Saha 1 Anuska Saha Semester 3 English Honours UID No: 0304200114 University Roll No: 202017-11-0365 University Registration No: 017-1211-3602-20 Course: CC5 An Exploration of Trauma in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry Haunting, dramatic, and painfully personal, Sylvia Plath’s literary career is an intense and honest exploration of the complex workings of the author’s internal world and its incessant grapples with the cultural milieau she inhabited. Written during the transitional period of post-war retreat in America, her poetry echoes the postmodern symptom of tension and disjointment between the self and the world. Through obsessive psychic musings and turning to mythical recreation, Plath’s poetic persona “I” demonstrates a desperate search for displaced identity in relation to the world she inhabited. The origin of this terrible identity crisis can be traced back to what Schwartz and Bollas termed “an absence at the center of her being” (149), a chasm rooted deep in childhood trauma resulting from tumultuous familial relationships at a tender developmental age. Although a majority of Plath’s poems revolve around the agonizing search for the absent father figure, the first rapturous injury to her young psyche points to Plath’s complex relationship with her mother, Aurelia Plath. In the myth of her childhood memoir, “Ocean 1212-W”, Plath recollects her experience of desertion and estrangement during the weeks that the birth of her brother kept her mother away at the hospital. She describes this crucial Saha 2 moment as the “awful birthday of otherness” when for the first time, her individuality – her “separateness” from the world – materialised before her. The blissful harmony she enjoyed with her objective world was subverted, thrown into disarray by her knowledge of the “other”, thrusting her behind the metaphorical looking glass of subjectivity, through which she perceived the world in deformed projections of her own fragmented psyche. The bitterness of this jarring childhood experience followed Plath into adolescence and adulthood. Resentment, coupled with hatred for her mother’s passivity, gave way to Plath’s ambivalent relationship with her mother, characterized by a sense of identification mingled with and in constant conflict with the fear and rejection of maternal influence. A trail backward from the depictions of trauma in Plath’s work lands one inevitably at the death of her father, Otto Plath, an event which would cause a large chunk of her works to center around a search for an absent, idealised paternal figure. The gaping void left by the deceased father and the unfulfilled approval of her identity by the first male figure in her life manifested in a distorted formation of her self-image (Schwartz and Bollas 155). Following Otto Plath’s death, as the family moved inland, she was uprooted from the mythical seaside world at Winthrop, Massachusetts, a world which she associated with her father. This translated into a symbolic reiteration of the loss of her father, which later fueled the development of the repetition compulsion of persistently recreating the life and death of Otto Plath in her poetry. The Freudian psychological model emphasizes the ritualistic mechanisms of response to trauma, which manifests in compulsive “narrative recall” of the traumatic experience (Balaev 150). Familiar with the psychoanalytical narrative herself, Plath profusely and intentionally evokes the father-imago and the sea as the symbolic mother, in an attempt to reconfigure her disjointed relationship with her roots through poetry. By employing a set of consistent objects Saha 3 images and manipulating them through a series of ritualistic metamorphoses, she designs a poetic theatre that vividly reflects the inner workings of her psychic world. The title poem of her first anthology, The Colossus (1960), records an attempt to recover the absent father by mythologizing him into a grand, deified idol. Assuming the role of a sculptress, she turns the act of reconstruction into a physical parody, yielding merely a gross caricature, a stony monument “pithy and historical as the Roman forum” before which she kneels helpless and small. In “Electra on Azalea Plath”, one of Plath’s earliest poems about her father, she visits his grave for the first time since his demise and crushes under the sickening weight of reality. Playing the tragic heroine of the Oreistian Tragedy, Electra, she identifies as the “ill-starred thing” responsible for her father’s death. The poem concludes with the bitter realization that her father “died like any man” and the colossal god she had pictured him as was no more than a self-deceptive myth. Plath’s poetic diction invariably binds love in an ill-fated marriage to images of loss and death, aptly exemplified by the line “It was my love that did us both to death”. In “Full Fathom Five”, her despair over her futile efforts to rebuild the myth of ‘daddy’ finally ends in an admission of defeat; “You defy godhood. / I walk dry on your kingdom’s border / Exiled to no good.” The desperate need to make sense of the sudden decease of her father forced her down the spiral path of twisted, misdirected associations to tie the loose ends, resulting in an incessant cycle of re-creation, disillusion, anger, and guilt. Plath’s posthumous volume, Ariel – comprising most of her later poems written between April 1962 and her suicide in February 1963 – marks a gradual shift in context from the supernatural and sublime to the historical and cultural. For the poet, this shift in poetic landscape possibly indicates the assimilation of external reality into her subjective world, thus complete nullification of any possibility of transcendence or rebirth, which was the Saha 4 superimposing theme in her earlier poems. Consequently, the father-imago loses its god-like grandeur in Ariel and embodies instead a prototypical authoritarian Nazi German oppressor, whose tongue resounds “A yew hedge of orders / Gothic and barbarous” (“Little Fugue”). Her repeated attempts at resurrecting the paternal figure through myth proving obsolete, she turns to locate him in history. Powerful poems such as “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy”, replete with allusions – both subtle and explicit – to historical cruelty, teeming with unbridled rage, represent the peak of exasperation and anguish in Plath’s poetry. Estranged from paternal love and shackled to an eternal search for lost origins, she pictures herself entrapped in a “black shoe”, the domineering shadow of patriarchal authority. Her impaired speech – “tongue stuck in my jaw” like in a “barb wire snare” – conveys the violent linguistic castration of the self before the “ghastly statue” of the colossal father. The mythical statue of the father in ‘Colossus’ transforms, in the bleak, realistic setting of ‘Daddy’ into “models” of Otto Plath, as is seen midway through ‘Daddy’, where the image of the tyrannical father blends into that of her husband, Ted Hughes, such that they become one and the same. Drawing from the outrageous and inhumane Holocaust, she establishes her victimhood in parallel with the collective trauma of history by identifying as the Jewish victim of a tyrannical, Hitler-equivalent father. The poet subsumes the dilemma of her confused origins and stifled language under the macrocosm of the Nazi atrocity that usurped towns and erased names, silencing voices and losing them to history for eternity. Through the “post-memory” (Hirsch) of historical breakdown, Plath places the self at the center of the narrative as what M.L. Rosenthal calls a “cultural seismograph that could register the aftershocks of the destructive events of the modern era.” (Boswell 36) Saha 5 By allowing her poetic self to be integrated with the social environment, the earlier hope for transcendence is subverted and replaced by the desire to reach “stasis”, a state of purity and equilibrium. Plath’s emphatic declaration in the powerful final line, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” is underscored by an ambivalence that resounds with both victory and a sense of finality that suggests death; which may as well be seen as synonymous. The parodical exhibition of the self in “Lady Lazarus” following her third suicide attempt showcases the mechanistic nature of Plath’s self-destructive tendencies, in which “dying” is mockingly elevated to an art. In Plath’s poetic realm, the singular path to reunification with “daddy” is a return to the symbolic “maternal matrix” of the sea, a feat achievable only through a plunge into self-annihilation. Although “Going There” proposes the possibility of rebirth, in which the train carriages become cradles to deliver her renewed self into the world, “pure as a baby”, the price to be paid is death. Plath’s poetry, in a way, not only paints a bizarre and jarring picture of her fragmented self but echoes the ambivalence and doubt that many creative women experienced in the chiefly patriarchal 20th-century American society. Maternal love and femininity, in the poet’s diction, are attributed to weakness and creative paralysis, hence, her brutal rejection of the monstrous mother figure in ‘Medusa’ – “Off, off, eely tentacle! / There is nothing between us.” However, in ‘Lady Lazarus’ the self is reborn as the same monstrosity that she strives to evade – the vengeful goddess, the “red stigmata” that would “eat men like air”. For the woman poet in post-war America, poetry – a form most vehemently denied to women– became a vehicle to overcome her unfairly disproportionate relationship to power in a social structure which had perenially regarded her as secondary (Ghasemi 297). Sylvia Plath’s dedication as a poet drove her to traverse the extremities of language and her creative psyche, committing her to the kind of honest poetry A. Alvarez terms “a murderous art.” The Saha 6 psychological brilliance and the terrifying beauty that thus resulted from her afflicted psyche paired with her poetic genius elevated her, perhaps, to a cultural myth and undeniably, to a remarkable and memorable poet in her own right. Saha 7 Works Cited Annas, Pamela J. A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Westport, Greenwood Press, 1988. Archive.org. Web. 1 Nov. 2021. Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, University of Manitoba, 2008, pp. 149–66. JSTOR. Web. 11 Nov. 2021. Boswell, Matthew. “‘Black Phones’: Postmodern Poetics in the Holocaust Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Critical Survey, vol. 20, no. 2, Berghahn Books, 2008, pp. 53–64. JSTOR. Web. 12 Nov. 2021. Egeland, Marianne. Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Google Books. Web. 2 Nov. 2021. Ghasemi, Parvin. “Violence, Rage, and Self-Hurt In Sylvia Plath’s Poetry.” CLA Journal, vol. 51, no. 3, College Language Association, 2008, pp. 284–303, JSTOR. Web. 10 Nov. 2021. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today, vol. 29, no. 1, 2008, pp. 103-128. Duke University Press. Web. 17 Nov. 2021. Micarakis, Tihana. “Dying is An Art”: The Images of Death in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry. Diss. 28 Sep. 2016, Zadar. Semantic Scholar. Web. 5 Nov. 2021. Schwartz, Murray M., Christopher Bollas. “The Absence at the Center: Sylvia Plath and Suicide.” Criticism, vol. 18, no. 2, Wayne State University Press, 1976, pp. 147–72. Web. 1 Nov. 2021.
