‘Viciousness in the Kitchen': Sylvia Plath's Domestic Poetry
In the
following essay, Dobbs examines allusions to marriage and motherhood in Plath's
poetry. According to Dobbs, the hostile and often violent imagery in such
pieces reflects Plath's strong resistance to the prospect of domestic
entrapment as a wife and mother.
There's a hex on the cradle
and death in the pot.
For Sylvia Plath, domesticity is an ultimate
concern. Like Erica Jong, Tillie Olsen, Marge Piercy and many other contemporary women writers Plath
frequently explores what it means to be a woman in terms of the traditional
conflict between family and career. Plath's life and her writing are filled
with anxiety and despair over her refusal to choose and instead to try to
have--what most males consider their birthright--both. It is apparent from her
life and letters that her commitment to writing was total and unwavering and
that her commitment to domesticity, especially motherhood, was ambivalent.
Paradoxically, it is out of her domestic relationships and experiences, which
she came to feel were stifling, even killing her that
the majority of her most powerful, most successful work was created.
Many Plath poems are concerned at one level or
another with suffering: with sickness, injury, torture, madness, death. Titles
alone, of many Plath poems, reveal this: "Cut," for example, and
"Fever 103°," "Paralytic," "Contusion,"
"Thalidomide," "Amnesiac," "Witch Burning."
This seems not surprising in that Plath's life and the lives of those close to
her contained more than an average share of illness and loss. There were the
amputation of her father's leg and his subsequent death when she was seven; her
mother's chronic ulcer; her grandmother's death; her own breakdown and
institutionalization, chronic sinus condition, broken leg, miscarriage,
appendectomy; her real life Buddy Willard's bout with TB and confinement to a sanitarium. In addition, her visit with Buddy Willard to
Boston-Lying-In hospital where she viewed medical students dissecting cadavers,
fetuses in bottles, and childbirth, provided a
traumatic extension to her more immediate experiences. What is more interesting
than the fact that her work reflects pain and suffering, however, is the fact
that she sometimes portrays physical and mental pain as retribution for doing
or being bad and that her poetry so frequently contains images that associate
physical and mental suffering and also effacement--a kind of living death--, as
well as death itself, with domestic relationships and/or domestic roles.
Several incidents in The Bell Jar illustrate
Plath's linking of suffering and sin. Bad-girl Doreen flaunts her sexuality
(and perhaps, in Esther Greenwood's eyes, does worse) and gets drunk-sick.
Buddy Willard's TB is seen as retribution for his boasted infidelity with a
waitress. Esther wonders what bad thing she has done to deserve electric shock.
She views her broken leg as paying herself back for being bad--that is, for
refusing to marry Buddy Willard. In Plath's work in general, not only are other
people the objects of vengeance--her parents, her suitors, her husband and in
later poems his mistress--but she herself is an object of her own vengeance.
The idea of revenge of the self by the self is, of course, masochistic. But the
linking of suffering and sin provides her with powerful, original images and
diction when she deals with areas of life about which she had complex,
ambivalent attitudes, such as marriage and especially motherhood.
Plath's letters to her mother and her novel both make
it explicitly clear that Plath was confused and frustrated by the necessity of
defining herself as a woman. In 1949, at age seventeen, she wrote: "I am
afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day--spare me
from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free. . . ."
She felt "bewildered," two years later, by an extended stint as a
sleep-in nursemaid and spoke of the job as "slavery." "Learning
of the limitations of a woman's sphere," she wrote, "is no fun at
all." And at twenty, a student at Smith, she insisted: "Graduate
school and travel abroad are not going to be stymied by any squealing,
breastfed brats." By the time she reached the University at
In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood mirrors Plath's
ambivalence, alternating between insisting she'll marry and have a parcel of
kids and exclaiming: "If I had a baby to wait on all day, I would go
mad." But one of the ironies of the novel is the fact that the reader
knows from the beginning of the book that Esther will have a baby. Discussing
the gifts she received during her month in
Writing to her mother from Smith, Plath agonized
over "which to choose?"--meaning, work or pleasure? career or marriage? The central metaphor of The Bell Jar,
the fig tree, is Plath's literary portrayal of this dilemma. Each fig
represents an option, a future: to be a famous poet, an editor or the like, or
to be a wife and mother. Each is mutually exclusive and only one can be picked.
As Esther (very much an extension of her creator here) hesitates, debating with
herself, "the figs began to wrinkle and go black,
and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at her feet." Rejection of any
option was difficult because something in her wanted it all. "I'll be
flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the
rest of my days," Esther says. In her own life, Plath tried for the
compromise. There were times, her letters and the remembrances of her family
and friends reveal, that domestic life alone seemed to
fulfill her. She was a perfectionist at housekeeping
as she had always been at her college work and at writing. At times she reveled in being "cowlike"
and maternal. Then, writing pot-boilers for "soppy women's magazines and
cooking and sewing" were her highest ambitions. At times, too, she felt
that "children seem[ed]
an impetus to [her serious] writing." But a resentment
against them, against their demands on her time, their drain on her creativity,
is evident too. Pleasure, resentment, guilt. Ambivalence. Plath's work suggests that the attempt to
resolve these feelings failed. Her suicide may have been, to some degree, a final
acting out of her belief in punishment, vengeance, of the self on the self, for
this failure.
Plath's use of images and diction depicting
suffering in relationship to female roles and domestic experience expressed in
The Bell Jar and her late poetry are foreshadowed in several poems in her first
book of poetry, The Colossus (1960). Many of the poems in this volume were
written after her marriage; some were written during her first pregnancy. (Her
daughter was born in April of 1960). Poems in The Colossus that deal with
male/female relationships or motherhood are primarily dark, fearful poems.
"The
Not apprehension but real revulsion to motherhood
is expressed in "Sow." Written earlier than "The Manor
Garden," the poem "Sow" is a portrait of a Brobdingnagian
hog not yet "hedged by a litter of feat-footed ninnies / Shrilling her
hulk / To halt for a swig at the pink teats," but a monstrous maiden pig
awaiting a "boar fabulous enough to straddle her heat." In action,
this comic, this grotesque sow consumes the world. Exaggeration is one dimension
of Plath's vision. The sow is one of her colossal figures. Although the sow is
ridiculous, she is frightening. For Plath, she represents the destiny of the
adult female--the Dodo Conways of the human world, a
breed not about to become extinct.
"I Want, I Want" is a more difficult poem
than "Sow," but it seems to describe the terrible, insatiable demands
of the "baby-god" who "cried out for the mother's dug." Its
two final lines, "Barbs on the crown of gilded wire / Thorns on the bloody
rose stem" vaguely suggest the crucifixion and set up a parallel between
it and childbirth which Plath develops more extensively in later poems.
Another Colossus poem, "Moonrise," uses
exceedingly ominous imagery and allusions to Christ's death in relation to
pregnancy:
Berries redden. A body of whiteness
Rots, and smells of rot under its headstone
Though the body walk out in
clean linen.
. . .
Death whitens in the egg and out of it.
The poem concludes with an address to Lucina, the goddess of childbirth, whom Plath transforms
into a Woman in the Moon. The moon, traditionally connected with the female
cycle of menstruation, represents the negation of pregnancy. And the child of
the labor Plath describes is an "ancient
father," "white-bearded, weary," a figure resembling Father Time
or perhaps Father Death, rather than a child. Thus, the birth or the
anticipation of that experience includes its antithesis. The horror here
matches any created in the last Ariel poems.
The first four of the five separate poems that make
up "Poem for a Birthday" also center around domestic situations. The speaker's pregnancy is the
subject of the first two poems ("Who" and "Dark House") and
is alluded to in the third ("Maenad"). In the fourth ("The
Beast"), the marital situation is described and the speaker's
disillusionment with it: "I've married a cupboard of rubbish / . . . I
housekeep in Time's gut-end."
The familial portraits presented in these four
poems are, even for Plath, particularly grotesque. The fetus
is described as "All mouth who licks up the bushes / And
the pots of meat. / . . . He's to blame" ("Dark House"). And the
husband, although "he was bullman earlier / King
of my dish, my lucky animal," becomes "Mumblepaws,"
"Fido Littlesoul, the bowel's familiar"
("The Beast"). In "Who," he is "Dogsbody"; in
"Maenad," he is "Dog-head, devourer."
In the sections of "Poem for a Birthday"
that deal with pregnancy, there is the unlikely linking of birth not with death
but with madness. A loss of identity, a sense of insignificance and smallness,
are portrayed as common to both experiences. In "Who," the speaker
begs, "Let me sit in the flowerpot / The spiders
won't notice." She is "a root, a stone, an owl pellet." She
reveals that "for weeks I can remember nothing at all." In
"Maenad," she begs. "Tell me my name." In "The
Stones," she is "a still pebble"; and she becomes one with the fetus:
I entered
The stomach of indifference
. . .
Drunk as a fetus
I suck at the paps of
darkness
All in all, these early poems, written around the time
of Plath's first pregnancy and personally selected for publication in her first
collection, reveal degrees of mental stress over the maternal condition.
Motherhood may be something monstrous, as the child may be. Signs attending
birth are not propitious. There is a confusion over
the meaning of the event reminiscent of the attitude of Eliot's magi.
The Colossus also introduces one of Plath's single
women. "The Spinster," written in the year of her marriage, describes
a woman who renounces the disorder that romance brings into her life. Romance
is symbolized in this poem by the fertility which spring promises, "the rank wilderness of fern and flower." The
"lover's gesture imbalances the air." The spinster rejects "this
tumult" and adopts instead the "frosty discipline" of winter:
And round her house she set
Such a barricade of barb and check
Against mutinous weather
As no mere insurgent man could hope to break
With curse, fist, threat
Or love either.
In addition to disorder, there is a violence in love that threatens the spinster, that
victimizes her. Some early but uncollected poems also explore the experience of
the woman rejecting or attempting to reject the man. In "The Snowman on
the Moor" (written near the end of 1956 and published in Poetry: July,
1957), Plath investigates more closely the spinster's choice. In "The
Snowman," a man and a woman have had an argument and the woman flees.
Escape, however, is not really what she wants. "Come find me," she
cries. But "he did not come." Clearly it is pursuit that the woman
wants: "police and hounds to bring her in." She wants the
demonstration on the man's part of his desire for her, a sign of his
submission. The second part of the poem shows how the woman is subjugated
instead. She is subjugated not by a figure of passion but by "a grisly-thewed / Austere, corpse-white /
Giant" who is "sky high." "Snow / Floured his beard."
This colossus represents the wintry world into which she has fled--the
spinster's world of "frosty discipline."
o she felt
No love in his eye,
Worse--saw dangling from that spike-studded belt
Ladies' shaved skulls:
Mournfully the dry tongues clacked their guilt:
"Our wit made fools
Of kings, unmanned kings' sons: our masteries
Amused court halls:
For that brag, we barnacle these iron thighs."
The women already conquered by the cold giant are,
significantly, witty women. They exist as heads: women without bodies, without
hair. Their wit threatened men--it unmanned them. In turn, the women themselves
were punished--they lost their femininity, their sexuality. This vision is of
the frigid, truncated world of the woman alone, the world without love.
Although the giant does not succeed in adding the speaker's head to his
collection and, in fact, disintegrated--"crumbled to smoke"--when she
"shied sideways," he does win. The fleeing girl is subdued by her
vision of the alternative to the embattled state in which she and the man live:
Humbled then, and crying
The girl bent homeward, brimful of gentle talk
And mild obeying.
The giant is male because males rule the woman's
world, her choices. The man to whom the woman humbly returns rules her real
world. The giant who personifies the executioner--the punisher of women who
rebel--rules her imaginary world of women unsubjugated
and, therefore, unloved by men. The vision in which no alternative is tenable
becomes more and more Plath's way of seeing the world.
"Pursuit" is a similar, early,
uncollected poem (Atlantic: January, 1957), the first poem Plath wrote after
meeting Ted Hughes. Its speaker is a woman who cannot transcend her own
physical nature and who has intense and ambivalent feelings about her desire to
do so. Like the woman in "The Snowman," she flees from a man because
he is capable of hurting her. However, because of his strength and her
weakness, she knows she will succumb. The woman is the victim not only of the
male but of her own sexuality as well. She is pursued by a panther, a creature
which embodies in the poem both the idea of the ravaging male and the woman's
own desire.
Keen the rending teeth and sweet
The singeing fury of his fur;
His kisses parch, each
paw's a briar,
Doom consummates that appetite.
Here the beast represents the man, whose lovemaking
both wounds and pleases. The assurance between "teeth" and
"sweet" helps emphasize the paradox. The woman is aware what her fate
will be if she succumbs, because like the giant snowman the panther has
previously victimized other women:
In the wake of this fierce cat,
Kindled like torches for his joy,
Charred and ravened women lie.
Soon, however, the woman admits her own desires:
"His ardor snares me, lights the trees, / And I run flaring in my skin." Finally she is overcome
by her awareness of the beast in herself. She recognizes her own lust as well as
the cruel brilliance of his: "Appalled by secret want, I rush / From such assault of radiance." Such intensity and such
awareness frighten the woman, and she wants to repress them. She bolts the
doors. Nevertheless as the poem concludes, the woman knows: "The panther's
tread is on the stairs / Coming up and up the stairs."
Women dominated. Women manipulated. Women
subjugated. Plath continued to turn the subject this way and that. She seems to
see these conditions as inevitable. She writes in The Bell Jar: "I knew
that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered
on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding
service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs.
Willard's kitchen mat." Men train their wives to serve. In a poem
describing an ocean voyage entitled "On Deck" (Crossing the Water),
she observes:
And the white-haired jeweler
from
A perfectly faceted wife to wait
On him hand and foot, quiet as a diamond.
Women fear men, they run from them; but they want
to be caught. Women seem to need to be dominated, domineered; perhaps they love
it:
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like
you.
--"Daddy" (Ariel)
Still the resentment, the rebellion
bubble up. To be married is to be in purdah,
in plaster, in jail.
Plath sees a bride as a woman upon whom a certain
kind of seclusion is forced, a woman in "Purdah"
(Winter Trees). The bride sees herself become a private possession to be
enjoyed by her owner at will. "I am his. / Even
in his / Absence," the woman says. Her resentment, her rebellion, build:
I shall unloose
One feather . . .
. . .
I shall unloose
One note
Shattering
The chandelier
And finally they burst:
I shall unloose--
From the small jeweled
Doll he guards like a heart--
The lioness,
The shriek in the bath,
The cloth of holes.
Revenge--this is the commitment sworn in the final
stanza. The woman in purdah recalls Plath's more
well-known Lady Lazarus, whose climatic boast in the face of all her (male)
enemies is: "I eat men like air!"
The prisoner of a poem called "The
Jailor" (Encounter: October, 1963) is also desperate over her treatment
and the jailor's demands on her: "He has been burning me with cigarettes /
. . . / I am myself. That is not enough." The prisoner despairs, however,
of escape--partly at least because of the man's dependency on her:
I wish him dead or away.
That, it seems is the impossibility,
That, being free. What would the dark
Do without fevers to eat?
What would the light
Do, without eyes to knife, what would he
Do, do do without me?
Such dependency is also acknowledged in "In
Plaster" (Crossing the Water), where the relationship between body and
cast is described as "a kind of marriage." The metaphor is highly
successful, the poem working at both the literal and the metaphorical levels.
Thus the body and cast have an interdependency, the
cast playing a supporting role like "the best of nurses." When the
body begins to heal, however, and has visions of shucking the cast, he
discovers that "living with her was like living with my own coffin / Yet I still depended on her, though I did it
regretfully."
Marriage, like a cast or a
prosthesis, fills a need, according to Plath. Certainly the relationship
is about a prospective spouse, a groom. Being wifeless, he is missing
something, some primary possession. His hand is empty. He is told:
Here is a hand
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
The bride will fit the groom like a tuxedo for his
wedding or a coffin for his funeral:
Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
. . .
Believe me, they'll bury
you in it.
Wedding or funeral, one is the same as the other.
The bride will obey. Whatever the man lacks, she will supply. She will support
him the way the cast supports the body. This woman is a domestic blob. She is a
kind of Gracie Allen puppet: "It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk."
Plath continued to explore the subject of woman
with child as well as that of woman with man. As previously
noted, the poems in The Colossus dealing with maternity are somewhat less than
enthusiastic. She did write, however, some poems that express very
positive, good feelings about children. "Poem for a Fatherless Son"
(Winter Trees) is one. Yet she wrote few poems on any subject in which the mood
does not turn downward at the end. If she perceives any joy, any little glimpse
of beauty, she is almost sure to drop it climactically. Hence her poetic
technique frequently parallels what literally happens in her poem
"Balloons." The reader (in the poem, her son) sits contemplating a
rosy world (glimpsed through a red balloon) when bang! He sits back holding his
"red shred." Her short poem "Child" (Winter Trees)
illustrates this deflated closing. Here the speaker wants to present the child
with only the objects and experiences appropriate to its youth and innocence:
"colors," "ducks," wildflowers.
But the final stanza suggests that disturbing emotions and dark vistas are the
reluctant offering: "this troublous / Wringing
of hands, this dark / Ceiling without a star."
There are too many poems concerning pregnancy or
children that close in this way to examine them all. To mention a few titles,
"The Night Dances" (Ariel), which Ted Hughes says is about their son
Nicholas dancing in his crib, and "Heavy Women" (Crossing the Water),
a poem about pregnancy, are two.
Several of Plath's poems about pregnancy and
motherhood (all published before her second child was born) are exceptions to
her more common habit of ending on a note of pessimism or of terror. These
poems are all composed using the same technique. They play a metaphorical game:
the referent (the fetus or the child or the pregnant
woman) is described through a series of images. If the reader does not perceive
the subject, the poems remain obscure. "You're" (Ariel) addresses a fetus:
Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled
Gilled like a fish.
In "Dark House," the subject is the
pregnant woman (or her womb):
This is a dark house, very big.
I made it myself,
Cell by cell from a quiet
corner.
In "Metaphors" (Crossing the Water) the
pregnant woman is "a riddle in nine syllables, / An
elephant, a ponderous house." "Words for a Nursery" (Atlantic:
August, 1961) plays this metaphor game, describing the baby's hands, its
fingers: "Rosebud, knot of worms / . . . / Five moony crescents."
This type of verse is clever; cleverness alone,
however, does not make good poetry. In these poems she is dealing with an
inherently sentimental subject in a merely cute manner. ("There's a cuddly
mother"--"Dark House.") These poems constitute some of her
weakest work. It seems significant that she could not deal with maternity or
babies in a positive or hopeful manner and at the same time raise the quality
of her writing out of the level of mere verse and into the realm of true
poetry. That she occasionally tried to treat these subjects positively and
hopefully shows her ambivalent attitude toward them.
Sentimentality or cuteness are
charges seldom leveled against Sylvia Plath. She is more
often accused of excess hostility, of hysteria. Most of her poems about
maternity exhibit these characteristics. In "Parliament Hill Fields"
(Crossing the Water), for instance, a bevy of children is playing. As the
speaker approaches them, she observes that their tightly knit group opens like
a "crocodile . . . to swallow me." The fear is one of survival. Like
the baby-god, children make demands that are often disturbing, cruel:
"These children are after something, with hooks and cries" ("Berck-Plage"--Ariel). Fear and resentment of children
are as prevalent as fear and resentment of men.
Plath's fear of procreativity was, in large part, a
fear of a resultant loss of creativity. Esther Greenwood voices Plath's fear in
The Bell Jar: "I . . . remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister,
knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want
to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you
were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterwards you
went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state."
What then about childlessness? For Plath,
childbirth is a kind of martyrdom. A woman dies as a particular kind of woman
when she bears a child, and she continues to die as the child feeds literally
and metaphorically on her. What, then, about the woman who refuses to make this
sacrifice?
This woman . . .
Says she is a man, not a woman.
. . .
She hates
The thought of a baby--
Stealer of cells, stealer of beauty--
She would rather be dead than fat,
Dead and perfect like Nefertit.
-"The Fearful" (The Observer: February,
1963)
Plath sees childlessness as a kind of perfection,
but perfection of a terrible nature because it is also death. The woman no
longer sacrifices herself for the sake of life. The sacrifice is complete
because all life is denied: "Perfection is terrible, it cannot have
children" ("The Munich Mannequins"--Ariel). In "Edge"
(Ariel), the mother proudly takes back the gift of herself: "The woman is
perfected" because she has reversed her maternal functions:
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body. . . .
In "Tulips" (Ariel), one of Plath's most
popular poems, she uses a personal experience as a setting to express the
complexities that the idea of childlessness has for her. Ted Hughes says she
wrote "Tulips" after being hospitalized for an appendectomy in March
of 1961. She had miscarried just a short time before this
operation; probably the second hospital confinement triggered associations with
death and birth. These tulips are "like an awful baby." There is
something wild and dangerous about them. She wants to reject them because she
says they "eat my oxygen." She wants to reject the tulips as she
wants to reject the trappings of her life and the family she has:
Now I have lost myself, I am sick of baggage--
My husband and child smiling out of the family
photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
Not tulips but death is the gift she wants, as in
"A Birthday Present" (Ariel), but in both cases the irony is that the
gift is life. What she finds in her rejection of the gift here is freedom, a
kind of perfection:
I didn't want any flowers. I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly
empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free--
. . .
It is what the dead close on, finally. . . .
Her freedom is both wonderful and terrible because the
price is so high. The woman must give up her man and her child that hook onto
her, as well as her things, her possessions. And the ultimate price--and
reward--is death. Just as it is "the mouths of
corpses" that suck in the poem "Childless Woman" (Winter Trees).
In May of 1962 Plath finished her one dramatic
work, "Three Women" (Winter Trees), which was produced by the BBC in
August of that year. The setting is "a maternity ward and round
about." Three voices are heard: The Wife, The Secretary, and The Girl.
Each voice captures an aspect of Plath's attitudes toward motherhood as
revealed by her other work. The Wife, the First Voice, believes she is ready
for the ultimate experience of her life. She is shaken by the violence of her labor to exclaim: "There is no miracle more cruel than
this," and "I am used"; but after the birth, she exults in her
son.
The Second Voice, The Secretary, is the voice of
the woman who loses her child and is, therefore, both mother and no mother.
Reflecting on her loss, she says:
I did not look. But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its
perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
But her loss has left her empty, useless. By personifying
this in terms of a woman who is characterized by her function outside the home,
The Secretary, Plath may be suggesting that this fate, this loss, is a
punishment. The Secretary reassured herself that her husband will still love
her in her "deformity." And she vows a kind of penance, a
rededication to her domestic duties:
I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters,
confined in a letter case.
The end of the drama finds this woman, true to her
promise, "mending a silk slip," and reaffirming both her identity and
her dedication to her husband: "I am a wife." She seems also to be
anticipating a reward: another chance, another pregnancy.
The Third Voice, The Girl, is not ready for her
experience. Her attitude is one of extreme hostility to men in general for her
predicament. When her "red, terrible girl" is born, The Girl remarks:
"Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats. / It
is by these hooks she climbs to my notice." The Girl rejects her child and
re-establishes herself in her old life, which is college life, intellectual
life. However, her "black gown is a little funeral."
Through the voices of the three women, then, Plath
again explores women's fates and choices such as those represented by the fig
tree. Because she did not die at twenty, she was forced to define her life in
terms of the choices women have traditionally had to make.
Roles are exclusively maintained in bee society. In
Plath's series of "bee" poems, she uses their society and her
experience with beekeeping as a way to express her frustration over her own
roles. In "Stings" (Ariel), she identifies with both the drones and
the queen, and reveals the conflict between her domestic and her poetic--her
queenly--selves:
I stand in a column
Of winged, unmiraculous
women,
Honey-drudgers.
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my
dense hair.
And seen my strangeness evaporate . . .
They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
But even had she wished it, the real children could
not be folded back into her womb. They were there to contend with along with
the daily, routine, household chores. Added to this was the frustration of
being married to a poet, whose own poetry was getting written while she dusted,
diapered, and served as his secretary.
Plath's poems with domestic settings are usually
her most ominous poems. There is "viciousness in the kitchen" as she
says in the first line of "
The mouth first . . .
. . .
Her breasts next.
. . .
Then the dry wood, the gates,
The brown motherly furrows,
the whole estate.
Death came, the result of a deadly atmosphere (even
the sunlight is "bored"), the withdrawal of love, the drain of
motherhood ("there was no absence of lips, there were two children").
Mothers are devoured by their children, effaced;
women are subjugated by men, imprisoned, mutilated, made into puppets or toys,
hollow or blank with no identities and no wills. Plath's ambivalence toward
men, marriage, and motherhood (in her last poems, abandonment by her husband added
other dimensions as well), and the guilt she surely felt help explain the
degree to which her domestic poems are associated with suffering. They are not
exaggerations of pain but accumulations of it. They reflect not only her
perception of outer reality, but they project her inner reality as well.
It can never be known whether or not Plath chose
(consciously or unconsciously) paths that would lead her deeper and deeper into
a domestic labyrinth because she needed those subjects and those experiences
and the emotions they stimulated in order to create her best work. Her letters
reveal, however, that in the final weeks of her life, separated from her
husband, writing the final stunning poems, she felt poetically released,
"as if domesticity had choked me." Perhaps it is not stretching a
point to say that choosing to die by sticking her head in a gas oven is a
perfect symbolization of, and final statement on, that
aspect of her experience.
Jeannine Dobbs, 1977
Source: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2,
1977, pp. 11-25. Reproduced by permission
http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/dobbs.html