Did Sylvia Plath overcome her feeling of entrapment?

Sylvia Plath’s poetry is a response to her lack of power. Examine her Selected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes, to determine whether, in writing poetry, she is exerting power or simply expressing defeat.

It can be argued that a lot of Sylvia Plath’s writing was a response to a lack of power resulting from a sense of psychological and social entrapment, both as a girl and young woman growing up in early twentieth century America and later as a married woman in Britain. However, through her poetry, she constantly strove to perfect a voice to free herself from these constrictions. Extremely aware, as she was, of the feelings of rage, sickness and despair that can defeat any human being, she nevertheless, willed herself to overcome these demons by means of an audacious and disciplined exploration of them. Before her final defeat by suicide, it cannot be said that she gave in to or was defeated by extreme emotions. Even when exposing the darkest recesses of her soul and psyche or when teetering on the edge of madness, misery, and death, she is able to cock a snook at the grimness of the human condition with a defiant energy and celebrate the wonders of life despite all its flaws and injustices.

This is not to say, however, that her poetry is in any way predictable. The majority of her poems defy conclusive categorization or any sort of definitive interpretation. Undoubtedly, they are powerful, in terms of style, form and language, but it may be said that some contain a sense of latent defeat as well. In ‘Spinster’, for example, the speaker shrinks from the natural attractions of spring, usually associated with vitality and new life, in favour of ‘scrupulously austere’ winter, with its ‘frosty discipline’. She prefers to withdraw ‘neatly’ and let ‘idiots/Reel giddy in bedlam spring’. Here the speaker in the poem expresses her aversion to the disorder of spring. It is inferred, also, that she feels threatened by the amorous inclinations of the suitor she is walking out with, echoed in the ‘birds’ irregular babel’. She has a longing to retreat to a cold, bleak territory of ‘ice and rock’, which suggests that she is happy to forgo any sort of emotional attachment. She also wants to shut herself away in a fort-like house, which will be impregnable to any ‘insurgent man’ who might come to break it down:

‘With curse, fist, threat

Or love, either.’

Here, in the last short line of the poem, there would appear to be a change of tone, from superior self-satisfaction to pathos. She is implying that the spinster, in shutting out love, is doomed to a cold empty existence. The blunt, monosyllabic nouns of the final two lines tersely reflect the defeated spinster’s situation, as well as showing a deeper layer of understanding.

The regular and controlled rhythm of ‘Spinster’, appropriately reflecting the neat, determined nature of her existence, contrasts with the extravagant, fluid rhythms in ‘Tulips’, written in 1961. The tulips that the speaker in the poem receives jolt her out of her contented inertia and the ‘quiet’, ‘snowed-in’ ‘peacefulness’ of the hospital ward, where she is recovering from a surgical operation. The colourful, life-affirming flowers are almost ‘too excitable’ and disturbing at the beginning of the poem, but in the end, she knows that she must choose what they represent – life with all its pain and difficulties as opposed to non-participation in life. It is not an easy choice, however. There is quite a lot of tension in the poem. The passiveness and tranquillity of the ward is sensuously captured by the ‘eye that will not shut between two white lids’. The continual toing and froing of the staff is strikingly conveyed not only by repetition in the phrase, ‘The nurses pass and pass,’ but also by the comparison of the nurses to gulls that ‘pass inland in their white caps’. This image gives a vivid impression, not only of the flapping of the nurses’ headgear as they move about, but also of how numerous they are as the ‘white caps’ remind us of waves on the sea. Also, in the next stanza, she compares her body to a pebble which the nurses tend ‘as water/Tends to the pebbles it must run over’. This startling image very effectively conveys how immobile and impassive she is, lying in her bed, as well as giving an intriguing picture of how she is luxuriating in the tender care of the nurses.

However, there is no real joy in her situation; with stark frankness she goes on to describe a state of ‘numbness’. She conjures up the colour black, comparing her ‘patent leather overnight case’ to a ‘black pillbox’. This colour is often associated in her poetry with feelings of lifelessness and defeat. It is linked here with the colour white, also bringing to mind images of emptiness and sterility, and both colours are used in this way in ‘Spinster’. Here it is also linked to her personal ‘baggage’, which includes her ‘husband and child smiling out of the family photo’. The ‘pillbox’ simile conveys an image of a military attack, adding to the thread of vulnerability, which runs through the poem. There are, though, small hints of a lifeline. The smiles from the family photo ‘catch onto [her] skin’ and are ‘little smiling hooks’. This image – suggesting rescue – may pull her away from defeat, away from the untherapeutic clinical whiteness of the hospital, which is robbing her of her identity, and making her into a spinsterish ‘nun’.

The rescue, however, will not be plain sailing. The persona in the poem is a woman, struggling between life and death, who is confronted by red tulips. These flowers, seemingly innocuous at first, are now hurting her and fomenting fear. Their red colour reminds her of her ‘wound’ and mortality. Although ‘they seem to float’, they are ‘A dozen red lead sinkers round [her] neck’ weighing her down and attempting to drown her. Paradoxically, there is a positive force at work here, symbolising the power of the natural world. In an extreme, life-threatening way (threatening to ‘eat [her] oxygen’) they are preventing her from remaining numb. They also disturb her complacent, non-committal self because they are ‘loud’ and threaten her ‘like dangerous animals’. The colour of the flowers is reminiscent of the wise open mouth of ‘some great African cat’. But, despite the danger, the tulips have restored her. They have warmed up the walls of the ward and warmed her ‘heart’, tugging her towards the sea, which can be a symbol of beauty as well as danger. So, her rehabilitation, the poem concludes, is not going to be easy. The reference to the sea and ‘a country far away as health’ indicates that she has a powerful vision of where happiness lies but she is also aware of how distant it is.

This ambiguous sea symbolism is also present in ‘Daddy’. The father of the speaker in this poem is shockingly reconstructed into a huge ‘Ghastly statue’ with ‘one grey toe/Big as a Frisco seal’ and ‘a head in the freakish Atlantic. The monstrous size of this figure graphically suggests the towering significance of the father-figure in the daughter’s life. However, it is not a totally negative memory. Although she puts his head in the Atlantic, suggesting she wants to drown him and wash away all memory of him, she simultaneously recalls idyllic childhood memories off ‘beautiful Nauset’, where the sea ‘pours bean green over blue’. This vivid lyrical image, together with her prayer ‘to recover you’ suggests that she may wish to be reunited in a watery grave with her father.

The ambiguous nature of the filial relationship is further explored during the rest of the poem. Unquestionably, the daughter figure is powerfully assertive, though there are suggestions of vulnerability and defeat in some of the lines. For example, perversely and controversially, she becomes a Holocaust victim, identifying herself with a persecuted race that she did not have any connection with. She compounds this fantasy by transforming her father into a Nazi ‘Panzer man’, claiming that ‘I have always been scared of [him]’. What are we to make of these extreme accusations? Is she implying that she is feeling persecuted by all men? Some feminist critics have asserted that, in referring to these horrors, she is inveighing against the extent of patriarchy’s dominance and misuse of power in the modern world. Although critics have disagreed about this, there can be no doubt that, despite the grim and almost hysterical and cruel humour, the brutal imagery and references to Nazi violence convey a powerful impression of the speaker’s suffering and feelings of anger and abandonment.

The speaker’s tone is equally raw and penetrating in stanza ten. In stating that ‘Every woman adores a Fascist’, she may be suggesting that she is attracted to the person who is oppressing her, except her tone is bitterly sarcastic. There is a suggestion that there could be a certain amount of masochistic pleasure in a relationship such as this. In the following stanza, her father is grotesquely compared to a devil and equated to the blackguard she married, who ‘Bit my pretty red heart in two’. She later implies that this man, ‘A man in black with a Meinkampf look’, was modelled on her father and that he was just as sadistic, for he had ‘a love of the rack and the screw’. In seeking out a man who is a copy of her father, the speaker would seem to be fulfilling the Electra complex.