Sylvia Plaths Lesbos & Child Analysis

Lesbos
Title: The most immediate association is of course a romantic relationship between
two women, though it also could be a reference to a Greek island that often crops up
as a resting place in Greek mythology (Orpheus was buried there) and that has in
more recent times become a vacation spot for tourists.
Paraphrase: Lesbos deals with the difficulties involved with adjusting to the
drudgery of domestic life and the lack of solutions for a mother who has been driven
to the edge by her responsibilities. Through a monologue directed at another
woman in a similar situation the narrator (in this case the details match up well
enough that the narrator can be assumed to be an isolated part of Sylvias own
emotions on the matter) explores the helplessness of being held captive by the same
oblivious creatures her life revolves around and having no way out.
Connotation: The potatoes hiss. It is all Hollywood, windowless. fluorescent light
coy paper I, love, am a pathological liar, and my child why she is schizophrenic
- Through these overly dramatized words Sylvia puts her life in the context of a
terrible game, someones overblown Hollywood movie thats fake and too bright and
more than she can handle being a part of.
they crap and puke and cry sick cats acid baths blood-loving bats you who
have blown your tubes like a radio doped and thick from my last sleeping
pill There are constant allusions to animals and basic animal-type
functions. Medical terminology like the sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you TB
as a contrast to the hollywood start, the once you were beautiful.
Her focus is on the most basic, least controllable function of her subjects of which
she herself is one. In this poem we are to her all sick, twisted animals.
Attitude: She sets the poem up as if it is written to a female lover who she considers
running away with (I should have an affair. We should meet in another life, we
should meet in air, me and you.) but this cuts a stark contrast to her general attitude
towards the object of her address that tends to be caustic and cruel. The tone she
uses towards her husband and kids is if anything even more bitter and dismissive:
the impotent husband slumps out for a coffee. I try to keep him in, an old pole for
the lightning the baby smiles, fat snail, but it is as if she is fighting with herself over
this attitude, even as both speaker and subject express a similar revulsion for the
situation (You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell! You say I should drown
my girl.) it seems the reason she is fighting with her lover she would run away with
is her (the lovers) urging to do away with these burdens.
Shifts: The first couple sections are more or less universally derisive and cruel
except for the one bit about meeting together in air, but as she begins to delve even
deeper into the hate she feels towards her husband and her life now it becomes
obvious that the strength of her negativity is somehow a symptom of her love. She
writes O vase of acid, it is love you are full of. You know who you hate, He is
hugging his ball and chain down by the gate every day you fill him with soul-stuff,
like a pitcher. You are so exhausted. Her feelings toward her husband are more

than just revulsion then, but she feels that for everything she puts into that
relationship the pain of it only grows deeper; much like her kids she seems to view
her spouse as an insatiable parasite - a viewpoint that makes a particular sense in
the context of Sylvia Plaths own marriage to Ted Hughes where his infidelity caused
them to separate and left her to look after the children on her own (its a lot more
complicated than that and there was no formal breaking off but it seems likely that
this while this poem was written she had to bear the burden of the children alone).
Title: Which brings me to the last bit of information from her personal life which is to
all appearances the title Lesbos refers to an imagined romantic relationship
between Sylvia and the woman her husband was having an affair with - Assia
Wevill. The business of connecting the individual details of the poem to Assias life
and Sylvias actual relationship with her is probably left best to others since there
isnt much space here but insofar as it relates to the meaning of the poem Assias
background in advertising seems to connect well with the narrators comments about
Hollywood and the complex mix of bitter sympathy for a shared domestic plight and
outright anger towards the lover in the poem ( sad hag. Every womans a whore. I
cant communicate.) makes sense in the context of Sylvias feelings towards her
husbands mistress.
Theme: I dont think theres a theme here so much as an overwhelming current of
bitterness and love turned to unbearable pressure in a mind that can spin people
and their lives into a network that makes sense without actually opening itself up to
any outside perspective. Lesbos is a letter or a one-way missive of some other
sort - it is definitely not a conversation. The narrator frames the life of her subject in
terms of her own and discounts any differences as delusions or superstitions (even
in your Zen heaven we shant meet). What Sylvia Plath has done here is preserved
the closed off nature of a life that is probably not nearly as uniquely self-destructive
and self-pitying as skeptical readers tend to assume. Even had she been willing to
attempt understanding and communication with the instigators of her torment the
distances between their private hells arent something easily breached. I cant
communicate being something of a universal mantra in this case, a condition of
loneliness and private pain often exacerbated by cultural norms like those that made
it the narrators duty to care for her children alone but by no means unique to
situations with those outside pressures.