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Sylvia Plath: Antigone of Our Times? Chetan Deshmane

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Sylvia Plath: Antigone of Our Times? Chetan Deshmane Plath Profiles 145 Sylvia Plath: 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 <http://www.freeonlineresearchpapers.com>. 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 “Lady Lazarus” (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 “Daddy” (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.
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