Month: February 2016

“I Do It So It Feels Like Hell”

The Suicidal Body in the Works of Sylvia Plath

In Women Poets and the American Sublime, Joanne Feit Diehl identifies “the engendered body” as Sylvia Plath’s primary trope (Diehl, 136). This assertion is echoed in the writings of critics such as Kathleen Lant, who examines in Plath’s poetry “a concern with the body and with the physical” (Lant, 624), and Steven Axelrod, who illustrates a multitude of ways in which “Plath enthusiastically traced connections between body and text” (Axelrod, 9-10). The significance of Plath’s literary treatment of bodies, and particularly suicidal and female bodies, is heightened by the cultural context in which her works were written. In the rising field of psychoanalysis in twentieth century America, women were not only denied sexual agency, but also symbolically castrated via phallocentric systems of scientific thought; for instance, Sigmund Freud’s conviction that “The libido is constantly and regularly male in essence, whether it appears in man or in woman,” which Simone de Beauvoir challenges at length in The Second Sex (Beauvoir, 74). Of course, it would be nearly impossible (and likely inadvisable) to write on the treatment of human bodies in Plath’s works without acknowledging the overwhelming presence of Judaic and Holocaust imagery within them. But this essay poses no answer, however tentative, to the question of whether or not Plath’s fascination with the Holocaust is necessarily justifiable; that is to say, this piece does not intend to establish any ethical ground (or lack thereof) upon which Plath’s literature should necessarily be read. Rather, the work seeks to observe the presence and thematic relevance of suicidal bodies, including Jewish and female bodies, within The Bell Jar, ‘Daddy,’ and ‘Lady Lazarus,’ with a particular regard for their impact upon the narrative relationship between the psychological and physical in each text.

In chapter twelve of The Bell Jar, Esther observes, “It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, a whole lot harder to get at” (Plath, TBJ, 142). Of course, suicide is a defining thematic element of The Bell Jar as a novel; a relentless desire for self-inflicted death characterizes Esther’s entire narrative. But the quotation at hand bears a particular significance in its implied recognition of a sort of distance between the physical form (“that skin” and “thin blue pulse”), which Esther repeatedly brutalizes throughout The Bell Jar, and the enigmatic, unnamed something that exists “somewhere else,” and can be compellingly read as Esther’s realized sense of self—her ego or linguistic “I.” In light of this, the passage offers one possible interpretation of Plath’s preoccupation with the body; namely, that a realized identity generates tensions between the visceral and the psychological. The very word “suicide,” derived from the Latin sui (‘of oneself’) and caedere (‘kill’), indicates both linguistically and conceptually, the destruction of the self; and although Esther seeks to eliminate her physical form, recognizing the contingency of the “I” upon it, she nevertheless identifies, in her reference to “somewhere else,” a degree of separation between the body she mutilates and the self she seeks to kill. The body and the “I,” though in many ways inextricably bound, are also necessarily distinguishable from each other in the language of the narrative. This is echoed in the recurring imagery of blood, which Esther encounters repeatedly throughout The Bell Jar—most notably in the physically and psychologically gruesome experience of losing her virginity. Blood operates within The Bell Jar as one of the text’s most visceral narrative devices; but its source of its distribution, the heart, is also a primary indicator of the psychologically realized self, and its rhythm conveys that ultimate self-affirming phrase, “I am I am I am” (Plath, TBJ, 152). Beneath Esther’s relentless endeavors towards the destruction of her own anatomy, a more complex interrogation of the ego is evoked; thus, Plath constructs a narrative understanding of the body that underscores the psychoanalytic value of the text.

Published within a year of The Bell Jar, the confessional poem ‘Daddy’ apotheosizes many of the most contentious elements of Plath’s work. Like the majority of Plath’s literature, ‘Daddy’ is a terrifyingly visceral, at times even erotic poem, engaging with the body as a representative space upon which both longings and traumas are made manifest. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Jacqueline Rose suggests that the line, “Barely daring to breathe or Achoo” (Plath, D, ll.5) implies that the narrator’s convoluted psychological fascination with her father can be attributed to his exertion of control over her body. The narrator of ‘Daddy’ is rendered physically unable to move: she is the recipient of a psychological distress that leaves her incapable of performing the actions necessary for bodily survival. Plath, who described Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” as “[a]n almost exact description of my feelings and reasons for suicide: a transferred murderous impulse” (Plath, Journals, 280), communicates her ruthless desires through the narrator’s physical experiences and suicidal efforts; thus, “The poem…presents itself as protest and emancipation from a condition which reduces the one oppressed to the barest minimum of human, but inarticulate, life” (Rose). But of course, the most overt and controversial use of the body within “Daddy” occurs in its relation to the Holocaust, and in Plath’s appropriation of a heritage and a tragedy that is not necessarily her own. But Rose asserts that in ‘Daddy,’ “…identities are fantasies, not for the banal and obvious reason that they occur inside a text, but because the poem addresses the production of fantasy as such” (Rose); in accordance with this, even allowing for the potentially gratuitous association Plath draws between herself and the victims of an ethnic genocide, there is considerable metaphoric value to Plath’s use of Nazi symbolism. “For doesn’t Nazism itself also turn on the image of the father, a father enshrined in the place of the symbolic, all-powerful to the extent that he is so utterly out of reach?… this body suffers because the father has for too long oppressed” (Rose).

‘Lady Lazarus,’ which many critics position alongside ‘Daddy’ as one of Plath’s three “Holocaust Poems” (Fermaglich, 14), is another text inherently concerned with the body; in the graphic recounting of her suicide attempts, Plath evokes a striking image of resurrection and even of triumph. Throughout the poem, she engages unflinchingly with her body, announcing, “Gentlemen, ladies, / These are my hands. / My knees” (Plath, LL, ll.30-2). The language of the stanza is simultaneously sensual and disturbing: as she verbalizes the “big strip tease,” Plath forces the audience to reckon with the suicidal nature of her physical form. As Gayle Wurst asserts, “Graphically female, made to be unmade, [Plath’s] body…seeks to break its confinement, equating movement with the breaking of silence” (Wurst, 24). These paradigms of sexuality, subjugation, and cynicism allow the narrator’s suicidal body to be read not only as mutilated, but also as strangely powerful, and at times even revenant. Paul Breslin argues that ‘Lady Lazarus’ functions as “a legitimately mimetic representation of the psychology of suicide” (Breslin); and indeed, the text as engages with self-destruction in a trenchant, lucid manner by combining psychological fantasies of death and the erotic pleasures of a pornographic performance. Largely as a result of this, a number of vindicative perspectives on suicide arise in ‘Lady Lazarus’—most significantly, the potential to exert full and violent ownership over one’s own body, the possibility of rebirth, and the grisly but potentially triumphant severing of the psychological and physical selves.

The Bell Jar, ‘Daddy,’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ are, in many respects, markedly different texts; nevertheless, each engages in a striking narrative confrontation with the volatile relationship between physical bodies and the conscious self. Tempestuous interactions between the mind and body, fraught as they are with varied connotations of identity and desire, form a primary thematic cornerstone of each text; and although her use of metaphor offers no clear explanations (and certainly no sense of solace) for her audience, her ruminations upon the self-destroying body carry considerable aesthetic and psychoanalytic merit. Within these three pieces, Plath engages with the suicidal body as an object of great physical and psychological fascination: in efforts to verbalize her own willful movement towards dying, she establishes the presence of suicide in her literature as an intimate narrative interrogation of violence, desire, exploitation, and resistance.

 Works Cited

Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Google Scholar. Web.

Beauvoir, Simone De. The Second Sex. New York: Knopf, 1953. Google Scholar. Web.

Breslin, Paul. The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987.. On “Lady Lazarus” University of Illinois. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/lazarus.htm

Diehl, Joanne Feit. Women Poets and the American Sublime. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Google Scholar. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

Fermaglich, Kirsten Lise. American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957-1965. Waltham, MA: Brandeis UP, 2006. Google Scholar. Web. 29 Jan. 2016.

Gilbert, Sandra M. “The Supple Suitor: Death, Women, Feminism, and (Assisted or Unassisted) Suicide.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 24.2, The Feminist Legacy of Carolyn Heilbrun (2005): 247-55. JSTOR. Web. 01 Feb. 2016.

Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Big Strip Tease: Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Contemporary Literature 34.4 (1993): 620-69. JSTOR. Web. 01 Feb. 2016.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London: Faber & Faber, 2013. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Frances McCullough and Ted Hughes. New York: Dial, 1982. Print.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. On “Daddy” University of Illinois. Web. <http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/daddy.htm>.

Runco, Mark A. “Suicide And Creativity: The Case Of Sylvia Plath.” Death Studies 22.7 (1998): 637-54. Web. 01 Feb. 2016.

Wurst, Gayle. “I’ve Boarded the Train There’s No Getting Off: The Body as Metaphor in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Revue Française D’études Américaines No. 44 (1990): 23-35. JSTOR. Web. 03 Feb. 2016.

until the night comes howling

There will be time to murder and create.

T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I found you in the edges of some long-forgotten calamity, in the respite of my solitude, in the hunting call of winter. I still remember the night you came into my life; you had shadows under your eyes and a voice like tinted glass. I had been cynical and listless and tired as all hell, and you made me feel new, like the morning. But I was reckless, when I should have been wary. I cared deeply, when I should have felt nothing at all. That will be the tragedy to destroy our aimless days: what I mistook for love was nothing more than the reflection of a formless vanity, an irredeemable exercise in the practice of self-gratification. Our tenderness dims now into a delirium of unfinished thoughts and half-remembered sentiments. In the mournful present of this fading exaltation, I have nothing left to give.

Are you reluctant now to live like this, to descend further into the chaos of a liminal existence at my side? I know a rapid, caustic love that breathes away beneath my reason, tasting faintly of an abandonment that I may never exorcise. It festers and compels my form, like a richness in the soil: can you feel this darkness, when you move in me? Is it why you draw back, then closer, imitating tenderness, when we both desire to tear skin back with gleaming teeth and bare our subtle bones? What madness have you kindled in the refuge of my intrigue, and why you, why now? You know I never wanted this—so forgive me, Eurydice, if I cannot meet your gaze.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stele. Witness your expulsion from my fury and form: your normalcy, your mortality, all the strange and sensual yearnings of the body you destroy, your own. You were a long-term causality, you were a slowly unwinding catastrophe. I exhale your savage radiance like a constellation; oh, you feral thing.

I will be there when the floods roll back, when celestial light rains down in landslides and sanctifies this living earth in tides of midday fire. On the shorelines of Tragedy, that Janus-faced collapsing of time, I will remain and recall this lost potentiality, the stillborn adoration that died before taking form. As it waned, it left me barren, and neither the earth nor I can now sustain what our ravaged countenances crave. This, of all inane things, is my inherent sin: I could not keep her, or my memories, or this love alive. I am not fertile, I am not whole. My empathy is not a virtue, but a willful tendency towards self-mutilation. I am deficient. I am empty. I allow things to die.

In the volatile fervor of a physical existence, allegory invariably falls short; you and I evoke a wasteland that has yet to come into being. Desecrate or find me there, in the chemical currents of that which could consume you, for we have destroyed each other as surely as we have destroyed ourselves. In what light remains, I glimpse her preternatural form: that strange, seraphic figure, lamenting and exalting as the mutilated world moves silently towards decay. I recall her from childhood, in reluctant fingers turning the pages of my mother’s Bible, Isaiah 14:12—And how you have fallen from heaven, morning star, child of the dawn! In the narcotic-dimmed haze of my first dying, I knew the violence in those eyes, the hair cropped short in locks of silver, the saturnine wings unfolding from the notches in her spine. Alone now, she unwillingly endures; and the world will suffer the torment of looking upon her, somnambulist and wretched thing, wandering that desolation in search of a better self. Even you will know then, for all your pride and carelessness, how I came to live like this.

Every woman was born to wrest stars from their galaxies, to grapple with the voiceless language that floods the ruptures of physical sensation, when ecstasy moves through the body’s breathing core, and the world speaks to itself in paradigms of music. I more than most, in the still-living darkness of my sanity and soul, have been birthed for this purpose. I occupy that liminal positionality between the tangible and the untrue, my memory colored by the fantasies and phobias of a thousand other minds. A sentient lucidity moves through my androgyny and my desires, carving the space for a nameless gender.

Two years ago, the waking spring told different stories of this same conscience. Even now, I cannot write or speak plainly of that time: it is too shameful, too obscene. When I lost her, that second self, I lost all will to suffer on. I thought that this mind, and all that it is capable of, would die there, on some shit couch, in some shit apartment, and I simply did not care. But when the fourth morning dawned, its pale light found me upright, enduring, alive. I had waited for my grief to end, and it had not. Do not mistake me: this was not an epiphany, not a rebirth. It was resignation to living another day. It was, in some ways, unforgivable surrender. I was too dead even to die.

So I turned from what was left of it, that life I used to love: I stopped striving for pleasure and learned to appreciate feeling anything at all. It was then, on the streets of London, that I found her. She stood before me, grinning wryly in the shadow of the city, and I experienced a sensation that I could never hope to name—something fierce, like defiance, and something rapturous, like joy. I knew then what I should have known all along: that no trivial circumstance of the social world, no meaningless extent of its sanctimony or its cruelty, could have undone so extraordinary a mind. How arrogant I had been, how misguided, to imagine that I alone could crawl from a self-appointed grave. Denied the tenderness and the solace that I owed her, she had nevertheless endured. I had betrayed her utterly, I had failed her unforgivably; and still she had come back to me, and she was altered, but alive.

We spent six hours in a dimly lit bar. Soporific elation whispered up and down my form, and in the revenant consequences of a shared history of self-destruction, we met one another once more. A part of us had died with bygone days: we both felt this irrevocable absence, both mourned for that which we could not change. But we spoke on in spite of this, exchanging admissions of pleasure and penance; we resurrected the world of our collective past, and all of the memories, sweet and unspeakable, which we had so wrongly believed would be better off forgotten. Until my mind fails me entirely, and perhaps even then, I will remember that night. She seemed to be more than human and far from divine; not angelic, of course, for she had always been too irreverent for such fragile categorization, but savage, sardonic, extraordinary. As the light threw shadows across her face, I could feel, like ink and cyanide, the chiaroscuro of this beautiful creature: and how natural it was, how fitting, to be one with her again. How easily I knew her mind—after all, it was mine.

The bus was silent and midnight had long since passed. From one sleeping city to the next, I rode with leaden eyelids and an opiate soul. The young man sitting behind me answered a ringing phone, and received, as I could perceive it, the news of a woman’s death. He had loved her, at some time and in some way: I could it hear it in the way his voice broke, running like a wrist across the edge of each shattered word. That man bled as he spoke, and I watched his life change before my clouded eyes. In my narcotized state, I felt his sobs move like ocean currents through my mind. Compelled to preserve the strangeness and sorrow of the scene, I made as though to write, but could form only a single phrase, which echoed incessantly as I lapsed in and out of consciousness—I bear witness. I bear witness.

I was a voyeur to tragedy, in that night torn mad with a thousand turns of circumstance; and although some secret part of me felt deeply for him, it was more than I could communicate or understand. So it was her that I ultimately thought of, the catastrophe that almost was, flooding my exhausted memory in the garlands of white roses that framed her sightless eyes. Foremost among my racing thoughts was the question so simple and so very strange—how can a body die? And why couldn’t ours, when we wanted them to?

Sometimes I wonder at my own inane existence. Would I be another Lazarus, incomparably versed in the art of impermanent demise? I catch my reflection in each window that I pass: lithe and emaciated in my Orphean state, I can see the subtle movement of each bone beneath my skin. Every time I lose myself in these bouts of paranoia, someone inevitably offers mundane consolation: You will survive this. But perhaps I do not want to survive. I have been surviving all my life. Perhaps I am ready for something else, anything else, something more than survival. After all of these years, I am nourishing myself still.

So if ever I was thoughtless, or distant, or withdrawn, please know that I never chose to be. I will always remember you fondly—those nights of shared cigarettes and unending conversations, your unconscious earnestness and quickness to laugh, how strange and sweet it felt to finally kiss you on the corner of that silent street. My mind retreats often to half-imagined visions of the history we have shared: I can still recall those inimitable rushes of fondness and fascination that flooded this body on clandestine evenings, as I knelt among the rattlesnakes that fell around your feet.

But in some ways you are so very like me; you are suffering, you are not whole. On a bridge above the nighttime currents of the Thames, for a handful of five-pound notes and a few quiet words, you gave me consecration in its chemical form: that folded piece of paper, so small and nondescript, that would undo us both in time. You ran your hands through my shaved hair, along the lines of dark ink that moved across my skin like the waters below us, and I became exquisitely aware of my own living form: shorn and scarred and still so beautiful. In some ways, I think I always knew you. I think you have always wanted to be known.

But I cannot remain in stasis any longer; I cannot cheapen my existence, cannot limit the potential of this body and its longings. Just the other evening, I came to learn the language of yet another form that was not yours, watching and loving the helplessness of his pleasure as I manifested quiet, coiled desires upon his skin. I made myself alive again in each rapid breath he drew, in the mouth that moved beneath the tips of my fingers, in the rose-damp parting of my thighs. Too often, we define such acts in terms of penetration, but this is the fallacy of a misinformed world. The experience is one of envelopment, of consumption: not an entering, but a taking in. With violent affection, I took him apart with my teeth, decided to suffer so that I might heal—and how wonderful it was, to feel those muscles move again. As the sun began to rise, I lay entwined in his limbs and waited for the morning. A cold light fell across the bruises on his neck, running down over the lovely shoulders, where my mouth had left impressions in the skin.

This is how it always begins. I have a beautiful, damning habit of loving many people—loving them deeply, ardently, differently, and all at once. Even now, I have not forgotten you. There are still so many ways in which I wish to know you, so many questions I never thought to ask. Are you lonely in the winter? Are you afraid to die? Perhaps, in time, you will overcome what has happened to you, and awake on some far-off morning to find that you are whole and strong and ready to try again. And if this should come to pass, then I hope you will return to me, no matter the place or time. You have suffered enough, my love, and so have I; but this existence is cyclical, and I am never hard to find. So if you ever heal, come back to me. Perhaps I will still be waiting.

Oh, indifferent soul, how I could have loved you. Maybe there is still reason to try. Maybe this doubt will fade with the winter. Maybe you have yet the time and tenderness to unearth the obscured, lovely parts of me, to make me clean again.

But it is too late, I am afraid. I am not blameless anymore. I do not have ambitions. I do not have ideals. I live for those evenings of rushing pleasure, when this body is roused like a rainstorm and I feel real again. I am moving towards a willful apathy, so that when the time comes I might look readily upon the falling world. It is better this way. So allow me to take leave of this, to live indifferently on—and until the night comes howling, may I never write of you again.