Witches in the Gingerbread, the Making of the Plathian Voice by Adrianne Kalfopoulou

relationship with Aurelia engendered and intensified. ow does one reconcile H Reading the letters, one gets a the voice of “, I have had to kill sense of their urgency: the impulses to you.” “… you bastard, I’m through” (6); communicate events as they happen or the irony of ’ edgy are a part of registering their effect. In entrepreneurial register as she barters this they sometimes read like Plath’s the “charge” for “the eyeing” of her journal entries with their many ellipses “scars,” with the ever loyal Sivvy in and dashes. And in being addressed to Plath’s letters home to her mother Aurelia they are implicitly and often Aurelia? Aurelia’s selection of the letters explicitly asking of her to encourage, was meant to carefully construct a reassure, and support the writer and portrait in which she omits significant person Plath is forging. After a first chunks of Plath’s “anger, illness, and rejection of a Fulbright application, she left-wing politics” (Rose 79) that exist in begins a January 27, 1955 letter with the letters as a whole. Yet if Aurelia has “Dear Mother, I always hate to be a chosen these letters to rectify what she harbinger of bad news, but I am really considered to be the distorted pretty miserable this morning. Evidently expression of herself in and my interview decided the committee in poems like “The Disquieting Muses” against me, and this is the first time I and “Medusa,” the letters’ have been really rejected after having demonstration of the polyphony of all the chances, and I have been terribly Plath’s varying Sivvys with their mood sad all morning” (Letters Home 151-2); changes, tonal registers and expanding it is one of the longer letters, and one ambitions suggests an intimacy and she picks up again in the middle of the porousness with language that her day. “Hello again.” She writes: “It is

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now after lunch, and I am beginning to Aurelia’s presence begins to beg the think a little. I shall write immediately to question of what needs her example, Columbia and ask if it is too late to after her husband ’s death, apply for a scholarship there…” It ends might not be fulfilling. Finally in with the line: “Oh well something will Cambridge on her much-coveted work out. I’ll keep fighting. Lots of love, Fulbright (this was the second but Your rejected offspring, Sivvy” (Letters successful time she had applied), Plath Home 154); the detailing of feelings, writes in an October 3 1955 letter: “Do and need to communicate the minutiae bear with me. It really helps me to write of the day demonstrates the level at you and will be nice to establish a which Plath involves Aurelia, both in the regular correspondence where we routine of her day and how she is answer each other instead of talking in a thinking and feeling. Some days later, sort of vacuum” (Letters Home 185). on January 29, her mood’s lifted and The request to “establish a regular she writes: “Just thought I’d sit down correspondence” which had long been and write you a little note on this bright established, with the qualifier that it sunny day”; but Aurelia is not feeling would be “nice” next to the “vacuum” well, and Plath ends with “Chin up, of not having one, is both poignant and mother, and get well for me! Do all you chilling; it suggests the emotional can to put me at ease about that! Love lacunae that the relationship had for to all. Your very own Sivvy” (Letters Plath—one she had difficulty expressing Home 156). A February 2, 1955 letter directly to Aurelia. Four months later in repeats the line: “keep well for me,” a February 25, 1956 letter she writes of adding: “That’s the one thing you can “debating inwardly with problems” and do for me and for Warren!” (Letters ends the letter with the following Home 157). request: “I hope you will understand my The letter writing between present frankness and know that it has Aurelia and Sylvia engages what Aurelia made me feel much better just to know has called their “psychic osmosis,” that you are listening” (Letters Home (Letters Home 32)—a shared need to 220). “keep well” for the other or keep How closely was Aurelia listening, present in a seemingly no-holds-barred and what had she consciously or epistolary exchange in which Plath’s unconsciously, chosen not to hear? letters, from Smith in particular, suggest “The Disquieting Muses” written in that Aurelia’s inclusion in Sylvia’s 1957, which opens with a direct address bildungsroman of developing selfhood to the mother, gives us a sense of what is crucial to her acts of self-invention Aurelia’s 1940s child rearing ethos, with and affirmation. Yet as symbiotic its commitment to providing extension to Plath’s growing ambitions, opportunities and discipline, might have

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neglected. The daughter-speaker’s around my bed, “ (9-10,14-15). The feeling of difference and inadequacy in poem speaks to what Jacqueline Rose “The Disquieting Muses” makes clear points out regarding Aurelia’s editing that despite the mother’s provisions of choices in Letters Home, that “what is “piano lessons” and praise, she felt removed” in the “unpublished letters” “heavy-footed”: “ is “anything at the level of psychic and political life that might jar – signs of When on tiptoe the hostility… demands for autonomy and schoolgirls danced, separation, which slip through Plath’s Blinking flashlights almost seamless assertion of what is like fireflies positive, in her life and in their And singing the relationship;” (78). That the poem’s first glowworm song, I could line begins with “Mother, mother,” and Not lift a foot in the is repeated in its second to last line twinkle-dress amplifies the beseeching tone of the But, heavy-footed, daughter-speaker’s need to be heard. stood aside Eerily, as Rose points out regarding the In the shadow cast selection of letters, Aurelia continues by my dismal-headed after Plath’s death to be crediting the Godmothers, and language of the young Sivvy “in the you cried and cried: twinkle dress” as opposed to the adult Sylvia’s claim that the disquieting muses (25-31) were casting their “shadows long in the setting sun / That never brightens or An upbringing that included “cookies goes down” (28, 52-53). and Ovaltine” and “witches always, In a November 22, 1955 letter always /… baked into gingerbread,” did from Cambridge, Plath writes: not console the daughter-speaker fixated on muses nodding “Mouthless, I want to force myself again and eyeless, with stitched bald head” (20, again to leave the warmth and 11-12, 16) If the poem’s mother praises security of static situations and the daughter’s “arabesques and trills” move into the world of growth the daughter wonders if the mother and suffering where the real ever saw those witches she baked, books are people’s minds and asking too if with the mother’s “made souls… It is often tempting to to order stories /Of Mixie Blackshort hide from the blood and guts of and the heroic bear,” she wasn’t life in a neat special subject on speaking of such “Words to rid me of paper where one can become an those three ladies /Nodding by night unchallenged expert, but I, like

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Yeats, would rather say: ‘It was elide. She writes Aurelia on February my glory to have such friend,’ 26, 1956, that she is unhappy with what when I finally leave the world. she has written to date, telling her that she finds herself( bereft of the language Uninterested in the sequestered life and she needs, “… because what I have the kinds of security Aurelia’s hard work done so far seems so small, smug, and and sacrifice have provided for, Sivvy- little. I keep telling myself that I haven’t the-daughter-writing-home to Aurelia- learned to be tough and disciplined the mother is trying to find ways to enough with the form I give it in words express how Aurelia’s cautionary tale of which limits me, not the life itself” emotional and monetary frugality is as (Letters Home 219). What is limiting her ill-fitting to the life she imagines for is partly her censorship of the feelings herself as the “Mother, who made to and frustrations she begins to name in order stories / Of Mixie Blackshort the her therapy with Ruth Beuscher. heroic bear” and baked gingerbread as In the unabridged journals Plath those ladies of the stitched bald heads famously notes the “permission” “broke the panes” (9-10, 24). It is those Beuscher gives her to express the hate “disfigured and unsightly” apparitions for what she felt Aurelia’s example had excluded from Aurelia’s tale of kept her from. In NOTES ON mothering that Plath finds she can’t INTERVIEWS WITH RB she writes in a ignore; the “Cousin” that was “so November1958 entry, “In a smarmy unwisely” kept “Unasked” to her matriarchy of togetherness it is hard to christening whom she finds kindred (2- get a sanction to hate one’s mother… I 4). believe in RB because she is a clever Written in 1957, after Plath has woman who knows her business & I married —whose poetry admire her. She is for me a ‘permissive and person represents her turn away mother-figure’” (Journals 429). Still, from what she calls “the old, lyric things are not so simple. In another sentimental stuff” (Letters Home 293)— journal entry from January 1959 she “The Disquieting Muses” is also one of says of Aurelia: “She praises me, and I the first poems to express what feel hungry for it: I castigate myself so Christina Britzolakis in and completely. What a mess I am… To see Theatre of Mourning calls “an ironic what to expect from mother etc., accept self-reflexivity” (75), a precociousness in it and know how to deal with it. This the voice as it confronts the mother as presupposed an independence and Other. Married to Hughes, but also sense of identity in myself, which I have back in therapy with Ruth Beuscher, not got. This is the main issue” Plath’s journals tell the story that the (Journals 461). The main issue, or the letters Aurelia has chosen to publish main struggle, in Plath’s maturing voice

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engages what Jacqueline Rose evening” and “taste her enjoyment as if describes as “the unconscious and it had been my own” (Letters Home 38). normally covered-over conditions or In discussing “the speaking substrata of speech,” writing “along the subject” in Plath’s work, Christina edge of language where words fill with Britzolakis notes that it is often an orality they have only partly “structurally incomplete, or ‘jealous,’ subsumed, where to speak is to mouth dependent upon a loved/hated other: a or to tongue – a substitution both lover, a father, a mother, a reader” metaphoric and literal in so far as it lays (149). In more quotidian terms, Plath’s bare the grossness latent to, and eagerness to please and seek Aurelia’s productive of, the physical act of approval is less dependent on the speech” (34). The tension between what requirements of her audience than it is Plath notes in her journal as a on a need for Plath’s own self-invention presupposed “independence and sense and affirmation. In Plath’s words, “[t]his of identity” and what she perceives as presupposed” sense of “an its lack is one she generates at a independence” is what she is after. And boundary between the self she hopes to writing to Aurelia, particularly in her forge and what she feels is threatening letters from Smith, become a method of or repressing that independence. Plath writing herself into existence, but a exclaims in a 1958 journal entry: “MY method which grows increasingly WRITING IS MY WRITING IS MY complicated by Plath’s competing need WRITING. Whatever elements there to voice selves that had little to do with were in it of getting her approval I must Aurelia’s “Sivvy”. Again in a journal no longer use it for that. I must not entry describing a session with Beuscher expect love for it.” (Journals 449) While in December 1957, the year she writes Aurelia is Plath’s first avid reader and “The Disquieting Muses,” she writes of constant advocate she is also, as crying “with her and only with her” and Aurelia, the mother who, perhaps that she has only just begun to admit to unbeknownst to herself, sabotages the herself “a grief reaction or something language her daughter-poet feels [that] isn’t there: a mother’s love” necessary to voice that Aurelia might (Journals 446). In the same entry Plath not approve of, a voice that connects this to the suicidal feelings differentiates itself from the young Sivvy described in Freud’s “Mourning and who, Aurelia writes so nostalgically in Melancholia.” She points out that it the preface to Letters Home would represents “An almost exact description “hurry into my bedroom, whispering of my feelings and reasons for suicide: a excitedly, ‘Mummy, are you awake?’” transferred murderous impulse from my To whom her stories of a night out mother onto myself” (Journals 447). allowed Aurelia to “picture the She asks: “How can I get rid of this

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depression:” And answers, “by refusing like a terrible fish” (17-18). What to believe she [Aurelia] has any power remains unclear, in this final line of the over me, like the old witches for whom poem, is if the young girl and the old one sets out plates of milk and honey.” woman might be one and the same, Later in the entry she writes: “WHY and which of the two, if they are indeed DON’T I FEEL SHE LOVES ME? WHAT separate, the other is mirroring. The DO I EXPECT BY ‘LOVE’ FROM HER? poem’s last four lines highlight the WHAT IS IT I DON’T GET THAT MAKES symbiosis: the mirror’s ability to reflect ME CRY?” and answers, though not in what it “sees” is also what is being caps this time: “Writing, then, was a searched for in its reflection by the substitute for myself: if you don’t love woman who “comes and goes. / Each me, love my writing & love me for my morning… “and whose face “replaces writing… When I am cured of my witch- the darkness” (15-16). This darkness is belief, I will be able to tell her of writing what, one imagines, Plath wished of without a flinch and still feel it mine. She Aurelia to help her through. That Plath’s is a sad old woman. Not a witch…” speaker wakes to see the mother “On a (Journals 448). The entry is striking for green balloon bright with a million/ how it attempts to demythologize the Flowers and bluebirds that never were / hold Aurelia has on her writing while at Never, never, found anywhere” (43-44) the same time speaking of the writing in “The Disquieting Muses” is telling of as that which will free her of how she’s where Aurelia’s language and example conceptualized Aurelia’s witchery. falls short. It’s October 23, 1961 when Plath Plath says it herself in her journal, writes her poem “Mirror” where we see “One reason I keep up such a the darkly ambiguous role of a speaker satisfactory letter-relationship with her whose purpose it is to reflect the other while in England was [so that] we could “just as it is, unmisted by love or both verbalize our desired image of dislike” (3). As a mirror, the speaker is ourselves in relation to each other: dependent on what it reflects, whether interest and sincere love, and never feel it is “the opposite wall” that, she says, the emotional currents at war with these starts to feel like it is “a part of my verbally expressed feelings. I feel her heart,” or “A woman” who “bends over disapproval. But I feel it countries away me, / Searching my reaches for what too” (Journals 449). It is Ruth Beuscher she really is” (6, 8, 12-13). This woman who points out that Plath was trying to who “… replaces the darkness” is a face do “two mutually incompatible things” which the poem keeps ambiguous; all 1) spite [her] mother [and] 2) write” we know is that in the mirror “she has during that 1958 year when she was in drowned a young girl, and in me an old therapy and had decided with Hughes woman / Rises toward her day after day, that they would devote themselves

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exclusively to their writing. Beuscher From “Burning the explains that Plath is not writing Letters” there’s weariness in because she feels that the language she unexpressed rage: “I was tired / is using is not hers: “…you feel you Of cardboard cartons the color of have to give the stories to her, or that cement or a dog pack /Holding she will appropriate them” (Journals in its hate / Dully” (10-13). 448). From “Purdah” disparate Anxieties of appropriation, of body parts amount to an being viscerally engulfed, fragmented, impasse: “I breathe, and the gagged, left unseen, piecemeal, mouth // Veil stirs its curtain / My silenced or dead, have informed the eye/ veil is // A concatenation of dramas that have shaped the Plathian rainbows. / I am his. / Even in his voice as we know it: they feed the // Absence, I /Revolve in my/ declarations and defiance of the sheath of impossibilities” (24-33). speakers in “The Rabbit Catcher”, From “Lady Lazarus” a “Burning the Letters”, “Daddy”, return of the repressed creates “Purdah”, “The Jailer”, “”, “Lady gothic apparitions: “Peel off the Lazarus” and others who confront an napkin / O my enemy, / Do I overt threat of self-erasure: terrify? –” (10-12). From “Ariel” a From “Daddy” we have: deconstructing self makes for a “You do not do, you do not do/ suicidal drive: “White / Godiva, I Any more, black shoe/ In which I unpeel – / Dead hands, dead have lived like a foot/ For thirty stringencies. //” (19-21). years, poor and white,/ Barely From “The Rabbit daring to breathe or Achoo” (1- Catcher” the speaker risks being 5). strangled: “It was a place of force From “A Birthday Present” – / The wind gagging my mouth the seemingly innocuous with my own blown hair, / becomes deadly: “If you only Tearing off my voice, ” (1-3). knew how the veils were killing my days. / To you they are only That Aurelia’s “kingdom” she transparencies, clear air” (39-40). bore her daughter to is one the From “The Jailer” the maturing Plath felt her mother was speaker calls out her multiple unable to protect her from is made destructions: “How did I get explicit in “The Disquieting Muses” as here? / Indeterminate criminal,/ I are some of those kingdom’s dangers die with variety – / Hung, starved, which include the mother’s “little burned, hooked” (32-35). planet” of flowers and bluebirds that

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“never were never, never, found poet, she is also the first, perhaps anywhere” (46, 45). The three unintentionally, to present the threat to repetitions of “never” foreground the the voicings of an already fragile ego, cost to the speaker of this the “Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic disappointment that here takes on the cable,” that manages to keep itself “in a weight of a betrayal as it leaves the state of miraculous repair” (14, 15) A daughter facing those muses standing medusa who will not let go, and whose their vigil in “gowns of stone” with “Fat and red” placenta is “Squeezing blank faces. Is the fascination then with the breath from the blood bells of the hard stone, bone, and granite surfaces, fuchsia” (25,28). Aurelia’s example and the crippled, eyeless, and “ill-starred” lesson is indelible as it will leave Plath (Collected Poems 117), a metonymy for the poet, the “Sheath of impossibilities” the dangers and consequences of the (33) out of which her most iconic lines struggle for an individuated voice will dramatize just this impasse of against those forces that will threaten it? potential; as will happen in the later After Plath meets and marries Ted crisis of her marriage with Hughes, “All Hughes, despite her admiration for his my life I have been ‘stood up’ work, she continues to feel vulnerable in emotionally by the people I loved most: her attempts to maintain an daddy dying and leaving me, mother independent voice: “How to develop somehow not there” (Journals 455). Yet my independence?” She writes in a it is this very fragility of selfhood, the December 25, 1958 journal entry: “Not plasticity of ego boundaries that in its tell him everything. Hard, seeing him all moment of threat does what she the time.” (Journals 445), and in an admonishes herself to do in a earlier July entry, she writes: “We are September 1958 journal entry: “Forget amazing compatible. But I must be myself, myself. Become a vehicle of the myself – make myself & not let myself world, a tongue, a voice” (Journals be made by him” (Journals 401). 502), one that will “unloose” “The When Britzolakis discusses what lioness, / The shriek in the bath,/ The she calls a “register of demand” in cloak of holes. //” (51, 54-56) in a blood Plath’s “speaking subject” and notes jet of poetry. that it is “structurally incomplete” she explains it as a consequence of how the Other is positioned in relation to the I “defined by various modalities of Works Cited antagonisms, rejection or disavowal” (149). If Aurelia is the first to give her Britzolakis, Christina. Sylvia Plath and daughter a love of language, as the the Theatre of Mourning. Clarendon daughter-Sivvy becomes Sylvia-the Press, 2001.

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Plath, Sylvia, and Karen V. Kukil. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962: Transcribed from the Original Manuscripts at Smith College. Faber & Faber, 2014.

Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber, 1989.

Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, Correspondence 1950-1963. Edited by Aurelia Schober Plath, Harper Perennial, 1992.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Virago, 2013.

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