How has the study of Textual Conversations enhanced your understanding of the ways texts communicate with each other? - confessional mode as a platform for communication

The textual analysis of ’s and ’ Birthday Letters reveals how textual mode can establish a circular communication between works. In Ariel, Plath poetically expresses anxieties emanating from her suffocating Cold-war climate, her ‘Freudian’ confessions navigating a labyrinth of gender and the female societal role. In his 1998 Birthday Letters, Hughes employs a late-post modern revisionist brand of confession, his poetic voice directed at the enduring trauma of which he played an inherent role. A circular ‘textual conversation’ emerges whereby the confessional mode, positions the articulation of personal trauma implicit to interdependence as a means for reconciliation and understanding.

Sylvia Plath’s explores her admission of filial dependency and her attempts to liberate herself from these impediments. Juxtaposing then infantile naivety of nursery rhyme invocations with a macabre narrative, Plath compares her father to both a "black shoe” and “a Nazi”, coupling child-like reliance with haunting descriptors and applying Nazism as a metaphor to express her feelings towards her father. Complicating this relationship are the Freudian implications of the ‘Electra complex’, invoked by her assertion that “You died before I had time”. Exposing the more private aspects of life, concealed within American society, Plath confesses that, she married a man “who drank my blood for a year", her self-victimised reference to her marriage, metaphorically labelling Hughes as her killer. This ‘Freudian’ convergence of father and husband, exposes the convoluted nature of Plath’s relationship with masculinity, suspended between male reliance and resent,

emerging from the tendency of Cold War America to de-value female intuition in favour of the historically validated masculinist post-war agenda.

Hughes’ The Shot metrically re-envisions the confessional mode as he attempts to reassess his role within his late wife’s articulation of trauma. In his explanation of her need for a higher figure, “Your worship needed a god./Where it lacked one, it found one.”, Hughes establishes a psychoanalytic narrative whereby Plath’s relationship with deceased father Otto, becomes a trigger for the fracturing of her consequential relationships, as explored in Daddy. In his reflection, the speak recognises the bullets “real target/...behind me. Your Daddy”, confirming the Electra-like anxiety Plath bore for Otto, Hughes labelling himself as a surrogate for Sylvia’s anger concerning her father. His concluding admission about how he, “Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands…” exposes that he lacked the supernatural powers of “the right witchdoctor”, leaving him a mere spectator, tangled alongside Plath’s father in her psyche. Through re-appropriating Plath’s form, Hughes confesses his inability to help his wife, exposing her unrestrained rebellion as societally propelled .

In compliance with Plath’s post-war voice, Lady Lazarus unveils a complex form of self-destructive exhibitionism as she further dismantles the societal construct of privacy. The poem’s opening stanza immediately establishes theatricality -“I have done it again”- csuicide is an act of defiance and Plath revels in it, seeking any means to retaliate against governmental constraints. Her highly sexualised, “ big strip tease”, for the “peanut-crunching crowd”, (the population complying with cold- war world roles), can be seen as a means for Plath’s to satisfy her desire for a voyeuristic gaze, providing empowerment and validation, in a society in which she is denied it. “The art” of dying allow ‘Lady Lazarus’ to confirm this finesse for

manipulative theatricality; “I do it exceptionally well./I do it so it feels like hell…”. Plath’s urge to dominance masculinity is finally accomplished through her final retaliation as she emerges from “the ash”, her “red hair” symbolic of empowerment that allows her to “eat men like air”, detaching from her role as a domesticated female figure.

In Hughes’, Fever, he can be seen to exploit his profoundly conflicted and ultimately incomplete understanding of the elevated proportions of Plath’s suffering. Although initially embracing his role as the domesticated “nursemaid”, Hughes questions the authenticity of his wife’s “ailment”, “Your cry jammed so hard/Over into the red of catastrophe…”. His suspicion, of "the burning woman”, a direct reference to the exaggerative tenancies of Lady Lazarus, leads him to recoil in mistrust; “‘Stop crying wolf’”. Hughes’ post-Cold War re-assessment of Plath’s articulated trauma acknowledges his battle to understand her chronic oscillation between a desire for control and a fear of its implications. In recognising confession of theatricality in Lady Lazarus, an exchange can be seen with Ted Hughes’ Fever in which he attempts to discern the complexities that informed their marital tribulations. a

Plath’s, Nick and the Candlestick, explores the ambivalence of her maternal self, suspended between the restorative possibilities of maternity and the contextual futility of her environment. The poems initial use of brevity, immediately establishes Plath’s isolation; “I am a miner”. In her reference to the “Old cave of calcium” as her maternal self, the concept of motherhood is complicated by arcane, quasi- supernatural metaphors – “Black bat airs” - revealing the parasitic hemisphere of Cold-War maternity. Plath confesses both an awareness and a wariness of the hostilities of her landscape - “The pain/You wake to is not yours” - as her consistent paralysis by societal gender distinctions continues to destroy her psyche. However

as insinuated by Christian motifs, the speaker is released from these terrors by her baby, a symbol of new life; “The blood blooms clean/In you, ruby”.This revelation initiates a sense of ambivalence, the complicated dichotomy of life and death exposing both signs of maternal joy and symptoms of resistance to motherhood.

As the closing epistle of Hughes’ reflection, Red sees retrospective appraisal of Plath’s condition, positioning ‘lost’ opportunities for recovery against chronic torment and discontent. In utilising Plath’s explicit motif of colour, Hughes speculates ‘red’ as a conduit to a lost past, “Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?”. His hyperbolised account of their intimate space as a “judgement chamber” connects ‘red’ to the dynamics of retribution and vengeance. He explores how Plath sought the solace of white - “everything you painted you painted white” - searching for some kind of passion in life, however she could not settle for neutrality; “Then splashed it with roses, defeated it…”. Hughes’ introduction of a third colour - “Blue was better for you. Blue was wings.” - seeks to retroactively negate Plath’s fascination with ‘red’, through the serendipity of pregnancy, “the light burns blue…The earthen womb”, reflecting the metaphorical language of Nick and the Candlestick. In Hughes’ final salutation “But the jewel you lost was blue”, his retrospect assesses a tormented, sad account whereby an opportunity for a transcendent poetic vision was left as unresolved.

The application of the confessional mode within both Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters allows for the exposure of intertextual dialogue in which Plath provokes Hughes’ reflective, post-war response. Together, the textual pairings and their form emphasise the vitality of context to conceptualising the intentional connections between each work.

NOTES:

- Resonances and dissonances - Sims and diffs - mirror, align or collide with the details of another text

- Reframing - connected in same narrative - Tension between two poetic collections

- How composers are influenced by each other.

- Personal, cultural, historical context

- Dealing with one set of poems written in 1962/1963 and another set published 35 years later.

- ‘The discursive bond’. Idea of debate, driven by discussion and debate. Implicit debate to relationship. Tension is a strength and a weakness. - What resonates throughout the over-arching Plath-Hughes conversation is the articulation of trauma as a means for reconciliation and understanding. - the dynamics of grief and loss are collectively evident. a sense ‘absence’

ARIEL - Central to the poetic achievement of Plath’s Ariel is it’s post-war ‘gendered voice’ as Plath attempt to give voice to the (hitherto) marginalised female experience. - Dissatisfying characterisation of the female role

- The anxiety and rage that fuels Ariel constitutes an attempt to dismantle such a hierarchy and re-instate the ‘subjected’ female voice.

- Confessional: Form provided a vehicle for need to articulate personal trauma, entry into post war gender discourse and a response to the invasiveness of the post war ‘institution’. - As a consequence of ‘confession’ the private and the public become blurred, allowing the reader a rare glimpse into confrontingly private territory, as private disclosure ultimate becomes political commentary.

PROVACATION & RESPONSE

- In ‘A Picture of Otto’, Hughes confirms himself as one of these failed liberating gestures through attempt to retrospectively confide in the ‘mythical’ figure was ‘too late to replace’ - Plath’s urgency to transcend the limitations of her condition

- With its ‘Cold War’ overtures, Plath’s ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ gives voice to her ambivalent relationship to power and control as her inherited ‘bee box’ metaphorises the fragility of her own capacity for self-assertion - - In ‘The Bee God’, Hughes proposed the spectre of Path’s father as the source of her ambivalence, as the ‘retaliation’ of the bees confirms his inefficacy as both husband and lover