[e]merging from renewed interest in Plath studies”, for instance, “is a greater emphasis on and appreciation of interdisciplinary and cross-genre ramifications, as well as bold reformulations of the public and private forces that have shaped Plath’s legacy as a ‘confessional’ writer” (Helle 2005:633). It is in terms of such complex critical enquiry that I intend to consider Plath’s Ariel – a volume which, according to new archival research, cannot insistently be understood as an idiosyncratic record of a gifted woman’s psychological instability, but taps extra-poetically into “the irreducible center of public life” (Von Hallberg 1985:4). As a woman in the twenty-first century, I will approach Plath’s poetry from the perspective of someone living in a world where the concept of identity is being significantly redefined. The contemporary ‘striptease culture’ (McNair 2002), for example, is one of explicit self-exposure in which the public/private boundaries collapse, and questions of 1 agency and subjection are difficult to situate. Here, for instance, I will be bound to address scholarship which has sought to annex Plath to a feminist project, for as Helle argues, “Plath and her identities still do not conform to any monocular feminist lens”. In many ways, the fragmented self I will discuss in relation to the Ariel poems reflects the impasse of a critical discourse that has, in Helle’s words, “broken down along a number of lines” (2005:640). With this in mind, I will not only conceptualise Plath’s poetry in relation to a number of fairly traditional tropes (among them ‘mask’, ‘gaze’, and ‘ventriloquism’) but place these against more contemporary analytical concepts such as ‘the archive’, and ‘the performative’. In doing so, I hope to illustrate the significance of both conventional and contemporary tropes as they bear upon Plath’s mediated female identity. Further, in some regard, as current Plath scholarship is suggesting, the new millennium retrains a critical spotlight on issues of privacy and surveillance that pervaded North American Cold War poetry of the 1950s. In this climate, where acceding to comfortable conformity was the norm, Plath’s Ariel poems push to the limit some of the experiential and stylistic risks associated with ‘self’ and ‘exposure’. Peter Childs, for example, proposes that Plath’s suffering is “tied up in her poetry” with “postwar issues of anonymity”, “the relationship between the individual and the mass-produced, the ownership of bodies and the production of identities” (1999:64). Here, instead of simply trying to align Plath’s ‘confessionalism’ with feminist readings of women’s writing, my research will affiliate with recent revisions of the term. Deborah Nelson’s Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (2002), for instance, broadens rather limiting early studies of the mode by C. B. Cox and A. R. Jones (1964), and Alfred Alvarez (1968). In particular, I support Nelson’s theory that ‘confessionalism’ – the “most secret, damaging and disruptive elements of private life on display” – arose as a counter- discourse to the official ideologies of privacy and surveillance during the Cold War (2006:23). A particularly interesting study is Christina Britzolakis’ Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (2002), a text which posits the notion that Plath stages her confessions. Clearly, new scholarship presents a fascinating opportunity for me to engage with the Ariel poems through the unstable zone where privacy meets what Helle calls the “shifting borders of identity” (2005:636). Overall, I intend to investigate the possibilities and limitations which arise when a reader attempts to bridge traditional and current takes on Plath, and I will argue that the Ariel poems attest to the complex sites of being and becoming which inflect the identity2 of the middle class American woman poet in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Historical context is 2 important in this regard. The tension between Plath’s ambition to be a successful poet and the perfect daughter, wife and mother, among other roles, is inextricably bound to the hypocrisies of her era – “an age which for a long time refused to acknowledge the end of the kind of brave-face mask of cheerful wholeness in the aftermath of two World Wars” (Lim 1997:41). Socioculturally significant, the Ariel poems are explosive in that they confront the sexual double standards and societal expectations which the Eisenhower era imposed on women. As Janet Malcolm explains, the history of Plath’s life is a signature story of the fearful, double-faced fifties. Plath embodies in a vivid, almost emblematic way the schizoid character of the period. She is the divided self par excellence. The taut realism of the late poems and the slack, girls’-book realism of her life ... are grotesquely incongruous. The photographs of Plath as a vacuous girl of the fifties, with dark lipstick and blond hair, add to one’s sense of the jarring disparity between the life and the work. (1993:89) As a corollary, Plath displays an acute awareness, in numerous settings, of playing various roles before different audiences. This multiple role playing is complicated by her identity as a poet – a role which leads her to focus on self-representation in a way that is personal and highly individual. Writing is, after all, a profession that is “imagined as a process of becoming aimed at total self- realization, which Plath understood as the achievement of a heightened, intensified, permanent ‘life’ (Plath’s word, which she uses repeatedly)” (Hammer 2001:67). On this note, I will endeavour to answer the following questions: how are protean, multiple identities – from the perspective of the 1950s woman poet – conceptualised in Ariel? Further, how are these identities influenced by Plath’s psychobiography and western cultural discourses, and how are they unstable and enigmatic, defying straightforward assessment? While it is true that other scholars (Sandra Lim and Susan R. Van Dyne, for example) have examined Plath’s representation of the protean self, my objective is to re-frame this investigation by placing the literary texts firmly and, I imagine, resonantly, in conjunction with more non-literary contexts and materials.
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