DEAD SUBJECTS: RESURRECTING THE FEMALE VOICE

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University ^ In partial fulfillment of zoiB the requirements for ENGjL the Degree 5

Master of Arts

In

English: Literature

by

April Marie Sanders

San Francisco, California

May 2018 Copyright by April Marie Sanders 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Dead Subjects: Resurrecting the Female Voice by April Marie

Sanders, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in

English: Literature at San Francisco State University. DEAD SUBJECTS: RESURRECTING THE FEMALE VOICE

April Marie Sanders San Francisco, California 2018

Beginning with Emily Dickinson, I trace the posthumous voice to Lorine Niedecker and

Sylvia Plath. In opposition to the elegy convention, I examine how Plath and Niedecker revive figuratively dead female speakers, specifically the voice of the wife, in select poems to bring awareness to women’s inequality through anatomization, commodification language, consumerism, and societal expectations of femininity from the 1940s onward. Considering the tradition and the trajectory of the posthumous voice, I analyze the specific function and the greater political purpose of the dead female speakers as a means to promote individual identity and equality. Ultimately, I argue that the posthumous voice functions as the ideal vehicle for marginalized speakers and transforms the place of death from stasis to one of resistance and power. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would first and foremost like to express my deep gratitude to my dedicated readers,

Professor Meg Schoerke and Professor Summer Star, for their generosity, kindness, and extraordinary patience. Professor Schoerke consistently provided keen feedback, which was crucial to my learning and progress. She also offered apt advice on ways for me to improve as a writer, reader, and thinker. Professor Star kept me motivated with her

warmth, helped me discover new connections, and suggested different areas to explore in

my work. I could have not completed this project without their unwavering positivity. I would also like to thank my partner, family, and friends for their love, understanding, and encouragement to pursue my passions. Special thanks to Professor Steven Gould Axelrod for nurturing my love of poetry and helping me see endless possibilities in everything.

And finally, thank you to all poets (living and dead) for their beautiful contributions to the world.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

Chapter One: Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970): Speaking through the Bride, Wife, and Strife...... 18

The Image of the Dead Doll Wife...... 21

Confined Bodies...... 31

Gender, Worth, and Nothingness...... 38

Chapter Two: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963): Revivification, or Metaphorically Dead Women Speaking...... 47

The Reconfiguration of the Female Body...... 50

Aligning Death, Marriage, and Oppression...... 60

Lost and Found Identity in “Lady Lazarus”...... 69

Conclusion...... 84

Bibliography...... 97 1

Introduction

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air - Between the Heaves of Storm - —Emily Dickinson (591)

We do not think of the dead as active in their graves, so how might their words be vital to the living? What does it mean for the dead to metaphorically resurrect, and even further, to speak? In Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died-” the female voice resurrects after death but appears almost on a separate plane. The speaker remains

“still,” as does the tone in the poem which is reinforced by the repetition of the word

“still” and the enclosed space of the “room.” While this stillness does not denote much power or agency, the fly buzzes in direct contrast with this “stillness.” In Dickinson:

Selected Poems and Commentaries, Helen Vendler remarks on the seemingly unfortunate relationship between the speaker and the fly:

The dying speaker realizes the insignificant Fly is herself. Her death-emblem is no winged Psyche-soul rising like a butterfly from the discarded body, but rather the Fly, a mocking (and songless) sign of mortal dissolution . . . Mortality, in the person of the monumentalized and actual Fly, possesses the grandeur of Truth defeating Illusion. (268)

One would hope not to feel as though a fly is what one becomes or represents one’s self after death. However, Vendler points out that the fly’s presence carries more truth than anything else. While poetry tends to speak highly of the afterlife, and affirms religious belief, in this moment, there is no “King” to welcome the dead speaker, but simply a fly to keep the body company (and eventually to feast upon its decay). Dead speakers rarely 2 have motivation to sugareoat because there is no reason to charm or impress; there is only a need to warn or help the living.

By speaking for herself, as Dickinson’s speaker does in the above poem, the dead woman is able to produce a powerful voice from an unlikely source—from death.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff writes that Dickinson “transformed [Poe’s trope'] into a woman poet who has the courage to ‘look’ squarely at death itself-probing to discover the meaning of that final moment that awaits us all, and then imposing aesthetic structures upon her insights. The result is a unique form of empowerment” (The Columbia History of American Poetry 133). Wolff argues that Dickinson’s use of the dead voice acts as a means to agency as she undermines traditional elegy. By giving a voice to those who have typically been silent or silenced, women poets can use the space of death to build informed and politically charged female speakers. Rather than the man elegizing the woman, the woman can relay the reality of her situation as opposed to an elegy written by a man that would reinforce false perceptions of feminine perfection.

While the trope of the speaking dead originated before Dickinson, she was most likely writing in response to male writers who killed off women in their writing, so they could elegize them. This trope traces back before Shakespeare, but he did it regularly with characters such as Ophelia or Lavinia.2 But, more contemporaneous with Dickinson, we might think of Edgar Allan Poe with works like “The Raven,” “The Black Cat,”

1 From Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition.” A woman was meant to be the mournful subject of a poem—not the creator. 2 Both Ophelia and Lavinia are mourned and elegized by male characters. Lavinia’s, from Titus Andronicus, mourning is a bit more complicated since her father, who mourns her the most, is also her murderer. 3

“Ligeia,” or Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems.3 But what is the key difference between a male speaker elegizing a dead woman, versus a dead woman who can speak for herself?

Customarily, the elegy assumes an already dead subject of a poem that a poet mourns. In a way, elegy acts as a form of silencing and idealizing of the dead. However, when the dead actively choose to speak for themselves, they reject traditional elegy form. Through speaking for themselves, they create a new space for speech and agency.

Feminine Self-Elegy, as discussed in Claire Raymond’s The Posthumous Voice in

Women's Writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath, is defined as “the formal gesture by which . . . a writer position[s] herself as at once outcast from the canon and is able to overturn that outcast status” (31). Traditional pastoral elegy, typically written by men, silences the female voice, but through Raymond’s “feminine self-elegy” the poet can claim a space for herself in the canon, as well as empower the female speaker to have a voice after death and take agency to reflect on herself rather than be reflected on by a male speaker. Although is it the voice of the dead, the female voice should be able to occupy the same space as the male voice—or even have more of a right to speak— specifically in the event of her own death.

Similar to Raymond’s argument, I consider how the female poets, Lorine

Niedecker and Sylvia Plath, reclaim their space in poetry and how they shape the voice of the dead. However, instead of considering feminism in terms of self-elegy, I examine the place of the dead speaker and how it acts as a key space to reveal secrets of gender oppression, and ultimately, highlights underlying feminist politics. Elegy, whether self or

Published in 1800, the “Lucy” poems were a series of five elegy poems regarding the same young, beautiful, female, and dead subject “Lucy.” 4 other, denotes a sort of inactivity or a posture of being “on the outside looking in”

(similar to what we see in Niedecker’s “I rose from marsh mud” which reads as if it were a wedding elegy). But the dead female speaker takes the elegy tradition a step further, for she is within the realm of the dead and shares that sacred space. Generally, there is some type of movement even if space is limited. Specifically Sylvia Plath and Lorine

Niedecker undermine elegy tradition because in their poems there is no time for grief or sadness for the dead. The elegy, due to the lack of lamenting, becomes a half truth. We can keep the reflection portion of the elegy, but we must remove the element of melancholy to fully understand the dead female speaker presented in the poems ahead.

While the dead make it clear that they have suffered, they take solace in the fact that they can help other women. So, the dead no longer have much to be sad about, but have all the experience to communicate to the living how they might work on creating a more equal society so that they will not have to suffer in life as the dead did. Niedecker and Plath use the dead speaker to highlight injustices done to women and speak of what the living might traditionally hesitate to protest. The tone shifts from elegy to an empowered dead speaker, respectively, from an offer of consolation to revolution and resurrection.

Although Lorine Niedecker and Sylvia Plath were not exact contemporaries, as

Niedecker was bom almost 30 years prior, both poets share the convention of the posthumous voice. Both poets use the posthumous voice as a pathway to challenge inequality, and their experiential confinement, specifically related to gender expectations and the institution of marriage. In the works of Niedecker and Plath, female gender and marriage interconnect, for marriage was a stereotypical facet of what it was to be a 5 woman in the mid-20th century. Societal expectations prescribed women to traditional roles of the housewife, the mother, and the caregiver. These strictures held true throughout both Niedecker and Plath’s lifetimes (and still carry on through parts of society and media today). Both writers offered insight into what many women were experiencing, particularly during the 1950s: the desolate life of wifehood.

But the dead speakers used by these poets are unlike the ones we are used to hearing about in Poe’s world: beautiful, dead, perfect, and silent. In “The Philosophy of

Composition” Edgar Allan Poe notes how such women fit into what he considers to be the topic best suited for poetry: “When it [melancholy] most closely allies itself to

Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world — and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover” (643). In Poe’s definition there is no space for female poets or creators; instead, they must always-already be the subject. However, Niedecker and Plath undermine Poe’s definition; these posthumous voices are active, raw, experienced, and unapologetic. These speakers do not talk about what they missed in life, nor what they are missing; instead, they discuss the hardships that were brought on by an overly patriarchal society. They no longer fear speaking out against their oppressors. The metaphorical space of death operates as a space of reflection and because of that, the speakers are prepared to share their experience.

As haunting as it may be, women poets create a voice that rises from the idealization of the female corpse. The speaker protests “feminine” perfection; she does not allow it to exist because she rejects silence; she finds strength in her revived language 6 and power. The female speaker refuses to let death stop her. The subversion of the perfected female corpse acts as a way for the female speaker to gain agency in her metaphorical death. Death, as a metaphorical and transitory state, is where Niedecker and

Plath choose for their speaker to speak, for they are no longer barred by the rules of society, and social institutions no longer hold them. Diana Fuss, in her book on elegy poems, Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy, recognizes the connection between language and power. She suggests that women writers construct death poems because speech after death signals power. Fuss remarks that there are:

[significantly . . . more last-word consolation poems by women than by men, a gender imbalance that can be attributed not merely to women’s socially sanctioned role as ideal mourners but to the freedom the deathbed provides to women to finally speak their minds. The deathbed, historians now recognize, is one of the few areas where a woman’s words have not historically been devalued. (16) As depressing of a statement as this may be, women writers have an undeniable power when using the voice of the dead. Since the deathbed acts as a sacred place, the dead are rarely interrupted or doubted, so with the dead speaker comes recognition and credibility.

Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen in Death and Representation similarly recognize “[s]ince death is most often powerful—supremely so—the representation of death may covertly, or incidentally, assign power in ways that cannot be directly realized within a particular culture at a given moment in history” therefore, . .the corpse may have more authority than any other political body” (17). To use the voice of the dead means to appropriate more power of any single person. By gendering the dead, then,

Niedecker and Plath consciously decide to supply the woman speaker with power she most likely did not have during life. 7

Bronfen and Goodwin also argue that since the living do not have access to the position or state of the dead, we must always assume that any representation of death is not accurate. They maintain that:

fejvery representation o f death is a misrepresentation. Thus the analysis of it must show not only how it claims to represent death, but also what else it in fact represents, however suppressed: assertion of alternative power, self-referential metaphor, aggression against individuals or groups, formation of group identities and ideologies, and so forth. Whether as state or as event, death cannot be represented. Attempts at representation therefore seek to appropriate their resistant power. (20)

Niedecker and Plath experiment with this voice because it opens up a different form of resistance. With a dead speaker, Niedecker and Plath address gender inequality and social issues that plague American society, but are unable to plague the speaker since death creates an immunity to the living’s social conditions. Therefore, the speaker does a service for the living; the dead are no longer affected by society, but the living must both endure the treatment as well as continue the work to improve society for the next generation. In a way, the dead support the living.

Therefore, a reference to death, or the voice of the dead in this case, is not for the sake of a pure focus on death itself, but rather to highlight something else. Bronfen and

Goodwin go on to say that “representations are not intended to be true or accurate but instead used to bring attention to—to represent things other than death or things that bring the living distress that match the distress of death” (16). While death may seem like an exaggerated comparison, the distress that it causes could easily mirror how society treats marginalized people or we can think of how “social” death can affect the psyche. 8

On a surface level, and certainly deeper, a poem may concern death; however, death may function as a gate that leads to something of importance for the living.

Several other scholars have examined how the voice of the dead signifies society’s oppressive structures through female speakers. For instance, in Dead Women

Talking: Figures o f Injustice in American Literature, Brian Norman analyzes the use of dead speakers in novels and pinpoints the need for why these women must speak after their death. Norman posits that the posthumous voice is “a tradition in which writers address pressing social issues that refuse to stay dead” (1). Fictional women speak after death because they must, in order to correct the wrongs they experienced within life and what continues in the world after they pass. Norman claims that the goal of the posthumous voice is to get to a place where “dead women need not talk” (21). He believes that justice will be achieved once the dead no longer need to speak, as “[sjilence has a role to play in restoring dignity and autonomy to violated women” (183). Dead speakers who speak out themselves are those who have endured some form of violence.

Even outside the context of the poem, if the dead speak then some injustice has been witnessed by or carried out against the speaker.

This voice has been identified by scholars with many terms and phrases, from the

“posthumous voice” to the “proleptic voice,” to “posthumous postures.” Across all fronts, critics tend to agree that the posthumous voice is intentionally unnatural. A dead speaker can be jarring, so what better way to attract a reader's attention than to confront the reader with the uncanny? Once the poet has the attention of the living, she can then use the dead speaker as a vehicle to raise awareness of the injustice experienced by the living, 9 specifically women. The speaker may have died, but the conditions under which she was living may continue, and because of that the posthumous voice as a recurring trope then asks us to consider not just the text but also the social conditions under which the dead speakers were living.

To utilize a voice is the rejection of silence, but silence in death problematizes the way we may traditionally consider silence. Death, as a represented position from the standpoint of the living, is the ultimate silencing. How then, might silence be employed as empowering rather than deflating? Silence as a form of control, especially in poetry, empowers the female as poet and the female as figure as she chooses her silence. The speaker has the authority to determine what is revealed. Lorine Niedecker enriches poems by using the power of precise language. Silence, used as a means of agency, functions as an influential tool because the poet can decide how she is to speak or not speak and how to best communicate a particular message. In her article on Lorine Niedecker, “From

Smallness to Greatness: The Forgotten Poetry of Lorine Niedecker” Anne Loecher writes that “to follow the development of Niedecker’s poetics is to find its tracks and traces in silences, in smallness, in pauses and paucities” (1). Therefore, the stylistic choices of the poet and their precision of language and form enhance the poetry. The main importance of silence, however, lies in choice, and this is a source of power: silence by choice, smallness by choice, anonymity by choice, a dead speaker by choice. Everything becomes bound in what society does not expect from women: her agency, power, and cunning. Typically we give silence to the dead as a form of respect, so the dead speakers here seize their opportunity to be heard by controlling what they chose to say or not say. 10

While it may appear ironic that a dead female speaker may be heard, even if one considers her death metaphorical, not being heard was also a condition that many female writers were used to. On the level of the poet, half the battle of entering the canon was getting readers and critics to accept women seriously as creators. For both speaker and poet, gender socially determined her weakness, which is almost always the cause of her unchosen silence; the dead share her despair in going unheard without choice. Therefore, by taking on a posthumous voice, the speaker becomes traditionally silenced but uncovers a voice of the unfamiliar, that is, the dead speaker. Even better, these dead speakers are not lifeless or zombie like; neither Niedecker nor Plath are mindless in their poetry, they are sharp, multiplicitous, and charged with a sense of reinvigoration. Both create frightening figures at times, yet their speakers proclaim truths and critique the eeriness of everyday American life, or more accurately, the feigned equality of American consumerist culture.

Both poets were also exposed to and a part of American culture during the

1940s-60s, which was obsessed with materialism. This obsession showed itself through consumerist tendencies and the construction of the perfect appliance-packed home, housewife, and family. Niedecker and Plath wrote in response to and to challenge 1950s patriarchal culture. The 1950s were a prime time of the nuclear family, the attempt to be happy, fulfilled, and feign perfection. The 50s and 60s were eventually exposed for their oppressive tendencies in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. While this is not the most inclusive text, it works well to prove a point about the social conditions of

Niedecker and Plath’s time. Friedan shares the deeply rooted oppression women faced, 11 specifically in the domestic realm. “The problem with no name” as Friedan described it, took over women’s lives; there was an underlying expectation that women needed to either marry or search for a man to marry. Friedan notes that this era proclaimed that

“[a]ll they [women] had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children” (16). The image of the child bride comes into view since even at a young age girls were expected to be on the hunt for a husband.4 Friedan notes that the age women were getting married plummeted to an average of 20 years old, and in correlation with that, women’s enrollment in college significantly decreased. Of those women who did enroll in college, some would drop out as soon as they got engaged, fulfilling the social requirements of womanhood and completing her “Mrs.” degree.

Marriage and bearing children was marketed to be the ultimate goal of female life.

Education and independence were put to the wayside:

The suburban housewife-she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife-freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery .... She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. (Friedan 18)

The housewife during Niedecker and Plath’s time became a symbol of what a woman should aspire to in her life. Media, fashion, and other societal outlets continued to reinforce this even after The Feminine Mystique (and still do). The Feminine Mystique helps us locate the times Niedecker and Plath were exposed to, which gives insight into why we see echoes of consumerism, the housewife, the dead, and the domestic interwoven in their poetry.

4 The first poem in chapter one, “I rose from marsh mud” looks at a child bride, so we see the continuation of these themes in the poems. 12

When we consider why the dead speaker voice resurrects specifically with

Dickinson, Niedecker, and Plath (and others still today), it may be due to atmosphere of war or political unrest. Most of the poems examined in the next two chapters reflect some type of violence or reference to war. Therefore, the sociohistorical connection between (at least these three poets) may be because of the influence that war plays on the writers in regards to a need to talk about gender roles as well as to consider marriage and death.

First, war means a significant amount of death which would bring the dead to a poet’s mind. Second, war has a tendency to exaggerate traditional gender roles. Men and women have different roles that they must fulfill during wartime. Within traditional patriarchal society, if men don’t join the cause, they are not performing their masculinity and in turn letting down their country. If women do not perform their duty of marrying and holding down the fort they are not asserting their femininity. If men are expected to perform hyper-masculinity then women must perform hyper-femininity which translates to traditional feminine gender roles of the housewife, the mother, etc. Niedecker and Plath critique these expectations of hyper-femininity by attaching those expectations to dead women while displaying the speakers’ lack of satisfaction in life.

Since these gender roles are exaggerated, this exaggeration echoes throughout other areas of society, specifically consumerism, which we also see Niedecker and Plath discuss in their poems. In “Homophobia, Housewives, and Hyper-Masculinity: Gender and American Policymaking in the Nuclear Age,” Matthew W. Dunne examines how war affects societal expectations and in turn gender expectations, which resonates with

Friedan’s study. He notes that “the ideal American family was predicated on the 13 assumption that behind every housewife was a male breadwinner who could provide her with the washing machine and vacuum cleaners that would free her from the drudgery of housework and allow her to live an easier, more fulfilling life as a housewife and consumer” (103). Not only do Niedecker and Plath use the language of consumerism and materialism, which acts as a distraction from war as well as keeps the economy bolstered, but war also calculates into why they use the voice of the dead and the wife.

Many of the dead female speakers I consider address some aspect of safety, which also seems apt for wartime. Marriage, which in the past has increased during wartime, creates a safety net, or at least an appearance of safety, for both husband and wife. Later in his article Dunne emphasizes that war encourages marriage for the purpose of safety,

“the climate of the Cold War created anxieties and pressures that influenced Americans to embrace domesticity in an attempt to seek safety and security in the nuclear age” (105).

War means there will be death, which in turn creates fear, and therefore, pushes society to seek safety through whatever means necessary. Niedecker and Plath subvert gender roles and critique societal expectations of marriage, which during war time seems extra subversive. The dead speaker becomes appropriate because she embodies most people’s worst fear. But once that fear deteriorates, what is left underneath is the reality of gender inequality that continues to persist within marriage.

Both poets present marriage as an institution that is more confining rather than freeing.The relationship of husband and wife goes beyond the binary of victim/oppressor, and Niedecker and Plath encourage us to turn our focus to society and the social institutions themselves. In The Wedding Complex: Forms o f Belonging in Modern 14

American Culture Elizabeth Freeman writes that “[a] civil wedding seems overtly to confirm the state’s power over marriage . . . [and] also announces the existence of a body politic and makes explicit the induction of a couple as its disciplinary subjects” (104).

While Freeman makes this argument specifically about the civil wedding, she argues that marriage creates two different relationships, “one between husband and wife, and one between couple and state” (107). Marriage, in this way is less of a beautiful union, and more of a state institution used to control its subjects. In Niedecker and Plath, we see how the pressure to marry and marry young actually hurts the female speakers, whether it be physically, spiritually, or mentally. Ultimately, Niedecker’s and Plath’s poems with dead female speakers highlight that marriage functions more as a form of patriarchal control and a reinforcement of gender hierarchy, rather than an expression of love.

Throughout the poetry of Lorine Niedecker and Sylvia Plath, the idea of marriage is emphasized as a social institution, as something that a woman becomes locked in and a space in which she loses herself. In marriage, individuality is lost and the woman becomes a part of her “other half’ as the female is traditionally expected to take the last name of her husband which acts as a marker of ownership. Marriage as a stifling circumstance not only relates to the image of the metaphorically dead woman, but also to reaching a point of feminine fulfillment, which is traditionally understood for a woman as marrying, having children, and settling down. The archetype of the “beautiful dead woman” lies within her paralysis, her silence, and her inability to act. Therefore, I argue that this “beautiful dead woman” that Poe references in his “Philosophy of Composition” is actually the figure of the “wife.” The figure of the wife is assumed to accept her social 15 death as a sacrifice to her husband and be silenced by him; within society’s perspective he is the one who is endowed with agency.

Moreover, the choice to focus on the voice of the wife, rather than the virgin, means that the speakers may have much more experience to reflect on during the poem.

Traditionally “virgin” follows young, dead, and beautiful in poetry. The use of the wife instead of the virgin then seems to convey that the speaker is experienced, wise, and is not naive, for she has potentially lived a fuller life than the prior might have. The word

“wife” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (as the first definition shows) is

“restricted to woman of humble rank or of ‘low employment’” and another definition follows “A woman joined to a man by marriage.” The first definition is surprising, as the housewife was considered a low ranking job in earlier times; the origin of the word itself is demeaning to women. On the other hand, the first definition for “husband” in the

Oxford English Dictionary is “Uses relating to a family or household” and “[t]he male head of household; the master of the house.”5 Why is the husband not seen as a position of low rank, but rather as a head of a household? The two terms are ill-balanced. The wife is always seen in relation to the husband figure as the wife is the lesser subject in the binary of husband and wife. Colloquially in English, “husband” is said before “wife” when one refers to the “husband and wife” or “man and wife.” Overall, the wife is treated as a figure of subservience.

The dead wife speaker’s recognition of herself as possession or object acts as a way to empower the female voice. After her acknowledgement of reality, she overcomes

5 On the Oxford English Dictionary website the entry actually points the reader to continue to click on the definition of “master” as a synonym for husband. 16 her lack of agency and warns other women of what can happen in marriage because of the cultural climate and limited space in gender roles. However, the subversion of dead speakers lies in the works of Emily Dickinson, as the dead woman begins to speak, but this tradition carries on into the works of Lorine Niedecker and Sylvia Plath, as the dead woman is finally able to take the stage and speak her grievances. Niedecker and Plath act as exemplary female writers who construct female speakers who speak through death as a means to overcome the idealization of the female corpse.

Both Niedecker and Plath undermine what Poe refers to as the “bereaved lover,” as these women take on the voices of the dead loved one. In my particular selection of poems, I focus primarily on the voice and figure of the dead wife. By taking on the specific voice of the dead loved one, the female reclaims her agency that is lost in marriage. Therefore, there is no bereavement for her own death, but rather an insistence upon a time for honesty and pure expression that the marriage may not have allowed.

Lorine Niedecker and Sylvia Plath are representative poets who showcase the dead female speaker as an empowering force through which a woman may speak openly and freely. Through close readings of their poems, I analyze how these women encourage female empowerment and combat gender oppression. These poems use the dead wife voice as one of rebirth, growth, and breakthrough. Through death, the speaker may step outside of social expectations and boundaries. Once dead, the female speaker transcends the confinements of sex, gender, and marriage, and it is death that frees her, as is commonly noted in marriage vows, “Until death do us part.” Therefore, I examine death

(in its figurative form) as a social and cultural release or escape and as a means to 17 empowerment within and outside of a patriarchal society. Over the next two chapters, one dedicated to Niedecker and one to Plath, I consider a sample set of three poems per poet that use a dead speaker to communicate a revived sense of agency. The dead female voice is one of strength, whether dead or alive, but ultimately, Niedecker and Plath’s poetry resists the silencing of death. 18

Chapter 1: Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970): Speaking through the Bride, Wife, and Strife

To give a voice to the corpse, to represent the body, is in a sense to return it to life; the voice represents not so much the dead as the once living, juxtaposed with the needs of the as yet living.

—Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elizabeth Bronfen, Death and Representation

Lorine Niedecker employs the figurative posthumous voice in only a slice of her work, yet she does so in such an artful way that it allows the reader to become fully enveloped by her ability to bring a speaker in and out of life. The posthumous voice reminds the reader that the body may be lifeless, yet the voice lives on. Through the female posthumous voice, Lorine Niedecker uncovers a powerful being, untouched by the constraints of society and gender expectations. She disjoints our notions of the normal, complicates our complacency, and forces us to challenge all that we accept for

“normality.”

Born May 12, 1903 in Fort Atkinson, Niedecker spent most of her life in rural

Wisconsin. Niedecker had little literary success in her lifetime, only publishing a few short books of poetry, as well as publishing poems in literary journals, yet she never reached “famous” status. Fortunately, a few dedicated scholars have championed her poetry and pushed for its canonization. Current debates in Niedecker studies revolve around whether it was her intention to write for fame or for personal benefit. Critics such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis argue that Niedecker had deliberate intentions to remain anonymous:

[h]er anonymity is, then, a utopian gamble; she will have a name when poetic changes . . . and social and political changes -even unto revolution -begin to transform the class and gender materials that she spent a lifetime analyzing in 19

pretended simplicity and principled anonymity. (Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work 161)

DuPlessis contends that Niedecker intended to keep solidarity with her readers by remaining anonymous and thus part of a working class, folk tradition. On the other hand,

Margot Peters in Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life argues that Niedecker feared anything

less than fame, “Lorine’s greatest fear was that her poetry and name would vanish” (4).

However, the extroverted tendencies that seem prerequisite to fame did not characterize

Niedecker, “she refused to read her poetry [to others or aloud] at all, believing that a

poem must emerge from a silence shared by reader and work,” nor did it seem that she

made attempts to cultivate such fame-seeking habits (5). Whether or not Niedecker

sought fame or anonymity, what deserves closer observation was her feminist approach

and use of the posthumous voice.

Lorine Niedecker passed away on December 31st, 1970. What she sometimes pointed to in her poetry, and primarily the poetry discussed in this chapter, was women’s

inequality, the limitations of gender, and gender expectations. Niedecker looked at the

dislocation of the female in a patriarchal society and used it to create her poetry.

Throughout her work there is a sense of disjointedness and anatomization, reminding the reader of the incoherent expectations society placed (and continues to place) on women.

Niedecker worked on exposing patriarchal American tendencies, and did so in critical

and thoughtful ways.

Within this chapter, I extrapolate on how Niedecker uses the posthumous female voice in order to empower the female voice. Using her poems from Jenny Penberthy’s edition of Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works (2002), I closely examine: “I rose from 20 marsh mud,” “I married,” and “What horror to awake at night.” I chose to organize the poems in this order, out of their chronology, to configure a type of coming-of-age story.

In this re-ordering, Niedecker takes us through three primary stages of gender expectation and what “womanhood” may look like for a societal abiding female during the

1940s-60s. While the 1940s may have been the prime time for the “New Woman,” it was also a build up to the 1950s housewife, which was ultimately an expectation of the automated domestic figure.

The three stages Niedecker takes us through in the poems are the three “most important” stages of female existence according to stereotypical female expectations during the 40s and 50s, those being: an all too early (heteronormative) marriage, married life, and finally the relatively dull, repetitive, and lost existence of wifehood resulting in a sense of lost opportunities. First, “I rose from marsh mud” whisks us away to the church where we witness the child bride enter silently into the marriage. Next, “I married” examines the metaphorically dead speaker’s claustrophobic experience within marriage.

And finally, “What horror to awake at night” engrains the metaphorical death through a speaker who is referred to as “nothing.” Throughout all the poems, the posthumous voice exists with its permeating, all-knowing tone. Some of the primary functions of this voice are prominent because it allows for several actions to take place: once dead, the voice evades socio-cultural gender identity and the expectations of the 1940s and 50s; the voice becomes boundless, and remains outside of society. Therefore, the voice gains privileges not given to man or woman; rather, there is an underlying wisdom, secrecy, and intimacy with the reader. The reader potentially connects more deeply with the dead female 21 speaker simply because she chooses to come back and speak, giving insight into what lies beyond our material surface. Niedecker also engages the figurative dead female voice because it is an adequate vehicle for release, not only for poetic challenge, but potentially for a method through which a woman may seek agency in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society.

The Image o f the Dead Doll Wife

In “I rose from marsh mud” Niedecker herds the reader into the arena of the consumerist and male dominated main stage. Silence plays a large role, as Niedecker delivers a visually thin poem, with strong sounds, and eerie pauses. Written in 1948,6 and published in 1949, Niedecker’s poem “I rose from marsh mud” aligns marriage with an imprisonment that is in contrast with nature. The poem constructs marriage as an unnatural social institution held within another societal structure, a church, which is separated from nature. “I rose from marsh mud” reads as a cautionary tale in which a female speaker rises from nature to see another woman married in a church. While, socially, we would expect the woman to be wed as better off, dressed in her “diamond fronds,” we watch her become possessed by her husband. The diction that Niedecker employs is haunting with “rich” silences, and the description of the bride as a silenced doll-like figure:

I rose from marsh mud, algae, equisetum, and willows, sweet green, noisy birds and frogs

6 Date taken from Lorine Niedecker: A Poet's Life by Margot Peters. Peters bases the date off of a friend of Niedecker’s wedding that inspired Niedecker to write the poem “I rose from marsh mud.” 22 to see her wed in the rich rich silence of the church, the little white slave-girl in her diamond fronds.

In aisle and arch the satin secret collects. United for life to serve silver. Possessed. (Niedecker 2002, 170)

Here, the wife is a figure rather than a speaker. The speaker’s identity is unclear; neither the gender nor the livelihood is clearly stated. Instead, the unidentifiable “I” is a spectator to the silenced and almost doll-like “wife.” If we are to assume that the speaker is female, then several connections begin to come into view. First, Niedecker unites the speaker with nature. The word choices of “algae, equisetum, willows” all form a green natural image. The poem follows poetic conventions by aligning the female figure with nature.

However, Niedecker does not follow a simple prescribed tradition. Margaret Homans discusses poetic tradition in Women Writers and Poetic Identity, and cites several male writers who associated women with the natural, originating as far back as the Bible (12),

“[t]his matriarchy is generally described as originating in the worship of fertility, in which the earth is a mother goddess and all nature, including humanity, is her creation and her domain . . . she is prolific biologically, not linguistically, and she is as destructive as she is creative” (15). Homans argues that by giving nature gender, often referred to as

“mother” nature, the writer in turn takes away the feminine subjectivity; therefore the female is always already the other and the object (12). Because the female figure was linked to nature, almost literally, the female poet in the Romantic era, and later on, found difficulty in taking on her own voice. Niedecker, however, challenges this assumption by 23 creating a female figure who is literally one with nature. She gains her power not only through voice, but in re-appropriating the position of the female as nature. Nature, then, takes the position of power and in turn gives more control to the speaker. In Niedecker’s version of feminine nature, the female figure is the most powerful; she has speech, agency, and freedom.

But if Niedecker connects the female figure to nature and depicts her character as free and wild, then how is she supposed to be assumed as a figuratively dead speaker?

Homans describes Mother Nature as a creator; however, she also remarks that, “Mother

Nature is also traditionally associated with death as much as with life” (17). Mother

Nature can be both creator and destroyer, both life-giving and death bringing. The duplicity that Niedecker injects into the female figure provides the figure with a significant amount of strength and agency. What female poets once avoided writing about, fearing the implications it brought, Niedecker approached with ease and fearlessness. Niedecker denied the simplification of her poetry. Instead, she allows her poetry to exist in an in-between space, emphasizing the significance of living between binaries, adhering to only her choice of traditions and rules.

Assuming, then, that the speaker is female, the marsh mud gives birth to the woman as she is covered in nature: the natural plants, the “birds and frogs” surrounding her. As the poem develops, the second stanza comes into contrast with the first; the first stanza is messy and noisy yet natural, whereas the second stanza is clean, silent, and hauntingly unnatural. Although the “fronds” in the second stanza are a natural image, it is conjoined with the word “diamond.” “[Fjrond” also refers to the first stanza in that a 24

frond is a type of leaf, which links the “slave-girl” to the woman rising from the marsh mud. The association between “diamond” and “fronds” suggests the natural becoming

unnatural. Most obviously, diamonds are associated with the engagement ring that a woman would receive from her soon-to-be husband. Once the woman accepts the ring,

she wears it, and displays a symbolic band showing that she “belongs” to her husband.

Even though diamonds are a naturally occurring object, created from carbon and by

intense pressure, over time humans have made them into a status marker: they signal

wealth, luxury, and material attachment. Niedecker juxtaposes both natural objects, the

fronds and the diamonds, as complete binaries yet existing on the same natural plane:

fronds are soft and natural, similar to how a woman may be described to look on her wedding day; and while diamonds are known for their remarkable beauty, they are also the hardest substance known to humanity. Diamonds, like the women in the poem, are

impossible to crush. By the diamond representing a natural and artificial construct,

Niedecker suggests that this is what the figure of the wife has also become; something that begins as natural but over time is constructed artificially and can be owned: a possession. Therefore, while the diamond may represent her potential to be owned, it also represents her inability to be chipped away at, both physically and mentally.

The enjambment in the final two lines also positions the wife figure as a servant and as an object: “United for life to serve/ silver. Possessed.” However, it allows “silver” to encapsulate a wide array of potential meanings. If the poem is read line by line, in the first line the marriage suggests that the female’s role as a wife is to “serve” which makes her a servant to the husband figure, and therefore subordinate. If we read the complete 25 sentence as a whole, then we can gather that the female serves “silver.” The “silver” may be reference to the traditional 25th anniversary wedding gift, therefore assuming that her entire is life is to be spent with this man uninterrupted. In treating “silver” as a reference, it may refer to the wife as a high-class maid, serving silver or a precious metal at a dinner party. Silver may also be a biblical reference to Judas betraying Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, which would follow consumerist undertones. If we add the husband to the equation since they both are “united,” then this would also mean that the couple “serves” or lives for money and things, and are possessed by them. Finally, silver may be used because of its closeness to the word “sliver,” as something that is slight and barely present, just as the wife is expected to be, or potentially, to denote her subordinate status. Niedecker ends on these two lines to create a feeling of unease in her reader. Throughout the poem this is the only line to receive two periods, one after “silver” and the other after “possessed.” To allow a single word to own an entire sentence carries a sort of shock value. Therefore, the weight of the word “possessed” conveys not only a lack of control over one’s life, but also becoming an object to be possessed or owned. The period after “possessed” further validates her lack of control and the oppressive restraint that has been placed upon her.

Another eerie aspect of the poem is the richness of silence. The repetition of “rich” bears extreme significance because of Niedecker’s meticulous diction; in a short poem the repetition of such a short word grabs attention and creates multiple opportunities for meaning. The repetition of “rich” confirms the varying levels of richness that reference the entirety of the poem: the richness of soil within the first stanza, the wealth of the people in the church, the richness of silence during the wedding ceremony. The silence 26 associates with rich possibly because that is what makes a valuable wife traditionally, her silence and her subservience; therefore for a wife to show these qualities is a richness to her husband. The wife figure’s silence is also what makes her perfect and doll-like: she never speaks. Rather, we receive a second-hand account of her wedding. Therefore, the bride is both subjected to and objectified in the speaker’s and the reader’s point of view.

Potentially, the emphasis on the rich silence also incites a sort of funeral taking place instead of a wedding, especially given the outside woman’s awakening from her own grave to bear witness to the unnerving wedding.

According to Jane Augustine in her article ‘“What’s Wrong with Marriage’: Lorine

Niedecker’s Struggle with Gender Roles,” it is through poems such as “I rose from marsh mud” that Niedecker ultimately denies the institution of marriage as a whole, siding neither with the bride nor the groom. Ultimately, both participants end up suffering societal consequences. Augustine finds that by refusing marriage, Niedecker is in turn refusing capitalism, consumerism, and an American way of life, refusing a “social prescription of marriage as a sole career” (142). Augustine describes Niedecker as viewing conventional married life as “shallow,” “barren” and “unfulfilled” (144). “I rose from marsh mud” not only depicts these traits in great detail, but it places Niedecker as a strong feminist voice unafraid to reveal the reality of American culture.

Only a few years later in 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique stressed the same oppressive binaries. Friedan writes that “[wjomen are human beings, not stuffed dolls, not animals” (67). As Friedan emphasizes, there had been an ongoing assumption that a woman was supposed to be child-like, doll-like, and because of that, less than 27 human and of a lesser class. Through this poem Niedecker chose to present the woman in the church as a “white slave-girl”: a bride who was intended to have no control of her own self, and lost her identity to the marriage. Even during the 1960s, women still had to deal with completely unrealistic standards, which demanded that they learn to be automatons and emotionless objects. Niedecker takes on the figuratively dead speaker, and ends up creating greater critiques out of patriarchal expectations.

Niedecker wrote from a feminist standpoint so as to alert society of its warped construction. Rachel Blau DuPlessis cites Niedecker as also sharply criticizing female gender expectations and notes how Niedecker weaves in her feminist perspective:

Niedecker also made barbed comments about gender institutions. She resists beauty, construed as a trap for women, for females in general, for herself—the critique of beauty as a part of both general ideology and poetic ideology make her refuse the romantic lyric and its rhetorics of transcendence. Her refusal is anatomized in a balladlike work of intense feminist critique. (147)

In “I rose from marsh mud” the “I” who rises from the marsh mud fits no ideal beauty standards, as she is shrouded in the natural. Moreover, there is no attempt to depict the speaker’s physical appearance. She cannot be aestheticized because there is no way to view this woman as an object like the child bride in the poem. Instead, she is speaker and seer; she is the reader’s eyes and is in total control of the focus. The wedding inside the church falls far short of perfect, as it is sterile, silent, and it lacks any liveliness. As

DuPlessis emphasizes, “I rose from marsh mud” is a resistance poem. The enjambments disjoint the reader as well as the characters and the scene, while everything is pieced together to create a hauntingly unnatural picture of stereotypical perfection, specifically the perfection of the child bride. 28

The bride in “I rose from marsh mud” is presented as a “slave-girl” whom her husband will own. By choosing “girl” instead of woman, Niedecker may be mocking the common cultural assumption that a girl can only become a woman once she marries; upon marriage she transforms from Miss to Mrs. Also, upon consummation of the marriage, the woman is no longer a virgin, which changes her sexual status and symbolically removes her girlhood and innocence. In this case, Niedecker acknowledges that society only chooses to recognize a girl as a woman once her prefix changes with marriage. The same argument could be carried on to assume that her object-status is further completed once she takes on her husband’s last name. The name is able to act as a property marker directly connected to the woman’s identity.

The choice of “slave-girl” acts as another marker to convey the binary of master and servant which is immediately established before the ceremony is even complete. The description of the girl is eerie, as she is “little,” “white,” and in “diamond fronds.” She appears beautiful but ghostly, which is reaffirmed by the final word of the poem,

“possessed.” Therefore, marriage acts as a sort of death. However, one is able to see her transition from a presumably normal girl to the “little white slave-girl” as she is disembodied or possessed in her death. She is forced to surrender, and sacrifice her selfhood to the husband figure. In “satin secret collects,” the verb “collects” implies that there is movement in the scene, yet the girl remains static. The girl is figuratively, and communicatively dead—her stillness as well as her inability to speak throughout the poem denotes her lifelessness. The marriage then, is the metaphorical death of the girl; 29 upon the ritual she loses her ability to speak or even appear life-like, and instead becomes a doll figure in her “diamond fronds.”

At the same time, the marriage does not place the male figure in a particularly active oppressor role either. The couple is “United for life to serve/ silver. Possessed.”

Instead, Niedecker creates a larger commentary on the institution of marriage. The man and woman may both become subjected to the servitude of life, bonded by their material things. In regards to this poem, DuPlessis makes the point that it “shows the newlyweds possessed by their possessions, in martial jail, enslaved by propriety and property” (148).

Therefore, it is not the individual male who shows her any kind of dishonor or oppression, it is instead the oppression of society, the system, and the institution of marriage itself.

The odd twist of the speaker in the poem “I rose from marsh mud,” however, is that it is not the possessed wife but what may be a dead woman who sees the young bride’s fate. Niedecker presents a dead female speaker who is able to have the agency in death that the young girl loses in marriage. The dead figure bom from the marsh mud is not definitively female but rather one who knows the “secrets of marriage”7 because she communicates what she sees and what she may already know. The figure who rises from the marsh mud is female because of her connection with nature, as she is a part of her surroundings. The speaker also rises from a grave-like state, which further informs her status as a dead woman risen and reanimated like Lazarus, or more closely references the

7 As opposed to the “little white slave-girl,” the woman who rises from the marsh mud is most likely not a virgin because she knows the “secrets of marriage.” Not only is she shown in contrast with the girl in the church, but her changed sexual status also removes her symbolic innocence and naivety, which allows her to speak her devastating truth. 30

g biblical tale of the little girl resurrected by Jesus. The girl within the poem wedded within the church seems to have more femininity than the speaker, as she is referred to as a girl, because of her “diamond fronds” and in contrast with the speaker’s nature laden appearance.

Because the speaker is so outside of society by her alignment with nature, she almost appears to have escaped from hegemonic society. Whereas the woman rising up from the marsh mud has it rough, covered in mud and algae, she is completely free from expectation and society; she is virtually dead to society. She lacks material goods, yet she has her freedom and control of her life. Therefore, Niedecker presents a highly feminist figure through the woman from the marsh mud, and while she is closely likened to a zombie rising from her grave, she is also the most empowered and formative figure in the poem. The risen female figure comes back with a strength and a wisdom that allows her to clearly see the status of women, but fortunately for herself, she is outside of her expected subservience. The figuratively dead speaker parallels the bride in the church, yet she is her complete opposite. Niedecker exaggerates the two women’s differences while remarking on the presence of binaries and the need to find a comfortable space in the spectrum.

“I rose from marsh mud,” conveys two contrasting images: one as the speaker, the woman who has freedom and has risen from the marsh mud, and the other, the bride, who is “trapped” within the marriage, the church, and society. Niedecker utilizes enclosed spaces to show the constraint on women, not only in the context of the poem itself, but as

8 KJV Bible. Book of Mark 5:21-43. 31 a representation of the ways in which women are oppressed and constrained by society.

These suffocating images alert the reader to the trapped space, which allows no room for agency let alone small advancements. However, Niedecker always leaves gaps for escape.

The woman from the marsh mud dwells outside of the enclosed oppressed space and defies aestheticization. Despite her death, she rises.

In her poem “I married,” Niedecker continues with the theme of marriage but enters the space of the home. Niedecker’s construction of the home, however, is unusual and unnatural—a coffin-like dwelling. While the bride in “I rose from marsh mud” has space to breathe (the church is assumed to be an enclosed space, but still a literally large space), the woman in “I married” is now more entrapped than the bride, while her body is depicted as occupying both a “cupboard” and a “closet.” In the next section, Niedecker explores the second stage of “womanhood” as defined in the 1940s and 50s, married life, exposed here as an actual loss of identity within the institution of marriage. Again,

Niedecker gives voice to the figuratively dead, identity-less, female figure and sheds light on her containment within a patriarchal society.

Confined Bodies

Niedecker takes the element of narrowness one step further in the poem “I married,” where our speaker dwells in a coffin-like interior, with short, unnaturally spaced lines. In “I married,” one of her more anthologized poems, Niedecker develops a distinct purpose for why the speaker married. In the poem, marriage occurs in order to escape loneliness, “for warmth.” Unlike the previous poem “I rose from marsh mud,” only one speaker is present, yet she finds herself in incredibly tight, claustrophobic 32 spaces. Also, the female speaker in this poem has significantly more agency than the bride in “I rose from marsh mud” which shows the female figure’s progression.

Nevertheless, while the speaker does have more of a voice, and more control, she still is bound by marriage:

I married

in the world’s black night for warmth if not repose. At the close— someone.

I hid with him from the long range guns. We lay leg in the cupboard, head

in closet.

A slit of light at no bird dawn— Untaught I thought he drank

too much. I say I married And lived unburied. I thought— (Niedecker 2002, 228)

“I married...” offers another perception of marriage, one of comfort and security rather than connection. These themes of dissatisfaction and settling down run through many of Niedecker’s poems, as a woman is consumed with mind-numbing tasks that she must complete in order to keep her life (and primarily her husband) content. 33

In “I married,” Niedecker forces the reader to consider the walled space created by both the structure of the poem and content. Notice the spacing before the phrase “for warmth” which suggests the lack of warmth within the marriage. The spacing signals that there is still a distance between the speaker and her husband; perhaps it is because the desire for warmth may have been forgotten with time, or it was not fulfilled as the marriage progressed. The speaker in Niedecker’s poem seeks nothing from marriage but companionship, yet over time she discovers the difficulties of marriage, “I married/ and lived unburied. / 1 thought—.” The speaker finds marriage paralyzing, a kind of burial.

Marriage begins as a foundation able to keep the speaker alive longer, to help her thrive so she does not have to handle the world alone; however, marriage becomes so burdensome that it is more restricting than being alone. What begins as an attempt to marry for a sense of security, now transforms into the opposite. The weight of marriage acts as the pressure of a coffin door. Niedecker does not directly write that the female speaker is dead, yet she uses ambiguity to create this notion of death. The images of the tight enclosed spaces nod towards suffocation, and an inability to move, similar to the enclosed space of a coffin.

Niedecker forces the reader to question the vitality of the speaker in the poem “I married,” as well to wonder whether it is she or her marriage that is buried alive.

Throughout the poem, Niedecker places the female speaker into tight confined spaces which allow no room for movement, or in her case, agency. The marriage, and the proximity of the husband, restrain her within these tight spaces. Under the weight of the marriage, and with the loss of the singular self, or single personhood, she resigns to the 34 necessity to take care of someone else (her husband). Niedecker aligns images of both marriage and death throughout the poem. Further diction and images such as “guns,”

“leg/ in the cupboard,” “head/ in the closet,” and “unburied” signal death, danger, or inability to move. The parallel phrases “leg/in the cupboard” (9-10), “head/in the closet” invoke dismemberment and death, as the line breaks imply that the unattached parts of the body are located in multiple parts of the household. The division of the body implies the possible division that the female speaker may experience between mind and body.

The poem reads as an anatomy poem as well, for the speaker’s body parts are objectified, and while the female may have more agency than she did in the previous poem, she still is depicted as incomplete or fragmented. Therefore, the marriage causes fissures throughout the speaker’s body and mind, proving that the original intention for the marriage to be for “warmth” was not achieved.

The speaker marries for “warmth,” a sensation that may only be bodily, and one can assume that she marries for “repose” which may insinuate multiple meanings: her need for rest and security, or marking her ensuing death or loss of agency within the marriage, or an actual repositioning of herself in society. Or, potentially, “if not repose” could also mean that the speaker has considered repositioning herself in the marriage, or breaking away from it, as a sort of defiance to the marriage itself. Marriage becomes such an entrapment that the female speaker begins to question her livelihood and a sense of whole self, as she lies figuratively confined and dismembered.

Niedecker’s diction also forces one to consider the circumstances in which the marriage is arranged. The marriage takes place in the “world’s black night/ At the 35 close—” the nighttime setting not only assumes blindness but also suggests the cold and emptiness. The addition of “world” heightens the vast isolation that the speaker must have felt before her union. The nighttime imagery allows the word “repose” to take a literal effect as well; as nighttime comes the female speaker is tired, wants to relax, and potentially surrender to what are perceived as normal societal expectations (marriage in this case). If the woman is marrying at nighttime, then we can most likely assume it is toward the later years in her life, and she is fulfilling the expectation to marry “’til death do us part.” The darkness of the night also coincides with the final word of the first stanza

“someone” in that the night is blind just like the woman is in choosing her husband. The poem remains dark throughout except for the twelfth line that acts as a turning point, which holds “a slit of light.” The “slit of light” is the only source of hope within the poem, and it acknowledges the potential for hope or escape.

The coffin surfaces in the second to last line of the poem, where she “lived unburied.” Not only does the supposed burial resonate with a coffin as one is “laid in a coffin to rest” so to speak, but it also suggests the speaker is still alive. The look of the poem is slim, which may suggest a coffin-like structure, further enhancing the fragmentation, enjambment, and disjointedness in the poem. The coffin may also act as the place of the home because the role of the housewife is to care for the household, yet the home is a place where most of the time she feels locked in. While the home is meant to be a place of solace, instead it acts as a place of imprisonment.

Within the poem “I married” Niedecker engages in both a posthumous voice as well as the voice of a wife. In her biography Emily Dickinson, Cynthia Griffin Wolff cites 36

Dickinson as also using several voices to create representative figures. Wolff clearly defines these voices, citing the “proleptic” voice as being removed from the world, and the wife voice as one of domesticity (239). While Wolff does admit that “[a]ll these voices have one thing in common: they are not essentially of this world,” this seems like an unlikely commonality (222). The posthumous voice is fitting, as the poem visually resembles a tight cramped space, similar to a coffin, yet the coffin is actually the house itself. Therefore, by invoking both the wife and the dead voice, Niedecker pushes boundaries. Niedecker incites the reader to think past any understanding of surface meaning, the intermingling of the two voices insinuates a sense of placelessness, timelessness, and a power to be able to access this inaccessible location.

Niedecker expresses feminist values as the speaker openly exposes her limited space in her home, and by extension, in society. Throughout Niedecker’s poems she communicates such an exactness, or specific experience that in doing so she can encompass a larger critique of society as a whole. The experience of the child bride in “I rose from marsh mud” and the woman in “I married” are the symbolic 1950s female, attempting to fulfill what patriarchal society has convinced her to do. In writing these normative ideological figures, Niedecker pins down her issues with specific parts of

American culture. In Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes this pattern in Niedecker’s work, remarking that “[t]he resistances Niedecker makes in her poetry involve her critical discomfort with gender norms, class assumptions, and

Americanist ideology as she lives out her intense marginality to dominant culture of materialism, bellicosity, bigness/bestness, and fame developed in the postwar period” 37

(143). Niedecker chooses to create the opposing view in her critique of consumerism—she presents a smallness that lives not only in the physicality of the poem, but also in its contextual space. The reader has a clear understanding of the speaker’s discomfort: a contorted body lodged into different places of the home. Space becomes limited, which may signal limitations that occur on a larger, socio-cultural scale.

If the woman within Niedecker’s poem “I married” is perceived as dead, then she is speaking from a coffin-like state; however, she remains “unburied.” She appears to

“live” in an in-between state. She carries the powers of both the dead and the living, meaning her life has metaphorically ended. However, she has discovered a place where she can no longer be silenced or debased from her position of achieved power. She has agency in order to speak out; she has allotted herself a space into which she may share her situation. The space of the home becomes her domain where she takes charge, whether it be her coffin or not. Death detaches the speaker from life and therefore the metaphorical death that occurs within the marriage allows the female speaker to reclaim her voice and agency. Her speech alone is subversive because she is expected to be silenced in death. Traditional beliefs of the male as head of the household are also debunked as she takes the lead in this space and claims herself as well as speaks her inner truth.

Niedecker constructs female speakers who are unafraid to voice their situations or reality. By using the posthumous voice, Niedecker seems to lose any fear of breaking conventions or letting her minimalism speak for itself. She makes precise choices in her work with her minimalist tendencies, and integrates the dead speaker as well as the voice 38 of the wife into her discourse. In her poem “What horror to awake at night” she examines inside and beyond the poem “I married” because there is no sense of unity between the husband and wife. There is no him, there is no one the speaker lies with in cupboards, or has any consolation with; instead she is “nothing” and her husband is able to be

“something.”

Gender, Worth, and Nothingness

Niedecker’s “What horror to awake at night” coincides with the same theme of disillusionment in marriage and death as the poem “I married.” Within this poem the speaker finds that her life is spent on “nothing” and lacks purpose. The notion that the speaker is not fulfilled and comes to believe that her life is spent on nothing and therefore meaningless comes from the things she believes would fulfill her. The wife speaker is pained by the lack of meaning in her life, and her second class status in comparison to her husband:

What horror to awake at night and in the dimness see the light. Time is white mosquitoes bite I’ve spent my life on nothing.

The thought that stings. How are you, Nothing, sitting around with Something’s wife. Buzz and burn is all I learn I’ve spent my life on nothing.

I’m pillowed and padded, pale and puffing lifting household stuffing— carpets, dishes benches, fishes I’ve spent my life in nothing. (Niedecker 2002, 147) Niedecker not only criticizes marriage in this part of the poem but also shows the stark contrast between “something” and “nothing.” The poem addresses “nothing” as the female figure and the speaker, as Niedecker writes “How are you, Nothing.” “Nothing” is the assumed female, with the line “Something’s wife.” One can assume that the man, although reduced to a nameless character, is at least “Something.” But even though he is something, his humanity is lost in referring to him as something rather than someone. The wife figure is, however, the one named “nothing,” which points to her lack of importance and meaninglessness. With the image that comes with “Nothing” we assume that the wife is, to an extent, dead, but one can also glean a small scrap of hope from this poem. The word “nothing” may also be broken down into “no” and “thing.” The woman is able to enter into being—she is not a thing, but a human, a woman. At the very least she has spent her life in no “things” but rather actively being. The lack of appropriate punctuation

(there is no question mark at the end of the question “How are you”) also insinuates that the polite question is without the intention of an answer.

Unfortunately, during Niedecker’s, as well as Plath’s time, the “place” of women had not developed much. According to Betty Friedan “[fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949—the housewife-mother. As swiftly as in a dream, the image of the American woman as a changing, growing individual in a changing world was shattered” (44). Niedecker watched the “new woman” of the 1940s fall victim to the housewife role. Therefore, to become the housewife/mother a woman needed to let go of all of her other identities and assume these new roles in order to take care of her family. Niedecker portrays this situation quite artfully as the speaker loses her 40 sense of individuality and selfhood so much that she becomes part of the house-an inanimate and lifeless object. Friedan explains the transition of the female as “[h]er limitless world shrunk to the cozy walls of home” (44). Therefore, to a greater extent,

Niedecker remarks on the limiting notions of female expectation during the 1940s and

50s and plays with that diminishing notion of individuality. Niedecker creates fearless speakers who are unafraid to announce the truth, even in harsh ways. The speaker here becomes the ultimate representative for the 1950s era; she goes through the expected motions of a woman and she shows the reader where she ends up by following this prescribed formula. Not only does she lose herself, but, even worse, she loses herself to things and to her husband, as her identity becomes lodged in others and objects. While her loss of identity into things does express the amount of care and time the housewife must put into to her efforts, it also remarks on how her agency is taken from her as she plays along within the patriarchal settings. Her freedoms dwindle down to the home, and all her time is “spent.”

Carefully choosing her diction through words like “spent,” “nothing,” and

“something,” Niedecker draws close attention to the speaker’s status. Niedecker balances her choice of “spent” with both “nothing” and “something.” Not only does she assert the

9 meaning of “spent” as tired or near death, but also as used up, or consumed, giving the word a consumerist or materialist connotation, which reinforces the wife as object and

9 Consulted Oxford English Dictionary for definitions of word entry: spent, adj. 1. a. Of material things: Expended, consumed, used up completely. 3. a. Of persons or animals: Deprived of force or strength; tired or worn out by labour, exertion, hardship, etc.; completely exhausted. 41 commodity. “Spent” may also have sexual implications, because the woman is simply an object to her husband, so she may also be spent from pleasing her husband. She is consumed by being “nothing” and she is devalued by her renaming. Niedecker plays with language in her reassignment of prepositions in her repeated line: “I’ve spent my life on nothing.” In her final repetition of the line, she switches her preposition choice of “on” to

“in” so that the phrase transitions to “I’ve spent my life in nothing.” The preposition “on” converts her meaning to something that is consumed rather than free from. The “in” may signal the confinement of marriage that the “nothing” in the final line may refer to her marriage and her position as a housewife. The previous usage of the preposition “on” may refer to her lack of lifelong achievements or projects that would have given her life value. The preposition “on” interacts with the word “spent” creating a lack of value in the female speaker’s life, just as one may say that something that is purchased for a large value is worth nothing. Taking this notion of monetary value placed on life, one may say that the woman is devaluing herself and therefore placing a monetary value on her life which would link her to an object that could be owned.

Niedecker uses the setting of the home to create a sensation similar to that of the poem “I married.” The space is claustrophobic as the speaker becomes the things within the home. By utilizing the home as both a space and a main focal point within the poem,

Niedecker centers the reader on the domesticity of the speaker, as well as on the consumerist tendencies of American culture. The speaker may be spent because there is so much to be done, there are so many things to be cleaned, and tended to. Anne Loecher 42 notes that Niedecker’s focus on the domestic helped advance her “powerful poetic voice”:

Niedecker’s subject matter of domestic work, not to mention her direct address of marriage, of brides as property, and her indictment of modern domesticity, connected to soulless consumerism, and an amorality that enabled the Cold War - presents a strong feminist/humanist stance that undoubtedly played a role in the development of her powerful poetic voice . . . (“From Smallness to Greatness: The Forgotten Poetry of Lorine Niedecker”)

By playing on the voice of the wife and the domestic, Niedecker critiques everything common in her society, from gender to the consumerism of the time. Through using a voice that is both of the home and deathly, she presents the reader with the notion that the speaker slowly loses her identity, and she too becomes “nothing” of value.

However, towards the end of the poem she is put back into her position of housewife. The wife becomes an inanimate object as she is the “things” she handles. She becomes pillows and the padding because these things mean nothing and she believes that neither does she. Here, Niedecker also plays with the literal implications of what a

“housewife” is; as if the wife is married to the house itself. The recurring image of the dead housewife then turns up again as a woman who has come to realize the limits of her potential once she enters the social institution of marriage. It is in the act of marrying and performing the duties of a housewife that the limitations of the female speaker become apparent. She lacks agency and therefore she becomes silenced and metaphorically dead.

Yet once she has reached this “death,” she clutches onto authority to speak and reclaims her agency. The ability to speak out of death denotes the subversive nature of Niedecker’s female speaker and the location of the home is where she gains the power to speak.

Loecher agrees that Niedecker fears that these are voices that commonly go unheard in 43 suggesting, “It is the voice of the silenced wife/bride/female/daughter that has gone unheard, that Niedecker asks us to lean in close to hear. The quieted, suppressed and submerged are speaking in Niedecker’s radically feminist works” (5). Niedecker gives voice to these typically underrepresented figures and brings the reader into their personal situations. Through these three poems and their given order in this chapter one can observe Niedecker’s ability to bring the silent and the forgotten to the forefront. The female voice, through death or oppression, can be revived and reveal the realities of gender inequality. However, by bringing these inequalities to light, Niedecker must also artfully portray the speaker’s inequity in more than one way, specifically through stylistic techniques.

Niedecker employs alliteration in “What horror to awake at night” to emphasize the hollowness of the female speaker’s life. The first line lists things that are inanimate and also correlate to dead things. The word “pillowed” creates suffocation as if the female is silenced by her household duties, and the words “pale and puffing” refer to a corpse, both pale and bloated. “Pillowed” might also suggest that the female speaker is separated from the outside world; the space of the house is what keeps her from reality and her ability to be considered “alive.” The list in the final stanza proves that all these things in her life are simply stuffing: filler for her life, which emphasizes the purposelessness. Niedecker lists these material things to develop the argument that material goods are “nothing” because they are not real and do not give life. The space of the house, the household, and even the figure of the wife are all constructions of society, and society forces meaning upon them. The “stuffing” that Niedecker refers to then is 44 nothing that is required for life but rather something that is believed to fulfill. Just like the household items the figure of the wife is also a construction that is given meaning by society which lends itself to her feelings of being empty.

Throughout these three poems, Niedecker discusses consumerism, value, gender, society, and culture. She takes us through the three levels of female expectation in contemporary American society: the wedding, the marriage with the realization that the institution may be set up in order for women to be controlled, and the unfulfilled life of a

1950s era housewife. The wife in “What horror to awake at night” can do all she wanted within the household, yet she is “nothing” outside it or without it. Even with condensing,

Niedecker creates expansive meaning that transcends these deceivingly simple scenes.

She pushes us to evaluate our own society, culture, and values, as she gives us our oppressive tendencies in artful bits and pieces. Niedecker intricately weaves her speakers in and out of death, and she produces representative figures that are without time and location. Ultimately, the figures of the dead and the wife mix to yield a fleeting, timeless voice: a voice that carries knowledge, knows pain and suffering, and yet continues to speak for her own and other’s sakes. In The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing from

Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath, Claire Raymond suggests that women writers chose, in part, to speak from the position of the dead because “[i]t is death as this space of incompleteness, a sort of radical homelessness or bodilessness” (12-13). While

“homelessness or bodilessess” may not be the primary or only reason that Niedecker wrote from the position of the posthumous voice, it assists us in understanding the strengths of taking on this type of persona. The position of wife as speaker generally 45 locates us within the home and the domestic, inside the familiar; but in pairing domesticity with death it is then defamiliarized, and not only is it easy to lose track of the speaker’s vitality, but the speaker is also empowered by her extreme sense of freedom, openness, and multiplicity.

If Poe regards the dead woman as a “thing” of beauty, then it is not until she loses her agency, voice, and life that she may be considered perfect. The attempt to reconfigure the female as only having the potential to be a wife is not only limiting in that she may have few other ventures to pursue, but also in that once she becomes a wife, once she marries, she becomes socially dead and is mentally numbed or suppressed. Her social death is in the way her last name is stripped from her, and she becomes owned by the man she marries: she becomes part of his family and is removed from her own. Her mental numbing comes with more time spent in the marriage as in Niedecker’s “What a horror to awake at night” where the female speaker begins to lose vitality and agency, until she realizes that she has “spent her life on [and in] nothing.” She loses touch from a world she once knew. Her lack of interest, and her eventual depression become a figurative easing into death. The female speakers describe images of entrapment, tight claustrophobic spaces which cause stasis. A figure of subservience, the silenced woman is portrayed as a devout servant to her male “owner.” However, Niedecker reconfigures the female in figurative death as the speakers are able to have agency and openly express dissatisfaction with their male counterpart. She dies only to be empowered and rebirthed anew. 46

In a metaphorical death, the female speaker finds herself and revives her voice in order to reclaim agency. In looking at Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz—when I died—" Brian Norman argues that “[t]here is a catch: the power afforded by posthumous speech entails a loss of individual identity because to will ‘Keepsakes’ is to forsake that which is private, personal” (13). However, Niedecker uses this technique multiple times to her advantage. Niedecker does not seem to make any call towards specificity or an individual experience; instead, she hones in on shared experiences of women. Niedecker leaves out specific details of character because she intends an all-encompassing scene: readers are able to interchange themselves with the speaker. She accesses that freedom and allows readers to experience the moments first-hand. Niedecker has no intention of private or personal; she wants the communal, and shared experience. Therefore, the posthumous voice is a precise vehicle that communicates a sense of universality, even as the individual is lost in death. 47

Chapter 2: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963): Revivification, or Metaphorically Dead Women Speaking

Born in 1932, Sylvia Plath gained extraordinary literary success, but much of it came after her suicide in 1963. While her fame exists because of her provocative confessional style poetry, that same fame and work carry many twists. Many readers came (and still come) to Plath’s work because they interpret it as completely biographical. While some of those parallels are undeniable, what urged those types of readings even further was Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes.

In Ariel, published posthumously, Plath intended a particular voice and intention, but her husband manipulated her original edition. Since Ariel is a rather controversial release because Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, re-ordered the poems, I will use Plath’s intended order of her Ariel poems, The Restored Edition: Ariel. Plath’s organization proves angry and fierce, but resolves on a note of hope and reinvention. Her final poem ends “The bees are flying. They taste the spring” (90). Plath implies rebirth and creates her own narrative structure that allows for growth. In stark contrast, Hughes’s manipulated version ends with the poem “Edge,” one that focuses primarily on death and stasis. Marjorie PerlofFs “The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon” discusses the importance of Plath’s arrangement since the reader experiences Plath’s arc of struggle, revenge, and rebirth instead of Hughes’s organization that “reconciles to death” (181). Perloff also suggests that Hughes’s reasoning behind reorganizing the poems was to create a narrative that more closely mirrored the public perception of

Plath’s life and eventual suicide, “[o]ne can argue that Hughes is simply completing 48

Plath’s own story . . . carrying it into its final conclusion” (196). Ted Hughes encouraged the biographical reading of Plath's poems by placing them in an order that focuses on and ends with death. But, the attempt to mirror her art with her life takes too much away from her work and eclipses the poetry. In his version, Hughes forces her biography to align with her poetry. In Plath’s organization, the speakers push on; we watch them develop in their struggle and ultimately find growth and freedom.

Unlike Lorine Niedecker, Sylvia Plath wrote with a stronger focus on death and its association with rebirth. While not necessarily always in the posthumous voice, her poems frequently portray disembodied female speakers. Plath also wrote with a tone different from Niedecker. Instead of a light and accepting tone, Plath took on a voice of power, largeness, and aggression. The married posthumous speakers in Plath’s poems carry fractured identities but ultimately come together to regenerate by their own strength. Her anger and hostility aim towards her oppressor: society, the patriarchal male figure, and/or the husband.

In this chapter I will analyze Plath’s poems: “The Applicant”; “The Jailor”; and

“Lady Lazarus.” I will examine issues of agency, rebirth, and voice despite the oppression the speaker encounters. In keeping this order, I will look at how the situations within the poems become increasingly more extreme as well as how the dead female speaker continues to gain her agency through her own effort and intentions. We start with a female figure that has no voice or agency in “The Applicant,” shift to more violent circumstances in “The Jailor,” and finally end in the truest form of a dead female speaker who radiates power in “Lady Lazarus.” Through these poems we will consider how the 49 speaker regains her voice after death and how the posthumous voice effectively critiques patriarchal structures and societal pressures on women.

All these poems position the female dead speaker in relation to a male/husband figure. In “The Applicant” a female figure is offered to a male as a wife, and she has little to no say in her willingness to the union. The female figure is referred to as an “it” and the speaker insists that she will care for the male without question. In “The Jailor” the female figure gains agency in her ability to speak and exposes her endured abuse from her husband. The final poem, “Lady Lazarus,” embodies the quintessential resurrected dead speaker. Finally, the dead female speaker claims her body and her freedom. She acknowledges her death, the value of her female physical body, and the item of highest importance, her strength to continue to grow despite her “death.”

Plath’s speakers are exceptionally accepting of death and use it as a form of empowerment rather than disempowerment. For Plath, metaphorical death does not halt anything; instead, death allows for rebirth and a shedding of old expectations. Plath uses death as a way to strengthen the female voice. For the time, 1950s and 60s, Plath creates speakers that are aggressive in a society where they were expected to be submissive and small. By undermining these norms, she resurrects the female voice by giving it a new sense of vigor.

For this study, I will not examine the similarities or differences that arise between

Plath’s life and her poetry. In doing this, I hope to look at her work as art to be analyzed, just as chapter one looks at Lorine Niedecker’s work rather than a reflection of the poet’s life. While I do not deny that commonalities exist between Plath’s life and her poetry, 50 they are not the purpose nor the focus of this study. I choose to analyze the work produced in consideration with my thesis, and not test whether or not my thesis proves true for an individual’s life.

The Reconfiguration o f the Female Body

Like Niedecker, Plath was very critical of the capitalistic and consumerist tendencies of American society during the 1950s. In Plath’s “The Applicant,” she alerts the reader of these tendencies through media saturated, consumerist language. The title and subject matter create an opportunity for transaction or purchase, instead of of a coerced union.

The speaker (or advertiser) reminds the male in the poem that he is empty without the product, a wife. The poem goes on to feel less like an interview and more like a forced sale, as the male is repeatedly told to “marry it.” Just like in Niedecker’s poems, the female figure is rarely given gendered pronouns and instead is referred to as an “it.” Plath chooses this language carefully, as she criticizes not only advertising but also society’s expectations of marriage; women were not the only ones who were expected to marry and have a family. While males did not receive as much push, they were still pressured by society to provide for the the nuclear family. Also the consumerist language makes the reader more aware of social institutions, in this case marriage, and highlights the problematic system that society forces with a focus on the institution rather than anything else:

First, are you our sort of a person? Do you wear A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook, Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, 5 51

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing? Stop crying. Open your hand. Empty? Empty. Here is a hand 10

To fill it and willing To bring teacups and roll away headaches And do whatever you tell it. Will you marry it? It is guaranteed 15

To thumb shut your eyes at the end And dissolve of sorrow. We make new stock from the salt. I notice you are stark naked. How about this suit 20

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. Will you marry it? It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof Against fire and bombs through the roof. Believe me, they'll bury you in it. 25

Now your head, excuse me, is empty. I have the ticket for that. Come here, sweetie, out of the closet. Well, what do you think of that? Naked as paper to start 30

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver, In fifty, gold. A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. 35

It works, there is nothing wrong with it. You have a hole, it's a poultice. You have an eye, it's an image. My boy, it's your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it. 40 (Plath 1962, 11-12)

The applicant is literally the husband figure, as he applies for a wife, or for something to fulfill his emptiness. While an application process for a potential partner may seem like a positive prospect, there is no special consideration given to either party.

The husband is repeatedly referred to as “empty” throughout the poem, and the wife is referred to as an “it” multiple times. Neither characters are given names, a chance to speak, or even an opportunity to agree to their arrangement; instead, it is forced upon them both. However, the male character still gets the upper hand as he is the one who is urged to “marry it, marry it, marry it” by the speaker. Therefore, the female transforms into a compliant commodity, while the male retains his humanity and at least some agency. The salesperson in the poem speaks with evangelical fervour, and his/her product is both the female and the marriage itself, as a contract that the male must agree to so that he can be “fulfilled.” Society, as told by the advertisement language, dictates that the male is “empty” without a wife. By accepting the male as “empty,” society also forces the assumption that the female is only needed to fulfill a role as a wife.

In the case of this poem, the speaker is not the one who is dead. Although it can be argued that the voice lacks humanity, the speaker is a silver-tongued solicitor. The male and the female characters, on the other hand, are those who seem to lack identity and sense of life. The male maintains some of his livelihood because he is able to show emotion in the poem; at one point the speaker must tell the man to “stop crying,” which reinforces societal gender expectations of how a man should act “masculine,” and therefore, not cry. However, the female is only “[a] living doll.” The term “living doll” is problematic because doll implies an inanimate object, while living assumes she is breathing and functioning. Therefore, through this female figure the metaphorical dead 53 wife emerges. She functions, and lives only to serve the husband. Even further, her sex is stripped of her as she is a doll “everywhere you look” (33), reminding us again of the falseness throughout the entirety of the poem, back to the “rubber breasts” and “rubber crotch” (5). With the word ‘doll’ Plath creates not only a feminine expectation of perfection, but also a contradictory feminized subject. Through the image of the doll,

Plath brings out two opposing characteristics: first, that a doll is a stereotypical feminine toy, and is usually a role model for children as the doll tends to have reached a level of perfection. The doll also represents a de-gendered controllable object, “A living doll, everywhere you look,” and, when connected with the line “Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,” it implies that the doll is artificial, and only performs her expectation of a feminine gender identity.

Throughout the poem, the wife is defined by her service abilities and her ability to perform her domestic feminine identity. The man is assured that “It is guaranteed// To thumb shut your eyes at the end/ And dissolve of sorrow” (15-16). With the enjambment in the line, the consumerist influenced language is highlighted just as one would see a car come with a guarantee. At the same time, the wife is also guaranteed to take care of the husband until his death, when afterwards she will no longer be able to live without him because the sorrow will be too great. Plath ultimately creates society’s perception of marriage in the 1950s as being not a symbiotic relationship, but rather one of caretaker and cared-for. The relationship reminds the reader of the stringent rules of domesticity placed upon women in the mid-1900s. Women were essentially viewed as a utility to serve man. 54

The wife in the poem is not only dehumanized but also desexualized as she is hidden in the closet. “Come here, sweetie, out of the closet” (28) is how the speaker addresses the female figure, treating her as if she is a scared child. The speaker furthers the simplicity of the female remarking that the female is “[n]aked as paper to start” (30), which emphasizes her position as object and her deficiency without a husband. Further,

Plath plays with the idea of paper, as the female speaker is to be written upon by man and society, and therefore, defined by them. The child bride echoes Niedecker’s child bride in

“I rose from marsh mud” as she is silent, objectified, and portrayed as a doll. Similar to

Niedecker, Plath also plays with marriage traditions; “But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,/ In fifty, gold” (31-32). Plath not only remarks on the notable anniversaries and the traditional gifts that align with them, but she also shows the female becoming a more valuable commodity. Even though the wife’s value increases, showing her transition from silver to gold, her value only increases because of the amount of years invested in the marriage to the male.

Furthering the dehumanization of the wife as commodity, the last line of the poem comes off as a desperate plea, which is also repeated throughout poem, “Will you marry it, marry it, marry it” (40). The woman or the applicant again loses her gender and her humanity, as she is referred to as an “it.” In the repetition of the two words “marry it,”

Plath constructs a sense of despair in the speaker’s voice, as the speaker fears that the woman is still not good enough to be married. The plea or advertisement shows that the male of this heteronormative coupling must be lured into agreement. This positions marriage as a purely feminine desire and further connects to a ‘normalized’ set of 55 feminine goals of domesticity and settlement; ultimately a gendered desire created within a patriarchal construct of marriage and heteronormativity. The repetition of “marry it” also mirrors the previous repetition of “it can talk, talk, talk” which, because of this line’s repetition, is made to sound both meaningless and consumeristic. Through the language of advertisement and commodification, Plath crafts a social critique on the institution of marriage and its perceived importance to women. In this particular poem the importance of marriage is solicited to both sexes, as both are in ‘need’ of one another; however, for the woman, marriage is portrayed as a way to fulfill her feminine duties. Without marriage, she lacks the ability to be ‘real.’ In a way, without marriage she ceases to exist which further reinforces her death-like status.

“The Applicant,” also delivers a subjectivity that is highly destabilized in that a woman is referred to as multiple inanimate objects, “she’ll be silver . . . gold” which is a reference to marriage anniversaries; however, it is also the woman turning the color of the year, and it is also the woman compared to the ‘living doll.’ The woman’s lack of autonomy is also visible in the line, “To fill it and willing . . . And do whatever you tell it” (11-13). This line can be directly linked back to the line “It can talk, talk, talk” (35), in which these repeated words become a non-directed coaxing form of speech, and therefore lose their meaning. Instead, the female subject must be ‘told’ what to do, and although she can talk, sew, and cook, none of these things have value without the male counterpart.

Similarly, without the male input that is ‘telling’ the female subject what to do, she lacks agency to act on her own. 56

The female in the poem may be understood to be an automaton, or “lifeless” in the sense that she is simply a mechanical being. Through much of the language, Plath creates a macabre background in the poem as well. By using such words as “black and stiff” (21) to refer to the man’s suit, “to thumb shut your eyes at the end” (16) to refer to closing one’s eyes after he/she has died, and “they’ll bury you in it” (25) to refer to the suit the man will be buried in, Plath creates an ominous fate for both the man and woman if they refuse to wed. Also, this language reinforces the grave tone.

In the same stanza, the speaker also informs the reader that there is “stock” of the product, “[w]e make new stock from the salt” (18). Therefore, other wives are somehow created from the tears of the wives already existing. Plath plays with the word “stock” as it has associations with consumerism (extra supplies), domesticity (stock as a sort of broth), and animals (livestock or breeding stock). Not only does Plath deliver a strong critique on gender by implying that women supply enough tears to create more females, but she further reflects women’s dehumanization. In doing so, Plath comments on perceived notions of femininity as associated with weakness and emotions as well as referring to women as animal or object. However, by owning the emotions, she brings creativity and power to them; tears become a creative force that are life giving. Plath strategically breezes over the connection between women and power to follow in the same style of the poem. The notion of women as creators, not specifically procreators of life, which is true, but as producers and originators plays into two parts of Plath’s poem.

First, we see that woman as producer places her on an equal level with men as the female is equally vulnerable to consumerist society. The female gives into producing for profit. 57

Secondly, and more important, positioning the female figure as life-giving and creative allows Plath to comment on woman as a writer and artist. Through the poem, Plath recognizes the importance of women on several levels, from fundamental reproducers to innovative creators. Therefore, Plath rejects women’s prescribed position as passive and powerless, and redefines them as active and powerful.

In the following stanza, the suit and the woman (ambiguously), are said to be

“waterproof, shatterproof, and proof/ Against fire and bombs through the roof’ (23).

While the rhyme makes the line seem satirical, or sales-induced, it also highlights the wife’s strength and her inability to be broken. While these type of terms reinforce her position as product and object, they further strengthen the female figure. Even though her humanity is taken from her by linking her to objects, her dehumanization forces her to adopt a callousness and strength. If she is “shatterproof,” or even fireproof, the woman must have taken away all her human qualities that once made her weak. Furthermore, these attributes of strength put her in a position above the male figure and above the living. The woman is able to withstand even more than the male, she is caretaker, and ultimately, she is marked as durable—emotionally and physically—unlike the description the speaker gives of the male.

Plath also engages in language of contradiction, falseness, and inadequacy; all of which are linked to a discourse of oppression. The irony or sarcasm of Plath’s poem operates as coded language which produces a source of contradiction to the serious and real. With the poem’s focus on falseness and inadequacy, Plath is further constructing a statement on the position or status of women, and the expectations in which they are 58 assumed to live by. The standards for a female within the poem are automated and sarcastic, to the point of absurdity. The convergence of the female and the false also occurs in the mention of the phrase, “A living doll...” (33) in that the female figure is expected to be perfect but at the same time false and simultaneously unable and able to perform tasks on her own. The idea of the doll, acts as a contradiction by the expectations of the female to be perfect, yet inanimate at the same time. Plath then satirizes the expectation of the female by depicting the entrapments of domesticity and femininity.

The insertion of domestic discourse linked to the feminine subject also emerges in the line, “It can sew, it can cook, /It can talk, talk, talk” (34-35). Here, the woman is referred to as an “it.” Not only does ‘it’ replace the pronoun “she,” which would gender the subject, but it also references back to the female subject’s inanimateness, as ‘its’ only purpose is to exist for the male counterpart. The pronoun ‘it’ here also works as a form of degeneracy, as if the woman is in no condition to be loved and the man must be forcibly pushed into marriage. From the line above, the tasks that the woman is expected to perform are stereotypically domestic, ‘housewife’ responsibilities. Marjorie Perloff recognizes this trope of the wife as domestic robot in her book Poetic License: Essays on

Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, “Marriage, in other words, demands of the woman that she turn herself into a mindless robot” (187). Not only was this relationship dynamic common in marriages in the 1950s and the surrounding eras, it also rings true for the poem. With the repetition of “it” rather than a specific gendered pronoun, the speaker/salesperson reminds us that the bride’s duty is not to fulfill her own purposes, but rather those of her husband. She is meant to carry out the household chores, without 59 complaint. Therefore, Plath produces this dual expectation of perfection and domestic suburban perfection, in the wife’s ability to complete all household duties while remaining in a doll-like state.

By the end of the poem the characters remain childish, frightened, and even wounded: “You have a hole, it’s a poultice” (37). The man is defined as wounded and lacking without the female, while the female’s primary role is to be his caretaker. Plath plays with the idea of marriage as institution and tradition; she shows the pressure placed on young adults in her era to marry young and create the nuclear family. More importantly, none of the advertisement language, not even once, suggests that the marriage is for love. Rather it is a cure for emptiness, to provide service, and to reinforce normalcy.

While neither the male nor the female have much agency throughout the poem, the female is in the position of object (which we will continue to see throughout Plath’s poems). When standing opposite capitalistic marketing, few have a real sense of agency, but the female becomes the product itself. By the woman becoming a product, she dies in a sense and loses her identity and humanity. This is how we arrive at the metaphorically dead female speaker. In showing this portrayal, Plath parallels society: few are able to actually have power against patriarchy, but ultimately women are forced to the bottom of the formation. Plath acknowledges the female as a commodity, as does Niedecker, and points out the gender injustices. She satirizes the situation of female as commodity because this is what she saw mirrored in 1950s-60s society. However, just in recognizing the injustice, she brings attention to the mistreatment of women, and the inequality that 60 exists between men and women. By expressing the imbalance of power through art, she politicizes it and furthers a feminist call to action.

Aligning Death, Marriage, and Oppression

“Have you been married? Yes, I’ve been attacked.” —Lorine Niedecker “Stage Directions”

Whereas before in “The Applicant” we witness a uncomfortable and forceful sales pitch, in “The Jailor,” we hear from the potentially sold woman (product), or at least a woman who feels as though she has been physically and mentally confined in marriage and domesticity. “The Jailor,” or in this case, the female speaker’s husband, attempts to control the speaker’s life, and, to some extent, fails. The speaker’s awareness of her situation and her tearing down of his “fakery” proves her compounding power. Her choice to speak out about the abuse, as well as her disparaging remarks about his power reflect her aggression and resilience. Despite her treatment, she continues to move forward.

The female speaker admits to dying in distinct ways. In this case, we can look at the speaker as metaphorically dead for a few reasons. First, Plath creates several scenes of rebirth or regrowth that imply that a sort of death had to have occured in order for the rebirth to take place. Secondly, Plath alludes to several scenes of death: a graveyard and other variations of death that the speaker has experienced. Therefore, the female speaker is a metaphorically dead one, and in turn, carries the benefits of a dead female speaker:

My night sweats grease his breakfast plate. The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position With the same trees and headstones. Is that all he can come up with, The rattler of keys? 5 61

I have been drugged and raped. Seven hours knocked out of my right mind Into a black sack Where I relax, foetus or cat, Lever of his wet dreams. 10

Something is gone. My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin Drops me from a terrible altitude. Carapace smashed, I spread to the beaks of birds. 15

0 little gimlets— What holes this papery day is already full of! He has been burning me with cigarettes, Pretending I am a negress with pink paws. 1 am myself. That is not enough. 20

The fever trickles and stiffens in my hair. My ribs show. What have I eaten? Lies and smiles. Surely the sky is not that color, Surely the grass should be rippling. 25

All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticks, I dream of someone else entirely. And he, for this subversion Hurts me, he With his armory of fakery, 30

His high, cold masks of amnesia. How did I get here? Indeterminate criminal, I die with variety— Hung, starved, burned, hooked. 35

I imagine him Impotent as distant thunder, In whose shadow I have eaten my ghost ration. I wish him dead or away. That, it seems, is the impossibility. 40

That being free. What would the dark Do without fevers to eat? 62

What would the light Do without eyes to knife, what would he Do, do, do without me. 45 (Plath 1962, 23-24)

Throughout the poem, Plath equates the husband figure with a jailor, by positioning the wife as the imprisoned or the captive, who does everything for the male while the male mistreats the wife figure. The poem opens “My night sweats grease his breakfast plate” (1). Traditionally, the wife prepares meals for the husband; however, this preparation and meal are violent. It is her “night sweats” or her malnourished body that he feeds on. The initial line reveals that the husband is fulfilled when the wife is under stress or pressure; his happiness feeds off of her anxiety. The night sweats that the woman has presume a high-pressure environment of expectation as well as discomfort. Further, her status of wife is made clear by her domestic duties. However, it is important to note that her night sweats are not his breakfast; instead it is her night sweats that “grease” his plate. Her sweat as the grease not only introduces the idea of potential insidious food tampering, but also furthers the idea of revenge since grease is harmful to the human body. Grease, among numerous other things, builds up in the arteries to create life threatening effects, so in choosing the word “grease,” Plath shows a sinister love, a love of calculated revenge. The voice of the dead wife begins to reclaim her authority as well as seek vengeance under the guise of housewifely obedience.

The following lines move away from the husband-wife dynamic to the jailer-jailed. The speaker imagines every night the same: a threatening graveyard. The term “placard” (2) is unusual here, as it refers to a false recreation of a haunting image. 63

The scene almost becomes the set of a play as everything is “wheeled into position” (2).

Plath immediately aligns the marriage with an image of death. The subservience to the male not only acts as a silencing and a removal of agency but also as a figurative death for the female speaker. The male figure taunts her with recurring scenes and threats of death, which is further reinforced by “the rattler of keys” (5). However, Plath undermines and mocks with the previous line, “is that all he can come up with?” (4). His attempt to assert dominance is a failed one; the speaker shows no fear. In her acknowledgement of his falseness, she admits she can see through him and maintains her vigor. Here, Plath critiques the balance of power in marriage: in appearance the male has the upper hand as he is literally the key holder; however, the female is just as powerful. The metaphorical dead female speaker not only reveals the abuses she endures but also that she is strong regardless of the husband’s threats.

But what initially begins as a haunting, yet a less intimidating scene in the first stanza, becomes significantly more dangerous in the second stanza. The speaker remarks on her physical abuse and rape. The assumed marriage described seems less like a marriage and more like an abduction, particularly with the mention of the “black sack”

(7). Through each stanza the speaker realizes more and more the oppression of her current state.With moments of sexual violence, sickness, and fantasy, Plath drags the reader into the twisted mind games that the husband figured has invented. The husband/abuser tortures the wife physically and emotionally. Whether or not these are exaggerations that reflect how the woman feels about her marriage, the mention of abuse demands an investigation or a more serious consideration of female oppression. 64

Society’s depiction of marriage does not match her harsh reality. We are reminded that the voice of the wife is one that is “intimate with pain” (Wolff 200).

Plath highlights the wife’s intimacy with pain through detailing her physical and mental abuse. The speaker imagines herself as something delicate and fragile as her

“carapace smashed,/I spread to the beaks of birds” (14-15). Her “carapace,” her whole self or protective shell, breaks and presumably reveals a more vulnerable self. Plath’s choice of the word “carapace” is an interesting one, as it is the third time the wife refers to herself as something that is not human (in previous lines she refers to herself as

“foetus” and “cat”). Her word choice for non-human characteristics also continues throughout the poem as references to dehumanization, fragility, and/or rebirths.

Furthermore, the breaking that takes place may refer to the breaking of the wife’s spirit.

Her husband’s violence has worn away at her and continues to break her down. However, her spirit is not entirely broken. While her “carapace” may be smashed, an underlying layer still exists. Therefore, the breaking of the “carapace” may signify a rebirth or renewal of the speaker as there is a possible layer that remains.

Despite her rebirth, the speaker alerts the reader that she is malnourished; her ribs show and she has only eaten “lies and smiles” (23). In that description we find that her husband or jailor has a particular falseness and malice since her ribs show she may be malnourished in terms of food intake and nutrition. We can see this in two ways: one is that he does not provide for the wife because he does not feed her regularly, making her appear dependent on the husband for substance. A focus on dependency functions as a larger critique on the the lack of agency a female may have within marriage. On a literal 65 level, she is held captive and would have no control over her food intake. But, on the other hand, she may also be malnourished in her needs. Since the relationship is abusive, we can assume that she is emotionally and mentally neglected. He feeds her “lies and smiles,” neither of which are capable of sustaining life, nor a relationship. Not only is she captive to her husband, but also to the institution of marriage and all the expectations it brings with it.

In the same vein, the speaker is a captive of the home when Plath refers to the domestic space as a cell. In doing so, she envisions the home as an enclosed space, much like the coffin in Niedecker’s “I married.” The domestic space is no longer a place of safety or solace, but instead a place of violence, discomfort, and oppression. The space itself is emphasized as being false, when the speaker says “[s]urely the sky is not that color/Surely the grass should be rippling” (24-25). Her “outdoor” experience is falsified because she is captive; therefore, the described experience is simply pictures on the wall or what she has been told; we are reminded of the “placards” from the first stanza.

However, because the speaker knows that a breeze would cause ripples in the grass, or the true color of the sky, we can assume that she has had some freedom in the past and that she knows of the exterior world. This analogy could also stretch to refer to what the speaker knows about healthy relationships. The speaker recognizes that her relationship should “surely” not have the dynamic that has developed. Society’s construct of marriage has corrupted the female speaker’s expectation, and in this stanza we see the speaker recognizing the reality of her toxic situation. 66

Later in the poem, within the same realm of unreachable expectations, the female speaker remarks, “I am myself. That is not enough” (20). Not only is the line haunting, but it allows one to assume that the female has come to hold herself to expectations that are not realistic. The speaker’s understanding of the difference between expectations and reality continues to blur, and the jailor seems to be at fault for this lack of clarity. The husband in the poem creates such unrealistic expectations for the wife to live up to that she has lost herself in them, and thus she no longer is able to be a human being. She loses her humanity to the point that she realizes she is not enough for something that she has consented to and in turn loses her sense of deserving and any lingering agency that she could have possibly had left. As the poem continues, the woman becomes less and less alive; she becomes sickly, and thin. Yet at the end of the poem she continues to justify her existence through him; in part, she exists for him: “what would he/ do, do, do without me?” (44-45). Her purpose for life is in direct correlation to serving him, yet the repetition of “do” forces the question of the female speaker’s coherence. The repetition not only makes us question what would the male do without the female but also how stable is the female at this point in the poem? Why is she basing her life off of her husband’s need for her? Or “The Jailor[’s]” need for her?

The most terrifying aspect of all, though, remains in the continuing relationship between the jailor and the captive. The wife chooses to stay as if she has Stockholm

Syndrome, and even feels compelled to stay because she asks, “...what would he /Do, do, do without me?” The final stanza deals in violent binaries, and in a way, symbiotic relationships. Whether it be harmful or useful, one organism feeds off another. From the 67 eighth and ninth stanzas, the speaker assumes that freedom is impossible, and she makes it seem as though dichotomies must and infinitely combat one another. Therefore, the speaker and the husband figure both thrive off this division and violence. Not only is

Plath pointing to the unhealthy dynamic of the relationship, but she also highlights that this is the husband’s primary skill and hobby. Without her, he has no one to torture, and no one to consistently hurt. The wife’s consistent exposure to this dynamic allows her to accept this reality as permanent and regular. Applying this concept on a larger scale, Plath comments on how women have come to accept their position as second class citizens, but her final line reminds the reader that women are not part of society simply to be oppressed. Instead, Plath incites women to recognize the jailor/captive dynamic, and break away from it.

While Plath clearly defines the unhealthy relationship, she also points out the dangers or pitfalls of the type of marriage similar to what we saw in “The Applicant.” In

“The Applicant” there is consistent pressure to marry young, and marry for the purpose of not being “empty.” The marriage dynamic in “The Jailor” sets up the notion not of rushed marriage, but of a kidnapping or a lie that becomes far more sinister. The poem focuses on the abuses that the speaker has endured instead of her joy, her independence, her accomplishments, or even well-being. Violence becomes the main association with marriage. Through the voice of the dead wife, or tortured wife in this case, Plath acknowledges what can be taken away in marriage: independence, identity, confidence, ambition. However, it does not seem to be entirely the fault of the partner, but society also plays a role in taking away female independence and forcing her into the household. 68

Plath writes in such a way that we feel her pain and see why her critique must be so violent. Her opinions on oppression, female status, and domesticity all become clear through her politically charged poetry. With poems like “The Jailor,” the outright violence grabs attention and draws the reader into the oppression that some women faced, and some still face, in marriage. The binary of husband and wife creates tension and division between the two. Perloff writes of Plath’s poetry as being “a poetry anguished, demonic, feverish, obsessed, violent, tragic” (176). We see all these characteristics in

“The Jailor.” Through the dead wife's voice, Plath raises awareness about domestic violence and female equality, and she does so in a non-traditional way. This poem would not commonly be defined by society as particularly feminine, and it is because of such existence of definitions, that we see Plath creating controversial poems like “The Jailor.”

“The Jailor” reveals the dirty secrets of a marriage that make for a volatile and hostile union. This poem may represent the culmination of disenchantment that occurs in marriage. The speaker of the poem asks “[h]ow did I get here?” which shows remorse for ever getting into the marriage in the first place as the speaker feels as though she is imprisoned within the marriage by the figure of the husband or the “jailor.” The poem is formed in nine stanzas at five lines each in which she criticizes the husband figure for hurting her both mentally and physically. The poem’s form creates a sensation of the woman being dragged through various stages of pain and let-down. Plath’s diction also points out the viciousness of the jailor as he only feeds her “lies and smiles.” In relation to this set-up the most terrifying and sick aspect of the poem is in the final two lines,

“what would he/Do, do, do without me?” The wife feels responsible for him, and she still 69 takes care of him after the pain he puts her through. The Jailor also acts as an alternative name for the husband, positioning the husband as a figure of oppression and violence, which situates the marriage as an institutional prison.

Lost and Found Identity in “Lady Lazarus ”

Unlike the other poems, the speaker in “Lady Lazarus” takes pride in her corpse-like state. The body becomes a fetishized object, pieced together for the audience to consume. Instead of receiving a full body, Plath gives us a fragmented corpse, a corpse that continues to die and revivify. From the pieces, Plath creates a disembodied figure that appears to have no fear and intends on aggressively seeking out her enemies. The speaker allows her audience to think that they have control, to think that they are the ones who carry the power; however, she remains unassailable.

“Lady Lazarus” contains all the elements of the figure discussed so far. She is

“dead,” she is married, and she endures oppression placed on her by society and her husband. However, she proves that through her voice, and her desire to continue to revivify, she can bring awareness to her and other women’s oppression. She returns in order to critique society, and be heard with a different level of awareness. Through death, the speaker claims a sacred space for her voice to resonate. Furthering the notion of sacred, the speaker takes part in a ritual-like practice of revivification once every ten years. Her ability to resurrect, and do so as a performance both on the level of the

“strip-tease” after the rebirth and the poem itself, solidifies her position as a dead and all-powerful speaker. 70

In the first few stanzas, the speaker anatomizes and objectifies herself, with no intention of letting anyone else do it to her. The repetition of “I” in the first stanza places the focus on the speaker and her control:

I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it—

A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot

A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen.

Plath begins to anatomize the body and then compare it to inanimate objects, “my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade,/My right foot/A paperweight.” The speaker describes her face as “featureless,” which could imply a number of things. First, she may be unidentifiable because she is simply an accumulation of body parts. The speaker then imagines the body as violated and violently pictured as the speaker’s skin is referred to as a “Nazi lampshade.”10 Second, the speaker absorbs an anonymous persona by taking away any sort of meaningful features; she is simply “featureless.” In a way, “Lady

Lazarus” is universal, allowing any woman an opportunity for rebirth. However, her identity is always at odds with her death. In Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic, Elisabeth Bronfen cites Sally Humphreys’ point that ‘“death threatens to put an end to differentiation.’” Bronfen continues to argue that:

10 Throughout the poem, Plath makes references to the holocaust through her diction and imagery. In doing so, she evokes an ongoing sense of doom, mistreatment, and death. While it is difficult to say that mistreatment and oppression of women and the holocaust are on the same scale, relating the two commands attention. 71

[b]ecause the corpse is a figure without any distinguishing facial traits of its own, one could say that semiotically it serves as an arbitrary, empty, interchangeable sign .... this obliteration of gender, along with all other socially constructed features, is represented in western culture through a gendered body, the superlatively beautiful, desirable feminine corpse. (64)

“Lady Lazarus” fits well with Bronfen’s description because the speaker is certainly gendered even though in death gender no longer seems necessary. Once a person dies, they can no longer participate in society, and therefore social constructs no longer apply to them. However, Plath plays with moments of the individual and the universal. The speaker continues to describe her ordinary and interchangeable, yet frightening face:

Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify?—

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day.

The first stanza remarks on the speaker’s ability to die and come back to life, pointing back to the title, “Lady Lazarus.” The reference to Lazarus, a biblical figure resurrected by Jesus in John 11, is turned female by the addition of “Lady” to the title. By adding

“Lady,” Plath does not only identify the sex of the speaker, but she also appropriates a mighty biblical figure. The speaker has the most agency of any of the speakers discussed so far; she resurrects herself in the poem and continues to rise anew as she must literally be unwrapped: “unwrap me hand and foot.” The voice reinvigorates as the poem gains ground; the speaker becomes stronger and empowered. She speaks of her ability to continue to survive despite her attempts at suicide. “Lady Lazarus” revises the male biblical figure and creates a space for a powerful and dead female figure. 72

The speaker knows her visage frightens when she asks “[d]o I terrify?” However, all her features continue to be indistinct pointing to a more universal and unidentifiable speaker. The next lines signal that the speaker certainly means to scare and to remind her

“enemy” that death consumes. Plath does so not only with images, but with her diction and sounds. She seems to remind us of the importance of life itself, rather than societal expectations and the heavy pressure placed upon women:

Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me

And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.

Plath’s diction and internal rhyme, especially the second line of the first stanza above, “the grave cave ate” force the reader to read slowly and with care. “The grave cave ate” seems to literally refer to her coffin eaten by the ground, which the speaker claims as her new home after death. The rhyme grabs the reader’s attention and focuses on the reality of her death. At the same time, she brings together a disturbing image of the flesh eaten off the speaker and rotting away in her coffin. However, the speaker creates ambiguity as to whether or not she is dead in any sense. On a literal level, she remarks on her rotting flesh, and on her coffin. On a metaphorical level, she remains an active speaker, and the only speaker, in the poem. Therefore, we can assume this is not a literal death experience, but a metaphorical death (or a recounting of near death experiences).

The juxtaposition of death, the female body, and youth encased in the two stanzas reminds us of what Poe believed to be the quintessential poem. However, “Lady Lazarus” 73 is not a poem of grief; rather, it is a poem of force and taking charge of the speaker’s own body and resurrection. Even though her flesh gets eaten away, she dies and resurrects; even though she pieces apart, she still manages to be “a smiling woman.” Plath precisely chooses to pair the word “smiling” with “woman.” Plath must reinforce that the only reason the speaker needs to maintain a smile—even in death—is solely because she is female. Therefore, the speaker’s smile may be a form of conformity, or even more so, it may be a way to give the appearance of conformity.

In “The Applicant” and “The Jailor,” Plath gives us images of complacency and compliance, whether it is communicated through silence, staying in an abusive relationship, or in this case, through the speaker’s “smile.” However, all these forms of communication are not real indications of consent or compliance. They may be markers of fear— for safety in the case of “The Jailor”; however, in “Lady Lazarus” the smile acts as performance. As a woman, the speaker acknowledges that she is not only watched but judged. Her smile then, fulfills society’s expectation of who this “lady” is, while also alerting the reader of how aware the speaker is of her audience in the poem:

This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see

They unwrap me hand and foot— The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone, 74

At thirty years old, the speaker recognizes that she has wasted each decade because of an attempted suicide. Because of this, along with her femininity, she becomes a spectacle. Society turns into a mass audience as they watch her unveiling and her rebirth. However, since she is a woman, the unveiling becomes a sexualized experience despite the fact she has returned from the grave. The removal of her bandages is provocative as it is referred to as her “big strip tease.” Strangely, Plath sexualizes the dead female body. Initially, a dead sexualized body seems disturbing; however male poets commonly utilized this popular trope in the 19th century. Plath must have been aware of the theme among male poets, and by showing the other side of it- the dead female body performing for the audience- Plath highlights the bizarre, fetishized theme. Plath takes ownership of the dead female speaker because the speaker becomes objectified only momentarily -it is not for the full duration of the poem, and she chooses to perform in this manner. She commands control of her situation by acknowledging and recognizing her crowd through her address of “Gentlemen, ladies.” Instead of judging without being seen, she lets her crowd know that she is watching back. She takes ownership of her body, specifically with the use of “my.” Ultimately, Plath not only claims the dead female voice, but also reclaims the dead female body. She performs society’s expectations of the dead smiling woman11 and shows the exceedingly eerie level of female expectation.

11 The dead smiling woman image returns in Plath’s “Edge,” yet another poem where a female speaker straddles the line of life and death in order to achieve perfection. 75

The speaker goes on to detail her attempts at suicide recognizing that it has not changed her, yet she continues to get better at it and comes to articulate each experience artfully:

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident.

The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut

As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.

As the speaker details her attempts at suicide, she then goes on to relate dying to an art.

Plath likens it to an art in a few different ways. We may interpret that even after the attempts at suicide the speaker continues to live, which would have to be a type of creation and, therefore, a sort of art. In terms of her continuing descriptions of her suicide attempts, her depictions progressively get more detailed and symbolic. The first description of the suicide is “[i]t was an accident,” whereas the second description features her “rock[ing] shut//As a seashell.” The language gets more descriptive and articulate with each suicide attempt. According to the speaker, her resurrections may even contribute to her growing artistic ability. 76

Plath comes back to the idea of art and spectacle in the following stanzas by framing death as “theatrical”:

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell. It’s easy enough to do it and stay put. It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’ That knocks me out. There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart— It really goes.

Similar to the voyeurism in the earlier stanza, Plath returns to the dynamic of the speaker and the audience. She refers to suicide as “theatrical,” which relates it to an art form as well as a performance or a representation. Furthermore, if we read straight through, ignoring the stanza break, “It’s the theatrical//Comeback in broad day,” the lines focus on the “theatrical comeback” and position the speaker as an entertainer. Everytime she comes back from her attempted suicide it is more of a spectacle and surprise rather than a genuine relief. To say it is a “theatrical comeback” belittles the attempted suicide and refocuses on the return and the rebirth. However, at this point, the rebirth seems to do little for the speaker as she returns to the “same place, the same face, the same brute....”

The speaker may hope for her rebirths to bring about change to her exterior life, but she winds up exactly where she left. The brute,12 who is assumed to be the speaker’s husband,

12 The reference to the husband as the “brute” also appears in Plath’s poem “Daddy.” 77 responds to her comeback as “A miracle!” While a seemingly positive reaction, the speaker interprets it as artificial and linked back to the idea of performance and theatrics.

She claims to be knocked out from the comment— meaning either she does not truly believe the response of her husband, or it is so ridiculous it is comical. Here, marriage begins to play a role into the dead wife construct. In the next stanzas, the speaker remarks on how she is worth more:

And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Here, the speaker addresses the husband directly. She is his “opus,” which refers back to the speaker relating death and art. In this way, the husband takes away the female speaker’s potential to be creator or artist. The female speaker is his opus, meaning that she does not even belong to herself, but instead he has created her and made her valuable.

She then refers to herself in the eyes of her partner as “valuable,” and a “pure gold baby” both of which further objectify the speaker. She satirizes herself as being precious to her husband, but she knows it not to be true. Instead she is the “pure gold baby/That melts to a shriek.” The husband figure only sees her worth in relation to him, but not her as an 78 individual. However, she performs her own sort of art to continue to prove her value and worth; even further, she resurrects herself. In one sense her motives appear vengeful; she comes back to haunt. Yet in another way, she continues to prove herself as creator, artist, and always able to rise.

The speaker may be invincible since she can continue to resurrect herself, yet the husband continues to see in her nothing of value. However, on the other hand the speaker may become a sort of disembodied ghost figure:

Ash, ash— You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—

A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. (Plath 1962, 14-17)

Again, Plath references the Holocaust by alluding to Nazi soldiers who would harvest valuables such as jewelry or gold fillings from the dead bodies. The “cake of soap” refers to the soap Nazis would make from the corpses, and therefore nothing would be left of the bodies except for the bones leading to the line, “there is nothing there.” 13 Another

13 In referencing the Holocaust, Plath not only brings remembrance to the Holocaust, but also conflates issues that seems incomparable. In ‘“The Boot in the Face’: The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath,” Al Strangeways discusses Plath’s controversial use of Holocaust references in her poetry as attempts to transcend history as well as to name it so as not to forget it. 79 possible interpretation would be the male directly aligning with husband as Plath alludes to traditional wedding images: “A cake of soap,/A wedding ring,/A gold filling.” The cake and ring are reminiscent of a wedding while the soap and filling images are of things that try to fix, replace, or purify. The image of purity may also relate to how marriages are supposed to be, but with the chaos that occurs in the poem, the reader can assume that the marriage is not typical in nature. These images may also represent all that is left of the previous version of the wife as the husband pokes, and “there is nothing there.” The husband, who is also aligned with the oppressor, and the Nazi, uses up the female speaker, to the point that there are no remains. Instead, the speaker returns as a ghost to haunt, without chance of being discovered or overpowered. The dead female speaker as spirit becomes all-powerful and threatening.

In the final stanzas, Plath invokes the Holocaust again through the word choice of

“Herr” (which is German for mister, or man). The lines that follow further the notion of an all-controlling male counterpart, as the speaker refers to the husband as “Herr God,

Herr Lucifer.” In Stealing the Language: The Emergence o f Women's Poetry in America

Alicia Ostriker writes that “Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus dismisses ‘Herr God, Herr

Lucifer’ as the two faces of a single authoritarian and domineering being for whom a woman’s body is ‘your opus . . . your valuable’” (216). While Ostriker interprets the male as a general authoritarian, the male may be more specifically the husband. In the stanza situated before “Herr God” Plath juxtaposes marriage with authoritarianism. As Ostriker mentions, in referring to the female body as an “opus . . . valuable,” Plath is in turn objectifying the body, but also assigning to the male the roles of both creator and artist. 80

However, the speaker also refers to herself as an artist and resurrects herself “back” to life. As in Niedecker’s poems, we have the female body belittled to only the physical and material, as opposed to the value of the mind and the spirit. Plath forces the reader to acknowledge the spirit, as the speaker is able to regenerate her body repeatedly.

Out of all the poems examined in this chapter, this is the one that truly embraces a dead female speaker. Lady Lazarus requires death in order for a resurrection to occur and while death always seems to assume a lack of power, Plath manipulates this notion.

Transcending death is the ultimate form of power because death carries the unknown, so we attribute knowledge to death because it is so mysterious. Speaking from beyond the grave then associates power with the speaker as she must be aware of things the living may not know and could potentially never understand. Death is a place of authority because the art of resurrection can undo death itself, making the posthumous voice ideal for the oppressed.

Further, “Lady Lazarus” is the most threatening of any of the speakers encountered in Niedecker’s or Plath’s work; she “eats men like air.” By equating men to air, she claims their lack of power, especially in comparison to her. Where women were commonly referred to as the weaker sex, specifically in Plath’s era, Plath generates a figure who “eats” men as if they are nothing. The speaker of “Lady Lazarus” further exemplifies her fearlessness (and reason to be feared) as she purposefully breaks herself into pieces so that she can bring herself back together in any way she choses. Plath uses the dead speaker to take advantage of what the living cannot do. Therefore, by using the dead speaker, Plath locates a power larger than male or female, one of supernatural 81 strengths. In doing so, she rejects the binary of male/female which also banishes the idealization of the female corpse. Instead, the speaker is cannibalistic and continues to regenerate, taking on new identities.

Through “Lady Lazarus,” Plath may have tried to show readers what transcending beyond gender and reclaiming agency looked like. In The Haunting o f Sylvia Plath

Jacqueline Rose argues that in “Lady Lazarus” as well as other poems, specifically from

Ariel, Plath crafts speakers with emerging female selfhood that begins to transcend beyond gender binaries. Rose notes that “... Plath finally takes off from, bums herself out of, whatever it was . . . that had her in its thrall. This self enters into no dialogue . . . it simultaneously sheds all others, as well as any otherness in its relation to itself; it sheds the trappings of language and the world” (144). Throughout the Plath poems examined in this chapter, such a rawness exists that these images of transcendence continue to surface.

Because these speakers are emerging and breaking away from what oppresses them, death seems the appropriate voice. The notion of emergence links well with rebirth which allows death to function as a method of transcendence. Once the speaker arrives at a new selfhood, then she is able to release herself from the trappings of her old self. In doing so, she reclaims her agency with her newfound identity and exists in a space outside of social constructs, or at least a space where she feels safe to disregard gender expectations.

Existing outside of social constructs, Plath both fulfills and denies the universal dead speaker. Her speakers are anonymous to an extent, but some are considerably identifiable. “The Applicant” depicts the most universal of figures while the speakers in

“The Jailor” and “Lady Lazarus” appear to have easily differentiating circumstances that 82 confirm a sense of individual experience, although in “Lady Lazarus,” Plath makes a point to return to the notion that the speaker’s face is “featureless.” Plath pulls focus away from the body and shifts it entirely on the voice. The dead body in “Lady Lazarus” may exist, and even take part in an unveiling of sorts, but the body is never truly revealed. By withholding the body, Plath rejects aestheticization and idealization of the female body. Also, if the focus shifts to the voice rather the body, the resurrection becomes a means of spiritual and mental rebirth. The speaker determines her recreation and resurrection; it is not random, but a matter of choice and intention.

Plath’s speakers must willingly lose or transcend their identity in order for them to recover it. The power of letting go of one’s identity and accepting the vulnerability required to lose one’s identity is what the speakers must partake in to resurrect and reclaim themselves. Letting go through death allows speakers to transcend beyond ordinary understanding and allows them to step outside of societal expectations, boundaries, and limitations on gender. Therefore, the “[posthumous voice] may be a means of asserting a real identity not to be confused with blurred and distorted surface images—or with what can die” (Ostriker 65). By creating a metaphorically dead speaker,

Plath and Niedecker sculpt something stronger; something that cannot die. Just as the poems rest on the paper and continue to exist, so do their speakers. These speakers are not meek and movable; they are strong and permanent. Even though the newfound identity is located in the universal, the speakers continue to vacillate between individual and universal. 83

By starting at the place of death, Niedecker’s and Plath’s poems allow for more of a focus on what brought them there. The poems function as recountings of what many women may have experienced in their lives. Through reflection, the speakers gain a new sense of understanding and a revitalized sense of power. Through rebirth, the speakers reinvigorate and move forward. Niedecker and Plath reinforce Virginia Woolf’s

“Professions for Women” that underpins the need to kill the identity that doesn’t suit one’s self, specifically one placed upon one’s self by an outside force (usually society).

Woolf writes, “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had dispatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe” (236). Plath’s speakers show no desire to live a life passively in the service of others. The violent images aptly reframe Plath’s speakers; the violence is not present for the sake of violence; instead, it is present to showcase what is underneath and discover new identities that accurately reflect one’s true self. 84

Conclusion: Resurrection through Revision and Re-evaluation

“How do you know if you are going to die?” I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence she answered, “When you can no longer make a fist.” —“Making a Fist” Naomi Shihab Nye

In Naomi Shihab Nye’s 1988 poem “Making a Fist,” a young girl asks her mother how does one know if they are going to die. Her mother responds “[w]hen you can no longer make a fist.” In the end of the poem, the young girl continues to clench and open her hand. The mother’s response to her daughter in this poem works well to highlight what we have come to see within the convention of metaphorically dead female speakers.

To use the dead voice is like an exercise in political fight— a clenching of the fist.

However, how the mother in Nye’s poem defines if a person is alive is not true of the dead speaker, but it is true of a poem’s ability to survive (and reach more readers if it is preserved in the canon). If beyond death these speakers still have political fight or power, then they never really die; they can continue to change the future for the better. Despite the speaker, or even the poet’s death, the poem itself can continue to fight. Writing denies death; it exists on after the creator passes, so it can continue to inform and set the task for what the living can do. For that reason, the dead speaker is an immensely important element not only to poetry as an art form, but also to poetry as political activism.

Lorine Niedecker and Sylvia Plath use the dead female speaker as an empowering force through which a woman may speak freely and as a place where her words can survive. Through Niedecker and Plath’s poems we see these voices as expressing 85 strength, anger, and growth and as refusing oppression. Since we know so little of death, using this voice creates a sort of mysteriousness which ultimately allows the reader to reconsider or revisit the issues laid before them. Therefore, death (in its figurative forms) acts as a place to disrupt the reader from the norm, and draw their attention to a focus on the issues of the living. Death is able to act as a window to the injustices of the living.

The girl in Niedecker’s poem “I rose from marsh mud” is just that: a “girl.”

Niedecker and Plath may be identifying problems of young marriage—as if a female may be stunted by marriage. Marriage for a young woman according to the first poems in the

Niedecker and Plath chapters perpetuates a meaninglessness in life and shows that a woman can no longer devote herself to her own life after marriage. These poems take preconceived notions of marriage as fulfilling or as a necessity to achieve womanhood, and subvert marriage by considering that it may take away from one’s own life and ultimately remove meaning from life rather than add to it. I do not believe that these women are taking the stance that women should never marry, but rather sounding a call to choice for women, a call for agency within one’s own life, and a rejection of doing something just because society prescribes it. The women portrayed in the poetry are passive and submissive to their husbands in life and they regret it; these dead speakers seek to warn of submission to anyone or anything that proclaims themselves/itself a figure of authority without question.

Although the death in these poems is metaphorical, the poems still speak to Poe’s belief of the dead woman as poetically beautiful. The poets access the most beautiful poetic subject (the dead woman) yet reverse the roles of the speakers. Instead, the female 86 rises to a position of speech while everyone else is to remain silent without chance for interruption. Yet this is a question that lingers for these poems: are these secrets meant to be revealed or are they to be kept? Niedecker’s poems appear more silent and personal with diary qualities, whereas Plath’s are angry and violent at times. We see differences in how Niedecker and Plath critique masculinity and femininity in their own way;

Niedecker disguises her speaker as traditionally feminine while her content undermines expected feminine passivity. Plath, on the other hand, takes on a more dominant voice and reclaims power on her own. The idealized female and wife figures are primarily what women poets have been trying to work against in order to gain space for being human and true to oneself. Without humanity, or being allowed to make errors and not fit within a cookie-cutter essence of perfection, one becomes automated and therefore metaphorically dead to whom they truly are. In becoming someone else one must lose one’s old self and this is tragic. These poems argue for a perseverance and preservation of identity, empowerment, and female agency.

Since Plath’s time there has been a decline in social pressure to marry. This may be why, in current poetry, we see less of the dead wife voice and more of the posthumous female voice that focuses on the rejection of material wealth and feminine performance.

Maybe it is not war that brings female dead voices to speak out but rather an ongoing heaviness of the demands to fit into society. Maybe now it is the realization that the battle for equality seems endless. While women’s rights have come far in the past eighty or so years, there is always something that pushes society back a few steps. The pressure on the 87 body and the mind still exists through popular media and therefore works to transform individuals into mindless consumers.

This pattern of dead women speaking today seems as though there is more of a focus on the dead female as individual. We may consider this as a victory, as it is no longer marriage as an institution that we see speakers struggling with, but at the same time a struggle still remains. In Cynthia Cruz’s “Self Portrait” we return to an ambiguously dead figure. At first, the focus is on the body, and then it opens up into what the speaker did and did not want in life. As we progress through the poem the images become lodged in nature, rather than in material:

I did not want my body Spackled in the world’s Black beads and broke Diamonds. What the world

Wanted, I did not. Of the things It wanted. The body of Sunday Morning, the warm wine and The blood. The dripping fox

Furs dragged through the black New York snow—the parked car, the pearls, To the first pew—the funders, The trustees, the bloat, the red weight of

The world. Their faces. I wanted not That. I wanted Saint Francis, the love of His animals. The wolf, broken and bleeding— That was me.14

Within the first stanza we are reminded of Niedecker’s “I rose from marsh mud” in terms of structure and content. The speaker expresses that she did not desire for her

14 “Self Portrait” from The Glimmering Room (2012) by Cynthia Cruz. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved. body to be “spackled” in “beads” and “broke diamonds.” We can think back to the white slave girl in the church from Niedecker in her “diamond fronds.” Cruz’s speaker directly speaks out against what the “world” wanted of her and society’s feminine expectations.

The choice of the word “spackled” also reflects on how the woman may be missing something, and, therefore, need repairing or fixing. Since this voice continues to live on with similar themes, then we can start theorizing what the dead female speaker signifies.

After several years there remains an obsession with wealth, specifically diamonds.

However, diamonds, or any type of material wealth for that matter, are not desired by either Niedecker nor Cruz’s speakers—these indicators of wealth are something they adorn to appease and fit into society.

Similar to Plath, Cruz carries on the theme of violence as it reinforces suffering and oppression while keeping the alignment between women and nature that we saw in

Niedecker. As she continues to the end of the second stanza and the remaining portion of the poem, she begins to align materialism with violence—if a female does not follow what society prescribes for her then she feels a potential threat. The ongoing references to the body, not only reinforce images of Christ and religion (the expectation of the “good

Christian” or the “good Catholic”), but also remind us of the obsession with the female body. Throughout the poem the speaker reminds the reader that what the world wanted and what she wanted were two vastly different things. Again, we see similar themes of consumerism and material obsession which we saw in Niedecker and Plath. What this proves is these were not problems that came and went, but these are issues that women still struggle with today, and so these troubles pervade contemporary poetry and society. 89

The third stanza is the most violent and overwhelming as Cruz uses dashes and commas to list and interrupt the heavy consumerist expectations. The speaker refers to the New York snow as black, so the world becomes dark and dirty which sets the mood for how the reader should feel about the following list. Cruz then goes on to list the expectations: the “car”; “the pearls”; “the first pew”; “the funders”; “the trustees”; “the bloat.” All these things funnel into what the speaker calls the “red weight of/ The world.”

The list refers to everything society expects and perpetuates for the “success” of an individual. Notice also the organization and line breaks. Cruz directs our attention to those who specifically occupy the first pew: the wealthy and those who potentially contribute to corruption who attend church to wash away their sins. However, the stanza as a whole is so overwhelming, fast-paced, and dark it reflects gluttony and we are reminded of the blood and the threat in the second and fourth stanza.The fourth and final stanza offers a final shift of what the speaker wanted as she references the story of St.

Francis and the wolf.15 She refers to herself as the wolf “broken and bleeding” signaling that she has attempted to protect herself from society, but it has managed to still affect her greatly and wound her. At the same time, she becomes one with nature by aligning herself with an animal. Overall, the poem works to show the stark contrast between

15 In the Christian narrative of St. Francis and the wolf, or “The Wolf of Gubbio,” a wolf terrorizes a village leaving dead livestock and humans in its path. St. Francis, the patron saint known for his love of animals and nature, communicates with the wolf and discovers that the wolf acted for his own survival. The wolf expresses that the townspeople attempted to kill him, and he now has a broken leg rendering him unable to chase prey. After learning that the wolf needs forgiveness and acceptance, St. Francis returns to the town to inform the townspeople that they must feed and care for the wolf, and create a functional relationship for the two to live together in peace. At first, the people are hesitant, specifically those who lost loved ones to the wolf, but in the end they care for the wolf as the wolf vows to never hurt any of the townspeople. 90 individual identity and societal expectations. The speaker shows us that when society forces an identity on an individual, it not only hurts the individual but could potentially damage society as a whole.

When we consider the differences between Niedecker and Plath versus Cruz, we start to notice that the focus on the husband oppressor shifts to a societal wide oppression.

Cruz presents the potentially damaging effects of gender performance, consumerism, and overconsumption. Cruz’s poem does not focus on a one-on-one opposition but looks at society’s dominance and aims to dismantle the sort of hierarchical structure constructed by wealth, religion, or anything else that feeds into giving people false senses of dominance over one another. The speaker, like in the legend of St. Francis and the wolf, desires a type of acceptance and a freedom of choice so as not to be cornered into a particular identity.

Cruz’s posthumous speaker is not attempting elegy; instead this poem is written in resistance to social constructs that demand performed gender characteristics. Cruz’s speaker does not mourn for herself; instead, she is raw and “broken and bleeding— she defines herself as an animal. Cruz’s reference to the wolf may also act as a reference to reincarnation. Cruz critiques society’s obsession with the material, and the return to the primal signals a rejection of the material. Like St. Francis, who chose to live in poverty and denied money, by aligning herself with nature, the speaker critiques over-consumption, just as Niedecker’s speaker does. 91

In another contemporary poem, Melissa Studdard’s “Everyone in Me Is a Bird”16 which she cites as originally the title of an Anne Sexton poem, we see a metaphorically dead female speaker who rejects society’s expectations. Harking back to both Niedecker and Plath, the poem repeats images that reject material and societal expectations while threatening violence and oppression if that rejection takes place. Even further, the speaker seems to have internalized these cultural demands, and in the beginning, it haunts her.

However, the speaker acknowledges her confinement, and decides to take control of it:

Mind was a prison, ruby lined in its lipstick noir—everything woman I was expected to be, trapped between papered walls. What they said to do, I did not but only levitated at the burning, the body a water in which I drowned, the life a windshield dirty with love. What they said to think, I thought not but instead made my mind into a birdcage with wings. (2017)

In the first stanza, the speaker claims that her mind is a prison, but one that is hyper-feminized. She describes her mind as “ruby lined” in “lipstick.” She shows us that she has done her part to perform her gender. Further, she links her further performance to gender in her link to the housewife, as she is “trapped between papered walls.” This links us to the voice of the wife; not a voice that is in opposition with the partner, but one that is in direct opposition with domestic expectations. While Studdard partakes in the voice of the wife, it is not exactly like what we saw in Niedecker or Plath, but it is one that takes issue with overall society. The speaker rejects traditional femininity: passivity, make-up, and the position of the housewife. Her speaker rises with more power, and she

16 (Title is from an Anne Sexton Poem). Appears with permission of Melissa Studdard. 92 removes herself from society by likening herself to a witch and eventually growing her mind—adding wings to her cage. In a way, society’s demands may remain internalized, but at least by being out of the direct influence of it, the speaker can come to make her own choices and reclaim her agency.

Studdard’s speaker takes a direction different from those of Dickinson and

Niedecker by making a connection to the supernatural, a witch. The figure of the witch links to Plath’s speaker in “Lady Lazarus,” not because of her ability to resurrect, but more because of her supernatural abilities—Plath’s speaker “eats men like air.” This fantasy element, on top of the metaphorical death, takes us even further away from reality, and therefore, outside the constructs of society and its pressures. If we look to the title, “Everyone in Me Is a Bird,” we realize the level of control that the speaker develops for herself On one hand, her mind is still a cage, and she must live with the “birds” that tell her how she should be; however, she is the birdcage with wings, not the bird, and therefore has control over what goes in and out of the cage itself. She has protection, thus controls her own environment.

Both Cruz and Stoddard, as well as Plath and Niedecker, play with visual confinement as it is able to reflect the confinement in the content of the poems. Not only does form signal physical and mental confinement, but the smallness also reinforces feminine standards that carry such a pressure to be met—to the extent that the speaker feels threatened. Through these poems it starts to become clear that there is something suppressed within each speaker. Society did not let these speakers freely express themselves, and the confinement transfers over to the body, the mind, and to any sort of 93 expression of identity. Plath and Niedecker channel the voice of the wife to communicate the stifled potential and oppression a woman may have felt from her marriage and from society. However, as we move forward, we may start to notice these poems communicating it is not an individual source of marriage, but an ongoing wall of social barriers that keeps a woman from reaching her full potential and expressing her true identity.

As we have shifted as a culture, women recieve less pressure to marry or marry young. When we consider the poems discussed here, we might consider how social conditions may have shifted or how these changes come to affect the trajectory of dead speakers in poetry. First off, from what I found, we see fewer dead speakers who are also wives, or at least fewer who have been wronged by this institution. This does not mean that less dead speakers continue to haunt poetry. However, we may see less of the wife because of the reason Stephanie Genz gives in her essay, ‘“I Am Not a Housewife, but... ’

Postfeminism and the Revival of Domesticity.” Genz argues that “[t]he postfeminist housewife is no longer easily categorized as an emblem of female oppression but she renegotiates and resignifies her domestic/feminist position, deliberately choosing to ‘go home’” (50). Genz posits that postfeminism allows us to understand the position of housewife not as one of past implications or limitations, but as one of self-definition and choice. Therefore the position of housewife, instead of a condition of feminity, is more considered an open choice. It is no longer marked as a position of subordination,and it is also no longer linked to a single gender. While there are still looming expectations of what it means to be a mother or a homemaker, we have progressed to more female 94 agency, and in part, poetry, specifically those poets in this study, may have had some pull into helping readers, and society as a whole consider what narrow expectations can do to a person’s livelihood. Ultimately, we now see individuals—both women and men— marrying later, as well as maintaining their agency within marriage. Marriage, over time seems as it has become more of a equal team rather than a hierarchy of participants.

Socially, these poems encourage us to focus more on individual choice and ignore what identities society dictates for us. The poems inspire us to dismantle hierarchies and assertions of dominance in hopes to lessen violence and create equality.

Further areas of exploration for this study could consider the poems through different lenses, or consider poets who have also experienced some form of oppression.

Looking at gender performativity more closely would also be a point of interest since we could break down iterations of performance, expectation, masculinity, and femininity.

Moving forward, for the poetry that still takes part in this tradition, there are also new avenues to consider. It may prove beneficial to look at writers from different backgrounds and experiences since those who have been marginalized may have compelling things to say about intersectionality and marginalized groups through the voice of the dead. An interesting starting point may be Audre Lorde’s “A Woman Speaks” which fits with themes of femininity, resurrection, and race. Similarly, through these poems we could look more closely at other elements of femininity or other issues brought up such as motherhood, domestic violence, or a cultural study of how American society has treated women over time through policy and social institutions. 95

This study also has great potential to grow since there are several poems of Plath and Niedecker’s that would have been fitting. The most obvious poems that come to mind are Plath’s “Edge” and “The Detective.” These would be ideal poems to apply this framework and look at the differences in speakers and message. Niedecker also has some additional work, including “Stage Directions,” “Let’s play a game,” or “Domestic and

Unavoidable.” Since Niedecker has some plays mixed in with her poetry, these plays might also be interesting to look at what similarities and differences are carried out between the two modes. Overall, there are also many other facets of the poems that could be more closely examined.

So why might we see contemporary women poets using these same conventions as Dickinson, Niedecker, Plath and others did? We might consider that the social conditions that seem prerequisite to inspire this convention still continue today. In terms of social progress, women’s rights have come a long way, but there are still many ongoing issues women have to continue to face. Furthermore, we may see this convention grow among those groups who are marginalized or those who have their rights taken from them. This voice lends itself to a political usefulness. We silence ourselves for the dead, and because of that, the expectation is that someone is listening.

In “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” Adrienne Rich examines the vital importance of looking back in order to create the new, “Re-vision— the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history:it is an act of survival”

(167). Revision, as Rich points out, is a mode of survival. If we as a society come 96 together to correct our wrongs, or revisit our wrongs of the past, we will find ourselves doing better for the future. This might mean looking at past poetic voices to see how they can add to the richness of the culture by their addition to the literary canon. Re-vision may also mean keeping track of new dead voices to see what we must revise as a society, so we can bring justice to those who have been wronged in the past.

Throughout this study I do not mean to say that the speakers require death in order to be heard. Instead, death adds an element of the unknown, secrecy, and a sort of mystery. A dead speaker may draw someone in for reasons outside of politics, but they will end up considering political implications addressed by the speaker. Poetry, as a mode, and dead speakers, as a specific voice, continue to be a productive convention because we still know very little about death. To resurrect a voice from a place normally shrouded by mystery, the writer takes a risk. On a deeper level, the poet challenges what we as readers believe we know, or be true. We know that someone cannot speak from beyond the grave, but if we suspend our disbelief we can imagine it as possible. The metaphorical dead speakers can continue to live, just as the poet lives through her writing once she has passed. Even further, poets push that concept by challenging the reader to accept a dead speaker. At the same time, readers must re-evaluate and question standards and traditions that we may blindly accept as a part of our social structure and institutions.

If we find ourselves accepting a dead speaker, it might move us to question everything else we accept. 97

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