Vision and Visual Art in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and Last Poems Submitted by Lucy Suzannah Tunstall to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English June 2015 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature: ………………………………………………………….. 1 ABSTRACT This dissertation is concerned with Sylvia Plath’s late works. Engaging with critical discussion of what constitutes the corpus of Ariel I show that an appreciation of the editorial history reveals the beginnings of a third book (the last poems) and opens up those difficult and important texts to fresh enquiry. Recent work in Plath studies has focused on visual art. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley’s Eye Rhymes examines Plath’s own artwork in an ‘attempt to answer the question, How did Plath arrive at Ariel?’ (1). I contribute to that discussion, but also ask the questions, How did Plath leave Ariel behind and arrive at the even more remarkable last poems, and how did visual art contribute to those journeys? I argue that Ariel’s characteristically lucid style is informed by the dismantling of depth perspective in Post-impressionist painting, and by the colour theory and pedagogy of the Bauhaus teachers. My work is underpinned by an appreciation of Plath’s unique cultural moment in mid-century East Coast America. I show how Plath’s knowledge of the theories, practice and iconic images of visual art, from the old masters to the Post-impressionists, offered new possibilities for stylistic development. Working with archival materials including annotated works from Plath’s personal library and drafts of her poems, as well as published material, I examine the synthesis of visual and literary influences. Demonstrating specific textual relations between Plath and the work of Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, as well as other poets, I show that Plath’s visual poetics combine influences from the modern 2 poets with her New Critical literary training and with painting and sculpture. I offer new readings of rarely discussed poems such as ‘Totem’, ‘The Munich Mannequins’ and ‘Child’ as well as fresh insights into the well known works, Tulips’, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, ‘Fever 103º, and ‘Edge’. 3 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 5 List of abbreviations and textual note 6 Introduction. Ariel, the Last Poems and the Beginning of a New Book 7 1. Planetary Light: Landscape, Perspective and Painting in ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree‘ 51 2. Into the Red: Colour Theory in Ariel and the Last Poems 97 3. Pure? What Does it Mean?: ‘Fever 103º‘ and ‘The Munich Mannequins‘ 145 4. One Absolutely Beautiful Thing: the Child’s Eye in ‘Berck-Plage and ‘Child‘ 172 5 Art Versus Magic in ‘Totem’ and the Last Poems 197 Conclusion Drag, Performance, Wit and the Neediness of the Poet 245 Appendix: Artworks 258 Works Cited 284 Works Consulted 297 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the English Department of the University of Exeter for a PhD Bursary to pursue this research, and for the unstinting support of my supervisors, Professors Tim Kendall and Jo Gill. Many of the discoveries explored here began in the Sylvia Plath archive at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College, the riches of which were made available to me by a British Association for American Studies Postgraduate Short-Term Travel Award. I am grateful to the staff of the Rare Book Room, especially Karen Kukil and Barbara Blumenthal who were so generous with their time and expertise. For advice on colour and theories of late style, thanks are due to Professor Sam Smiles, and to Catherine Cleary and Victoria Chalmers for their knowledge of painting and visual composition. 5 ABBREVIATIONS AND TEXTUAL NOTES Unless otherwise indicated, poems cited in this dissertation are from Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. All references to annotated volumes from Plath’s personal library indicate those held in the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College. Unless otherwise indicated all references to the writings of Johannes Itten are taken from Elements of Color: a Treatise on the Color System of Johannes Itten Based on His Book, The Art of Color. Ed. Faber Birren. London: Chapman & Hill, 1990. Print. CP Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. J Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962. Ed. Karen Kukil. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. LH Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963. Ed. Aurelia Plath. London: Faber and Faber, 1976. WP Hughes, Ted. Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose. Ed. William Scammell. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. BF Stevenson, Anne. Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. London: Viking, 1989. 6 Introduction Ariel, the last poems and the beginning of a new book. Such has been the inevitable association of Ariel with Plath’s early and violent death that the existence of post-Ariel work would seem, to those uninitiated in the vagaries of Plath’s publishing history, an impossibility or a macabre joke. While Plath arranged her Ariel manuscript for the last time at some point in November or December 1962, she seems to have made no attempt to publish it (WP 164-5, 191, Kendall 187-88, BF 277). The poems remained on her desk in typescript in a black binder. Plath also left uncollected several poems written during the period of the Ariel poems, but not arranged with them; a further handful of poems written after ‘Death & Co’ (the last Ariel work) in 1962; and, lastly, a group of twelve poems all completed in January or February 1963 (WP 172–73). Few critics treat these 1963 works as a discrete group; and ‘last poems’ has sometimes been used to refer to everything in the 1965 Ariel or to everything written in 1962 or to everything written in the last year, or last two years, of Plath’s life. In this thesis, ‘last poems’ refers specifically to the final twelve works completed in the first two months of 1963. That Plath went on, after writing everything she would select for Ariel, to produce a group of poems which is stranger, more intriguing and perhaps even more successful than any of the previous work, is a surprising discovery and a matter for serious consideration. The concision, formal audacity and elliptical, leveraged imagery of her last twelve poems, from ‘Sheep in Fog’ completed on 28 January 1963 to ‘Edge’ and ‘Balloons’ both written on 5 February of the same year, sets them, as a group, beyond any earlier sequences. Both ‘Balloons’ and ‘Edge’ as well as perhaps ‘Words’ and ‘Kindness’ have been much discussed and widely anthologised (The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Women’s Poetry, 1987, edited by Fleur 7 Adcock, is perhaps the most generous to the last poems, presenting ‘Sheep in Fog’, ‘Paralytic’, ‘Kindness’, ‘Balloons’, and ‘Edge’). The same cannot be said for ‘Totem’, ‘The Munich Mannequins’, ‘Mystic’, and ‘Contusion’. Where these very late works are discussed as a discrete group, they are often read simply as a waning of the dynamic, transcendent Ariel spirit, and of Plath’s creativity. Few enquiries have examined the particular nature or genesis of these distinctive and important works; Tim Kendall’s Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study is unique in devoting a whole chapter to the last poems. Far from a draining away of creative energy, the last poems represent an expansion of poetic possibility. Hughes and Plath herself (according to Hughes) regarded these last twelve works as a new departure and the beginning of the collection which would succeed Ariel. There is very little evidence of Plath’s own thoughts on the 1963 poems; almost everything that is on record is reported by Hughes. Her perfunctory introduction to a BBC recording of ‘Sheep in Fog’ gives nothing away: In this poem, the speaker’s horse is proceeding at a slow, cold walk down a hill of macadam to the stable at the bottom. It is December. It is foggy. In the fog there are sheep. (CP 295n) Other than this perfunctory observation, Plath’s only known commentaries on these important works are found in the notes to the Collected Poems and in various prose pieces by Hughes. He is consistent and insistent in repeatedly referring to both the more austere atmosphere of the 1963 poems and their status as a cohesive group; they are the beginning of a new collection with an energy quite distinct from the heat and velocity of Ariel. In ‘Sylvia Plath and Her Journals’, Hughes writes, ‘She considered these poems a fresh start. She liked the different, cooler inspiration (as 8 she described it) and the denser pattern ... as they took shape’ (WP 189); and in ‘Publishing Sylvia Plath,’ ‘She herself regarded those last poems as the beginning of a new book’ (WP 167) and ‘[Plath] herself recognising the different inspiration of these new pieces regarded them as the beginnings of a third book’ (WP 172). The evidence in Hughes’s essay, ‘Sylvia Plath: The Evolution of Sheep in Fog’, is more uncertain (WP 191-211). This important and helpful analysis uses the many drafts of ‘Sheep in Fog’ to begin to account for the stylistic metamorphosis of the last twelve poems. Hughes identifies within the drafts a retreat from, or suppression of, the glimpsed possibility of a ‘mythic poem’ that would express ‘the full subjective drama of her fate’ (211).