Sylvia Plath, or, The Angel of the Hearth Suicides
Evalutes the notions of Marriage and Motherhood as they appear in Plath's poetry.
Sylvia Plath was born in Massachusetts in 1932. Her mother and maternal grandparents brought her up, since her father died when she was only eight years old. She grew up to be not only an excellent student but also a very talented and brilliant young woman.
In the 1950s, when Plath was in her twenties, American society was geared towards family, marriage and children. Motherhood and housewifery was all that the national agenda had in store for women and societal pressure on women was huge forcing them to concentrate their aspirations on a wedding ring.
Plath, who already wrote poetry as well as numerous short stories, abhorred the insubstantial role that women in the fifties were expected to play. She already knew of course that ?Marriage is the destiny traditionally offered to women by society. It is still true that most women are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being. The celibate woman is to be explained and defined with reference to marriage, whether she is frustrated, rebellious, or even indifferent in regard to that institution.? (The Second Sex, 445). She intensely desired to be a wife as well as a mother, but on her own terms. Her potential mate would never bind her into a woman she did not want to be. So, despite her rejection of traditional housewifely roles, she dreamt of a husband who would share her intellectual interests and not suppress her poetic genius. Sylvia Plath, by all means, wanted to break free from the stereotype that pictured women as going to college to get an M.R.S degree (Mrs. Degree), meaning a husband.
However, she was the perfectionist daughter of a middleclass family who wanted to please people in her social circle and shine in every occasion. She, therefore, both studied hard and dated Ivy League men; she was the golden girl on the Campus, smiling and charming, taking part in every social gathering while at the same time she was a tormented soul, burdened by mental illness and seeking an outlet in poetry.
Sylvia Plath wanted it all: a loving husband and children and a brilliant poetic career: ?I would live a life of conflict, of balancing children, sonnets, love and dirty dishes; and banging, banging an affirmation of life out of pianos and ski slops and in bed, in bed, in bed.? (The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 126)
In her poem ?Wreath for a Bridal? she celebrates her marriage to Ted Hughes, as a wedding held outdoors, ?love?s proper chapel?.
?Call here with flying colors all watchful birds
To people the twigged aisles; lead Babel tongues
Of animal to choir: ?Look what thresh of wings
Wields guard of honor over there!? Starred with words
Let night bless that luck-rooted mead of clover
Where, bedded like angels, two burn one in fever?
(Complete Poems, 44-45)
In this poem she emphasizes their union as the union of two creatures of nature male and female. Sylvia was happy with Ted Hughes and she considered their marriage ideal. She even promised him that she would make him a success. Unfortunately giving such single-minded attention to Ted?s work meant that developing her own voice as a poet was difficult. Moreover, Sylvia soon discovered that even her marriage was like every other marriage a different thing for a man and a different one for a woman. Her poetry abides in images emphasizing this difference.
?Boys get married, they take a wife. They look marriage for an enlargement, a confirmation of their existence, but not the mere right to exist; it is a charge they assume voluntarily. Thus they can inquire concerning its advantages and disadvantages, as did the Greek and medieval satirists; for them it is one mode of living, not a preordained lot? (The Second Sex, 449) In her poem ?Purdah? (Winter Trees), Plath sees the woman as a bride upon whom a certain kind of seclusion is forced and certainly not as a person granting affirmation or enlargement out of a blissful union.
? Side of green Adam, I
Smile, cross-legged,
Enigmatical,?
The speaker remains enigmatical to the man because he does not even bother to really see who she is. He defines his wife under the male gaze that sadly transforms her into a? small jeweled /doll he guards like a heart-.? However, the poetic persona has a warning and a threat hidden under her double-entendre words: ?I shall unloose-from the small jeweled /doll he guards like a heart-/the lioness, /the shriek in the bath, /the cloak of holes? (Norton Anthology of American Literature, 2753)
In another similar poem ?In Plaster? (Crossing the water) the relationship between body and cast is described as ?a kind of marriage?. Body and cast develop a certain interdependency; the cast provides a supporting role like ?the best of nurses?. A time comes, of course, that the body heals and envisions shackling the cast. However, he finds out that ?living with her was living with my own coffin/ yet I still depend on her, though I did it regretfully?
In ?The Applicant? marriage is depicted as an artificial thing that fills a need; it works somehow as a cast, as we saw ?In Plaster?, or as a prosthesis. The man is wifeless and that is interpreted as missing a primary possession, so he is told (probably by society): ?Here is a hand.
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?? and further down the hand-wife is described as ? Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they?ll bury you in it? (Norton Anthology of American Literature, 2753). The woman in ?The Applicant? is nothing but a domestic blob who can ?sew, it can cook/it can talk, talk, talk?. She becomes an appendage to the husband, a mere puppet. Simone De Beauvoir commenting on marriage shares Plath?s view of what becomes to a married woman assuming the role of the hand-wife: ? She takes his name; she belongs to his religion, his class, his circle; she joins his family, she becomes his ?half?. She follows wherever his work call him and determines their place of residence; she breaks more or less decisively with her past, becoming attached to her husband?s universe; she gives him her person, virginity and a rigorous fidelity being required.? (The Second Sex, 449)
Similarly enough, Plath?s four of the five poems that make up ?Poem for a Birthday? center around domestic situations. In the fourth of these poems ?The Beast? the speaker sounds disillusioned by her marriage: ?I?ve married a cupboard of rubbish/?I housekeep in Time?s gut-end?, she says. In the same Poem the man ?was a bull man earlier/ king of my dish, my lucky animal?, but subsequently becomes ?mumblepaws?, ?Fido Littlesoul, the bowel?s familiar?. In ?Who? he is ?Dogsbody?. In ?Maenad? he is ?Dog-head, devourer?. The husband is represented as an animal who failed to look up to his wife?s expectations, this reference to failed expectations may have an autobiographical hint to her disillusionment from Ted Hughes, but poetry must be read universally and not narrowly interpreted according to the author?s personal experience. As the author is dead, according to Foucault, the text is open to interpretation so Plath?s woman ?Housekeeping in Time?s gut-end? is, for me, the universal woman entrapped in her domestic carceral. Her creativity and individuality are annulled in a Sisyphean battle with dust. ?Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present. ?. Eating, sleeping, cleaning-the years no longer rise up towards heaven; they lay spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won? (The Second Sex, 470).
In ?The Detective? (Winter Trees) Plath?s imagery is so strong that we can even smell ?the Years burning, here in the Kitchen?. There is a death in this house, but the body is nowhere to be found as the woman has long since ceased to exist as a person. She may have kept her house immaculate, yet her own self has atrophied to nothingness.
?The mouth first?..
????????.
Her breasts next??
????????..
Then the dry wood, the gates,
The brown motherly furrows, the whole estate.?
As Simone De Beauvoir argues ?A household, in fact, with its meticulous and limitless tasks, permits to woman a sadomasochistic flight from herself as she contends madly with the things around her and with herself in a state of distraction and mental vacancy? (The Second Sex, 471)
In ?Lesbos?(Ariel) Plath examines the relationship between two women with completely different domestic considerations while the imagery is once more one of ?viciousness in the kitchen?, where ?Potatoes hiss, /it is all Hollywood, windowless, /the fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine?. This viciousness is in fact a depiction of in larger scale of how domesticity kills women without them realizing it. ?Any doctrine of transcendence and liberty subordinates the defeat of evil to progress towards the good. But woman is not called upon to build a better world: her domain is fixed and she has only to keep up the never ending struggle against the evil principles that creep into it; in her war against dust, stains, mud, and dirt she is fighting sin, wrestling with Satan. But it is a sad fate to be required without respite to repel an enemy instead of working towards positive ends, and very often the housekeeper submits to it in a kind of madness that may verge on pervasion, a kind of sadomasochism.? (The Second Sex, 471)
In ?Tulips?(Ariel) the speaker says: ? My husband and child smiling out of the family photo,
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks?. For Plath a family photo with her smiling loved ones, husband and child, becomes a nightmare thing, since her familial life hooks her in the sad reality that she, in fact, is their happy homemaker, their happy inmate. Simone De Beauvoir explains how women are driven to foster such ambiguous feelings for their family: ?Married life assumes different forms in different cases. But for a great many women the day passes in much the same fashion. The husband leaves in the morning and the wife is glad to hear the door close behind him. She is free; the children go to school; she is alone; she attends to a thousand small tasks; her hands are busy, but her mind is empty; what plans she has are for her family; she lives only for them.? (The Second Sex, 493-494)
So, marriage traps women in a web were they are supposed to ?defer? their own self infinitely in order to live up to the role of the happy housewife. This sad realization overwhelmed Plath, her poetry therefore is full of violent domestic imagery, suggesting that a wife?s life is confined in the kitchen: ?The tragedy of marriage is not that it fails to assure woman the promised happiness-there is no such thing as assurance in regard with happiness-but that it mutilates her; it dooms her to repetition and routine.? (The Second Sex, 496). This mutilation is even more painful when the entrapped wife happens to be an extremely talented woman watching her creativity being jeopardized by domesticity, while her equally talented husband ?s creativity thrived.
Plath was as ambivalent towards motherhood as she was about married life. De Beauvoir says, ?It is in maternity that woman fulfills her physiological destiny; it is her natural ?calling?, since her whole organic structure is adapted for the perpetuation of the species.? (The Second Sex, 501). Sylvia Plath both longed to be a mother and was terrified by the prospect of it. In the sections of ?Poem for a Birthday? that deal with pregnancy, Plath links pregnancy with madness. The woman in all cases loses her identity and is overwhelmed by a sense of insignificance and smallness. In ?Who? the poetic persona says: ?Let me sit in the flowerpot/the spiders won?t notice?. In ?Maenad? she screams: ?Tell me my name?. In ?The Stones? she identifies with the fetus: ?I entered
the stomach of indifference
???????????
Drunk as a fetus
I suck at the paps of darkness.?
Plath wrote these poems while expecting her first child. They all reveal a certain mental distress over the maternal condition. The ambiguity she fostered about motherhood is clearly exhibited in the deflated closing even of her most optimistic and positive poems on motherhood. In ?Child?(Winter Trees), the speaker wants to present the child with only the best objects and experiences that will construct a peaceful universe for him/her: ?colors?, ?ducks?, ?wildflowers?. The anti-climax comes in the final stanza where the mother reluctantly disturbs this peaceful universe, since in reality all she can offer is: ? ?this troublous/wringing of hands, this dark/Ceiling without a star.? (Norton Anthology of American Literature, 2754)
Particularly her last poetry, which I consider the strongest verses she ever wrote and which I examine mostly in this essay, is filled with this disillusionment with married life, pain, and domestic suffering. She wrote most of it while ?her health was poor; both in Devon and in London, she fought the combined hardships of flu and high fever, and cold, damp weather. Yet she wrote more urgently than ever before; she daily set aside the very early morning hours for her poetry, composing as she said ?a poem a day before breakfast?.? (Sylvia Plath, 74). Despite the general bleakness and despair that prevailed in her poetry of that time, she also produced certain baby poems in which: ? For brief moments, perhaps, the mother?s love may provide partial relief from the otherwise unrelieved world of nightmare.? (Sylvia Plath, 86). Such poems are ? Morning Song?, ?Balloons? and ?For a Fatherless Son?. In these poems the mother?s love is evident, yet her ambivalence on motherhood creeps up in her own words. ? The precious child of ? Morning Song? is also a ?New statue/in a drafty museum?; in ?Balloons? he holds a ?red /Shred in his little fist?; and the fatherless son ?will be aware of an absence, presently, / growing beside you like a tree, / a death tree, color gone?. There are dead babies in ?Death & Co.?, and the woman who is perfected by death in ?Edge? hold her dead children at her breast? (Sylvia Plath, 87)
?The Night Dances?(Ariel), which Ted Hughes says is about their son Nicholas-their second child-dancing in his crib, is a very tender poem that ends in a similar deflating way: ?Falling like blessings, like flakes/six-sided, white/on my eyes, my lips, my hair/Touching and melting. Nowhere.? Snow for Plath bears negative connotations; it is associated with emptiness, sterility, and coldness. In ?Parliament Hill fields?(Crossing the Water) a group of children looks like a? crocodile?to swallow me? to the speaker, while in ?Berck Plage?(Ariel): ?These children are after something, with hooks and cries?. In her poem ?I want, I want? the baby is the baby-Rex, a tyrannical, demanding force: ?Open ?mouthed, the Baby god, / Immense, bald, though, baby-headed, /cried out for the mother?s dug? (Collected Poems, 106). These depictions shatter the perfect image of the angelic mother, sacrificing herself for her children, the image that flourished in the advertisements of baby-boom America, where the happy homemaker played with her plumb children while baking biscuits with ?Pillsbury flour?. However, it is nearer to reality: ?Maternity is usually a strange mixture of narcissism, altruism, idle day-dreaming, sincerity, bad faith, devotion and cynicism.? (The Second Sex, 528).
Sylvia Plath tries to depict all these feelings towards motherhood in her poetry as well as incorporate in her verse the inherent fear a mother feels at this stranger inhabiting her body. ? But pregnancy is above all a drama that is acted out within the woman herself. She feels it as at once an enrichment and an injury; the fetus is a part of her body, and it is a parasite that feeds on it; she possesses it and is possessed by it; it represents the future and carrying it, she feels herself vast as the world; but this very opulence annihilates her, she feels that she herself is no longer anything. A new life is going to manifest itself and justify its own separate existence, she is proud of it; but she also feels herself tossed and driven, the plaything of obscure forces? (The Second Sex, 512)
Plath was afraid of procreativity because she pictured it as a loss off poetic creativity. In her poem ?Stillborn? (Collected Poems, 142) she says:
? These poems do not live: it is a sad diagnosis
They grew their toes and fingers well enough
Their little foreheads bulged out with concentration
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn?t for any lack of mother-love
O I cannot understand what happened to them!
They are so proper in shape and number and everything
They sit so nicely in the picking fluid!
They smile and smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won?t fill and the heart won?t start.?
Plath here likens her poetic creations to babies and laments the fact that they are stillborn despite her ?maternal? affection. In this case the word ?mother? is one and the same with ?creator?. Her poems are her children; the offspring of her creative powers, while the birth of a child is the product of a natural, biological process. In her poem ?The Munich Mannequins?(Ariel) Plath once more likens poetic creation with fertility.
? Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb
?????????????????..
Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose?
(Ariel, 74-75)
?Creative acts originating in liberty establish the object as value and give it the quality of the essential; whereas the child in the maternal body is not thus justified; it is still only a gratuitous cellular growth, a brute fact of nature as contingent on circumstances as death and corresponding philosophically with it. A mother can have her reasons for wanting a child, but she cannot give to this independent person, who is to exist tomorrow, his own reasons, his justification, for existence; she engenders him as a product of her generalized body, not of her individualized existence.? (The Second Sex, 514) Plath?s ambivalent feelings toward motherhood do not make her selfish or cruel. She just cries out what it means to be a woman in terms of the traditional conflict between family and career. Her life and writing are filled with anxiety and despair over her refusal to choose and try to have both.
Some critics such as David Holbrook characterized Plath?s writing hysterical. However, ? writing castigated as hysterical is writing where the passage of the body through language is too insistently present; it is writing in which a body, normally ordered by the properties of language and sexual identity, gets too close. Fragmented and disorderly, this writing refuses to submit to the aesthetic norms of integration and wholeness against which it is diagnosed and judged. Its body can be called feminine to the precise degree it flouts the rigidity (the masculinity) of the requisite forms of literary cohesion and control.? (The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 27-28). Plath wrote her body in a way similar to that Cixous advised women to do in her The Laugh of the Medusa. She urges women to write themselves: ?Because poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women, or as Hoffman would say, fairies? (Norton Anthology, Theory and Criticism, 2043).
Even though, I am not in favor of the essentialism entailed in the ecriture feminine theory, I have to admit that Sylvia Plath writes in a unique way. Her verse is not merely informed by her experience as a woman in a confining society but it sounds almost like a cry coming from the depths of her soul to us today.
People indulge into simplified versions of Plath. For them she is either the feminist martyr, abandoned by her two-timing husband, driven to suicide by him and by the societal clout of 1950s America, or the mad genius doomed to death by her mental illness. Some fragments of truth exist in both descriptions, however we must not interpret Plath?s poetic persona so narrowly.
Sylvia Plath was a great poet, touching universal themes of love and individuality following a domestic thread as well as a nightmare landscape and imagery. She posthumously became the symbol of the repressed woman not only through her poetic creations, but also through her suicide. The fact that she put her head in the oven and gassed herself was interpreted by many as an act of protest against the symbolic death of women in their cell-kitchens.
In my opinion, Plath should be remember for the strong poetry she left us and not for her suicide or whatever her act entailed. To understand Sylvia Plath ?you only have to look. ??Straight on to see her. And she?s not deadly. She?s beautiful and she?s laughing? (Norton Anthology, Theory and Criticism, The Laugh of the Medusa, 2048)
Bibliography
Barnard, Caroline. Sylvia Plath. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978
Butscer, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. New York: The Seabury Press, 1976
Cixous, Helene, ?The Laugh of the Medusa?. The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism. General Ed.Leitch, B.Vincent, New York-London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Gallimard, 1949 (edited by H.M. Parshley for Vintage Books, 1997)
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. London: Faber and Faber, 1965
Plath, Sylvia. Crossing the Water. London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1975
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed.Ted Hughes. New York: Harper &Row, 1981
Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough. New York: Ballantine Books, 1982
Plath, Sylvia. Winter Trees. London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1975
Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London: Virago, 1991
