Sylvia Plath is regarded as one of the major, dynamic and admired poets of the twentieth century. She is considered a controversial figure in the history of American literature, and this view is supported by Joyce Carol Oates’ description of Plath in a New York Times Book Review.
She is particularly famous for her poetry collection Ariel (1965). This book is a moving work because of the pathos it evokes in the reader. There is also an ongoing controversy about this book in between Plath’s partisans and opponents.
Her work attracted readers because of her attempt to present her despair, obsession with death, and violent emotions. Her works are earnestly autobiographical, and in her poems, she explores her mental anguish. There are traces of her failed, unhappy marriage, troubles, and conflicts with her parents and the problems caused by her vision of herself.
She wrote about different issues, and these include social restrictions on individuals, nature, individual desires, and dreams, etc. but her writing was essentially different from others. She didn’t write with the superficial politeness; rather, she exposed the ugliness of what seemed ugly to her.
In her writing, she expressed the primaeval fears and elemental forces. This way, her writing tore apart the veil used to hide the contradictions in postwar-American society. She showed the tensions that were in action just beneath the surface, and nobody was paying attention to them.
Her poems are hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, beating violently, and this shows the feelings of hurt and profligate imagination. She is a controlled voice of cynicism, which delineates the boundaries of reality and hope. She is considered a brutal poet because of her ability to transform her poetic voice to avenge womanhood and innocence. In her works, she has made poetry and death inseparable.
She is seen by feminists as a gifted woman driven by her authoritarian father, which ruined her life. The unfaithfulness of her husband drove her into madness. Some see her as a confessional poet who expressed in her works the hectic, uncontrollable things which needed to be thought about. In her last days’ works, she has expressed a unique image of death, which is though preeminent but not oppressive.
She experimented with different forms in poetry. She was influenced by writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, etc. It was the last two poets to whom confessional school she is linked.
Shortly she is a master, and her poetry is regarded by many writers as an inspiration. While to some readers, it evokes a sense of disgust, confirming her controversial status.
A Short Biography of Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was born to a German immigrant professor in America, Otto Emil Plath, and his student-turned-wife, Aurelia Schober Plath, in Boston. She was born on October 27th, 1932. Her mother was also of German descent whose parents had immigrated from Austria. Her father taught German and Biology at Boston University while her mother taught English and German at a high school.
Two and half years after her birth, her brother, Warren, was born. When she was about four years old, her family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts. Her father had treatable diabetes while he was misdiagnosed with lung cancer. He had his leg amputated, and he never returned home after this surgery. An embolism became the reason for his death.
In 1940 her grandparents moved to their house to provide her mother additional support. Later her mother found a job at a university, and they moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts. Sylvia Plath was admitted to Smith College, and there she received three scholarships in a year. Opportunities were opening for her, and at the same time, the first bouts of depression were taking her.
The first major attack of depression came as a result of the news that she was not accepted for the Frank O’Connor writing course at Harvard. She was much disappointed by this news and left a note to her mother that she was going on a day-long walk. Instead of going out, she hid in the basement and took sleeping pills. The next day she was found there and was taken to hospital.
She returned to college in spring 1954 and was one of the four graduates this year who scored the highest GPA. She secured a Fulbright scholarship to Newham College, Cambridge, England. There she met with Ted Hughes, and they got married in 1956. This was the time when she became active and built a brilliant social life.
She moved with her husband back to the United States after her graduation and taught at Smith College. She was exhausted by this experience and left for Boston to continue her writing career. They moved back to England, and it was found that she was pregnant. She gave birth to her daughter Rebecca, and this gave her much pleasure.
It was the year when she had signed a contract for The Colossus and Other Poems. This collection was favourably received in the United States, and this followed her next work, The Bell Jar.
In this novel, she wrote about her attempt to commit suicide at the age of twenty. They went to a country manor house in the summer of 1962. There she came to know that her husband and Assia Wevill were involved with each other. This led to the straining of their relationship ending in the tacit separation. She lived in London before she committed suicide. She faced financial problems; there are focused on her writing.
She took sleeping pills and consumed gas from a stove, which led to her death on April 11th, 1963.
Sylvia Plath’s Writing Style
Like every true writer, Sylvia Plath has a distinct style, and this was developed by her. It differentiated her from her contemporaries as well as predecessors. The main themes that she explores in her novel are individualism, death, mental illness, etc.
Her diction is precise, but she expresses it informally. There are testimonies, descriptions, and anecdotes in her works. There is a variation seen in her syntax from asyndeton to polysyndeton.
The tone of her poetry is dark and sardonically honest, which is furthered by the features and techniques she uses. The negative connotation of words can be seen in her descriptions, and this gives a view of her being depressed. There is a lack of emotion in her works, which can be confirmed by the use of concise sentences and phrases.
There is a rich use of literary figures like similes and metaphors in her poems and novel. There are concrete and specific images that are testimonials to her skill and excellence in her works.
Abstract concepts and non-living things are personified in her novel. This is done to give descriptions of life that otherwise wouldn’t have been that effective. There is a variety of sentence structures; some are blunt and dry, some run-ons, others long and descriptive. This creates the desired effect, which is the pervading gloom, bleakness, and a sense of emptiness.
Opposing Perspectives
In her poems, we see that there is a constant implicit mention of the oppression she faces. This is seen in her poems The Colossus and Little Fugue. Consciousness is explored on a more personal level. There are regrets and the memories of a dead father, as well as the struggle to recover from these memories, which carry the connotations of oppressing days. In opposition to this, we see in Daddy that there are efforts to revivify her dead father.
In these poems, we see that they are confessional. They illuminate the point that patriarchal culture shapes the psyche of a woman. We see that in her poems, there is a symbiosis between an individual and a larger oppressive design. We see in these poems that the daughter looks for her father as an oracle. He is the “guarantor of all values” and ensures the meaning in the life of his child.
The perspective is double, which is both critical and devoted. The daughter is seen restoring the statue in The Colossus, but her emotions are contradictory as there is disagreement within herself. On one side, she wants to join the fragments of the statue while on the other side, she is reluctant to join them. She shows her reverence for him by praising his appearance, but in the very next line, it is compared to a barnyard.
In these lines, she both glorifies the memory of her father as well as comically challenges his oracular status. She tells the statue, which is, in fact, a conference with her father, that she has seen oppression for thirty years and unwisely bore them.
Unending Searches
There is not only an impossible personal quest seen in her poems, but they also speak of the lost Western ideal. Again the example is from her poem The Colossus, where she uses stony imagery, which refers to the unyielding cold male colossus. It is considered by some critics as an admission of the need for a sense of security, which she had in her childhood.
But she moves ahead and comes to her present, and there we see that she is not content to wait further. These lines go against the grain of the poem because there are no metaphors of hope or any anaphora, which can be a clue to her pessimism.
The tone of the poem is hovering between wearied impatience and lightly accusing.
Maternal and Paternal Tug of War
In her bee poems, she views herself as a biological being and her father as the beekeeper, which is a disturbing view. In poems The Arrival of the Bee Box and Wintering, we notice that there is a shift in the essential nature of the bees. They become agents of destruction from the power of creation. This is a symbolical use of bees as women who can refuse to be used by men for creation.
It is an autobiographical narrative that Plath assigned a mythic status. There are references to the transgressive appropriation of power, forbidden desires, and gender identities that rework the psychodrama in her earlier works. In her poem The Beekeeper’s Daughter, she shows the disdain and desire for the authoritative role that her father had.
She moves between her roles of a father and a mother showing the destructive role of the former. It is evident in her poem The Arrival of the Bumblebees.
Counter Aggression
There is a bee life metaphor in her poems that expresses the exploitation of women. Beekeepers, in her poem The Arrival of the Bee Box, are described as manipulators and oppressors. This refers metaphorically to the role of men in society.
This metaphor expresses the fear in the human psyche and refers to the fundamentally female attributes. The poet brings the readers’ attention to the mercurial shift to aggressiveness from being oppressed. It is a paradox in their behavior because they become aggressors from the victims.
It shows the political menacing of women when they are referred to as bees. They can stand up for the collective cause and drive away from the oppressor. Her poems The Swarm and Arrival of the Bee Box are an example of it.
Racism
In Plath’s poetry, there is an implicit and unacknowledged racial (essentially racist) factor. In her collection Ariel, the bee poems sequence, there is the intertextual relation of Tar Baby with racism. Many critics recognize the image of the insect queen as the theme of female selfhood. A reading by Toni Morrison reveals that this self is a white self in which there is a partial black construction of fear and repression.
Morrison sees the Africanist presence in Plath’s poems as destructive. In, The Arrival of the Bee Box, simple color imagery changes to racism by recurrent application of color dark and black. There is repetitive use of terms like ‘dark,’ ‘black,’ ‘African hands,’ ‘swarmy,’ and the trade of African slaves. This she compares with the oppression of women.
African slaves are compared to savages connotatively. There is a benevolent portrayal of the white owners of the slaves. An instance is a line “Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.” Racial discourse is used defining in the abuse of bees.
Sounds of the Poem
In her poem, Lady Lazarus, her late poems’ aesthetic principles are defined. The dominant effects of the poem are derived from the colloquial language. It appears a monologue that starts with conversational opening and then clipped warnings of the ending. It shows her psychic disintegration and pain.
In contrast to simple colloquial language, there are Latinate terms introduced. The plain style is given enormous power by the repetition of keywords and phrases. This shows Lady Lazarus gathering power and preparing for the assault.
Genocide Imagery
In her final poems, Sylvia Plath has used Auschwitz imagery. There is no personal justification for the use of this imagery; it is an aesthetic step to present a pure image. Her poetry can’t be separated from her biography. The death-camp imagery is important because it plays the role of touchstone for her sincerity and lack of cynicism.
The most relevant poem in this discussion is Daddy. There are regular rhythms in this poem and essential nursery rhymes. The same reference is there in her poem Getting There. It is overtly said in Daddy where she tells of an engine that is taking her to Dachau, Belsen, or Auschwitz like a Jew. This imagery on one side is the reference to her sufferings, and on other sides, it has the meaning of a memorial because of its essential nature as a symbol.
Revamping of Elegy
Plath, as said earlier, left off from her contemporary writers, and this is evident in the case of elegy. An embodiment of this fact is her poem, Daddy. In Daddy, she has adopted an ambivalent narrative where, on one side, she depends on his discourse while, on the other side, she shows resistance towards it. She portrays his demonic and fascistic violence. She presents this new elegy as the destroying image of the subject.
She uses the metaphor of Nazi concentration camps to present patriarchal oppression. She was the victim of her father’s violence, and this she fights back and batters with the same aggression. She uses this patriarchal discourse in the elegy to banish and kill the patriarch.
She, at a single time, glorifies and parodies the patriarch. There is a parody of a number of motifs of this genre. She demolishes the image of traditional elegy’s psychological backbone.
Internalization of the Apocalypse
She has internalized both the roles of avenger and victim. She descends into darkness and then rises as a terrible mother in her collection Ariel. She has made her poetry unusual, not with her preoccupation with death but with a mysterious rebirth, and she ascends not to redeem herself but to seek vengeance.
In her poem Ariel she gives the image of “God’s Lioness.” There is an attempt to describe sexual interaction without a male. It is a transcendent image where the sexual conflict is resolved by a cosmic unity.
There is no loss of self into another, but there is a loss of world see where nothing remains but the ‘cauldron.’ This presents fire and sun that are about to come.