Plath Profiles 145 : Antigone of Our Times? Chetan Deshmane

[T]ragic heroes . . . are always beyond established limits. -- Jacques Lacan 1

Shoshana Felman opens her essay “Women and Madness: the Critical Phallacy” with a series of questions that question the “privileged relation and a definite correlation,” which exists in the so-called “sociological statistics” even today, between women and madness; her intention is to analyze and interpret this “sociological fact” (7). She thinks it necessary to “speak from the place of the Other” and to think about women outside of the dichotomous oppositions like masculine/feminine or sanity/insanity (10). Sylvia Plath’s poetry, especially her “Tulips” (CP 160-2), not only gives rise to questions about the dichotomous oppositions Felman talks about, but it also provides answers to avoiding these oppositions in the language of both literature and criticism. This essay, therefore, seeks to speak from ‘the place of Plath’ (or of the speaker of “Tulips”) and, at the same time, to find a cure--no, not to the so-called ‘madness’ exhibited in the poem, but--to better the situation that forced Plath to speak the way she does in this poem. For lack of any overt or clear statement of resentment by Plath regarding whether she saw herself oppressed by patriarchal law, feminist readings of her works have often struggled to accuse patriarchy for what Curtis calls her “sense of entrapment” (177), and they have preferred to extend the scope of Plath’s problem to encompass all women, most of whom do not feel entrapped in their practical life, with the exception of certain situations: these situations may be likened to those in which some “men” feel entrapped (or “framed,” to use the term preferred by Hollywood films in which people working around the hero in a bureaucratic establishment raise obstacles in his/her path as he/she is about to receive credit for something he/she has done). A critic, paradoxically using ‘barelylegal’ for username, has tried to legalize Plath’s problem by comparing her with patients of anorexia, who attempt to gain control over some law or established code of

1 Lacan, Seminar VII 271. All references to Lacan, unless otherwise stated, are from his Seminar VII ; those to Plath’s poems are from her Collected Poems , abbreviated in the text as CP followed by page reference. Deshmane 146 conduct, and points out that 90% of the anorexia patients are women. 2 However, this critic does not talk about the remaining 10% and conveniently makes it a specifically feminine and thus a social problem. I argue that there is a great need to confront Plath’s problem as unique. She was certainly a militant, whose struggle was less with patriarchy or, with herself, as Curtis suggests (178), than with the Law in a Lacanian sense: that prohibits, ordains limits on attaining jouissance . It is true that patriarchy is responsible for the law that exists, but it could have as easily been matriarchy--even transgenderism--had we that kind of social or familial order. Plath’s “raw” poetry must not be looked upon as a resistance to patriarchy or patriarchal law as such, but as an expression of a radical desire to transgress the ‘archy’ of Law or of the symbolic. To this end, her “Tulips” may be read in order to provide a proper context for understanding her mental state and poetry. The poem vents her desire for death many times: “I am nobody . . ./ I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses / . . . my history to the anesthetist . . . my body to surgeons;” “Now I have lost myself;” “I am a nun [none?] now;” “I only wanted / To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty;” “I have wanted to efface myself” (ll. 5-7, 18, 28, 29-30, 48). Giving up of day-clothes in the first stanza evokes night- clothes; the symbolism of day (life / life-giving) and night (death / death-giving) is already at work. In fact, death is praised in the poem as something that swabs one of all the dirt one collects in life; in short, it is a kind of purgation: “I am a nun now” is immediately followed by “I have never been so pure” in Stanza V. The next stanza delineates death as a deliverer (“How free it is, you have no idea how free--”). In the same stanza, the peacefulness after death is eulogized: “it dazes you, / And it asks nothing.” “Tulips,” through the homonymous ‘two lips,’ corresponds with the two eyelids formed by the white pillow and the white sheet-cuff (l. 8). What is between each of the two pairs? Life, of course. The white eyelids “that will not shut” signify life since it is death that can shut them (metaphorically if not literally) forever (l. 8-9); similarly, the “loud noise” the tulips/two lips seem to make, and fill the air with, also suggests life (ll.

2 The critic’s actual name is not known, but the article is available on . Plath Profiles 147 50-52). Plath has the feeling that before the tulips came, there were only the gull-like nurses who were “no trouble” (l. 11). However, now she feels that the tulips, which symbolize life, are watching her. She visibly writhes under their gaze and wishes to “efface [her]self” (l. 48). The sun, too, is a symbol of life. Plath sees herself foully caught between the sun and tulips. She hates to be engulfed by life; it is as if life were a whirlpool and she a dry leaf in its basin. The comparison of the tulips with “dangerous animals/. . . some great African cat” (ll. 58-59) also indicates Plath’s aversion to life. At the very beginning, tulips are called “too excitable.” ‘Excitable’ is derived from the Latin exci ēre , meaning ‘set in motion.’ The poem’s dialectic, however, clarifies that Plath is suggesting the tulips’ ability to set her life in motion. Before they came, she “was happy” as she was “resting” and “playing” with death (ll. 55-56). Now they seem to conspire against her desire for death; they have brought life with them, even the (cold white) walls of the hospital room seem to be “warming themselves” with life (l. 57). The air, one more symbol of life, “snags and eddies” round the tulips (l. 53), which now assimilate Plath’s self that is backing up from death and coming alive. Unwillingly, she seems to commit herself to the coming on of life; the “rust-red engine” of her existence might begin to function (l. 54). Finally, she is seen tasting the water, again a symbol of life, that “comes from a country far away as health” (ll. 62-63). Despite her anti-life attitude, she is made to taste (or put to test by) life’s “warm[th] and salt” (l. 62). Thus, life “(s)nags” at her much like -- as Jacqueline Rose would have it – “the haunting of Sylvia Plath” by her critics. The poem is unique in the sense that ‘life’ is the master signifier here; whereas, usually, in literary works, we see ‘death’ as the master signifier. 3 Plath’s poem stops at the point where signs of life become discernible. For her, death does mean something: “Dying/Is an art,” she writes in “” (CP 245). She constantly testifies through her work that she had lost the meaning of “life.” The repressed signifier, whose meaning is lost for the subject, means less than what it means to others. The less a

3 In Lacan’s view, the unconscious is comprised of signifiers and “structured . . . like a language” (Écrits 234). His concept of the ‘master signifier’ suggests that it is a signifier that is cut off from the psychical chain of the person’s conscious thought and repressed deep into the unconscious and, against which, the person “repeatedly butts up . . . encountering a total opacity of meaning” (Fink 77). It may be a word like ‘sex’ or ‘death’ which, after a traumatic experience involving it, come to signify nothing to the person. Also see Deshmane’s article below. Deshmane 148 signifier means the greater its impact on the subject. 4 Therefore, ironically enough, for lovers of Plath as a person the poem ends on a note of hope; whereas for herself, it ends on a melancholy note. In “” (CP 222-224), she employs the trope of a Jew for herself, almost identifying herself with the subject of Nazi Law. This extension clarifies that she did not view law simply as patriarchal and its subject as female. She was rather concerned with her own unstable, precarious, insecure condition as a subject of the Law that she could not bear. 5 However, crossing the limit ordained by the symbolic is a merger with the (larger) Other; it is no less than the death instinct (Hamlet and Oedipus may be recalled here). Plath’s passivity or (f)rigidity in “Tulips” is the same inanimate condition in which Freud sees the manifestation of the death instinct; in fact, placed very close to the middle of her Collected Poems , the poem is the consummation of her desire for death. Before the arrival of the tulips, she was happy sinking into the nothing that, for her , is ; it is ironically referred to as her “oxygen” that the tulips eat (l. 49). She was thus surviving with the hope of death -- her oxygen and deliverer. This clearly reveals Plath’s desire to transgress the limits imposed by Law or by the symbolic. Let it be suggested here that the agency that establishes the limits or Law is a secondary question since jouissance is the aim of the subject of the Law, but it cannot be attained by challenging the lawmakers but by transgressing the Law itself. Transgression here must not be taken simply as the desire to challenge the limit imposed by the symbolic, for the aim of desire is always beyond this limit; certainly, there is a difference between the jouissance of transgression and jouissance proper. Once we accept that it was Plath’s personal problem, the true splendor of this woman begins to emerge. Plath can be compared to Sophocles’ Antigone. For both there is no question of gaining control over the Law; it is only that they find it so unjust as to make them feel radically alienated from their desire. Antigone cannot bear subjection to Creon’s Law

4 “[T]he more the signifier signifies nothing, the more indestructible it is” (Lacan, Seminar III 185). 5 Plath associated anything German with the atrocious yet inevitable, and this is precisely what characterizes law for one who harbors the desire to violate it since law makes being unbearable for him/her. Plath’s “bee” poems, which are about being (as a subject to law) and death, suggest this. Gordon also agrees with Rose in seeing some connection between Nazi ideology and the “regularity and discipline of bee colonies,” which I take to be a law. Her failure in coping with this law is mirrored in her inability to learn the German language (see Rose 227). It was she--not all women--who thus failed. Plath Profiles 149 while Plath feels subjected to the familial or social Law. The greater the suppression of desire, the stronger the desire to transgress. In both cases, it is the Law--whether patriarchal or not--that challenges the subject’s desire, which therefore seeks to transgress it in order to achieve jouissance , since “without a transgression there is no access to jouissance ” (Lacan 177). Like Antigone, as Lacan points out, Plath too (in the hospital) is “suspended in the zone between life and death,” with everything given away or up; it is from here that their “lamentation on life” is heard (Lacan 280). Though Plath does not complain very ostensibly about life, her praise of death in retrospect reflects the lamentation on life. 6 Both Antigone and Plath seem to have become “ ωωός,” which Lacan translates as ‘inflexible’ or ‘raw’ (263); both feel “[d]ead in life,” “dead to everything” (qtd. in Lacan 271); both are at the radical limit where they value their desire out of human proportions. Thus, while Antigone is not concerned with whether her brother, Polynices, had committed a serious crime, Plath does not seem to care about (her antipathy toward) her child or husband. 7 Law here functions as the corroborative principle of desire. It is true that males are the creators of the law, yet there is no dearth of males suffering from the same law: witness lovers committing suicide on finding the law of class or caste ridden societies unbearable. I wish to emphasize that fundamentally it is a question of individual desire which, if repressed, revolts--to the extent of driving the subject of Law to become inhuman or a self-willed victim of it’s own desire. Thus, though Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” looks at “Herr Doktor,” “Herr God,” “Herr Lucifer” as “Her[.] Enem[ies],” we must not forget that these are human incarnations (note the use of “Herr”) of the all powerful human Law, whose word cannot be turned down; this is precisely why the poem’s speaker transgresses it and embraces death, from where she rises and “eats”--not “men” but--Law (CP 246-247). And eating is not literally eating but it is a trope Plath uses to

6 “Some things of this world are indigestible” (CP 155). 7 Curtis suggests that Plath might have experienced murderous feeling toward her child, and then also a feeling of guilt. Both feelings would not arise without our society singing praises of motherhood. This binds the mother in our expectations that give rise to a code of conduct for her. A mother feeling burdened by this unwritten code or law is likely to develop these feelings: murderous feelings are a violation of the law while guilt feelings initiate (re)acceptance. It is the awe of the Law which the mother has assimilated into her unconscious that creates the pressure, and Plath’s aversion to “committing [her]self” is manifest even as she prefers people who cause “no trouble” to the “hooks” that bind (ll. 56, 11, 21). Thus, it is not exactly an “awful baby” but the “(l)awful baby” that Plath refers to (l. 38). Deshmane 150 represent herself as a scorner of the Law that she hates (Rose 35). To belittle Creon’s Law, Antigone praises the Law of God and declares herself to be its follower, but we must recognize that it is the Law of Desire that both Antigone and Plath really revere. The homonym of tulips, two lips, also suggests speech, language, through which Law comes into existence and which, like “some great African cat,” might devour the speaker. This is immediately followed by “And I am aware of my heart” (l. 60), where heart is her desire, desire for death. The association heart-desire-blood-death cannot be missed. The intermittent “red blooms” of the desire are the metonymic way through which death, which she feels loves her, is revealed to her (ll. 60-61). Plath would like to be consumed by (her desire for) death than by Law. This seems to be the more likely function of the comma after “some great African cat” and the use of the conjunction “And” at the beginning of the next line. And yet the tulips win (they are indeed “too excitable”), hence the cathartic tears. In redefining catharsis, Lacan suggests that it is the calming effect upon returning from the limit of excitement or a Dionysian frenzy which, if crossed, the “desire’s formidable center sucks us in,” into death (245-246). Through this calming effect, one returns from death since, for Lacan, desire is always desire for death. Plath returns from that limit; this is how she undergoes catharsis and returns to the symbolic domain. The implied rolling of the tears down her cheeks could be understood through the proverb Lacan quotes: ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss’ (60). 8 The pains of living have almost petrified her in the same way as Daphne in the Greek myth was “transformed into a tree under the pressure of a pain from which she [could] not flee” (Lacan 60). The tears represent human emotions, a return from the state of almost petrification (or from the real) to the symbolic, which is the human sphere (which in turn is the sphere of Law) where she will start ‘rolling’ her life (sadly) again. Lacan introduces two terms, ’άτη (Atè ) and ’εκτος ’άτας (ektos atas ), in Seminar VII in relation to jouissance ; by the former he designates the human limit of symbolic jouissance (the jouissance of remaining within the limits imposed by Law or the symbolic

8 Lacan’s argument suggests that ‘rolling’ is movement, life; conversely, not-rolling is fixity, petrification, an “actualization of pain” (Lacan 60), one’s petrification through pain, or--if the coinage is permitted-- “paintrification,” which Emily Dickinson has described as ‘a formal feeling’ that comes after great pain. This is echoed in the descriptors of the body as ‘pebble’ or “sunken rust-red engine” (ll. 15, 54). Plath’s “The Arrival of the Bee Box” also is about her paintrification like Daphne (CP 212-213). Plath Profiles 151 order), and by the latter he means a crossing over of that limit and virtually meeting with death as desire (262-3, 277, 280-3). The latter is the entry into an area where human life cannot survive for long. Plath and Antigone both had to die soon after the ’εκτος ’άτας , but with a differ(e/a)nce: Antigone’s death does not take much time to follow since she did not return from the ’άτη like Plath; this may have been the sad moment bringing tears in the eyes of Plath’s speaker in “Tulips,” yet she did succeed in less than two years after composing the poem. The moment of the tears is poised between Atè and ektos atas ; on the one hand they are cathartic, giving the pleasure of catharsis that enables a person to return to normalcy after experiencing the extreme and yet, on the other, they express the grief of returning to the former limits of the dominant Law. The case of both Plath and Antigone is that of an exceptional woman; the cure in such a case does not lie in the reason of the other / man since such reasoning seeks to restore the person’s subjection to the same law against which (s)he has revolted. The subject is asked to ‘think again’ and to ‘try to adapt’ him / herself to the erstwhile situation; this is to throw him / her back to the pittances of the Law (s)he hates. The cure lies in extending the limits imposed by the Law or in exempting the subject altogether from obeying that particular law which (s)he has violated--just as the law of a university may exempt a brilliant student from taking a particular course or paper in a given term. This suggestion does not mean to give rise to a lawless society, but intends to enable the Law to respect its subject as an individual. In fact, Lacan says that the subject may have reasons to say that the Law is unjust, even idiotic; however, (s)he is at the same time aware that saying so is no less than violation of the Law. Thus the subject’s feelings about the Law are repressed--only to surface in the form of a dream in which the subject takes on punishment for violating the Law (129). Even though the subject may be correct in observing some idiocy in the Law, (s)he cannot overcome the guilt-feeling of having violated it. Lacan, therefore, maintains that “no one can grasp [the Law] in its entirety” (127). This is precisely the situation in which Plath and Antigone can be located. The Law should be able to help the subject overcome the guilt-feeling. This cannot happen unless the Law or Lawmakers become a little more considerate. In such a situation, to think of individual cases to be able to see the idiocy of the Law, or to distinguish the uniqueness of the subject’s situation, is very important from the humanitarian viewpoint. Deshmane 152

Only this would rid the subject of guilt feelings. Unfortunately, Plath was ahead of her times and did not know that her feelings of antipathy toward her husband or children “were not unnatural” (Curtis 179), that they are now acceptable--almost lawful. Plath Profiles 153 Works Cited barelylegal. “Contemporary Trends in Feminist Criticism and Their Echo in Sylvia Plath’s Later Poems.” 30 Dec. 2005. 01 Dec. 2006 . Curtis, Diana. “Plath’s ‘Tulips.’” The Explicator 64.3 (Spring 2006): 177-179. Deshmane, Chetan. “Wordsworth’s ‘A Slumber.’” The Explicator 64.4 (Summer 2006): 214-218. Felman, Shoshana. “Women and Madness: the Critical Phallacy.” Feminims: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism . Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. 2nd ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. 7-20. Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance . Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Gordon, John. “Sylvia Plath: three bee notes.” ANQ 22 June 2003. 11 Jan. 2007 . Lacan, Jacques. Écrits : A Selection . Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. ---. Seminar III: The Psychoses (1955-56) . Trans. Russell Grigg. London: Routledge, 1993. ---. Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60). Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems . London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.