Claudia Minter Context and Form in the Work of Plath and Hughes Having an Understanding of the Context and Form of Sylvia Plath's And
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Claudia Minter Context and Form in the Work of Plath and Hughes Having an understanding of the context and form of Sylvia Plath's and Ted Hughes' writing is vital in appreciating the textual conversations they form. The connections between the texts are enhanced by intertextuality and language techniques to explore significant events and values from their contexts. Plath's poem 'Fever 103' is found in her Ariel collection, written in the early 1960s, and uses literary allusion to convey Plath's feeling of being trapped by societal expectations of womanhood. She alludes to Dante's 'Inferno', in which Dante travels across three worlds, with a motif of the number three significantly within the poem through it being comprised of a number of tercets. Dante's first location was the underworld, in which Plath describes "with almost a kind of glee or pleasure in the darkness and the violence of the language" (Abbott, 2018) "the bodies of adulterers" burning for their sins. This comes after her discovery of Hughes' betrayal: he was having an affair with family friend Assia Wevill, making Plath's description of an adulterer's fate all the more poignant. 'Fever 103' then moves on to Dante's second setting, Earth, as Plath alludes to the fever she caught on her honeymoon. Hughes fed her "Lemon water, chicken / Water. Water makes me retch", the thrice repeated "water" punctuated by the negatively connoted "retch", revealing Plath's disgust at Hughes' lack of commitment to their marriage. In the final section, she breaks the motif, stating "I think I am going up / I think I may rise", repeating the personal pronoun "I" four times, symbolising her new focus on independence, aligned with Dante's ascension to Heaven. Through this manipulation of form and language, elements of Plath's context can be uncovered as she moves away from a constraining and one- sided marriage and comes to value freedom. Hughes' collection Birthday Letters collides with this depiction, attempting to argue instead that Plath's spiralling mental illness and fixation on her deceased father was what put strain on their relationship. In 'The Shot', Hughes employs the extended metaphor of Plath as a bullet, released "when his death touched the trigger", referring to Otto Plath who died when Sylvia was only young. Hughes aligns this to the development of an Electra complex, as a result of which he as her husband is only a stand-in for her father. The free-verse poem is full of ballistic imagery such as "You ricocheted" and "Trajectory perfect", detailing the hurt Hughes felt when Plath promptly left his life through first separation then her subsequent suicide. Again, he claims the reasoning was "Your Daddy, / The god with the smoking gun", rather than the dehumanising reality of being a woman in a patriarchal society. This line itself is an allusion to one of Plath's other poems, 'Daddy', where she kills the titular father figure in order to free herself from male influence and pursue her literary career. By inverting this, Hughes provides comments from his own perspective, that Plath's troubling mental illnesses stemmed only from her father's early and sudden death: Hughes himself played no part in it. Plath's 'Nick and the Candlestick' also draws on this idea of a god dictating reality, except here she is this almighty figure and her son, Nicholas, the baby Jesus. Through continuous religious allusion, Plath explores the idea of rebirth and Nicholas as a saviour, most explicitly with the line "You are the baby in the barn", referring to the nativity scene. The tercet form of the three line verses symbolises the Holy Trinity she positions herself in: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Her "earthen womb" is imagined with natural imagery as fertile and valuable, capable of producing new life. Plath's valuing of her capacity for pregnancy is a move to reclaim her power in a world that dictates that a woman's only role is as a child incubator: by reimagining her son as the Messiah, Plath directly labels herself then as God, all powerful. No matter how much she must endure - Hughes' affair, him abusing her to the point of miscarriage, difficulty achieving a serious career due to her sex - Plath ultimately reclaims the ability to being again, rebirth, as shown in the metaphor of the magical phoenix in 'Lady Lazarus': "out of the ash / I rise with my red hair. / And I eat men like air." Plath's determination to overcome the limitations of her context by reimaging the patriarchal Christian tradition is revealed through her use of form and language. Hughes' 'The Bee God' "ransack[s] Plath's store of private narrative and biography" (Alvarez Imbuido, 2001), presenting a perspective that collides with her established narrative of resistance. As discussed in 'Nick and the Candlestick', Plath can be viewed as "the girl who wanted to be God" (Plath, 1949), a position which Hughes denies. He demotes her to an "Abbess / In the nunnery of the bees", stripping her of authority and placing her in service of "the bees", symbolic of her father due to his work as an entomologist studying bees. Alike to 'The Shot', when Hughes is fatally wounded by Plath in the form of a bullet, 'The Bee God' closes with Hughes' death, this time stung by an army of bees. He insists "Your face wanted to save me / From what had been decided", the direct address to Plath claiming she still cared for him, contrary to her work seeking to escape him and his influence. Hughes even mimics Plath's frequent use of tercet form, departing from his usual free-verse arrangement. These recollections to her work and implication in his poetry that she had killed some part of him, suppressed his poetic voice, are ironic considering her death by suicide in 1963. As Birthday Letters was published in 1998, Hughes indeed got the final say, and Plath will never have the chance to continue their textual conversation from beyond the grave. Both Plath and Hughes' manipulation of form and language with frequent use of intertextuality provides insight into their respective personal, social, and historical contexts, allowing the audience to develop a greater understanding of the connections between them. .