9. Sylvia on Aurelia Plath
Mother, you are the one mouth
I would be a tongue to...
--"Poem for a Birthday"
Some readers of Sylvia Plath's work have remarked to an unusual degree on the sense that it "seems an encoded message" (Schwartz and Bollas 150), or is structured around "an underlying code" or "pre-ordained scheme" (Lavers 101) or "predetermined meaning" (Kroll 19) which is to be revealed by "a laborious decoding" (Holbrook 239). While differing as to the specific contents of her cipher, most critics agree that these concern aspects of her biography, particularly in its unconscious dimension. The impinging pressure of her unconscious shows up not just in some themes of her writing--anger at mother, feelings of inadequacy, jealousy, dreams, ambivalence--but even more so in their repetitive nature. Take for example a discrete image-set which appears in the selected "Juvenilia" (pre-1956) section of the collected poetry. In "To a Jilted Lover" the speaker, lying "cold on my narrow cot," looks "in sorrow" through "my window-square of black" and imagines that
... from the moon, my lover's eye
chills me to death
with radiance of his frozen faith.
(CP 309)(1)Now there is "nowhere ... to hide," for "moon and sun reflect his flame," but when noon comes, her love will see how she is "blazing" still in her "golden hell." In "Tongues of Stone," a story dating from January 1955, the twenty-two year old Plath turns to her experience in McLean Hospital after her breakdown and attempted suicide of less than eighteen months before. Here the protagonist ("the girl") feels "dead inside" and unreachable by any laughter or love: "As from a distant moon, extinct and cold, she saw their supplicant, sorrowful faces, their hands stretching out to her, frozen in attitudes of love" (JP 266, italics added). There was, she feels, "nowhere to hide." Over four years later, in a journal entry for 13 October 1959, Plath records feeling "very depressed today," and adds, "Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthly world. In to a nest of lovers' beds ... and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass" (J 291). Finally, in the brief poetic memoir of her early childhood, "Ocean 1212-W," composed in 1962, Plath evokes her depressed response to the birth of her one sibling, Warren, when she was two and a half: "As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin: I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over" (JP 23). The repetitive insistence of these similar images of separateness covering at least seven years of writing and twenty-four years of experience points to the absence of time in the unconscious and asks us to ponder the origin of this particular feeling and expression. The appearance of the image in poem, journal, and fiction bears out as well what one critic considers "the almost perfect continuity and agreement between her direct statements about herself and the descriptions of events and feelings" of her fictional protagonists and poetic personae (Orgel 271).
In fact, one might see the antecedent of the image components picked out above in a story which dates from the early 1950s, "Among the Bumblebees." Through her protagonist Alice, Plath returns to her childhood--the younger brother in the story is even named "Warren"--and summons up a picture of her relation to her father when he was wasting away from diabetes mellitus during the summer of her seventh year. Entering the sickroom of the man she has been shown to adore and idealize, Alice comes to the sleeping figure, leans over his chest, and "[f]rom somewhere, very faint and far off" hears his faint heartbeat. Then:
"Father," she said in a small pleading voice. "Father." But he did not hear, withdrawn as he was into the core of himself, insulated against the sound of her supplicant voice. Lost and betrayed, she slowly turned away and left the room. (JP 312, italics added)
With the father's withdrawal into deep inner space, this scene seems a kind of inversion of the others; but perhaps they can suggest a possible psycho-logical sequence of variations consequent on an internalization and then re-projection of this splitting/distancing. In "To a Jilted Lover," the writer addresses herself; she first makes the beloved a kind of man in the moon, chilling her with rejection, but ends by identifying with his (lunar) perspective of her in her aureate, "golden hell." We might imagine a kind of splitting of a primordial object, after which the two entities rush apart, one deep within and the other far without--except of course that both are still "inside" the author. In "Tongues of Stone," the author "dead inside" fully assumes the lunar perspective and sees, as it were, the mirror of her own earlier state in the "supplicant, sorrowful faces." The journal entry four years after shows the deepening of this particular attitude and formula, but the still later occurrence in "Ocean 1212-W" introduces a fascinating modification as the original splitting is pushed back well before her father's death to Warren's birth. Even here, however, one senses that not so much the advent of the sibling as circumstances it crystallized are at issue--the little girl left, while her mother was in the hospital, with her maternal grandparents (as was again often to be the case during her father's long demise): "She had been gone three weeks. I sulked. I would do nothing. Her desertion punched a smoldering hole in my sky. How could she, so loving and faithful, so easily leave me?" (JP 23).(2)
Plath saw her life, it seems, in terms of betrayal and loss, though one discovers therein nothing to indicate gross "developmental failures." Instead, we must consider her work as bearing witness to some invisible, unconscious structuring aspects of her existence. There is first of all her real genetic endowment; this included not just great verbal facility and a 160 IQ (Scigaj 249) but a history of depression in her father's family that her mother, though learning of it after Sylvia Plath's breakdown, never thought to relate to her daughter. There is the psycho-sociology of a recently established immigrant family: Plath's father, Otto, had arrived at sixteen from "some manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia" (BJ 27); and while her mother's mother had as a girl presented flowers to the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef (CP 149), the mother herself had been stoned by schoolmates in the anti-German outpouring after America entered the first world war. The desire to master the language her parents spoke as children and later at times taught reappears throughout Plath's journal,(3) as does the occasional passing fantasy of exchanging the agnosticism bequeathed by her father for her mother's Catholic roots. Such diffuse social insecurity, exacerbated by the surrounding Massachusetts Yankeeism, helps account for Plath's large investment in the imaginary "culture" retailed by the magazines she doted on and wrote for, like Seventeen, Mademoiselle, Ladies Home Journal, and The New Yorker.
Still more pervasive in the structuring of Plath's being are the many subtle complexities of her family dynamics and history. Plath's mother, Aurelia, was twenty-five when she unwittingly gave up her hard-won career as a teacher of English and German to marry the polymath entomologist and occasional German professor twenty-one years her elder, Otto Plath. If Aurelia, having been raised "in a matriarchy" (LH 3) that arose after her father lost money and nerve, was seeking a strong father figure, she seems to have gotten more than she bargained for in the figure she recalled as "der Herr des Hauses" (LH 13). The narrator of The Bell Jar, Esther, reports her mother's telling how, just after the marriage, "my father said to her, `whew, that's a relief, now we can stop pretending and be ourselves'" and "from that day on my mother never had a minute's peace" (BJ 69). One wonders as well about forty-six-year-old Otto's projection onto young Aurelia's mother, also named Aurelia, who chaperoned the couple on their cross-country auto trip to get married and who proved to be a constant presence in Sylvia Plath's childhood. His daughter, at any rate, could imagine seeking "a young man with a brilliant father. I could wed both" (J 117). When his daughter was born, promptly nine months after his marriage, Otto Plath announced to his colleagues, "I hope for one more thing in life--a son, two and a half years from now" (LH 12). Aurelia Plath comments that at Warren's birth, "only two hours off schedule," Otto was greeted as "the man who gets what he wants when he wants it" (LH 12). In Sylvia Plath's "Among the Bumblebees," the protagonist claims to be "her father's pet" and notes with approval the way he looked "when he scolded Mother sometimes, strong and proud" (JP 308), and Aurelia Plath refers to her husband's "explosive outbursts of anger" (LH 18) as he began to tire from the diabetes he refused (fearing cancer) to have diagnosed. The respected author of Bumblebees and Their Ways died just after his daughter turned eight, leaving a legacy of anger, frustration, and no insurance.
The leg that was amputated in his final hospitalization became a powerful signifier for Otto Plath's survivors. Some thirty-five years afterwards, Aurelia Plath pauses in her introduction to Letters Home to explain that, "I had talked with the doctors concerning the type of help a wife must give to restore confidence to a husband who has been mutilated by surgery and I understood the compelling necessity to make him feel a `whole man' and completely acceptable to me" (24). Her daughter perhaps thought she could have done the job better, and at twenty reports to her mother her "best baby yet," a story "about a vet with one leg missing and a girl meeting on a train" (LH 84). In The Bell Jar, Plath anticipates and exposes her mother's pieties via Esther's memory of her mother's having said "what a merciful thing it was for him [Esther's father] he had died, because if he had lived he would have been crippled and an invalid for life, and he couldn't have stood that, he would rather have died than had that happen" (137). A recurring double for the author's mother, "Mrs. Tomolillo," voices outrage in a 1959 story after accidentally reading the "`Lies, lies, lies,'" in the "record book" of her psychiatric treatment, but quiets at the sight of "[a] man on crutches, one pants leg empty and folded up in a neat tuck" (JP 128). One doubts, however, that Aurelia had to deal with dreams like her daughter's, such as that of a man with a great sword hacking off legs "whereupon the men fell down like ninepins with their leg stumps and lower legs scattered. I believe they were supposed to dig their own graves on their leg stumps" (J 269-70). Given her own psycho-therapy and reading, Plath could make some obvious oedipal interpretations and ask, in her journal, "If I really think I killed and castrated my father may all my dreams of deformed and tortured people be my guilty visions of him or fears of punishment for me?" (J 273). A scene deleted from the final version of The Bell Jar shows Esther struggling with the missing leg in a different way, as she complains to her psychiatrist, "I feel so cut off." "`No! no!'" she is told; "`It is not you who are cut off! .... It is your father's leg that was cut off!'" (Kroll 112-13). And while she can be glad that "it was my father's leg, and not me, that had been cut off" (Kroll 113), the very fact that she does feel so cut off ("outcast," "as from a star," etc.) suggests that in some way she is or would be "her father's leg". Plath's pen is her means of undoing the cut-off state and making things right; at least for its moment, writing can restore daddy (her penis) and happiness: "I felt happier than I had been since I was about nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father the summer before he died" (BJ 90). But the copy of daddy's Roget's Thesaurus which Plath kept by her as fetish and bible (cf. J 88) supported her concomitant attempt not to restore but to appropriate and rewrite her father's legacy. Unfortunately, the question of where to lay responsibility for (and file psychic claims against) her father's death is never adequately resolved, and in that uncertainty Plath vacillates between self-castigation and blaming her mother who, in turn, she imagines, "feels I killed him" (J 253).
With her father's death, Plath's immediate environment was reconstituted. The family moved inland, where they were joined by the grandmother, Aurelia, whose husband lived away during the week, working as a steward in a country club. The "matriarchy" Plath's mother had experienced arose again in what Plath later described as "a smarmy matriarchy of togetherness" in "[t]he little white house on the corner with a family full of women" (J 242). Deprived of "mirroring" from her father, Plath had to make do with feedback from the cultural authority of the women's "slicks" and their image of woman in the Name-of-the-Father. Writing for these magazines offered Plath a way in which the mystery of acceptance/rejection by such authority could be mastered concretely. But the oedipal romance with the father and its aborted conclusion, immensely formative and haunting though it was, permits in its failure a glimpse of the anterior, pre-oedipal structure it would have sublated. One might say that with her father's death, Plath was condemned to repeat her infantile situation with her first "leg," her mother--even down to sharing a bedroom with her. "Narcissistic women seek to replace the absent father, whom the mother has castrated, and thus reunite themselves with the mother of earliest infancy," summarizes Christopher Lash (299), and it was Plath's unhappy fate to find this phantasy completely realized.
Many critics have commented on Plath's "unusually, even disconcertingly, close" relationship with her mother (Bennett 99) and have seen in her astonishingly voluminous Letters Home a desperate attempt "to delimit where Aurelia ends and Sylvia begins" (Kamel 223). It is Mrs. Plath herself who makes the disturbing observation that "[b]etween Sylvia and me there existed--as between my own mother and me--a sort of psychic osmosis," and then proceeds to relate how she and her daughter read together Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Renascence," which "particularly moved" Sylvia with the lines,
A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
(LH 32)Aurelia Plath emerges as the "dominant parent" who hungrily lives out "her own fantasies of an ideal girlhood--of what she wanted for herself as a child--through her daughter" (Bundtzen 42, 63). After Sylvia had had a "`special'" date, reports Mrs. Plath, "ah, then she'd picture the evening for me, and I'd taste her enjoyment as if it were my own" (LH 38). For psychoanalytically oriented critics, Plath's investment in the letters home, her history of aggressive achievement, her breakdown and final suicide "raise questions about the earliest maternal attachment" (Brink 217) and seem rooted in "a failure in the early months of her life to find herself consistently reflected in the human environment" (Schwartz and Bollas 167): she "seems to have experienced the mother's handling in infancy, for whatever reason, as something meaningless and bewildering" (Holbrook 27-28) and to have felt throughout her life "the effects of her fissured pre-Oedipal union with her mother and of their subsequent hyper-symbiosis or `osmosis'" (Axelrod 179). Such speculations are not to criticize Plath's mother, "a remarkable woman, a true survivor" (Rich 230) in her own right and one whose own needs (from a psychodynamic perspective) had themselves never been fully attended to (cf. Bennett 99, 163), but to see if they may open ways into Plath's writing, that "substitute for [her]self" (J 255). Aurelia Plath was indeed, overly solicitous of her daughter [i.e. her own self-projection]: Linda Wagner-Martin reports that toward the end of Sylvia Plath's junior high years, Mrs. Plath was offered the attractive and rewarding position of Dean of Women at Northeastern University. On hearing the possibility of her mother's no longer being able to return home from work before her everyday (Warren was soon to be off at boarding school), Sylvia complained angrily that "For your self-aggrandizement you would make us complete orphans!" (41). Mrs. Plath declined the opportunity.
Melanie Klein and an ongoing strand of "object-relations" psychoanalytic theory attribute "fundamental importance to the infant's first object relation--the relation to the mother's breast and to the mother" and conclude that the secure "introjection" of this primal (and "not merely physical") object is the basis of a satisfactory development for the ego (Envy 178, 180). Aurelia Plath is, significantly enough, eager to be heard on this issue and her language merits attention. After describing how she was "totally imbued" with the desire to be a good mother and how even if, supposing, she had been "inclined to rigidity" she would have been "strongly opposed" by her husband's "constantly voiced ... recollections" of his (surely idealized) nurture, Aurelia Plath reports that she "quietly followed the `demand feeding' accepted as modern today" though she would "never confess to it in front of my contemporaries, who conscientiously followed the typed instructions of their children's pediatricians" (LH 10, 12). A tone of defensive insecurity lurks around these claims, and one might recall Klein's observation that "[a] too anxious attitude" over demand feeding can increase the infant's anxiety (Envy 186). Late in her life Plath offers a comment which suggests her sense of her mother's general attitude, "For goodness sake, stop being so frightened of everything, Mother!" (unpublished; quoted Wagner-Martin 223). But Plath's most telling comment on the "Mother somehow not there" (J 259) is the picture of Esther in a doctor's waiting room, vainly watching a mother and baby "for some clue to their mutual satisfaction" (BJ 182). Aurelia's breast becomes again her daughter's focus with the birth of Warren:
... the one difficult period was when I nursed the baby; it was always then that Sylvia wanted to get into my lap. Fortunately, around this time she discovered the alphabet from packaged goods on the pantry shelves. With great rapidity she learned the names of the letters and I taught her the separate sounds of each. From then on, each time I nursed Warren, she would get out the newspaper, sit on the floor in front of me and pick out the capital letters to "read." (LH 16)
Learning to read opened the way for Sylvia "to lay in her mother's lap" self-substitutes of "poems and prizes" (Rich 230) and artfully to remind her, as she does at age seven, that "When mother goes away from me / I miss her as much, as much can be" (unpublished; quoted Stevenson 1).
In her frequently cited discussion of "Narcissistic Object Choice in Women," the analyst Annie Reich presents the case of a young woman whose mother's own narcissistic disturbance or insecure sense of self "made it impossible for the child to develop any feeling of depth in relation to the mother, but kept her on the level of imitation" (310). Such a mother does not offer the child as it were a reassuring mirror and good feelings about self (positive narcissistic nurture) but rather an inconstant, vacillating or even antagonistic ( la Snow-white) reflection. Such inconstancy, the internalization of which begins at the breast, amplifies the developing psyche's inherent adaptive tendency to split good object from bad and so massively confirms what might otherwise be passing, tentative ambivalence into a permanent aspect of personality--ambivalence such as is often noted in Plath (Bundtzen 36, Williamson 54). In the case Reich relates, the woman as a child was sent away to school rather than, like Plath, to nearby grandparents, but on weekends at age four she regularly witnessed her brother's breast-feeding. This scene reactivated and augmented earlier ambivalence so that the mother's breast "which was denied to her in such drastic fashion, became something to be hated; she wanted to destroy it, to tear it to bits.... any wish for the mother was superseded by the feeling: `She makes me sick; I am not incorporating something wonderful but something poisonous'" (314). Here the incorporation occurs through the eye and revives a sickening, poisonous feeling or affect which is the timeless, split off, internal bad object made up of the child's archaic and still unresolved (inadequately mirrored, un-interpreted) anger, disappointment, envy, jealousy, regret. Reich's conclusion, published the year of Sylvia Plath's first breakdown, seems prophetically to address the poet's dynamic:
The mother, the mother's breast--later superseded by the paternal phallus--represented the core of the rather unsublimated ego ideal which she wanted to be in order to undo the intense, narcissistic injuries, particularly feelings of being deserted and castrated, that she had experienced. The heterosexual love object represented this ideal; but her aggression against the original, homosexual, love object made her devalue the ideal and destroy the partner. However, she was so fused with the object, which after all she had elevated into her own ego ideal, that by destroying it she destroyed herself. (314)
"I notice women's breasts and thighs with the calculation of a man choosing a mistress," Plath writes in her journal at age nineteen (J 22). Her "delicately flat little bosom" (J 21) or "small inadequate breasts" (J 32) contrast with the "full breasts under the taut black jersey" she singles out on another (J 13), "full breasts" which she longs for even as she "abhor[s] the sensuousness which they bring.... I desire the things which will destroy me in the end" (J 22). The breasts she desires would be nurturing with "full milky love" (J 83), a love transferred to Esther's favorite dishes, "full of butter and cheese and sour cream" (BJ 20). A dream shortly before her twenty-seventh birthday has Plath "drinking milk from a gold chalice & repeating a name" (J 289), and one recalls that the name "Aurelia" embodies associations to gold (Lt. aureolus, golden) and--via "areola"--breast and nipple. When she wants to deflate the phantasy, Plath mocks herself as having been "lulled in the arms of a blind optimism with breasts full of champagne and nipples made of caviar" (J 73) But a fantastically "good feed," the caviar-surfeited Esther later discovers, carries the risk of ptomaine poisoning (BJ 22, 35ff.). In another dream Plath "drank from a plastic cylindrical bottle with a red tip and realized in horror it was starch-poison I put in it" (J 221). Her husband's comment that it was a "dream of conception" doesn't go very far, though it may remind one of the apparent interchangeability of penis and breast in some unconscious imagery (see Klein, Envy 199). More interesting is the anomalous formulation of "starch-poison." Perhaps, primed by her mother's old joke about "jellyfish" as the second of the two meanings of "Aurelia," the poet's ear had noted "starch" as a dialect term for "the jelly-fish" (OED, "starch, sb.," 3.b). In any event, a very late poem invokes the pseudo-concern of "talkers," like Aurelia, asking, "`You all right?'", to comment, blankly: "The starched, inaccessible breast" ("Paralytic," CP 266). So, in "I Want, I Want," which seems to recall the mother's and grandmother's "cocoa butter on the nipples so they won't crack" (J 243), Plath imagines "the baby god" who
Cried out for the mother's dug.
The dry volcanoes cracked and spit,Sand abraded the milkless lip.
(CP 106)"Medusa"--itself the name of genus of jellyfish synonymous with "Aurelia" (noted by Kroll 252)--opens with a vision of "that landspit of stony mouth-plugs," and that stony Winthrop (Mass.) strand of Plath's childhood leads to images of breasts like stones and "dry-papped stones" ("The Detective," CP 209; "Point Shirley," CP 111).
Before entering into stranger connections in Plath's imagery, we ought to pause and consider some examples of the associations she wrought. As Judith Kroll notes, in Plath's discourse, metaphors are "strikingly frequent, and similes have the immediacy of metaphor" (16). In "The Courage of Shutting-Up," eye pupils suggest "black disks" which, via the link of brain / electronic brain / tape spools, lead to the image of "the disks of the brain" revolving "like the muzzles of cannon" (CP 210). In an explicit but illogical simile, flat circles have become mouths of cannon, and we experience a wrenching jump from (as it were) two to three dimensions. A little over a month later the simile marker drops out altogether as the poet presents a train in "Getting There":
... the wheels move, they appall me--
The terrible brains
Of Krupp, black muzzles
Revolving...
(CP 248)When we are told that "the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea" ("Stings," CP 215), one imagines that this "ravenous" reader of even "the instructions on soap-flake boxes" (JP 208) has associated back to "Ivory" soap and the Proctor and Gamble logo. For some critics, poetic transformations such as these from the later poems exhibit "the `concrete attitude' of the schizophrenic for whom the distance between the use of metaphor and the recognition of it as metaphor collapses. Words then become an equivalent of experience rather than mediating or reparative symbols" (Schwartz and Bollas 153).(4) Other critics argue, more "positively," that "[w]hen she comes to see that reality resides in her own mind, words and poems become as real as anything else"--though one may wonder how, given such a sense of "reality," one "never ceases to know the difference between art and life" (Juhasz 102).
Several associations to the name-complex "Aurelia" have already been mentioned, but the author who for years composed with the thesaurus open beside her would no doubt have noted cognates of Aurelia--aureole and aureate--and a synonym for the latter, "yellow."(5) So, in "Candles," the flames' "pale, tentative yellows" lead the speaker to remember her "maternal grandmother" Aurelia (CP 149) and the association figures still more prominently elsewhere. With the discovery of her father's grave, and the name of the "yellow gravel" trail leading to it, Plath coyly addresses Aurelia Plath in the guise of "Electra on Azalea Path" (CP 116-17)--the attempt never quite gels, though, torn between Plath's guilty sense that her desire killed her father (heightened by an accusing dream of her mother's [J 244 and 253]) and her desire to lay that responsibility on her mother. On the other hand, recurring fears of losing her mother (e.g. J 253) help determine the weird image of "absence" as "an Australia gum tree-- / Balding, gelded" ("For a Fatherless Son," CP 205). To see "Aurelia" in Australia would hardly tax Plath's "crazy eye for anagrams" (J 176).
The father's name, Otto, seems to lurk in Plath's repeated images of getting to the bottom, as well as in the first line of "Daddy," which struggles, almost baby-like, to articulate his name: "Y oudo n otdo, y oudo n otdo" (line respaced). Other critics have noted the pertinence for Plath of the German platt, "flat," and the French plate, which also means "flat" (Kroll 35, Lavers 218). We can see her constructing onomastic puns as she writes to her friend Gordon Lameyer shortly before her initial suicide attempt: "God on le mer. Or filial reward for the mother: e.g. Guerdon la mre" (Stevenson 45). The Bell Jar offers some outrageous puns, as when Esther reports Constantin's asking if she would "would like to come [ - - ] up to his apartment to hear some balalaika records," and her response that she was "very fond of balalaika music" (85). This joke turns out to be on Esther, since Constantin doesn't like to ball at all. Another oblique sexual pun might gloss the phrase "masturbating a glitter" ("Death & Co.," CP 254), which one reader finds "perhaps the most perplexing ... in all Sylvia Plath's poetry" (Holbrook 168). A poet who wants "to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket" (BJ 68) would delight, one might suppose, in manipulating the sound/image of a "glittering clitoris." Puns offer one way for the expressing and coordinating of ambivalence, which is the life-long task of the split subject convinced that "Either way we choose, the angry witch / will punish us for saying which is which" ("Metamorphoses of the Moon" ["Juvenilia"], CP 308). Where "concrete" declarations are feared, language itself can be sought as an absolute--as though if one could master language one might finally formulate the unspeakable and deliver oneself in answerable style of the burden of deep inner conflict. But the conflict, not having been encoded in or by language (however much it may lie in the difference between language and felt perception) cannot for all the puns and leaps of metaphor be answered by or in that activity which is its own displacement. What is needed are not more "Words dry and riderless"--and the creation of yet another "psychic landscape poem" (Bassnett 61)--but some way of telling how "From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars / Govern a life" ("Words," CP 270).
One further aspect of Plath's relation to language concerns her involvement with letters themselves. Approaching her breakdown, Esther looks at a printed page and finds that "The letters grew barbs and rams' horns. I watched them separate, each from the other, and juggle up and down in a silly way. Then they associated themselves in fantastic, untranslatable shapes, like Arabic or Chinese" (BJ 102). The letter o in particular obsesses Plath (one of her links to Keats). It is "[t]he dead syllable" ("Widow," CP 164), "O so much emptiness" ("Three Women," CP 181), the "O moon of illusion" ("Moonsong at Morning," CP 316), the "O embryo" ("Nick and the Candlestick," CP 242), the o-pen "O-mouth" ("The Rival," CP 166; "Three Women," CP 182), and the "opus" ("Lady Lazarus," CP 242). O marks the figure of one who could feel "I was nothing ... a zero" (Steiner 44); indeed, the well-known conclusion to "Ariel" shows I as an arrow driving into its target, "the red / Eye [O], the cauldron [O] of morning" (CP 240). One wonders how far this really is from Plath's fictionalized little girl who, explaining how she punishes her doll, says, "I bang her eyes in" (JP 142). The wish to see I enter O perhaps relates to the curious presence of carbon monoxide in some later poems ("The Rival," CP 166; "A Birthday Present," CP 207; "Poppies in October," CP 240). In her at last unbridled drive to recover a zero degree state of difference/split/separation ("There is nothing between us" ["Medusa," CP 226), even the puns fuse--"Coal gas is ghastly stuff" ("The Tour," CP 238)--and we see O enter I in CO as a way, the way Plath chose, to death ("Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in, / Filling my veins with invisibles" ["A Birthday Present," CP 207]).
As with Keats, the moon hangs over Plath's poetry and, as for Keats, seems bound up with unconscious phantasies concerning the mother and the maternal breast. "The moon is my mother," announces "The Moon and the Yew Tree": "She is bald and wild" (CP 207). More evocatively, in "Barren Woman," "The moon lays a hand on my forehead, / Blank-faced and mum as a nurse"--a description which recalls the curious note in Letters Home where Plath's "Mum" (as she is often addressed) relates, in indecipherable tones, how her daughter and son-in-law drove up five days ahead of a scheduled visit: "After a few minutes' conversation, however, I realized this early arrival had a purpose behind it other than just our mutual pleasure. I placed my hand on Sylvia's forehead in the old maternal gesture; it was burning hot ..." (333). The relative rarity of the "day-moon" makes it apt for comparison to "a sorry mother" ("Sleep in the Mojave Desert," CP 144) and contrasts to the more typical "moon ... a stone madonna" ("The Net-Menders," CP 121). The association of moon and breast appears already in Plath's "Juvenilia" with "nippled moons" and "the milk of the moon" ("Danse macabre," CP 321) or "lunar globes / of bulbous jellyfish / [which] glow milkgreen" ("Aquatic Nocturne," CP 306). The "mother's dug. / The dry volcanoes" cited before doubles the environment of "[t]he moon's man" "chattering among the leprous / Peaks and craters of those extinct volcanoes" ("The Everlasting Monday," CP 62). This latter poem testifies to Plath's dislike of Mondays (11 February 1962 was a Monday) and has as epigraph, "Thou shalt have an everlasting / Monday and stand in the moon." In a letter to her Mum, Plath expresses the wish that "all the destructive people could be sent to the moon ... " (LH 538).As in Keats, the breast/moon is the eye of the "blank moon-mother's face that stares from Sylvia Plath's poems" (Holbrook 141). The "moon's ball" ("The Everlasting Monday," CP 62) becomes "the bald moon" ("Candles," CP 149), a type of the "Small bald eye" ("Love Letter," CP 147) or "bald, white tumuli" of eyes ("The Colossus," CP 129) writ still larger in the breast-like "bald hill" and its "crest of grass" ("Parliament Hill Fields," CP 152; cf. "Berck-Plage": "A crest of breasts, eyelids and lips / Storming the hilltop" [CP 200]; and "Three Women": "I am a river of milk. / I am a warm hill" [CP 183]). Eyes which are "lidded / And balled" ("Death & Co.," CP 254) offer less danger than "pupils / whose moons of black / transform to cripples / all who look" ("On Looking into the Eyes of a Demon Lover," CP 325).(6) Images of being "Impaled upon a stern angelic stare" ("The Trial of Man," CP 312), or of being able to "kill with my mind, my ice-eye" (J 193) or of eye-beam war--"She glared at me and I gave her a mad wild still stony glare that snuffed hers out" (J 215)--suggest Plath's familiarity with the "evil eye" that builds on the infant's lack of felt loving reflection or "mirroring" from the mother's eyes (those other nipples at which it feeds). So Esther, with a similar past, longs for someone who could "see through" to what she really is (BJ 60), but paints a sad picture of yet another failed mirroring as she watches her sleeping new acquaintance wake: "his eyelids lifted and he looked through me and his eyes were full of love. I watched dumbly as a shutter of recognition clicked across the blur of tenderness and the wide pupils went glossy and depthless as patent leather" (BJ 69). The eyes Plath sees more frequently, however, are "like transparent agate marbles" (BJ 4), "solid quartz" (JP 159), or "pebbles" (BJ 177--these last providing a link back to nipples in the form of "stony mouth plugs" ["Medusa," CP 224]). Hence, aggressive phantasies about the mother can center on the un-nourishing eye-nipples and produce the "[i]mage of mother dead with the Eye Bank having cut her eyes out. Not a dream, but a vision" (J 285). But she, not her mother, dies, and in what may be her ultimate poetic effort she imagines that even faced with her dead body, the "bony mother" ("Moonrise," CP 98),
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.
("Edge," CP 273)The need for nurture suggested by Plath's concern with breasts and eyes also figures in her recurrent mouth images. In positive manifestations, a happy oral fusion can be recalled: "I fanned the hot milk out on my tongue as it went down, tasting it luxuriously, the way a baby tastes its mother" (BJ 164). But the suggestions of a "bad feed" are more likely, as after Esther has hurtled herself down a ski slope toward "the pebble at the bottom of the well, the white sweet baby cradled in its mother's belly" only to crash: "My teeth crunched a gravelly mouthful. Ice water seeped down my throat" (BJ 79). In "Among the Bumblebees," little Alice's jealousy at seeing Warren, whom she has kicked, comforted in her mother's arms, makes "the lump of pudding stop in the back of her throat as she was about to swallow, and she almost gagged" (JP 307). Much later, feeling betrayed by her husband, Plath writes, "Love has been an inexhaustible spring for my nourishment and now I gag" (J 212). The "Fury [which] jams the gullet and spreads poison" (J 232) continues the rage of jealousy that begins with the awareness of deprivation, as in "Berck-Plage" where "a green pool opens its eye, / Sick with what it has swallowed" directly after images of "Breasts and hips ... titillating the light" (CP 197). Ambivalence about ingestion leads to conflicting claims about being "all mouth" ("Poem for a Birthday," CP 131) or being without one:
The mouth first, its absence reported
In the second year. It had been insatiable
And in punishment was hung out like brown fruit
To wrinkle and dry.This poem, "The Detective" (CP 209), proceeds directly from brown fruit-like mouth to breasts; in The Bell Jar, on the other hand, Doreen's breasts are "like full brown melons" (BJ 14), though the closest Esther gets to mouthing them is to suck at her salty knuckles while saying "I want Doreen" (BJ 89).
Self-destruction offers the radical resolution of oral ambivalence with its dangerous hatred of the mother's body, since by this means the real object, still desired, is preserved. Plath's striking lines in "Poem for a Birthday" in part speak to this idea: "Mother, you are the one mouth / I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness / Eat me" (CP 132). But the formulation, "a tongue," with its associated implications of "a language" offers other possibilities given a young author who finds it sad "only to mouth other poets" and wants "someone to mouth me" (J 14). If she could mirror the mother, supplying her with a tongue already known, then perhaps communion would be possible and death a small price. But since "[t]he mother of mouths didn't love me," her only recourse is to "swallow it all" (CP 133). In one of Klein's most remarkable postulates, the infant's phantasied devouring onslaughts against the frustrating breast (o-gape mouth versus areola) give rise in turn to anxious phantasies of persecution by a devouring breast (anxieties which Klein sees as giving rise to the kind of chronic nightmares that Plath evidently suffered). This deep fear of talion punishment for the impulse "to suck dry, bite up, scoop out and rob the mother's body of its good contents" (Klein, "Notes" 183)--"Vampiring dry of milk" the udder ("Goatsucker," CP 111)--seems to surface in the following strangely mixed image from Plath's journal: "And again the dark eats at me: the fear of being crushed in a huge dark machine, sucked dry by the grinding indifferent millstones of circumstance" (J 120). Images elsewhere of "milling ... breasts" ("Gigolo," CP 267) and "dry-papped stones" instilled with "milk" ("Point Shirley," CP 111) point to some phantasy of the indifferent, milkstone breasts of "the Dark Mother. The Mummy" (J 288), ma-maw, which might grind the poet to fragments. "The mother of pestles diminished me. / I became a still pebble" ("Poem for a Birthday" ["7. The Stones"], CP 136; see Kroll 241 for a possible prompt from African folktale).
The phantasies noted all lead to and then manifest a concern with inner contents or objects. The inner dynamic would develop as follows: If I feel badly then it must be that I have been fed poison and must vomit it out to save myself. If I feel conflicting emotions then perhaps there are several of me, or I am disintegrating into fragments--in any event I do not know what (or who) is inside, and perhaps must not if my "I" is to endure. In the space of six weeks in early 1953, Plath's fascination with inner contents ranges from food:
... the good corn-thickened soup and tuna salad, lush with mayonnaise and pink succulent laced shreds of meat, and sliced quarters of hard-boiled egg, slick white crescents cradling the brilliant yellow powdery yolk, cool long gulps of milk, the savory brown resilience of gingerbread--and tonight the warm glutinous cheese-curded macaroni, green lima beans mealy and good on the tongue, and a sweet syrupy mash of peach slices. (J 68)
to the "illicit sensuous delight" she gets from picking her nose:
I always have, ever since I was a child. There are so many subtle variations of sensation. A delicate, pointed-nailed fifth finger can catch under dry scabs and flakes of mucous in the nostril and draw them out to be looked at, crumbled between fingers, and flicked to the floor in minute crusts. Or a heavier, determined forefinger can reach up and smear down-and-out the soft, resilient, elastic greenish-yellow smallish blobs of mucous, roll them round and jellylike between thumb and forefinger, and spread them on the undersurface of a desk or chair where they will harden into organic crusts. How many desks and chairs have I thus secretively befouled since childhood? Or sometimes there will be blood mingled with the mucous: in dry brown scabs, or bright sudden wet red on the finger that scraped too rudely the nasal membranes. God, what sexual satisfaction! (J 64-65)
to the puzzle of excrement:
Remember how you used to lock the bathroom door (they told you not to because it might stick, and then the firemen would have to come in the window and get you) and squat in fascinated discovery over the hand mirror on the floor and defecate? (J 66)
In connection with this last, one recalls that Esther, according to her mother, had been "perfectly [potty] trained at a very early age and [had] given her [mother] no trouble whatsoever" (BJ 166); the self-control reflected in the early formulation of her "[o]ld wish to get reward for elimination" (J 293) and "old need of giving Mother accomplishments, getting reward of love" (J 252) breaks down behind locked doors under the greater need for a more physical mirroring. "Nowhere does one find an indication that Sylvia Plath was loved for herself," comments Stephen Gould Axelrod (92).
Plath's anxieties over inner contents surface in her many images of food "turning to poison" (J 186) and, more pathetically, images of what she terms in the journal "that old corruption I always feared would break out from behind the bubbles of my eyes" (J 91--this closely echoes "Tongues of Stone," written a year earlier [see LH 155], which describes "poisons ... gathering in her body, ready to break out behind the bright, false bubbles of her eyes at any moment crying: Idiot! Imposter!" [JP 264]). In her psycho-anatomy the mouth opens on "a large darkness," "the blind cave behind the face" where "the dybbuk" hides (BJ 82): "I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness" (J 55). This "gaping void in her own head" (JP 208) can be viewed as "merely" hollow while the ego is strong enough to maintain a force-field of repression around negative contents, but whenever that strength or cohesiveness falters (as it does repeatedly), they spew forth as a "great poisonous store of corrosive ashes" (J 58), a "dark pestilence" (J 55), the "poison" of fury (J 232), a mass of "bewildered, chaotic fragments" (J 58). The self's pressing concern, then, is how "to keep from flying to fragments--disintegrating in one wild dispersal" (J 233), but "where is the integrating force going to come from?" (J 55). One tack, evidently, is to project or displace the fragmenting attack onto others. So, confronting a girl who was stealing rhododendron branches for a school dance, Plath reports how she "stared that sassy girl down, and [had] a blood-longing to [rush] at her and tear her to bloody beating bits" (J 216). Less than a year earlier, however, Plath had denominated herself as the "[f]resh, brazen stubborn girl Sassy" in her story about "[d]ynamite under high tension" struggling with a dominating mother ("Trouble-Making Mother"; J 151-52). In a dream on Halloween night 1959, Plath returns to her childhood home and encounters two juvenile delinquents throwing out "our saucepan of milk" (left for witches? [cf. J 254]): "In a fury, I flew at one and actually started tearing him apart with my teeth and hands. The other had said he was going into the house, and I thought he would ruin it and hurt Mother" (J 295). This image, and several others of biting (JP 143, 186; J 102, 301), point to repercussions from some childhood incident(s) of her biting someone (Warren?), and back still further to phantasied oral attacks on the breast. The nexus of anger and fragmentation achieves remarkable expression in The Bell Jar, as Esther overthrows a "tray of thermometers" (the mom meters) to secure her cure in "a ball of mercury":
I opened my fingers a crack, like a child with a secret, and smiled at the silver globe cupped in my palm. If I dropped it, it would break into a million little replicas of itself, and if I pushed them near each other, they would fuse, without a crack, into one whole again. (BJ 150)
Both striving for perfection and writing represent ways of defending against and disproving disintegration. Plath's attempt to be perfect fills her biographies and reaches from an entry in her diary made when she had just turned seventeen, which laments, "Never, never, never will I reach the perfection I long for with all my soul--my poetry, my poems, my stories--all, poor reflections" (LH 40), to the last of the collected poems, which mocks the attempt and the etymology with its opening, "The woman is perfected. / ... dead" ("Edge," CP 272).(7) Writing offered a means for attempting to perfect herself; by it she would be "a small god" able to "re-create the flux and smash of the world through the small ordered word patterns" she made (J 119). More dramatically, she writes: "I cannot live for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time" (J 150). In addition to giving her object permanence in the form of her own self-image, "Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead ..." (J 150), and so gives access to "some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor" (BJ 53) of the unconscious. When Plath decides that "[w]riting is a religious act ... an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and the world as they are and as they ought to be" (J 246), one almost hopes to have come upon some expression of truly reparative potential in her endeavor; but nine months on, the issue is still defense: "My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master" (J 291). Writing, then, is in part a way to mastery and self-presence, as in the signature formula offered by the seventeen-year-old self-described "girl who wanted to be God": "I am I--I am powerful--but to what extent? I am I" (LH 40). But this repeated formula, with its theological grandiosity (cf. JP 155, "messages from the great I Am") itself stumbles on its shifting reference, as when the author writes, "Who am I angry at? Myself. No, not yourself. Who is it?" (J 247). Her writing cannot bridge the gap it records between her "good," "essential" self and the "demon of negation," the "black cloud which would annihilate my whole being with its demand for perfection and measure, not of what I am, but of what I am not" (J 160, 161, 162). "I am what I am," she concludes, unable to imagine how she is what she (thinks she) is not and so see what she (thinks she) grasps concerning her mother, "how her conscious mind is always split off, at war with her unconscious" (J 202).
Plath can be very astute at realizing her duality in other people; regarding her boyfriend model for "Buddy Willard" in The Bell Jar, she writes in a 1952 journal entry, "Is there not a sort of duality, then, in him--a desire, born of childhood, to be `mothered,' to be a child, sucking at the breast (a transfer of eroticism from mother to girlfriend)--and yet to escape the subtle feminine snare and be free of the insidious female domination he has sensed in his home all these years ...?" (J 40). Four years on she is still telling her mother, "I feel like being `babied,'" and longing for someone to "tell me they love me" (LH 217). Only several years and some psychotherapy later does she characterize her own childhood household as a "smarmy matriarchy" and ask, "What do I expect or want from Mother? Hugging, mother's milk? but that is impossible to all of us now. Why should I want it still?" (J 242, 260). The psychodynamic thesis, of course, is that she wants "it" because she lacks "it," having been deprived at very early stages of ego development of the nurture and mirroring suitable to her particular psychic endowment (one of the reasons Esther loves Dr. Nolan is that she "hugged me like a mother' [BJ 173]); in the timelessness of the unconscious that "lack of mother love" ("Stillborn," CP 142) is always, "still," ongoing, and in Plath's case was perhaps retroactively intensified with her father's death. Evidence of what Plath feels she lacks comes with the mother's first appearance in the published Journals: "She was in my room [i.e. their shared sleeping room] when I came home, fussing with clothes, and she didn't even sense that something had happened [a kissing incident]. She just kept scolding and chattering on and on" (J 5). Lack of attention emerges in a different guise a few months later in a letter appropriately addressed "Dear Mum": "I had a strange experience in history today. As I always sit in the middle seat in the front row, it seems as if Mrs. Kafka [i.e. Koffka] is talking directly to me. I felt the oddest thrill" (LH 60). Eleven days later she describes to her mother "a friend" who thinks of suicide but whose mother "kept telling her she was foolish and could do it all." "Oh well," she signs off, "maybe it's none of my business, but I love the girl and feel very inadequate and responsible. If you were her mother, she would be all right" (LH 64).
During the months leading up to Plath's August 1953 suicide attempt, which became the central incident in The Bell Jar, the author's rage toward her mother had begun to surface in "visions of yourself ... murdering your mother in actuality" (J 79). A story written two years afterwards describes how "the girl had lain awake listening to the thin thread of her mother's breathing, wanting to get up and twist the life out of the fragile throat, to end at once the process of slow disintegration" (JP 265; cf. BJ 101). But instead of murder, the girl crawls "into bed with her mother" only to experience "with growing terror the weakness of the sleeping form" and creep back to her own bed (JP 265). In light of these accounts, Plath's passionate cry that summer, "Oh, Mother, the world is so rotten! I want to die! Let's die together!" (LH 124) is a barely restrained attack. "Slow disintegration" of ego-syntonicity and "weakness" of the good object lead to the welling up of "uncontrollable dangerous hatred" from which the subject "by his suicide is in part struggling to preserve his real objects" (Klein, "A Contribution" 132).
It seems clear that Plath expected her first suicide attempt to succeed, and it seems just as evident that nothing changed when her relationship with her mother was unexpectedly resurrected : "`We'll take up where we left off,'" Esther's mother tells her; "`We'll act as if all this were a bad dream'" (BJ 193). To fulfill her mother's good dream, Plath was driven to present a false self, and the language of some of her early letters home from England, where she had time and distance for her idealizing phantasy to flourish, makes for painful reading. In January of 1956 she gushes, "Oh, Mummy, I am so happy that you are coming, there are tears in my eyes!" (LH 206); two months later, her Fulbright grant having been renewed, she begins, "Dearest darling beautiful saintly Mother!!! Hold on to your hat and brace yourself for a whistling hurricane of happiness" (LH 229); and a week later, effusing over Aurelia's upcoming visit, "I want a rosy, fat mummy to meet me in June!" (LH 231). Reading Plath's journal for these months, however, we see a completely different young woman in the overlapping process of disposing of one "eternal" love and installing another. As her relationship with Ted Hughes deepens, she writes her mother at the end of April, "radiance and love just surge out of me like a sun. I can't wait to set you down in its rays. Think, I shall devote two whole weeks of my life to taking utter care and very special tending of you" (LH 243). The upshot, in perfectly overdetermined fashion, was that Plath took the occasion of her mother's arrival to marry Hughes (with Mrs. Plath as the only family present), at once deftly shifting the focus to herself, obviating her previously offered solicitude ("Think,..."), and upstaging her brother's recent graduation.
A second psychotherapy, in 1958-59, with Dr. Ruth Beutscher ["Dr. Nolan" in The Bell Jar] who had greatly helped her after the suicide attempt seems to have put Plath in much closer touch with feelings of rage against her mother. But in giving Plath the "permission to hate [her] mother" which was so enthusiastically received (J 242, 250), Dr. Beutscher released a djin which circumstance(8) did not permit to be transferred and worked through in the "holding environment" of the therapeutic situation. Dr. Beutscher became the good object and Aurelia Plath the bad, a simplification which must have considerably complicated Plath's ongoing internal object world. She was, however, now free to articulate her negative feelings and the pre-verbal contradictions of her psyche. In one entry she writes that she feels "only the Idea of Love" from her mother and that "I felt cheated: I wasn't loved, but all the signs said I was loved: the world said I was loved: the powers-that-were said I was loved" (J 244). She realizes that in her "satisfactory" letter-relationship carried on from England, "we could both verbalize our desired image of ourselves in relation to each other: interest and sincere love, and never feel the emotional currents at war with these verbally expressed feelings. I feel her disapproval. But I feel it countries away too" (J 255). So, "The Rival" complains, "No day is safe from news of you, / Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me" (CP 167). As she moved toward and into her first pregnancy, the repressed returned in the new form of "[m]agical fear Mother will become a child, my child: an old hag child" (J 260). She dreams of "[m]y mother furious at my pregnancy" (J 289), and shortly after, of "[m]y mother having a little son: my confusion: this son of mine is a twin to her son" (J 294). Frieda--not the expected son--was born four months after Plath and Hughes returned to England in late 1959. With the subsequent birth of her son in early 1962, Plath now mirrored her own sibling environment and increased the possibilities for role confusion. "I have the queerest feeling of having been reborn with Frieda," she writes her mother after the birth of Nicholas. "I suppose it's a case of knowing what one wants. I never really knew before"; and then, for the seeming fruit of that knowledge: "I hope I shall always be a `young' mother like you" (LH 450). In Plath's dream-life, however, her mother appears "snoopy" and "old" (J 301), like the "bastardly nanny," "snoopy old bitch" whom Plath, as she writes her brother, "can't wait to get rid of" (LH 471, 472). Even as she struggles with this last incident she complains to Warren that their mother "identifies much too much with me" (LH 472) and even writes her directly, ten weeks before the suicide, "Why do you identify so with me?" (unpublished; quoted Bundtzen 88).(9)
Plath's journal as published by Hughes ends (with a few minor exceptions) in late 1959, so consideration of her ongoing struggle with her Aurelia's imago must turn to her poetry and "fiction" (Plath's quotation marks), that "naked reflection of what I felt, as a child and later, must be true" (J 290). Readers have long recognized that The Bell Jar, written largely during 1961 but incorporating material from her journal and "fiction" of at least the preceding six years, is preoccupied with the protagonist's "hatred of her mother" (Holbrook 31) and "the indefinable hostility surrounding the mother's character" (Berman 145)--that there is hardly any "portrait of a parent in modern fiction so damaging as this one" (Brink 220). The novel figure of Joan Gilling, however, who appears suddenly to occupy the final fifth of the text, has struck many as a thematic and structural oddity, not least for her sudden suicide which forms the story's climax and appears, amidst the rampant autobiographical reference, "the only purely imagined event in the book" (Butscher 342).
The name "Joan," first of all, seems significant in Plath's private iconography, dating at least from March 1954 when she saw a silent French version of the "Temptation of Saint Joan." The film made a profound impression, which she describes in detail to her mother (LH 135), and over four years later Plath notes in her journal how "nightmares haunt me: Joan of Arc's face as she feels the fire and the world blurs out in a smoke, a pall of horror" (J 206). "Gilling" perhaps was appropriated from the "very intuitive" director of an amateur production of Bartholomew Fair who cast Plath as "a screaming whore in a yellow dress. A mad poet. How clever of Dick Gilling" (J 93). Joan is evidently a complex, composite double for Esther, who describes her as "the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me" (BJ 167) and later builds on a paraphrase of Isaiah (55:8) to say, "Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own" (179). So, Esther continues, "Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been ..." (179). But then again, she thinks, "In spite of my profound reservations, I thought I would always treasure Joan. It was as if we had been forced together by overwhelming circumstance, like war or plague, and shared a world of our own" (184). These ambivalent descriptions, together with the obsessive emphasis on Joan's "starey," nipple-like "pebble eyes" (48, 164, 177, 179, 189), suggest that with the "character" we verge upon almost unmediated permutations of the ma-imago. Anxious over her regained equilibrium, Esther imagines her rival's intention to "suck up by mere nearness" the "sweetness of recovery" (177).
The progression of scenes which unfold around Joan point to homosexual attraction as the idea against which the narrator needs most to defend herself. She recalls coming upon Joan and the older DeeDee in bed, and one suspects that the author sent her into that room seeking "two-part sheet music" (cf. the earlier "balalaika music") for the sake of the further double-entendre in Joan's saying, "Wait for me, Esther, I'll come play the bottom part with you" (179). The incident leads Esther to ask good-mother Dr. Nolan about lesbianism and to the disturbing response that "Tenderness" might be what a woman can see in another woman that she can't see in a man (179, cf. J 263). That single word "shuts up" Esther because it is, in fact, the master term for what she herself most wants (Holbrook notes Plath's "continual images of yearning for tender care" [296]). Esther then jumps to the memory of a "minor scandal" at her college dormitory involving a grandmotherly, "matronly-breasted senior" and a gawky freshman who had once been discovered "embracing." Under questioning, the reported "embrace" is found to have consisted in "Theodora ... lying on the bed, and Milly ... stroking Theodora's hair" (180). Long before, when Constantin happened to stroke her hair, Esther detailed the considerable infantile charge bound up in that kind of contact: "A little electric shock flared through me and I sat quite still. Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful" (70). In "The Moon and the Yew Tree," written shortly after Plath had finished her novel (cf. J 248), the speaker invokes the Holy Mother and sighs,
How I would like to believe in tenderness--
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
(CP 173)But no sooner does Esther posit the attractive possibility of motherly-daughterly tenderness, than she recoils again to her memory of a lesbian couple at college, a famous poet and an old Classical scholar, and the poet's staring condemnation at hearing of Esther's wish to have children. On that slender basis Esther reflects:
Why did I attract these weird old women? There was the famous poet, and Philomena Guinea, and Jay Cee, and the Christian Scientist lady and lord knows who, and they all wanted to adopt me in some way, and, for the price of their care and influence, have me resemble them. (180)
All these figures can be identified, with the exception of "lord knows who"--though Plath probably knew her as the mother of whom she writes, "I think I have always felt she uses me as an extension of herself" (J 255). The entire sequence with Joan is punctuated and concluded by Joan's telling Esther, "I like you" (179, 180), and bracketed by Esther's violent desire physically to expel the sickening tension that utterance creates: "That's tough, Joan," she says; "Because I don't like you. You make me puke, if you want to know" (180, cf. 179). In a one sentence coda, Esther exits the scene, "leaving Joan lying, lumpy as an old horse" across Esther's own bed. Horsiness, one might note, is, along with her pebbly eyes, emphatically associated with Joan. Perhaps a clue to its import can be found in a letter of 5 May 1953, apparently first reported by Lynda Bundtzen, in which Plath "imagines a life with her `twin' Aurelia, both of them as creative writers: `I am elated by the way you are to be a ghost-writer. Dobbin nothing! You have a gift in your own line, and between the two of us we should make a lovely life. I owe all I am to you anyway, for you have made all possible'" (Bundtzen 76; my emphasis--Plath is evidently responding to some horsey self-characterization by her mother).
Esther's involvement with Joan culminates with the author's killing Gilling in the melodrama of Joan's surprise suicide. In terms of the psycho-logic of the narrative, Joan is responding to the return on her repeated "I like you" advances, which is that Esther goes out and loses her virginity to a Warren-clone, hemorrhages from the encounter (as did Plath, cf. J 248), then uses Joan for help without at all confiding the truth of her experience. Instead, she fobs off on Joan the notion of some problem concerning her period. The account here does not match the biographical record, reported by her roommate at that time, Nancy Steiner, but does suit Plath's experience of a mother who "could never accept Sylvia's sexual involvements" (Wagner-Martin 123). The narrative then capitalizes on Esther's surname, taken from the senior Aurelia's maiden name, as Joan's psychiatrist--a woman with "an abstract quality that appealed to Joan" (183)--drops by in the hope that "Miss Greenwood" "might have some idea" about Joan's presence (191). Esther now wants "to dissociate [herself] from Joan completely" and seems unmoved by the report that Joan "was alone." But later, as she tries to sleep, "Joan's face floated before me, bodiless and smiling, like the face of the Cheshire cat. I even thought I heard her voice..." (192). The import of this vision becomes clear on the next page--after news of Joan's having hanged herself and a chapter break--as Esther reports another vision: "My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon," and recalls "her sweet, martyr's smile" (193). The double image of the martyred "mother/Joan" echoes "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams"--Plath's earlier breakthrough story--and its narrator's discovery that
Whatever the dream I unearth, by work, taxing work, and even by a kind of prayer, I am sure to find a thumbprint in the corner, a malicious detail to the right of center, a bodiless midair Cheshire cat grin, which shows the whole work to be gotten up by the genius of Johnny Panic, and him alone. He's sly, he's subtle, he's sudden as thunder, but he gives himself away only too often. He simply can't resist melodrama. Melodrama of the oldest, most obvious variety. (JP 156-57)
In the novel's penultimate scene, Esther attends Joan's funeral; where, before, she "wondered" if she had made Joan up, now she says, oddly, "I wondered what I thought I was burying" (198). Joan's coffin, like Plath's text, is "the black shadow of something that wasn't there" (198). But Plath's anger and phantasized killing of her mother are all too present, and Aurelia Plath's description of the book as representing "the basest ingratitude" of a "raging adolescent voice" (see Ames 215 and Rose 75) was surely anticipated by the author. Among the over-determinations for Plath's suicide, it seems that once again she came too close to actually attacking her mother and had, again, to introject her anger. The novel was published pseudonymously on January 14, 1963, and two days later Plath wrote her mother--to whom she had divulged little about the book--that if only she could "have some windfall, like doing a really successful novel," then she "could almost be self-supporting" (LH 495). But by the first week of February it was clear that the novel, though respectfully noted, was not to elicit the impossible complete and total public affirmation that would force the mother to acquiesce to a now psychically independent daughter's vision. And without that self-won support, there would be again, as at the end of the "Johnny Panic" story, the mother-figure saying, "I'll have that little black book" while her "own baby," the transcriber, protested futilely "against her whopping milkless breasts" and her damning "Naughty naughty" (JP 165, 166).(10)
Notes to Chapter 9:
1. *The following abbreviations are used in citing titles of Plath's work: CP, The Collected Poems; J, The Journals of Sylvia Plath; LH, Letters Home by Sylvia Plath; BJ, The Bell Jar; JP, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts.
2. *The nineteenth-century Italian Giacomo Leopardi's dream-poem, "The Terror by Night," written when the author was twenty-one, describes a dream "in which the moon falls out of the sky and burns itself out in a field. The dreamer then looks up at the sky and is frozen with terror at the sight of the hole from which the moon has been torn" (Rycroft 29). In the case of a female patient's somewhat similar dream, Rycroft concludes that "the moon represents the [mother/] breast" (36). Given the the curious parallel, one notes, apropos of The Bell Jar (discussed below), that according to his translator, Leopardi "`committed to his notebook one of the most terrible indictments ever penned by a son against his mother' even though `he always treated her outwards with the most scrupulous respect'" (Rycroft 35).
3. So perhaps to attempt to unlock the meaning of the opening to a German song she had as a child from her mother, a refrain "[r]unning through the various texts of Plath's writing ... `Ich weiss nicht was sol es bedeuten' [`I do not know what it means']" (Rose 112).
4. *In Brink's formulation, "traditional symbols are evacuated to be replaced by those uncanny coinages forcing out healthy meanings by the pressures of unresolved ego conflict" (225).
5. **In her copy of Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (a gift from her mother), Plath underlined the remark that "primitive man regards his name as a vital portion of himself" (Axelrod 234).
6. The Latin "pupilla" is the diminutive of "puppa," used in vulgar Latin to indicated the nipple, and in modern Italian as a vulgar word for the female breasts (Almansi 61; cf. "areola," which in English can refer either to the iris of the eye or to the pigmented area surrounding the nipple).
7. *Cf. Brink: "she had also become master of a new ironically mocking language in which the psychotic vindication of archaic hurt pours forth" (232).
8. *The overdetermination here is aptly suggested by Axelrod, who comments that "We might hypothesize how her reason for acquiescing [in late 1959] in Hughes's return to England was not that he would be `his best' there but that she could escape her analysis there, could escape those resonant questions, `Would you have the guts to admit you'd made a wrong choice?' and `Does Ted want you to get better?'" (190).
9. With her interest in the magic of names, Plath would perhaps by this time have been particularly struck by Peter Quenell's remark, regarding two late works by the French writer and suicide Gerard de Nerval, that Aurlia "is the matrix of confusion, from which Sylvie has been drawn. The writer's cloudy preoccupations had grown so vast, so overweening that the narrow chambers of art proved scarcely ample enough to house them" (Baudelaire and the Symbolists [London: Chatto & Windus, 1929)
10. * Anyone who studies Sylvia Plath's work and life can only regret how she remains under the censorship of England's Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, the husband from whom she had separated, and his sister Olwyn Hughes, now installed as "literary agent to the Estate of Sylvia Plath" (Stevenson ix). Ted Hughes' destruction of Plath's record of the "several months" leading up to her suicide (J xi), the disappearance he reports of the journal covering late 1959 to mid-1962 (J xi--from which Olwyn Hughes obligingly recalls a quotation for the biography she jointly authors [Stevenson 241, ix]), the disappearance he reports of the manuscript of Plath's unfinished second novel (JP 1), the excisions he stipulated for Plath's Letters Home edited by her mother, the many deletions in The Journals of Sylvia Plath as published, all suggest, contra Heidegger, that one can indeed "take the Other's dying away" from one whose writing is a substitute self (J 255). Regarding the journal he destroyed, Ted Hughes comments parenthetically that "in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival" (J xi); but according to the biography his sister co-authorizes, he "could neither forget nor forgive" the occasion when his wife, sometime in the first week of February 1961 "`reduced to "fluff"'" "[a]ll his work in progress" and his edition of Shakespeare (Stevenson 206). Dido Merwin, evidently the only source for this incident, reports that she heard of it from Ted Hughes some twenty months after the fact, having asked him "What had been the hardest to take during the time he and Sylvia were together" (Stevenson, Appendix II 334). According to this hearsay account, Sylvia Plath was in a jealous rage because Ted Hughes was "half an hour" overdue in returning from meeting a BBC producer whose lilting telephone voice had triggered Sylvia Plath's anxiety. As a specific date for this "watershed" (Stevenson, Appendix II 335) never appears, one can only regret the more the disappearance of the journal which might comment on the event, not to mention perhaps illuminate its exact chronology with regard to Plath's miscarriage that same first week of February (early February 6). For further discussion see the interesting accounts in Rose (esp. pp. xi-xiv and 65-113).