Series Editors:
Ted Hughes: Alternative
Horizons
EDITED BY
JOANNY MOULIN
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2004 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
All rights reserved. No part of this publication or the information contained herein may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, by photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written prior permission from the publishers.
Although all care is taken to ensure the integrity and quality of this publication and the information herein, no responsibility is assumed by the publishers nor the author for any damage to property or persons as a result of operation or use of this
publication and/or the information contained herein.
Published by: Taylor & Francis The Netherlands, Lisse http://www.tandf.co.uk/books
ISBN 0-203-01798-6 Master e-book ISBN
Series Preface vii
Foreword
Joanny Moulin viii
The Deterministic Ghost in the Machine of Birthday Letters
Leonard M.Scigaj 1
Words to “Patch the Havoc:” The Imagination of Ted Hughes in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Gayle Wurst
1
Complicated with Old Ghosts: The Assia Poems
Carol Bere 14
“Dead Farms, Dead Leaves:” Culture as Nature in Remains of Elmet & Elmet
Terry Gifford
23
Ted Hughes’s Crying Horizons: “Wind” & the Poetics of Sublimity
Christian La Cassagnère 32
Poetry & Magic
Ann Skea 40
Self-Revelation, Self-Concealment & the Making of the Ted Hughes Archive
Stephen Enniss
50
Drives & their Vicissitudes in the Poetry of Ted Hughes
Axel Nesme 60
Hughes & the Female Addressee
Neil J.Roberts 79
Ted Hughes’s Anti-Mythic Method
Joanny Moulin 86
In Search of the Autobiography of Ted Hughes
“Earth-Moon:” Ted Hughes’s Books for Children (& Adults)
Claas Kazzer 101
Ted Hughes & the Folk Tale
Paul Volsik 115
List of Contributors 125
Works Cited 128
Abbreviations 135
Context and Genre in English Literature
The aim of the Context and Genre in English Literature series is to place bodies of prose, poetry, and drama in their historical, literary, intellectual or generic contexts. It seeks to present new work and scholarship in a way that is informed by contemporary debates in literary criticism and current methodological practices.
The various contextual approaches reflect the great diversity of the books in the series. Three leading categories of approaches can be discerned. The first category, consisting of historical and philological approaches, covers subjects that range from marginal glosses in medieval manuscripts to the interaction between folklore and literature. The second category, of cultural and theoretical approaches, covers subjects as diverse as changing perceptions of childhood as a background to children’s literature on the one hand and queer theory and translation studies on the other. Finally, the third category consists of single author studies informed by contextual approaches from either one of the first two categories.
this collection should be seen as a search for different ways to steer Hughes criticism gently but firmly out of the ruts of certain well-travelled avenues. Impartial assessment is, to be sure, the best service that can be rendered to Hughes’s poetry, by helping to ensure that one of the most powerful poetic achievements of the twentieth-century is no longer stranded in biographical or psychological sands. This collection of essays is the first to be produced since the poet’s death and presents a good sample of directions in academic research devoted to the poetry of Ted Hughes at the turn of the century. It is meant as a continuation of Hughes studies and a tentative broadening of their perspectives.
The Deterministic Ghost in the Machine of
Birthday Letters
Leonard M.Scigaj
“I looked for omens,” Ted Hughes writes, as he and Sylvia Plath enter their first rented flat in BirthdayLetters (49). But in Birthday Letters (1998) all the omens save Assia’s pike dream are bad omens. A pillowstain of blood, a gypsy’s curse, a ouija board, an earthenware head, a possibly rabid bat, a fox cub, a snake, ponderous astrology, and the word “Fate,” capitalized many times—all testify to a fatalistic inevitability. These are the “fixed stars” (118, 152, 188) that led to Plath’s suicide. For Hughes these “fixed stars” are the poet’s story, the one deep story at the heart of a lifetime that the poet expresses with a “thirst of the whole being. “But are Hughes’s “fixed stars” the same as the “fixed stars” Plath stated “Govern a life” in her late poem “Words” (CPP 270)?
The central structural design of Birthday Letters concerns an obsessive equation of Otto and Sylvia Plath with King Minos and the Minotaur of Cretan mythology. In Apollodaurus, summarized by Edith Hamilton (151–2), Poseidon gives a bull to Minos, king of Crete, in order that the king sacrifice the bull to him. Instead Minos keeps it for himself, and Poseidon in turn punishes Minos by having his wife, Pasiphae, fall in love with it, producing the ravenous half-man, half-beast Minotaur. Minos directed his architect Daedalus to build a labyrinth to house the Minotaur. Once inside, no one could escape the labyrinth’s maze, and Minos used the structure to sacrifice captured enemies until the Athenian hero Theseus slays the Minotaur and finds his way out with the help of Ariadne’s thread. Hughes evidently sees in this myth a parable of how a centered, self-absorbed person becomes inattentive to the spiritual, obsessed with the covetous rational, and in so doing bestializes his or her instinctual life, creating chronic and self-destructive needs to overindulge in satisfying one’s passions. In this contemporary recension, Hughes casts Otto Plath as the self-absorbed Minos (133), given his autocratic pater familias behavior acquired from his Germanic roots. In her self-destructive indulgence in anger and emotional tirades, Plath apes her father as she becomes the Minotaur (120).
But Hughes does not stop here. He adds a second level of genetic and cultural determinism. Otto himself is infected with fascistic faith in an all-powerful Ruler, derHerr des Hauses (LH 13), and this has destructive consequences. So Plath, his offspring, exhibits in her destructive behavior that same genetic tendency. Her dreams in BirthdayLetters are infected not only with corpses, but with “father-worship” and its particular Germanic legacy of Nazi horrors, the “Death-camp atrocities,” the “gas-chamber and the oven” (141–42). Otto’s brow is “Modified in Peenemümde/Via Brueghel” (179). Peenemünde is the village in the north of Germany where the Nazis researched and tested their V-1 and V-2 rockets, and the Brueghel alluded to is no doubt Peter Brueghel the Elder’s “The Triumph of Death,” a painting of carnage and slaughter that Plath meditated upon in her early poem “Two Views of a Cadaver Room” (CPP 114).
Both World Wars deeply affected Hughes’s personality development. As a child Hughes heard endless stories of the dead and the survivors of World War I at family gatherings and at Sunday night dinners, for his father was one of only seventeen survivors of an entire regiment that went through its numbers three times at Gallipoli. Hughes was nine when World War II began, and his adolescence was molded in the food rationing, the stresses of the Blitz, and the daily news accounts of the fighting. German fighters flew sorties regularly over much of England, looking mostly for aircraft hangars and Rolls Royce engine factories, but also bombing many cities in the shires. Parachuted pilots already crisped by explosions and fires in their planes were not uncommon, as in Hughes’s early poem “The Casualty” in The Hawk in the Rain.
modernist view that myth in twentieth century literature performs that religious function for a populace less and less influenced by traditional beliefs. Hence, as I have argued in my 1986 and 1991 works, Hughes controlled aggression through meaning-bearing modernist structures developed from his storehouse of myth and cultural anthropology: the Lupercalia ritual and the poem as wolf mask in Lupercal, the narrative of the adventure of the hero in Wodwo, the Zen Enlightenment of Part III of Wodwo and in the irony of Crow, and the psychology of alchemical transmutation to achieve the Jungian Self in Cave Birds. Often in these works—and especially in the Lupercal poem “Childbirth,” and the Wodwo poems “Thistles” and “The Warriors of the North” —Hughes meditated on Freud’s theory of phylogenetic inheritance, of an aggressive taint in the blood, transmitted to each succeeding generation by one’s forebears, that can instigate violent actions (See Scigaj, 1986, 43, 95; 1991, 52–5).
Hughes’s use of the Minotaur myth in Birthday Letters, however, is deterministic, not liberating. Genetic determinism is how Hughes understands his former wife’s bouts of sullenness, her hostility, anger, and her final act of self-violence. Otto’s hands are the hands of Fate manipulating Plath’s actions (184– 5), and those hands function as a perfect incarnation of a German death-wish, a cultural Ragnarok, in World War II. What Plath’s parents wanted from their daughter, insists Hughes, was “Thor’s voice” in the act of “Doing a hammer-dance on Daddy’s body/Avenging the twenty-year forsaken/Sobs of Germania” (169). Just as Sylvia “danced for (her) father/In the home of anger” (26) as a child, so the adult’s “flames fed on rage” (149), ultimately to unite with him (153) after convicting him of autocratic control in “Daddy.” Hughes views “Daddy” as both Plath’s love letter and her death-wish, her “Cupid’s bow” nailing her father to the town square “Stark naked full of those arrows/In the bronze of immortal poesy” (179). Every arrow becomes a poetic “star” in her “constellation,” though “it was/[Her] blood that dried on him” (180). Using her published poetry as evidence against her, Hughes argues that ultimately Plath really “wanted/To be with [her] father” (153) in a “wedding” foreshadowed by her summer 1962 interest in becoming a beekeeper (150). Plath’s analyst, Ruth Beuscher, convinced her that she had “instant access” to her creative energies (69), but what coalesced from “the core of [her] Inferno” (69) was “Germany’s eagle/Bleeding up through [her] American eagle/In a cloud of Dettol” (78), as the dead Otto rose in poetic form from the well at the center of the Devon house (137, 150, 152).
leaking thatch drip” and “staring at that sunken church” just beyond the graveyard (122–3). Creating a bedroom in red (197–8) and planing an elm plank for her writing table (138) were other errors committed by Hughes during the move to Devon that only gave Plath easier access to her anger and her past, and thus a quickly opened door into Otto’s grave (138).
But what of the genetic determinism that Hughes advances in his reading of Plath’s poetry and in the structure of Birthday Letters? A key term, deposited in the poem “Suttee,” is “gruelling prolongueur,” which Hughes uses to describe Plath’s resurrection from her first suicide attempt into the “labour-pangs” of a “child-bride” on the “pyre” of a new myth—a myth of suicidal devotion to Daddy (147–9). Hughes had used “gruelling prolongueur” in the Wodwo poem “The Warriors of the North,” to signify a Viking genetic inheritance of aggressive behavior in the North Country Englishmen that flowed into the Predestination of Calvin. To what extent can we accept this deterministic ghost in the structural machine of Birthday Letters? From her student days at Smith College until her death, Plath was an existentialist, wavering only between the agnostic and atheistic versions. As Sartre persistently argued, deterministic thinking is absolutely inimical to existential freedom, choice and responsibility.
In The Concept of Mind (1949), Gilbert Ryle invented the term “The Ghost in the Machine” (15–6) to characterize the mistaken view, originating with Descartes and seventeenth-century mechanistic thinking, that the mind operates as a shadowy, unwitnessable realm that nevertheless partakes of the mechanistic logic that drives the body. Because “the physical world is a deterministic system, so the mental world must be a deterministic system” (20), and mechanists like Descartes were really reformulating the religious bogey of Predestination in the new scientific language of Galileo (23). Descartes placated his religious scruples by using mental conduct words in ways that suggested that the mind is a quasi-deterministic causal agent of human action. Thus the bodily machine was governed by its deterministically-inclined ghost, the mind. Using logic and linguistic categories, Ryle argues against this determinism throughout The Concept of Mind. He affirms that dozens of mental conduct words used to signify intelligence (“clever,” “sensible” “stupid,” etc.) actually signify many different categories of dispositions, abilities, capacities, and qualities of character that may express themselves in observable behaviors under certain conditions or on certain occasions. We must reason back from observed behavior and recognize the element of freedom of purpose in assessing whether any dispositions or qualities of character have been employed, and this is not the same as attributing a fixed or deterministic cause of all behavior. Knowing “how” is a disposition that cannot be absorbed into knowing “that,” into knowing with causal certainty (45–6).
how or improving in ability” (59). “There are very few machines in nature. The only machines that we find are the machines that human beings make” (82). In Birthday Letters Ted Hughes has created a machine of words, a labyrinth meant to reduce his former wife’s behavior to one deterministic cause, and in so doing deflect attention from his actions as well as reaffirm for one last time in print his male control of her actions.
Through the obsessive emphasis upon the genetic determinism of Otto Plath’s anger and control, Hughes eliminates all other possible causes of Sylvia Plath’s actions in the last years of her life. What Plath learned in writing The Bell Jar was her fixed link to her father, according to Hughes, a link that electroconvulsive shock only temporarily numbed with its emptiness, and in composing the poems of Ariel Plath expressed that one inevitable wish—to merge with her father in a suicidal pyre. But by reasoning with Ryle, however, one could scrutinize Plath’s Journals, “The Magic Mirror,” The Bell Jar, the poems of Ariel, and instances of behavior in Plath’s last years, and locate responses to needs and desires other than a suicidal merging with her father, as well as recognize gains in her craft that reflect improvements in her abilities to comprehend social forces from a woman’s point of view.
On five occasions in Birthday Letters (8, 18–9, 20–2, 25, 136), Hughes informs his readers that he has been rereading Plath’s Journals. In the first three occasions, Hughes is primarily interested in how Plath referenced early encounters with him —when he and Lucas Myers lobbed clods of mud at the wrong dormitory window (J 133), or her anticipation of his panther-like male prowess (131–4); how Plath perceived their first meeting at the infamous St. Botolph’s Review party (112–3), or how she was really on her way to find Richard Sassoon when she fell into Hughes’s arms and first made love with him (134–44). On the fourth occasion, Hughes alludes to her “juggernaut” of ambition that was meant to defeat “The grinding indifferent millstone of circumstance” (132). The last allusion to Plath’s Journals reveals that Hughes has reread a portion from 1961– 62, from writings that were supposedly either lost or burned, and remembered “what furies” she “bled into” that rag rug she labored over in the Devon home.
In “Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems and The Bell Jar” Hughes wrote that “The BellJar is the story, in other words, from behind the Electroconvulsive Therapy. It dramatizes the decisive event of her adult life which was her attempted suicide and accidental survival, and reveals how this attempt to annihilate herself had grown from the decisive event in her childhood, which was the death of her father when she was eight” (WP 468). This may suit Hughes’s deterministic purpose in Birthday Letters, but it does so by denying that the novel catalogued what must have been for Plath the tremendously liberating experience of bringing to the surface a past traumatic event in a way that revealed the social causes of her earlier demise—an American 1950s society organized and administered by males, where roles for women are secondary and where gender equality in the exercise of social and political power is impossible.
The goal of liberation through knowledge, both self-knowledge and knowledge of society—what Ryle would see as non-deterministic improvement by developing one’s abilities (Ryle 59) —is the most pervasive theme in Plath’s work. This is apparent even in “The Magic Mirror,” her undergraduate Honors thesis on the Double in Dostoevsky’s The Double and The Brothers Karamazov. Plath’s central assertion here is that Golyadkin in the former novel commits suicide because he never recognizes that his double is his own creation, a crystalization of his own suppressed ambition. In the latter novel, Ivan has the chance for recovering his “health and integrity” because he is “an artist in his own right” who self-analytically recognizes both his responsibility for his bastard brother’s parricide and the Devil as his own projection of his worst ideas (“Magic Mirror” 43, 57–60). As in Freud, acknowledging the repressed and the traumatic can lead to liberation through self-knowledge. In her Journals Plath also records her jagged progress from late adolescence through early adulthood as a struggle with her own doubts and inner demons, a struggle which is also potentially liberating.
onward toward adulthood and accept responsibility for her own actions. Though Plath consciously presented her father in many early poems as “the buried male muse and god-creator risen to be my mate in Ted,” a remark she entered in her Journals in 1958 (J 222), she does not develop Esther’s relationship with her father in the chapters before or after the graveyard visit in The Bell Jar, a work she completed three years later. No one will gainsay that Otto’s early death was “the decisive event of her childhood,” as Hughes insists, but if The Bell Jar were primarily devoted to exploring her relationship with her father, Plath would certainly have developed it into a major structural motif. In real life her father’s early death did leave her with feelings of abandonment that led to overdependence upon male figures and at times a treatment of males as surrogate father figures, but she was aware of this tendency in herself by 1959 (J 267, 278, 284), and this is NOT the central subject of The Bell Jar. The main character’s (and the reader’s) liberating growth in understanding the limitations placed upon women in a society of male privilege is the central focus of every Bell Jar chapter.
Twice in chapter thirteen of The Bell Jar, Plath presents Esther Greenwood reading books on abnormal psychology shortly before her unsuccessful suicide event. Plath had read Eric Fromm’s Escape From Freedom (J 83–6) and consulted psychiatrists in the summer of 1953, in the weeks before her unsuccessful suicide attempt (LH 130). By 1958 Plath had found in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” a perfectly acceptable reason for her first suicide attempt, and it concerned her mother, not her father. She wrote that Freud’s account is “An almost exact description of my feelings and reasons for suicide: a transferred murderous impulse from my mother onto myself: the “vampire” metaphor Freud uses, “draining the ego”: that is exactly the feeling I have getting in the way of my writing: Mother’s clutch. I mask my self-abasement (a transferred hate of her) and weave it with my own real dissatisfactions in myself.” As Plath recorded this in her Journals (279), she emphasized that this is both a source of depression and “a changeable liability.” How to rectify the situation? Again notice the emphasis upon awareness promoting self-development: “Talking and becoming aware of what is what and studying it is a help” (J 279). Plath was to reuse that Freudian vampire metaphor later, in the Ariel poem “Daddy,” and for a similar liberating purpose.
idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters” (BJ 100, 62). But for a woman to achieve domestic and career equality in 1950s America was next to impossible.
Like Plath, Esther Greenwood is an aspiring poet. Well, what are the possibilities for acquiring that “self-integral freedom” and equal opportunity for career advancement (J 31, 35) in The Bell Jar? Esther goes to New York having won a prestigious guest editorship at Mademoiselle, as did hundreds of American coeds in the fifties. Before long she bursts into tears while being photographed as a guest editor, simply because she is asked what career she desires, and she answers “a poet” (BJ 83). Esther has already learned from Jay Cee, her supervisor, that to be in the literary game is to exhaust oneself in dull days of routine editorial work, punctuated by vapid social events such as fashion shows and advertising or women’s products luncheons, and interrupted by inane meetings where one must stroke successful authors, almost all of whom are males. Being in the literary game means desexing oneself to the point of being an unlovely, driven Jay Cee, with “pug-ugly looks” (5), who fills out schedule cards (25) after spending years learning languages (27). Esther’s tears signify her recognition of the hopelessness of trying to fulfill her career ideals as a poet in this society. Here the only fact that Plath did not add was that most of the powerful senior editors above the Jay Cees in these slick magazines were males., veteran slicks writer and 1942 Smith graduate, was learning this in 1961, the year Plath composed The Bell Jar, as Friedan researched and composed the first text of the feminist movement, The Feminine Mystique (1963; see ch. 2, pp. 54–5). When not on the slow track to dull middle management jobs, the guest editors at Mademoiselle are encouraged to waste their time accumulating free gifts and dressing up as dolls, only to be escorted by mysogynists like Marco, the Peruvian United Nations delegate, who throws Esther into the mud after tearing off the front of her dress (BJ 86– 9).
Instead of the very minor graveyard scene, Hughes should have focused on Esther’s green dirndl skirt and white peasant blouse. When Esther, despondent at the hollowness of her Mademoiselle experience, rejects the New York literary scene that has ended her career dream, she tosses all of her new fashion clothing out the window during her last night in the city, and borrows from her friend Betsy a green dirndl skirt and white peasant blouse. Continuing this defiant attitude after she returns home, Esther wears the same outfit for the next three weeks, sees Dr. Gordon in that outfit a few days before he begins administering the electroconvulsive shock treatments, and wears precisely this outfit on the day of the attempted suicide (BJ 91–2, 104, 108, 137). This clothing motif suggests that balked career advancement in a society of male privilege causes the attempted suicide, not feelings of abandonment from a father who died more than a decade ago.
like Doreen (19). Esther rejects an obvious potential husband in Buddy Willard, for his air of scientific superiority, his disdain of a poem as “a piece of dust,” and most of all, for his male double standard regarding sex (45, 56–9). Esther would like the same sexual freedom (63), but when she decides to allow Constantin, the one non-threatening male she meets, to seduce her, she falls asleep. Constantin wouldn’t work as a husband anyway, reasons Esther, for even such a nice person would expect her to live under the bell jar of gender inequality. Constantin would no doubt want her to spend her day washing dishes and making up beds (68). Marriage could only be Mrs. Willard’s dreary routine: “I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself” (68–69).
Males remain in complete control throughout The Bell Jar. Even the joys of childbirth are not joys in this male-oriented society. When Buddy takes Esther to watch him carve up cadavers, she views a live birth in ways that anticipate Adrienne Rich’s exposure of male hospital practices in Of Woman Born. Immobilized on “an awful torture table with these metal stirrups,” the woman is given drugs to alleviate pain and put her to sleep, so she never experiences the joy of childbirth. For Esther this is “just like the sort of drug a man would invent” (BJ 53). When Esther finally allows the ugly, unguent Irwin, who takes pride in always seeming “to get on with the ladies,” to seduce her, the event causes an excruciatingly painful hemorrhage, evidently the cost for a member of a subordinate gender to become “part of a great tradition” (184–91).
Many scholars, especially Lynda Bundtzen, have observed that composing The BellJar was a liberating experience for Plath, an instructive exercise in how social forces affect individual behavior and judgment. One can readily see why Plath’s portraits of her father in the Ariel poems “Little Fugue” and “Daddy” differ so markedly from her early deifications of Otto. Having taken a more measured view of Otto as an ordinary person in the Bell Jar graveyard scene, Plath by the time of the Ariel poems has grown to an adult knowledge of the gender inequalities within American society and now views her father as symbolic of yet another control-minded male who restricts the development of women.
In 1982, Hughes observed in his essay “Sylvia Plath and Her Journals” that in “Little Fugue” the ghost of her father suddenly reappears, after a two-and-a-half-year absence, for “a daunting, point-blank, demythologized assessment” (WP 187). Hughes sees this as the beginning of Plath’s final tailspin toward identifying with the “deathly woman” at the heart of “Elm,” which he argues develops into a deterministic resignation to the inevitability of suicide. In this essay, composed thirteen years before the “Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems and The Bell Jar” essay, Hughes wrote that “An Appearance” (CPP 189), the poem Plath composed two days after “Little Fugue,” was “the most precise description she ever gave of The Other—the deathly woman at the heart of everything she now closed in on” (WP 187). “An Appearance” concerns Plath’s self-revelation of the super-efficient housewife role—so like her mother and the married women in TheBell Jar—that she could sink into as easily as a stuffed chair. Note that Hughes’s 1982 observation identifies Plath’s central problem as a tug-of-war with her maternal role, with her mother as model. This is far from the obsessive determinism of Otto Plath and German genetics that Hughes develops in Birthday Letters.
One can view “Little Fugue,” composed on 2 April 1962, as the consequence of the more realistic view of the father in The Bell Jar, and as a prelude to the exorcism of the patriarchal imago inside the dutifully trained, once subordinated, but now rebellious 1950s woman persona of “Daddy.” Contrary to the god-like figure in the poems of The Colossus (1960), Plath’s first poetry volume, the father in “Little Fugue” appears as a gruff, grotesque autocrat, with a “yew hedge of orders,/Gothic and barbarous,” and the power to judge and decapitate, as in the memory of him lopping sausages “Red, mottled, like cut necks” (CPP 188). Even in memories that are two decades old, this is scary enough to induce guilt. The persona’s direct, calm reply, however, is that of an adult woman in control of her own life: “I am guilty of nothing.” The distance of time in the cold white clouds that spread their “vacuous sheets” and in the lameness of the persona’s memory becomes a saving buffer that ensures survival at the end of the poem. Hughes is correct: this is a “demythologized assessment,” but one that becomes an occasion for personality growth.
Melancholia,” where a person’s destructive impulse toward a parent may induce sufficient guilt that the impulse recoils upon the self. Like Esther Greenwood with her abnormal psychology textbooks, Plath is trying to understand her past in order to liberate herself from its grip. As Freud argued, hate transferred to the self produces guilt that can “drain the ego” and at the very least leave one in a limbo that forestalls personality growth. So in “Daddy” Plath adapts her Freudian vampire metaphor (J 279) into a liberating exorcism. No longer the victim of the male imago that leads to subordination, Plath will erase from her psyche the negative influence of both the father and the adulterous husband, “The vampire who said he was you/And drank my blood” for over six years of marriage. The final stake in the heart continues the vampire imagery and the exorcism, though the real vampire is the male imago introjected into the female superego as a controlling patriarchal force. As a single parent now, Plath desires the freedom to erase the hold that the past has on her psyche, so she can set new self-development goals. She is still struggling toward that “self-integral freedom” (31) that has been the driving force of all her adult work.
That Hughes moved Plath’s five beekeeping poems from their original position at the conclusion of Ariel to a less important position near the midpoint of the volume has been a sore spot for decades among Plath scholars. Hughes further complicates our understanding of the beekeeping poems in his Birthday Letters poem “The Bee God” (150–2). He writes that the original beekeeping activities he and Plath engaged in during the summer of 1962 were actually a marriage of Plath with her father, and that the stings Hughes received the day he didn’t wear the proper hat were the result of Otto Plath’s “Prussian” plans. Here Hughes ignores the import of Plath’s beekeeping poems. In an important 1982 essay, Susan Van Dyne examined the drafts of the five beekeeping poems and concluded that, as Plath revised, she downplayed her anger at Hughes by condensing the stinging incident and moderating her descriptive language. She did this, Van Dyne observed, because Plath recognized that the major thrust of those beekeeping poems was to reassert her own self-confident authenticity as an artist in control of her emotions and life, whereas the bees who lose their stingers in venting their anger will soon die. The central moment of the entire, five-poem sequence occurs in “Stings,” where Plath asserts “I/Have a self to recover, a queen” (CPP 215). Once again Plath’s theme concerns the realization of that “self-integral freedom” and career equality that she desires in her Journals (J 31, 35), and once again Hughes ignores this theme as he revisits the events.
years after Plath’s suicide. But it is a pity that Hughes could not occasionally celebrate Plath’s desire for a liberating equality of career and personal life in the poems of Birthday Letters. Until Birthday Letters, Hughes shared with Plath that quest theme of a liberating growth through self-knowledge and knowledge of society. He could have offered a more balanced view of his former wife thirty-five years after her death—both for posterity and for the solace of his children, who must continue to live amid the tangled and hopelessly sensationalized Plath biographies. In his “Foreword” to Plath’s Journals, Hughes wrote that he destroyed Plath’s last journal, because he “did not want her children to have to read it” (J xv). But he will let his children read Birthday Letters, the poems of which contain not a single sympathetic portrait of Plath that might console her children.
Hughes follows a straightforward historical sequence in Birthday Letters from his first notice of Fulbright scholars at Cambridge to beyond Plath’s suicide, but even in the final glimpses the determinism grinds on, with poems that note the Plath family features genetically inherited in his children—in Frieda’s nimble fingers (194), so like her mother’s “long, balletic” fingers (15), and in Nick’s eyes and facial features, features that are so like Otto’s that his portrait could be Nick’s (130, 182, 193). Yet the “fixed stars” that Plath referred to in the late poem “Words,” may not be the fixed stars of genetic determinism, but of a woman’s steadfast determination to find equality and “self-integral freedom” until the very end.
Doubtless the few misguided feminists who repeatedly defaced the gravestone where Hughes kept renewing the lettering of his name, and the dozens and dozens of biographers and academic researchers who wanted interviews and copyright permissions during his thirty-five years of silence, wore Hughes down. He says as much in one of the final Birthday Letters poems, disdainfully entitled “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother” (195–6). But since he was rereading Plath materials during the composition of BirthdayLetters, he could have balanced his portrait with other factors that surely must have influenced Plath’s final suicide decision, factors that have become available in the research data that has accumulated over this thirty-five year span. We know that Hughes read Linda Wagner-Martin’s 1987 Plath biography, because he strongly disagreed with the manuscript version. But he could have made a mental note of one important paragraph in chapter seven:
During 1954, Aurelia heard from Otto’s sister that the women in the Plath family had histories of depression. Otto’s mother had been hospitalized at least once; his other sister and a niece also struggled with the problem. But Mrs. Plath never told Sylvia this—nor, so far as is known, did she ever tell her daughter’s psychiatrist. Her tactic with Sylvia was not to discuss her breakdown or anything relating to it. (Wagner-Martin 110).
ill, needed hospital care, and had been taking an antidepressant for several days before the suicide, specifically a “mono-oxidase inhibitor” which could restore enough energy for the patient to carry out a “determined, desperate action” (Stevenson 297).
Ryle would find one of Aurelia Plath’s letters to her son Warren extremely interesting. During her last visit to Devon, unluckily during the tense time when Sylvia first learned of Hughes’s infidelity, Aurelia sought refuge at the home of Plath’s midwife, Winifred Davies. From there she sent a letter to Warren, dated 17 July 1962 (available in the Plath Collection of the Lilly Research Library, Indiana University), stating that her daughter had crowded her day with too many duties, and that this wasn’t the first time Sylvia had overworked herself with a difficult daily schedule (a reference to her first suicide attempt?) Many women and men, especially the highly intelligent, become afflicted with episodes of depression when their life becomes too crowded with cares and duties. This does not augur genetic determinism, but occasional tailspins—tailspins that are very treatable with today’s more sophisticated drugs and therapy.
One recent medical study, conducted over ten years by Canadian psychiatric researchers and published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, concludes that humans who have more than the usual 2A serotonin receptors in their brains are more likely to become depressed. About twenty million Americans suffer from depression, and about one-tenth of one per cent (20,000) commit suicide each year (Du). This genetic trait simply increases the possibility of depression and suicide; the research does not suggest determinism. Ryle would agree that under some conditions, individuals with certain character traits and dispositions may succumb to depression, and a few of these might commit suicide. Individuals with such character traits can help themselves by avoiding situations and behavior that cause these tailspins.
This is just one of many possible accounts of Plath’s suicide that does not entail an obsessive fixation upon merging with one’s dead father in a saga of genetic determinism. But sophisticated medical and marital counseling were unknown in the early 1960s in both America and England. In America last year, amid the media blitz surrounding the Emory University acquisition of Hughes literary materials, Hillel Italie ran a syndicated column for the Associated Press (12 April 1999) in which he quoted from a letter that Hughes sent to Aurelia, years after the suicide, about Plath having been “emotionally exhausted and devastated by those last tranquilizers.” Tranquilizers! Was Hughes unaware of his children’s mother’s medical condition in the weeks before the suicide? Depression is one of the most frequently used words in all of the Plath biographies to describe her occasional episodes of aberrant behavior, but Hughes pays it no heed.
friend Dan Huws concocted a broadsheet satirizing the convoluted style and cool, lofty aesthetic diction of these two Plath poems (see Stevenson 69). But Hughes is blind to the point of Plath’s poem. Caryatids are pillars, supporting columns molded in the forms of draped female figures. In Plath’s short, twelve-line poem with a long title (“Three Caryatids Without a Portico. by Hugo Robus. A Study in Sculptural Dimensions”), the persona observes that these virginal pillars of aristocratic “classic sister” have the strength to perform the public task of holding up a portico. But the Gods do not grant the caryatids “such a trial” of strength. Once again Plath appeals for equal career opportunity for women, but the point never registers in Hughes’s perceptions. In the labyrinth of words that Hughes concocts in Birthday Letters, Plath must always appear as the destructive Minotaur (130), offspring of “King Minos,/Alias Otto” (133), enflamed in uncontrollable passions, ravenous for more victims. Only childbirth gives her momentary respite. Hughes never considers Aurelia’s unequivocal statement, in her “Introduction” to Letters Home, that Otto Plath, a well-liked university professor of entomology and Middle High German at Boston University, was “a confirmed pacifist,” who would “never bear arms” or “take another’s life” (LH 9, 31).
Appearing early in Birthday Letters, the poem “Your Paris” suggests an irreparable opposition of culturally inherited perceptions, with Hughes’s formed in the crucible of World War II. Here Hughes coaxes the reader into accepting the major premise of Birthday Letters—that Hughes was a “post-war utility survivor” whose “perspectives were veiled by what rose/Like methane from the reopened/Mass grave of Verdun.” And Plath’s perspectives were already split into a surface glitter of Impressionism and Modern Art from her American education that covered “the underground,” a “chamber where (she) still hung waiting/For (her) torturer,” Thanatos-Otto, “To remember his amusement” (36–7). From then on most of the poems follow an unvarying structural formula: discrete instances of Plath’s behavior followed by the same deterministic judgment, the same foreshadowed glimpse into the crypt: “You had to lift/The coffin lid an inch” (118). Meanwhile, Hughes’s perceptions do not vary. Near the end of Birthday Letters the war imagery concludes in “A Picture of Otto,” where Hughes expects to meet the “Lutheran/Minister manqué” in the underworld beyond the grave, in the “dark adit,” as in Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” where Owen meets the man he killed yesterday in battle in the “profound dull tunnel” of Hell (Owen 148–9). Here, as Hughes suggests, Owen sleeps “with his German as if alone” (193).
scrambled into a one-semester teaching appointment at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, just ten miles away. And when Plath realized that college teaching exhausted her creative energies, they spent a year in Boston with their salary savings and met William and Dido Merwin, who convinced them that they could possibly avoid the college teaching track forever by working for the BBC in London (Stevenson 322–4). Throughout this period, Hughes definitely followed Plath’s ideal of career equality.
After their return to England in December of 1959, and throughout the first year-and-a-half of their daughter Frieda’s life (born 1 April 1960), Hughes followed a regimen that was the most sacrosanct in the household: he watched little Frieda in their cramped, three-room apartment from 8 a. m. until noon, to free Plath for her creative writing. Plath fed Frieda lunch and Hughes composed in the afternoon. Six months after the move back to England, Plath noticed a roomy corner town house or row house for sale nearby, at 41 Fitzroy Road, just a few doors from 23 Fitzroy Road, where she eventually would end her life two-and-a-half years later (LH 387). Living at 41 Fitzroy Road would have allowed Plath to have two things she desperately needed to maintain her career equality: London’s assurance of cultured intellectual women to converse with, and reliable child care to ensure that sacrosanct creative writing time. But Hughes demurred, probably rightly so, for their finances were nowhere near the purchase price. But during the next year, Hughes was thoroughly “taken up” by the BBC, his career and the family finances assured. Had they remained in London, there is at least a chance that their marriage could have survived, and a stronger chance that Plath may not have attempted suicide again, even had the marriage not survived.
Words to “Patch the Havoc:” The Imagination
of Ted Hughes in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Gayle Wurst
As editor of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, Ted Hughes chose 1956, the year of his marriage to Plath, as the first “logical division” in her poetry, using it as a line of demarcation to separate her juvenilia from the beginning of her mature work. “Early 1956,” when Plath had just turned twenty-four, “presents itself as a watershed,” Hughes tells us, “because from later this year came the earliest poems of her first collection, TheColossus. And from this time I worked closely with her and watched her poems being written” (Introduction, J 16).
The eye of Ted Hughes is indeed ever present in Plath’s early poetry, just as his vision of her development was later determinant in the over-all organization, interpretation, and publication of her largely posthumous work. The meaning of this poetic regard for Plath herself is inseparable from her joyous “big Hero Worship” of Hughes, whom she famously portrays as destined for the pantheon she self-consciously worshipped as “gods” in the likes of Eliot, Auden and Yeats (LH 108). Even before Plath identifies Hughes by name, the entry in her Journal written the morning after “that fatal party where [she] met Ted” announces him with gusto as “the only one there huge enough for me.” He is “that big, dark, hunky boy. The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge with hulk and dynamic chunks of words” (J 211–2). Writing to her mother, Plath was more ecstatic yet: “I met the strongest man in the world, ex-Cambridge, brilliant poet whose work I loved before I met him, a large, hulking, healthy Adam, half French, half Irish, with a voice like the thunder of God—a singer, storyteller, lion and world-wanderer, a vagabond who will never stop” (LH 233).
Just as Ted was writing “virile, deep banging poems,” he would “work with [her] to make [her] a woman poet like the world will gape at” (LH 248): “Ted says he never read poems by a woman like mine working, sweating, heaving poems born out of the way words should be said” (244). And, while Plath was very proud of having been “clairvoyant” enough to foresee Hughes’s rise to fame as one of Britain’s most promising young poets (329), in 1958 she accurately predicted his future as Poet Laureate in a parenthetical afterthought to a sudden surge of assurance about herself: “Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be the Poetess of America (just as Ted will be the Poet of England and her Dominions)” (J 360).
As Plath’s descriptions of Hughes’s “virile, deep banging” poems, and the birth-throes of her own “heaving” work vividly illustrate, her fantasies of mutual poetic potency and creation are keyed to a sexual metaphor based on the erotic attraction of male poet and female muse. Given the strength of this metaphor in her letters and journals, it is not surprising that immediately after Plath met Hughes in February 1956, a composite male figure, poet/lover/muse, begins to inhabit her poetry. The first of these poems, chronologically speaking, is “Pursuit” (CPP 22, 23), a piece about sexual attraction and flight, written on February 27, 1956, only two days after the poets” tempestuous first encounter. “Wrote a full-page poem about the dark forces of lust: “Pursuit”, Plath recorded in her Journal. “It is not bad. It is dedicated to Ted Hughes’s (J 214). As Hughes recalls it in “St. Botolph’s” (BL 15), he himself was the pursued in an incident “that was to brand [his] face” with a “swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks.” Plath’s poem, however, foregoes the depiction of physical contact to prominently feature the dangerous, hypnotic gaze of the poet/lover: “There is a panther stalks me down:/ One day I’ll have my death of him,” she begins. “What lull, what cool can lap me in/ When burns and brands that yellow gaze? ”
This poetic jeu de regard reaches its climax in “Ode for Ted” (CPP 29–30), another of the earliest pieces from 1956, and the sole poem Plath ever wrote to bear her husband’s name. Here, the male poet’s very look makes the universe bear fruit, conflating the image of the poet-as-Adam with that of a pagan nature deity. In the poem’s most interesting turn, “Ode for Ted” takes the trope of the fruitful male gaze to its furthest extent only to end in a curiously distant, apparently rhetorical, yet self-reflexive question: “how but most glad/could be this adam’s woman,” Plath asks, “when all earth his words do summon/leaps to laud such man’s blood!”
How but most glad, indeed? Much of Plath’s poetry from 1956 through 1958 and, it could be argued, for the rest of her career, will attempt to work out the answer to this question. Plath purposely fashions Hughes into the primal namer of all things, leaping to “laud such man’s blood” the better to imagine herself as “adam’s woman.” Likewise, she proudly took up the mantle of muse and ceaselessly worked as his amanuensis, typing his poetry and submitting his manuscripts for contests and publications, the better to nourish her imagination of Hughes as a powerful creator, and turn this image into a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I am so glad Ted is first,” she declared when Hawk in the Rain “won the Harper’s first publication contest.” Hughes entered this competition at the insistence of Plath, who both scouted out possible venues for his work and saw to the typing of his manuscript: “All my pat theories against marrying a writer dissolve with Ted,” she reflected in her Journal: “his rejections more than double my sorrow and his acceptances rejoice me more than mine—it is as if he is the perfect male counterpart to my own self: each of us giving the other an extension of the life we believe in living. It sounds so paragon. But I honestly believe we are.” (J 271).
Yet when “this adam’s woman” turned to writing poetry herself, her fantasy of fruitful poetic union ironically backfired. Plath’s poems tell a very different picture than the rosy idealization she painted in her letters home, and even in her journal. Rather than providing an enabling myth which permitted her to see herself as poet-god and co-creator, Plath’s deification of her husband played into, and quickly exacerbated, her lifelong dread of her own poetic sterility, once he began “work[ing] closely with her” and “watch[ing] the poems being written.” As Steven Gould Axelrod has succinctly worded the problem, Hughes became the model for a “male force which engendered (Plath’s) creativity even as he annulled it” (30). This is the view which Hughes, too, has followed in Birthday Letters, portraying himself as both “puppet” and unwitting “male lead in [her] drama” (BL 7), the victim of a “Greek necessity” (CPP 272) stronger and bigger than them both, which gradually, but relentlessly, conflated his image with Daddy.
ever encountered him. Significantly, perhaps tragically, Plath most acutely expresses her self-doubt in the juvenilia in the single poem that dares to confront her interiorization of the “spinster” woman writer. The encounter with this stereotype occurs in an undated poem she ironically entitles “Female Author” (CPP 301), as if the term were an oxymoron. Plath portrays her “prim, pink-breasted, feminine” poetess as the very image of de-natured sterility: “nurs[ing]/ Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms,” she “lies on cushions curled,” “lost in subtle metaphor” in isolated “retreat” from all that is vital in the world. Furthermore, Plath’s use of intertextuality in this poem deftly calls on Blake’s “London,” Eliot’s “Wasteland” and even Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to make her scornful point. All come barreling down on her unfortunate female author, only to prove that her frivolous musings are not worth the paper they are written on—and to distance Plath herself from scribblers of this genre.1
Given Plath’s early tendency to extol the vitality of the male gaze at the expense of the woman writer, it is perhaps to Hughes’s credit that as editor of the Collected Poems he foregoes chronology to introduce the body of Plath’s “mature” work with “Conversation Among the Ruins” (CPP 21). This sonnet, named after a painting by Georgio De Chirico, actually postdates “Pursuit” and other pieces from 1956 in which the role of the male poet/lover is less ambiguously praised. Poem and painting both feature two figures: a standing man dressed in modern clothing, and a seated woman, wearing a white tunic. In the painting, the woman is at a table, her back turned to the viewer, while the man stands to her left, looking down on her with dark eyes. Above his head, and turned in the same direction, is the bust of a Greek statue, perhaps Apollo. The landscape around them, barren of life, is glimpsed between a column to the left, and two half open doors which swing inward toward the female figure from a broken wall to the right.2
“Conversation Among the Ruins” differs from many other poems Plath wrote in 1956 in that she here already is takes stock of her own mythologizing, and especially of its effect on herself as a poet-god. One of the most striking things about the poem is its portrait of the male figure as an intruder responsible for a wasted landscape. The male poet-figure, described as “heroic” in spite of his “wild furies,” is both active principle and agent of destruction. He “stalks,” “disturbs,” and “rends” the structures of an elaborately composed, classical landscape, turning it into an “appalling ruin.” A modern figure, too, dressed “in coat and tie,” he stands in domination over the “bankrupt estate,” where “fractured pillars frame prospects of rock.” By contrast, the female figure, still
1. A fuller analysis of this poem focusing on Plath’s use of intertextuality is found in my
Voice andVision: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath.
tied to the past and robed in classical tradition, remains subordinate and unmoving: “I sit /Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot,/Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic.” Like “Ode for Ted,” this sonnet also ends with a crucial question that will reverberate throughout Plath’s entire work: “What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?”
This question is all the more important in that “Conversation Among the Ruins,” which serves as a portal to the Collected Poems, is manifestly reflexive in nature. Plath’s blighted landscape, once decorous and “elegant,” now “blighted,” not only foreshadows future developments in her poetry; it turns back to allegorically evoke the highly artiflcial world of her juvenilia—a world of balanced symmetries, archetypal figures, and carefully structured villanelles and sonnets. Destruction, usually imminent rather than actualized, constantly menaced Plath’s “elaborately structured and staidly traditional” poems of this period (Broe 6), and she constructed her world all the more tightly to keep her doubts about herself as creator at bay: “The asteroids turn traitor in the air,/The planets plot with old elliptical cunning; clocks cry, stillness is a lie, my dear,” she warned herself in the early villanelle, “To Eva Descending the Stair” (CPP 303).
In Birthday Letters, Hughes represents his initial response to this poetry, noting how he and his friends “concocted/An attack, a dismemberment, laughing,” when Plath “published [a] poem/About Caryatids” in Cambridge. In yet another poem about the incident, he writes, “It was the only poem you ever wrote/That I disliked through the eyes of a stranger./It seemed thin and brittle, the lines cold” (BL 4, 5). Once Hughes’s eyes were no longer those “of a stranger,” he continued to dislike much of the work Plath was producing; he thus set about criticizing her poems and assigning her subjects for new ones. While Plath learned much under his tutelage, internal evidence from her Journals and the poems she wrote during their early marriage shows that she also began to focus the persistent, yet heretofore vaguely identified, menace that had always threatened to blow her “rich order of walls” apart. From mid-1956 on, Plath gave danger a habitation and a name in the “bleak light of his stormy eye.”
fierce as rooks” “hulk[s]” across the Queen’s “dainty acres,” causing her to “sing us thus: “How sad, alas, it is/To see my people shrunk so small, so small.”
It is crucial to note that the gaze of the male poet is never lovingly directed at the muse in Plath’s poetry, nor is there ever a mutually gratifying exchange of regards between a male and female figure. Typically, Plath’s speakers and narrators are removed from the arena of action: their role is to witness from the margins while the poet figure at the center of the poem causes the universe to blossom or blow apart wherever he directs his gaze. Notably for the development of her later voice, Plath also begins to distance herself from this dilemma in “Conversation Among the Ruins,” ironizing the “black look” and devastating commentary of the poet/lover in her description of the birds emblematic of Hughes: “rooks croak above the appalling ruin (my emphasis). The male figure’s mythified “black look,” however, still remains the center of concern in the poem and her work as a whole. Turning to his eyes in the hope of finding herself reflected as poet, Plath instead discovers a muse in her “psyche-knot,” “composed” but no composer.
Although Plath’s Journals joyously claimed her “buried male muse and god-creator” had “risen to be (her) mate in Ted” (J 381), her poem, “Full Fathom Five,” written in The Colossus period, tells another story. Here, the image of the bountiful young poet/ god gives way to a more ominous male figure—a Titian who “surface[s]” suddenly as an “old man” in the “unimaginable,” yet haunting guise of the drowned father: “foam-/ Capped: white hair, white beard, far—flung,/ A dragnet, rising as the waves/Crest and trough.” Writing to herself about this poem in her Journal, Plath exclaims, “O, only left to myself, what a poet I will flay myself into!” (381). Meanwhile, the speaker, confined to the margins of the poem and her role as witness to male power, walks “dry” on the border of a troubling “kingdom/exiled to no good” (CPP 92).
In “Apprehensions” (BL 140), Hughes has written very affectingly both about Plath’s terror of sterility, the “fear” that “hid in [her] Schaeffer pen,” and what it was like to be the focal point of her efforts to write herself out of it. Doing so, he pays considerable, and painful homage to the power of Plath’s own poetic regard, overturning the convention that so plagued Plath herself. This reversal is exemplified in Hughes’s “Black Coat” (BL 102–03), a poem that responds to “Full Fathom Five,” and even more directly to Plath’s “Man in Black” (CPP 119– 20). Plath wrote this piece in March 1959 on a what she blithely calls “one of my fruitful visits to Winthrop” (J 477); after visiting her father’s grave, she “walked over rocks along the oceanside” where she observed “Ted out at the end of the bar, in black coat, defining the distance of stones and stones humped out of the sea” (J 473).
“black overcoat” many years later, Hughes recalled the incident quite differently. The speaker of “Man in Black” is literally out of the picture. For Plath, this distance permits her to make a stake on safer ground, but it also signals her position of exile in relation to Hughes’s enviable (and increasingly ominous) centrality; for Hughes, this centrality is not only unwanted, it transforms him into a prey in a telescopic rifle lens. For Hughes and Plath both, the male figure in the black coat, seen from “so far off/half a mile, maybe,” “rivets” the universe together as the first clear precursor to “Daddy” (BL 103; CPP 120).
During the later phase of Plath’s poetry, she famously rid herself of Ted’s “shadow,” as she put it in 1962 (LH 479)—a shadow largely formed and formed in large by her former projections of his prowess. Although critics have tended to neglect or misinterpret them, numerous poems Plath wrote between February 1956 and March 1958 shed much light on this change in her work, and form an intermediate stage in her effort to shed “dead hands, dead stringencies,” as she so famously put it in “Ariel” (CPP 239–40). Poems like “Strumpet Song,” “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” “On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad,” “On the Plethora of Dryads,” “The Lady and the Earthenware Head,” “Ouija,” “On the Decline of Oracles,” “Virgin in a Tree,” “Perseus,” and “The Disquieting Muses” shift the male poet from center stage to concentrate on the figure of the female muse, all the while foregrounding the absence of inspiration.3 Taken together, these poems show Plath coming to consciousness of her specificity as a woman poet by reflecting on the conditions of representation, and articulating her reactions to the portrayal of female figures in western art.
Plath’s use of the myth of Daphne and Apollo, common to several of these poems, succinctly illustrates the shift in her paradigm. According to Annis Pratt’s groundbreaking study, this myth forms one of the major archetypal patterns in fiction authored by women. For Pratt, the story of Apollo and Daphne originates as the “account” of a cultural “invasion,” the “story of the rape of (a) local female divinity by a “patriarchally structured culture, the Achaeans,” whom Apollo represents. Pratt points out that “Daphne means laurel and laurel leaves were chewed by pre-Achaean priestesses to induce oracular powers:” the myth thus recounts how “Apollo conquers a territory by raping its goddess, assimilating her magic, and setting himself up in her place.” Or rather, how he attempts to conquer the goddess. For unlike his usurpation of the oracular powers of Gaea at Delphi, Apollo is unable to conquer Daphne the nature nymph. To return to Pratt once more: “Daphne wishes to protect her body and her sacred places from forced entry and thus turns herself into a tree. Because of her natural magic, she remains forever unravished, Apollo forever in the process of ravishing” (4).
victor in spite of Daphne’s successful escape. His is the image of the conquering poet, cultural guardian and producer of language in the perpetual act of desire; while Daphne, the perpetually pursued object of his attentions, is reabsorbed into nature, a state tantamount to silence and unconsciousness. Elements of this myth were particularly well suited to Plath’s imagination of Hughes, whose head she so willingly envisioned crowned with laurels. More problematical, the ironic nature of Daphne’s victory presented Plath with the conundrum of her own role as muse, as she tried to tap the tradition for a conscious female subject, only to discover that traditional poetic conventions proved an obstacle to her course. “Why do I freeze in fear my mind & writing: say, look, no head, what can you expect of a girl with no head? “she queried herself in her Journals (437).
One of the earliest of Plath’s Daphne poems, “On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad” (CPP 65–6) ironically foregrounds “the vaunting mind” of a female poet which “wrestles to impose/its own order” on recalcitrant nature and myth.4 “However I wrench obstinate bark and trunk/To my sweet will, no luminous shape/Steps out radiant in limb, eye, lip.” Plath declares, foregrounding the “difficulty” the title of her poem announces. In stanza five, the speaker comes to the root of the problem, acknowledging her jealousy of male poets: her vision is “cold,” she says, addressing a “doctor “and adopting the medieval medical vocabulary that equated the lack of female imaginative powers to a cold, wet humor.5 The final stanza compares her feminine “fancy” to the powerful fecundity of the masculine imagination, which, ironically, she can envision all too well. Unable to conjure up a dryad, the speaker “spurns such fictions as nymphs,” but her envious description of the male poet’s fertility makes her statement seem like sour grapes. Left with a strong sense of inadequacy, she ends with a sad self-diagnosis: her “Beggared brain/Hatches no fortune,/But from leaf, from grass,/ Thieves what it has.” The diminished female author steals what little she can, and Plath herself plays the thief in this poem. As Margaret (Dickie) Uroff has noted, the language throughout is a “strange concoction of Hughes and Wallace Stevens.” In an embedded reference, the “star-lucky slight of hand man” can even be seen as “Hughes described in Stevens’ words” (78, 80). Yet Hughes is far more than the envied referent: Plath makes Hughes’s success as a poet represent the dynamics of an entire poetic tradition, then uses her art to study the way her relationship to “her poetic fathers undermines her sense of competence” (Axelrod 35).
This transformation is all the more striking in that Plath grafts into the poem a key citation from Yeats, whom she associates with Hughes in her Journals.6 Notably, she takes a phrase from Yeats’ “A Prayer for my Daughter,” which
also draws on the Daphne myth to express the wish that his daughter Anne “become like a flourishing hidden tree:” “Oh may she live like some green laurel/Rooted in one dear place,” Yeats writes. For Yeats, his daughter’s soul is cognizant that “its own sweet will is heaven’s will:” for Plath, however, such company only assures her of the insufficiencies of her own “sweet will” as poet. 7 “That damn scrupulous tree won’t practice wiles/To beguile sight,” her persona states, mockingly reporting her symptoms of sterility to the “doctor” she consults. “However I wrench obstinate bark and trunk/To my sweet will, no luminous shape/Steps out radiant in limb, eye, lip.” As a result, the female poet cannot “concoct a Daphne.” She says: “My tree stays tree.”
The rare feminist critics who have addressed these early poems seem to find their avowal of failure an embarrassment. Jacqueline Rose, for example, hesitates between two opposing scenarios in the attempt to explain their “very awkwardness.” Plath here is either “symptomatic of the way women internalize patriarchy, take into themselves and embody some of patriarchy’s most sexual images and tropes” or, conversely, she “expos[es] or foreground[s] the denigrated femininity on which the more inspired vision of women (and poetry) so often relies” (115). Seen within the evolution of the poetic regard in Plath’s work, however, the interest and value of her dryad poems surely lie in the way she is consciously struggling to conceptualize the problem of representation from a woman’s point of view, using specifically gendered terms for what well may be the first time in contemporary poetry.
In a sense, these poems are very private. They show Plath in the process of articulating the problem and formulating it for herself: and although she attempts to move from the first to the second position Rose delineates, from “internalizing” to “exposing,” she does not entirely succeed in her aims. Rose asserts that Plath “writes herself into the place of the man” who is “lured, failed, or deceived” or, conversely, as in “On the Plethora of Dryads,” is distracted by nymphs “who surfeit the senses” (114, 115). Yet Plath’s early work represents the erotic attraction between male poet and female muse as always fully consummated. The male poet is such a stud he has only to look, to make “the opulent air go studded with seed.” Only from the female point of view does the erotic spark refuse to ignite, and the model fail for lack of inspiration.
4. Hargrove dates “On the Plethora of Dryads” October 26, 1956 (48), and my analysis supports her conjecture that “On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad,” which is obviously a companion poem, was also composed in the fall of that year.
5. For an excellent examination of the medical, philosophical, psychoanalytical and literary discourse on the female imagination in the theory of humors, see: Christine Battersby, Gender andGenius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. Pages 31–33 and 83–87 are particularly to the point for Plath’s poem.
In 1958, Plath attacked the model of Daphne with redoubled vigor in “Virgin in a Tree” (CPP 81–2), a poem modeled on an etching by Paul Klee entitled “Jung Frau in Baum.” This depicts a naked, sour-looking, knarled female figure horizontally reclining in an awkward posture that conforms to the boughs of a dwarfed and blighted tree. Propped on one elbow, the figure looks the viewer straight in the eye.
Paradoxically, Plath now can see the dryad, or “virgin in a tree” all too well; the trouble is, she can’t see how to get her out. Plath dismantles this “tart fable,” enlisting irony and bawdy puns throughout her poem in an effort to diminish the virgin’s “untongued” torture. She also foregrounds her own poetic regard, and even sets it off in a frame, engraving Klee’s etching on her mind as a warning: “As you etch on the inner window of your eye/This virgin on her rack.” “Barren sirs” and “ugly spinsters” feed their imagination on the dryad’s “ache and wake,” but the regard of the virile male poet is absent from the list of the guilty; still fertile in Plath’s imagination, his gaze has nothing to do with the “lemon-tasting droop” of the dryad’s “lips.” As a result, Plaths poem ends in a characteristic avowal of failure: “Tree twist will ape this gross anatomy/ Till irony’s bough break.”
“Virgin in a Tree” was the first in a series of poems Plath wrote in a week which left her “stunned” by her own capabilities: “I had about seven or eight paintings and etchings I wanted to write on as poem-subjects, and bang! After the first one, “Virgin in a Tree,” after an early etching by Paul Klee, I ripped into another,” she writes excitedly in LettersHome. “These are easily the best poems I have written and open up new material and a new voice” (336). Her Journal entry of March 28 seconds this excitement, equating the week to the first break-though in her writing since her suicide attempt in the Spring of 1953: “I wrote eight poems in the last eight days,” Plath records, “poems breaking open my real experience of life in the last five years: life which has been shut-up, untouchable, in a rococo crystal cage, not to be touched. I feel these are the best poems I’ve ever done” (J 356). These are the poems that caused Plath to exclaim she had written lines which “qualify [her] to be the Poetess of America,” as cited above (360).
Part of Plath’s elation derives from her new concentration on her dilemma from the specific point of view of a woman poet: as “Virgin in a Tree” illustrates, once she begins to analyze her own response to the representation of the feminine, the male figure modeled on Hughes drops out. Yet the fact that his
Plath goes so far as to envision her marriage to Hughes as “a team better than Mr. and Mrs. Yeats” (LH 280).
7. For further analysis of Plath’s use of Yeats, see: Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, “A Father’s Prayer, A Daughter’s Anger: W.B.Yeats and Sylvia Plath,” Daughters and Fathers,
