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SYLVIA Plath who became a cult figure adored by the
American youth when on the fateful day of February 11, 1963, she
committed a fiery suicide, thrusting her head into a gas oven. Her
suicide was, at bottom, a violent finis to the war of the selves. She
saw no way of ending otherwise. Her poetry was in reality an extension
of the inner war, though ipso facto, it also served to dissipate
the fevers raging in her blood and bones since early childhood. Her
earlier poetry consists of delicate, little poems and villanelles,
but as she turned into a woman, she started writing poems
"jet-blood of her heart" and "hell-fired" verses.
She knew not when the song turned into a lament, a cry, a shriek, a
threnody, a requiem. She had soon become "God’s lioness"
about which she sings in her famous poem, Ariel. Thus, she became
soon after her death an idol, an icon, and that reputation has remained
undiminished since. No wonder, she earned many a sobriquet "bitch
goddess", mannequin", "vampire", "Medusa",
"white goddess" etc. That’s how the critics later defined
her Protean personality which is at once attractive and abrasive,
sun-lit and sepulchral, authentic and fake. The most important figure in
her early life was her father, the German Otto Plath, and in her
terrifying poem Daddy, he turns into an ugly totem, and into a
massive metaphor signalling a female hunt for being in a world without
men’s "stings" and "knives". All this is vividly
recorded in her sequence of "bee-poems". But before we reach
this harrowing stage in her journey to a Calvary of her own making, we
have to go back to the image of Plath associated in the American mind
with "the golden girl". It’s an image cultivated with all
her cunning and intuition, for the tall, handsome, glittering blonde
needed a powerful persona to perpetuate her ‘daughterliness’ on the
one hand, her sexual mystique, on the other. Her father, then, turns
into a "bogey man" hated by her "bitchy" daughter, a
Nazi minister who had unconsciously poisoned her life. In the poem "Daddy",
her hatred reaches a point of black pitch: There’s a stake in your
fat black heart, And the villagers never liked you, They are dancing
and stamping on you, They always knew it was you, Daddy,
daddy, you bastard, I’m through. It is the dramatisation of her
"buffoonery of emotion", and she, thus, seeks her oblique
revenge on her progenitors who created her female in a world of male
sway and hegemony. And this basic, irreversible sense of gender
insecurity accounts for Plath’s aggradisement of the self, and for the
lethal, narcissism. It was only after she had become an object of sexual
attraction that her tragedy as a woman, lover and wife started. A victim
of sexual politics, she developed a strong streak of misandry in her. As
she writes in the poem Gigolo. And I, in my snazzy blacks, Mill a
litter of breasts like jelly fish. She now becomes a "Demon
Lover", the eternal woman who has to settle scores with God, man
and society. But, finally, it’s as a wife that all the freights of
her fears and repressions are fully breached, and a Niagra of lament,
protest, invective and indictment breaks out in the form of stormy
poems, frothing in their ire and wrath. It was her marriage with British
poet, Ted Hughes that unleashes the final fury in her. His infidelities
and his hidden cruelties break her heart, and the poems written in
torment become a long verdict on a marriage that was good for her verse,
but bad for her person. He now becomes, along with her father, a symbol
of deep hatred. The subjects of childbirth and mother-love (she had a
daughter and a son) and mother-fixation ride her aggrieved imagination.
And this brings me back to where we started: her suicide and those
intense poems which were written at 4.30 a.m. in the hush and chill and
dark of the hour. Even the titles —The Surgeon at 2 a.m., Fever
103, Amnesia, Thalidomide, Death and Co indicate the approaching
night of storm and dissolution. Indeed, all such poems are voices from a
graveyard. But Plath has been moving in that direction almost like a
Somnambulist for quite some time. As early as March 24, 1957, Olive
Prouty wrote her a letter in relation to one of her poems in the Atantic:
"A lamp turned too high might shatter its chimney. Please just glow
sometimes." Even A. Alvarez who saw her helplessly slipping into a
void later said, "Poetry of this order is a murderous act".
But Plath knew what she was doing. "Art", she observed,
"is wild as cat and quite separate from civilisation". The
last poem she was to write is ominously called Edge and it shows how she
was making herself ready for the leap. She had, in a Henry James phrase,
"the imagination of disaster". Was Plath’s breakdown a
condition for her breakthrough or transcendence? Did she per chance
achieve "the purity of a nun" as claimed by Aileen M. Arid?
Or, was it a fiery nirvana, a white hunt for eternity? These questions
cannot be answered within the orbit of this article. All I can affirm is
the unquestionable authenticity of the "killer" verse that in
its daring, vibrosity and effect went as far as poetry of this kind
could go. A difficult daughter, a tortured woman, a violated wife, a
misfit mother all these roles are finally subsumed in the grand role of
the "artist" Plath who could subdue life not to her
necessities, but only to her art. Plath belongs to that supreme
trinity of American confessional poets — Robert Lowell, Theodore
Rothke and herself — and like those elder poets, she unbuttoned her
heart, her mind and her soul in her later poetry. Plath was a
constitutive rebel, a born-revolutionary, and her poetry, therefore,
becomes a troublesome story of her nature, her unique signatures. In
confessional poetry, all the seams are undone, and the self bared in all
its nakedness. In all her important published volumes of poetry — The
Glosuss (1960), Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water
(1971) and Winter Trees (1971), we find her tragic and traumatic
life enacted in a "theatre of cruelty", so to speak. She did
write and autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar and there was also
a volume of published letters later. These books help supplement the
poetry which remains a sui generis phenomenon in American history. She
had sought to reach out to the skies and in that flight, she lost her
life, but found her wings — her poetry. |
