Southern Methodist University A Passage to "Ariel": Sylvia Plath and the Evolution of Self Author(s): GREG JOHNSON Source: Southwest Review, Vol. 65, No. 1 (WINTER 1980), pp. 1-11 Published by: Southern Methodist University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43469198 Accessed: 21-05-2016 12:24 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Southern Methodist University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Southwest Review This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms A Passage to ' 'Ariel " Sylvia Plath and the Evolution of Self GREG JOHNSON Sylvia plath's poetry has been misinterpreted as "confessional" per- haps in an attempt to grant her - both as woman and as poet - a measure of the compassion she seemingly would not grant herself. This kind of compassionate acceptance has been offered, quite understandably, by poets such as Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and A. Alvarez, yet their individual assessments of Plath's work are disappointing because of their insistence upon the intimate connection between Plath's life and her poetry; this connection has been emphasized to such an extent that other, more meaningful connections have been ignored - or worse, made to seem irrelevant - and the result has been to exaggerate the significance of Plath's life while minimizing the importance of her art. Combining with this view of Plath as a confessional poet has developed the ten- dency to view her latest poems, those posthumously collected in Ariel, as distinctly apart from those written earlier in her career. In Robert Lowell's hyperbolic phrasing, Sylvia Plath in Ariel "becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created - hardly a person at all."1 This emphasis upon the newness of the poet rather than that of the poetry typifies an attitude which improperly deflects atten- tion from Plath's artistic achievement: in order to come to terms with the poems it will ultimately prove morę fruitful to view Sylvia Plath not as myth but as mythmaker, and to trace not the tragic patterns of her life but the careful progression of her poetic myth. That Plath's life and art have been so often considered side by side is understandable, of course, since the evolution of self is her major theme and since autobiographical details appear with such frequency in the poems. What remains to be seen, however, is Plath's skill in trans- lating her own personal development into a poetry which is controlled, intelligent, accessible, the artistic quality never declining into what she southwest Review 1 This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms contemptuously termed "cries from the heart." In an interview for the British Council, Plath defined her own method of transforming personal experience into a relevant, coherent work of art: 1 believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experi- ence, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an in- formed and an intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant , and relevant to the larger things.2 From the earliest poems of The Colossus to those written in the last days of her life, Plath's emphasis is therefore upon artistic transformation rather than personal confession; as Ted Hughes has remarked, Plath uses her "informed and intelligent mind" to create her own mythology, and in this way she is able to give her private experience a broad cultural relevance: Her poetic strategies, the poetic events she draws out of her experience of disintegration and renewal, the radiant, visionary light in which she en- counters her family and the realities of her daily life, are quite different in kind from anything one finds in Robert Lowell's poetry, or Anne Sexton's. Their work is truly autobiographical and personal. The autobiographical details in Sylvia Plath's poetry work differently. She sets them out like masks, which are then lifted up by dramatis personae of nearly supernatural quali- ties. The world of her poetry is one of emblematic visionary events.3 Drawing upon classical tradition, received conventions, and an ac- cumulated store of private images, Plath eventually is able to combine the tortured, rasping voice of Ariel with a language and technique which lend that voice its authority and control - an achievement for which the carefully crafted Colossus poems laid essential groundwork. Readers may find Plath's "disintegration and renewal" frightening, distasteful, even perverted - since the only possible renewal is in death - but what must be recognized is her success in manipulating painful experience toward the expression of a broadly relevant, deeply moving tragic vision.4 Despite the shift in style and tone which marks the transition from The Colossus to Plath's later work, there is a remarkable coherence to 2 winter 1980 This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms this vision as it develops through her four published volumes; collec- tively and sequentially the poems display a continuity in her concept of identity as she begins to give increased attention to this theme in Crossing the Water and Winter Trees , and a constant recurrence of specific images links even the earliest poems in The Colossus to poems in Ariel such as "Edge," written in the last week of Plath's life. With the advantage of hindsight, in fact, we may see that Plath's acceptance of her vision - and her awareness of its probable direction - came early. In "The Dis- quieting Muses," written in 1957, she dramatizes her perception that fate has singled her out for a special, dark achievement: her muses are "bald," "in gowns of stone, /Faces blank as the day I was born," and at the close of the poem she accepts them grimly: "no frown of mine/Will betray the company I keep."* Although most of the poems in The Colossus have a studied formality and are self-conscious in their use of conventional poetic techniques, elaborate stanza structures, and a highly stylized rhetoric, they nonetheless seem informed by this sense of mis- sion, and few are mere exercises by a precocious craftsman: these early poems are a necessary preparation, in fact, for the achievement of the wholly distinct voice that emerges in the later work, and a few intro- duce images which recur throughout all of Plath's poetry. For the most part, however, Plath's poems of identity in The Colossus approach her subject only in oblique ways, and a certain poetic caginess keeps the experience of transformation at a distance. Her primary method of achieving this distance is writing in the third person, disclaiming the experience from her stance as poet: in "Spinster," a "particular girl" suddenly perceives a chaos all about her ("the birds' irregular babel," "the leaves' litter," "petals in disarray, /The whole season, sloven") which makes love seem meaningless and causes her to create a new life which is in fact the enactment of a death wish: How she longed for winter then! - Scrupulously austere in its order Of white and black Ice and rock, each sentiment within border, And hearts frosty discipline Exact as a snowflake. Death is actually achieved in "Suicide Off Egg Rock," though again the experience is distanced through use of a protagonist. In "Hardcastle southwest Review 3 This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Sat, 21 May 2016 12:24:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Crags" a young woman walks out into the bleak deathscape of the English moors to discover "pastures bordered by black stone set/On black stone," realizes that the landscape is "enough to snuff the quick/Of her small heat out," and decides to turn back. This basic confrontation will recur in a later poem ("Wuthering Heights"), but with a different result. Two poems in The Colossus may further serve as a bridge to the more explicit handling of the identity theme in later poems. In "The Burnt-Out Spa" the speaker glimpses her future self as she leans out over a pool of water: O she is gracious and austere, Seated beneath the toneless water! It is not I, it is not I. And in "The Stones" the process of transformation seems already be- gun, the imagery of actual physical metamorphosis anticipating that of several key identity poems in Crossing the Water and Ariel. She finds herself in "the city where men are mended"; sucking at "the paps of darkness," she prepares for the new self predicted in "The Disquieting Muses," and her bald muses are replaced by a "bald nurse." Again there is a retreat from love ("Love is the bone and sinew of my curse") coin- ciding with a progress toward death, "a quarry of silences." In the transitional volumes, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees , Plath's obsession with both identity and death becomes intense, urgent - the mounting excitement of her voice suggests that she is closing the gap between the two.