The Death Throes of Romanticism The Poems of Sylvia Plath

The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poems of Sylvia Plath

Critic: Joyce Carol Oates

Source: The Southern Review, Vol. IX, No. 3, Summer, 1973, pp. 501–22. Reproduced by permission

Criticism about: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), also known as: Victoria Lucas, Mrs. Ted Hughes



Nationality: American







Tragedy is not a woman, however gifted, dragging her shadow around in a circle or analyzing with dazzling

scrupulosity the stale, boring inertia of the circle; tragedy is cultural, mysteriously enlarging the individual

so that what he has experienced is both what we have experienced and what we need not experience

because of his, or her, private agony. It is proper to say that Sylvia Plath represents for us a tragic figure

involved in a tragic action, and that her tragedy is offered to us as a near-perfect work of art in her books....

[The] cult of Sylvia Plath insists that she is a saintly martyr, but of course she is something less dramatic

than that, though more valuable. The I of the poems is an artful construction, a tragic figure whose

tragedy is classical, the result of a limited vision that believed itself the mirror held up to nature as in the

poem Mirror, the eye of a little god that imagines itself without preconceptions, unmisted by love or

dislike. This is the audacious hubris of tragedy, the inevitable reality-challenging statement of the

participant in a dramatic action which he does not know is tragic. He dies, and only we can see the

purpose of his death to illustrate the error of a personality that believed itself godlike. (pp. 501 02)



[The] creatures of Heavy Women ... smile to themselves above their weighty stomachs and meditate

devoutly as the Dutch bulb, absolutely mute, among the archetypes. Between the archetypes of jealous,

ruthless power represented by the Father/Son of religious and social tradition, and the archetype of moronic

fleshly beauty represented by these smug mothers, there is a very small space for the creative intellect, for

the employment and expansion of a consciousness that tries to transcend such limits. Before we reject

Sylvia Plath's definition of the artistic self as unreasonably passive, even as infantile, we should inquire why

so intelligent a woman should assume these limitations, why she should not declare war against the holders

of power and of the mysteries of the flesh why her poetry approaches but never crosses over the

threshold of an active, healthy attack upon obvious evils and injustices. The solitary ego in its prison cell is

there by its own desire, its own admission of guilt in the face of even the most crazily ignorant of accusors.

(p. 504)



Sylvia Plath did not like other people; like many who are persecuted, she identified in a perverse way with

her own persecutors and not with those who, along with her, were victims. But she did not like other

people because she did not essentially believe that they existed; she knew intellectually that they existed, of

course, since they had the power to injure her, but she did not believe they existed in the way she did, as

pulsating, breathing, suffering individuals. Even her own children were objects of her perception, there for

the restless scrutiny of her image-making mind and not there as human beings with a potentiality that would

someday take them beyond their immediate dependency upon her, which she sometimes enjoyed and

sometimes dreaded.



The moral assumptions behind Sylvia Plath's poetry condemned her to death, just as she, in creating this

body of poems, condemned it to death. But her moral predicament is not so pathological as one might think,

if conformity to an essentially sick society is taken to be as many traditional moralists and psychologists

take it a sign of normality. Miss Plath speaks very clearly a language we can understand. She is saying

what men have been saying for many centuries, though they have not been so frank as she and, being less

sensitive as well, they have not sickened upon their own hatred for humanity they have thrived upon it, in

fact, sublimating it into wondrous achievements of material and mechanical splendor. Let us assume that

Sylvia Plath acted out in her poetry and in her private life the deathliness of an old consciousness, the old

corrupting hell of the Renaissance ideal and its I -ness separate and distinct from all other fields of

consciousness, which exist only to be conquered or to inflict pain upon the I. Where at one point in

civilization this very masculine, combative ideal of an I set against all other I's and against nature as

well was necessary in order to wrench man from the hermetic contemplation of a God-centered universe

and get him into action, it is no longer necessary; its health has become a pathology and whoever clings to

its outmoded concepts will die. If Romanticism and its gradually accelerating hysteria is taken as the

ultimate end of a once-vital Renaissance ideal of subject/object antagonism, then Miss Plath must be

diagnosed as one of the last Romantics; and already her poetry seems to us a poetry of the past, swiftly

receding into history.



The I that is declared an enemy of all others cannot identify with anyone or anything, since even nature

or especially nature is antagonistic to it. Man is spirit/body, but as in the poem Last Things, Sylvia Plath

states her distrust of the spirit which escapes like steam/In dreams, through the mouth-hole or eye-hole. I

can't stop it. Spirit is also intellect, but the intellect exists uneasily inside a prison-house of the flesh, a

small, desperate calculating process (like the Ego in Freud's psychology) that achieves only spasmodic

powers of identity in the constant struggle between the Id and the Superego or between the bestial world of

fleshly female archetypes and hypocritical, deathly male authorities. This intellect does not belong

naturally in the universe and feels guilt and apprehension at all times. It does not belong in nature; nature is

outside man, superior in brute power to man though admittedly inferior in the possibilities of imagination.

When this intellect attempts its own kind of creation, it cannot be judged as transcendent to the biological

processes of change and decay but as somehow conditioned by these processes and, of course, found

inferior. Why else would Miss Plath call a poem about her own poetry Stillborn and lament the deadness

of her poems, forcing them to compete with low but living creatures? They are not pigs, they are not even

fish.... It is one of the truly pathological habits of this old consciousness that it puts all things into

immediate competition: erecting Aristotelian categories of X and non-X, assuming that the distinction

between two totally unconnected phases of life demands a kind of war, a superior/inferior grading. (pp.

504 06)



The poems of hatred seem to us very contemporary, in their jagged rhythms and surreal yoking together of

images, and in their defiant expression of a rejection of love, of motherhood, of men, of the Good, the

True, the Beautiful.... If life really is a struggle for survival, even in a relatively advanced civilization, then

very few individuals will win; most will lose (and nearly all women are fated to lose); something is rotten in

the very fabric of the universe. All this appears to be contemporary, but Sylvia Plath's poems are in fact the

clearest, most precise (because most private) expression of an old moral predicament that has become

unbearable now in the mid-twentieth century. (p. 509)



The passive, paralyzed, continually surfacing and fading consciousness of Sylvia Plath in her poems is

disturbing to us because it seems to summon forth, to articulate with deadly accuracy, the regressive

fantasies we have rejected and want to forget. The experience of reading her poems deeply is a frightening

one: it is like waking to discover one's adult self, grown to full height, crouched in some long-forgotten

childhood hiding place, one's heart pounding senselessly, all the old, rejected transparent beasts and

monsters crawling out of the wallpaper. So much for Plato! So much for adulthood! Yet I cannot emphasize

strongly enough how valuable the experience of reading Miss Plath can be, for it is a kind of elegant

dreaming-back, a cathartic experience that not only cleanses us of our personal and cultural desires for

regression, but explains by way of its deadly accuracy what was wrong with such desires.



The same can be said for the reading of much of contemporary poetry and fiction, fixated as it is upon the

childhood fears of annihilation and persecution, the helplessness we have all experienced when we are, for

one reason or another, denied an intellectual awareness of what is happening. For instance, the novels of

Robbe-Grillet and his imitators emphasize the hypnotized passivity of the I in a world of dense and

apparently autonomous things; one must never ask Who manufactured these things? who brought them

home? who arranged them? for such questions destroy the novels. Similarly, the highly praised works of

Pynchon, Barthelme, Barth (the Barth of the minimal stories, not the earlier Barth), and countless others, are

verbalized screams and shudders to express the confusion of the ego that believes perhaps because it has

been told so often itself somehow out of place in the universe, a mechanized creature if foolish enough to

venture into Nature; a too-natural creature for the mechanical urban paradise he has inherited but has had no

part in designing. The I generated by these writers is typically a transparent, near-nameless personality; in

the nightmarish works of William Burroughs, the central consciousness does not explore a world so much as

submit pathetically to the exploration of himself by a comically hostile world, all cartoons and surprising

metamorphoses. Sylvia Plath's tentative identity in such poems as Winter Trees, Tulips, and even the

robustly defiant Daddy, is a child's consciousness, essentially, seizing upon a symbolic particularity

(tulips, for instance) and then shrinking from its primary noon, so that the poems like the fiction we read so

often today demonstrate a dissolution of personality. (pp. 509 11)



There is never any integrating of the self and its experience, the self and its field of perception. Human

consciousness, to Sylvia Plath, is always an intruder in the natural universe.



This distrust of the intellect in certain poets can result in lyric-meditative poetry of an almost ecstatic

beauty, when the poet acknowledges his separateness from nature but seems not to despise or fear it.... It is a

paradox that the poet believes he will honor the objects of his perception whether swallows, trees, sheep,

bees, or infants only by withdrawing from them. Why does it never occur to Romantic poets that they exist

as much by right in the universe as any other creature, and that their function as poets is a natural function

that the human imagination is, to put it bluntly, superior to the imagination of birds and infants?



In art this can lead to silence; in life, to suicide, (pp. 513 14)



Perhaps it is not just Sylvia Plath's position at the end of a once-energetic tradition, and the circumstances of

her own unhappy life, that doomed her and her poetry to premature dissolution, but something in the very

nature of lyric poetry itself. What of this curious art form which, when not liberated by music, tends to turn

inward upon the singer, folding and folding again upon the poet? If he is immature to begin with, of what

can he sing except his own self's immaturity, and to what task can his imagination put itself except the

selection of ingenious images to illustrate this immaturity? ... The risk of lyric poetry is its availability to the

precocious imagination, its immediate rewards in terms of technical skill, which then hypnotize the poet into

believing that he has achieved all there is to achieve in life as well as in his art.... Most lyric poets explore

themselves endlessly, like patients involved in a permanent psychoanalysis, reporting back for each session

determined to discover, to drag out of hiding, the essential problem of their personalities when perhaps

there is no problem in their personalities at all, except this insane preoccupation with the self and its moods

and doubts, while much of the human universe struggles simply for survival.... The small, enclosed form of

the typical lyric poem seems to preclude an active sanctifying of other people.... [The] lyric poet, if he is

stuck in a limited emotional cul-de-sac, will circle endlessly inside the bell jar of his own world and only by

tremendous strength can he break free. (pp. 514 16)



Again, lyric poetry is a risk because it rarely seems to open into a future: the time of lyric poetry is usually

the present or the past. This is a disease I carry home, this is a death, Miss Plath says in Three Women,

and, indeed, this characterizes most of her lines. All is brute process, without a future; the past is recalled

only with bitterness, a stimulus for present dismay.



When the epic promise of One's-self I sing , is mistaken as the singing of a separate self, and not the

universal self, the results can only be tragic. (p. 518)



Sylvia Plath's essential innocence, her victimization by the pressures of an old, dying, ungenerous

conception of man and his relationship to nature, must be made clear; this essay is not an attack upon her.

She understood well the hellish fate of being Swift's true counterpart, the woman who agrees that the

physical side of life is a horror, an ungainly synthesis of flesh and spirit the disappointment of all the

Romantic love poems and the nightmare of the monkish soul. (pp. 518 19)

In most of the poems, and very noticeably in The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath exhibits a recurring tendency to

dehumanize people, to flatten everyone into cut-paper people, most of all herself. She performs a kind of

reversed magic, a desacralizing ritual for which psychologists have terms reification, rubricization.

Absolute, dramatic boundaries are set up between the I and all others, and there is a peculiar refusal to

distinguish among those who mean well, those who mean ill, and those who are neutral. Thus, one is

shocked to discover in The Bell Jar that Esther, the intelligent young narrator, is as callous toward her

mother as the psychiatrist is to her, and that she sets about an awkward seduction with the chilling precision

of a machine hardly aware of the man involved, telling us very little about him as an existing human being.

He does not really exist, he has no personality worth mentioning. Only Esther exists.



Lady Lazarus, risen once again from the dead, does not expect a sympathetic response from the mob of

spectators that crowd in to view her, a mock-phoenix rising from another failed suicide attempt: to Sylvia

Plath there cannot be any connection between people, between the I that performs and the crowd that

stares. All deaths are separate, and do not evoke human responses. To be really safe, one must be like the

young man of Gigolo, who has eluded the bright fish hooks, the smiles of women, and who will never

age because like Miss Plath's ideal self he is a perfect narcissus, self-gratified. He has successfully

dehumanized himself.



The Cosmos is indeed lost to Sylvia Plath and her era, and even a tentative exploration of a possible God

is viewed in the old terms, in the old images of dread and terror. Mystic is an interesting poem, on a

subject rare indeed in Miss Plath, and seems to indicate that her uneasiness with the mill of hooks of the

air questions without answer had led her briefly to thoughts of God. Yet whoever or whatever this

God is, no comfort is possible because the ego cannot experience any interest or desire without being

engulfed.... Sylvia Plath has made beautiful poetry out of the paranoia sometimes expressed by a certain

kind of emotionally disturbed person, who imagines that any relationship with anyone will overwhelm him,

engulf and destroy his soul. (For a brilliant poem about the savagery of erotic love between lovers who

cannot quite achieve adult autonomy or the generosity of granting humanity to each other, see Ted Hughes's

Lovesong, in Crow, not inappropriate in this context.)



The dread of being possessed by the Other results in the individual's failure to distinguish between real and

illusory enemies.... Sylvia Plath's inability to grade the possibilities of danger is reflected generally in our

society, and helps to account for peculiar admissions of helplessness and confusion in adults who should be

informing their children: if everything unusual or foreign is an evil, if everything new is an evil, then the

individual is lost. The political equivalent of childlike paranoia is too obvious to need restating, but we have

a cultural equivalent as well which seems to pass unnoticed. Surely the sinister immorality of films like A

Clockwork Orange (though not the original, English version of the Burgess novel) lies in their excited focus

upon small, isolated, glamorized acts of violence by non-representative individuals, so that the

unfathomable violence of governments is totally ignored or misapprehended. (pp. 519 21)



What may come to seem obvious to people in the future that unique personality does not necessitate

isolation, that the I of the poet belongs as naturally in the universe as any other aspect of its fluid totality,

above all that this I exists in a field of living spirit of which it is one aspect was tragically unknown to

Miss Plath, as it has been unknown or denied by most men. Hopefully, a world of totality awaits us, not a

played-out world of fragments; but Sylvia Plath acted out a tragically isolated existence, synthesizing for her

survivors so many of the sorrows of that dying age Romanticism in its death throes, the self's ship, Ariel,

prematurely drowned. (p. 522)



Source: Joyce Carol Oates, The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poems of Sylvia Plath, in The

Southern Review, Vol. IX, No. 3, Summer, 1973, pp. 501 22. Reproduced by permission.



Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism

Sylvia Plath: `Love, Love, My Season'

Critic: Arthur Oberg

Source: Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley, and Plath, Rutgers University Press, 1978,

pp. 127–73. Reproduced by permission

Criticism about: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), also known as: Victoria Lucas, Mrs. Ted Hughes



Nationality: American







[No] poet more than Sylvia Plath keeps reminding us of the terms and the ground of her writing. To say that

she writes in extremis is not only an accurate statement of fact but a suggestion that more than aesthetic

matters may be involved. (p. 127)



Ariel, Sylvia Plath's major posthumously published book of poems, begins and ends in extremis. Morning

Song, the opening poem, begins with the word love. Words, the concluding poem, ends on the word

life. The title of the last poem Words, and the pun in the title of the opening poem Morning Song

suggest the two other prominent centers here, art and death. Love and death, life and art these are the

extremities out of which the Ariel poems proceed. And Plath insisted upon them and returned to them for

alignments of the most dangerous kind.



The Ariel poems reveal and often pursue a direction more nearly final than that found in Plath's earlier

poetry or in her nonpoetic work. What surfaces in Ariel proves to be a love of extremity. It expresses itself

in obsessive rhythm, in a momentum and an inventiveness of image, and in a defining vocabulary

recognizable by what it is attracted to and by what it seeks: totality, finality, obduracy. In Plath's most

central books of poetry, The Colossus and Ariel, the adjectives expose this range of thought and feeling.

The attraction involves what is sheer, mere, pure, absolute, necessary. Movement in the poems is

toward what cannot be stopped or reversed, things intractable and tireless. It is toward what lies beyond

loving, human feeling, things vast and immense. And toward what is unrepeatable, things unique and

perfect. Plath's recurrent use of the prefixes in-, un-, and ir- relates to this defining poetics. And her

attempt at using words like terrible, awful, and horrible in their root sense further characterizes her

poetry and its preferences. The vocabulary which she evolved in her poetry is never far from the limits her

opening and concluding poems announced and made final as the proper centers among which her poems

move. (p. 128)



The terms under which Plath chose to write her poems are unmistakably given, over and over. She sought to

embrace nothing less than everything. A procedure on this scale was bound to assume personal and

historical, aesthetic and sexual dimensions. (pp. 128 29)



If ideally nothing escaped Plath, her tone when confronting what she called atrocity or enormity shifted

between the mocking and the serious, the playful and the deadly. She could play child, adolescent, and

adult, alternately, and at the same time. As a consequence, it sometimes is difficult to separate boast from

threat or fear from wish in her readiness for the enormity of everything.... Predictably, the question of

knowledge returned the poet to the smaller, but still large questions of love and death, life and art.



What can love manage. What is death's domain. What are the just concerns of life and of art. These involved

Plath in the issue not only of poetic content but of poetic form as well.



At once inclusive and exclusive, the content of Sylvia Plath's poetry appropriated all provinces of

knowledge. She not only accepted the extremity and enormity of history and personality but sought out the

most outrageous facts and facta of life and art. Repeatedly, the impression she conveyed was that of a

woman and poet to whom nothing was alien. In moving prose written after her death, Ted Hughes ...

attempted to detail this sense in her:



The world of her poetry is one of emblematic visionary events, mathematical symmetries, clairvoyance,

metamorphoses, and something resembling total biological and racial recall.



Hughes's last clause defines what readers coming to Plath's work even for the first time inevitably feel. (pp.

129 30)



What Sylvia Plath sought to manage as content, she also had to handle in and as form. The poetry she

admitted admiring and the methods of composition attributed to her by people who knew her involved

poems written all-of-a-piece. Such poems are in evidence in the post-Romantic, organic verse she

frequently succeeded in writing....



If the word organic commonly has been turned into an almost meaningless term expressive of a quasi-

mystical ideality which is present in a particular poem, for Plath's poetry it can be a critical term of the most

descriptive and telling kind. The best poems in her first book, The Colossus, are organic in conception, in

their management of matters as basic as stanza and line length and image. In the poem, Man in Black,

taken from the first book, Plath achieved a poem unmistakably all-of-a-piece. ... (p. 131)



What Plath accomplishes in Man in Black is nothing less than the achievement, wished for, willed, and

executed, of the kind of organic, post-Romantic poem which she delighted in and which she aspired to

write....



The last line in Man in Black All of it, together succeeds impressively in underlining the

impression that the poem has been or at least given the illusion of being born all-of-a-piece. Man in

Black concludes by becoming something like a completed miniature Kubla Khan. The poem is there on

the page, all of it, together. In part, Man in Black is one more attempt at writing the final, Romantic

poem in the English language. (p. 133)



The early poems, when seen in connection with the poems from the posthumous volumes, reveal a search on

the part of the poet for objects or images adequate to whatever love or hate she wished to attach to them. In

many of the late poems, she directed her relentless precision toward casting poems in the form of extended

correlatives. In the first line of each poem, an interior state commonly is recorded toward which the rest of

the movement of the poem is painstakingly devoted.... Each poem exposes a search for adequate image.

Each exposes the wish to find whatever is in the vase or in the tree or behind the veil. In the course of each

poem the poet steadily attempts [in Ted Hughes's words] to locate just what it was that hurt. (p. 139)



Separately and as a group, [ Tulips, The Swarm, and A Birthday Present ] deal with problems of

language, or, more specifically, with the adequacy of any image in the face of an extreme situation. They

address the confrontation, immediate or potential, of something desired, yet also feared. And they address

the problem of finding words able to express that confrontation. In each of these poems, the poet attempts to

locate, by means of a run of images, what it is: in Tulips , what it is that is in the vase and to what it

corresponds, a correspondence which signals sickness or health, life or death; in The Swarm, what it

is that is in the tree and, in the mind, so intriguing and threatening at the same time; in A Birthday

Present, what it is that can lie behind the veil and be the source of such comforting and horrible

enormity. (pp. 142 43)



The need to locate what it is proves equally central to the movement and meanings of other poems of

Plath's. In part, the mad and associational intensity of poems like Lady Lazarus, Daddy, and The

Applicant becomes understandable in view of what the poet, there, is bent on relentlessly seeking out....

(p. 143)

The Applicant, Daddy, and Lady Lazarus reveal Plath centrally concerned with the universal habit

of image-making, [but] this is not all. More important, in these poems she exhibits the extremes, personal

and historical, to which image-making has been taken.



Daddy and Lady Lazarus extend and provide variations on the concerns of The Applicant. In

particular, they seek to locate what it was that hurt. These two poems radically confront Lear-like questions

of man and his image, of what constitutes for him need and excess. Is man no more than this? Consider

him well, Lear mused. Both Lady Lazarus and Daddy raise issues as basic as image and as man.

They seek to find images which will sufficiently body forth that man.



Lady Lazarus and Daddy are poems which seem written at the edge of sensibility and of imagistic

technique. They both utilize an imagery of severe disintegration and dislocation. The public horrors of the

Nazi concentration camps and the personal horrors of fragmented identities become interchangeable. Men

are reduced to parts of bodies and to piles of things. The movement in each poem is at once historical and

private; the confusion in these two spheres suggests the extent to which this century has often made it

impossible to separate them. (p. 146)



The barkerlike tone of Lady Lazarus is not accidental. As in Daddy, the persona strips herself before

the reader ... all the time utilizing a cool or slang idiom in order to disguise feeling. Sylvia Plath borrowed

from a sideshow or vaudeville world the respect for virtuosity which the performer must acquire, for which

the audience pays and never stops paying. Elsewhere in her work, she admired the virtuosity of the

magician's unflinching girl or of the unshaking tattoo artist. Here, in Lady Lazarus, it is the barker and

the striptease artist who consume her attention. What the poet pursues in image and in rhyme (for example,

the rhyming of Jew and gobbledygoo ) becomes part of the same process I observed in so many of her

other poems, that attempt, brilliant and desperate, to locate what it was that hurt. (p. 147)



Sylvia Plath never stopped recording in her poetry the wish and need to clear a space for love. Yet she

joined this to an inclination to see love as unreal, to accompanying fears of being unable to give and receive

love, and to the eventual distortion and displacement of love in the verse. Loving completely or wholly

she considered to be dangerous, from her earliest verse on.



Love was so much a part of her world that it often stood in her poetry for that world itself. When the world

seemed unreal, so did love. In the early poetry, this sometimes approximated a secondhand, Romantic

poetics. But the early poems also give evidence of some more profound sense of a loving unreality which

the later poems turned into a more desperate, pathetic tableau of valentine-faces and candy or enamel-

painted hearts.



Plath often wrote with humor and irony when she considered love. She could be the satirist alert to the

sentiments of a Victorian or Edwardian age. She could be a shrewd psychologist of love's ambiguities. She

could be sane and clairvoyant, joining writers as major as Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in probing the

darkness of the heart. But in what she wrote just before and at the time of Ariel, she began to establish a

stance which I find problematic and dangerous. A progression is evident in her handling of love and the love

poem that calls into question the loving of intentions which some of the first lines of poems announce, but

which the tone of whole poems or the endings of poems commonly belie. (pp. 152 53)



In the important Ariel bee poems, her uncertainty issues in the fear of being hurt or fatally stung by love.

It is the kind of bad joke or bad pun which comes to typify her late art. It expresses a situation so extreme

and intolerable to her that only by such devices could she ever have hoped to manage her world. Lowell and

Berryman use similar devices, but very often out of real strength. In Plath, however, the strategy commonly

reduces to sheer helplessness.



The Ariel poems reveal a woman both too exposed and too unopen. The sexuality is relentless and

overwhelming. The puns not only proliferate head, queen, screw, cherry but succeed in words

like mail (letter and male ) and box (sexual organ and coffin) in making explicit the meanings which

are central to her work. (p. 154)



If Plath wished her poems to stand as love letters to the world, the perspective from which they proceed

may, in the end, have made that wish impossible. Her metaphor for the world may very well have been a

response to a loveless world. But it is here that the logic of the argument breaks down. For the poetry shows

the controlling metaphor threatening to become the informing vision itself. By the time she wrote her last

poems, there was less and less room for and patience with love. If the poems were once meant to create

love, they came to stand for a world which had forgone or gone beyond some loving, human circumference.



The problem of artistic control which so many critics have addressed in Sylvia Plath I find less central and

settleable than that of the controlling metaphor in her verse. Her best poems are incredibly controlled. But

the issue of controlling metaphor lingers on long after a reader has decided whether the poems show control

or the look of control or controlled uncontrolledness.



The controlling metaphor affects much that happens in Plath's poetry. In the process of finding what to do

with her love, she often concluded by inverting it. Poem by poem, not just in Ariel, she radically confused

love and death, self and other. Images of love give way to images of incest ( Daddy, and the bee poems)

and masturbation ( Suicide Off Egg Rock, Ariel, Death & Co., The Jailor, Childless Woman ).

Loveless images of madness, suicide, and solipsism from the I am, I am, I am of Suicide Off Egg

Rock to the ich, ich, ich, ich of Daddy take on the force of leitmotifs for her work. And art, if

capable of leading us back to loving, human contexts, here gives the impression of being one more inversion

of love. It can be one more deception in this life.



In the late poems, something happens to language and to love and to the possibility of defining a self

through love. Repeatedly, the health or breakdown of one is a reflection of the other. (pp. 156 57)



As a representative, twentieth-century writer, Plath lends to language as language a central place in her

work. But in the implications and concluding achievement of this, she is entirely herself. In five very late

poems, Words, Kindness, Edge, Contusion, and The Fearful, she has no rival, perhaps

fortunately so.



These poems, unlike Lesbos or Stillborn which show love and language breaking down but which

discover no words or tone artful enough to manage that fact, succeed in what they attempt. They learn the

art of leaving human love behind, but whether out of necessity or freedom it is not always clear.



The five poems share, aside from having been written during the last week of Plath 's life, an assessment of

a situation where love seems either absent or unreal, deceptive or unimportant. In all of them, there is a

rightness in choice of phrase and word and a brilliance in the run of images in individual stanzas and in

entire poems. (p. 158)



These poems all take an associational, imagistic technique to a point of deadly confusion and delusion

where the poet can fold her poem-children back into her body simply by writing out the wish ( Edge ) or

where she is so uncomprehending of human, loving kindness that she cannot distinguish between children

and roses ( Kindness ).



What I am suggesting is that these late poems are not the mystically calm, orderly pieces which some critics

have seen them to be. Instead, they are the terrible, terrifying creations of a woman who, near the end of a

life, still could not do without love, even if she never learned what to do with it, As a result, the tone of the

poems is something less than the matter-of-factness of the saint. (p. 160)



If love was never completely renounced by her, neither was it constant in her work. And the poems keep

recording a journey and a movement as inevitable as death. Now that the poems which were written just

before or at the same time as the Ariel poems have been collected and published in Crossing the Water and

Winter Trees, we are afforded an even better means of charting and confirming larger movements and

stages in her work. When Ted Hughes and other critics first wrote of an inevitable, conscious development

in her poetry and when the titles of the posthumous books Crossing the Water and Winter Trees were first

announced, I wondered how willful was the creation of that legendary development and reputation. But a

consideration of the poems themselves and of her title, The Colossus, for her first book, helped to dispel

such fears. In the same way, interpretations of her art after the fact of her suicide now strike me as less

arbitrary and fallacious than they once did. That she eventually took her own life is important. It might be

dangerous not to consider that fact seriously.



Plath 's development from The Colossus to the poems of the later volumes is technical as much as it is

psychic and spiritual. More particularly, that development concerns her use of image in connection with the

possibilities for language and love. How that development implies and makes explicit a journey, her

gathered work actualizes and clarifies.



By the title of her first volume, The Colossus, Plath signified what she would spend a lifetime trying to

create. Sometimes she exchanged the colossus image for the image of an ark or a garden. But the intentions

were always the same, to write words that would bear love and that would have life. The difficulty,

however, was that, from the very beginning, her landscape risked turning into (to use images from her own

poems) some nightmarish bestiary or wintering ship or burnt-out spa. The problem of what would be her

controlling metaphor, then, was full upon her from her earliest work.



The poems she wrote after those included in The Colossus show her still involved in trying to put together

saving, loving words. But the colossus which she feared would never get put together entirely and which

she feared would be a ruin becomes more than a distant, playful fear. The opening and closing poems of

The Colossus The Manor Garden and The Stones depend upon and establish the essential,

ominous ambiguity that mark later poems like Tulip. (pp. 161 62)



Now that Crossing the Water and Winter Trees have been published, there is the opportunity to observe the

poet at every stage taking stock of her situation and development. The Colossus and Ariel, even before the

other volumes appeared recently, showed her charting a course, or getting there, as she put it; she assigned

it as a title to one of her poems. If the exact nature of the journey or voyage or ride, all prominent metaphor

in her verse, was often in doubt, its connection with love was not.



There are two major movements which the entire body of Plath's poetry suggests toward the creation of

love and toward some state beyond love. These movements are not strictly chronological any more than

they are exclusive of one another. In part, they exist in and through the very last poems she wrote. But, as

poems written in time, by a woman aware of time, they tend to build toward that point where the second

movement, a state beyond human love, can be claimed, or at least volitionally prophesied.... Sometimes

Plath depended upon the fierce repetitions of would or shall or let us in order to move toward and

create that state beyond love. The syntax of poems like A Birthday Present and Lady Lazarus depend

greatly upon such a volitional strategy. (pp. 162 63)



Mystic contains within it a countermovement toward a belief in earthly love.



The contradictory impression which Mystic succeeds in conveying not only is central to the meaning of

that poem, but it also connects with a defining center in much of Plath's late verse. On the one hand, there is

the woman who becomes a contemporary doubting Thomas, except that what she disbelieves are not

Christ's wounds and resurrected presence but his love:







How I would like to believe in tenderness.

( The Moon and the Yew Tree ...)



This moment is as desperate as any in modern poetry. It is as pathetic as Prufrock's musing on the

mermaids, I do not think that they will sing to me. (p. 165)



Marriage imagery is resplendent in Sylvia Plath's poetry. Do is recurrent and hypnotic as a word and as an

action. At times the persona saying, I do, I do, is a mechanical doll or a prisoner confessing to a crime.

These senses of the word and phrase Plath commonly linked with the recital of the marriage vow. Do also

is punned upon, especially in her poem, Daddy. The German, familiar du or you ( do, du, you

they even rhyme) of intimate address and love songs is recalled, almost as a reminder of the historical and

personal perversions to which love and action can be subjected. (pp. 165 66)



The Colossus already revealed the poet's predilection for decadent unions between love and death, and art

and life. If her browned gardenia and ghastly orchid recall finde siècle botanical catalogues, it is in her taste

in sounds, colors, jewels, music, painting, and literature that she shows herself to be a contemporary

decadent.... In the poems that came after The Colossus, however, we are able to see how this incipient

decadence is turned from something faintly literary into something closer to the poet's very self: Pom!

Pom! They would have killed me! (pp. 166 67)



That Sylvia Plath wrote two last-words poems, one called just that ( Last Words ) and another, Words, I

find significant. The major problem which I address in this chapter to whom and to what do her poems

finally belong the two poems engage, although in the body of her poetry they are not unique in that

concern. (p. 168)



Last Words is a very different kind of poem, closer in style to poems of intense desire like Tulips, A

Birthday Present , or The Arrival of the Bee Box. The poet in Last Words [in Crossing the Water]

wants and volitionally unlooses herself from domestic things in order to achieve a state of utter mystic

peace:







It will be dark,



And the shine of these small things sweeter than the



face of Ishtar.



Ishtar, Babylonian and Assyrian goddess of love and fertility, is invoked. But it is the artful, statuary face of

Ishtar which has importance for her in this poem. The state yearned for is death, not love. The word

sweeter in this quotation goes back to a line earlier in the same poem, I should sugar and preserve my

days like fruit! Sweetness commonly threatened loving deception for Plath . Here it carries equally dark

connotations of preservation, but always at the unnatural expense of life. Sweetness proves costly, proves to

be death.



As Last Words earns its authority, there emerges that tone, or decor an important word for ... Plath

which related to the matter of control and to whatever triumph or failure these final poems contain.



Last Words manages to indicate how the poet willed to move herself and her poetry toward love as much

as it indicates how she could not handle the artful business she went about. I can't stop it, she wrote in this

poem. Here It meant not love or blood-hurt but the escape of spirit-breath or the release of images. (pp.

168 69)

Last Words, like any of the major poems from Ariel or Crossing the Water or Winter Trees, does not

dispose of the nagging sense that, in love as it may be with a soldier repose than death's (a phrase from an

early poem, The Sculptor ), in the end, it belongs to an art of elegy, less by choice than by some

desperate, pathetic necessity. (p. 170)



If the late poems belong to anyone, they belong not to her father or husband or children or even to poetry

(the sense of the poem as unloving love-child she never forgot). But to Death, Death the lover, Death the

double.... (pp. 170 71)



What I have been tracing the attempts of the poems to establish lyric and love and the countermovement

toward elegy and to a deadly journey which could not be stopped gain authority and intensity from the

more recently released volumes. They never contradict but extend what the Ariel poems were about. The old

faults prove to be the same; love cannot come here, we again find.



The moving center of both books, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, is that of a woman of sorrows.

Recurrently, Plath imagined herself as Mary and Christ. Ease, love, correspondence, and relationship all

were yearned for and did not emerge. (p. 172)



If some important part of Sylvia Plath in her late poetry refused to accept a world of gigolos as the final

version of the world, she never abandoned the doubt that she could recognize or accept love even were she

able to manage it in her life and art. As a result, tone figures more and more prominently in the

interpretation of the poems she left behind. Tone, its readiness and surety, dominates.



The posthumous poems expose discrepancies and failures of the most serious kind. The phoenix figure,

prominent in various guises in her work, deserted her outside her poems. And the children-poems she

imagined in the late poem, Edge, folded back into her and taken out of this life, became painfully distinct

from her in death the two children fathered by Ted Hughes and left behind; the poems which were

posthumous. And the Medea figure, once little more than a literary trapping in her early poem, Aftermath,

proved in the late poem, Edge, only a pathetic wish denied to her outside of mythology. When she died,

so did her long sought-after and invoked gods.



The confusions and delusions of art and life, wish fulfillment and reality, became exposed at her death. And

they record a sad fact. But, beyond that and more important, they reach back to some sense of lovelessness

or lack implicit in a major part of her poetry. The Ariel poems, looked at together with the poems from

Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, now strike me as less in love's behalf than she would have liked

them to be. Poems like Daddy and Lady Lazarus in the end may not be the triumphs which their

momentum and inventiveness at times celebrate. Instead, and this is my sense of them, they belong more to

elegy and to death, to the woman whose loving associations abandoned her as she sought to create images

for them. (pp. 172 73)



Source: Arthur Oberg, Sylvia Plath: `Love, Love, My Season', in his Modern American Lyric: Lowell,

Berryman, Creeley, and Plath, Rutgers University Press, 1978, pp. 127 73. Reproduced by permission.



Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism

Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration

Critic: M. D. Uroff

Source: Iowa Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1977, pp. 104-15. Reproduced by permission

Criticism about: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), also known as: Victoria Lucas, Mrs. Ted Hughes



Nationality: American







[(essay date 1977) In the following essay, Uroff contrasts Plath's poetic voice with the confessional mode

developed by American poet Robert Lowell. Uroff contends that Plath, unlike Lowell, incorporates

abstracted autobiographic detail in her poetry only to amplify or dramatize feelings of pain and sorrow

rather than to induce actual self-revelation.]



When M. L. Rosenthal first used the term, confessional poetry, he had in mind a phase in Robert Lowell's

career when Lowell turned to themes of sexual guilt, alcoholism, confinement in a mental hospital, and

developed them in the first person in a way that intended, in Rosenthal's view, to point to the poet himself.

Rosenthal was careful to limit the possibilities of the mode but he did name Sylvia Plath a confessional poet

as well because, he said, she put the speaker herself at the center of her poems in such a way as to make her

psychological vulnerability and shame an embodiment of her civilization. Rosenthal's widely accepted

estimation was challenged first by Ted Hughes who pointed out that Plath uses autobiographical details in

her poetry in a more emblematic way than Lowell, and more recently by Marjorie Perloff who claims that

Plath's poetry lacks the realistic detail of Lowell's work. If Hughes and Perloff are right, and I think they are,

then we should reconsider the nature of the speaker in Plath's poems, her relationship to the poet, and the

extent to which the poems are confessional.



What distinguishes Plath's poems from Lowell's is precisely the kind of person in the poem. With Lowell,

according to Rosenthal, it is the literal self. Lowell himself has said that while he invented some of his

autobiography, he nonetheless wants the reader to feel it is true, that he is getting the real Robert Lowell.

The literal self in Lowell's poetry is to be sure a literary self, but fairly consistently developed as a self-

deprecating, modest, comic figure with identifiable parents, summer homes, experiences at particular

addresses. When he discloses under these circumstances his weaknesses, his ineptitude, his misery, his

inflicting of pain on others, he is in fact revealing information that is humiliating or prejudicial to himself. In

this sense, the person in the poem is making an act of confession, and, although we as readers have no

power to forgive, Lowell's self-accusatory manner makes it impossible to judge. We are not outraged but

chastened by such revelations. With Plath, it is otherwise. The person in her poem calls certain people father

or mother but her characters lack the particularity of Commander and Mrs. Lowell. They are generalized

figures not real-life people, types that Plath manipulates dramatically in order to reveal their limitations.

Precisely because they are such types, the information that Plath reveals about them is necessarily

prejudicial and has consequently misled some readers who react with hostility to what she has to reveal.

Elizabeth Hardwick calls her lacerating and claims that Plath has the distinction of never being in her poems

a nice person. While niceness is not a perfect standard for judging a person in a poem, Hardwick's reaction

and that of many other critics who follow her reveal the particular way in which Plath's revelations are

prejudicial to her. Plath's outraged speakers do not confess their misery so much as they vent it, and this

attitude, unlike that of Lowell's characters, makes them susceptible to rather severe critical judgments.

However, if we look at the strategy of the poems, we might arrive at a more accurate estimate of the person

in them and of her relationship to the poet.



Sylvia Plath herself has said, "I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional

experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by

nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and

manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and

one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind." The difference

between Plath and Lowell is clearly outlined when we set this statement next to Lowell's account of how he

came to write confessional poetry. He says that when he started writing the poems in Life Studies he had

been doing a number of readings on the West Coast and found that he was simplifying his poems, breaking

the meter, making impromptu changes as he read. He claimed that poets had become proficient in forms and

needed to make a "breakthrough back into life." Life Studies may be read as that repossession of his own

life, and its mode is properly confessional because both in the poems and the prose of that volume the

suffering and victimizing speaker searches through his own pain in order to perceive some truth about the

nature of his experience. Plath's speakers make no such search. They are anxious to contain rather than to

understand their situation. When Lowell's speaker in "Skunk Hour" says, "My mind's not right," he

expresses some kind of desolate self-knowledge. By contrast, Plath calls the maddened woman in "Miss

Drake Proceeds to Supper," "No novice / In those elaborate rituals / Which allay the malice / Of knotted

table and crooked chair." Both characters may be mad but their strategies differ. Where Lowell's character

confesses his weakness, Plath's character employs all her energies in maintaining a ritualistic defense

against her situation. She seems in a perverse way to act out the program of the poet whose informed and

intelligent mind must manipulate its terrifying experiences. There is in fact a strange correspondence

between Miss Drake's methods and those of her creator. Miss Drake is superbly sensitive, wildly inventive

in objectifying her fears, and skilled at controlling them. But there is also a vast distance between Miss

Drake and the poet, a distance that may be measured by the techniques of parody, caricature, hyperbole that

Plath employs in characterizing her. There is something perversely comical about Miss Drake who "can see

in the nick of time / How perilous needles grain the floorboards." If Miss Drake's rigid efforts are not quite

ridiculed, it is fair to say that she does not engage our sympathies in the way that Lowell's speaker in "Skunk

Hour" (who may also be ridiculous) does. She has been distanced from us by the poet who sees her as a

grotesque reflection of herself, employing the manipulative strategies of the uninformed mind against an

undefined terror, channeling what might have been creative energy into pointless rituals.



"Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper" is an early poem but it reveals the way in which Plath controlled her

own terrifying experiences in her poetry. She did so by creating characters and later speakers who

demonstrate the way in which the embattled mind operates. Far from speaking for the poet, they stage crazy

performances which are parodic versions of the imaginative act. Through them, Plath shows how terror may

grip the mind and render it rigid. Through her speaker's projective fantasies, she projects her own

understanding of hysterical control and the darker knowledge of its perilous subversion of the imagination.

While Miss Drake's elaborate rituals are designed to hold off her fears, the poet who created her is handling

in the act of the poem, however indirectly, her own frightening knowledge of madness. What for the mad

woman is a means of avoiding experience becomes for the poet a means of controlling it. The poems, unlike

the speakers in them, reveal Plath's terrifying self-knowledge.



In her poems, Plath is not concerned with the nature of her experience, rather she is engaged in

demonstrating the way in which the mind deals with extreme circumstances or circumstances to which it

responds with excessive sensitivity. The typical strategy of her speakers is to heighten or exaggerate

ordinary experience and at the same time to intensify the mind's manipulative skills so that fathers become

Fascists and the mind that must deal with the image it has conjured up becomes rigidly ritualistic. In her

early poems, Plath stands outside and judges her characters, drawing caricatures not only of madness but of

its counterpart, hysterical sanity. As she continued to write however, she began to let the characters speak

for themselves in caricature, parody, and hyperbole which they use not as vehicles of judgment but as

inevitable methods of their performances. When the mind that must deal with terror stiffens and rigidifies,

parody will become its natural means of expression.



Between "Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper" and her late poems, however, Plath explored another way in

which the mind responds to its terrors. In what has been called her middle period, Plath became interested in

a kind of character who had been exhausted by her fears and could not control experience. For example, the

insomniac of "Zoo Keeper's Wife" lies awake at night thinking over her grievances and the particular

horrors of her husband's zoo full of "wolf-headed fruit bats" and the "bird-eating spider." Her response to

her husband is as hyperbolic as the hysterical spinster's disdain for love's slovenliness in an early Plath poem

but she has no rituals with which to deal with it nor barricades to hide behind. Rather, she says, "I can't get it

out of my mind." All she can do is "flog apes owls bears sheep / Over their iron stile" and still she can't

sleep. Again, in "Insomniac," the mind cannot handle memories that "jostle each other for face-room like

obsolete film stars." The speaker's "head is a little interior of grey mirrors. / Each gesture flees immediately

down an alley / Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance / Drains like water out the hole at the far

end." It is in these poems and others like them of this period that Plath's speakers sound most like Lowell's

in his more exhausted and despairing moods yet even here Plath focuses on the function or nonfunction of

the mind rather than on the meaning of the experience.



As Plath turned into her later period in a poem such as "Tulips" the speaker of her poem seems to welcome

the loss of control that had harried the insomniacs. As she goes into the hospital in this poem, she claims to

be learning peacefulness, and she hands herself over to the hospital attendants to be propped up and tended

to. The nurses bring her numbness in "bright needles," and, as she succumbs to the anesthesia, she claims

that she only wanted to be utterly empty. However, she does not rest in that attitude very long before she

comes out of the operating room and its anesthetized state and begins reluctantly to confront her pain. Her

first response is to complain that the tulips hurt her, watch her, that they eat up her oxygen. But, when the

speaker claims a correspondence between the tulips' redness and her own wound, her manipulative mind

begins to function again, first in negative ways, tormenting itself by objectifying its pain. Then, in a brief

but alarming reversal, the speaker associates the tulips not only with the pain but with the heart so that the

outside threat and power are not only overcome but subsumed. Because the speaker here has so exaggerated

her own emptiness and the tulips' violence and vitality, she must then accept in herself the attributes she has

cast onto the tulips which now return to her. The heart blooms. Here, for once, the manipulative mind works

its own cure. If the supersensitive mind can turn tulips into explosions, it can also reverse the process and

turn dangerous animals into blooming hearts. What it cannot do, despite the speaker's claim, is accept utter

emptiness. It cannot refuse to be excited by the flowers that it does not want.



"Tulips" is an unusual poem in Plath's work not because it demonstrates how the mind may generate

hyperboles to torture itself (which is a common strategy of Plath's poems) but because it shows how this

generative faculty may have a positive as well as a negative function. "Tulips" is not a cheerful poem, but

it does move from cold to warmth, from numbness to love, from empty whiteness to vivid redness, a process

manipulated by the associative imagination. The speaker herself seems surprised by her own gifts and ends

the poem on a tentative note, moving toward the faraway country of health. Despite this possibly hopeful

ending, however, the body of the poem demonstrates the way in which the mind may intensify its pain by

objectifying it.



What takes place in "Tulips" in a private meditation (and perhaps the privacy accounts for the mind's

pliancy) is given a much more ferocious treatment in the public performances of Plath's late poems. It is in

fact the sense of being on public display that calls forth the rage of the speakers in these late poems. Forced

to perform, they develop elaborate rituals. Their manipulative powers become a curse not a cure. In "The

Tour," the speaker, caught "in slippers and housedress with no lipstick," greets with mock hospitality her

maiden aunt who wants "to be shown about": "Do step into the hall," "Yes, yes, this is my address. / Not a

patch on your place, I guess." Instead of refusing to become a victim of the aunt's meddlesome curiosity, the

speaker readily assents to it. After apologizing for the mess, she leads her aunt right into it, showing her the

frost-box that bites, the furnace that exploded, the sink that ate "seven maids and a plumber." With mock

concern, she warns the aunt, "O I shouldn't put my finger in that," "O I shouldn't dip my hankie in, it hurts!"

"I am bitter? I'm averse?" she asks, dropping for a second her polite mask but resuming it immediately in

her refrain, "Toddle on home to tea now." The speaker manipulates the aunt's curiosity, turning it back on

itself by maintaining a tone of insistent courtesy and forced intimacy that is designed to jeeringly protect the

aunt from the brazen exhibition of the open house of horrors. She appears to contrast her own dreary

domestic appliances to her aunt's exotic possessions (the gecko she wears as costume jewelry, her Javanese

geese and monkey trees); but actually her machines are "wild," she says, and in a different way unlike her

aunt's tamed decorations. However, when she calls herself "creepy-creepy," she seems to have assumed her

aunt's gecko-like qualities. The staginess of this speaker, her insistent rhyming, exclamatory sentences,

italicized words, all provide not only a grotesque reflection of the aunt's alarm, but also suggest a kind of

hysterical control. The speaker's ability to manipulate the aunt is matched by a more sinister ability to

manipulate her own horrors, to locate them in furnace and stove, and there to give them a separate identity.

Her mind, like Miss Drake's, is extremely skilled at objectifying her fears. The poet who felt that the

intelligent mind must manipulate its most terrifying experiences also knew that the deranged mind could

operate in such a way as to hold off its terror, separate itself from the agony it suffered, and the speaker here

exemplifies that process. When at the end she warns the aunt not to trip over the nurse-midwife who "can

bring the dead to life," she points to the source of her misery, the creative principle that has itself assumed

an objective identity and become part of the mess. The midwife, like a poet, delivers life with "wiggly

fingers," and she has in fact been very active in endowing dead household appliances with a lively if

destructive energy; but now she too has been cast out.



In this speaker who can not only caricature her aunt with the "specs" and "flat hat" but also her own

creepiness as well as her "awfully nice" creative faculties, Plath presents a damning portrait of the too

inventive mind that exults in self-laceration. It is not quite accurate to say that this speaker is unaware of her

own strategies because she is supremely self-conscious; but she is trapped by them. Where others have been

devoured or repelled, she lives on, neither despairing nor shocked but charged with a hysterical energy that

she deploys finally against herself. Her nurse-mid-wife is eyeless. She too can only see herself now as

others see her. Her ability to manipulate her own suffering is a subversion of the poet's creative powers; it

becomes a means of holding off rather than exploring her situation.



A quite different manipulator is the speaker in "The Applicant" who appears to be a comic figure, reveling

in her machinations. Unlike the woman in "The Tour," she seems to speak for others not for herself. She

starts out with the characteristic question of the convention-loving woman, "First, are you our sort of

person?" What interests her, she reveals, is not what we might expect from someone who would ask that

question, the social qualities of her marriage applicant, but rather her physical parts. "Our sort of person"

has no glass eyes, false teeth, rubber breasts, stitches to show something's missing. Once having assured

herself on that score, she presents her applicant's hand in marriage, promising not only the traditional

services that it will "bring teacups and roll away headaches" but that at the end it will even "dissolve of

sorrow." Then, as if this "guaranteed" emotion might be too much for the man, she confides, "We make new

stock from the salt." Such economy, such efficiency, this marriage broker seems to cluck. The woman

"willing" "to do whatever you tell it" can be easily recycled. Next the speaker turns to the man who like the

woman is "stark naked." Instead of putting him through the same examination of parts, she quickly offers

him a wedding suit, "Black and stiff," that he can reuse as a funeral shroud. She adopts the familiar tone of

the tailor ("How about this suit--" "Believe me, they'll bury you in it.") that shades into that of the mortician.

Suddenly the suit, the girl, the deadly convention of marriage are all one, like a tomb, equally "waterproof,

shatterproof, proof / Against fire and bombs through the roof." The subversive excess of her promises here

is hastily passed over as her sales pitch continues: "Now your head, excuse me, is empty. / I have the ticket

for that. / Come here, sweetie, out of the closet." What she presents is "A living doll" whose value will

increase with each anniversary, paper at first but silver in 25 years and gold at 50 years.



It might be argued that "The Applicant" does not properly belong to those poems in which Plath exposes

the mind's manipulation of terrifying experiences. After all, marriage--and especially the marriage

contracted here--is a conventional arrangement which should not affect the fears or passions or emotions of

either the man or the woman. In addition, the speaker here appears safely removed from the situation she

directs. These facts, however, do not explain the tone of the poem which comes through in the insistent

refrain, "Will you marry it?" This speaker who has "the ticket" for everything seems, despite her all-

knowing and consoling comic pose, very anxious to have her question answered. Again, as in the other

poems we have discussed, the nature of the speaker in "The Applicant" deserves more attention than it has

received. What she says is obvious enough but why does she say it? I have called her a woman although her

sex is nowhere identified partly because of her language (she calls the woman "sweetie" and the man "My

boy") and partly because of her claim that her applicant can sew, cook and "talk, talk, talk" (no man, I

believe would have considered that last feature a selling point) but chiefly because she seems to be

extremely concerned for the successful outcome of her applicant. She is like the applicant herself willing to

make any claim and to accede to any demands in order to strike a bargain. Hers is a pose of course, but it is

the pose of the compliant woman. Like the patient in "Tulips" who accepts the gift of flowers that torment

her and the niece in "The Tour" who responds to her aunt's detested visit, the speaker here insists on

participating in a situation the demands of which she finds abhorrent. Her only recourse for dealing with it is

a mode at which she is particularly skilled, burlesque. Yet behind the scorn and the scoffing is another

feeling, something like hysteria, that expresses itself in her repeated question. She seems trapped by the

sexual stereotypes she parodies. The ventriloquism of this poem hides the fact that this is an internal debate.

The sexual fear that has driven the "sweetie" into the closet and the boy to his last resort also propels the

manipulations of this shrewd if too agreeable woman. Here again is the controlling mind using its powers to

compartmentalize rather than explore its situation.



"The Applicant" has been given serious consideration as Plath's statement on marriage yet it does not point

to the poet herself in the same way that, for example, Robert Lowell's "Man and Wife" does. Its characters

are unparticularized and unconnected to any specific event in Plath's experience. Its sexual stereotypes (the

girl willing to do anything in order to be married and the boy only willing to marry if he can be convinced

that he will get a worthwhile product) are manipulated by a speaker whose tension-filled control reveals not

only their power over her but the terror that informs them. This speaker can manage, but she cannot escape

her situation.



The relationship between poet and speaker in two other late poems, "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy," is

somewhat more complicated because these poems do call upon specific incidents in Plath's biography, her

suicide attempts and her father's death. Yet to associate the poet with the speaker directly, as many critics

have done, does not account for the fact that Plath employs here as before the techniques of caricature,

hyperbole, and parody that serve both to distance the speaker from the poet and at the same time to project

onto the speaker a subversive variety of the poet's own strategies. In "Lady Lazarus," the nature of the

speaker is peculiar and defies our ordinary notions of someone prone to attempt suicide. Suicide is not a

joyous act, and yet there is something of triumph in the speaker's assertion that she has done it again. The

person recovering from a suicide attempt, as this speaker says she is, cannot possibly be so confident at the

very moment of her recovery that her sour breath will vanish in a day and that she will soon be a smiling

woman. Nor could she have the presence of mind to characterize those who surround her as a "peanut-

crunching crowd" and her rescuers as enemies. And finally it seems psychologically impossible for the

suicide victim to have the energy to rise at all against other people, much less to threaten to "eat men like

air." The person who speaks here does so not to explore her situation but to control it. She is first of all a

performer, and, although she adopts many different roles, she is chiefly remarkable for her control not only

of herself but of the effects she wishes to work on those who surround her. She speaks of herself in

hyperboles, calling herself a "walking miracle," boasting that she has "nine times to die," exclaiming that

dying is an art she does "exceptionally well," asserting that "the theatrical / Comeback in broad day" knocks

her out. Her treatment of suicide in such buoyant terms amounts to a parody of her own act. When she

compares her suicide to the victimization of the Jews and later on when she claims there is a charge for a

piece of her hair or clothes and thus compares her rescued self to the crucified Christ or martyred saint, she

is engaging in self-parody. She employs these techniques partly to defy the crowd with its "brute / Amused

shout: / 'A miracle!'" and partly to taunt her rescuers, "Herr Doktor" "Herr Enemy," who regard her as their

"opus." She is neither a miracle nor an opus, and she fends off those who would regard her in this way. But

the techniques have another function as well; they display the extent to which she can objectify herself,

ritualize her fears, manipulate her own terror. Her extreme control in fact is intimately entwined with her

suicidal tendencies. The suicide is her own victim, can control her own fate. If she is not to succumb to this

desire, she must engage in the elaborate ritual which goes on all the time in the mind of the would-be

suicide by which she allays her persistent wish to destroy herself. Her act is the only means of dealing with

a situation she cannot face. Her control is not sane but hysterical. When the speaker assures the crowd that

she is "the same, identical woman" after her rescue, she is in fact telling them her inmost fear that she could

and probably will do it again. What the crowd takes for a return to health, the speaker sees as a return to the

perilous conditions that have driven her three times to suicide. By making a spectacle out of herself and by

locating the victimizer outside herself in the doctor and the crowd, she is casting out her terrors so that she

can control them. When she says at the end that she will rise and eat men like air, she is projecting (and

again perhaps she is only boasting) her destruction outward. That last stanza of defiance is in fact an effort

of the mind to triumph over terror, to rise and not to succumb to its own victimization.



The speaker's tone is hysterical, triumphant, defiant. Only once does she drop this tone to admit the despair

that underlies it when she says. "What a trash / To annihilate each decade." Otherwise she maintains her

rigid self-control in accents that range from frenzied gaiety to spiteful threats. Although her situation is

much more extreme than those social occasions of "Tulips," "The Tour," "The Applicant," it is like

them not of her own making. She has been rescued when she wanted to die. Her response is perverse. She

does not welcome her rescuers, nor does she examine the condition that forced her death wish; instead she

accepts her fate and presents herself as in complete control. The effort of her act which comes through in her

tone is intense yet necessary because without it she would have to face the fact that she is not in control. Her

performance is a defense against utter desolation. Here again is the mind manipulating its own terrors. Plath

was no stranger to this method, as we have said before, but while she works here with a parallel between

hysterical control and creative control she presents the first as a mad reflection of the second. The speaker

like Miss Drake is "No novice / In those elaborate rituals" that allay her terror yet her tremendous energies

are so absorbed in maintaining them that she has no reserve with which to understand why she performs as

she does. When she sees herself as a victimized Jew or Christ, she may be engaging in self-parody but the

extremity of her circumstances does not allow her to realize it. The poet behind the poem is not caricaturing

Lady Lazarus as she had Miss Drake; she is rather allowing Lady Lazarus to caricature herself and thus

demonstrating the way in which the mind turns ritualistic against horror. Despite the fact that "Lady

Lazarus" draws on Plath's own suicide attempt, the poem tells us little more than a newspaper account of

the actual event. It is not a personal confession. What it does reveal is Plath's understanding of the way the

suicidal person thinks.



"Daddy" is an even more complicated treatment of the same process. The poem opens with the daughter's

assertion that "You do not do, you do not do." But if Daddy will not do, neither will he not not do, and we

find this speaker in the characteristic Plath trap, forcing herself to deal with a situation she finds

unacceptable. "Daddy" is not so much an account of a true-life situation as a demonstration of the mind

confronting its own suffering and trying to control that by which it feels controlled. The simplistic, insistent

rhythm is one form of control, the obsessive rhyming and repeated short phrases are others, means by which

she attempts to charm and hold off the evil spirits. But the speaker is even more crafty than this technical

expertise demonstrates. She is skilled at image-making like a poet and she can manipulate her images with

extreme facility. The images themselves are important for what they tell us of her sense of being victimized

and victimizer but more significant than the actual image is the swift ease with which she can turn it to

various uses. For example, she starts out imagining herself as a prisoner living like a foot in the black shoe

of her father. Then she casts her father in her own role and he becomes "one grey toe / Big as a Frisco seal"

and then quickly she is looking for his foot, his root. Next he reverts to his original boot identity, and she is

the one with "The boot in the face." And immediately he returns with "A cleft in your chin instead of your

foot." At the end, she sees the villagers stamping on him. Thus she moves from booted to booter as her

father reverses the direction. The mind that works in this way is neither logical nor psychologically

penetrating; it is simply extremely adept at juggling images. In fact, the speaker is caught in her own

strategies. She can control her terrors by forcing them into images, but she seems to have no understanding

of the confusion her wild image-making betrays. When she identifies herself as a foot, she suggests that she

is trapped, but when she calls her father a foot the associations break down. In the same way, when she

caricatures her father as a Fascist and herself as a Jew, she develops associations of torture which are not

exactly reversed when she reverses the identification and calls herself the killer of her vampire-father. The

speaker here can categorize and manipulate her feelings in name-calling, in rituals, in images, but these are

only techniques, and her frenzied use of them suggests that they are methods she employs in the absence of

any other. When she says, "Daddy, I have had to kill you," she seems to realize the necessity of the

exorcism and to understand the ritual she performs, but the frantic pitch of the language and the swift

switches of images do not confirm any self-understanding. The pace of the poem reveals its speaker as one

driven by a hysterical need for complete control, a need that stems from the fear that without such control

she will be destroyed. Her simple, incantatory monologue is the perfect vehicle of expression for the orderly

disordered mind.



In talking to A. Alvarez, Plath called these poems "light verse." "Daddy" does not seem to fall easily into

that category despite its nonsense rhymes and rhythms, its quickly flicking images. It is neither decorous nor

playful. On the other hand, given its subject, neither is it ponderous or solemn. Above all it offers no insight

into the speaker, no mitigating evidence, no justification. Plath's classification is clear perhaps only if we

consider her speaker a parodic version of the poet. The speaker manipulates her terror in singsong language

and thus delivers herself in "light verse" that employs its craft in holding off its subject. For all the frankness

of this poem, the name-calling and blaming, the dark feeling that pervades it is undefined, held back rather

than revealed by the technique. The poet who has created this speaker knows the speaker's strategies

because they are a perverted version of her own, and that is the distinction between the speaker's "light

verse" and the poet's serious poem.



From her earliest madwomen and hysterical virgins to the late suicides and father-killers, Plath portrays

characters whose stagey performances are subversions of the creative act. Absorbed in their rituals, they

confess nothing. They are not anxious to make a breakthrough back into life. In fact, their energies are

engaged in erecting a barricade against self-revelation. Plath's fascination with this parodic image of the

creative artist stems from a deep knowledge of the machinations of the mind. If she reveals herself in these

poems, she does so in the grotesque mirror of parody. If these poems come out of her own emotional

experiences, as she said they did, they are not uninformed cries from the heart. Rather, she chose to deal

with her experience by creating characters who could not deal with theirs and through their rituals

demonstrate their failure. These poems, like the speakers in them, are superbly controlled; but the poet

behind the poem uses her immense technical control to manipulate the tone, the rhythm, the rhyme, the pace

of the speakers' language in order to reveal truths about the speakers that their obsessive assertions deny.



Source: M. D. Uroff, "Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration," in Iowa Review, Vol. 8,

No. 1, 1977, pp. 104-15. Reproduced by permission.



Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism

The Monster in Plath's 'Mirror'

Critic: William Freedman

Source: Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 108, No. 5, October, 1993, pp. 152-69. Reproduced by

permission

Criticism about: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), also known as: Victoria Lucas, Mrs. Ted Hughes



Nationality: American







[(essay date October 1993) In the following essay, Freedman discusses Plath's use of the mirror as a symbol

of female passivity, subjugation, and Plath's own conflicted self-identity caused by social pressure to

reconcile the competing obligations of artistic and domestic life.]



For many women writers, the search in the mirror is ultimately a search for the self, often for the self as

artist. So it is in Plath's poem "Mirror." Here, the figure gazing at and reflected in the mirror is neither the

child nor the man the woman-as-mirror habitually reflects, but a woman. In this poem, the mirror is in effect

looking into itself, for the image in the mirror is woman, the object that is itself more mirror than person. A

woman will see herself both in and as a mirror. To look into the glass is to look for oneself inside or as

reflected on the surface of the mirror and to seek or discover oneself in the person (or non-person) of the

mirror.



The "She" who seeks in the reflecting lake a flattering distortion of herself is an image of one aspect of the

mirror into which she gazes. She is the woman as male-defined ideal or as the ideal manqué, the woman

who desires to remain forever the "young girl" and who "turns to those liars, the candles or the moon" for

confirmation of the man-pleasing myth of perpetual youth, docility, and sexual allure. As such, she is the

personification--or reflection--of the mirror as passive servant, the preconditionless object whose perception

is a form of helpless swallowing or absorption. The image that finally appears in the mirror, the old woman

as "terrible fish," is the opposite or "dark" side of the mirror. She is the mirror who takes a kind of fierce

pleasure in her uncompromising veracity and who, by rejecting the role of passive reflector for a more

creative autonomy, becomes, in that same male-inscribed view, a devouring monster. The woman/mirror,

then, seeks her reflection in the mirror/woman, and the result is a human replication of the linguistic

phenomenon the poem becomes. Violating its implicit claim, the poem becomes a mirror not of the world,

but of other mirrors and of the process of mirroring. When living mirrors gaze into mirrors, as when

language stares only at itself, only mirrors and mirroring will be visible.



This parallel between person and poem suggests that the glass (and lake) in "Mirror" is woman--and more

particularly the woman writer or artist for whom the question of mimetic reflection or creative

transformation is definitive. For the woman--and especially for the mother--per se, the crucial choice is

between the affirmation and effacement of the self: will she reflect the child or more generalized "other" as

it presents itself for obliging reflection, or will she insist on her own autonomous identity and perception. To

do the latter is to risk looking into the mirror and seeing, not the pleasing young girl, but the terrible fish.



Viewed in these terms, "Mirror" may be read as a broadening and more sophisticated extension of poems

like "Morning Song" and "Medusa," which question or reject the maternal role. "I'm no more your

mother," announces the voice of "Morning Song," "Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own

slow/Effacement at the wind's hand." To say as much, however, is to acknowledge what it denies. The

statement succeeds only in rejecting the maternal identity for one that is identical with it, for that of the

vaguely insubstantial image (the cloud) that is ultimately erased from the surface of its other, equally

effaced identity as maternal mirror. The escape from mirror and mother to cloud does not permit an escape

from their mutual fate as depersonalized victims of erasure. And the ambiguity of "its own" suggests that the

mirror as well as the cloud is effaced by the wind that blows the child into the mother's life. "Morning

Song" ends with reconciliation and acceptance, an acceptance reflected in the developing animation of the

poem's imagery: of the child from watch and statue to moth, cat, and singer; of the mother from walls and

cloud to cow-heavy woman.



"Medusa" ends with the rejection that presumably motivated it, the rejection of the poet's own mother as a

kind of terrible sea creature that poisons, paralyzes, and devours:







Off, off, eely tentacle!



There is nothing between us.



Even here, however, there is an injected sense of the speaker as mother as well as child. The Medusa,

apparently the mother, is also the child/mother's own newborn infant, a "tremulous breath at the end of my

line . . . dazzling and grateful, / Touching and sucking." She is "Fat and red, a placenta" who, like a new

unwelcomed baby, was not called, yet "steamed to me over the sea . . . Paralyzing the kicking lovers." The

obliterating mother, then, is at the same time the infant whose emergence sucks life and identity from the

child-cum-mother. Indeed, the evocation of the mother as devouring monster seems to be a reactive

inversion of the perhaps more primitive sense that the speaking child consumes or threatens to consume its

sacrificial mother. "Who do you think you are?" She asks harshly. "A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary? /

I shall take no bite of your body, / Bottle in which I live." Here Plath as embryo or new offspring rejects the

sacrificial offer of the mother's body, and the poem's enraged rejection of the monstrous mother may at

bottom be a rejection of the mother's ironically devouring self-annihilation. A letter Plath wrote to her

brother in 1953 reflects such an image of their mother:



You know, as I do, and it is a frightening thing, that mother would actually kill herself for us if we calmly

accepted all she wanted to do for us. She is an abnormally altruistic person, and I have realized lately that

we have to fight against her selflessness as we would fight against a deadly disease . . .

After extracting her life blood and care for 20 years we should start bringing in big dividends of joy for her .

. . (Letter to Warren, May 12, 1953).



A passage from Jung's "The Development of Personality," which Plath transcribed, describes the

phenomenon of crushing maternal self-annihilation that Plath experienced and transformed into poetry.

"Parents," wrote Jung,



set themselves the fanatical task of always "doing their best" for the children and "living only for them."

This claimant ideal effectively prevents the parents from doing anything about their own development and

allows them to thrust their "best" down their children's throats. This so-called "best" turns out to be the very

things the parents have most badly engaged in themselves. In this way the children are goaded on to achieve

their parents' most dismal failures, and are loaded with ambitions that are never fulfilled.



The parents Jung describes assume contradictory roles, just as Plath's image of the mother-woman-mirror as

terrible fish assumes contradictory or at least contrary forms. On the one hand, it is an image of a monstrous

autonomy that cannot perform the self-effacing function of infant-confirming mother. Instead, "reflecting its

own mood or, worse still, the rigidity of her own defenses," it generates in the child the threat of chaos that

produces the disturbed obsession with distorting mirrors in Plath's poetry. Conversely, this terrible fish or

medusa may be the image of maternal self-annihilation, the mother's guilt-inducing refusal of autonomy.

The required self-denial of new motherhood, if perpetuated or exaggerated, may, as Jung suggests, be as

threatening as its opposite. As virtually exclusive nurturer of the infant and small child, the mother cannot

win. Caught between annihilation of self and annihilation of other, and lanced on the sacrifice of self that

may efface the other, her denigration, rejection, and perceived monstrosity are all but insured.

The same near-identity of assertive autonomy with an at least seemingly contradictory self-annihilation

characterizes the language of "Mirror" and colors the poem's implicit treatment of the woman as writer.

The poem is finally about language and imitation, about poetry and its relation to what it describes. As such,

it is a poem that assumes a central place in the literature of female authorship, the literature that takes as its

subject the woman as writer and her obligation to create for woman and herself a resistant and resilient

language of her own. The popularity of Plath's relatively few poems of aggressive threat and power, poems

such as "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy," misleads us. Far more of her poetry presents protagonists or

personae who are basically passive and depersonalized, victimized and helpless. Like the mirror, the

speakers in these poems--dolls, mannequins, stones, patients--are typically confined, often inanimate,

absorbently passive, and devoid of personal initiative or will. They are, in short, images of the woman who,

as Gilbert and Gubar document, inanimately animate the "mirror of the male-inscribed literary text."



Much of Plath's poetry, in other words, is a mirror of the male text as mirror, a replication of the passive

images caught on its surface. Just as the mirror can only reflect reality, the woman writer can only reflect

male ideals and desires. Devoid of subjectivity and the power of narrative, the woman in many of Plath's

poems "speaks" not only to the plight of woman generally, but, more particularly, to the woman as writer.

For as Gilbert and Gubarargue, the mirror in much 19th- and 20th-century women's poetry and fiction is the

locus of authorial self-discovery, the place in which the woman author or would-be author perceives both

her silent subordination and the fierce urgency of repressed speech.



The image of woman as reflector functions in several ways. As mother or woman, the mirror's principal and

imposed obligation is to reflect infant and other--that is, she must present herself as the image mirrored in

man's eyes. But as speaking mirror, the woman becomes a narrating reflector of herself as mirror and of

whatever passes before it. She becomes the writer who writes of the mirror in which she perceives herself

and of the mirror she is. She becomes the text in which that recording occurs. Through these lenses, the

question of the object of perception gives place to the now central question of the nature of the narrator. The

mirror as woman or mother reflects the other to itself. The mirror as text or writer reflects self and world in

language that becomes a kind of mirror itself. But in both forms the principal conflict is between a self-

suppressing recapitulation of male expression and an autonomous resistance to the conventional truths and

methods of his inscriptions. The connections are further entangled by the fact that a selection of a narrative

technique inevitably determines the treatment of content. To let the mirror speak in self-defining ways that

resist prior definition or restriction is to alter the image in the glass. That resistance is what is represented by

the substitution of the "terrible fish" for the more attractive young girl in "Mirror."



The mirror's opening announcement of its identity calls that identity into question and begins to transform

the mirror from a passive reflector into an active speaker. The poem mirrors language's resistance to simple

representation and reflects the resistance of the woman writer and the feminine text to the roles assigned

them. It is this rebellion, this presumptuous arrogation of autonomy, that accounts for the shocking image of

the terrible fish in the poem's concluding line. The terrible fish is not just a symbol of approaching old age:

it is the image of "monstrous autonomy" that stares back at the literary woman in so many of her texts, often

out of the mirror of that text into which she gazes in embittered self-search. "The woman writer's self-

contemplation," Gilbert and Gubar maintain, "may be said to have begun with a searching glance into the

mirror of the male-inscribed literary text." It continues in her own text, where, as in Mary Elizabeth

Coleridge's "The Other Side of the Mirror," the "woman, wild," "bereft of loveliness," her mouth a "hideous

wound" bleeding "in silence and in secret," erupts into her poetry and fiction as demonic emblem of her

independent identity, her monstrous renunciation of the mirroring angel. The speaker in Coleridge's poem is

not a lonely, but a common figure. For like Coleridge, "the literary woman frequently finds herself staring

with horror at a fearful image of herself that has been mysteriously inscribed on the surface of the glass."

Plath's "Mirror" is in this tradition, its terrible fish a menacing image of its own self-terrifying

achievement.



There is, of course, a biographical dimension to this poem and its governing images, which intensifies the

purely literary force of the work. Plath had a dual image of herself: she was a brightly silvered surface

concealing a demonic form that threatened to tear the fragile membrane--in other words, both a mirror and a

fish. The mirror, of course, is the brilliant surface Plath presented to the world, as both woman and poet. As

poet, Plath the mirror is the precise measurer and recorder of minutiae, the four-cornered goddess of

aesthetic control. As woman, Plath the mirror is the strict and tightly disciplined achiever who glitteringly

fulfilled all expectations, a perfect mirror of acquired parental and social standards of elegance, beauty and

achievement--the persona that emitted what Lowell called "the checks and courtesies," her "air of

maddening docility," and what Alvarez called an "air of anxious pleasantness." It is the persona that, as

Plath herself described it, "Adher[ed] to rule, to rules, to rules," that, seemingly untroubled by her numbed

submission, "Stay[ed] put," like the mirror fixed on the wall, "according to habit." It is the side George

Stade labeled the "social cast of her personality, aesthetic, frozen in a cover girl smile. . . ." It is the

ambitious but distinctly anti-feminist cook and housekeeper whose accents "are those of the American girl

as we want her."



This Plath, in short, is the mirror that reflects back what others wish to see and that is itself a perfect

reflection of the feminine ideal in male eyes. But this Plath--it has become a commonplace--was only a

facade, a fragile surface laid thickly over an inner turmoil Plath herself perceived as a slouching beast

struggling for release. "There are two of me now," Plath writes grittily in "In Plaster": "This new

absolutely white person and the old yellow one." The white person, like the mirror, "had no personality . . .

she had a slave mentality." But the old yellow one, "ugly and hairy," is one of a profusion of monstrous

forms threatening the placid surface from below. As in "Lady Lazarus," it is a cannibal fury rising from

the dead. In "Fever 103°" it is a flaming sinner and a "pure acetylene / Virgin." In "Daddy" it is the

Electral avenger who stakes the vampire's heart; in "Stings" the sleeping queen bee with a menacing "self

to recover," a "lion-red body" that, as Plath's demons typically do, rises as a "red scar" and a flaming comet.

In "Mirror," the poem's deflective subject is itself a defense against its intimidating imagery and import.

The "terrible fish" is not simply the image of aging and decay apparent in the surface narrative; it is another

incarnation of the barely suppressed demon of sensuality and rage that charges Plath's poetry as it haunted

her life. What is more, it is, appropriately, the devouring monster of the deep, disturbingly at home in the

depths of Plath's element.



In an autobiographical essay, "Ocean 1212-W" Plath recounts a crucial memory: "When I was learning to

creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming

wave and was just through the walls of green when she caught my heels. What would have happened," Plath

wonders, "if I had managed to pierce that looking-glass?" The sea is a looking glass in which she claims to

have discovered, at two and a half, the "awful birthday of otherness," "the separateness of everything" and

ultimately therefore of herself. The sea is the terrible country of the void, of the "darkness [that] is leaking

from the cracks." The true habitat of the horrific buried self, it is also the environ of her father. As Plath

confessed in a BBC interview. "I probably wished many times that he were dead. When he obliged me and

died, I imagined that I had killed him." In a number of her poems, her father is the victim of suicide or

murder, usually by drowning, for the sea is her father's element, and it is there she takes her revenge. When

she announces in "Full Fathom Five," "father, this thick air is murderous / I would breathe water," she

identifies herself as a dark swimmer in its waves, in effect the terrible fish who would return to her father.

Whether she would return in order to love him like Electra or to destroy him as in "Daddy" matters little.

Forbidden love and murder are but two faces of the same resurgent beast.



That the appearance of the demonic in Plath's poetry is typically associated with the imagery of sea and

water helps explain, in biographical terms, the substitution of lake for mirror in the poem. The terrible fish is

implicit from the outset. It is contained in the rebellious rejection of the mirroring role in the opening lines

of "Mirror" that ostensibly accept and define it. It is implicit, too, in the barely concealed harshness of the

relentless veracity of the mirror's reflection, whose cruelty she unconvincingly denies. And it is explicit in

the mirror's urge to "swallow immediately" whatever it sees. But the image of the fish's emergence requires

that the mirror be transformed into water, Plath's symbol of the hideous depths in which the monster lives.

The terrible fish, then, is Plath's personal demon, the witch she strove to conceal beneath the snow white

surface or to transform into the "pure gold baby" of "Lady Lazarus." In this reading, the poem's attempt to

undermine the mirror's veritical claims with a figurative language that belies them is a linguistic replica of

the poem's content, of the effort of the woman who "turns to those liars, the candles and the moon" to avert

the terrible truth of her mounting ugliness and decay. Here, the flight from clarity and truth is also a flight,

parallel to the young woman's and the author's, from the horrifying image of the woman as the devouring

other. Her shocking emergence at the end of the poem marks the fearful triumph of a psychological reality

over the linguistic efforts to avert it. The woman outside the mirror or lake is of course the woman whose

image as terrible fish is also inside it, visible in its depths. To perceive oneself in the mirror or lake, then, is

to recognize one's Jungian shadow as the dark underside of the shining surface. The terrible fish is not

simply the time-transformed identity of the young girl; it is the Hydean alter-ego of the mirror or lake in

whose depths it is shudderingly disclosed.



Inside the woman-as-mirror, in other words, behind this physically restricted, passive, depersonalized

reflector of the external world, lurks the minatory force that will emerge with full power and vengeance in

some of the Ariel poems. To escape the obligations of literal truthfulness is not to escape the mirror of male

texts that identify her as the obedient angel, but the opposite. It is to evade the monstrous truth the angel

herself knows best and fears no less than does the male who protectively angelicizes her in order to prevent

her transformation into monster. It is to look into the mirror and pretend one does not see the monster.



Because it recognizes the danger both of reflecting and ignoring the world, "Mirror" can be seen as the

turning point in Plath's development. The voice in poems such as "Stones," "Lorelei," "Tulips," "Love

Letter," "Crossing the Water," "Purdah," "Face Lift," "Two Campers in Cloud Country,"

"Childless Woman," and dozens more is that of a woman who has accepted her depersonalization and

passivity or who longs for the numbing purity it promises. In many of these poems, the stone, jade, plaster,

or anesthetized persona shares the muted stage with old yellow, the lioness, the acetylene virgin, or other

threatening figures from the depths, though it is not until her final poems, principally "Daddy" and "Lady

Lazarus," that the menacing avenger explodes onto the surface as the dominant force in poems of assertive

threat and rage. "Mirror" represents a kind of middle-ground between the extremes of passivity and action,

numbing self-cancellation and aggressive self-assertion. It achieves its special position and effect by

adopting the former guise in ways that renounce it for the latter. To assume the mirror's role is implicitly to

accept the male-proscribed image of woman and mother. But the poem's method and equations situate the

terrible fish within the lake and mirror and quietly establish an identity between them. The poem's implicit

rejection of the mirror's claim to literal reflection is what generates the image of threatening female

autonomy that the poem ostensibly disavows. The fish that is in effect in the mirror from the outset charges

towards the mirroring surface at the end, its identity and import disguised by a subject that deflects our

attention to figures apparently external to the speaking mirror. Blending passive inactivity with devouring

hostility, the poem presages the vengeful uprising of "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" while maintaining the

innocent, expressionless appearance of paper, stone, mannequin, or doll. "Mirror," in other words, lends to

the monster in the attic (or basement) the face of the angel in the house.



The dread fish is identified with the passive mirror by its presence within or behind it. But their

identification with one another may have another source as well. The speaker sees herself "in" the mirror or

lake in two senses: She is the fearful image in the depths beyond the glass and she is the mirror itself. The

implication here is that Plath found her defenses hardly less repulsive than the assault they were created to

ward off. The terrible fish observed in the lake's depths and rising toward its surface is identifiable with the

mirror that reflects, neutrally and passively, whatever swims before it. The monster in the depths, in other

words, is also the monster on the surface, perhaps more accurately the monstrosity of mere surface or lack

of depth. The identification of the mirror with the terrible fish, then, erases the separation the dual identity

was constructed to sustain. It suggests on the one hand that the mirror contains the fish, that beneath the

angel in the house lurks the monster in the depths. But it may propose as well that a two-dimensional image

of the angel is also is a form of monstrosity.

In "Crossing the Water," the title poem of Plath's second volume, the speaker is identified as one of "two

black, cut-paper people" floating across the water as they float over the surface of their lives. Yet, as she

observes, "the spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes." And here, too, the double meaning suggests

itself. The spirit of blackness may refer to a dark force concealed beneath the cut paper surface. But, since

the paper itself is identified as black, the stronger reading points toward an identification of two-

dimensionality with blackness--and both flatness and darkness are identified with the fish made terrible in

"Mirror."



The monster is seen not only in the mirroring self, but "in" that self as surface reflector. The woman as the

passive, selfless reflector is inscribed in psychoanalysis, motherhood, and the male text and is submissively

adopted by the woman as her own identity. But Plath shows it to be a monstrous evasion of reality and

suppression of self. A woman who adopts the reflecting role is cruel primarily to herself. It is therefore

inevitable that the last image the reflector swallows is that of the terrible fish, which is at once its concealed

opposite and its concealing self.



The mirror is an image of the woman writer in her two conflicting roles as wife/mother and as author. In the

first she is the selfless reflector of man and infant, in the second the self-conscious, self-centering reflector

of herself and of the world as she willfully perceives it. Traditionally the roles were seen, by women as well

as men, as not merely conflicting but mutually exclusive. It was, in fact, the collective view of

psychoanalytic theory that the woman who has "created" a child required no other creative exercise or

outlet, and women felt the power, if not always the validity, of that argument in their lives. Some women

writers have so internalized this argument that they have felt the fear Susan Sulciman describes: "With

every word I write, with every metaphor, with every act of genuine creation, I hurt my child." The guilt this

idea elicits necessarily produces feelings of aggression. In Plath's "Mirror," and in many more of her

poems on motherhood and entrapment, this aggression wins out over any feelings of tenderness.



Like the women in the writing of Anne Finch and Anne Elliot, Emily Dickinson and the Brontë sisters, the

persona in a few of Plath's poems--in "In Plaster," the Bee poems, "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy"--

articulates what virtually her entire body of poetry represents: the striving of the fundamentally powerless

woman for autonomy. "The great woman writers of the past two centuries," Gilbert and Gubar argue,

"danced out of the debilitating looking glass of the male text into the health of female authority. Tracing

subversive pictures behind socially acceptable facades, they managed to appear to dissociate themselves

from their own revolutionary impulses even while passionately enacting such impulses." Plath hardly seems

at home in this tradition. The female authority she stole or discovered assumed no healthy form. Rather, her

work seems dangerously divided between poems in which she anesthetically dissociates herself from her

aggressive or rebellious impulses and those, mostly later poems, in which she ferociously enacts them. In

"Mirror" the contrary impulses come together--even as she dissociates herself from aggression, she acts it

out. And while the poem's repression does not bespeak a thoroughly healthy freedom, Plath has found a way

to allow her aggression to triumph over tenderness, but only within a controlled system that maintains the

integrity of poem and personality alike.



In "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf recalls a dream in which "I was looking in a glass when a horrible

face--the face of an animal--suddenly showed over my shoulder." What she sees is a variant of the monster

in the mirror familiar to women's poetry and fiction, the image of rebelliously monstrous autonomy typified

by the madwoman in the attic and an uneasy crowd of ominous female forms that darken the mirroring text

of women's fiction. As in Plath's poem, the young woman sees in the mirror the dread reflected image of a

beast that is clearly an aspect of the self Woolf elsewhere identified as a self-less mirror for man's

magnification.



Mary Elizabeth Coleridge's "The Other Side of the Mirror" offers a more pertinent parallel, for it implies

more strongly still the connection between feminine writing and monstrosity. In this poem, Coleridge traces

the emergence of the monster from behind the angelic facade, a creature whose rage betrays the shallowness

and fragility of the submissive pretense. This figure arises, as Gilbert and Gubar observe, "as if the very

process of writing had liberated [her] . . . from a silence in which neither she nor her author can continue to

acquiesce." In Plath, too, I believe, it is the writing that liberates the monster--or rather generates her. To

quote Gilbert and Gubar one final time, "If she is to be a poet the woman must deconstruct the dead self that

is a male 'opus' and discover a living 'inconsistent' self." And the implicit reference to Plath's "Lady

Lazarus" in the word opus--"I am your opus, / I am your valuable, / The pure gold baby / That melts to a

shriek"--is as apt as the verb that effects the metamorphosis. For it is precisely by deconstructing the

masculine mimetic language that entraps the woman in her traditional role that the speaking mirror

exchanges the anxious young woman for the monstrous autonomy of the terrible fish. The fish is the woman

as autonomous person and author. It is the role-rejecting woman/mother who, even as she proclaims her

acceptance of the task, refuses passively to mirror man, infant, or whatever else is set before it. And it is the

woman-as-writer who, even as she proclaims her obedient adherence to the mimetic model, adopts that

model only to tease and overturn it. "She accepts the woman's role as accurate reflecting mirror in order to

transcend it, to show how that very role inevitably thwarts and transcends itself." The mirror as woman and

as writer takes on the figure of the four-cornered glass in order to shatter it against the non-mirroring

language with which she affirms the comfort of the fit--to shatter it, too, by focusing on herself, making

herself the subject of her own attention and the poem. It is the nature and occupation of the mirror self-

effacingly to reflect the other. In "Mirror," however, the glass is both subject and speaker at once. The

poem begins with "I," a pronoun that appears five times in the first four lines and, together with "me" or

"my," seventeen times in this poem of only eighteen lines. The mirror/woman, who is by definition without

identity, defines and identifies herself. The persona that has no story, tells it, and in the defiant mirror-

breaking act of doing so, she becomes the terrible fish of assertive selfhood. To tell one's own story, even if

it is, as it must be, the story of absence and effacement, is to establish a presence and to display, perhaps for

the first time, the face behind the angelic silver mask.



Plath's emergent monster, then, is not an imagined other, a beckoning fulfillment of hopeless ambition. It is

the reconstruction of the speechless woman whose language deconstructs her verbal confession of mere

reflective silence. This reconstructed self still bears the conscience of the complaint, and therefore the image

of autonomy is not a thoroughly positive figure of assertive strength. The woman continues to subscribe to

the male dread of female sexuality and to the male identification of female defiance or aggression with

bestiality. The monster, then, does not so much dwell on the other side of the mirror; she is the other side of

the mirror, the perpetuation of the mirror's male-inscribed ideal in a form that otherwise rejects it. The

contradictions travel in both directions. The announcement of a mirroring silence or self-effacement

implicitly rejects the identity it affirms. Yet the monstrous shape this autonomy assumes attests to the

persistence of the woman's sense of self as dependent and faceless.



The woman achieves autonomy in Plath's "Mirror" and comparable works by rejecting the phallocentric

language whose fixed truth fixes woman as the mirroring or speechless other. The rejection of the false and

insulting "truth" of woman's identity is effected in a language that undermines the very possibility of

definable identity and truth. Woman achieves freedom from male definition at the price of all definition,

freedom from the name with which the masculine text identifies her in the affirmation of unnamability. Yet,

as in Conrad, the unnamed, too, may be a form of monstrosity or horror: the chilling truth at the heart of the

darkness may be an unnamed evil or the evil of unnamability itself, the fearful prospect of truth as mere

illusion. The stakes are perhaps lower in "Mirror," the curse a mixed blessing of menacing independence

and creativity. But the merging dichotomy is present here as well. In these terms, the terrible fish is not only

the monstrous autonomy of woman as personally or artistically creative self. It is also the impossibility of all

autonomy or self-definition. Defining herself in and as that which cannot be defined, the woman writer

comes perilously close to her previous condition of subjectlessness. That is the price of creative autonomy

viewed in terms of resistance and dissociation.



Different in several ways from other poems on "monstrous" female autonomy, creativity is not the manifest

subject of "Mirror," and the terrible creature is not the acknowledged alter-ego of the speaker. The image,

moreover, retains more of its primordial menace as both monster and internal threat than in most of the

poems of the genre. There is little apparent nobility or dignity in the terrible fish, and its immediate if not

exclusive prey seems to be not man or "the oppressor" but the mirror (or lake) itself and the young woman

who is drowned in it. Almost to the very end Plath remained ambivalent, retained her dual identity, and

could not celebrate liberation or defiance unperplexed. Unlike Lady Lazarus, Plath's mirror is a cannibal

Charybdis who either has not yet identified the enemy or is not prepared to attack it. Finally and most

impressively, however, unlike most poems that consciously identify their beast of creative enterprise,

"Mirror" generates its emblem of autonomy in the language and processes of a poem that has ostensibly

made its peace with mere reflection. The terrible fish is not so much an image in the poem as an image of

the poem and its achievement, the self-generated product of its method.



Source: William Freedman, "The Monster in Plath's 'Mirror,'" in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol.

108, No. 5, October, 1993, pp. 152-69. Reproduced by permission.



Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism