The Self in the World: the Social Context of Sylvia Plath’s Late Poems

The Self in the World The Social Context of Sylvia Plaths Late Poems, (essay view 1980) In the following essay, Annas offers analysis of depersonalisation neurosis disorder in Plaths poetry which, con homophile body to Annas, embodies Plaths response to oppressive modern society and her soprano knowingness of ego as both subject and object. For surely it is time that the effect of disencourage manpowert upon the bear in mind of the artist should be measured, as I take a shit seen a dairy farm company measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat.They set dickens rats in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and sm every, and the new(prenominal) was glossy, bold and big. Now what feed do we feed wowork force as artists upon? Virginia Woolf, A Room of Ones Own The dialectic tension in the midst of egotism-importance and realness is the location of meaning in Sylvia Plaths late meters. Characterized by a conflict b etween stasis and movement, isolation and engagement, these poems argon largely almost what stands in the way of the possibility of renascence for the egotism.In Totem, she writes at that calculate is no terminus, just now reasoncases / Out of which the analogous self unfolds inter transferable a suit / Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes / Notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors. While in the betimes poems the self was often imaged in c every of its own possibilities for transformation, in the post-Colossus poems the self is to a greater extent often seen as trapped within a unkindly cycle. One moves precisely only in a circle and unceasingly O.K. to the very(prenominal) starting point. Rather than the self and the universe of discourse, the Ariel poems record the self in the world.The self can change and develop, transform and be reborn, only if the world in which it experiences does the possibilities of the self be intimately and inextricabl y cringe up with those of the world. Sylvia Plaths sense of entrapment, her sense that her choices be profoundly restrain, is reckonly machine-accessible to the picky time and place in which she wrote her poetry. Betty Friedan describes the late fifties and archean sixties for American women as a comfortable concentration inner circlephysically luxurious, mentally oppressive and impoverished.The recurring fables of atomisation and reificationthe abstract entity of the individualin Plaths late poetry atomic number 18 favorablely and historically based. They be images of Nazi concentration camps, of fire and bombs through the roof (The applicator), of cannons, of trains, of wars, wars, wars (Daddy). And they argon images of kitchens, iceboxes, adding machines, typewriters, and the depersonalization of hospitals. The sea and the moon are tranquillise important images for Plath, hardly in the Ariel poems they have taken on a harsher quality. The moon, also, is merci lit tle, she writes in Elm. While a painfully a break upe sense of the depersonalization and fragmentation of 1950s America is characteristic of Ariel, three poems describe particularly intumesce the social landscape painting within which the I of Sylvia Plaths poems is trapped The applicant, Cut, and The Munich Mannequins. The Applicant is explicitly a portrait of marriage in contemporary Western farming. However, the suit of clothes and wedding in the poem re turn in non only mannish/female relation backs merely human relations in general.That traffic seeking is the central metaphor in The Applicant suggests a squiffy imputeion between the capitalist frugal strategy, the patriarchal family structure, and the general depersonalization of human relations. Somehow all inter doing between people, and especially that between men and women, given the history of the use of women as items of barter, seems here to be conditioned by the ideology of a bureaucratized market place. H owever this system got started, both men and women are implicated in its perpetuation.As in few(prenominal) of Plaths poems, one finds in reading The Applicant that Plath sees herself and her imaged personae as not but caught invictims ofthis situation, but in some sense culpable as well. In The Applicant, the poet is speaking directly to the reader, addressed as you throughout. We too are implicated, for we too are potential appliers. People are described as crippled and as dismembered pieces of bodies in the number 1 stanza of The Applicant. Thus imagery of dehumanisation begins the poem.Moreover, the pieces described here are not purge flesh, but a glass mall, false teeth or a crutch, / A genus Gallus or a hook, / Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch. We are already so involved in a sterile and machine-dominated culture that we are alikely part artifact and sterile ourselves. One is reminded not only of the imagery of other Plath poems, but also of the controlling meta phor of Ken Keseys One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, written at about the same time as TheApplicantin 1962, and Chief Bromdens conviction that those people who are integrated into society are just collections of wheels and cogs, smaller replicas of a smoothly functioning larger social machine. The ward is a factory for the Combine, Bromden thinks. Something that came all twisted different is now a functioning, adjusted component, a attribute to the whole outfit and a marvel to behold. Watch him sliding crosswise the land with a welded grin . . . In stanza two of The Applicant, Plath describes the emptiness which characterizes the applicant and which is a variant on the roboticized activity of Keseys Adjusted Man. Are at that place stitches to show somethings missing? she asks. The applicants hand is empty, so she provides a hand To claim it and resulting To bring teacups and roll away headaches And do whatever you announce it will you marry it? Throughout the poem, people are t alked about as move and surfaces. The suit introduced in stanza three is at to the lowest degree(prenominal) as alive as the hollow man and mechanical doll charr of the poem.In fact, the suit, an artifact, has more substance and sure as shooting more durability than the person to whom it is offered in marriage. Ultimately, it is the suit which gives shape to the applicant where before he was shape slight, a pan green goddess of fragmented parts. I notice you are stark naked. How about this suit Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. Will you marry it? It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof Against fire and bombs through the roof. Believe me, theyll bury you in it.The man in the poem is finally defined by the dour suit he puts on, but the description of the char shows her to be even more alienated and dehumanized. While the man is a junk heap of miscellaneous parts given shape by a suit of clothes, the char is a wind-up toy, a puppet of that total darkness suit. She doesnt e ven exist unless the abusive suit needs and wills her to. Will you marry it? It is guaranteed To thumb eject your eyes at the end And dissolve of sorrow. We make new standard from the salt. The woman in the poem is referred to as it. Like the man, she has no individuality, but where his suit gives him form, standing for the role he plays in a bureaucratic society, for the expire he does, the only thing that gives the woman form is the grounding of marriage. She does not exist before it and dissolves back into vigourness after it. In The Applicant there is at least an implication that something exists underneath the mans swarthy suit that however fragmented he is, he at least marries the suit and he at least has a choice. In contrast, the woman is the role she plays she does not exist apart from it. Naked as motif to start, Plath writes, But in twenty-five years shell be silver, In fifty, gold. A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook. It can talk, talk, ta lk. The man, the type of a standard issue corporation junior executive, is also alienated. He has granting immunity of choice only in comparison to the much more limited situation of the woman. That is to say, he has relative freedom of choice in direct proportion to his role as recognized utilisationer in the stinting structure of his society. This should not imply, however, that this man is in any kind of satisfy and meaningful relation to his work.The emphasis in The Applicant upon the mans surfacehis fatal suittogether with the opening skepticism of the poem (First, are you our sort of person? ) suggests that even his descent to his work is not going to be in any sense direct or satisfying. It will be filtered first through the suit of clothes, whence through the glass eye and rubber crotch before it can reach the real human being, assuming there is anything left of him. The woman in the poem is seen as an appendage she works, but she works in a realm international socia lly recognized labor.She works for the man in the black suit. She is seen as making contact with the world only through the medium of the man, who is already twice removed. This buffering effect is exacerbated by the fact that the man is probably not engaged in work that would allow him to feel a relationship to the product of his labor. He is probably a bureaucrat of some kind, and hence his relationship is to pieces of musical composition, successive and fragmented figures of the product (whatever it is, chamberpots or wooden tables) rather than to the product itself.And of course, the more buffered the man is, the more buffered the woman is, for in a sense her real relationship to the world of labor is that of consumer rather than producer. Therefore, her only relationship to socially acceptable productionas opposed to outgois through the man. In another sense, however, the woman is not a consumer, but a goodness. Certainly she is seen as a trade good in this poem, as a re ward only slightly less important than his black suit, which the man receives for being our sort of person. It can be argued that the man is to some extent also a commodity yet just as he is in a sense more a diddly and less a consumer than the womanat least in terms of the social recognition of his positionso in a atomic number 42 sense he is more a consumer and less a commodity than the woman. And when we move out from the particularly flat, composition-like image of the woman in the poem to the consciousness which speaks the poem in a tone of bitter irony, then the situation of the woman as unrecognized actor/recognized commodity becomes clearer.The man in The Applicant, because of the in-between class bureaucratic nature of his work (one does not wear a new black suit to work in a steel mill or to handcraft a cabinet) and because of his position vis-a-vis the woman (her social existence depends upon his recognition), is more a member of an exploiting class than one which is exploited. There are some parts of his world, specifically those involving the woman, in which he can feel himself relatively in control and therefore able to understand his relationship to this world in a contemplative way.Thus, whatever we may think of the system he has bought into, he himself can see it as comparatively stable, a paradigm with certain atmospherics features which nevertheless allows him to move upward in an neat fashion. Within the context of this poem, then, and within the context of the womans relationship to the man in the black suit, she is finally both worker and commodity while he is consumer. Her position is close to that of the Marxist conception of the proletariat.Fredric Jameson, in Marxism and Form, defines the perception of orthogonal objects and events which arises naturally in the consciousness of an individual who is simultaneously worker and commodity. heretofore before the worker posits elements of the outside world as objects of his thought, he feels himself to be an object, and this sign alienation within himself takes precedence over everything else. Yet precisely in this terrible alienation lies the strength of the workers position his first movement is not toward familiarity of the work but toward knowledge of himself as an object, toward self-consciousness.Yet this self-consciousness, because it is initially knowledge of an object (himself, his own labor as a commodity, his life get which he is under obligation to sell), permits him more genuine knowledge of the commodity nature of the outside world than is granted to middle-class objectivity. For and here Jameson quotes Georg Lukacs in The History of Class Consciousness his consciousness is the self-consciousness of merchandise itself . . . This dual consciousness of self as both subject and object is characteristic of the writings of minority and/or oppressed classes.It is characteristic of the proletarian writer in his (admittedly often dogmatic) percepti on of his relation to a decadent past, a stateless demo, and a utopian future. It is characteristic of black American writers W. E. B. Du Bois makes a argument very similar in substance to Jamesons in The Souls of Black Folk, and certainly the basic existential condition of Ellisons invisible man is his dual consciousness which only toward the end of that novel becomes a means to freedom of action rather than paralysis.It is true of contemporary women writers, of novelists like Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Rita Mae Brown, and of poets like Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, and Marge Piercy. In a sense, it is more characteristic of American literature than of any other major world literature, for each immigrant group, however great its desire for socialization into the American power structure, initially possessed this dual consciousness.Finally, a dialectic perception of self as both subject and object, both worker and commodity, in relation to past and future as well as pre sent, is characteristic of revolutionary literature, whether the revolution is political or cultural. Sylvia Plath has this dialectical awareness of self as both subject and object in particular relation to the society in which she lived. The riddle for her, and possibly the main problem of Cold War America, is in the second aspect of a dialectical consciousnessan awareness of oneself in significant relation to past and future.The first person narrator of what is probably Plaths best short story, Johnny fear and the Bible of Dreams, is a clerk/typist in a psychiatric clinic, a self-described dream connoisseur who keeps her own personal record of all the dreams which stand out through her office, and who longs to look at the oldest record book the Psychoanalytic base possesses. This dream book was spanking new the day I was born, she says, and elsewhere makes the connection even clearer The clinic started thirty-three years agothe year of my birth, strangely enough. This conne ction suggests the way in which Plath uses history and views herself in relation to it. The landscape of her late work is a contemporary social landscape. It goes back in time to encompass such significant historical events as the Rosenberg tribulation and executionthe opening chapter of The Bell Jar alludes dramatically to these eventsand of course it encompasses, is perhaps obsessed with, the major historical event of Plaths time, the second world war.But social history seems to stop for Plath where her own life starts, and it is replaced at that point by a mythic timeless past populated by creatures from phratry tale and classical mythology. This is not surprising, since as a woman this poet had short(p) part in shaping history. Why should she feel any relation to it? But more crucially, there is no imagination of the future in Sylvia Plaths work, no utopian or even antiutopian consciousness.In her poetry there is a dialectical consciousness of the self as simultaneously objec t and subject, but in her particular social context she was unable to develop a consciousness of herself in relation to a past and future beyond her own lifetime. This foreshortening of a historical consciousness affects in turn the dual consciousness of self in relation to itself (as subject) and in relation to the world (as object). It raises the question of how one accounts objectively for oneself. For instance, if I am involved in everything I see, can I still be objective and trial-and-error in my perception, free from myth and language?Finally, this foreshortening of historical consciousness affects the question of whether the subject is a function of the object or vice versa. Since the two seem to have equal possibilities, this last question is never resolved. As a result, the individual feels trapped and in Sylvia Plaths poetry one senses a insistent struggle to be reborn into some new present which causes the perceiving consciousness, when it opens its eyes, to discover t hat it has instead (as in Lady Lazarus) made a theatrical performance / Comeback in broad day / To the same place, the same face, the same brute / Am utilize shout A miracle This punishingy in status the self and the concomitant suspicion that as a result the self may be unreal are clear in poems like Cut, which describe the self-image of the poet as paper. The ostensible occasion of Cut is slicing ones finger instead of an onion the first two stanzas of the poem describe the cut finger in minute and almost naturalistic detail. There is a suppressed hysteria here which is only discernible in the poems risible mixture of surrealism and objectivity.The images of the poem are predominantly images of terrorism and war, immediately suggested to the poet by the sight of her bleeding finger out of a gap / A million soldiers run, Saboteur / Kamikaze man, and finally, trepanne d veteran. The metaphors of war are extensive, and, though suggested by the actual experience, they are remov ed from it. In the one place in the poem where the speaker mentions her own feelings as a free entity (apart from but including her cut finger) the image is of paper. She says, O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to killThe thin topicy feeling. Paper often stands for the self-image of the poet in the post-Colossus poems. It is used in the title poem of crossing the Water, where the two black cut-paper people come along less substantial and less real than the solidity and immensity of the natural world surrounding them. In the play Three Women, the Secretary says of the men in her office there was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it. She sees her own infertility as directly related to her complicity in a bureaucratic, impersonal, male-dominated society.Paper is symbolic of our particular socioeconomic condition and its characteristic bureaucratic labor. It stands for insubstantiality the paper model of something is clearly less real than the t hing itself, even though in developed economies the machines, accoutrements, and objects appear to have vitality, purpose, and emotion, while the people are literally colorless, objectified, and atrophied. The paper self is therefore part of Plaths portrait of a depersonalized society, a bureaucracy, a paper world.In A Life (Crossing the Water), she writes A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle / About a bald hospital saucer. / It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper / And appears to have suffered a snobbish blitzkrieg. In Tulips the speaker of the poem, also a hospital patient, describes herself as flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow / Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips. In The Applicant, the woman is again described as paper Naked as paper to start / But in twenty-five years shell be silver, / In fifty, gold. present in Cut, the thin, / Papery feeling juxtaposes her emotional dissociation from the ache to the horrific detail of the cut and the credit liney images of conflict it suggests. It stands for her sense of depersonalization, for the separation of self from self, and is juxtaposed to that devaluation of human life which is a necessary consideration to war, the separation of society from itself. In this context, it is significant that one would take a pill to kill a feeling of substancelessness and depersonalization. Writing about American women in the 1950s, Betty Friedan asks, Just what was the problem that had no name?What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say, I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete. Or she would say, I feel as if I dont exist. Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. A papery world is a sterile world this equation recurs throughout the Ariel poems. For Sylvia Plath, stasis and perfection are always associated with sterility, while fertility is associated with movement and process. The opening lines of The Munich Mannequins in troduce this equation. ideal is terrible, Plath writes, it cannot have children. / Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb / Where the yew trees blow like hydras. The put of The Munich Mannequins is a city in winter. Often, Plaths poems have imaged winter as a time of rest preceding rebirth (Wintering, Frog free fall), but only when the reference point is nature. The natural world is characterized in Sylvia Plaths poems by process, by the ebb and give of months and seasons, by a continual dying and rebirth. The moon is a symbol for the monthly ebb and flow of the tides and of a womans body.The social world, however, the world of the city, is both male defined and disjunct from this process. In the city, winter has more sinister connotations it suggests death rather than hibernation. Here the cold is equated with the perfection and sterility to which the poems opening lines refer. Perfection stands in The Munich Mannequins for something by artificial means created and part of the social world. The poem follows the male quest for perfection to its uniform endmannequins in a store windowlifeless and empty in their sulphur loveliness, in their smiles. The mannequins contrast with the real woman in the same way that the city contrasts with the moon. The real woman is not static but complicated The tree of life and the tree of life Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose. The blood flood is the flood of love, The absolute hand However, in Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome, the artificial has somehow triumphed. Women have become mannequins or have been replaced by mannequins, or at least mannequins seem to have a greater reality because they are more ordered and comprehensible than real women.It is appropriate that Plath should focus on the middle class of a German city, in a country where fascism was a middle class movement and women allowed themselves to be idealized, to be perfected, to be made, essentially, into mannequins. In The Mu nich Mannequins, as in The Applicant, Plath points out the deadening of human beings, their disappearance and fragmentation and accretion into the objects that surround them. In The Applicant the woman is a paper doll here she has been replaced by a store window dummy.In The Applicant all that is left of her at the end is a kind of saline solution in The Munich Mannequins the only remaining sign of her presence is the domesticity of these windows / The ball up lace, the green-leaved confectionery. And where the man in The Applicant is described in terms of his black suit, here the men are described in terms of their shoes, present in the anonymity of hotel corridors, where Hands will be opening doors and setting Down shoes for a polish of carbon Into which broad toes will go tomorrow. People accrete to their things, are absorbed into their artifacts.Finally, they lose all sense of a whole self and become atomized. Parts of them connect to their shoes, parts to their suits, parts to their lace curtains, parts to their iceboxes, and so on. There is nothing left people have become reified and dispersed into a fill up artificial landscape of their own production. Because the world she describes is a place created by men rather than women (since men are in control of the forces of production), Plath sees men as having ultimate culpability for this state of affairs which affects both men and women.But men have gone further than this in their desire to change and control the world round them. In The Munich Mannequins man has finally modify woman into a puppet, a mannequin, something that reflects both his disgust with and his fear of women. A mannequin cannot have children, but neither does it have that messy, terrifying, and incomprehensible blood flow each month. Mannequins entirely do away with the problems of female creativeness and self-determination.Trapped inside this vision, therefore, the speaker of the Ariel poems sees herself caught between nature a nd society, biology and intellect, Dionysus and Apollo, her self definition and the expectations of others, as between two mirrors. Discussion of the Ariel poems has often centered around Sylvia Plaths most shocking images. Yet her images of wars and concentration camps, of mass and individual violence, are only the end result of an underlying depersonalization, an abdication of people to their artifacts, and an economic and social structure that equates people and objects.Like the paper doll woman in The Applicant, Sylvia Plath was doubly alienated from such a world, doubly objectified by it, and as a woman artist, doubly isolated within it. Isolated both from a past tradition and a present community, she found it difficult to structure new alternatives for the future. No wonder her individual quest for rebirth failed as it led her continuously in a circle back to the same self in the