The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poems of Sylvia Plath

Critic: Joyce Carol Oates Source: The Southern Review, Vol. IX, No. 3, Summer, 1973, pp. 50122. Reproduced by permission Criticism about: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), also known as: Victoria Lucas, Mrs. Ted Hughes Nationality: American

Tragedy is not a woman, however gifted, dragging her shadow around in a circle or analyzing with dazzling scrupulosity the stale, boring inertia of the circle; tragedy is cultural, mysteriously enlarging the individual so that what he has experienced is both what we have experienced and what we need not experience because of his, or her, private agony. It is proper to say that Sylvia Plath represents for us a tragic figure involved in a tragic action, and that her tragedy is offered to us as a near-perfect work of art in her books.... [The] cult of Sylvia Plath insists that she is a saintly martyr, but of course she is something less dramatic than that, though more valuable. The I of the poems is an artful construction, a tragic figure whose tragedy is classical, the result of a limited vision that believed itself the mirror held up to nature as in the poem Mirror, the eye of a little god that imagines itself without preconceptions, unmisted by love or dislike. This is the audacious hubris of tragedy, the inevitable reality-challenging statement of the participant in a dramatic action which he does not know is tragic. He dies, and only we can see the purpose of his death to illustrate the error of a personality that believed itself godlike. (pp. 501 02) [The] creatures of Heavy Women ... smile to themselves above their weighty stomachs and meditate devoutly as the Dutch bulb, absolutely mute, among the archetypes. Between the archetypes of jealous, ruthless power represented by the Father/Son of religious and social tradition, and the archetype of moronic fleshly beauty represented by these smug mothers, there is a very small space for the creative intellect, for the employment and expansion of a consciousness that tries to transcend such limits. Before we reject Sylvia Plath's definition of the artistic self as unreasonably passive, even as infantile, we should inquire why so intelligent a woman should assume these limitations, why she should not declare war against the holders of power and of the mysteries of the flesh why her poetry approaches but never crosses over the threshold of an active, healthy attack upon obvious evils and injustices. The solitary ego in its prison cell is there by its own desire, its own admission of guilt in the face of even the most crazily ignorant of accusors. (p. 504) Sylvia Plath did not like other people; like many who are persecuted, she identified in a perverse way with her own persecutors and not with those who, along with her, were victims. But she did not like other people because she did not essentially believe that they existed; she knew intellectually that they existed, of course, since they had the power to injure her, but she did not believe they existed in the way she did, as pulsating, breathing, suffering individuals. Even her own children were objects of her perception, there for the restless scrutiny of her image-making mind and not there as human beings with a potentiality that would someday take them beyond their immediate dependency upon her, which she sometimes enjoyed and sometimes dreaded. The moral assumptions behind Sylvia Plath's poetry condemned her to death, just as she, in creating this body of poems, condemned it to death. But her moral predicament is not so pathological as one might think, if conformity to an essentially sick society is taken to be as many traditional moralists and psychologists take it a sign of normality. Miss Plath speaks very clearly a language we can understand. She is saying what men have been saying for many centuries, though they have not been so frank as she and, being less sensitive as well, they have not sickened upon their own hatred for humanity they have thrived upon it, in fact, sublimating it into wondrous achievements of material and mechanical splendor. Let us assume that Sylvia Plath acted out in her poetry and in her private life the deathliness of an old consciousness, the old corrupting hell of the Renaissance ideal and its I -ness separate and distinct from all other fields of

consciousness, which exist only to be conquered or to inflict pain upon the I. Where at one point in civilization this very masculine, combative ideal of an I set against all other I's and against nature as well was necessary in order to wrench man from the hermetic contemplation of a God-centered universe and get him into action, it is no longer necessary; its health has become a pathology and whoever clings to its outmoded concepts will die. If Romanticism and its gradually accelerating hysteria is taken as the ultimate end of a once-vital Renaissance ideal of subject/object antagonism, then Miss Plath must be diagnosed as one of the last Romantics; and already her poetry seems to us a poetry of the past, swiftly receding into history. The I that is declared an enemy of all others cannot identify with anyone or anything, since even nature or especially nature is antagonistic to it. Man is spirit/body, but as in the poem Last Things, Sylvia Plath states her distrust of the spirit which escapes like steam/In dreams, through the mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can't stop it. Spirit is also intellect, but the intellect exists uneasily inside a prison-house of the flesh, a small, desperate calculating process (like the Ego in Freud's psychology) that achieves only spasmodic powers of identity in the constant struggle between the Id and the Superego or between the bestial world of fleshly female archetypes and hypocritical, deathly male authorities. This intellect does not belong naturally in the universe and feels guilt and apprehension at all times. It does not belong in nature; nature is outside man, superior in brute power to man though admittedly inferior in the possibilities of imagination. When this intellect attempts its own kind of creation, it cannot be judged as transcendent to the biological processes of change and decay but as somehow conditioned by these processes and, of course, found inferior. Why else would Miss Plath call a poem about her own poetry Stillborn and lament the deadness of her poems, forcing them to compete with low but living creatures? They are not pigs, they are not even fish.... It is one of the truly pathological habits of this old consciousness that it puts all things into immediate competition: erecting Aristotelian categories of X and non-X, assuming that the distinction between two totally unconnected phases of life demands a kind of war, a superior/inferior grading. (pp. 504 06) The poems of hatred seem to us very contemporary, in their jagged rhythms and surreal yoking together of images, and in their defiant expression of a rejection of love, of motherhood, of men, of the Good, the True, the Beautiful.... If life really is a struggle for survival, even in a relatively advanced civilization, then very few individuals will win; most will lose (and nearly all women are fated to lose); something is rotten in the very fabric of the universe. All this appears to be contemporary, but Sylvia Plath's poems are in fact the clearest, most precise (because most private) expression of an old moral predicament that has become unbearable now in the mid-twentieth century. (p. 509) The passive, paralyzed, continually surfacing and fading consciousness of Sylvia Plath in her poems is disturbing to us because it seems to summon forth, to articulate with deadly accuracy, the regressive fantasies we have rejected and want to forget. The experience of reading her poems deeply is a frightening one: it is like waking to discover one's adult self, grown to full height, crouched in some long-forgotten childhood hiding place, one's heart pounding senselessly, all the old, rejected transparent beasts and monsters crawling out of the wallpaper. So much for Plato! So much for adulthood! Yet I cannot emphasize strongly enough how valuable the experience of reading Miss Plath can be, for it is a kind of elegant dreaming-back, a cathartic experience that not only cleanses us of our personal and cultural desires for regression, but explains by way of its deadly accuracy what was wrong with such desires. The same can be said for the reading of much of contemporary poetry and fiction, fixated as it is upon the childhood fears of annihilation and persecution, the helplessness we have all experienced when we are, for one reason or another, denied an intellectual awareness of what is happening. For instance, the novels of Robbe-Grillet and his imitators emphasize the hypnotized passivity of the I in a world of dense and apparently autonomous things; one must never ask Who manufactured these things? who brought them home? who arranged them? for such questions destroy the novels. Similarly, the highly praised works of Pynchon, Barthelme, Barth (the Barth of the minimal stories, not the earlier Barth), and countless others, are verbalized screams and shudders to express the confusion of the ego that believes perhaps because it has

been told so often itself somehow out of place in the universe, a mechanized creature if foolish enough to venture into Nature; a too-natural creature for the mechanical urban paradise he has inherited but has had no part in designing. The I generated by these writers is typically a transparent, near-nameless personality; in the nightmarish works of William Burroughs, the central consciousness does not explore a world so much as submit pathetically to the exploration of himself by a comically hostile world, all cartoons and surprising metamorphoses. Sylvia Plath's tentative identity in such poems as Winter Trees, Tulips, and even the robustly defiant Daddy, is a child's consciousness, essentially, seizing upon a symbolic particularity (tulips, for instance) and then shrinking from its primary noon, so that the poems like the fiction we read so often today demonstrate a dissolution of personality. (pp. 509 11) There is never any integrating of the self and its experience, the self and its field of perception. Human consciousness, to Sylvia Plath, is always an intruder in the natural universe. This distrust of the intellect in certain poets can result in lyric-meditative poetry of an almost ecstatic beauty, when the poet acknowledges his separateness from nature but seems not to despise or fear it.... It is a paradox that the poet believes he will honor the objects of his perception whether swallows, trees, sheep, bees, or infants only by withdrawing from them. Why does it never occur to Romantic poets that they exist as much by right in the universe as any other creature, and that their function as poets is a natural function that the human imagination is, to put it bluntly, superior to the imagination of birds and infants? In art this can lead to silence; in life, to suicide, (pp. 513 14) Perhaps it is not just Sylvia Plath's position at the end of a once-energetic tradition, and the circumstances of her own unhappy life, that doomed her and her poetry to premature dissolution, but something in the very nature of lyric poetry itself. What of this curious art form which, when not liberated by music, tends to turn inward upon the singer, folding and folding again upon the poet? If he is immature to begin with, of what can he sing except his own self's immaturity, and to what task can his imagination put itself except the selection of ingenious images to illustrate this immaturity? ... The risk of lyric poetry is its availability to the precocious imagination, its immediate rewards in terms of technical skill, which then hypnotize the poet into believing that he has achieved all there is to achieve in life as well as in his art.... Most lyric poets explore themselves endlessly, like patients involved in a permanent psychoanalysis, reporting back for each session determined to discover, to drag out of hiding, the essential problem of their personalities when perhaps there is no problem in their personalities at all, except this insane preoccupation with the self and its moods and doubts, while much of the human universe struggles simply for survival.... The small, enclosed form of the typical lyric poem seems to preclude an active sanctifying of other people.... [The] lyric poet, if he is stuck in a limited emotional cul-de-sac, will circle endlessly inside the bell jar of his own world and only by tremendous strength can he break free. (pp. 514 16) Again, lyric poetry is a risk because it rarely seems to open into a future: the time of lyric poetry is usually the present or the past. This is a disease I carry home, this is a death, Miss Plath says in Three Women, and, indeed, this characterizes most of her lines. All is brute process, without a future; the past is recalled only with bitterness, a stimulus for present dismay. When the epic promise of One's-self I sing , is mistaken as the singing of a separate self, and not the universal self, the results can only be tragic. (p. 518) Sylvia Plath's essential innocence, her victimization by the pressures of an old, dying, ungenerous conception of man and his relationship to nature, must be made clear; this essay is not an attack upon her. She understood well the hellish fate of being Swift's true counterpart, the woman who agrees that the physical side of life is a horror, an ungainly synthesis of flesh and spirit the disappointment of all the Romantic love poems and the nightmare of the monkish soul. (pp. 518 19)

In most of the poems, and very noticeably in The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath exhibits a recurring tendency to dehumanize people, to flatten everyone into cut-paper people, most of all herself. She performs a kind of reversed magic, a desacralizing ritual for which psychologists have terms reification, rubricization. Absolute, dramatic boundaries are set up between the I and all others, and there is a peculiar refusal to distinguish among those who mean well, those who mean ill, and those who are neutral. Thus, one is shocked to discover in The Bell Jar that Esther, the intelligent young narrator, is as callous toward her mother as the psychiatrist is to her, and that she sets about an awkward seduction with the chilling precision of a machine hardly aware of the man involved, telling us very little about him as an existing human being. He does not really exist, he has no personality worth mentioning. Only Esther exists. Lady Lazarus, risen once again from the dead, does not expect a sympathetic response from the mob of spectators that crowd in to view her, a mock-phoenix rising from another failed suicide attempt: to Sylvia Plath there cannot be any connection between people, between the I that performs and the crowd that stares. All deaths are separate, and do not evoke human responses. To be really safe, one must be like the young man of Gigolo, who has eluded the bright fish hooks, the smiles of women, and who will never age because like Miss Plath's ideal self he is a perfect narcissus, self-gratified. He has successfully dehumanized himself. The Cosmos is indeed lost to Sylvia Plath and her era, and even a tentative exploration of a possible God is viewed in the old terms, in the old images of dread and terror. Mystic is an interesting poem, on a subject rare indeed in Miss Plath, and seems to indicate that her uneasiness with the mill of hooks of the air questions without answer had led her briefly to thoughts of God. Yet whoever or whatever this God is, no comfort is possible because the ego cannot experience any interest or desire without being engulfed.... Sylvia Plath has made beautiful poetry out of the paranoia sometimes expressed by a certain kind of emotionally disturbed person, who imagines that any relationship with anyone will overwhelm him, engulf and destroy his soul. (For a brilliant poem about the savagery of erotic love between lovers who cannot quite achieve adult autonomy or the generosity of granting humanity to each other, see Ted Hughes's Lovesong, in Crow, not inappropriate in this context.) The dread of being possessed by the Other results in the individual's failure to distinguish between real and illusory enemies.... Sylvia Plath's inability to grade the possibilities of danger is reflected generally in our society, and helps to account for peculiar admissions of helplessness and confusion in adults who should be informing their children: if everything unusual or foreign is an evil, if everything new is an evil, then the individual is lost. The political equivalent of childlike paranoia is too obvious to need restating, but we have a cultural equivalent as well which seems to pass unnoticed. Surely the sinister immorality of films like A Clockwork Orange (though not the original, English version of the Burgess novel) lies in their excited focus upon small, isolated, glamorized acts of violence by non-representative individuals, so that the unfathomable violence of governments is totally ignored or misapprehended. (pp. 519 21) What may come to seem obvious to people in the future that unique personality does not necessitate isolation, that the I of the poet belongs as naturally in the universe as any other aspect of its fluid totality, above all that this I exists in a field of living spirit of which it is one aspect was tragically unknown to Miss Plath, as it has been unknown or denied by most men. Hopefully, a world of totality awaits us, not a played-out world of fragments; but Sylvia Plath acted out a tragically isolated existence, synthesizing for her survivors so many of the sorrows of that dying age Romanticism in its death throes, the self's ship, Ariel, prematurely drowned. (p. 522) Source: Joyce Carol Oates, The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poems of Sylvia Plath, in The Southern Review, Vol. IX, No. 3, Summer, 1973, pp. 501 22. Reproduced by permission. Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism

Sylvia Plath: `Love, Love, My Season'

Critic: Arthur Oberg Source: Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley, and Plath, Rutgers University Press, 1978, pp. 12773. Reproduced by permission Criticism about: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), also known as: Victoria Lucas, Mrs. Ted Hughes Nationality: American

[No] poet more than Sylvia Plath keeps reminding us of the terms and the ground of her writing. To say that she writes in extremis is not only an accurate statement of fact but a suggestion that more than aesthetic matters may be involved. (p. 127) Ariel, Sylvia Plath's major posthumously published book of poems, begins and ends in extremis. Morning Song, the opening poem, begins with the word love. Words, the concluding poem, ends on the word life. The title of the last poem Words, and the pun in the title of the opening poem Morning Song suggest the two other prominent centers here, art and death. Love and death, life and art these are the extremities out of which the Ariel poems proceed. And Plath insisted upon them and returned to them for alignments of the most dangerous kind. The Ariel poems reveal and often pursue a direction more nearly final than that found in Plath's earlier poetry or in her nonpoetic work. What surfaces in Ariel proves to be a love of extremity. It expresses itself in obsessive rhythm, in a momentum and an inventiveness of image, and in a defining vocabulary recognizable by what it is attracted to and by what it seeks: totality, finality, obduracy. In Plath's most central books of poetry, The Colossus and Ariel, the adjectives expose this range of thought and feeling. The attraction involves what is sheer, mere, pure, absolute, necessary. Movement in the poems is toward what cannot be stopped or reversed, things intractable and tireless. It is toward what lies beyond loving, human feeling, things vast and immense. And toward what is unrepeatable, things unique and perfect. Plath's recurrent use of the prefixes in-, un-, and ir- relates to this defining poetics. And her attempt at using words like terrible, awful, and horrible in their root sense further characterizes her poetry and its preferences. The vocabulary which she evolved in her poetry is never far from the limits her opening and concluding poems announced and made final as the proper centers among which her poems move. (p. 128) The terms under which Plath chose to write her poems are unmistakably given, over and over. She sought to embrace nothing less than everything. A procedure on this scale was bound to assume personal and historical, aesthetic and sexual dimensions. (pp. 128 29) If ideally nothing escaped Plath, her tone when confronting what she called atrocity or enormity shifted between the mocking and the serious, the playful and the deadly. She could play child, adolescent, and adult, alternately, and at the same time. As a consequence, it sometimes is difficult to separate boast from threat or fear from wish in her readiness for the enormity of everything.... Predictably, the question of knowledge returned the poet to the smaller, but still large questions of love and death, life and art. What can love manage. What is death's domain. What are the just concerns of life and of art. These involved Plath in the issue not only of poetic content but of poetic form as well. At once inclusive and exclusive, the content of Sylvia Plath's poetry appropriated all provinces of knowledge. She not only accepted the extremity and enormity of history and personality but sought out the most outrageous facts and facta of life and art. Repeatedly, the impression she conveyed was that of a

woman and poet to whom nothing was alien. In moving prose written after her death, Ted Hughes ... attempted to detail this sense in her: The world of her poetry is one of emblematic visionary events, mathematical symmetries, clairvoyance, metamorphoses, and something resembling total biological and racial recall. Hughes's last clause defines what readers coming to Plath's work even for the first time inevitably feel. (pp. 129 30) What Sylvia Plath sought to manage as content, she also had to handle in and as form. The poetry she admitted admiring and the methods of composition attributed to her by people who knew her involved poems written all-of-a-piece. Such poems are in evidence in the post-Romantic, organic verse she frequently succeeded in writing.... If the word organic commonly has been turned into an almost meaningless term expressive of a quasimystical ideality which is present in a particular poem, for Plath's poetry it can be a critical term of the most descriptive and telling kind. The best poems in her first book, The Colossus, are organic in conception, in their management of matters as basic as stanza and line length and image. In the poem, Man in Black, taken from the first book, Plath achieved a poem unmistakably all-of-a-piece. ... (p. 131) What Plath accomplishes in Man in Black is nothing less than the achievement, wished for, willed, and executed, of the kind of organic, post-Romantic poem which she delighted in and which she aspired to write.... The last line in Man in Black All of it, together succeeds impressively in underlining the impression that the poem has been or at least given the illusion of being born all-of-a-piece. Man in Black concludes by becoming something like a completed miniature Kubla Khan. The poem is there on the page, all of it, together. In part, Man in Black is one more attempt at writing the final, Romantic poem in the English language. (p. 133) The early poems, when seen in connection with the poems from the posthumous volumes, reveal a search on the part of the poet for objects or images adequate to whatever love or hate she wished to attach to them. In many of the late poems, she directed her relentless precision toward casting poems in the form of extended correlatives. In the first line of each poem, an interior state commonly is recorded toward which the rest of the movement of the poem is painstakingly devoted.... Each poem exposes a search for adequate image. Each exposes the wish to find whatever is in the vase or in the tree or behind the veil. In the course of each poem the poet steadily attempts [in Ted Hughes's words] to locate just what it was that hurt. (p. 139) Separately and as a group, [ Tulips, The Swarm, and A Birthday Present ] deal with problems of language, or, more specifically, with the adequacy of any image in the face of an extreme situation. They address the confrontation, immediate or potential, of something desired, yet also feared. And they address the problem of finding words able to express that confrontation. In each of these poems, the poet attempts to locate, by means of a run of images, what it is: in Tulips , what it is that is in the vase and to what it corresponds, a correspondence which signals sickness or health, life or death; in The Swarm, what it is that is in the tree and, in the mind, so intriguing and threatening at the same time; in A Birthday Present, what it is that can lie behind the veil and be the source of such comforting and horrible enormity. (pp. 142 43) The need to locate what it is proves equally central to the movement and meanings of other poems of Plath's. In part, the mad and associational intensity of poems like Lady Lazarus, Daddy, and The Applicant becomes understandable in view of what the poet, there, is bent on relentlessly seeking out.... (p. 143)

The Applicant, Daddy, and Lady Lazarus reveal Plath centrally concerned with the universal habit of image-making, [but] this is not all. More important, in these poems she exhibits the extremes, personal and historical, to which image-making has been taken. Daddy and Lady Lazarus extend and provide variations on the concerns of The Applicant. In particular, they seek to locate what it was that hurt. These two poems radically confront Lear-like questions of man and his image, of what constitutes for him need and excess. Is man no more than this? Consider him well, Lear mused. Both Lady Lazarus and Daddy raise issues as basic as image and as man. They seek to find images which will sufficiently body forth that man. Lady Lazarus and Daddy are poems which seem written at the edge of sensibility and of imagistic technique. They both utilize an imagery of severe disintegration and dislocation. The public horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the personal horrors of fragmented identities become interchangeable. Men are reduced to parts of bodies and to piles of things. The movement in each poem is at once historical and private; the confusion in these two spheres suggests the extent to which this century has often made it impossible to separate them. (p. 146) The barkerlike tone of Lady Lazarus is not accidental. As in Daddy, the persona strips herself before the reader ... all the time utilizing a cool or slang idiom in order to disguise feeling. Sylvia Plath borrowed from a sideshow or vaudeville world the respect for virtuosity which the performer must acquire, for which the audience pays and never stops paying. Elsewhere in her work, she admired the virtuosity of the magician's unflinching girl or of the unshaking tattoo artist. Here, in Lady Lazarus, it is the barker and the striptease artist who consume her attention. What the poet pursues in image and in rhyme (for example, the rhyming of Jew and gobbledygoo ) becomes part of the same process I observed in so many of her other poems, that attempt, brilliant and desperate, to locate what it was that hurt. (p. 147) Sylvia Plath never stopped recording in her poetry the wish and need to clear a space for love. Yet she joined this to an inclination to see love as unreal, to accompanying fears of being unable to give and receive love, and to the eventual distortion and displacement of love in the verse. Loving completely or wholly she considered to be dangerous, from her earliest verse on. Love was so much a part of her world that it often stood in her poetry for that world itself. When the world seemed unreal, so did love. In the early poetry, this sometimes approximated a secondhand, Romantic poetics. But the early poems also give evidence of some more profound sense of a loving unreality which the later poems turned into a more desperate, pathetic tableau of valentine-faces and candy or enamelpainted hearts. Plath often wrote with humor and irony when she considered love. She could be the satirist alert to the sentiments of a Victorian or Edwardian age. She could be a shrewd psychologist of love's ambiguities. She could be sane and clairvoyant, joining writers as major as Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in probing the darkness of the heart. But in what she wrote just before and at the time of Ariel, she began to establish a stance which I find problematic and dangerous. A progression is evident in her handling of love and the love poem that calls into question the loving of intentions which some of the first lines of poems announce, but which the tone of whole poems or the endings of poems commonly belie. (pp. 152 53) In the important Ariel bee poems, her uncertainty issues in the fear of being hurt or fatally stung by love. It is the kind of bad joke or bad pun which comes to typify her late art. It expresses a situation so extreme and intolerable to her that only by such devices could she ever have hoped to manage her world. Lowell and Berryman use similar devices, but very often out of real strength. In Plath, however, the strategy commonly reduces to sheer helplessness. The Ariel poems reveal a woman both too exposed and too unopen. The sexuality is relentless and overwhelming. The puns not only proliferate head, queen, screw, cherry but succeed in words

like mail (letter and male ) and box (sexual organ and coffin) in making explicit the meanings which are central to her work. (p. 154) If Plath wished her poems to stand as love letters to the world, the perspective from which they proceed may, in the end, have made that wish impossible. Her metaphor for the world may very well have been a response to a loveless world. But it is here that the logic of the argument breaks down. For the poetry shows the controlling metaphor threatening to become the informing vision itself. By the time she wrote her last poems, there was less and less room for and patience with love. If the poems were once meant to create love, they came to stand for a world which had forgone or gone beyond some loving, human circumference. The problem of artistic control which so many critics have addressed in Sylvia Plath I find less central and settleable than that of the controlling metaphor in her verse. Her best poems are incredibly controlled. But the issue of controlling metaphor lingers on long after a reader has decided whether the poems show control or the look of control or controlled uncontrolledness. The controlling metaphor affects much that happens in Plath's poetry. In the process of finding what to do with her love, she often concluded by inverting it. Poem by poem, not just in Ariel, she radically confused love and death, self and other. Images of love give way to images of incest ( Daddy, and the bee poems) and masturbation ( Suicide Off Egg Rock, Ariel, Death & Co., The Jailor, Childless Woman ). Loveless images of madness, suicide, and solipsism from the I am, I am, I am of Suicide Off Egg Rock to the ich, ich, ich, ich of Daddy take on the force of leitmotifs for her work. And art, if capable of leading us back to loving, human contexts, here gives the impression of being one more inversion of love. It can be one more deception in this life. In the late poems, something happens to language and to love and to the possibility of defining a self through love. Repeatedly, the health or breakdown of one is a reflection of the other. (pp. 156 57) As a representative, twentieth-century writer, Plath lends to language as language a central place in her work. But in the implications and concluding achievement of this, she is entirely herself. In five very late poems, Words, Kindness, Edge, Contusion, and The Fearful, she has no rival, perhaps fortunately so. These poems, unlike Lesbos or Stillborn which show love and language breaking down but which discover no words or tone artful enough to manage that fact, succeed in what they attempt. They learn the art of leaving human love behind, but whether out of necessity or freedom it is not always clear. The five poems share, aside from having been written during the last week of Plath 's life, an assessment of a situation where love seems either absent or unreal, deceptive or unimportant. In all of them, there is a rightness in choice of phrase and word and a brilliance in the run of images in individual stanzas and in entire poems. (p. 158) These poems all take an associational, imagistic technique to a point of deadly confusion and delusion where the poet can fold her poem-children back into her body simply by writing out the wish ( Edge ) or where she is so uncomprehending of human, loving kindness that she cannot distinguish between children and roses ( Kindness ). What I am suggesting is that these late poems are not the mystically calm, orderly pieces which some critics have seen them to be. Instead, they are the terrible, terrifying creations of a woman who, near the end of a life, still could not do without love, even if she never learned what to do with it, As a result, the tone of the poems is something less than the matter-of-factness of the saint. (p. 160) If love was never completely renounced by her, neither was it constant in her work. And the poems keep recording a journey and a movement as inevitable as death. Now that the poems which were written just

before or at the same time as the Ariel poems have been collected and published in Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, we are afforded an even better means of charting and confirming larger movements and stages in her work. When Ted Hughes and other critics first wrote of an inevitable, conscious development in her poetry and when the titles of the posthumous books Crossing the Water and Winter Trees were first announced, I wondered how willful was the creation of that legendary development and reputation. But a consideration of the poems themselves and of her title, The Colossus, for her first book, helped to dispel such fears. In the same way, interpretations of her art after the fact of her suicide now strike me as less arbitrary and fallacious than they once did. That she eventually took her own life is important. It might be dangerous not to consider that fact seriously. Plath 's development from The Colossus to the poems of the later volumes is technical as much as it is psychic and spiritual. More particularly, that development concerns her use of image in connection with the possibilities for language and love. How that development implies and makes explicit a journey, her gathered work actualizes and clarifies. By the title of her first volume, The Colossus, Plath signified what she would spend a lifetime trying to create. Sometimes she exchanged the colossus image for the image of an ark or a garden. But the intentions were always the same, to write words that would bear love and that would have life. The difficulty, however, was that, from the very beginning, her landscape risked turning into (to use images from her own poems) some nightmarish bestiary or wintering ship or burnt-out spa. The problem of what would be her controlling metaphor, then, was full upon her from her earliest work. The poems she wrote after those included in The Colossus show her still involved in trying to put together saving, loving words. But the colossus which she feared would never get put together entirely and which she feared would be a ruin becomes more than a distant, playful fear. The opening and closing poems of The Colossus The Manor Garden and The Stones depend upon and establish the essential, ominous ambiguity that mark later poems like Tulip. (pp. 161 62) Now that Crossing the Water and Winter Trees have been published, there is the opportunity to observe the poet at every stage taking stock of her situation and development. The Colossus and Ariel, even before the other volumes appeared recently, showed her charting a course, or getting there, as she put it; she assigned it as a title to one of her poems. If the exact nature of the journey or voyage or ride, all prominent metaphor in her verse, was often in doubt, its connection with love was not. There are two major movements which the entire body of Plath's poetry suggests toward the creation of love and toward some state beyond love. These movements are not strictly chronological any more than they are exclusive of one another. In part, they exist in and through the very last poems she wrote. But, as poems written in time, by a woman aware of time, they tend to build toward that point where the second movement, a state beyond human love, can be claimed, or at least volitionally prophesied.... Sometimes Plath depended upon the fierce repetitions of would or shall or let us in order to move toward and create that state beyond love. The syntax of poems like A Birthday Present and Lady Lazarus depend greatly upon such a volitional strategy. (pp. 162 63) Mystic contains within it a countermovement toward a belief in earthly love. The contradictory impression which Mystic succeeds in conveying not only is central to the meaning of that poem, but it also connects with a defining center in much of Plath's late verse. On the one hand, there is the woman who becomes a contemporary doubting Thomas, except that what she disbelieves are not Christ's wounds and resurrected presence but his love:

How I would like to believe in tenderness.

( The Moon and the Yew Tree ...) This moment is as desperate as any in modern poetry. It is as pathetic as Prufrock's musing on the mermaids, I do not think that they will sing to me. (p. 165) Marriage imagery is resplendent in Sylvia Plath's poetry. Do is recurrent and hypnotic as a word and as an action. At times the persona saying, I do, I do, is a mechanical doll or a prisoner confessing to a crime. These senses of the word and phrase Plath commonly linked with the recital of the marriage vow. Do also is punned upon, especially in her poem, Daddy. The German, familiar du or you ( do, du, you they even rhyme) of intimate address and love songs is recalled, almost as a reminder of the historical and personal perversions to which love and action can be subjected. (pp. 165 66) The Colossus already revealed the poet's predilection for decadent unions between love and death, and art and life. If her browned gardenia and ghastly orchid recall finde sicle botanical catalogues, it is in her taste in sounds, colors, jewels, music, painting, and literature that she shows herself to be a contemporary decadent.... In the poems that came after The Colossus, however, we are able to see how this incipient decadence is turned from something faintly literary into something closer to the poet's very self: Pom! Pom! They would have killed me! (pp. 166 67) That Sylvia Plath wrote two last-words poems, one called just that ( Last Words ) and another, Words, I find significant. The major problem which I address in this chapter to whom and to what do her poems finally belong the two poems engage, although in the body of her poetry they are not unique in that concern. (p. 168) Last Words is a very different kind of poem, closer in style to poems of intense desire like Tulips, A Birthday Present , or The Arrival of the Bee Box. The poet in Last Words [in Crossing the Water] wants and volitionally unlooses herself from domestic things in order to achieve a state of utter mystic peace:

It will be dark, And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar. Ishtar, Babylonian and Assyrian goddess of love and fertility, is invoked. But it is the artful, statuary face of Ishtar which has importance for her in this poem. The state yearned for is death, not love. The word sweeter in this quotation goes back to a line earlier in the same poem, I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit! Sweetness commonly threatened loving deception for Plath . Here it carries equally dark connotations of preservation, but always at the unnatural expense of life. Sweetness proves costly, proves to be death. As Last Words earns its authority, there emerges that tone, or decor an important word for ... Plath which related to the matter of control and to whatever triumph or failure these final poems contain. Last Words manages to indicate how the poet willed to move herself and her poetry toward love as much as it indicates how she could not handle the artful business she went about. I can't stop it, she wrote in this poem. Here It meant not love or blood-hurt but the escape of spirit-breath or the release of images. (pp. 168 69)

Last Words, like any of the major poems from Ariel or Crossing the Water or Winter Trees, does not dispose of the nagging sense that, in love as it may be with a soldier repose than death's (a phrase from an early poem, The Sculptor ), in the end, it belongs to an art of elegy, less by choice than by some desperate, pathetic necessity. (p. 170) If the late poems belong to anyone, they belong not to her father or husband or children or even to poetry (the sense of the poem as unloving love-child she never forgot). But to Death, Death the lover, Death the double.... (pp. 170 71) What I have been tracing the attempts of the poems to establish lyric and love and the countermovement toward elegy and to a deadly journey which could not be stopped gain authority and intensity from the more recently released volumes. They never contradict but extend what the Ariel poems were about. The old faults prove to be the same; love cannot come here, we again find. The moving center of both books, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, is that of a woman of sorrows. Recurrently, Plath imagined herself as Mary and Christ. Ease, love, correspondence, and relationship all were yearned for and did not emerge. (p. 172) If some important part of Sylvia Plath in her late poetry refused to accept a world of gigolos as the final version of the world, she never abandoned the doubt that she could recognize or accept love even were she able to manage it in her life and art. As a result, tone figures more and more prominently in the interpretation of the poems she left behind. Tone, its readiness and surety, dominates. The posthumous poems expose discrepancies and failures of the most serious kind. The phoenix figure, prominent in various guises in her work, deserted her outside her poems. And the children-poems she imagined in the late poem, Edge, folded back into her and taken out of this life, became painfully distinct from her in death the two children fathered by Ted Hughes and left behind; the poems which were posthumous. And the Medea figure, once little more than a literary trapping in her early poem, Aftermath, proved in the late poem, Edge, only a pathetic wish denied to her outside of mythology. When she died, so did her long sought-after and invoked gods. The confusions and delusions of art and life, wish fulfillment and reality, became exposed at her death. And they record a sad fact. But, beyond that and more important, they reach back to some sense of lovelessness or lack implicit in a major part of her poetry. The Ariel poems, looked at together with the poems from Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, now strike me as less in love's behalf than she would have liked them to be. Poems like Daddy and Lady Lazarus in the end may not be the triumphs which their momentum and inventiveness at times celebrate. Instead, and this is my sense of them, they belong more to elegy and to death, to the woman whose loving associations abandoned her as she sought to create images for them. (pp. 172 73) Source: Arthur Oberg, Sylvia Plath: `Love, Love, My Season', in his Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley, and Plath, Rutgers University Press, 1978, pp. 127 73. Reproduced by permission. Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism

Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration

Critic: M. D. Uroff Source: Iowa Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1977, pp. 104-15. Reproduced by permission Criticism about: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), also known as: Victoria Lucas, Mrs. Ted Hughes Nationality: American

[(essay date 1977) In the following essay, Uroff contrasts Plath's poetic voice with the confessional mode developed by American poet Robert Lowell. Uroff contends that Plath, unlike Lowell, incorporates abstracted autobiographic detail in her poetry only to amplify or dramatize feelings of pain and sorrow rather than to induce actual self-revelation.] When M. L. Rosenthal first used the term, confessional poetry, he had in mind a phase in Robert Lowell's career when Lowell turned to themes of sexual guilt, alcoholism, confinement in a mental hospital, and developed them in the first person in a way that intended, in Rosenthal's view, to point to the poet himself. Rosenthal was careful to limit the possibilities of the mode but he did name Sylvia Plath a confessional poet as well because, he said, she put the speaker herself at the center of her poems in such a way as to make her psychological vulnerability and shame an embodiment of her civilization. Rosenthal's widely accepted estimation was challenged first by Ted Hughes who pointed out that Plath uses autobiographical details in her poetry in a more emblematic way than Lowell, and more recently by Marjorie Perloff who claims that Plath's poetry lacks the realistic detail of Lowell's work. If Hughes and Perloff are right, and I think they are, then we should reconsider the nature of the speaker in Plath's poems, her relationship to the poet, and the extent to which the poems are confessional. What distinguishes Plath's poems from Lowell's is precisely the kind of person in the poem. With Lowell, according to Rosenthal, it is the literal self. Lowell himself has said that while he invented some of his autobiography, he nonetheless wants the reader to feel it is true, that he is getting the real Robert Lowell. The literal self in Lowell's poetry is to be sure a literary self, but fairly consistently developed as a selfdeprecating, modest, comic figure with identifiable parents, summer homes, experiences at particular addresses. When he discloses under these circumstances his weaknesses, his ineptitude, his misery, his inflicting of pain on others, he is in fact revealing information that is humiliating or prejudicial to himself. In this sense, the person in the poem is making an act of confession, and, although we as readers have no power to forgive, Lowell's self-accusatory manner makes it impossible to judge. We are not outraged but chastened by such revelations. With Plath, it is otherwise. The person in her poem calls certain people father or mother but her characters lack the particularity of Commander and Mrs. Lowell. They are generalized figures not real-life people, types that Plath manipulates dramatically in order to reveal their limitations. Precisely because they are such types, the information that Plath reveals about them is necessarily prejudicial and has consequently misled some readers who react with hostility to what she has to reveal. Elizabeth Hardwick calls her lacerating and claims that Plath has the distinction of never being in her poems a nice person. While niceness is not a perfect standard for judging a person in a poem, Hardwick's reaction and that of many other critics who follow her reveal the particular way in which Plath's revelations are prejudicial to her. Plath's outraged speakers do not confess their misery so much as they vent it, and this attitude, unlike that of Lowell's characters, makes them susceptible to rather severe critical judgments. However, if we look at the strategy of the poems, we might arrive at a more accurate estimate of the person in them and of her relationship to the poet. Sylvia Plath herself has said, "I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and

manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind." The difference between Plath and Lowell is clearly outlined when we set this statement next to Lowell's account of how he came to write confessional poetry. He says that when he started writing the poems in Life Studies he had been doing a number of readings on the West Coast and found that he was simplifying his poems, breaking the meter, making impromptu changes as he read. He claimed that poets had become proficient in forms and needed to make a "breakthrough back into life." Life Studies may be read as that repossession of his own life, and its mode is properly confessional because both in the poems and the prose of that volume the suffering and victimizing speaker searches through his own pain in order to perceive some truth about the nature of his experience. Plath's speakers make no such search. They are anxious to contain rather than to understand their situation. When Lowell's speaker in "Skunk Hour" says, "My mind's not right," he expresses some kind of desolate self-knowledge. By contrast, Plath calls the maddened woman in "Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper," "No novice / In those elaborate rituals / Which allay the malice / Of knotted table and crooked chair." Both characters may be mad but their strategies differ. Where Lowell's character confesses his weakness, Plath's character employs all her energies in maintaining a ritualistic defense against her situation. She seems in a perverse way to act out the program of the poet whose informed and intelligent mind must manipulate its terrifying experiences. There is in fact a strange correspondence between Miss Drake's methods and those of her creator. Miss Drake is superbly sensitive, wildly inventive in objectifying her fears, and skilled at controlling them. But there is also a vast distance between Miss Drake and the poet, a distance that may be measured by the techniques of parody, caricature, hyperbole that Plath employs in characterizing her. There is something perversely comical about Miss Drake who "can see in the nick of time / How perilous needles grain the floorboards." If Miss Drake's rigid efforts are not quite ridiculed, it is fair to say that she does not engage our sympathies in the way that Lowell's speaker in "Skunk Hour" (who may also be ridiculous) does. She has been distanced from us by the poet who sees her as a grotesque reflection of herself, employing the manipulative strategies of the uninformed mind against an undefined terror, channeling what might have been creative energy into pointless rituals. "Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper" is an early poem but it reveals the way in which Plath controlled her own terrifying experiences in her poetry. She did so by creating characters and later speakers who demonstrate the way in which the embattled mind operates. Far from speaking for the poet, they stage crazy performances which are parodic versions of the imaginative act. Through them, Plath shows how terror may grip the mind and render it rigid. Through her speaker's projective fantasies, she projects her own understanding of hysterical control and the darker knowledge of its perilous subversion of the imagination. While Miss Drake's elaborate rituals are designed to hold off her fears, the poet who created her is handling in the act of the poem, however indirectly, her own frightening knowledge of madness. What for the mad woman is a means of avoiding experience becomes for the poet a means of controlling it. The poems, unlike the speakers in them, reveal Plath's terrifying self-knowledge. In her poems, Plath is not concerned with the nature of her experience, rather she is engaged in demonstrating the way in which the mind deals with extreme circumstances or circumstances to which it responds with excessive sensitivity. The typical strategy of her speakers is to heighten or exaggerate ordinary experience and at the same time to intensify the mind's manipulative skills so that fathers become Fascists and the mind that must deal with the image it has conjured up becomes rigidly ritualistic. In her early poems, Plath stands outside and judges her characters, drawing caricatures not only of madness but of its counterpart, hysterical sanity. As she continued to write however, she began to let the characters speak for themselves in caricature, parody, and hyperbole which they use not as vehicles of judgment but as inevitable methods of their performances. When the mind that must deal with terror stiffens and rigidifies, parody will become its natural means of expression. Between "Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper" and her late poems, however, Plath explored another way in which the mind responds to its terrors. In what has been called her middle period, Plath became interested in a kind of character who had been exhausted by her fears and could not control experience. For example, the insomniac of "Zoo Keeper's Wife" lies awake at night thinking over her grievances and the particular

horrors of her husband's zoo full of "wolf-headed fruit bats" and the "bird-eating spider." Her response to her husband is as hyperbolic as the hysterical spinster's disdain for love's slovenliness in an early Plath poem but she has no rituals with which to deal with it nor barricades to hide behind. Rather, she says, "I can't get it out of my mind." All she can do is "flog apes owls bears sheep / Over their iron stile" and still she can't sleep. Again, in "Insomniac," the mind cannot handle memories that "jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars." The speaker's "head is a little interior of grey mirrors. / Each gesture flees immediately down an alley / Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance / Drains like water out the hole at the far end." It is in these poems and others like them of this period that Plath's speakers sound most like Lowell's in his more exhausted and despairing moods yet even here Plath focuses on the function or nonfunction of the mind rather than on the meaning of the experience. As Plath turned into her later period in a poem such as "Tulips" the speaker of her poem seems to welcome the loss of control that had harried the insomniacs. As she goes into the hospital in this poem, she claims to be learning peacefulness, and she hands herself over to the hospital attendants to be propped up and tended to. The nurses bring her numbness in "bright needles," and, as she succumbs to the anesthesia, she claims that she only wanted to be utterly empty. However, she does not rest in that attitude very long before she comes out of the operating room and its anesthetized state and begins reluctantly to confront her pain. Her first response is to complain that the tulips hurt her, watch her, that they eat up her oxygen. But, when the speaker claims a correspondence between the tulips' redness and her own wound, her manipulative mind begins to function again, first in negative ways, tormenting itself by objectifying its pain. Then, in a brief but alarming reversal, the speaker associates the tulips not only with the pain but with the heart so that the outside threat and power are not only overcome but subsumed. Because the speaker here has so exaggerated her own emptiness and the tulips' violence and vitality, she must then accept in herself the attributes she has cast onto the tulips which now return to her. The heart blooms. Here, for once, the manipulative mind works its own cure. If the supersensitive mind can turn tulips into explosions, it can also reverse the process and turn dangerous animals into blooming hearts. What it cannot do, despite the speaker's claim, is accept utter emptiness. It cannot refuse to be excited by the flowers that it does not want. "Tulips" is an unusual poem in Plath's work not because it demonstrates how the mind may generate hyperboles to torture itself (which is a common strategy of Plath's poems) but because it shows how this generative faculty may have a positive as well as a negative function. "Tulips" is not a cheerful poem, but it does move from cold to warmth, from numbness to love, from empty whiteness to vivid redness, a process manipulated by the associative imagination. The speaker herself seems surprised by her own gifts and ends the poem on a tentative note, moving toward the faraway country of health. Despite this possibly hopeful ending, however, the body of the poem demonstrates the way in which the mind may intensify its pain by objectifying it. What takes place in "Tulips" in a private meditation (and perhaps the privacy accounts for the mind's pliancy) is given a much more ferocious treatment in the public performances of Plath's late poems. It is in fact the sense of being on public display that calls forth the rage of the speakers in these late poems. Forced to perform, they develop elaborate rituals. Their manipulative powers become a curse not a cure. In "The Tour," the speaker, caught "in slippers and housedress with no lipstick," greets with mock hospitality her maiden aunt who wants "to be shown about": "Do step into the hall," "Yes, yes, this is my address. / Not a patch on your place, I guess." Instead of refusing to become a victim of the aunt's meddlesome curiosity, the speaker readily assents to it. After apologizing for the mess, she leads her aunt right into it, showing her the frost-box that bites, the furnace that exploded, the sink that ate "seven maids and a plumber." With mock concern, she warns the aunt, "O I shouldn't put my finger in that," "O I shouldn't dip my hankie in, it hurts!" "I am bitter? I'm averse?" she asks, dropping for a second her polite mask but resuming it immediately in her refrain, "Toddle on home to tea now." The speaker manipulates the aunt's curiosity, turning it back on itself by maintaining a tone of insistent courtesy and forced intimacy that is designed to jeeringly protect the aunt from the brazen exhibition of the open house of horrors. She appears to contrast her own dreary domestic appliances to her aunt's exotic possessions (the gecko she wears as costume jewelry, her Javanese geese and monkey trees); but actually her machines are "wild," she says, and in a different way unlike her

aunt's tamed decorations. However, when she calls herself "creepy-creepy," she seems to have assumed her aunt's gecko-like qualities. The staginess of this speaker, her insistent rhyming, exclamatory sentences, italicized words, all provide not only a grotesque reflection of the aunt's alarm, but also suggest a kind of hysterical control. The speaker's ability to manipulate the aunt is matched by a more sinister ability to manipulate her own horrors, to locate them in furnace and stove, and there to give them a separate identity. Her mind, like Miss Drake's, is extremely skilled at objectifying her fears. The poet who felt that the intelligent mind must manipulate its most terrifying experiences also knew that the deranged mind could operate in such a way as to hold off its terror, separate itself from the agony it suffered, and the speaker here exemplifies that process. When at the end she warns the aunt not to trip over the nurse-midwife who "can bring the dead to life," she points to the source of her misery, the creative principle that has itself assumed an objective identity and become part of the mess. The midwife, like a poet, delivers life with "wiggly fingers," and she has in fact been very active in endowing dead household appliances with a lively if destructive energy; but now she too has been cast out. In this speaker who can not only caricature her aunt with the "specs" and "flat hat" but also her own creepiness as well as her "awfully nice" creative faculties, Plath presents a damning portrait of the too inventive mind that exults in self-laceration. It is not quite accurate to say that this speaker is unaware of her own strategies because she is supremely self-conscious; but she is trapped by them. Where others have been devoured or repelled, she lives on, neither despairing nor shocked but charged with a hysterical energy that she deploys finally against herself. Her nurse-mid-wife is eyeless. She too can only see herself now as others see her. Her ability to manipulate her own suffering is a subversion of the poet's creative powers; it becomes a means of holding off rather than exploring her situation. A quite different manipulator is the speaker in "The Applicant" who appears to be a comic figure, reveling in her machinations. Unlike the woman in "The Tour," she seems to speak for others not for herself. She starts out with the characteristic question of the convention-loving woman, "First, are you our sort of person?" What interests her, she reveals, is not what we might expect from someone who would ask that question, the social qualities of her marriage applicant, but rather her physical parts. "Our sort of person" has no glass eyes, false teeth, rubber breasts, stitches to show something's missing. Once having assured herself on that score, she presents her applicant's hand in marriage, promising not only the traditional services that it will "bring teacups and roll away headaches" but that at the end it will even "dissolve of sorrow." Then, as if this "guaranteed" emotion might be too much for the man, she confides, "We make new stock from the salt." Such economy, such efficiency, this marriage broker seems to cluck. The woman "willing" "to do whatever you tell it" can be easily recycled. Next the speaker turns to the man who like the woman is "stark naked." Instead of putting him through the same examination of parts, she quickly offers him a wedding suit, "Black and stiff," that he can reuse as a funeral shroud. She adopts the familiar tone of the tailor ("How about this suit--" "Believe me, they'll bury you in it.") that shades into that of the mortician. Suddenly the suit, the girl, the deadly convention of marriage are all one, like a tomb, equally "waterproof, shatterproof, proof / Against fire and bombs through the roof." The subversive excess of her promises here is hastily passed over as her sales pitch continues: "Now your head, excuse me, is empty. / I have the ticket for that. / Come here, sweetie, out of the closet." What she presents is "A living doll" whose value will increase with each anniversary, paper at first but silver in 25 years and gold at 50 years. It might be argued that "The Applicant" does not properly belong to those poems in which Plath exposes the mind's manipulation of terrifying experiences. After all, marriage--and especially the marriage contracted here--is a conventional arrangement which should not affect the fears or passions or emotions of either the man or the woman. In addition, the speaker here appears safely removed from the situation she directs. These facts, however, do not explain the tone of the poem which comes through in the insistent refrain, "Will you marry it?" This speaker who has "the ticket" for everything seems, despite her allknowing and consoling comic pose, very anxious to have her question answered. Again, as in the other poems we have discussed, the nature of the speaker in "The Applicant" deserves more attention than it has received. What she says is obvious enough but why does she say it? I have called her a woman although her sex is nowhere identified partly because of her language (she calls the woman "sweetie" and the man "My

boy") and partly because of her claim that her applicant can sew, cook and "talk, talk, talk" (no man, I believe would have considered that last feature a selling point) but chiefly because she seems to be extremely concerned for the successful outcome of her applicant. She is like the applicant herself willing to make any claim and to accede to any demands in order to strike a bargain. Hers is a pose of course, but it is the pose of the compliant woman. Like the patient in "Tulips" who accepts the gift of flowers that torment her and the niece in "The Tour" who responds to her aunt's detested visit, the speaker here insists on participating in a situation the demands of which she finds abhorrent. Her only recourse for dealing with it is a mode at which she is particularly skilled, burlesque. Yet behind the scorn and the scoffing is another feeling, something like hysteria, that expresses itself in her repeated question. She seems trapped by the sexual stereotypes she parodies. The ventriloquism of this poem hides the fact that this is an internal debate. The sexual fear that has driven the "sweetie" into the closet and the boy to his last resort also propels the manipulations of this shrewd if too agreeable woman. Here again is the controlling mind using its powers to compartmentalize rather than explore its situation. "The Applicant" has been given serious consideration as Plath's statement on marriage yet it does not point to the poet herself in the same way that, for example, Robert Lowell's "Man and Wife" does. Its characters are unparticularized and unconnected to any specific event in Plath's experience. Its sexual stereotypes (the girl willing to do anything in order to be married and the boy only willing to marry if he can be convinced that he will get a worthwhile product) are manipulated by a speaker whose tension-filled control reveals not only their power over her but the terror that informs them. This speaker can manage, but she cannot escape her situation. The relationship between poet and speaker in two other late poems, "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy," is somewhat more complicated because these poems do call upon specific incidents in Plath's biography, her suicide attempts and her father's death. Yet to associate the poet with the speaker directly, as many critics have done, does not account for the fact that Plath employs here as before the techniques of caricature, hyperbole, and parody that serve both to distance the speaker from the poet and at the same time to project onto the speaker a subversive variety of the poet's own strategies. In "Lady Lazarus," the nature of the speaker is peculiar and defies our ordinary notions of someone prone to attempt suicide. Suicide is not a joyous act, and yet there is something of triumph in the speaker's assertion that she has done it again. The person recovering from a suicide attempt, as this speaker says she is, cannot possibly be so confident at the very moment of her recovery that her sour breath will vanish in a day and that she will soon be a smiling woman. Nor could she have the presence of mind to characterize those who surround her as a "peanutcrunching crowd" and her rescuers as enemies. And finally it seems psychologically impossible for the suicide victim to have the energy to rise at all against other people, much less to threaten to "eat men like air." The person who speaks here does so not to explore her situation but to control it. She is first of all a performer, and, although she adopts many different roles, she is chiefly remarkable for her control not only of herself but of the effects she wishes to work on those who surround her. She speaks of herself in hyperboles, calling herself a "walking miracle," boasting that she has "nine times to die," exclaiming that dying is an art she does "exceptionally well," asserting that "the theatrical / Comeback in broad day" knocks her out. Her treatment of suicide in such buoyant terms amounts to a parody of her own act. When she compares her suicide to the victimization of the Jews and later on when she claims there is a charge for a piece of her hair or clothes and thus compares her rescued self to the crucified Christ or martyred saint, she is engaging in self-parody. She employs these techniques partly to defy the crowd with its "brute / Amused shout: / 'A miracle!'" and partly to taunt her rescuers, "Herr Doktor" "Herr Enemy," who regard her as their "opus." She is neither a miracle nor an opus, and she fends off those who would regard her in this way. But the techniques have another function as well; they display the extent to which she can objectify herself, ritualize her fears, manipulate her own terror. Her extreme control in fact is intimately entwined with her suicidal tendencies. The suicide is her own victim, can control her own fate. If she is not to succumb to this desire, she must engage in the elaborate ritual which goes on all the time in the mind of the would-be suicide by which she allays her persistent wish to destroy herself. Her act is the only means of dealing with a situation she cannot face. Her control is not sane but hysterical. When the speaker assures the crowd that she is "the same, identical woman" after her rescue, she is in fact telling them her inmost fear that she could

and probably will do it again. What the crowd takes for a return to health, the speaker sees as a return to the perilous conditions that have driven her three times to suicide. By making a spectacle out of herself and by locating the victimizer outside herself in the doctor and the crowd, she is casting out her terrors so that she can control them. When she says at the end that she will rise and eat men like air, she is projecting (and again perhaps she is only boasting) her destruction outward. That last stanza of defiance is in fact an effort of the mind to triumph over terror, to rise and not to succumb to its own victimization. The speaker's tone is hysterical, triumphant, defiant. Only once does she drop this tone to admit the despair that underlies it when she says. "What a trash / To annihilate each decade." Otherwise she maintains her rigid self-control in accents that range from frenzied gaiety to spiteful threats. Although her situation is much more extreme than those social occasions of "Tulips," "The Tour," "The Applicant," it is like them not of her own making. She has been rescued when she wanted to die. Her response is perverse. She does not welcome her rescuers, nor does she examine the condition that forced her death wish; instead she accepts her fate and presents herself as in complete control. The effort of her act which comes through in her tone is intense yet necessary because without it she would have to face the fact that she is not in control. Her performance is a defense against utter desolation. Here again is the mind manipulating its own terrors. Plath was no stranger to this method, as we have said before, but while she works here with a parallel between hysterical control and creative control she presents the first as a mad reflection of the second. The speaker like Miss Drake is "No novice / In those elaborate rituals" that allay her terror yet her tremendous energies are so absorbed in maintaining them that she has no reserve with which to understand why she performs as she does. When she sees herself as a victimized Jew or Christ, she may be engaging in self-parody but the extremity of her circumstances does not allow her to realize it. The poet behind the poem is not caricaturing Lady Lazarus as she had Miss Drake; she is rather allowing Lady Lazarus to caricature herself and thus demonstrating the way in which the mind turns ritualistic against horror. Despite the fact that "Lady Lazarus" draws on Plath's own suicide attempt, the poem tells us little more than a newspaper account of the actual event. It is not a personal confession. What it does reveal is Plath's understanding of the way the suicidal person thinks. "Daddy" is an even more complicated treatment of the same process. The poem opens with the daughter's assertion that "You do not do, you do not do." But if Daddy will not do, neither will he not not do, and we find this speaker in the characteristic Plath trap, forcing herself to deal with a situation she finds unacceptable. "Daddy" is not so much an account of a true-life situation as a demonstration of the mind confronting its own suffering and trying to control that by which it feels controlled. The simplistic, insistent rhythm is one form of control, the obsessive rhyming and repeated short phrases are others, means by which she attempts to charm and hold off the evil spirits. But the speaker is even more crafty than this technical expertise demonstrates. She is skilled at image-making like a poet and she can manipulate her images with extreme facility. The images themselves are important for what they tell us of her sense of being victimized and victimizer but more significant than the actual image is the swift ease with which she can turn it to various uses. For example, she starts out imagining herself as a prisoner living like a foot in the black shoe of her father. Then she casts her father in her own role and he becomes "one grey toe / Big as a Frisco seal" and then quickly she is looking for his foot, his root. Next he reverts to his original boot identity, and she is the one with "The boot in the face." And immediately he returns with "A cleft in your chin instead of your foot." At the end, she sees the villagers stamping on him. Thus she moves from booted to booter as her father reverses the direction. The mind that works in this way is neither logical nor psychologically penetrating; it is simply extremely adept at juggling images. In fact, the speaker is caught in her own strategies. She can control her terrors by forcing them into images, but she seems to have no understanding of the confusion her wild image-making betrays. When she identifies herself as a foot, she suggests that she is trapped, but when she calls her father a foot the associations break down. In the same way, when she caricatures her father as a Fascist and herself as a Jew, she develops associations of torture which are not exactly reversed when she reverses the identification and calls herself the killer of her vampire-father. The speaker here can categorize and manipulate her feelings in name-calling, in rituals, in images, but these are only techniques, and her frenzied use of them suggests that they are methods she employs in the absence of any other. When she says, "Daddy, I have had to kill you," she seems to realize the necessity of the

exorcism and to understand the ritual she performs, but the frantic pitch of the language and the swift switches of images do not confirm any self-understanding. The pace of the poem reveals its speaker as one driven by a hysterical need for complete control, a need that stems from the fear that without such control she will be destroyed. Her simple, incantatory monologue is the perfect vehicle of expression for the orderly disordered mind. In talking to A. Alvarez, Plath called these poems "light verse." "Daddy" does not seem to fall easily into that category despite its nonsense rhymes and rhythms, its quickly flicking images. It is neither decorous nor playful. On the other hand, given its subject, neither is it ponderous or solemn. Above all it offers no insight into the speaker, no mitigating evidence, no justification. Plath's classification is clear perhaps only if we consider her speaker a parodic version of the poet. The speaker manipulates her terror in singsong language and thus delivers herself in "light verse" that employs its craft in holding off its subject. For all the frankness of this poem, the name-calling and blaming, the dark feeling that pervades it is undefined, held back rather than revealed by the technique. The poet who has created this speaker knows the speaker's strategies because they are a perverted version of her own, and that is the distinction between the speaker's "light verse" and the poet's serious poem. From her earliest madwomen and hysterical virgins to the late suicides and father-killers, Plath portrays characters whose stagey performances are subversions of the creative act. Absorbed in their rituals, they confess nothing. They are not anxious to make a breakthrough back into life. In fact, their energies are engaged in erecting a barricade against self-revelation. Plath's fascination with this parodic image of the creative artist stems from a deep knowledge of the machinations of the mind. If she reveals herself in these poems, she does so in the grotesque mirror of parody. If these poems come out of her own emotional experiences, as she said they did, they are not uninformed cries from the heart. Rather, she chose to deal with her experience by creating characters who could not deal with theirs and through their rituals demonstrate their failure. These poems, like the speakers in them, are superbly controlled; but the poet behind the poem uses her immense technical control to manipulate the tone, the rhythm, the rhyme, the pace of the speakers' language in order to reveal truths about the speakers that their obsessive assertions deny. Source: M. D. Uroff, "Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration," in Iowa Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1977, pp. 104-15. Reproduced by permission. Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism

The Monster in Plath's 'Mirror'

Critic: William Freedman Source: Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 108, No. 5, October, 1993, pp. 152-69. Reproduced by permission Criticism about: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), also known as: Victoria Lucas, Mrs. Ted Hughes Nationality: American

[(essay date October 1993) In the following essay, Freedman discusses Plath's use of the mirror as a symbol of female passivity, subjugation, and Plath's own conflicted self-identity caused by social pressure to reconcile the competing obligations of artistic and domestic life.] For many women writers, the search in the mirror is ultimately a search for the self, often for the self as artist. So it is in Plath's poem "Mirror." Here, the figure gazing at and reflected in the mirror is neither the child nor the man the woman-as-mirror habitually reflects, but a woman. In this poem, the mirror is in effect looking into itself, for the image in the mirror is woman, the object that is itself more mirror than person. A woman will see herself both in and as a mirror. To look into the glass is to look for oneself inside or as reflected on the surface of the mirror and to seek or discover oneself in the person (or non-person) of the mirror. The "She" who seeks in the reflecting lake a flattering distortion of herself is an image of one aspect of the mirror into which she gazes. She is the woman as male-defined ideal or as the ideal manqu, the woman who desires to remain forever the "young girl" and who "turns to those liars, the candles or the moon" for confirmation of the man-pleasing myth of perpetual youth, docility, and sexual allure. As such, she is the personification--or reflection--of the mirror as passive servant, the preconditionless object whose perception is a form of helpless swallowing or absorption. The image that finally appears in the mirror, the old woman as "terrible fish," is the opposite or "dark" side of the mirror. She is the mirror who takes a kind of fierce pleasure in her uncompromising veracity and who, by rejecting the role of passive reflector for a more creative autonomy, becomes, in that same male-inscribed view, a devouring monster. The woman/mirror, then, seeks her reflection in the mirror/woman, and the result is a human replication of the linguistic phenomenon the poem becomes. Violating its implicit claim, the poem becomes a mirror not of the world, but of other mirrors and of the process of mirroring. When living mirrors gaze into mirrors, as when language stares only at itself, only mirrors and mirroring will be visible. This parallel between person and poem suggests that the glass (and lake) in "Mirror" is woman--and more particularly the woman writer or artist for whom the question of mimetic reflection or creative transformation is definitive. For the woman--and especially for the mother--per se, the crucial choice is between the affirmation and effacement of the self: will she reflect the child or more generalized "other" as it presents itself for obliging reflection, or will she insist on her own autonomous identity and perception. To do the latter is to risk looking into the mirror and seeing, not the pleasing young girl, but the terrible fish. Viewed in these terms, "Mirror" may be read as a broadening and more sophisticated extension of poems like "Morning Song" and "Medusa," which question or reject the maternal role. "I'm no more your mother," announces the voice of "Morning Song," "Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow/Effacement at the wind's hand." To say as much, however, is to acknowledge what it denies. The statement succeeds only in rejecting the maternal identity for one that is identical with it, for that of the vaguely insubstantial image (the cloud) that is ultimately erased from the surface of its other, equally effaced identity as maternal mirror. The escape from mirror and mother to cloud does not permit an escape from their mutual fate as depersonalized victims of erasure. And the ambiguity of "its own" suggests that the

mirror as well as the cloud is effaced by the wind that blows the child into the mother's life. "Morning Song" ends with reconciliation and acceptance, an acceptance reflected in the developing animation of the poem's imagery: of the child from watch and statue to moth, cat, and singer; of the mother from walls and cloud to cow-heavy woman. "Medusa" ends with the rejection that presumably motivated it, the rejection of the poet's own mother as a kind of terrible sea creature that poisons, paralyzes, and devours:

Off, off, eely tentacle! There is nothing between us. Even here, however, there is an injected sense of the speaker as mother as well as child. The Medusa, apparently the mother, is also the child/mother's own newborn infant, a "tremulous breath at the end of my line . . . dazzling and grateful, / Touching and sucking." She is "Fat and red, a placenta" who, like a new unwelcomed baby, was not called, yet "steamed to me over the sea . . . Paralyzing the kicking lovers." The obliterating mother, then, is at the same time the infant whose emergence sucks life and identity from the child-cum-mother. Indeed, the evocation of the mother as devouring monster seems to be a reactive inversion of the perhaps more primitive sense that the speaking child consumes or threatens to consume its sacrificial mother. "Who do you think you are?" She asks harshly. "A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary? / I shall take no bite of your body, / Bottle in which I live." Here Plath as embryo or new offspring rejects the sacrificial offer of the mother's body, and the poem's enraged rejection of the monstrous mother may at bottom be a rejection of the mother's ironically devouring self-annihilation. A letter Plath wrote to her brother in 1953 reflects such an image of their mother: You know, as I do, and it is a frightening thing, that mother would actually kill herself for us if we calmly accepted all she wanted to do for us. She is an abnormally altruistic person, and I have realized lately that we have to fight against her selflessness as we would fight against a deadly disease . . . After extracting her life blood and care for 20 years we should start bringing in big dividends of joy for her . . . (Letter to Warren, May 12, 1953). A passage from Jung's "The Development of Personality," which Plath transcribed, describes the phenomenon of crushing maternal self-annihilation that Plath experienced and transformed into poetry. "Parents," wrote Jung, set themselves the fanatical task of always "doing their best" for the children and "living only for them." This claimant ideal effectively prevents the parents from doing anything about their own development and allows them to thrust their "best" down their children's throats. This so-called "best" turns out to be the very things the parents have most badly engaged in themselves. In this way the children are goaded on to achieve their parents' most dismal failures, and are loaded with ambitions that are never fulfilled. The parents Jung describes assume contradictory roles, just as Plath's image of the mother-woman-mirror as terrible fish assumes contradictory or at least contrary forms. On the one hand, it is an image of a monstrous autonomy that cannot perform the self-effacing function of infant-confirming mother. Instead, "reflecting its own mood or, worse still, the rigidity of her own defenses," it generates in the child the threat of chaos that produces the disturbed obsession with distorting mirrors in Plath's poetry. Conversely, this terrible fish or medusa may be the image of maternal self-annihilation, the mother's guilt-inducing refusal of autonomy. The required self-denial of new motherhood, if perpetuated or exaggerated, may, as Jung suggests, be as threatening as its opposite. As virtually exclusive nurturer of the infant and small child, the mother cannot win. Caught between annihilation of self and annihilation of other, and lanced on the sacrifice of self that may efface the other, her denigration, rejection, and perceived monstrosity are all but insured.

The same near-identity of assertive autonomy with an at least seemingly contradictory self-annihilation characterizes the language of "Mirror" and colors the poem's implicit treatment of the woman as writer. The poem is finally about language and imitation, about poetry and its relation to what it describes. As such, it is a poem that assumes a central place in the literature of female authorship, the literature that takes as its subject the woman as writer and her obligation to create for woman and herself a resistant and resilient language of her own. The popularity of Plath's relatively few poems of aggressive threat and power, poems such as "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy," misleads us. Far more of her poetry presents protagonists or personae who are basically passive and depersonalized, victimized and helpless. Like the mirror, the speakers in these poems--dolls, mannequins, stones, patients--are typically confined, often inanimate, absorbently passive, and devoid of personal initiative or will. They are, in short, images of the woman who, as Gilbert and Gubar document, inanimately animate the "mirror of the male-inscribed literary text." Much of Plath's poetry, in other words, is a mirror of the male text as mirror, a replication of the passive images caught on its surface. Just as the mirror can only reflect reality, the woman writer can only reflect male ideals and desires. Devoid of subjectivity and the power of narrative, the woman in many of Plath's poems "speaks" not only to the plight of woman generally, but, more particularly, to the woman as writer. For as Gilbert and Gubarargue, the mirror in much 19th- and 20th-century women's poetry and fiction is the locus of authorial self-discovery, the place in which the woman author or would-be author perceives both her silent subordination and the fierce urgency of repressed speech. The image of woman as reflector functions in several ways. As mother or woman, the mirror's principal and imposed obligation is to reflect infant and other--that is, she must present herself as the image mirrored in man's eyes. But as speaking mirror, the woman becomes a narrating reflector of herself as mirror and of whatever passes before it. She becomes the writer who writes of the mirror in which she perceives herself and of the mirror she is. She becomes the text in which that recording occurs. Through these lenses, the question of the object of perception gives place to the now central question of the nature of the narrator. The mirror as woman or mother reflects the other to itself. The mirror as text or writer reflects self and world in language that becomes a kind of mirror itself. But in both forms the principal conflict is between a selfsuppressing recapitulation of male expression and an autonomous resistance to the conventional truths and methods of his inscriptions. The connections are further entangled by the fact that a selection of a narrative technique inevitably determines the treatment of content. To let the mirror speak in self-defining ways that resist prior definition or restriction is to alter the image in the glass. That resistance is what is represented by the substitution of the "terrible fish" for the more attractive young girl in "Mirror." The mirror's opening announcement of its identity calls that identity into question and begins to transform the mirror from a passive reflector into an active speaker. The poem mirrors language's resistance to simple representation and reflects the resistance of the woman writer and the feminine text to the roles assigned them. It is this rebellion, this presumptuous arrogation of autonomy, that accounts for the shocking image of the terrible fish in the poem's concluding line. The terrible fish is not just a symbol of approaching old age: it is the image of "monstrous autonomy" that stares back at the literary woman in so many of her texts, often out of the mirror of that text into which she gazes in embittered self-search. "The woman writer's selfcontemplation," Gilbert and Gubar maintain, "may be said to have begun with a searching glance into the mirror of the male-inscribed literary text." It continues in her own text, where, as in Mary Elizabeth Coleridge's "The Other Side of the Mirror," the "woman, wild," "bereft of loveliness," her mouth a "hideous wound" bleeding "in silence and in secret," erupts into her poetry and fiction as demonic emblem of her independent identity, her monstrous renunciation of the mirroring angel. The speaker in Coleridge's poem is not a lonely, but a common figure. For like Coleridge, "the literary woman frequently finds herself staring with horror at a fearful image of herself that has been mysteriously inscribed on the surface of the glass." Plath's "Mirror" is in this tradition, its terrible fish a menacing image of its own self-terrifying achievement. There is, of course, a biographical dimension to this poem and its governing images, which intensifies the purely literary force of the work. Plath had a dual image of herself: she was a brightly silvered surface

concealing a demonic form that threatened to tear the fragile membrane--in other words, both a mirror and a fish. The mirror, of course, is the brilliant surface Plath presented to the world, as both woman and poet. As poet, Plath the mirror is the precise measurer and recorder of minutiae, the four-cornered goddess of aesthetic control. As woman, Plath the mirror is the strict and tightly disciplined achiever who glitteringly fulfilled all expectations, a perfect mirror of acquired parental and social standards of elegance, beauty and achievement--the persona that emitted what Lowell called "the checks and courtesies," her "air of maddening docility," and what Alvarez called an "air of anxious pleasantness." It is the persona that, as Plath herself described it, "Adher[ed] to rule, to rules, to rules," that, seemingly untroubled by her numbed submission, "Stay[ed] put," like the mirror fixed on the wall, "according to habit." It is the side George Stade labeled the "social cast of her personality, aesthetic, frozen in a cover girl smile. . . ." It is the ambitious but distinctly anti-feminist cook and housekeeper whose accents "are those of the American girl as we want her." This Plath, in short, is the mirror that reflects back what others wish to see and that is itself a perfect reflection of the feminine ideal in male eyes. But this Plath--it has become a commonplace--was only a facade, a fragile surface laid thickly over an inner turmoil Plath herself perceived as a slouching beast struggling for release. "There are two of me now," Plath writes grittily in "In Plaster": "This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one." The white person, like the mirror, "had no personality . . . she had a slave mentality." But the old yellow one, "ugly and hairy," is one of a profusion of monstrous forms threatening the placid surface from below. As in "Lady Lazarus," it is a cannibal fury rising from the dead. In "Fever 103" it is a flaming sinner and a "pure acetylene / Virgin." In "Daddy" it is the Electral avenger who stakes the vampire's heart; in "Stings" the sleeping queen bee with a menacing "self to recover," a "lion-red body" that, as Plath's demons typically do, rises as a "red scar" and a flaming comet. In "Mirror," the poem's deflective subject is itself a defense against its intimidating imagery and import. The "terrible fish" is not simply the image of aging and decay apparent in the surface narrative; it is another incarnation of the barely suppressed demon of sensuality and rage that charges Plath's poetry as it haunted her life. What is more, it is, appropriately, the devouring monster of the deep, disturbingly at home in the depths of Plath's element. In an autobiographical essay, "Ocean 1212-W" Plath recounts a crucial memory: "When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the walls of green when she caught my heels. What would have happened," Plath wonders, "if I had managed to pierce that looking-glass?" The sea is a looking glass in which she claims to have discovered, at two and a half, the "awful birthday of otherness," "the separateness of everything" and ultimately therefore of herself. The sea is the terrible country of the void, of the "darkness [that] is leaking from the cracks." The true habitat of the horrific buried self, it is also the environ of her father. As Plath confessed in a BBC interview. "I probably wished many times that he were dead. When he obliged me and died, I imagined that I had killed him." In a number of her poems, her father is the victim of suicide or murder, usually by drowning, for the sea is her father's element, and it is there she takes her revenge. When she announces in "Full Fathom Five," "father, this thick air is murderous / I would breathe water," she identifies herself as a dark swimmer in its waves, in effect the terrible fish who would return to her father. Whether she would return in order to love him like Electra or to destroy him as in "Daddy" matters little. Forbidden love and murder are but two faces of the same resurgent beast. That the appearance of the demonic in Plath's poetry is typically associated with the imagery of sea and water helps explain, in biographical terms, the substitution of lake for mirror in the poem. The terrible fish is implicit from the outset. It is contained in the rebellious rejection of the mirroring role in the opening lines of "Mirror" that ostensibly accept and define it. It is implicit, too, in the barely concealed harshness of the relentless veracity of the mirror's reflection, whose cruelty she unconvincingly denies. And it is explicit in the mirror's urge to "swallow immediately" whatever it sees. But the image of the fish's emergence requires that the mirror be transformed into water, Plath's symbol of the hideous depths in which the monster lives.

The terrible fish, then, is Plath's personal demon, the witch she strove to conceal beneath the snow white surface or to transform into the "pure gold baby" of "Lady Lazarus." In this reading, the poem's attempt to undermine the mirror's veritical claims with a figurative language that belies them is a linguistic replica of the poem's content, of the effort of the woman who "turns to those liars, the candles and the moon" to avert the terrible truth of her mounting ugliness and decay. Here, the flight from clarity and truth is also a flight, parallel to the young woman's and the author's, from the horrifying image of the woman as the devouring other. Her shocking emergence at the end of the poem marks the fearful triumph of a psychological reality over the linguistic efforts to avert it. The woman outside the mirror or lake is of course the woman whose image as terrible fish is also inside it, visible in its depths. To perceive oneself in the mirror or lake, then, is to recognize one's Jungian shadow as the dark underside of the shining surface. The terrible fish is not simply the time-transformed identity of the young girl; it is the Hydean alter-ego of the mirror or lake in whose depths it is shudderingly disclosed. Inside the woman-as-mirror, in other words, behind this physically restricted, passive, depersonalized reflector of the external world, lurks the minatory force that will emerge with full power and vengeance in some of the Ariel poems. To escape the obligations of literal truthfulness is not to escape the mirror of male texts that identify her as the obedient angel, but the opposite. It is to evade the monstrous truth the angel herself knows best and fears no less than does the male who protectively angelicizes her in order to prevent her transformation into monster. It is to look into the mirror and pretend one does not see the monster. Because it recognizes the danger both of reflecting and ignoring the world, "Mirror" can be seen as the turning point in Plath's development. The voice in poems such as "Stones," "Lorelei," "Tulips," "Love Letter," "Crossing the Water," "Purdah," "Face Lift," "Two Campers in Cloud Country," "Childless Woman," and dozens more is that of a woman who has accepted her depersonalization and passivity or who longs for the numbing purity it promises. In many of these poems, the stone, jade, plaster, or anesthetized persona shares the muted stage with old yellow, the lioness, the acetylene virgin, or other threatening figures from the depths, though it is not until her final poems, principally "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," that the menacing avenger explodes onto the surface as the dominant force in poems of assertive threat and rage. "Mirror" represents a kind of middle-ground between the extremes of passivity and action, numbing self-cancellation and aggressive self-assertion. It achieves its special position and effect by adopting the former guise in ways that renounce it for the latter. To assume the mirror's role is implicitly to accept the male-proscribed image of woman and mother. But the poem's method and equations situate the terrible fish within the lake and mirror and quietly establish an identity between them. The poem's implicit rejection of the mirror's claim to literal reflection is what generates the image of threatening female autonomy that the poem ostensibly disavows. The fish that is in effect in the mirror from the outset charges towards the mirroring surface at the end, its identity and import disguised by a subject that deflects our attention to figures apparently external to the speaking mirror. Blending passive inactivity with devouring hostility, the poem presages the vengeful uprising of "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" while maintaining the innocent, expressionless appearance of paper, stone, mannequin, or doll. "Mirror," in other words, lends to the monster in the attic (or basement) the face of the angel in the house. The dread fish is identified with the passive mirror by its presence within or behind it. But their identification with one another may have another source as well. The speaker sees herself "in" the mirror or lake in two senses: She is the fearful image in the depths beyond the glass and she is the mirror itself. The implication here is that Plath found her defenses hardly less repulsive than the assault they were created to ward off. The terrible fish observed in the lake's depths and rising toward its surface is identifiable with the mirror that reflects, neutrally and passively, whatever swims before it. The monster in the depths, in other words, is also the monster on the surface, perhaps more accurately the monstrosity of mere surface or lack of depth. The identification of the mirror with the terrible fish, then, erases the separation the dual identity was constructed to sustain. It suggests on the one hand that the mirror contains the fish, that beneath the angel in the house lurks the monster in the depths. But it may propose as well that a two-dimensional image of the angel is also is a form of monstrosity.

In "Crossing the Water," the title poem of Plath's second volume, the speaker is identified as one of "two black, cut-paper people" floating across the water as they float over the surface of their lives. Yet, as she observes, "the spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes." And here, too, the double meaning suggests itself. The spirit of blackness may refer to a dark force concealed beneath the cut paper surface. But, since the paper itself is identified as black, the stronger reading points toward an identification of twodimensionality with blackness--and both flatness and darkness are identified with the fish made terrible in "Mirror." The monster is seen not only in the mirroring self, but "in" that self as surface reflector. The woman as the passive, selfless reflector is inscribed in psychoanalysis, motherhood, and the male text and is submissively adopted by the woman as her own identity. But Plath shows it to be a monstrous evasion of reality and suppression of self. A woman who adopts the reflecting role is cruel primarily to herself. It is therefore inevitable that the last image the reflector swallows is that of the terrible fish, which is at once its concealed opposite and its concealing self. The mirror is an image of the woman writer in her two conflicting roles as wife/mother and as author. In the first she is the selfless reflector of man and infant, in the second the self-conscious, self-centering reflector of herself and of the world as she willfully perceives it. Traditionally the roles were seen, by women as well as men, as not merely conflicting but mutually exclusive. It was, in fact, the collective view of psychoanalytic theory that the woman who has "created" a child required no other creative exercise or outlet, and women felt the power, if not always the validity, of that argument in their lives. Some women writers have so internalized this argument that they have felt the fear Susan Sulciman describes: "With every word I write, with every metaphor, with every act of genuine creation, I hurt my child." The guilt this idea elicits necessarily produces feelings of aggression. In Plath's "Mirror," and in many more of her poems on motherhood and entrapment, this aggression wins out over any feelings of tenderness. Like the women in the writing of Anne Finch and Anne Elliot, Emily Dickinson and the Bront sisters, the persona in a few of Plath's poems--in "In Plaster," the Bee poems, "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy"-articulates what virtually her entire body of poetry represents: the striving of the fundamentally powerless woman for autonomy. "The great woman writers of the past two centuries," Gilbert and Gubar argue, "danced out of the debilitating looking glass of the male text into the health of female authority. Tracing subversive pictures behind socially acceptable facades, they managed to appear to dissociate themselves from their own revolutionary impulses even while passionately enacting such impulses." Plath hardly seems at home in this tradition. The female authority she stole or discovered assumed no healthy form. Rather, her work seems dangerously divided between poems in which she anesthetically dissociates herself from her aggressive or rebellious impulses and those, mostly later poems, in which she ferociously enacts them. In "Mirror" the contrary impulses come together--even as she dissociates herself from aggression, she acts it out. And while the poem's repression does not bespeak a thoroughly healthy freedom, Plath has found a way to allow her aggression to triumph over tenderness, but only within a controlled system that maintains the integrity of poem and personality alike. In "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf recalls a dream in which "I was looking in a glass when a horrible face--the face of an animal--suddenly showed over my shoulder." What she sees is a variant of the monster in the mirror familiar to women's poetry and fiction, the image of rebelliously monstrous autonomy typified by the madwoman in the attic and an uneasy crowd of ominous female forms that darken the mirroring text of women's fiction. As in Plath's poem, the young woman sees in the mirror the dread reflected image of a beast that is clearly an aspect of the self Woolf elsewhere identified as a self-less mirror for man's magnification. Mary Elizabeth Coleridge's "The Other Side of the Mirror" offers a more pertinent parallel, for it implies more strongly still the connection between feminine writing and monstrosity. In this poem, Coleridge traces the emergence of the monster from behind the angelic facade, a creature whose rage betrays the shallowness and fragility of the submissive pretense. This figure arises, as Gilbert and Gubar observe, "as if the very

process of writing had liberated [her] . . . from a silence in which neither she nor her author can continue to acquiesce." In Plath, too, I believe, it is the writing that liberates the monster--or rather generates her. To quote Gilbert and Gubar one final time, "If she is to be a poet the woman must deconstruct the dead self that is a male 'opus' and discover a living 'inconsistent' self." And the implicit reference to Plath's "Lady Lazarus" in the word opus--"I am your opus, / I am your valuable, / The pure gold baby / That melts to a shriek"--is as apt as the verb that effects the metamorphosis. For it is precisely by deconstructing the masculine mimetic language that entraps the woman in her traditional role that the speaking mirror exchanges the anxious young woman for the monstrous autonomy of the terrible fish. The fish is the woman as autonomous person and author. It is the role-rejecting woman/mother who, even as she proclaims her acceptance of the task, refuses passively to mirror man, infant, or whatever else is set before it. And it is the woman-as-writer who, even as she proclaims her obedient adherence to the mimetic model, adopts that model only to tease and overturn it. "She accepts the woman's role as accurate reflecting mirror in order to transcend it, to show how that very role inevitably thwarts and transcends itself." The mirror as woman and as writer takes on the figure of the four-cornered glass in order to shatter it against the non-mirroring language with which she affirms the comfort of the fit--to shatter it, too, by focusing on herself, making herself the subject of her own attention and the poem. It is the nature and occupation of the mirror selfeffacingly to reflect the other. In "Mirror," however, the glass is both subject and speaker at once. The poem begins with "I," a pronoun that appears five times in the first four lines and, together with "me" or "my," seventeen times in this poem of only eighteen lines. The mirror/woman, who is by definition without identity, defines and identifies herself. The persona that has no story, tells it, and in the defiant mirrorbreaking act of doing so, she becomes the terrible fish of assertive selfhood. To tell one's own story, even if it is, as it must be, the story of absence and effacement, is to establish a presence and to display, perhaps for the first time, the face behind the angelic silver mask. Plath's emergent monster, then, is not an imagined other, a beckoning fulfillment of hopeless ambition. It is the reconstruction of the speechless woman whose language deconstructs her verbal confession of mere reflective silence. This reconstructed self still bears the conscience of the complaint, and therefore the image of autonomy is not a thoroughly positive figure of assertive strength. The woman continues to subscribe to the male dread of female sexuality and to the male identification of female defiance or aggression with bestiality. The monster, then, does not so much dwell on the other side of the mirror; she is the other side of the mirror, the perpetuation of the mirror's male-inscribed ideal in a form that otherwise rejects it. The contradictions travel in both directions. The announcement of a mirroring silence or self-effacement implicitly rejects the identity it affirms. Yet the monstrous shape this autonomy assumes attests to the persistence of the woman's sense of self as dependent and faceless. The woman achieves autonomy in Plath's "Mirror" and comparable works by rejecting the phallocentric language whose fixed truth fixes woman as the mirroring or speechless other. The rejection of the false and insulting "truth" of woman's identity is effected in a language that undermines the very possibility of definable identity and truth. Woman achieves freedom from male definition at the price of all definition, freedom from the name with which the masculine text identifies her in the affirmation of unnamability. Yet, as in Conrad, the unnamed, too, may be a form of monstrosity or horror: the chilling truth at the heart of the darkness may be an unnamed evil or the evil of unnamability itself, the fearful prospect of truth as mere illusion. The stakes are perhaps lower in "Mirror," the curse a mixed blessing of menacing independence and creativity. But the merging dichotomy is present here as well. In these terms, the terrible fish is not only the monstrous autonomy of woman as personally or artistically creative self. It is also the impossibility of all autonomy or self-definition. Defining herself in and as that which cannot be defined, the woman writer comes perilously close to her previous condition of subjectlessness. That is the price of creative autonomy viewed in terms of resistance and dissociation. Different in several ways from other poems on "monstrous" female autonomy, creativity is not the manifest subject of "Mirror," and the terrible creature is not the acknowledged alter-ego of the speaker. The image, moreover, retains more of its primordial menace as both monster and internal threat than in most of the poems of the genre. There is little apparent nobility or dignity in the terrible fish, and its immediate if not

exclusive prey seems to be not man or "the oppressor" but the mirror (or lake) itself and the young woman who is drowned in it. Almost to the very end Plath remained ambivalent, retained her dual identity, and could not celebrate liberation or defiance unperplexed. Unlike Lady Lazarus, Plath's mirror is a cannibal Charybdis who either has not yet identified the enemy or is not prepared to attack it. Finally and most impressively, however, unlike most poems that consciously identify their beast of creative enterprise, "Mirror" generates its emblem of autonomy in the language and processes of a poem that has ostensibly made its peace with mere reflection. The terrible fish is not so much an image in the poem as an image of the poem and its achievement, the self-generated product of its method. Source: William Freedman, "The Monster in Plath's 'Mirror,'" in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 108, No. 5, October, 1993, pp. 152-69. Reproduced by permission. Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism