Love Love Love; Sylvia Plath

My absolute favourite poet!

The recorded readings of her Ariel poems on YouTube are spine chilling! These are the words to an oral I presented to my year 12 English Studies class:

Write the words to an oral presentation where you discuss your thoughts regarding the emotional impact of the ideas explored by one of the core poets studied in class.

Artists carry the world on their shoulders; they feel acutely the anguishes of society and the harshness of nature. This is especially true for poet Sylvia Plath. As a confessional writer, to read her poetry is to gain an insight into her character, her soul. It is an extremely personal experience. Plath expertly uses imagery, combined with clever metaphors to express her oppression, her suffering at the hand of men and her struggle to find herself, the immaculate wife and mother, or the artist. The thematic concerns of her poetry, expressly childbirth, oppression, domestication and madness, often lend to feminism, and as such have significantly influenced and promoted the cause.

Plath is universally known for her explicit use of holocaust imagery, especially in her Ariel poems ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’. She often parallels her personal pain and torment to the unjust persecution of Jews by the German soldiers. Her persecutors in these poems are her father and husband, and by extension all men. Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’ is perhaps her most vengeful of men, she writes:

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you

Plath’s repetition of the word ‘brute’ conjures up a negative connotation of men (the Fascist), an image of intimidation. Her use of alliteration of the letter ‘b’ echoes the sound and motion of a boot in the face – symbolising dominance.

Many of Plath’s poems are pessimistic and clearly illustrate her feministic nature. Perhaps the best example is her poem ‘Mushrooms’, wherein she uses subtle metaphor to link the growth and population expansion of mushrooms to the struggles of women in the 1950’s to overcome the restraints of the role of ‘housewife’. Imagery and metaphor is paramount in this poem. She parallels the mushrooms to women, giving human qualities ‘toes and noses’ and ‘soft fists’ to the mushrooms. Noses and toes are dainty, and often thought of as womanly, fragile. Issues of domesticity are also present in the poem. She writes:

We are shelves, we are

Tables, we are meek

Here she objectifies women, giving them little importance. They are useless objects, living on the ‘crumbs of shadow’ of their husbands, fathers. Plath utilizes this technique for a similar purpose in many of her later poems, for instance, ‘The Applicant’. She compares women to ‘a living doll’, and goes on to say ‘it can sew, it can cook’. The personification of the doll is particularly effective; challenging the roles of men and women in a patriarchal society. She writes:

Here is a hand

To fill it and willing

To bring teacups and roll away headaches

And do whatever you tell it

The woman is objectified, a domestic hand to serve the man. She is referred to as ‘it’, the woman has no individuality, no identity, she is ‘naked as paper to start’. The woman is vulnerable, ‘I notice you are stark naked’. This poem acutely demonstrates the way in which women are objectified in her society, and treated as though they are merchandise.

In many of Plath’s poems she presents protagonists of personae who are passive and depersonalised, often helpless. Women are often objectified – dolls, mannequins, stones – inanimate objects. They are the ‘reflection’ of the male-defined ideal. Her poem ‘Mirror’ exemplifies her ideas pertaining to female passivity – her own conflicted self-identity caused by social pressure to adopt a domestic life and her desire to pursue her writing as an individual. She writes:

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.

The mirror is the personification – reflection – of herself. As a mother (or woman) her imposed obligation is to reflect man and infant - a passive servant. This image is also presented in her poem ‘Edge’:

The moon has nothing to be sad about,

Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.

Her blacks crackle and drag.

In this poem, the moon serves the same purpose as the mirror. Traditionally, women are connoted with the moon and men with the sun. The moon relies on the sun to give it light, thus women are reliant on men.

In the second stanza of ‘mirror’ the mirror has transformed into a lake, a terrible fish lurks in the darkness beneath the surface. Plath writes:

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

The fish symbolises her rejection of the role of mirror – her refusal to present herself as the image mirrored in the male’s eyes. Each day her conviction of her own self-identity cultivates.

Ultimately, however, I feel she finds liberation and triumph over the oppression of men in her life. With vengeance, she writes, at the conclusion of ‘Lady Lazarus’:

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

The woman has risen from the dead (her submissive state) like the legendary phoenix – men mean little to her now; she is her own individual woman. No longer does she bow to the whims of her oppressors, she has a new sense of empowerment. Plath urges all women to break free of the chains of domesticity, enumerating in her poem ‘Mushrooms’:

We shall by morning

Inherit the earth.

Our foot’s in the door.

Plath is hopeful for the future of women in society and evokes this triumph in her readers. Ironically, however, she ended her life by her own hand but a year before the feminist movement began. Sylvia Plath’s intelligent use of imagery, personification and metaphor combine to create particularly significant and moving poetry. I can relate exclusively to her poetry, not only heartrending poems, but also those which are euphoric. As a woman, even in today’s society, I identify with Plath because I know that in the near future I myself will struggle with a similar ultimatum: motherhood or career.