*

Three main threads run throughout Sylvia Plath’s struggle with

dominant aesthetics: binarism, most centrally in the trio of oppositions
life versus art, in versus out, and beauty versus ugliness; perfectionism,
especially the idea of woman as perfect; and poetic formalism.” These
echo many of the same issues H.D. and Hurston negotiated in the
previous generation. As the second generation, Brooks and Plath build
upon their predecessors’ dialogue, articulating an alternative aesthetic
vision. Like Brooks’, Plath’s argument with aesthetic ideology
develops in three main phases. Initially, Plath’s poetry follows the
precepts of second-generation modernists and accepts the aesthetic
In Search of “Part Two” 105

values inherent in her concerns with binarism, perfection, and

formalism. Like Brooks, however, Plath recognizes the position of
women within these frames as problematic and confining, and uses
irony as a tool of interrogation. In her second phase Plath sketches an
alternative, domestic aesthetic in her novel The Bell Jar (1962). The
novel, as a genre unburdened for Plath by formalist aesthetics, effects
this key transition in Plath’s oeuvre. After The Bell Jar, Plath’s
development of a domestic aesthetic rejects poetic formalism, allowing
her pursuit of a looser poetic consonant with her own ‘glimpse of part
two.” Plath’s third, truncated, phase attempts a radical, decolonizing
aesthetic vision.
 Plath’s early, seemingly traditional phase is illustrated in her
poems “On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad” (1957) and
“Virgin in a Tree” (1958). In their shared concern with poetry, life, and
art and use of images of dryads and trees, both poems echo H.D. at her
most “Greek”—and modernist. “On the Difficulty” in particular
revoices H.D.’s poem “Midday,” in which H.D. allegorizes her anxiety
of authorship (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman). (That these two poems
are part of a series of poetic “exercises” assigned by Plath’s husband,
Ted Hughes, underscores the parallel to H.D.’s anxiety of authorship.)
In “On the Difficulty” Plath articulates her phase one aesthetic, in
which art controls life. Although the poem opens with domestic details
of “blunt pencils, rosesprigged coffee cup, / Postage stamps, stacked
books’ clamor and yawn,” they are not accorded aesthetic value
(Collected Poems 65); rather this lively profusion is mere “backtalk,”
requiring a “vaunting mind” to “impose / Its order on what is” (66).
Even if formed into art, the domestic details would not satisfy the artist-
figure of the poem, who craves to create art by “fantasy alone” (66).
However, Plath problematizes this life versus art aesthetic by
inserting the issue of gender in the final stanza:

‘No doubt now in dream-propertied fall some moon-eyed,

Star-lucky sleight-of-hand man watches
My jilting lady squander coin, gold leaf stock ditches,
And the opulent air go stud with seed,
While this beggared brain
Hatches no fortune,
106 Embodying Beauty

But from leaf, from grass,

Thieves what it has.” (66)

The artist-figure, implicitly female, who has been unable to conjure up

a dryad, wryly contrasts herself to an explicitly male artist-figure for
whom this aesthetic maneuver (conjuring up dryads by fantasy alone) is
commonplace. It appears the female artist-figure suffers from an
anxiety of authorship, in which she feels her gender prevents her from
attempting the aesthetic ideals of male hegemony.
 However, Plath’s insistent irony throughout the poem undercuts
any such conclusion. First, she mocks as “arrogant,” and “brag[ging]”
the “importunate head[‘s]” desire to create art by fantasy alone (66). In
each of the three following stanzas, Plath repeatedly returns to life and
‘the real’ as the true benchmarks of artistic vision. The female artist’s
“tree stays tree”’; no dryad appears to “hoodwink the honest earth which
pointblank / Spurns such fiction / As nymphs; cold vision / Will have
no counterfeit / Palmed off on it” (66). In this construction, the tree, the
earth and cold vision serve as aesthetic emblems of the real; the
seemingly desired dryad becomes a “fiction” by comparison. The final
four lines of the poem present the female artist figure as building her art
“from leaf, from grass” (66).8 While she seems to denigrate this
“[t]hiev[ing]” and “beggared” aesthetic, it assumes a position of
integrity at the end of the stanza, following the description of the male
artist figure as “some moon-eyed, / Star-lucky sleight-of-hand man”
(66). Thus, Plath constructs in this poem a set of aesthetic values that
subtly undercut dominant aesthetic ideals. By grounding aesthetic value
in the natural, she presages her phase two recourse to the domestic, in
which she aestheticizes life into art and re-defines beauty as usefulness.
In “Virgin in a Tree” Plath draws upon and perpetuates the
oppositions of hegemonic aesthetics previously mentioned (life versus
art, in versus out, beauty versus ugliness). The poem relies upon them
to make its point. However, Plath’s irony targets the gender bias behind
the idealization of beauty in an art for art’s sake aesthetic, voicing her
awareness of the limitations of some traditional poetic themes for
women writers and readers. In “Virgin in a Tree” Plath’s irony is
palpable, despite the poem’s classical Greek subject matter. The
opening stanza announces the poem as a “parody” of myths in which
In Search of “Part Two” 107

women become trees to prevent rape (Collected Poems 81). Her method
in this poem involves a scene of ugliness in which, like Brooks, she
critiques the aesthetic idealism of beauty and art for art’s sake. Plath
articulates the in/out trope underlying the myths, in which the virgin is,
variously, “sheathe[d],” “protect[ed]” or “constrict[ed]” in wood (81),
and, thus supposedly becomes beauty immortalized: “the serene and
seraphic beauty / Of virgins for virginity’s sake” (82). Plath mocks an
art for art’s sake aesthetic because it ignores the gender issue in the
larger social context and inaccurately idealizes beauty. As the scene of
ugliness in the poem reveals, the beautiful virgin has deteriorated:
“Untongued, all beauty’s bright juice sours” (82).
Plath felt strongly the limits of formalist poetry and codified in her
discourse an opposition between poetry and prose in which prose
embraced all that she felt conventional poetry could not, including the
domestic.® Her poem, “Poems, Potatoes™ (1958), illustrates how Plath,
like many of her contemporaries, began to chafe at formal restraints. In
this poem, Plath characterizes poetic “word and line” as “defining,”
“muzzl[ing]” and “without conscience”; they “[s]hortchange” and,
ultimately, “dissatisfy” (106). In the final stanza, Plath points toward
her next phase, the domestic: “Unpoemed, unpictured, the potato /
Bunches its knobby browns on a vastly / Superior page; the blunt stone
also” (106). Here Plath presents an alternative, nonartistic aesthetic that
allows potatoes and stones. That this may require more space than a
poem lies in her word choice, “vastly.”
 “Poems, Potatoes” was written in 1958, the year she stole the pink
Smith memo paper for drafting her novel The Bell Jar. While Plath had
written prose from an early age, her journal and other writings suggest
she began at this time to rely on prose as that “unpoemed,” transitional
form in which she could articulate new aesthetic concerns and
incorporate content previously relegated to the margins of her poetic
discourse. In her journal, Plath wrote: “Prose sustains me. I can mess it,
mush it, rewrite it, pick it up any time—rhythms are slacker, more
variable, it doesn’t die so soon” (186).
The Bell Jar enacts Plath’s allegory of aesthetic hegemony and a
female writer’s attempts to overturn it.!® The main character, Esther,
acts as an aesthetic pawn, at first accepting the aesthetic ideals and
standards promulgated by the literary world and Mademoiselle
108 Embodying Beauty

magazine, then, after an aesthetic epiphany, searching for a ‘glimpse of

part two’ in which she could escape hegemonic aesthetics. Scenes of
beauty throughout the text present the colonized aesthetic discourse
within which the female writer must operate; scenes of ugliness depict
the costs of refusal. The text as a whole is placed within a domestic
frame that ultimately aestheticizes the domestic, yet replaces the value
of beauty with that of use.
Although Esther’s aesthetic struggle is truncated, the frame of the
novel suggests an alternative, domestic aesthetic. The speaker of the
novel, Esther as an adult and mother of a child, notes how she has used
some of the presents from her guest editorship, including, “last week I
cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with”
(3). This presents an aesthetic of use and implicitly contrasts with
Esther’s more traditional aesthetic response in the Mrs. Willard’s rug
scene, which I will turn to momentarily. Rather than elevating the
sunglasses case to the artistic realm, Esther as an adult allows the value
of the glasses case to lie in its usefulness and appeal to a baby. That
Plath places this scene of re-defined beauty on page three suggests she
intends the reader to read Esther’s aesthetic journey through the lens of
this alternative, domestic aesthetic of value.
Esther’s position early in the novel parallels that of the colonized
Dovima of the Avedon photo. Although Esther won the guest
editorship by her writing, the ‘rewards’ are focused on her beauty:
fashion shows, hair stylings, make-up, and endless photo sessions (2).
Esther herself accepts this beauty versus brains opposition, as her
description of Jay Cee suggests: “She wasn’t one of the fashion
magazine gushers with fake eyelashes and giddy jewelry. Jay Cee had
brains, so her plug-ugly looks didn’t seem to matter” (5). While
seeming to accept Jay Cee despite her lack of beauty, Esther
perpetuates the aesthetic evaluation of women based on physical
appearance.!!
Esther’s guest editorship, however, comes for her at a time of
aesthetic negotiation, a strugle underlined by her view of Jay Cee. As
an intelligent young woman, Esther is subjected to the same pressures
many young women of her generation face: to be beautiful, to be an
aesthetic object, to choose between a career and marriage. The novel
opens with the tension she feels between the execution of the
In Search of “Part Two" 109

Rosenbergs and her own aestheticization by the beauty culture. All she
can think of is “the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'd been to buy all those
uncomfortable, expensive clothes™ (1). Being a beautiful object seems
trivial compared to the intellectual and social issues involved in the
Rosenberg case.
This aesthetic negotiation evolves in the weeks and months
preceding Esther’s trip to New York. Framed in the novel as a choice
between a career and marriage, Esther’s struggle with the position of
the domesticity in her life marks Plath’s site of struggle with
developing a domestic aesthetic in her writing. During her stay in New
York, Esther recalls a scene illustrating this intersection of aesthetics,
the domestic, and gender:

Once when I visited Buddy I found Mrs. Willard braiding a rug out of
strips of wool from Mr. Willard’s old suits. She’d spent weeks on that
rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and greens patterning the
braid, but after Mrs. Willard was through, instead of hanging the rug
on the wall the way | would have done, she put it down in place of
her kitchen mat, and in a few days it was soiled and dull and
indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in
the five and ten. (69)

In this scene of beauty Esther wants to elevate Mrs. Willard's rug to the
artistic realm. She would hang it on the wall like a painting, rather than
allow it to be usefully employed. While Silvia Bovenschen reads this
scene as a positive example of how women’s creative work that has
been devalued finally is accorded artistic status, Teresa de Lauretis
strongly takes issue with such a construction. As de Lauretis points out,
Esther’s response to Mrs. Willard's rug shares the dominant modernist
aesthetic assumption that creative productions must be elevated to an
artistic realm in order to have value (Technologies of Gender 131). In
de Lauretis’ terms, Esther aestheticizes Mrs. Willard’s rug, an act
which ultimately reprises the problems in dominant aesthetics. Once
used, the rug, for Esther, becomes ugly; its value is cheapened, and it is
not art.
Esther’s negotiation of aesthetic values reaches a crisis in New
York. One key scene of beauty and ugliness demonstrates the negative