“And I a smiling woman.” ’s Unheimlich Domesticity by Candice L Wuehle

Doppelgängers, living dolls, monstered hopes of recovering their integrity. This speakers, and alien landscapes simple solution, however, is a false one, populate the corpus of Sylvia Plath’s for the repressed characteristics return writing from her juvenilia to her to haunt them in the form of their posthumously published poems.1 Doubles” (Coyne). Plath’s articulation of It is apparent from the poet’s “repressed characteristics” is certainly undergraduate thesis, “The Magic informed by Sigmund Freud’s 1919 Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of essay, “The Uncanny,” in which Freud Dostoyevsky’s Novels,” that Plath was analyzes E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story absorbed by the psychoanalytic “The Sandman” in order, ultimately, to underpinnings from which the concept argue that a “return of the repressed” is of the uncanny was birthed.2 In her at the root of uncanny affects. thesis, Plath argues that Dostoyevsky’s characters have “attempted to exclude Significantly, the Germanic origin of the some vital part of their personalities in adjective “uncanny” (“unheimlich”) springs forth from the space of the 1 Jo Gill offers a comprehensive overview of the domestic, ergo, the domain of the manner in which Plath’s treatment of themes feminine. Likewise, Plath’s use of regarding “the process of transformation, uncanny affects functions as a tool the translocation and even dislocation” (43) develop poet frequently employs to interrogate throughout the poet’s career. Gill considers representations of both natural and artificial cultural constructs regarding environments, ranging from physical “femininity,” particularly in relation to transformation to alien dislocation beginning in the domestic sphere, motherhood, and Plath’s juvenilia and ending with her objectification of the female body. posthumous Ariel poems. Likewise, Mary Lynn While Plath was already a well-known Broe provides a psychoanalytic interpretation of subjectivity in Plath’s early and mid-career figure throughout the English literary poetry that considers the fragmentary nature scene due to appearances on the BBC Plath’s speaker’s psyche. and in various publications, Frances McCullough argues that the poet 2 “The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in reached cross-continental renown in the Two of Dostoyevsky’s Novels” was submitted as a component of Plath’s Special Honors in years between the posthumous English at in 1955. publication of Ariel in 1964 and

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American publication of in Kelly Marie Coyne, in her recent article, 1971 due to the influence of the “The Magic Mirror”: Uncanny Suicides, Woman’s Movement, which politicized from Sylvia Plath to Chantal Ackerman the contents of Plath’s work written in and Judith Kroll in her 1978 biography, an era that was “pre-drugs, pre-Pill, pre- Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Women’s studies” (9). Plath biographers Sylvia Plath, have examined Plath’s work Anne Stevenson and Linda Wagner- through the lens of the uncanny. Martin agree with McCullough’s Indeed, these critics also take their reading; Stevenson claims Plath as “a point of departure from Plath’s heroine and martyr of the Woman’s undergraduate thesis, however, they do Movement” (Two Views of Plath 1994) not expand their analysis of her work while Wagner-Martin states, “Like beyond the concept of the “double” or Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique” “döppelganger” to consider the many Plath’s Ariel and The Bell Jar were other aspects of the Freudian uncanny “both a harbinger and an early voice of present in her poetry. Coyne offers an the Woman’s Movement” (Two Views of interesting analysis of the double from a Plath 1995). However, in spite of Plath’s queer studies perspective, ultimately unique significance to first wave arguing that, “Plath—in doubling on feminists, little attention to the manner both the extradiegetic and intradiegetic in which the poet persistently frames levels of [her] work—propose[s] a queer issues central to the Women’s liminal space that siphons and Movement as uncanny have been ultimately expels repressed uncanny considered.3 Several scholars, such as desire, allowing for both self- sustainability and personal integrity” (1).

My own reading of the Plathian uncanny 3 Plath biographer Frances McCullough argues that the poet reached cross-continental renown (specifically in relation to the in the years between the publication of Ariel in döppelganger) orients itself first from 1964 and The Bell Jar in 1971 due to the Luce Irigarary’s conceptualization of the influence of the Woman’s Movement, which döppelganger: “Within herself,” Irigaray politicized the contents of Plath’s work written in argues, “she is already two—but not an era that was “pre-drugs, pre-Pill, pre- Women’s studies” (9). Anne Stevenson and divisible into ones” because female Linda Wagner-Martin concur with McCullough’s desire “does not speak the same” reading; Stevenson claims Plath as “a heroine singular “language as male desire.” and martyr of the Woman’s Movement” (Two Rather, it is “diversified” and “multiple” Views of Plath 1994) while Wagner-Martin (100). Like Irigarary, my reading insists states, “Like Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique,” Plath’s Ariel and The Bell Jar were that to express female desire is always “both a harbinger and an early voice of the to speak the language of the uncanny, Woman’s Movement” (Two Views of Plath therefore, not even a “queer liminal 1995). space” possesses the ability to “expel

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uncanny desire”; rather, to speak of Do you wear female desire and the female A glass eye, false teeth or a experience is to always be speaking in crutch, the mode of the uncanny. Plath’s A brace or a hook, depictions of motherhood, domestic Rubber breasts or a rubber labor, and media representations of crotch, femininity as uncanny, monstrous, alien, and otherwise “creepy,” therefore, Stitches to show something’s provides crucial insight into both the missing?... (1-6) poetics of Sylvia Plath as well as the manner in which Plath’s use of the In these lines, Plath presents the gaze of uncanny comes to serve as a the (male) interviewer as one which synecdoche of a much larger cultural views the “ideal” woman (“our type of discourse. person”) as incomplete and inherently repressed. This repression generates an Via an etymological investigation uncanny mode (as displayed quite regarding that which constitutes the literally by Plath as a body outfitted with homelike (“Heimlich”) as “belonging to artificial parts) that presents the the house, not strange, familiar, tame, domesticated female body as a site of intimate, comfortable, homely, etc.” (2), contested cultural and psychological Freud locates the home at the center of memory. In “The Big Strip Tease: the unfamiliar, stating, “The word Female Bodies and Male Power in the Heimlich exhibits one which is identical Poetry of Sylvia Plath,” Kathleen with its opposite, unheimlich. What is Margaret Lant emphasizes the extreme Heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich” power the female body poses in Plath’s (3). The Freudian uncanny is thus the poetry, arguing that the poet’s frequent familiar, which has been estranged recourse to bodily imagery “…reveal[s] through repeated repression. What I Plath's conviction that undressing has have termed “the Plathian uncanny” become for her a powerful poetic manifests itself as a return to the (quite gesture, and in these poems it is the actual) home, whose constraints Plath’s female speaker who finally disrobes— speakers wish to outright reject, but are and here she attempts to appropriate compelled by cultural forces, legal the power of nakedness for herself” restraints, and/or historic precedent, to (630). Lant further elucidates the repress. In “The Applicant,” for connection between power and example, Plath presents a furious satire subjectivity, adding, “Plath does not of a job interview: simply contemplate from the spectator's point of view the horrors and the vigor First, are you our type of person? of the act of undressing; now her female

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subject dares to make herself naked, emerges and replays a repressed past. and she does so in an attempt to make Through further consideration of Lady herself mighty” (630). It is significant, Lazarus as an uncanny actor who replays then, that the “mighty” power of a past appropriated from other uncanny representations in Plath’s late tragedies (i.e., the Holocaust and the poetry are often generated by Lazarus Myth), I argue that Plath transformations and conflations of the emphasizes gender differences in the speaker’s body with cultural or historical act of remembering in order to perform artifacts; in “The Other,” the speaker’s the uncanny and give voice to the own blood becomes “an effect, a silenced, or, abjected. cosmetic” (line 30) while the speaker’s body in “Fever 103º” boldly transitions Plath’s Unhomelike Home 4 into “a pure acetylene/ Virgin” (46-47). The Heimlich/unheimlich distinction In this way, the body itself becomes an applies even more pointedly to the unheimlich vessel which functions to “home” of the female body itself. question, contest, and, ultimately, Plath’s female “I”/eye is much like protest normative ideals regarding Hoffman’s monstrous “Sandman” who female subjectivity. is “without eyes” and instead is possessed of “ghastly, deep, black This essay will begin by considering the cavities instead” (90).5 Plath’s speaker poetry and prose of Sylvia Plath from a both experiences the world as uncanny Kristevian perspective in order to and is herself an uncanny actor within it. illuminate the manner in which Plath This generates a doubled sense of dis- confronts and destabilizes the ease in Plath’s work; because the “borders” which confine the domestic speaker is often a “living doll” (“The space and domesticized body. A close Applicant”); a “little toy wife” reading of “” will examine (“Amnesiac”); or a collection of the way in which Plath constructs a assembled, inanimate parts, “My head a speaker who performs this moon/ Of Japanese paper” (“Fever destabilization by weaponizing the 103º”) who witnesses the world as a abject via a repetition compulsion which series of events rife with uncanny atmosphere, the rhetorical situation in 4 Notably, Marilyn Boyer considers the body in which these poems exist is itself “The Disabled Female Body as a Metaphor for disembodied. Language in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar” by utilizing a mixture of feminist and disability studies (with an emphasis on theories provided Even more troubling, however, is the by Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan) in order to implication that the female body is examine “The mind/body connection, or more pointedly, its dis-connection” (199) in The Bell Jar.

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never “whole” in terms of maternal capacity) yet is simultaneously consciousness or corporeality. Rather, it made unrecognizable via the utterance functions as a liminal site at which the that makes the body unrecognizable to real and the unreal not only meet, but itself (a toy, a corpse, a living doll). This merge. This merger situates the Plathian gesture resonates with Kristeva’s body as neither a subject nor an object, assertion that the abject marks the but rather as a Kristevian abject moment of individual psychosexual who/which, "preserves what existed in development when the self is separated the archaism of pre-objectal from the mother in order to distinguish relationship, in the immemorial violence a boundary between "me" and with which a body becomes separated "(m)other" (Felluga 3). Plath’s uncanny from another body in order to be" representation of motherhood and the (Kristeva 10). A resistance to a domestic space emphasize the “me” patriarchal symbolic order that attempts and “(m)other“ in order to suggest her to position the speaker as only a speaker exists in the liminal space which mother, wife, or sexual object generates “does not respect borders, positions, much of Plath’s uncanny tension. Liz rules” (Kristeva 4). Yorke also analyzes Plath’s work from the lens of French feminist thought in The stage of the unhomelike home in Impertinent Voices: Subversive which much of Plath’s Ariel era poetry Strategies in Contemporary Women’s takes place thus becomes the zone Poetry to argue that what is shocking in through which borders are stretched Plath’s work is her readiness to “enter and interrogated. In one of the poet’s into the fields of semantic danger of her final poems, “Balloons,” a mother own rage, anguish, and desire” (37). In surveys her children as they play with other words, Plath’s speakers party balloons that have “Since demonstrate symbolic and semantic risk Christmas…lived with us.” This via utterances that serve to 1.) Position traditionally cheerful scene takes on an the reader as the audience of an alien, if not horrific, quality. The uncanny experience in which the balloons have, from the poem’s first concept of “femininity” is made stanza, been described as an animate uncanny due to a sense of “intellectual “they” who “live” as “oval soul- uncertainty” (The Uncanny 7) and dis- animals,” yet they quickly become the ease. This gesture forces the reader to “queer moons we live with/ instead of consider female experience as dead furniture!” The balloons are, inherently othered. The speaker is thus unlike the furniture, not “dead” (they situated in a liminal space in which she seem to move of their own volition and recognizes that which is her own (her respond to sensation by “shrieking” Heimlich body in its sexual and and “delighting”), and yet despite the

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fact that they “live,” the balloons are branch, like a fat purple fig, a not quite alive. A balloon becomes, wonderful future beckoned and rather, a portal to “a funny pink world” winked. One fig was a husband that the children “may eat on the other and a happy home and children, side of it” and the iconic scene of small and another fig was a famous children playing with red and green poet and another fig was a balloons in the days following a holiday brilliant professor, and another becomes a space in which even a child fig was Ee Gee, the amazing can contemplate a world beyond the editor, and another fig was world they currently inhabit. Europe and Africa and South Importantly, it is the very act of “living” America, and another fig was alongside the uncanny balloons that Constantin and Socrates and illuminates their liminal quality and Attila and a pack of other lovers pressurizes the idea that the border with queer names and offbeat space between worlds actually becomes professions, and another fig was more available the closer it exists to the an Olympic lady crew champion, known. In other words, it is because the and beyond and above these figs balloons have become Heimlich that were many more figs I couldn't they must now also be unheimlich, and quite make out. I saw myself it is because of the conflation of their sitting in the crotch of this fig familiar status as (dead) objects of tree, starving to death, just domestic celebration with their aura of because I couldn't make up my humanness that they come to represent mind which of the figs I would the repressed. choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one Plath’s work repeatedly demonstrates meant losing all the rest, and, as I the transformation of the familiar to the sat there, unable to decide, the terrifying as a response (or resistance) to figs began to wrinkle and go the discovery of an institutionally, black, and, one by one, they politically, spiritually, or culturally plopped to the ground at my imposed boundary. In Plath’s semi- feet. (77) autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood (Plath’s fictional This passage enacts a double-death; manifestation of herself) famously first, of Esther, whose indecision states: prevents her from eating and second, of the fruit itself, which must be eaten I saw my life branching out before they “wrinkle and go black.” For before me like the green fig tree many readers, this passage simply in the story. From the tip of every evokes the uncertainty of youth.

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However, it also serves as an excellent At twenty I tried to die example of the psychic entrapment And get back, back, back to you. exposure to “borders, positions, rules” I thought even the bones would (Kristeva 4) produces in Plath’s do. speakers. The very familiar ideas of “a husband and a happy home and But they pulled me out of the children,” becoming “a famous poet” sack, or “brilliant professor” or “editor” or And they stuck me together with traveling the world each become glue. terrifying because to choose one means And then I knew what to do. to repress the rest and to choose none I made a model of you, means the death not just of the self, but A man in black with a Meinkampf of the opportunity to have a self. look

Plath’s later poetry, especially “Lady And a love of the rack and the Lazarus” and “,” accepts the screw. impossibility of attempting to balance And I said I do, I do. the unstable psychic economy So daddy, I’m finally through. displayed in Esther Greenwood’s The black telephone’s off at the lament. In each of these poems, Plath root, presents her speaker as a woman who The voices just can’t worm has “made the choice” to be a wife, a through. (58-70) daughter, or a sexual object and thus repressed her desire for other choices. Once the speaker herself is This repression reemerges as a disassembled and “stuck” back dangerous (and dangerously uncanny) “together with glue” she enters the protest against the very conditions that liminal/abjected space that reveals to manufactured it. That which has been her that she has the power to repressed returns as a monstered reconstruct her dead father in a woman who has the power to destroy shocking conflation of a Nazi/husband the borders that have abjected her; in lines, such as the flatly end-stopped through conflations of time, bodies, “And then I knew what to do.” (sec. 13, identity, and the border between death line 3) The repressed father reemerges, and life, Plath’s speaker weaponizes her then, in this uncanny figure, which own abjection. Consider, for instance, Plath’s speaker can confront via her own the speaker’s address to her dead uncanniness. It is the marriage (“And I father in “Daddy”: said I do, I do.”) of monster (“me together with glue”) to monster (“I made a model of you”) that grants her

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access to the origin (“the root”). In “which is familiar and old—established essence, Plath’s speakers are in the mind and which has become monstered, alien, or uncanny because alienated from the self only through the they are a chimera of remnants (the process of repression” (217) with a husband, the wife, the Nazi, the bones, larger cultural psyche of whom the and the glue) housed within a speaker identifies with in defiance of (physically and temporally) present cultural, historical, or social borders, body. positions, or rules.

The terrifying quality of Plath’s speaker (Lady) Lazarus: Cultural is not merely that she is a zombie-like Memory and Gender figure who eternally reemerges and Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith’s replays a repressed past in order to “Feminism and Cultural Memory” destabilize limits, but that she replays a provides a valuable lens through which past which was never known to begin to consider Plath’s poetry in regard to with. As in “Daddy,” images, symbols the role “the female witness or agent of and even languages that are outside transmission” plays in memory Plath’s own realm of psychic identity construction. Hirsch and Smith expand frequently emerge in order to evoke the Paul Connerton’s concept of the “act of uncanny. Critics, such as Irving Howe, transfer” to examine the way in which Arthur Olberg, and Susan Gubar, have “dynamics of gender and power” are noted Plath’s frequent recourse to manifested in cultural memories Holocaust imagery and identification mediated through a female speaker.6 with Judiasm is, to say the least, an odd Plath’s persistent presentation of the point of identification for a white, middle-class, Unitarian-raised woman from . In order to further 6 Hirsch and Smith define an “act of transfer” as analyze how the schism between the “an act in the present by which individuals and appropriated collective memory of groups constitute their identities by recalling a shared past on the basis of common, and other races and religions and the therefore often contested, norms, conventions, individual and highly confessional and practices. These transactions emerge out of memory of Plath’s speaker functions, a complex dynamic between past and present, this essay will consider how “gender individual and collective, public and private, differences in the act of remembering” recall and forgetting, power and powerlessness, history and myth, trauma and nostalgia, (Hirsch and Smith 4) that which was conscious and unconscious fears or desires. repressed generate a version of the Always mediated, cultural memory is the uncanny that is unique to Plath. This product of fragmentary personal and collective distinctively Plathian uncanny merges experiences articulated through technologies the poet’s own psychic sense of that and media that shape even as they transmit memory” (5).

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female speaker as a site of 1960’s, historian Stephanie Coontz objectification and abjection suggests, details the powerful reaction American then, that to be a woman engaged in middle-class women had in response to the act of remembering is always to Freidan’s opus. Within the first months mediate the past through the lens of of publication, Friedan received abjection that proposes a permanent hundreds of letters from women who slippage between the self and the believed The Feminine Mystique had other. As Arthur Oberg points out, saved their lives (xx). Friedan Plath’s late poems, “Daddy,” and its recognized the private disappointment companion piece, “Lady Lazarus,” both of the housewife as well as the deep incorporate a “movement” which “is at shame generated by “the silent once historical and private; the question—is this All?” (Friedan 1). confusion in these two spheres suggest Presciently, Plath’s work strives to create the extent to which this century has a grammar with which to address “the often made it impossible to separate problem that has no name” (Friedan them” (146). Interestingly, Oberg’s 63). analysis of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” omits a consideration of the “historical While Freidan clarifies the separation and private” dichotomy present in these between the public and private spheres poems as one that is distinctly mediated in order to argue that the public sphere via the gendered perspective of a generated social and political injustice, suburban white woman. However, his which served to silence the private observation that Plath presents these sphere, Plath revels in the blurring of “two spheres” as inextricable suggests the spheres in an attempt to disrupt that Plath’s speaker’s consciousness of both. A consideration of the extreme her own status as a housewife is actually emphasis on gender (specifically in quite mimetic of the blurred boundary regard to domesticity, motherhood, and between the real and the unreal which the body), which Plath uses to stress constitute uncanniness. “historical and private spheres” further illuminates the manner in which these Indeed, Plath’s anxiety regarding her poems invest themselves in uncanny domestic status was not unique to the remembrance. As Hirsch and Smith poet; a mere seven days after Plath note, “cultural memory is always about committed suicide in Primrose Hill, the distribution of and contested claims Betty Friedan articulated many of to power. What a culture remembers Plath’s central frustrations in The and what it chooses to forget are Feminine Mystique. In A Strange intricately bound up with issues of Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and power and hegemony, and thus with American Women at the Dawn of the gender” (6). As scholars such as

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Christina Britzolakis and Susan Gubar Fletcher provides a useful analysis of have highlighted, “Lady Lazarus” is a the relationship between the uncanny complex and fascinating consideration and repetition compulsion: of the relationship between gender and the manner in which secondary memory Freud shifts the emphasis away frames power relations. from the content that is being repeated, with its combination of “Lady Lazarus” perceives itself alien and the déjà vu, to the retroactively from its first line, “I have sheer fact of repetition itself. The done it again.” This declarative, uncanny feeling proceeds not abruptly end-stopped statement from the return of the once emphasizes the performative quality of familiar but no longer recognized this dramatic monologue while in itself but from what that simultaneously insisting that the retention testifies to: the activity moment of performativity is past—it is of autonomous—daemonic— already “done.” Immediately, a inner compulsion-to-repeat temporal dislocation is established that independent of the content of distances the poem itself from the what is repeated. (320) speaker and the speaker’s recollections. The title of the poem, of course, In light of Fletcher’s analysis, it is compounds this sense of dislocation especially significant that Lady Lazarus through its allusion to Lazarus of characterizes her resurrection, ironically, Bethany, the saint whom Christ restored in the diction of commercial media to life four days after his death. While because this particular medium the raising of Lazarus is typically heightens a sense of automated associated with rebirth and the power repetition. Like a “jingle,” which makes of Christian belief to triumph over death noise by clattering against itself itself, Plath subverts the traditional repeatedly, Lady Lazarus’ resurrection reading of this story by assigning testifies to the compulsion to repeat for Lazarus not just a different gender, but the sake of repetition. She sarcastically also the title of “Lady.” In this way, disregards her “theatrical comeback in Plath forces a reconsideration of the broad day” as a context-rich event and idea of resurrection through the lens of is decidedly scornful of the idea that her gender and class in order to present second birth is “A miracle!” this miracle not so much as “re/birth” or “re/surrection,” but rather as a On the contrary, she claims that her new re/inscription or re/impression that is living body is only a “sort of walking itself a form of repetition compulsion. In miracle,” which, upon further Freud and the Scene of Trauma, John examination appears to be more akin to

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an anti-miracle; a monstrous amalgam survivor’s life narrative to exist in a non- of the possessions of Holocaust victims. linear narrative that, until recovery from Indeed, it is this very conflation of life the traumatic event, is contextually and death that generates the “dehistoricized” from the survivor’s own intellectual slippage that signifies the life. It is not until the “unclaimed uncanny and positions Lady Lazarus as experience” of the trauma itself can be the personification of uncanniness (and, recalled that a trauma survivor can in the same vein, positions the uncanny create a context for the previously as the anti-miraculous). We read that unexplained text she has survived, but Lady Lazarus is resurrected not as a not yet incorporated into her human, but as human form composed recollection of personal history (Caruth of inanimate objects: 2-5). The structure of uncanny remembrance does, in many ways, act …my skin as a “double” of the structure of bright as a Nazi lampshade, traumatic remembrance; both undergo My right foot a period of latency prior to the reincorporation of a memory. However, A paperweight, while the traumatic structure is the My face a featureless, fine incorporation of memory that has been Jew linen. (4-9) repressed as the result of an external event which could not be understood While the repetition (and, as many by the survivor in its moment of impact critics have argued, appropriation) of (i.e., “shellshock”), the uncanny the tragedy of the Holocaust assigns structure is the reincorporation of an Lady Lazarus’s monologue a distinctly internal repression which has always traumatic texture, I would argue that been a component of the psyche and this is not actually a traumatic therefore understood on some level, remembrance, but an uncanny one. In but which has been, critically, repressed Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud or erased. Caruth’s notion of asserts that trauma manifests itself dehistoricization is therefore rendered indirectly through intrusive somewhat inapplicable if Lady Lazarus is “remembrances” which have not yet considered an uncanny actor instead of been incorporated into the psyche of a trauma survivor. Subsequently, the the sufferer (7). Trauma scholar Cathy implications of this poem in regard to Caruth adapts Freud’s initial theory to a the manner in which traumatic history study of literature in order to suggest itself relates to gender and power that intrusive phenomena or dynamics becomes significant. unabsorbed affects (and their subsequent effects) cause a trauma

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“Lady Lazarus’” disturbing gesture of Holocaust or the Lazarus Myth as a part prosopopoeia (in which victims speak, of her own individual memory, rather, impossibly, from inside the gas she is conflating it directly with her chamber) is conflated with an erotic repressed psyche in an act that burlesque performance in order to generates the chimeric Lady Lazarus. suggest that Plath’s speaker has a Paul Breslin questions Plath’s conflation distinctly gendered sense of of myth and reality, asking “…did she incorporeality. Lady Lazarus’ tone shifts fear that the experiential grounds of her from boastful to horrific to triumphant emotions were too personal for art as her strip tease reveals not flesh, unless mounted on the stilts of myth or bone, or even corpse, but the space psycho-historical analogy” (110)? from which her decomposition took Breslin’s reading of “Lady Lazarus” as a place. She begins her de-materialization confessional poem in which the poet with the curious pronouncement, “soon, fears that “the experiential grounds soon the flesh/ the grave cave ate will of…emotions” are inherently artless be/ at home on me.” The flesh, which seems to miss the point insofar as Lady has already decomposed (or been Lazarus’ (not Plath’s) “experiential “eaten” by the cave), impossibly grounds” are presented not so much as returns—significantly, it returns to “too personal” for the speaker, but for “home,” or the Heimlich. Via the the speaker’s audience. dissolution of the female flesh, Plath has ingeniously constructed a scene in Lady Lazarus’s audience, composed first which the process of objectifying the of “Gentlemen, ladies,” then “Herr body of Lady Lazarus becomes Doktor, Herr Enemy” and finally “Herr indistinguishable from the process of God, Herr Lucifer” is possessed of an abjectifying the body of Lady Lazarus. increasingly patriarchal gaze that Lady Lady Lazarus manifests her rage at “the Lazarus counters with a body which is peanut-crunching crowd” who shove weaponized by the uncanny conflation “in to see/ them unwrap me hand and of her “psycho-historical” composition. foot” in the unveiling of her new form The final five stanzas of “Lady Lazarus” (referred to as “The big strip tease.”) by perform a dynamic movement in which historically situating (first via the Lazarus the speaker rapidly shifts her Myth and then via the Holocaust) the presentation of her cultural importance performance of being a “Lady.” from inanimate yet cherished object to an enraged and murderous Significantly, this particular reincarnation of her own objectification. historicization of performance is what assigns this poem its uncanny structure; Lady Lazarus begins her transformation the speaker is not incorporating the with the statement:

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In the next two stanzas, we read that I am your opus, this emergence first manifests itself as a I am your valuable, palpable nothing, which then transforms The pure gold baby (66-68) into pure symbol: thereby asserting her belief that her Ash, ash— body is the grand scale creation You poke and stir. (“opus”) of the patriarchal figures she is Flesh, bone, there is nothing addressing. Furthermore, she there— recognizes her worth as a creation is entwined with a certain lack of personal A cake of soap, history or identity; the nature of the A wedding ring, opus is its triply asserted “purity.” A gold filling. (72-77) Plath’s use of the word “pure” is, in this context, itself a psycho-historical While Lady Lazarus was once a conflation of the idealization of the compilation of body parts arranged in virginal female body and the racial the shape of a strip tease performer or a policy of the Third Reich. Plath construct of beliefs about feminine complicates her speaker’s objectified virtue (an “opus”), the violence of being status with the dramatically enjambed “poked and stirred” has transformed line break between this stanza and the her from a resurrected body/ideology next, to nothing at all. The “cake of soap, “wedding ring,” and “gold filling” That melts to a shriek. emerge from the fire as doubly uncanny I turn and burn. objects. In one respect, they are Do not think I underestimate uncanny simply because they conceal your great concern.(69-71) their horrific origins in the trappings of the familiar. But, more directly to my The final image of an inanimate “pure point concerning gender difference in gold baby” is gruesomely brought to the act of remembering, these objects life in the moment of its murder. This symbolize domesticity, marriage, and stunning turn is mimetic of the poem’s beauty (respectively). controlling Lazarus motif; in both instances, the repressed can only It is, of course, imperative to observe emerge from its uncanny status (as that Plath has selected these specific living dead or golden baby) through an objects because they merge the act of great violence. idealized markers of femininity with the repurposed bodies of Holocaust victims. This merger insists that, for

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Plath, to be female is to be objectified, itself apparent becomes salient to our but more importantly, to be objectified understanding of Plath’s controversial is always to also be abjectified. In use of prosopopoeia and allusion. Powers of Horror, Kristeva explains, “refuse and corpses show me what I “Dying is an art”: Performing permanently thrust aside in order to the Uncanny live. These body fluids, this defilement, For Plath, the uncanny took on a this shit are what life withstands, hardly political potential precisely because it is and with difficulty, on the part of death. an aesthetic divorced from ethical There, I am at the border of my matters; it inherently privileges being condition as a living being (3).” To present—or, bringing to the surface that some degree, we can read that Plath’s which has been repressed—over all speaker has “permanently thrust aside” other considerations. The political her own subjectivity in order to potential of the uncanny (to disturb an “theatrically” project that which only idealized version of the female body; to “feels real.” make monstrous the object of the gaze; to question norms regarding The severe juxtaposition between these motherhood and domesticity) is object’s double connotations has been founded in its ability to articulate a deemed appropriative by many critics, history of which its speaker has not who question “the poet’s ‘right’ to participated, but rather articulated as Holocaust imagery” (Young 133). While emblems of her own circumstances. In some scholars have questioned Plath’s this way, Plath’s uncanny aesthetic has a ethics, others have questioned her radical capacity to disturb, or even sense of poetic scale, such as Irving rupture, the continuous, cohesive, and Howe, who argues that, “it is decidedly widely accepted historical narrative that unlikely” that the conditions of Jews instances of the uncanny necessarily living in the camps “was duplicated in a place in doubt because its very essence middle-class family living in Wellesley, is to resist comprehension. The political Massachusetts, even if it had a very bad potential of the uncanny therefore rests daddy indeed” (12-13). It is at the in an ability to bring what is juncture of these two critiques (one incomprehensible, unacceptable, or which suggests Plath’s identification is taboo to the center of conscious; quite unethical and the other which suggests actually, the uncanny gives voice to the it is overwrought) that complex issues of dead.7 gendered memory begin to emerge and a consideration of the manner in which the uncanny presents itself as the 7 It is notable that Plath chooses to “give voice mode by which the repressed makes to the dead” not via a spectered medium, but via the risen dead (or, the zombie). In this way,

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context, the Lazarus narrative is given The Lazarus myth, on one hand, is a prominence because it is emblematic of seemingly clear analogy for the Christ’s power “over the last and most repressed in the sense that Lazarus irresistible enemy of humanity—death” represents that which is repressed and (Tenney). Rhetorically, the Lazarus dead to us, ergo, his resurrection Miracle is an act of witnessing intended signals a clear return to the repressed. to deny the ambiguity of death, Lazarus, as one risen from the dead, is therefore refusing the concept of the both dead and alive in an living dead. In other words, although exemplification of the slippage which is Lazarus is arisen from the dead, he is the fundamental hallmark of the defined by the miraculous certainty of uncanny. However, I argue that, his life. The Lazarus Myth, then, is although he is arisen from the dead, decidedly canny because there is no Lazarus of Bethany would not be question or uncertainty whatsoever classified by Freud as an uncanny actor regarding the narrator’s reliability. at all. On the contrary, Lazarus would be Rather, to witness the Rising of Lazarus considered quite canny according to is to experience the total certainty of Freud’s definition, which stresses faith itself. “intellectual uncertainty”8 as the hallmark of an uncanny experience. Plath’s own version of the Lazarus myth, Within its Biblical (and canonical) on the contrary, ruptures the continuous, highly canonical narrative Plath again stresses the idea of the body as an presented in the Gospel of John via a object separate from its own subjectivity; she is reframing of the myth told from the also able to further emphasize the abject nature voices of those who have been of the rotting corpse. historically silenced and, subsequently, 8 Freud builds his definition of the uncanny reincorporated into archival memory. upon Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 essay, “On the Plath’s Lady Lazarus is, rather, an Psychology of the Uncanny,” in which Jentsch apocryphal speaker who asserts her argues the uncanny occurs when there is own version of history told from the intellectual uncertainty as to whether or not a being is animate or inanimate. Jentsch unstable zone of repressed memory. To considers the “The Sandman’s” uncanny doll, return to Hirsch and Smith’s “Feminism Olympia, to be the signifier of the uncanny. and Cultural Memory,” Lady Lazarus Freud extends this consideration of the serves as “the female witness or agent animate/inanimate binary, arguing that in of transmission” who actually comes to uncanny literature, the uncanny becomes apparent when the reader themselves perform the archive in which “dynamics experiences intellectual uncertainty regarding of gender and power” are made whether or not the events related by the manifest. Vast components of this narrator are real or imagined. archive are, however, unavailable to

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Lady Lazarus because they have not as a monstrous collage which borrows been incorporated into the collective pieces from the history of others in memory and, therefore, lack the social, order to write the history of her own historical, and cultural structures that alienation. It is important to note that in could contextualize those memories her biographical references to her three and, indeed, provide the vocabulary suicide attempts, Plath is acutely self- necessary to articulate them. As aware that she is suffering from mentioned earlier, Plath utilizes an repetition compulsion. I have already uncanny poetic technique in order to discussed the first line of the poem (“I express that “which is familiar and old— have done it once again.”), in which established in the mind and which has Plath establishes the poem’s temporal become alienated from the self only dislocation; this line also immediately through the process of repression” (The establishes the speaker’s awareness that Uncanny 217). Plath’s uncanny poetics she is compelled to repeat behavior stress the particularly gendered nature patterns which we as readers soon learn of this self-alienation in several ways: 1.) to be denatured and yet, are regarded Her use of prospopoeia conflates the as triumphs to the speaker, who objectified female body (grotesquely victoriously states: separated into pieces by the audience’s gaze) with pieces of Holocaust victim’s Dying repurposed bodies in order to suggest Is an art, like everything else. that gaze itself transforms the body into I do it exceptionally well. (42-22) a material, inanimate object whose crisis can be articulated only via the voices of Freud originally developed his theory of the victims of genocide, who have the phenomenon of repetition themselves been made objects. 2.) compulsion in his 1914 essay, While Plath’s use of prospopoeia frames “Remembering, Repeating, and the always gendered experience of Working-Through” as a pattern wherein being the object of the gaze through an individual interminably repeats the historically canonical (and accepted) patterns of behavior that were experience of survivors, her use of established during a period of trauma in allusion frames her private experience earlier life. It is clear that Plath’s speaker as a suicide survivor through allusions to is repeating the trauma of a suicide commercial culture, the Bible, and the attempt and, in fact, she goes so far as atrocity of the Holocaust. These to provide a timeline (we learn that allusions combine to create an “One year in every ten” an attempt is impossible amalgamation which made; that the first attempt occurred at suggests that the repressed elements of the age of ten years old; the second at Lady Lazarus’ psyche can only resurface twenty; that the speaker is “only thirty”;

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and, finally, that Lady Lazarus is repressed emerge as the memories and monologizing the third of “nine times to experiences of others via her use of die”) which further articulates the sense allusion and prosopopoiea. As Maurice that the speaker is highly aware of her Halbwachs, who developed the concept compulsion to repeat. of collective memory, has suggested, memory is one of the elements of our This compulsion is, in fact, an social architecture that binds us to one orchestrated performance. It is this another (22-49). Halbwachs’ quality of orchestration and foundational principles of memory performativity that transitions Lady theory, combined with Caruth’s Lazarus’ compulsion to repeatedly previously mentioned trauma theory, reenact her suicide attempt from a suggests that the traumatic memory is traumatic memory structure to an that which both binds and refuses to be uncanny one. Freud again revisits the past. To position this within its concept of repetition compulsion in The psychoanalytic context, a collective is Uncanny (five years after its original bound by the event that contains so inception) in order to suggest that the much force its trace refuses to fade or uncanny is also the result of an event be erased from the collective’s historical that has been superseded in one’s or narrative understanding of history. In psychic life and therefore serves as a this way, then, “Lady Lazarus’” reminder not of a suppressed external speaker’s inability to convey her trauma event, but a repressed internal event. without borrowing from events such as The repressed internal event of “Lady the Holocaust or the Lazarus Myth in Lazarus” does not, in fact, seem to be order to articulate her rage at constructs the speaker’s suicide attempts; we read, of gender indicates a larger cultural via the total recall and articulation with amnesia and repression. Trauma which the attempts are conveyed, that historian Judith Herman points out that these suicide attempts are fully a traumatic event can only come into incorporated into the speaker’s psyche. consciousness once a political event Rather, the speaker seems to have (such as a war, election, etc.) has repressed the very constructs (of history, occurred which provides culture with commerce, and religion) that have the language to articulate the combined to assign her a gendered conditions of the trauma. The trauma identity. that “Lady Lazarus” seeks to articulate, however, predates the language Lady Lazarus’ sense that nothing is provided by the Women’s Movement every truly erased, forgotten, or lost via and therefore must co-opt the language repression becomes uncanny precisely of other tragedies in a gesture which because the events that she has bears the uncanny marker of a psychic

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economy which has gone bankrupt; rhyme of “Herr” with the repeated which must use currency which is not its “Beware” sonically9 indicates to the own. reader that the oppressive forces have, quite actually, become a part of Lady “Like air”: The Monstrous Lazarus’ language, the poem’s final Nothing stanza suggests that the uncanny In the last two stanzas of “Lady archive from which Lady Lazarus has Lazarus,” the reader once again expressed herself throughout the poem witnesses a violent rebirth of the has now been weaponized and is speaker. Unlike the resurrections that capable of not just incorporating, but have played out in the poem’s previous devouring, the oppressor: twenty-six stanzas, this final act of transmogrification appears to have Out of the ash produced a new result. Lady Lazarus I rise with my red hair emerges as a sort of monstrous And I eat men like air. (81-83) feminine figure to deliver a message of warning to yet another conflation of Enraged, Lady Lazarus rises from history, myth, and religion in the nothing (the “ash” of the crematoria) address: with the ability to, in turn, regard the constructs that have degraded her as Herr God, Herr Lucifer nothing (“air”). Beware Beware. (78-80) By the end of the “Lady Lazarus,” Plath has transitioned genres: what was once One is reminded, here, of Plath’s similar horrifically uncanny is now only horrific. gesture in the poem “Daddy,” in which A differentiation of the uncanny from the speaker addresses her father: “I the horrific is necessary here. While the used to pray to recover you/ Ach, du // uncanny often displays elements of the In the German tongue, in the Polish horrific (such as feelings of fear, dread, town…” It seems that in the moment of repulsion, and terror) the horrific is direct articulation or confrontation with founded in a “fear of the unknown” the systems that have repressed the speaker, she must borrow the language 9 Christina Britzolakis considers the sonic (“tongue”; “Herr”) of the oppressor elements of the Ariel poems for their departure themselves to make herself understood. from Plath’s earlier narrative strategies of However, Plath begins to signal towards subject-based dislocation in favor of poetic an inversion of this incorporation of strategies reliant on sound sense and “oral/aural, incantatory element[s] at the level of oppressor to oppressed in the above language” (170). stanza’s rhyme scheme. Just as the hard

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(Lovecraft). The uncanny, conversely, is And I am aware of my heart: it founded in a fear of the reemergence of opens and closes that which was once known, but has Its bowl of red blooms out of been forgotten. Lady Lazarus is horrific sheer love of me. when she emerges to “eat men like air,” The water I taste is warm and but, importantly, the texture of salt, like the sea intellectual uncertainty which was And comes from a country far prominent in her previous away as health. (60-64) manifestations is now gone. She “rise[s]” with her “red hair” as a fully The reemergence of red in “Lady recognizable woman; this last line is the Lazarus,” signals that the speaker is no poem’s first presentation of Lady longer only an observer of “a country Lazarus as analogous to an incarnation far away as health,” but a citizen of it. In of Plath herself that is not conflated with accordance with the larger world of death. The autobiographical detail, “red Ariel, Lady Lazarus’ red hair indicates hair,” directs the reader towards a that she is no longer speaking in an corporeal, intellectually certain uncanny voice via a return to the rendering of Plath as woman (not a repressed as symbolized by woman/corpse or woman/myth). personification of the dead, but that she is now speaking in the horrific voice of a This moment is also significant in the woman who has returned to her own larger context of Ariel’s highly symbolic body to “eat men like air.” color scheme. As Eileen M. Aird points out, “The world of Ariel is a black and Interestingly, a consideration of Plath as white one into which red, which an artist consciously evoking elements represents blood, the heart and living is of horror positions her much more always an intrusion” (85). The color directly as a precursor to movements of red’s significance to Ariel’s symbolic political art during the 1970’s which order is perhaps best articulated in were directly in dialogue with the “,” a poem in which the speaker Women’s Movement. In The Feminist emerges from the white, sterile world of Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice, the hospital to the vivid, living world Alexandra M. Kokoli considers the work represented by the tulips by her of the visual artists in order to define bedside. In the following passage, we and explore the political power of read red as both the marker of life and uncanny representations of femininity.10 the marker of that which cannot be Kokoli argues: attained: 10 In particular, Kokoli examines the work of Judy Chicago, Faith Wilding, and Robin Weltsch.

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Plath’s speaker as an agent of Feminine writing takes place destruction who can speak the culturally when the culturally repressed and politically “impossible.” This return with a vengeance, when consideration also removes Plath from the long censored and her long-held position as a (presumed) impossible erupts “confessional” poet primarily invested into language and the world, in the speaker’s interiority. Perhaps the throwing it into ‘chaosmos.’ […] most unsettling aspect of the Plathian in which witches and female uncanny, however, is the promise that monsters are not merely the monstered speaker is “the same, reclaimed but reimagined as identical woman” as the confessional symbols of resistance and even speaker who began the poem. Perhaps revolutionary agents. (1-2) it is the insistence that for Plath, female interiority is itself alien, eerie, and by A consideration of Plath’s own “Lady nature, repressed, which is the most Lazarus” as a “female monster” birthed horrific element of her poetry. from an uncanny archive positions

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Works Cited Aird, Eileen M. From Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1973.

Annas, Pamela J. A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Breslin, Paul. “Sylvia Plath: The Mythically Fated Self.” The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry Since the Fifties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Britzolakis, Christina. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.

Broe, Mary Lynn. The Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980.

Boyer, Marilyn. “The Disabled Female Body as a Metaphor for Language in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.” Women's Studies, 33.2, 2004, 199-223.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, narrative and history. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Coontz, Stephanie. A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

Coyne, Kelly Marie. “The Magic Mirror”: Uncanny Suicides, from Sylvia Plath to Chantal Ackerman. Georgetown University, PhD Dissertation. 2017.

----“The Many Faces of Sylvia Plath.” Literary Hub. 27 Oct. 2017, http://lithub.com/the-many-faces-of-sylvia-plath/ Accessed: 23 February 18.

Curry, Renée R. White Women Writing White: H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Whiteness. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000.

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Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chiacgo: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. W. W. Norton & Company; The Standard Edition, 1990.

----The Uncanny. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003. ----“On the Sexual Theories of Children.” London: Read Books Limited, 2014. ----Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.

Betty Friedan. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997

The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, edited by Jo Gill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Felluga, Dino Franco. Critical Theory: the Key Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Fletcher, John. Freud and the Scene of Trauma. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

Gubar, Susan. “Prosopopœia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1, 2001, 191-215.

Halbwachs, Maurice and Lewis A. Coser. On Collective Memory. University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Hirsch, Marianne and Valerie Smith. “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.1, 2002, 1-19.

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Irigaray, Luce. The Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

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Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper Colophon Edition, 1978.

Kokoli, Alexandra M. The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice. Camden: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.

Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Big Strip Tease: Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Contemporary Literature, 34.4, 1993, 620–669.

Lovecraft, H.P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. The Palingenesis Project (Wermod and Wermod Publishing Group), 2013.

McCollough, Frances. “Introduction.” The Bell Jar. New York: Harper, 1971.

Miller, Ellen. “Philosophizing with Sylvia Plath: An Embodied Hermeneutic of Color in ‘Ariel’". Philosophy Today, 46.1, 2002, 91-101.

Tenney, Merril C., Kenneth L. Barker & John Kohlenberger III, ed. Zondervan NIV Bible Commentary. Nashville: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994.

Oberg, Arthur. Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creely, and Plath. New Brunskwick: Rutgers University Press, 1978.

Plath, Sylvia. Ariel: The Restored Edition. New York: Faber & Faber, 2010.

Stevenson, Anne. Two Views of Plath’s Life and Career—By Linda Wagner-Martin and Anne Stevenson. Modern American Poetry, 1994. Web. 26 February 2018.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Two Views of Plath’s Life and Career—By Linda Wagner-Martin and Anne Stevenson. Modern American Poetry, 1995. Web. 26 February 2018.

Yorke, Liz. Impertinent Voices: Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Women’s Poetry. Abingdon: Routledge, 1991.

Young, James. “’I may be a of a Jew’: The Holocaust Confessions of Sylvia Plath.” Philological Quarterly, 66.1, 1987, 127-147.

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