VIOLENCE, RAGE, AND SELF-HURT IN SYLVIA PLATH'S POETRY

Author(s): Parvin Ghasemi

Source: CLA Journal , MARCH 2008, Vol. 51, No. 3 (MARCH 2008), pp. 284-303
Published by: College Language Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44325429

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 VIOLENCE, RAGE, AND SELF-HURT IN
SYLVIA PLATH'S POETRY1

By Parvin Ghasemi

A considerable body of Sylvia Plath's work portrays a

world devoid of meaningful spiritual resources. This
world crashes the self and leaves out the corpse, mutilated
and silenced. As a reactionary gesture against this op-
pressive modern society, Plath employs a shockingly harsh
language, a host of violent images, impressed by painful
and hurting incidents and experiences. Her work, then,
exhibits a rebellion against the confinement of "self in the
bondage of conformity and subjection and suggests an out-
let of expression which indicates the individual's struggle
to liberate "self from the bondage of social conformity and
dispossession.
Thus, the bulk of Plath's work signifies development
and transition, emerging from the persona's experiences of
estrangement and entrapment. The very early short sto-
ries written during her junior year in school are embedded
with the gloomy sense of hopelessness and loneliness.
Most of these are peopled with women who found no sym-
pathy in the world around. "Heat," "The Attic View," "The
Brink," "The Dark River," and "East Wind," although be-
longing to Plath's school days, introduce the themes of her
future writings which also occur in her only novel, The
Bell Jar. Linda Wagner characterizes these themes as
"fears of never finding a suitable career, a worthy hus-
band, or her own mental health. Plath's interest in defin-
ing health and madness seems, too, to stem from these

1 This article has been prepared with the assistance and contribution of Ms.
Arezoo Amini, English Instructor, Azad University, Gazvin, Iran.

284

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 Violence, Rage, and Self-Hurt in Sylvia Plath's Poetry 285

earlier fragments of stories, for all of the women charac-

ters here are at least unusual rather than normal" (9).
Most critics ascribe this feeling of alienation and de-
pression to Plath's deprived childhood, especially after her
father's premature death in 1940, which left her with a
feeling of abandonment and the fear of losing people. Ob-
viously, her young life was troubled with an acute sense of
anxiety and distress. The feeling of anger, betrayal, and
hate, and the fear of loss never released Plath's mind.
This feeling, however, gave her an oversensitive sense to-
wards the world around her and enabled her to perceive
limitations and oppressions of the modern life with fresh
eyes. The persona that Plath presents in her work is a
multi-dimensional portrait of the modern woman. While
she does not rule out the domestic dimension of a twenti-
eth-century woman's existence, many of her poems deline-
ate a woman who stands far away from the established
domesticity governed by patriarchal laws. Although in her
poetry Plath shows sympathy and love towards maternal
bonds, she sees them as obstacles in the way of the crea-
tive imagination of the modern woman artist who at-
tempts to explore pure feminine experiences. The intense
rage in some of her poems is an outcome of the desperate
struggle of the voices of the personas inside her mind.
Having experienced different socially imposed roles as a
daughter, wife, and mother, Plath herself was too aware of
the dilemma of being "herself," overshadowed as she was
by male figures.
In this chaos of multiple - and imposed - identities and
masks, as a modern woman writer, Plath sets out on a
quest for her lost self, an ordeal which is adequately ex-
plained by Lizabeth Goodman as the shared painful ex-
perience of all women artists as they
all experienced isolation of one kind or another; all recognized
the need for mental and physical space for writing or dealt
with ideas of confinement, hidden writing or suppressed crea-
tivity; some lost children; some suffered mental and emotional

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286 Parvin Ghasemi

breakdowns after bearing children or

raising children and writing compet
ergy. (253)

Though the bulk of her poetry

tion to the patriarchal dispossessi
there are some poems which cl
selves as Plath's poems of anger
poems, which, through her use
hurting imagery, investigate
womanhood even more intensely and present "a new
harsh, demonic devastating self" (Perloff 2).
This "self' is the persona in "The Colossus," "Daddy,"
"Medusa, "Lady Lazarus," and "Arie." The giant father
figure in "Colossus," in Wagner's view, unlike the loosely
defined father figure of earlier poems, suggests "a sense of
the father as ein unattainable sphinx like status, an entity
more foreboding than real. In most of her early writing
the father persona is either lovingly affectionate grandfa-
ther or the absent man she yearns to bring back into her
existence" (12). The poem begins with the persona's declar-
ing her inability to reconstruct the broken statue: "I shall
never get you put together entirely, / pieced, glued, and
properly joined" (1-2). Not all critics view the father figure
as conveying the role of Plath's own father, Otto Plath.
Margaret Dickie Qrrof, for example, believes that the idol-
like colossus is not a mere description of the poet's father
but can be interpreted as a deity or a silenced god of po-
etry: "Perhaps the colossus," she states, "is not the actual
father but the creative father. . . . The concentration of
mouth imagery to describe the colossus also points to his
identification as a speaker or poet" (37). "The Colossus,"
written in a tone that developed in Plath's later poems, is
a beginning of the myth that she created out of her life. As
Linda Wagner states, Plath herself sees the modern poet
"creating new worlds from old. The poet might draw from
arenas of existing myth but then be obliged to transform
the material . . . [and] make it freshly his own and ours"

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 Violence, Rage, and Self-Hurt in Sylvia Plath's Poetry 287

(133). The central image of the poem is the giant statue

and the girl who desperately tries to mend it. The lan-
guage of the first stanza then leaves no doubt about the
greatness of the past; however, the description of this lost
past is one of humor and irony. In the third stanza the
speaker reveals her long-time-done act, which is more like
religious rituals, that ironically turns out to be unimpor-
tant or "small, domestic labors" (Shulman 29): "Scaling
little ladders with gluepots and pails of Lysol / 1 crawl like
an ant in mourning / Over the weedy acres of your brow"
(15-17).
What Plath is searching for on the ruins of the Colossus
is paternal love and approval. The woman-speaker claims
that her "hours are married to shadow" (28); by this claim
she states her never-ending engagement to "creative
dearth" and sees no sympathy from the statue of her fa-
ther. She is married, according to Steven Axelrod, "to the
soul of the inanimate and oppressive father-husband who
is only in her remembrance. As a result she herself be-
comes increasingly shadowlike. Indeed, she is the only
shadow in the scene since the colossus stands in the sun,
making the shade that she lives in" (75). In her letters she
relates the sun to the creativity and the ability to compose
poems (. Letters 274), and shadow to the writer's block or
the "creative" while repeatedly she says that she has lived
under the shadow of powerful males ( Journals 567).
"The Colossus" is a turning point in Plath's poetry in
which the artificial language of earlier poems is replaced
by a more intimate, conversational language in her choice
of both words and rhythm. The poem is written in five-line
stanzas in a way that was used in some of the Ariel poems,
in which "the verses are not rhymed and the hne lengths
follow no regular pattern" (Aird 65). The extension of the
subject of the poem, the daughter/father relation, is the
core image of Plath's worldwide known poem "Daddy," in
which the priestess-like daughter who marries shadow at
the end of "The Colossus" breaks up the relation and be-

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288 Parvin Ghasemi

comes the vampire slayer. If th

no choice but to serve her dead
in "Daddy" finds no way to gain
except by imaginatively killing
From "The Colossus" to "Daddy"
scape, from mythic landscape
social settings. The reference t
reflects the myth of Electra and
girl for a dead but godlike pow
uses the father/daughter relat
to show the relation between man and woman and, in a
wider scope, the position of the woman as an artist in a
patriarchal system. Wagner notes that in her more devel-
oped poem "Daddy," the speaker obviously "makes a trans-
fer from father to husband . . . [and] turns away, as rudely
as possible, from the powerful male force that had domi-
nated her life" (Wagner 129).
"Daddy" expresses Plath's anger and bitterness at the
domineering male power in an exceptionally high pitch of
intensity. Its shocking tone and style express the
speaker's vehement denunciations of male authority.
"Daddy" has been considered by many critics to belong to
the confessional poems that draw on Plath's own hatred
and love for her father. These biographical elements and
too much emphasis on them endanger Plath's artistic au-
thenticity, as Aird states: "[T]he danger of such criticism
lies in its assumption that the poem is objectively 'true',
that it bears a precise relationship to the facts of the poet's
life . . . but the poem cannot be literary or historically
true" (66). The creative force of Plath's poetry is an indi-
cation of her power to make great, universal drama out of
private and domestic events.
The enraged speaker of "Daddy" is distinguished by her
constraint. She suffers from social confinement caused by
male-dominance; thus, she is rebelling against the silence
and passivity imposed on women. The poem begins by
stating that the woman persona cannot live any longer

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 Violence, Rage, and Self-Hurt in Sylvia Plath's Poetry 289

under the control of the paternal shadow; the man's con-

trol is compared to a black shoe: "You do not do, you do not
do / any more, black shoe / In which I have lived like a
foot" (lines 1-3). Her lifetime has been enveloped by this
man; everything in the woman's life has been overshad-
owed by "the black shoe." This black shoe, like "the black
suit" in the poem "The Applicant," represents the mascu-
line power or patriarchal society. The woman is entrapped
in the domesticity imposed on her by this patriarchal sys-
tem. As Judith Krool observes, "In this image of passive
and victimized domesticity, the speaker implicitly com-
pares her past self to the 'old woman who lived in a shoe'
who 'didn't know what to do'; now, however, she makes it
clear that she does know what to do" (122). The girl con-
tinues by confessing, "Daddy, I have had to kill you / You
died before I had time" (lines 6-7). This stanza shows a
childish anger toward a beloved father. Kroll, in com-
menting on this disappointment, observes that "poems
explicitly about the protagonist's father, read in order of
composition, show that the attitude toward him evolves
from nostalgic mournfulness, a regret, and guilt, to re-
sentment and bitter resolve to break his hold on her"
(122). Then the father becomes a colossus-like statue:
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one grey toe
Big as Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset. (8-10)

Here the father's authority over his child is ironically

reduced to a "bag full of God" which is larger than the
statue of the colossus, with "one grey toe" that is a direct
reference to Otto Plath's diabetes and the misdiagnosis
that leads to his death; by this first metaphor the poet
speaker, as Mary Broe points out, "kills her father suc-
cinctly with her own words, demythologizing him to a lu-
dicrous piece of statuary that is hardly a Poseidon or the

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290 Parvin Ghasemi

Colossus of Rhodes" (173). At the end of the third stanza

the speaker confesses that as a child she "used to pray to
recover" him.
In the following stanzas the godlike, although broken
and ridiculous, father gradually changes into a heartless
killer or monster. Přiměla Annas notes that "the male fig-
ure at the center of 'Daddy takes four major forms: the
statue, the Gestapo officer, the professor, and the vam-
pire" (139). All these figures represent the father/daughter
or man/woman relationship. The woman is a devotee to
the statue, a victim Jew to the Gestapo, a student to the
professor, and at last a victim to the vampire's blood
thirst. Annas illustrates this serial of images as follows:
The Gestapo figure becomes Herr Professor' in stanza eleven,
an actual image of Plath's father, and also an image of what
has for centuries been seen as the prototypical and even ideal
relationship between a man and a woman. The professor, who
is a man, talks and is active; the woman, who is a student, lis-
tens and is passive. A patriarchal social structure is at its pur-
est and, superficially, at its most benign in the stereotyped re-
lationship of male teacher and female student and is a stock
romantic fantasy even in women's literature. . . . But Plath
places this image between the images of Nazi/Jew and vam-
pire/victim so that it becomes the center of a series. Indeed, the
image of daddy as teacher turns almost immediately into a
devil/demon/vampire. (140)

To some critics like Judith Kroll this rush of feelings is a

"Ritual of Exorcism" to exorcise the powerful de-
mon/shadow of father/husband who has been unfaithful to
her love; to smother critic, Steven G. Axelrod, "Daddy" is
an escape from the tyranny of masculine language to a
release of the speaker's power of articulation.
Considering this poem as an allegorical or symbolic
work of art, "Daddy" is a young woman's articulation of
her inner conflicts, as a daughter, a wife, a student, and a
victim in contrast to powerful male oppressors. According
to Axelrod, "[t]he poem concerns a young woman's paralyz-
ing self-division, which she can defeat only through alle-

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 Violence, Rage, and Self-Hurt in Sylvia Plath's Poetry 291

gorical representation" (52). The poet-speaker of the poem

has an urge to kill "Daddy to liberate herself: "If I've
killed one man, I've killed two - " (line 71).
To Plath the struggle to produce poems, to have a voice
of her own, is the only way to identify herself as a woman;
however, this challenge occurs both in her real life and her
work of art. Axelrod maintains that in writing "Daddy"
she sought "to demonstrate the existence of her voice,
which had been silent or subservient for so long. She wrote
it to prove her 'genius'" (57). The persona speaks in dif-
ferent languages, the childish language by which the poem
is entitled, the language of an adult girl, the language of
nonsense, and German. As Axelrod explains, "[t]he ten-
sion between erudition and simplicity in the speaker's
voice appears in her pairings that juxtapose adult with
childlike diction: breath or achoo, your luftewaffe, your
gobbledygook, and the other words, ancestor, Aryan,
Meinkampf' (57). Axelrod continues, describing Plath's
technique by characterizing Plath's use of language in
"Dadd^ as "careful intellectual discriminations, conven-
tionalized description, moral allegory, expressing regres-
sive language, exhibiting regressive fantasies, repetitions,
and inarticulateness" (57). In the process of writing
"Daddy" the poet exorcises the demonic-male possessor;
meanwhile, she exhibits her true voice in what she asserts
a "light verse" in the form of a lullaby. Aired describes the
poem as a light verse with "the strong, simple rhythm, the
full rhymes and subtle half-rhymes, the repetitive, incan-
tatory vowel-sounds [which] sweep the poem along in a
jaunty approximation to a ballad" (70). Alvarez believes
that the poem is conveyed in a tone that "like its psycho-
logical mechanisms, is not single or simple, and she
[Plath] uses a great deal of skill to keep it complex. Basi-
cally, her trick is to tell this horror story in a verse form as
insistently jaunty and ritualistic as a nursery rhyme" (65).
By means of all these techniques and figures of speech,
Plath creates a revenge story on two dominant male fig-

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292 Parvin Ghasemi

ures in her life, her father and

has married as a symbolic act o
girl cannot rejoin her father; s
patriarch order; therefore, she
both in her work and her real l
her father, who mercilessly h
heart in two;" the speaker conti
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do. (5

The demon-father has the abil

his projections is the woman'
love/hate relationship between
connected with the color "black
round her father and color eve
He is described as a "black man" (55) and her husband
again is "A man in black" (65); his shoe is black; he
"stand[s] at the blackboard" (51) and has a "fat black
heart" (76). The other characteristic of the demon-father is
his nationality as a German Nazi officer; historically, Na-
zism and Fascism convey brutality of war and censorship.
Father/husband or the patriarchal society is compared to
Nazism, which silences any opposite voice, or the voice of
the others who in a patriarchal society are considered to
be the female voice. A "bag full of God" (8), a "Ghastly
statue" (9), an "Aryan" blue-eyed "Panzer-man" with a
"neat mustache" (43-45), Daddy deploys all the regalia of
the fascist father against those robbed of selfhood, citizen-
ship, and language, for the speaker's stuttering tongue is
"stuck in a barb wire snare. / Ich, ich, ich, ich, / I could
hardly speak" (26-28). The daughter "confronts a symbolic
order in which the relationship between the fragile 'ich'
and the overpowering national and linguistic authority of
Daddy frustrates any autonomous self-definition" (Susan
Gubar 101). The dehumanization of Jews by the Germans

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 Violence, Rage, and Self-Hurt in Sylvia Plath's Poetry 293

in their concentration camps and the man-burning ma-

chines are the source of the comparison between mem and
woman. Axelrod notes that Plath "projected her struggle
for textual identity onto the figure of a partly Jewish
young woman who learns to express her anger at the pa-
triarch and at his language of male mastery, which is as
foreign to her as German, as 'obscene' as murder, and as
meaningless as 'gobbledygook' " (Axelrod 52). The mascu-
line world, as it is described in the poem, is a world of
wars, bombs, terror, torture, and dehumanization. The
violent language of "Daddy" seems to be a counterpart to
this world; the voice loses her whiteness to join this world
of black; the nursery-rhythm which is used as the medium
for the savage content emphasizes this conflict of white
and black, love and hate. Axelrod explains:
For Plath, as later for Adrienne Rich, the Holocaust and the
patriarchy's silencing of women were linked outcomes of the
masculinist interpretation of the world. Political insurrection
and female self-assertion also interlaced symbolically. In
"Daddy" Plath's speaker finds her voice and motive by identify-
ing herself as antithetical to her Fascist father. Rather than
getting the Colossus "glued" and properly jointed, she wishes
to stick herself "together with glue," an act that seems to re-
quire her father's dismemberment. Previously devoted to the
patriarch . . . she now seeks only to escape from him and to see
him destroyed. (55)

Near the end of the poem the image of daddy undergoes

the third transformation; this time in the form of a vam-
pire who lives upon other people's blood: "There's a stake
in your fat black heart" (76). The woman who has been
caught in the cycle of the father/husband trap finds her
way out of it. With the stake in his heart the vampire can-
not come back to life and torture her. The father/husband
figure can no longer hurt the girl with his voice, as if the
poet is no more under the tyranny of masculine language;
she says, "The black telephone's off at the root. / the voices
just can't worm through" (70). According to Susan R. Van
Dyne, "[t]he aggressive back talk of the poem is aimed not

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294 Parvin Ghasemi

merely at the patriarchal of th

construction of masculinity (4
persona of "The Snowman on t
"The Applicant," and "The Jai
possessing a metaphysical power
If "Daddy" is a rejection of pat
"Medusa" is a refusal of maternal love and selflessness.
"Medusa" is a poem of a monster-mother, "a bitter, brutal
attack on the mother of inner myth, Electra's rival or
daddy's love, but at the same times her actual mother"
(Stevenson 468). The differences between Plath's real feel-
ings and what she wrote to her mother in her letters home
reveal the lack of communication between them. She had
to wear the mask of "happily married daughter" to dis-
guise her sufferings; an emotionally charged relationship
with her mother suffuses many of her poems, of course,
and repeatedly in works such as "Medusa" and "The Dis-
quieting Muses" and throughout her novel The Bell Jar,
she reveals her deep antipathy toward her mother.
Similar to the way she wrote "Daddy," Plath wrote "Me-
dusa" in five-line stanzas in which the daughter rejects
her mother and her love; being both a mother and daugh-
ter simultaneously, she had the opportunity to handle sub-
jects in this realm. In a letter to her younger brother, Syl-
via Plath comments on their mother's personality: "She is
an abnormally altruistic person, and I have realized lately
that we have to fight against her selflessness as we would
fight against a deadly disease" ( Letters 12 May 1953). The
psychological background of this maternal selflessness is
what Jung explains in "The Development of Personality."
William Freedman believes that Plath's description of ma-
ternal self-annihilation is affected by it. He quotes Jung in
his essay:
Set themselves the fanatical task of always "doing their best"
for their children and "living only for them" this claimant ideal
effectively prevents the parents from doing anything about
their own development and allows them to thrust their "best"

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 Violence, Rage, and Self-Hurt in Sylvia Plath's Poetry 295

down their children's throats. This so-called "best" turns out to

be the very things the parents have most badly engaged in
themselves. In this way the children are goaded on to achieve
their parents' most dismal failures, and are loaded with ambi-
tions that are never fulfilled. (153)

In the demonic Ariel poems, Plath could finally vent her

anger, her hatred of men, her frustration with her
mother's consuming attachment, and her disappointments
in life. "Dearest Mother" now becomes the dreaded "Me-
dusa." The mythological beheading of Medusa by Perseus
symbolizes the ultimate silencing of female wisdom and
expression. It is an act which stops her growth and limits
her potential movement and cultural contributions. She is
killed and her severed head is flaunted on the Acropolis as
a symbol of all women's subjugation by violent men. Plath
uses the myth of Medusa to represent the patriarchal bru-
tal annihilation of women's bodies and souls. The modern
woman is broken and her body enslaved. Her spirit, her
mind, and her spiritual powers are killed. Her forces of
female creativity and autonomy are halted. Her role as
dynamic mediatrix is degraded. Her life-giving, death-
wielding powers and wild forces of nature are controlled,
tamed, and mastered by the male order. The cycles of life
and nature are made to conform to his linear perspective.
Moreover, the myth of Medusa has repeatedly appeared
in literature and psychology; the most famous example is a
text written by Freud in 1922 titled "Das Medusenhaupt"
["Medusa's Head"]. He presents Medusa as the supreme
talisman who represents the image of castration -
associated in the child's mind with the discovery of mater-
nal sexuality and its denial. To Robert Graves ( Greek
Myth, 1958) it is the myth of Perseus presenting the mem-
ory of the conflicts which occurred between men and
women in the transition from a matriarchal to a patriar-
chal society. Plath's "Medusa" is set in a horrible sea-
scape; the poem starts with the description of the head of
Medusa; the girl-persona encounters the ghastly figure of

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296 Parvin Ghasemi

her mother coming to her as

stands before her, "fat and red
cates "the rejection of the poet
terrible sea creature that poison
(Freedman 153). By this act of a
figure, the poet-persona revo
feminine element, symbolized
doomed to be defeated in a pat
tioned before, the conquest of
considered as the change in the hierarchical upheaval,
when maternal power is defeated by the paternal. The
speaker in "Daddy" is liberated by exorcizing the dead fa-
ther but in "Medusa" by avoiding the maternal love that
has paralyzed her: "I could draw no breath / dead and
moneyless" (29-30). She opposes the passivity of women,
their self-sacrifice and annihilation in the social life;
"there is an injected sense of the speaker as another as
well as child. The Medusa, apparently the mother, is also
the child/mother's own newborn infant a 'tremulous breath
at the end of my lines'" (Freedman 153).
The vision is that of the speaker as both a mother and a
child; as a mother she is rejecting motherhood while as a
child she resists the devouring mother's self-annihilation:
"I shall take no bite of your body, / Bottle in which I live"
(34-35). Consequently, the rejection of mother-Medusa is
the rejection of the portrait of woman as the other, espe-
cially the monstrous other, in the patriarchal system.
One major theme in Sylvia Plath's poems is the cycle of
death and re-birth which is employed specifically in "Lady
Lazarus." By the testimony in her letters and journals,
Plath seems to have been obsessed with the myth of the
biblical Lazarus who was brought back from the grave by
Jesus Christ. However, Plath changes the gender of Laza-
rus by the enactment of the resurrection of "Lady Laza-
rus." This miraculous resurrection is compared by Plath
to the skillful act of "Herr Doctor" that brings the speaker
back to life. Susan R. van Dyne explains: "The Ire of this

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 Violence, Rage, and Self-Hurt in Sylvia Plath's Poetry 297

poem is directed ... at multiple forms of male authority; . .

. what Lady Lazarus suffers is not male brutality but the
gendered asymmetry of her relationship to power in which
her role is always defined as dependendent and defective"
(55). The poem is among Plath's poems of sordid anger,
which, like its companion "Daddy," is written in light
verse containing the intense desire to die and be born; it is
a poem of personal pain, suffering, and revenge. Despite
all the biographical references to Plath's life and anxieties,
the poem remains extremely universal in the sense of its
nostalgia for a willing resurrection. The poem begins with
its direct confession of a desire for death: "I have done it
again. / One year in every ten / I manage it - " (1-3). As
Alvarez maintains, "[w]hat is remarkable about the poem
is the objectivity with which she [Plath] handles such per-
sonal material. She is not just talking about her own pri-
vate suffering. Instead it is the very closeness of her pain
which gives it a general meaning; through it she assumes
the suffering of the entire modern victim" (64).
The speaker in "Lady Lazarus" identifies herself with
the Jewish victims who symbolize the woman victim in a
patriarchal society; however, this time the helpless victim
of men renounces her victory over them, declaring that she
is a "sort of walking miracle" (4) or "a smiling woman"
(19). She is back to life by the hands of her "enemy" (11,
66); although she is reduced to an object to entertain the
"peanut-crunching crowd" (26), she is aware of their infe-
riority compared to her. She talks in a sure voice; it is her
will that conquers her oppressors. The coldness of the
woman-persona is intensified both by her way of describ-
ing her suicides as a routine activity and the technique of
the poet to handle such intimate, personal experience, as
Eileen Aird explains:
In this poem a disturbing tension is established between the
seriousness of the experience described and the misleadingly
light form of poem. The vocabulary and rhythms which ap-
proximate to the colloquial simplicity of the conversational

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298 Parvin Ghasemi

speech, the frequently end-stopped lin

have the effect of mockingly counter
meaning, all establish the deliberately
poem strives to achieve. ... At time
strident and demanding. (36)

Like "Daddy" the poet moves b

the world of symbol; if killing o
or ritual, then returning to lif
especially in contrast to the de
trapped in the grave: "Soon, so
cave ate will be /At home on m
The real world that entrapped the wo
which is ruled by the rules of patriar
caust and dehumanization; the woma
vided into parts [;] "the nose," "the ey
knees" are shown to the "peanut-crun
the act of striptease and the notion o
dominated system. (Aird 37)

However, the poet-speaker of

ter her physical death stronger
in the shape of a woman but a
can get vengeance on her victi
"[t]he entire symbolic procedu
'Lady Lazarus' has been deliberately chosen by the
speaker. She enacts her death repeatedly in order to
cleanse herself of the 'million filaments' of guilt and an-
guish that torment her. . . . [T]hese attempts at rebirth are
unsuccessful until the end of the poem" (Oberg 125).
However, Lady Lazarus's new life is nurtured by hate: she
becomes a fiery avenger who not only has the ability to
suffer but the power to control and manage as well:
Ash, ash -
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there -

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

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 Violence, Rage , and Self-Hurt in Sylvia Plath's Poetry 299

Herr God. Herr Lucifer

Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air. (73-84)

The last images of the poem are the manifestation of

deadly Holocaust and man-burning machines as remind-
ers of man's cruelty, torture, and death in contrast to the
myth of Phoenix as a symbol of birth after death, resurrec-
tion and eternal life. The lines "A cake of soup," "A wed-
ding ring," "A gold filling" show the gradual nearing of the
death of concentration camps; they represent one step to
death. The following two lines relate to the act of taking
gold rings and gold teeth from the victims. The last two
lines stand for the conflict between the real world and the
imaginative one. The merciless, cruel world of reality is in
contrast to the imaginative world in which the woman
transfers her own body to a mythical-demonic creature
that can "eat men like air." To Jon Rosenblatt, the poem
reflects Plath's recognition at the end of her life that the strug-
gle between self and others and between death and birth must
govern every aspect of poetic structure . . . [its] language
poured out of some burning inner fire, though it retains the
rhythmical precision that we expect from a much less intensely
felt expression. . . . "Lady Lazarus," like "Daddy" and "Fever
103," incorporates historical material into the initiatory and
imagistic patterns. (25)

Another important poem which explores the theme of

the female's force of will is "Ariel," a poem about move-
ment, transcendence, death, and rebirth. Kathleen-
Margaret Lant states that the poem "shows how Plath's
metaphorical universes collide but also how her mutually
exclusive systems of representation give rise to some of
the most effective and beautiful poetry she wrote" (109).
The poem is a clear indication of Plath's conflicted mind
and the urge of creativity of a poet. It is a poem of ambi-

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300 Parvin Ghasemi

guities; Plath's persona is so c

world is seen as if the characters are melted into each
other. It is a poem about poetry and inspiration, a move-
ment from "darkness" and colorlessness to the shiny realm
of sunshine and color. Ann Stevenson sees the poem as
follows:

The title "Ariel," like "Medusa" carries multiple meanings; it

refers to the ethereal spirit of Shakespeare's Tempest, but also
significantly, Ariel happened to be the name of the (rather eld-
erly, ponderous) horse on which Sylvia was learning to ride.
Most potent of all, Ariel is the spirit of poetry, the romantic
embodiment of inspiration or genius. In the canon of Sylvia's
work, "Ariel" is supreme, a quintessential statement of all that
had meaning for her. (Stevenson 20)

"Ariel" is the best metaphysical poem by Plath; the per-

sona transcends the gender category as the woman, the
horse, and the lioness merge. The woman is freed from
both the domestic chores and responsibilities and the
boundaries of the sexist system. The horseback riding
turns out to be a ride toward the sun; the poem opens with
the change from "stasis" to "movement," from "darkness"
to "sunshine." It is a poem of movement or activity in con-
trast to passivity.
The persona of the poem is God's lioness; symbolically
the lion is a sign of revenge; the woman-avenger of the
previous poems joins with the lioness and the horse, and
she is no more of "skin and blood." The persona of the
poem is God's lioness; symbolically it is a sign of calling
upon both strands of the female mythological lioness: as
an arrow she is associated with battle, and in her merging
with the sun she absorbs its fertility. According to Marga-
ret Dickie the "[d]estroyer-creator, masculine-feminine,
the spirit with which the speaker identifies in 'Ariel' is
whole, entire in itself. The fires that burn in honor of and
through this spirit are emblematic of its passion and ec-
stasy" (134). Moreover, God's lioness is a symbol of the
sun; the persona's riding to the light conveys moving to-

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 Violence, Rage, and Self-Hurt in Sylvia Plath's Poetry 301

ward creativity; as is said in the poem "The Colossus," the

shadow is the sign of an inability to articulate feelings,
while to Plath the sun parallels the ability of writing po-
ems.

Besides the implications of the image of the

represents the power of resurrection and life a
To another critic the lion has the life-giving p
world in "Ariel" is a world of reality and imagin
merge to create a new spiritual world; the bod
woman-persona undergoes a metamorphosis; sh
the world of "Dead hands" (21) and "The child's
She is an arrow with the power of going forwa
this state of bodylessness that the persona fin
"empowered to move forward . . . [and] doesn't
may be ahead" (Wagner-Martin 114).
The poem "Ariel" is the story of a magical jou
unknown destination; as soon as the journey be
reader sees a faint color blue in the sky; howeve
a smooth journey; there are forces that try to
horse/lioness/woman. The conflict is between creative
imagination, motion, and the obstacle on its way; stasis is
depicted by images like "Hooks" (12), "Shadows" (17), and
the dark colors. However, the persona changes into the
mythical "Govida" to escape the darkness of silence. Ac-
cording to Wendy Martin, "[antagonistic forces in the
poem are those contrary to the motion that is so passion-
ately evoked. Set against the unity of the moving horse
and rider are the 'Nigger-eye berries' casting 'dark hooks,'
creating both 'shadows' (in contrast to the ever-growing
light) and the only blood image of the poem" (Martin 5-7).
The woman persona of the poem has reached the long-
wanted freedom of Plath's poems; she transcends the real
world that is depicted as cruel, unsympathetic, and even
murderous, a world governed by men, to a world of magi-
cal power, rebirth, and spiritual freedom, the inner world
of the rebellious female personas of poems such as "Mir-
ror," "Medusa," " Daddy," and "Lady Lazarus"; at this

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302 Parvin Ghasemi

time the male-oppressor has be

breakable obstacles:

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks -

Black sweet blood mouthful

Shadows
Something else. (10-15)

The persona of "Ariel" no more suffers the pains of de-

humanization, entrapment, torture, and abuse. Unlike
Plath's other poems, the presence of the male antagonist is
at its minimum; the woman sees her way out of her op-
pressed disposition in a masculine world system that sup-
ports itself by taking control.
There is a link between the development of Plath's
women personas and her mastery over her craft as a poet;
to some extent this linkage can be explained by the
changes in her married life. The most powerful women are
depicted in the poems of powerful imagery and language.
The poet simultaneously releases herself from the bound-
ary of language as well as her female protagonists from
the snare of the masculine world. She forgets the strict-
ness of "tyrannical" poetry, releasing "herself from the
'oughts' and 'shoulds' of her superior education, on what
the right sort of people read and like" (Wagner 116). How-
ever, these poems of power and magical strength com-
mand significance by sacrificing the persona's body in the
favor of metaphysical rebirth. Van Dyne characterizes
these poems as "the poems of rage polarized by the dialec-
tic between power and deprivation, phallic mastery and
erotic dependence, and speech and silence" (63). These
poems are the medium through which the speaker articu-
lates her self-conscious attempt at reconstructing a self
which is liberated and autonomous, released from the con-
straints of patriarchal control and dominance.

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 Violence , Rage , and Self-Hurt in Sylvia Plath's Poetry 303

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Shiraz University
Shiraz, Iran

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