Rebirth of the Creative Self in Sylvia Plath's
âA Birthday Presentâ leads not toward the death of its speaker, but toward her transforming rebirth as an authentic, creative self.
In the years since Sylvia Plath?s death, readers and critics have tended to see her {Ariel} poems as a downward spiral toward destruction, pointing to the inevitability of her impending suicide. However, ?A Birthday Present? and the other poems from {Ariel} can be viewed in another light: an attempt at reclaiming life and working toward a rebirth into creative, independent selfhood. According to Judith Kroll, ?the image of death in Sylvia Plath?s late poetry usually encodes a deeper, hidden wish for rebirth, the birth of the true self? (129). Death images do dominate ?A Birthday Present,? yet they are presented alongside other important aspects of Plath?s personal mythology and technique, including conception and birth imagery, religious allusions, and repeated images of whiteness. Taken as a whole, ?A Birthday Present? leads not toward the death of its speaker, but toward her transforming rebirth as an authentic, creative self.
The events of Plath?s life before and during the time she wrote {Ariel} are well known, and it is generally accepted that she based much of her poetry on her own experiences, including her marriage with poet Ted Hughes. At the time the {Ariel} poems were written, Plath?s and Hughes? marriage was disintegrating due to his affair with the wife of a neighbor and fellow poet. While we should not assume the ?I? and the ?you? in ?A Birthday Present? are the actual Plath and Hughes, it is useful to think of them as a couple in a similar situation. An earlier, working title for the poem, ?The Truth? (Kroll 130), reveals this intent. Something has been hidden from the speaker, something of grave importance, and she asks that it be given to her. The shimmering, veiled birthday present is the ?truth? that will allow her to discard her current, crippling life and be reborn. In a Salon.com interview, Kate Moses asserts that ?there was something in Sylvia Plath that required a sense of endangerment and loss in order to really get to the heart of who she was personally as well as artistically. She needed to push things to the extreme in order to get there artistically? (Miller 4). Thus, the pain or ?death? of the birthday present will enable the poem?s speaker to reach a place of individual, creative selfhood.
The words ?shimmering? and ?veils? appear continually throughout the poem. The veils hide the mysterious birthday present, and both are described as shimmering. If the birthday present is the truth, then the veils hiding it are lies. The lies, rather than what they hide, pose the real threat to the speaker: ?If you only knew how the veils were killing my days. / To you they are only transparencies, clear air. / But my god, the clouds are like cotton. / Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide? (37-40). The word shimmering connotes a sense of attractiveness; the line ?Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains? (16) shows that at least for a time, the lies pleasantly hid the truth. Sometimes the truth is difficult to face, and a shimmering veil hiding it can be welcome. However, more often it is the birthday present, and not the veils, that is described as shimmering. The speaker is anxious to see it, and requests, ?Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam, / The glaze, the mirrory variety of it? (24-25). She finds she would rather have the present, no matter what it is, than the veils hiding it, and asks ?Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil? (55). The birthday present, the truth, is more welcome than the shimmering lies concealing it.
Images of whiteness fill ?A Birthday Present,? in reference to the present itself as well as the veils hiding it and other objects in the speaker?s realm. Within the poem?s context, whiteness is used in several ways. As a description of the veils, it can be seen as a reference to death, like a shroud, as in the lines ?The diaphanous satins of a January window / White as babies? bedding and glittering with dead breath? (17-18). As a description of the birthday present, however, whiteness represents truth or purity as well as the fresh start or creative rebirth the speaker will experience once she attains the truth. She says ?I would not mind if it was bones, or a pearl button? (12), but later decides ?It must be a tusk there, a ghost-column? (19). All these objects (the truth) are white, and the words ?bones? and ?ghost-column? impart a morbid feel. In addition, the tusk is a phallic image and connotes a powerful creativity. (In much of her poetry, Plath equated the creative with the masculine). Thus, the white objects are used to signify both death and creativity; as the birthday present, they are also the truth.
While references to death crowd ?A Birthday Present,? they occur alongside other references to conception and birth. The religious images in the poem work with all of these to reinforce the theme of birth, death and rebirth. The speaker refers to herself as ?the one with the black eye-pits and a scar? (6), and later admits ?I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way? (15), effectively setting up the idea that she expects death of some sort. As mentioned previously, she refers to the veils as killing her days (37) or ticking the years off her life (43), showing that if she does not kill herself, the veils or lies will kill her. The words ?dead? and ?death? recur throughout the poem, as well as morbid, deathlike images and a reference to the last supper. However, images of conception and birth are also frequent. The speaker imagines the birthday present as sentient, watching her and asking ?Is this the one for the annunciation?? (9). The choice of the word ?annunciation? gives the birthday present the status of ultimate savior, and the speaker the role of creative mother. The white babies? bedding of the veils and the phallic tusk of the birthday present reinforce the procreative theme. The lines ?It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead centre / Where spilt lives congeal and stiffen to history? (50-51) hint at failed procreation, but also the creative (even if not procreative) act of sex. (Plath was certainly also aware of the metaphor of sex as ?dying,? used throughout literary history by poets such as Donne.) The speaker asks that the present be ?delivered? all at once, another allusion to birth. The poem?s last lines wrap the birth and death themes into a whole, showing that from death the speaker will be renewed:
[q]If it were death
I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.
There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter
Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side. (56-63)[/q]
Some critics have argued that this conclusion represents the violation of the female speaker. While Kathleen Lant sees that ?she must create ? somehow ? the act of unveiling in order to get at an incandescent moment of poetic truth,? she claims that ?whatever is unveiled ? will be monumental; it promises to have the power of a rape: the knife will not simply offer pain and disfigurement; it will enter, violate, and deprive the female observer of life? (17-18). However, if what is unveiled is the truth, necessary for the creative life of the speaker, these lines can be seen not as her physical death, but as a creative rebirth. She specifies that the knife, though an instrument of violence, does not ?carve? or mutilate her; it enters cleanly and enables her, through the death of her false life, to give birth to her own encompassing creativity, ?the universe.?
According to Kate Moses, the published version of {Ariel} tells a very different story than Plath intended as she wrote and ordered the poems. She says, ?She was taking these poems that were in some way chapters from her own mythology and putting them in an order so that she could place herself in the position of imagining a future? (Miller 2). Further, Plath ?moved to London in December 1962, thinking that she could remake her life based on the weight of her understanding of her own success artistically? (3). ?A Birthday Present? represents this attempt at revisioning; the veiled present is not the end of life, but the truth that will enable the speaker to continue living. Kroll writes, ?the poem should be seen as expressive of a genuine wish that a miraculous rebirth might somehow result from the purifying confrontation with this truth, even though it be ?death?? (130). Through truth the speaker will experience the death of her present life and rebirth into a new, creative and autonomous self.
Works Cited
Kroll, Judith. {Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath}. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1976.
Lant, Kathleen Margaret. ?The Big Strip Tease: Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.? Contemporary Literature 34, n 4 (Winter 1993). Online. EBSCO Masterfile Premier. U. of Idaho Lib. System. 15 March 2003.
Miller, Laura. ?A Lioness in Winter: Novelist Kate Moses on her portrait of Sylvia Plath during the grim London winter when she changed literary history ? and then killed herself.? Online. Salon.com Books. http://www.salon.com/books/int/2003/02/18/moses/index.html. 15 March 2003.
Plath, Sylvia. ?A Birthday Present.? {Ariel}. New York: Harper Perennial, 1965. 42-44.
