Interpretations and Implications of Trauma and Narrative in

Sylvia Plath’s Ariel

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick

Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2012,

pp. 117-146 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jlt.2012.0009

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/508880

[ Access provided at 8 Mar 2022 02:46 GMT from Nanyang Technological University ]
 Interpretations and Implications
of Trauma and Narrative in
Sylvia Plath’s Ariel
julie goodspeed- chadwick

The distinction between poiesis (i.e., poetic formation, making) and

narration (i.e., telling or recounting) is elided in Ariel. The poetry with-
in this collection presents a linked combination of poiesis and narration,
prompting us to consider how the poetry might address epistemological
or teleological issues pertaining to trauma and its representation in litera-
ture. This scenario arises out of a constellation of factors related to trauma,
memory, and recollection. Along with the verity of real-life experience we
encounter in Ariel, we also discover poetic fabrication as well as proba-
ble memory omissions in the poems.1 Yet the tenor or emotional inten-
sity of the experience is captured in the formation or making of the po-
ems, while the narrative quality of them attempts to serve as an anchor,
grounding the emotional tenor in concrete images (i.e., the vehicle) that
address or speak to memories. In Plath scholarship, especially with regard
to Ariel, there will always be a fraught relationship between memory and
trauma because we cannot ascertain the intimate autobiographical details
of Plath’s life, as her husband destroyed her last journal.
The Ariel poems treat the memory of trauma, as we will note in “The
Moon and the Yew Tree,” and grapple with trauma at close range, as we
will observe in the October 1962 poems, most notably. Plath had tried to
commit suicide prior to 1963, and her life, once her marriage became trou-
bled, began to fit the mold of what Freud defines as the “melancholiac.”2
The poems I analyze and discuss below are composed of images, repre-
sentations, and stories of and about trauma. They might also point to a
partially damaged memory in the gaps and silences therein—or in the fro-
zen fixity in “The Moon and the Yew Tree” and the stunned fixation of
the victim in “Edge”—but these poems are counterbalanced by a poem
like “Daddy.” What we will note in the analyses and discussions of the po-
ems that follow is a tracking of spatial metaphors, metaphors that suggest
fixity, falling, cycling, and progressing. As I will elaborate, the stages of
traumatic experience, specifically the “acting out” and “working through”
responses that I see as characterizing the poetry of Ariel, are recursive in
nature. Because “acting out” and “working through” can actually consti-
tute recursive stages in traumatic experiences, the metaphors employed
are not contradictory: they are simply not participating in or constructing
a linear narrative. What follows is my attempt to elucidate the representa-
tions of trauma and the responses to it in Ariel.

“The Moon and the Yew Tree”

In “The Moon and the Yew Tree” the speaker delivers a landscape
that is filled with despair and silence, underscoring the importance of a
Gothic setting that carries insinuations of loss and death, signifies decay,
and communicates a sense of foreboding, accompanied by sinister asso-
ciations. The poem begins by describing the emotional state of the mind.
It is “cold and planetary,” with figurative black trees and blue light.3 This
Gothic setting is replete with the presences of “griefs,” “spirituous mists,”
“a row of headstones,” and a “yew tree” that “has a Gothic shape” (46).
She cannot detect a path out of this place, one created by her own mind:
“I simply cannot see where there is to get to” (46). Similar to what we
know about post-traumatic stress, the speaker demonstrates that she is
the subject who lives in [trauma’s] grip and unwittingly undergoes its
ceaseless repetitions and reenactments. The traumatic event, although
real, took place outside the parameters of “normal” reality, such as cau-
sality, sequence, place and time. The trauma is thus an event that has no
beginning, no ending, no before, no during, and no after. This absence
of categories that define it lends it a quality of “otherness.”4
The speaker is in an almost otherworldly place that resembles reality but
is uncertain, foreboding, and static; we shall see that the colors and im-

118 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

ages are repetitious, and the poem opens as it closes, with the speaker still
locked within her mind, caught in the grip of trauma, as Dori Laub de-
scribes it in the above passage. The speaker can neither gain the critical
distance that Dominick LaCapra understands as the hallmark of “work-
ing through” nor testify fully to an internal or external witness in order to
re-externalize the event, which Laub views as the crucial component of
healing, though this poem may have been an exercise for Plath herself to
process some sort of “acting out” compulsion or participate painfully in
a “working through” stage.5 However the case may be, what we do know
is that the speaker makes no progress in this poem; she is left in “black-
ness and silence,” a world that promises annihilation if the speaker can-
not escape her “cold and planetary” mind (47): that is, a mind that is cold
or numb and dominated by erratic and wandering thoughts. Moreover,
“planetary” may also suggest the global level or impact of the psychologi-
cal or emotional trauma on the speaker.
This interpretation of trauma in the poem, as a poem about a speaker
who desires to tell her story about trauma but cannot and, instead, suf-
fers as a traumatized survivor without an immediate witness, is one that is
intimated by Christina Britzolakis and, indirectly, Laub. Britzolakis notes
that “The Moon and the Yew Tree” reveals “psychic obstruction and ‘the
unspeakable.’”6 In his work involving survivors of trauma, Laub tells us,
“Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event
that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, had no
ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are con-
cerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect.”7 The
speaker in “The Moon and the Yew Tree” refrains from positioning herself
literally in regard to time and place. She reveals it is an endless night and
she is unable to return home (a place that would likely be the speaker’s
destination, though she is forever detained from attaining a safe haven or
a place of comfort in the poem because she is separated by metaphori-
cal headstones, signaling death and the burying of something that should
not be unearthed), and she has no knowledge of how to navigate or cut
through the headstones to find her way. Instead, she is caught in the grip
of trauma, paralyzed by something that is only alluded to and never articu-
lated for the reader or listener, possibly because to articulate it is to relive
the traumatic experience.

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 119

 “The Moon and the Yew Tree” pivots on feminine symbolism (i.e., ob-
jects that radiate with meaning while being couched in traditional gen-
dered ways) through the gendered or coded image of the moon, which is a
traditional marker of femininity in literature. As such, the poem appears to
direct our attention to feminized trauma: the yew tree points to the moon
(46). In this barren psychic landscape, there is nothing healing or amelio-
rative, and the yew tree and the moon, the titular symbols of the poem,
are signposts and indications that things are not right in this world. The
yew tree directs the eyes of the speaker to the moon because the moon is
a focal point of the poem. Most of the lines are dedicated to the moon or
in some way allude to it, and this signaling of femininity underscores the
gendered nature of the problem presented in the scenario of the poem.
Ultimately, the moon is of no help, though the moon should be nurtur-
ing because she has a maternal relationship with the speaker: “The moon
is my mother” (46). Britzolakis comments that the “vaultlike, ‘Gothic’
yew tree, coded as a medium of transmission for ancestral and paternal
voices, is lined up against the moon, token of ‘blank’ maternal mourning.”8
The speaker seeks out the help of saints and visits a church, but she finds
that the saints are “stiff ” and the pews are “cold” (47). Perhaps most tragi-
cally, the “moon sees nothing of this” (47), and so the speaker is left with-
out a protector, social support, or a narrative (i.e., religious, cultural, famil-
ial) that could be of service to her in her traumatized state. In other words,
the moon does not provide a way out of suffering or a pathway toward
healing (the moon is “no door” [46]). Moreover, the significance of the
moon may also point to the origin or nature of the speaker’s trauma. The
moon possesses a female identity, and it is an entity that has a “face in its
own right” (46), which suggests that the moon’s particular situation may
not be so distant or distinct from the speaker as we might initially be in-
clined to think. Therefore, it is important to note that the moon is fright-
ened (“white as a knuckle”) and “terribly upset” (46). The speaker tells
us that she lives where the sea follows the moon as if “a dark crime” were
involved and the moon wears a face of utter despair (46). With this rev-
elation, we learn more about this world of ultimate silence and despair—
the cause behind the deafening silence appears to be a “dark crime” that
remains secretive because neither the moon nor the speaker is in a posi-
tion where she can articulate or express more than what we have in this

120 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

poem. Caught somewhere between “acting out” and “working through,”
the speaker offers us a scenario where the trauma story is incomplete,
fragmented, and symbolic, but the trauma permeates every aspect of the
poem/narrative and ends with much unsaid.9 As Judith Lewis Herman
explains, the dialectic of trauma is such that, on the one hand, witnesses
and victims want to deny the horrible events, and on the other hand, they
want to proclaim them aloud.10 This dialectic likely traps the speaker of
“The Moon and the Yew Tree.”11
The moon, in dragging the sea or some sort of baggage with it “like a
dark crime,” falls into the “blame the victim” mindset that is so common
for women who are victims of rape and sexual assault or other gendered
societal violence, and this “dark crime” may be a euphemism for the trau-
ma.12 We should keep in mind that a poem like “The Moon and the Yew
Tree,” which was composed on October 22, 1961, before Plath learned of
any marital infidelity, though she was suspicious of it and her marriage was
troubled, and before she became a single mother of two small children,
was written at a very different time in terms of Plath’s perspective than
the other poems I consider here, which were composed mostly in Octo-
ber 1962 and February 1963, days before Plath died.13 Yet we still see Plath
struggling to articulate a response to trauma, whether it is a personal, lo-
cal, or global one in nature, and that may be due, in part, to Plath’s sensi-
tivity to trauma stories and to her own tragic past and outlook on life. It
is usual in Plath scholarship that “feminist readings of Plath’s later poems
have dwelt on their recurrent tropes of woundedness, bleeding, and mu-
tilation as signs of an internalized violence” because these texts are such
blatant cultural critiques of gender and gendered expectations (or they in-
voke them).14 Regardless of whether we want to align ourselves from the
outset with feminist critics, the moon is quiet with “the O-gape of com-
plete despair” (46) and the speaker identifies closely with the moon, so
closely, in fact, that she considers the moon a blood relative, which may be
an act of transference on her part. I maintain that the speaker, in oblique
ways, is attempting to process an experience of trauma that is gendered as
feminine in its violent impact on her.
Falling is a figure used to denote the feeling of being out of control,
as brought about by the traumatic experience. The speaker in “The Moon
and the Yew Tree” declares quietly that she has fallen, and she has fallen

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 121

a great distance (46). Both Plath’s speaker and Cathy Caruth invoke the
metaphor of falling to explore, as I read it, the slippage between the no-
tion of the traumatic experience and the understanding of it; a metaphor
for slippage is falling, but the figure also suggests what the traumatic ex-
perience feels like. Caruth explains that “the story of the falling body” is
“the story of trauma, and the story of trauma is inescapably bound to a
referential return.”15 In this instance, the survivor is caught up in the trau-
ma to such an extent that her body is forever reliving the cycling story of
trauma, a return to the site of injury, until she can work through it and
produce a narrative that relieves her of the burden of reliving the story.
Unfortunately for Plath’s speaker, she is trapped in the “referential return”
to the site of injury and the subsequent falling that keeps her looking at
the moon, a marker of the nature or a clue to the origin of her trauma. To
compound the very dire situation of the speaker, the poem ends with the
following line: “And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness
and silence” (47). With this closing, we see that the speaker is unable to
move beyond her traumatic history and is left in the black landscape of
her mind, with only occasional color or hope present.
There is, indeed, some color present: the poem opens with a reference
to light that is blue amid the blackness of the vast (“planetary”) night of
the mind in the first stanza, and it returns to those references and colors in
the last stanza. At the end, we see that the clouds are “[b]lue and mystical
over the face of the stars” and the “saints will be blue” in the church (46).
Early on, we have a reference to ghostliness (“[f]umy, spirituous mists in-
habit this place”), and the last stanza also underscores the mistiness or the
inability to perceive or see clearly in this state or atmosphere (46–47). The
vehicle—the gothic, gloomy, foreboding night—facilitates the tenor, the
psychological mindset of a traumatized speaker. The sociohistorical and
medico-political implications and ramifications of trauma, as suggested by
Plath, are a changed worldview. As Kai Erikson maintains in his study of
traumatized communities and individuals,
Among those shared perspectives [of survivors], often, is an under-
standing that the laws by which the natural world has always been gov-
erned as well as the decencies by which the human world has always
been governed are now suspended—or were never active to begin
with. Traumatized people . . . look out at the world through a different

122 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

 lens. And in that sense they can be said to have experienced not only a
changed sense of self and a changed way of relating to others but a changed
worldview.16
Erikson is clear that traumatized people suffer life-altering changes, and
the transformations that take place in the lives of victims will cause social
problems for communities. In “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” the speaker
is never able to overcome the debilitating cycle of traumatic memories,
and the poem formally mirrors it from the beginning of the poem to the
end of it. As for the speaker herself, she is lost figuratively in the misty, si-
lent, mostly dark, and foreboding world, and her ability to be a productive
member of society is severely circumscribed. It is important for us to con-
sider representations of trauma because our initial responses are lessons
to us in how we might react to or treat victims, but the formal study of
trauma and literature enables us to become more sensitive and useful wit-
nesses, as well as important parts of support systems for victims, once we
better understand the various dimensions of trauma.
In thinking through trauma and representations, Caruth interrogates
what trauma is, how it can be represented, and how it can be ameliorated.
According to Caruth, “The breach in the mind . . . [is caused by] ‘fright,’
the lack of preparedness to take in a stimulus that comes too quickly. It is
not simply, that is, the literal threatening of bodily life, but the fact that the
threat is recognized as such by the mind one moment too late.” She adds,
As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumat-
ic experience in the flashback can itself be re-traumatizing, if not life-
threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the
brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also
seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivors.17
Here Caruth shows us the medico-political facet of her theorizing: she ar-
gues that the mind cannot reconcile itself to the timing of the catastro-
phe and so the trauma still looms as a threat, one that can break down
the brain if it remains a constant animator. Perhaps it is unsurprising that
Plath’s late poetry carries a morbid note throughout: a tone of despair per-
meates “Edge” and “Words,” likely the very last poems she wrote.
The sociocultural implications of Plath’s work, I would suggest, are tied

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 123

to what Ruth Leys describes as the psychoanalytic agreement that “if nar-
ration cures, it does so not because it infallibly gives the patient access to
a primordially personal truth but because it makes possible a form of self-
understanding even in the absence of empirical verification.”18 If the vic-
tim can articulate a narrative, can testify or witness to some extent, then
she validates the experience for herself, which puts her on the pathway
toward healing in the traditional trauma studies/healing paradigm, but
she also provides an account that, if disseminated, allows for identification
and validation from other victims and nonvictims. As Leys traces the his-
torical trajectory of traumatic cures, she explains that the construction of a
“coherent narrative” by victims is critically important because of its “bear-
ing on present and future actions.”19 For Leys, the sociocultural responsi-
bility of future actions belongs to victims in this scenario, but we might
also include nonvictims because, as I see it, trauma and healing are social
justice issues that affect networks of people and communities, not merely
isolated individuals.
I have explored in depth “The Moon and the Yew Tree” because it em-
bodies the contemporary concerns and issues in trauma studies and it is
representative of the type of poems in Ariel. As Jane Hedley puts it, “Plath
would remain a poet of the image” from the beginning of her career until
the end of it.20 Moreover, “The Moon and the Yew Tree” is not as routinely
anthologized as, say, “Daddy” is, and scholarly examination of this poem
might open up discussion of it in the classroom when Plath’s slim volume
is taught instead of an anthology. From here, I will treat other represen-
tative poems that illustrate what Ariel does in connection with represen-
tations of trauma, and I have selected poems that work particularly well
together in the event that scholar-teachers may find the threads that I will
trace and braid together to be compelling and teach them in this group-
ing. I will close my discussion of Ariel poems by commenting on “Daddy.”
All references to poems will be to the standard American edition of Ar-
iel, edited by Ted Hughes, which is the most widely available.21 I use this
edition not only because of its accessibility for students (in terms of avail-
ability and price) but also because this collection foregrounds a power-
ful narrative of trauma.22 The first word of the 2004 “restored” edition of
Ariel is “love” and the last word is “spring,” and, from this structural move
alone, the volume possesses a different poetic and narrative trajectory

124 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

(i.e., beginning with birth, as in the literal birth of her child, and closing
with the hope of rebirth and rejuvenation in her rebirth as poet of Ariel)
than its counterpart.23 In short, because the 1966 edition of Ariel is more
established and more widely available than the 2004 version, which is very
different, I continue to teach with what I call the standard text, although it
would be very easy to supplement it with the restored edition.

The Late Poems

“A Birthday Present” and “Lady Lazarus”
On September 30, 1962, Plath composed “A Birthday Present,” which
anticipates the poems she would write very soon thereafter (i.e., “Dad-
dy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Ariel”) and the later poems (i.e., “Words” and
“Edge”). The language of trauma is similar in “A Birthday Present” to the
October 1962 work, and the calm and resigned voice anticipates “Edge”
and “Words.” We know this poem is about trauma from the speaker’s an-
nouncement that she does not want much in the way of a gift because she
is “alive only by accident” (48). In Caruth’s schema of trauma, we might
recall that, borrowing from Freud, the sense of the traumatic accident—of
being alive “only by accident,” of recognizing the traumatic impact a mo-
ment too late—defines trauma. The nature of the injury appears to be in-
formed by an interpersonal situation, discord that has killed something
in the home sphere. According to the speaker of the poem, there is some-
thing that stands looming in the window and breathes from the bedsheets,
making its cold and lifeless nature known. We learn that this place is where
“split lives congeal and stiffen to history” (50). In other ways, trauma per-
meates this poem through the fetishization of death: her demise appears
to be the birthday present for which the speaker longs. She tells us that
she knows why “you will not give it to me”: the addressee is “terrified” be-
cause “the world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it” (49). Fully
acknowledging that what she desires is destructive (to herself and others,
physically and emotionally), the speaker understands the gift is frighten-
ing and dangerous but wants it anyway. She will take it quietly and not
aggressively, she explains. The controlled and quiet tone creates a particu-
larly moving and painful ending when it is coupled with the content: a ro-
manticization of the stabbing and subsequent death of the speaker.
LaCapra’s notion of “founding trauma” places in perspective the drama

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 125

of this poem, especially when it is read in tandem with the other poems in
the collection. In “Lady Lazarus” the “founding trauma” is part and parcel
of how the speaker identifies herself: she deems herself a “valuable” that
“melts to a shriek” and turns and burns, while eliciting “great concern”
(9). The intensely serious tone here underscores the violence exacted
upon the speaker, violence that she is forced to enact and repeat through
her suicides, the repetition of which is symptomatic of trauma. The speak-
er “melts to a shriek” in “Lady Lazarus,” but the “world will go up in a
shriek” in “A Birthday Present.” Both speakers suffer, but anger energizes
and animates Lady Lazarus, spurring her on to retribution. Indeed, Lady
Lazarus warns her audience repeatedly to “beware” because she will arise
out of the ash and “eat men like air” (9). Lady Lazarus both threatens and
exacts revenge: once a victim, she now becomes the victimizer or the ag-
gressor, in keeping with the cycle of violence that often structures trauma
stories. “A Birthday Present,” however, prepares us for the deep and dark
resignation of the latest poems in Ariel.

“Ariel”
In the title poem, we get a cryptic and vivid portrayal of the female body
in pain. Composed on Plath’s birthday in 1962, “Ariel” describes what psy-
chological and emotional trauma can feel like. In the process of captur-
ing a traumatic state, the speaker moves from stasis and inactivity to self-
immolation. On the surface, this poem seems to address corporeality, and
it does, in terms of embodied trauma. But it is too glib of a reading to con-
sider only the physical body, the tortured body, of “Ariel.” Indeed, because
the collection takes its name from this poem, we can be assured that the
titular poem intends to address psychological states and emotional re-
sponses to life-changing events. The manner in which the speaker of “Ar-
iel” considers her world confirms this position: berries are not innocent
fruit that beautify the external world; instead, they lodge their hooks into
flesh and cause the speaker to think of the berries as bloody bites (29).
There is the implication here that the speaker is metaphorically hooked,
hooked by a force that determines her path. Caught in the grip of trauma,
she is painfully hurtled to a climax in a way that suggests this trajectory,
this “arc,” told as it is literally upon a horse by a speaker who will forever
be unable to grasp the neck of the horse (29), amounts to an (over)deter-

126 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

mined trauma script. Hauled through the air, the speaker’s body begins
to disintegrate, and she is transfigured as she abandons her physical body.
She becomes an arrow, one that is suicidal and “at one with the drive” into
the sun, “[e]ye, the cauldron of morning” (30). This end ironically prom-
ises a bright, new beginning for the suffering speaker, but it is undercut by
the fact that the speaker abandons maternal responsibilities (the “child’s
cry” [30]) and that she appears to be propelled by outside forces, not by
her own will.

“Edge”
“Edge” is reminiscent of H. D.’s poem “Helen” (1928), a revisionist work
in which beautiful Helen is despised and treated unfairly by all until she
dies—not until her death can she be loved and valued in a patriarchal so-
ciety. According to Alicia Ostriker, “H. D. implies that the beautiful wom-
an is always hated by the culture which pretends to adore her beauty and
that the only good beauty, so far as patriarchal culture is concerned, is a
dead one.”24 What is more ominous about Plath’s work than H. D.’s is the
heavy emphasis on the paradoxical positive associations attributed to the
dead woman and her two children in “Edge”: in contrast, H. D.’s speak-
er subtly laments the missed opportunity for the world to appreciate and
love Helen, as, it is implied, she deserves. No such revisionist tendency
is at play in “Edge,” in spite of the Greek allusions present. The logic of
the poem stamps death on the woman’s perfection, ostensibly her accom-
plishment. She is “perfected,” albeit “dead.” The speaker reports that the
“[b]ody wears the smile of accomplishment” (93). Even worse, her two
dead children, additional losses, are coiled at her breasts. The imagery is
that of a rose and its petals, even though the tone becomes dark and men-
acing when we are told that the garden harboring the rose “[s]tiffens and
odours bleed” (93). This scene is not an idyllic one in the spirit of Robert
Browning’s “[a]ll’s right with the world!”: the deaths are supposed to be
mourned and protested, as we detect from the diction, connotations, and
implications of language. Although “odours bleed,” the moon, invoking
the earlier “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” finds it cannot be sad as it stares
from “her hood of bone” because “[s]he is used to this sort of thing” (94).
What the speaker is actually saying, it seems to me, is that we should be
mournful, that this situation is not normal and should not be naturalized

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 127

as a result of desensitizing events or cultural norms. Other than an allu-
sion to “Greek necessity” and its roots in a patriarchal culture, we are not
told what has sent the female character over the metaphorical “Edge.” We
are shown the aftermath, the other side of the “Edge” instead.
Plath critics debate the significance of the title and theme of “Edge.”
Steven Gould Axelrod observes that “the woman and her poems pass
over a final precipice to silence.”25 Linda Wagner-Martin understands the
woman as having traveled to “the edge of the known world”: she refuses
to be hospitalized again or subjected to electroshock therapy and separa-
tion from her children. And so she escapes and succeeds in accomplishing
what she set out to do, which might be attainting “a mystical unity with
the spiritual world.”26 Originally titled “Nuns in Snow,” the poem initially
had nuns making a pilgrimage to view the dead woman’s body.27 The idea
here is that we could mourn the loss of what this woman represents: she is
worthy of a pilgrimage by nuns in the snow. Lynda K. Bundtzen notes that
the woman’s body is “chastely closed to the sexual seductions of the gar-
den” and that the “dead woman perversely resembles a Madonna, posed
with a dead child at each of her breasts.” From Bundtzen’s point of view,
the way that Hughes reordered Ariel, closing with “Edge” and “Words,
“confirm[s] once again the overall sense he has of Plath’s poetic trajectory
as fatal and doomed.”28
With “Edge,” we see that Plath “was drawn to ekphrastic writing be-
cause she was a woman who played to the gaze, self-consciously and with
considerable ambivalence.”29 The poem might be “a ‘notional ekphrasis,’
John Hollander’s term for the description of a ‘purely fictional painting
or sculpture that is indeed brought into being by the poetic language it-
self.’”30 Asserts Hedley, “The poem will only tell us how this woman ap-
pears, what her posture and expression seem to be saying. Plath has thus
declined to exercise the power that is given ekphrasis its traditional man-
date and raison d’être—the power of a verbal description to make a silent
image ‘speak.’”31 As this critic suggests, we may have bought into the illu-
sion “that how a woman looks will tell us all we need to know of her inner
self.”32 Hedley reads the woman’s death as committed by her own hand, a
suicide, as does Tim Kendall.33 Kendall gestures to manuscript drafts of
“Edge” that show us the poem opened with “Down there,” and he reports
that “the clinical examination of the terrible scene of suicide and infanti-

128 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

cide below is shocking because of its distance.”34 He also points out that
the speaker of the Ariel poems is a “protagonist,” presumably meaning
that the speaker changes or is transformed in some way, and the speak-
er of “Edge” possesses a very different voice from those in the other po-
ems in the collection. In fact, for Kendall, the voice is separated from the
subject.35 I take this separation of voice from subject as evidence that the
speaker is “acting out” trauma, in the parlance of trauma studies, instead
of “working through” it, which, I would argue, is what we see in the old-
er poems, like “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” keeping in mind that work-
ing through is a recursive process. Tellingly, then, our Ariel speaker, as the
“eye/I,” loses the “absolute power over the world it sees” by the time we
get to “Edge.”36 In an autobiographical manner, Plath may have conscious-
ly alluded to Hughes’s own work in the imagery that is embedded in her
“Edge” and “Words.” In her study on Hughes and Plath, Heather Clark
notes that these poems, in addition to “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” con-
tain elements that make it possible to read them as texts directed to or in-
fluenced by Hughes.37
We also do not see a speaker working through trauma in the poem that
closes the standard American edition, “Words.” Rather, we are put in the
position of witness to a voice that is acting out trauma. And we have come
full circle: the voice that speaks of being caught in the grip of trauma in
“The Moon and the Yew Tree” is the same voice in “Edge,” but in “Edge”
there is a sense of finality that is colder and more hopeless—or beyond
hope—than in the earlier, though similar, poem.

“Words”
In “Words,” we have a resigned speaker, one who is utterly detached from
the world of Ariel. One critic interprets the speaker as professing to have
little control over the style of the poem, and we can read this as a symptom
of “acting out” trauma.38 As I see it, the horse is one metaphorical agent
that propels the speaker in “Ariel” to a destructive future, and various fig-
ures in that poem suggest the impact of the almost deterministic traumatic
forces on the speaker (and perhaps on Plath, too, in this instance). The
speaker in “Words” is left at the doorstep of a founding trauma that ulti-
mately consumes her: her words are horses that are “riderless” (95). Al-
though our interpretations differ, Kendall and I agree that “Words” is a

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 129

“conclusion” of sorts.39 Another critic draws a connection between “Edge”
and “Words” by underscoring “the concept of astrological influences on
humankind” in the last two lines of “Words” that feature the governing
stars over a pool (95) and the “Greek necessity” of “Edge.”40
Ultimately, in this last poem of the collection, the speaker contem-
plates the role and power of words: what can they do? The first stanza
equates words to blows and echoes with meanings that carry on, reverber-
ate.41 The second stanza is especially noteworthy from a trauma studies
perspective. The sap cries/seeps like a wound, and the water/poem wants
to show something of life, to reflect it. But what the water can show, by
the final stanza, presents the most despairing lines of all, which close the
poem. There is no hope, no salvation, no metaphorical or literal spring:
there is nothing to look forward to, nothing to be angry at, nothing to cri-
tique and rebel against, and the stark denotations and connotations of be-
ing at the bottom of a pool with fixed stars overseeing one’s life are the
coldest lines of Ariel.

“Daddy”
Being that the Holocaust and 9/11 are the two events that receive the most
attention from trauma studies scholars in the United States in the twenty-
first century, it is not accidental that Plath borrows imagery from the Ho-
locaust in attempting to ramp up the emotional intensity of the trauma
in her own mid-twentieth-century work.42 According to Axelrod, “Some
have praised these references to historical tragedy for their empathy, while
others have disparaged them as appropriation. I think they may be bet-
ter viewed as commemoration. They resist the drift to moral anesthesia
and political amnesia.”43 James E. Young addresses the debate involving
Ariel and its Holocaust allusions and forcefully argues that Plath uses cur-
rent images in a traumatized/post-traumatic world because she internal-
ized public experiences and language and so ordered and understood
her personal world within this framework before deploying or recasting
this traumatic worldview in her poems.44 It may have been the case that
Plath suffered from a secondary identification with war victims as a re-
sult of newsreel images and courtroom details about the Holocaust.45 Or
perhaps we should read the Ariel poems that trade on what Antony Row-
land calls the “icons of atrocity” (i.e., Holocaust imagery) as ones that are

130 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

self-reflexively critiquing the sensationalism of media spectacle.46 In oth-
er words, trauma, implies Plath, should not be fetishized, which is quite
an ironic stance when one considers the larger-than-life mythos revolving
around Plath, the traumatic demise of her marriage, and her suicide.
“Daddy” is a poem about trauma and abandonment, what I call a
“working through” poem, in LaCapra’s sense. In order to heal, in the clas-
sic trauma studies model, the traumatized speaker needs to tell her story,
to construct a meaningful narrative about her experience in order to es-
tablish critical distance and be able to begin to put the past behind her.
Some readers fault Plath for “metaphoric excess, of irresponsibly ex-
ploiting the power of analogy, most notoriously in later poems such as
‘Daddy,’ which yoke together historical and psychic events.”47 But the gen-
esis of this poem is one steeped in trauma: we have a speaker grieving for
the literal loss of her father, the metaphorical loss of her husband, and the
failure of the brutal, violent, and misogynistic men that Daddy represents
to provide a safe world for the speaker, and, by extension, others, as attest-
ed by the reliance on Holocaust allusions and the invocation of vampiric
imagery.
For critics like Bundtzen and Marjorie Perloff, the demise of Plath’s
marriage was the great traumatic moment that instigated “Daddy” and
other poems like it. Bundtzen reads Plath’s letters to her mother as confir-
mation of “Hughes’s sense that Plath could not tell the difference between
husband and father in the final months,” perhaps because she saw her fa-
ther’s death as an abandonment or betrayal and viewed Hughes’s affair as
the same. Bundtzen cites the following passage (about Hughes) from a let-
ter to Aurelia Plath as evidence of how Plath conflated her father and her
husband in “Daddy”: “I hate and despise him so I can hardly speak.”48 Of
course, in the poem, the speaker talks to her father in apostrophe, stating
that she could never talk to him easily or safely. On one hand, we have a
speaker who is so traumatized that she has problems articulating herself
as a subject: she stutters in enunciating the German word for “I.” On the
other, we have a speaker who is the process of working through trauma
and who does not yet have the proper vocabulary, the right language to
testify or serve as witness to what has been done to her. In the next stanza
the speaker famously characterizes herself as a Jew who has been rounded
up and is headed to a concentration camp. Plath has her speaker assume

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 131

the role of what she apparently perceived to be the ultimate victim of the
twentieth century. We can think of the Ariel poems, especially “Daddy”
and “Lady Lazarus,” as dramatic monologues, as Matthew Boswell en-
courages us to do in his study on Holocaust imagery. However, Boswell
asserts, “in Plath’s Holocaust poetry, a certain reading of modern human
history emerges: history as process, as machine, whose meaning is under-
stood retrospectively, after Auschwitz, as Holocaust.”49 In some respect,
because of the very historicity of her allusions, Plath’s work cannot escape
an engagement with other para-literary discourses.
Likewise, we cannot avoid the interpersonal trauma in a microcosmic
context that permeates this piece if we delve into Plath or Ariel criticism.
Perloff points out that the “black telephone” of “Daddy” is the symbol of
spousal infidelity and betrayal: an overheard telephone conversation ex-
posed the affair between Hughes and Assia Wevill in 1962, months after
Plath’s son, Nicholas Hughes, was born.50 This revelation may have been
the deepest traumatic blow Plath would receive. According to Perloff,
“The import of such an overheard telephone conversation can be under-
stood only against the background of Plath’s total devotion to and depen-
dency upon her husband: indeed, it is not too much to say that she wor-
shipped him.”51 As such, “Daddy” tackles global traumatic events and local
ones and melds them together in an unsettling way—as is proper for lit-
erature of trauma.52
Various issues that fall squarely within trauma studies are addressed in
“Daddy.” We have deep psychological and emotional injuries that are un-
healed, intergenerational trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder and hy-
pervigilance, and a narrative that engages in “working through” the trau-
ma. The poem contains representations or traces of these features—and
to my mind, we do not need to diagnosis Plath (as author of these poems)
any further: as with her other poems, we can focus on the literary texts
and examine what it is they display and show us about representations of
trauma.
The embedded imagery offers a picture of suffering—torture—and se-
rious emotional and psychological injury. There is deep fear and anxiety
about what Daddy or other men like Daddy will do next. Ostensibly, there
are other men like Daddy, a dozen or two, perhaps, and the speaker ap-
pears to want to scan the horizon for Daddy, to sleep with one eye open.

132 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

Never being able to pinpoint his whereabouts or where the threats to her
safety are, the speaker is left voiceless. There is a desire to speak that is
shut down by the effects of the dysfunctional family romance, the trauma
story that the speaker will persevere in telling. To embrace this scenario,
one in which a woman must adore a Fascist and his brutality as figured in
his brutish heart and his metaphorical boot in her face, a woman must in-
ternalize the historical, social, and cultural expectations of gender and as-
sume a position of subservience in the face of masculine violence, power,
and authority, leaving her disempowered and divested of authority. The
extent of the trauma is most apparent in the Holocaust references, which
are insistent and repetitive. These shocking allusions to victims in connec-
tion with concentration camps convey what the speaker deems to be the
emotional intensity of her fear and trauma. This passage also highlights
the importance of language and voice in terms of identity: in speaking like
a Jew, the speaker concludes that she “may well be” a Jew and can appro-
priate or commemorate Holocaust imagery and the tenor of that experi-
ence. Moreover, we also see that Plath assigns the speaker a victim’s po-
sition, but a position from which the story can be told. Trauma will not
be that which is unspeakable here: it can be represented. And I believe
that this last poetic stance is part of what makes “Daddy” a great poem.
It can take traumatic experience and rework it through poetic distance to
produce a poem about trauma: a poem that demonstrates how “working
through” trauma can be figured.
“Daddy” possesses an insistent tone and is repetitive in its language
and imagery, but these stylistic choices only enhance the obsessive and
painful family romantic drama recounted. Repetition is quintessential of
trauma, and we see the speaker of the poem engaged in working through
her traumatic history of interpersonal relationships. She tells us in the
first two lines that the influence of Daddy (and all that he figuratively
represents) has ended or will end at her insistence. Daddy’s influence is
weighty, implying that the memories and/or his presence are a burden:
he is all-powerful, “[m]arble-heavy, a bag full of God” (56). In telling her
story, the speaker is attempting to exorcise Daddy. At the end of the poem,
we return to Daddy being metaphorically killed again and, this time, the
husband is conflated with him, and this utterance underscores the des-
perate need of the speaker to testify and to put the story and the past be-

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 133

hind her. These last two stanzas bring us full circle to the opening, and
the repetitive behavior (marrying a man who takes after Daddy, “I made a
model of you” [59]) points to an intergenerational cycle of violence. Both
Daddy and the husband are torturers: they have “a love of the rack and the
screw” (58). In order to end this cycle, to move beyond it, the speaker has
to metaphorically write off Daddy, to break her emotional and psychologi-
cal dependence on him. The last line of the poem promises that this writ-
ing off and, therefore, leaving off (literally and symbolically) will happen
and may even have happened if this last line is a performative utterance.
But in order to finalize a total rejection of Daddy and all that he rep-
resents, the speaker has to make sense of her trauma story. She has to re-
claim her life, and she seemingly is empowered by testifying: she tells us
twice that she is “through” with Daddy, although the first is attributed to
the husband (“So daddy, I’m finally through,” a line that follows the mar-
riage vows, “And I said, I do, I do” [58]) and the second is the powerful last
line. This declaration of “I’m through” strikes me as a metonymy for “I’m
working through this trauma and am on my way to being done with you.”

On the Real-World or Material Effects That

Should Follow the Study of the Literature of Trauma
When I teach the literature and scholarship of interdisciplinary trau-
ma studies, my objectives are for my students to become better critical
thinkers and for them to become more sophisticated in their social and
political engagements, to give them more critical thought. My students
read the poems contained in Ariel and become engaged because they un-
derstand that this work is important. Perhaps Plath reveals why her lit-
erary output matters in her exhortation to herself in a journal fragment
dated April 1, 1956: “you have seen a lot, felt deeply & your problems are
universal enough to be made meaningful—WRITE—.”53 In a 1962 bbc in-
terview, Plath says,
I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emo-
tional experiences I have, but I must say that I cannot sympathise with
these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle
or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control
and manipulate, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured,
this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these ex-

134 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

 periences with an informed and intelligent mind. I think that person-
al experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of
shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should
be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as
Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.54
In order to cultivate the “informed and intelligent mind” that discerns sig-
nificance, makes connections, and critically considers situations, my stu-
dents read articles by a host of trauma studies scholars in different dis-
ciplines, among them Laura S. Brown (psychology), Caruth (literature),
Erikson (sociology), Herman (psychology), LaCapra (history), Laub
(psychiatry), Leys (history), and Alexander C. McFarlane and Bessel A.
van der Kolk (medicine and psychology).55
Studying trauma can effect real-world change, making the study of it
across disciplines and professions an ethical and socially responsible proj-
ect. Though confronting the traumatic experiences of others should be
uncomfortable and even disconcerting, people who shut down or fore-
close the stories of victims or the sociocultural ramifications of trauma
and traumatized people create conditions or a climate that is “disastrous
for a society,” according to McFarlane and van der Kolk, because the rami-
fications of untreated trauma include the victim turning into the aggressor
and foreclosed pathways toward healing of victims that ultimately dam-
age communities.56 One way to combat apathy, fear, or something in be-
tween is to foreground the importance of a literary study of trauma. As
McFarlane and van der Kolk maintain, “[A]rtists have traditionally ful-
filled the function of holding up a mirror to humankind; they present the
issues of trauma with a clarity that contrasts sharply with the traditional
obfuscation of these issues in the field of mental health.”57 Literary texts
that represent trauma in some fashion participate in a larger sociocultur-
al and, as McFarlane and van der Kolk assert, medico-political conversa-
tion and agenda: considering what authors are communicating and how
and why the representations matter to us now reveals our own ideologies
(and strengths and shortcomings) concerning our responses to the multi-
ple dimensions of our world affected by traumatized people, including our
role in the social, cultural, medical, and political support systems (or lack
thereof) for victims. And it is important to recognize that one person can
make a significant difference.58

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 135

 Perhaps one of the largest and most regrettable tendencies of our so-
ciety is the “blame the victim” mindset. I would posit that studying the
literature of trauma might counteract this tendency. The rhetorical move
of “blame the victim” punishes society in the aforementioned ways, and
it severely punishes the victim because the trauma will “invade and con-
taminate the survivor’s daily life.”59 McFarlane and van der Kolk, Brown,
and Laub address this problem of placing blame on and expecting shame
from the victim. Brown interrogates the consequences of this convenient
mindset: “If we maintain the myth of the willing victim,” Brown tells us,
“who we then pathologize for her presumed willingness, we need never
question the social structures that perpetuate her victimization.”60 And
Laub adds that, in his experience working with Holocaust survivors, vic-
tims who could not (re)construct their stories or did not have witnesses to
listen to their narratives could come to believe that they, and not the per-
petrators, were responsible for the inhumane crimes committed against
them.61 We should come to the conclusion, then, that blaming the victim
fosters the stigma attached to trauma and victims and prevents any sort
of empathetic unsettlement, which undermines compassion and sociocul-
tural and political changes.
Without a listener, reader, or some sort of witness who will receive and
collaborate in the construction of the trauma story, survivors cannot eas-
ily heal, according to the traditional model of trauma. The significance of
testifying and of listening/reading/witnessing is underscored by Laub:
The survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their
stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive. There
is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus come to know
one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past against which one has
to protect oneself. One has to know one’s truth in order to be able to
live one’s life.62
The fundamental problem in “The Moon and the Yew Tree” is that the
speaker clearly has a need to tell her story in order to come to know it (in-
deed, other, inanimate voices clamor to claim individual identities and re-
birth: the bells, with their tongues, give their names, confirming the story
of the Resurrection), but she is impeded by ghosts (the “fumy, spirituous
mists” around the headstones), and her only witness is another inanimate

136 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

object, the moon, that she attempts to claim as a “mother” (46). Though
Laub illustrates that one can use an inanimate object, like a photograph,
and speak to it like a witness, what one is really doing in this process is
creating an internal witness “who substitutes the lack of witnessing in real
life.”63 But the moon in the poem appears to play some sort of part in the
trauma story, and perhaps that is why she cannot serve as a witness for the
speaker. The moon will not collaborate with the speaker in the creation of
the testimony: the moon is unsuitable in the role of witness because the
speaker states explicitly, “The moon is no door” (46), which I interpret as
the inability of the speaker to work through the trauma without a witness
(i.e., the door or way out is closed or closed off for the speaker in this met-
aphorical poem about the landscape of the speaker’s mind). The inability
to secure a witness and to construct a narrative about one’s traumatic ex-
perience results in one’s history being abolished and that, in turn, leads to
“annihilation,” as we see in “A Birthday Present,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Ariel,”
and “Edge,” and to the cessation of one’s identity, as we see in “Words.”64
In similar fashion, “Daddy” underscores the need to tell one’s story in or-
der to work through and begin to move away from what LaCapra calls a
“founding trauma,” that which becomes “the basis of an identity.”65 These
works attempt to give voice to a founding trauma, to work through it, and
they become evidence of a reconfigured identity. However, given her sui-
cide, Plath was unsuccessful in working through trauma and putting it be-
hind her. Ultimately, we see the need for another human to hear and wit-
ness one’s trauma story.
There is something to be salvaged in accounts about trauma for both
the victim and the witness, even when the witness is construed as the
reader. According to Laub, the “joint responsibility” of the victim and
her witness “is the source of the reemerging truth.”66 These are truths that
need to be constructed, (re)created in narratives that explore or explain
painful and sometimes unfathomable psychological, emotional, and phys-
ical injuries. In The Uses of Literature, Rita Felski makes a persuasive argu-
ment about the complex role of recognition, “a cognitive insight, a mo-
ment of knowing or knowing again” for readers:
When political theorists talk about recognition . . . they mean some-
thing else: not knowledge, but acknowledgment. Here the claim for
recognition is a claim for acceptance, dignity and inclusion in public

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 137

 life. Its force is ethical rather than epistemic, a call for justice rather
than a claim to truth. Moreover, recognition in reading revolves around
a moment of personal illumination and heightened self-understanding;
recognition in politics involves a demand for public acceptance and
validation. . . .
Yet this distinction is far from being a dichotomy.67
In agreeing with Felski, I want to emphasize the ability for ethical ac-
knowledgment and social justice to work in conjunction with personal il-
lumination and validation. We hope that no one can fully identify with
the depths of despair that Plath’s speakers (and Plath) experienced. But
literature is a multifaceted cultural artifact that allows readers to engage in
“parsing the complexities of personhood,” in reference both to themselves
and to others different from themselves.68 It seems to me that the cultur-
al work and importance of literature are also related to how we approach
language and the ideas and representations therein and how literary texts
mark and shape our world.
In accordance with Derridean logic . . . the importance of texts and tex-
tuality becomes vital to considerations of lived experience, or how one
is to understand one’s world and embodied state because texts are also
material embodiments that display the way we think.69
And Plath’s work is one that has exerted great influence: a steady stream
of books and a 2004 biopic with a major film company attest to both aca-
demic and popular interest in Plath and her work in the twenty-first cen-
tury. New directions for Plath scholarship will undoubtedly continue: the
fiftieth anniversary of Plath’s death is 2013, when all of Plath’s manuscripts
in the Smith College archive will be made accessible, should there be
anything left that is still sealed.70 As it is, Plath’s star is one that has never
dimmed in the literary marketplace, and new generation of students take
to Ariel in fresh ways.
In his commentary on Derrida and literature, J. Hillis Miller argues that
“the words of a literary world do not create the world they report, but only
discover it, or uncover it, for the reader.” He elaborates that reading litera-
ture “is a way of being in the material world” because, by displacement,
words “refer to social, psychological, historical, and physical reality.”71 Julia

138 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

Kristeva asks us to consider the importance of literature, specifically po-
ems, in relation to what is psychologically real and indebted to material re-
ality and language: “Doesn’t poetry lead to the establishment of an object
as a substitute for the symbolic order under attack, an object that is never
clearly posited but always ‘in perspective’?”72 According to Plath,
Certain poems and lines of poetry seem as solid and miraculous to me
as church altars or the coronation of queens must seem to people who
revere quite different images. I am not worried that poems reach rela-
tively few people. As it is, they go surprisingly far—among strangers,
around the world, even. Farther than the words of a classroom teacher
or the prescriptions of a doctor; if they are very lucky, farther than a
lifetime.73
In this vein, we can learn many things from Plath’s Ariel: at a founda-
tional level, we have the opportunity to investigate perspectives. In this
article I extrapolate from the poems in order to gain insight into the var-
ious dimensions of traumatic experiences and responses to trauma. The
politics inherent in such representations and their victims in literary texts
should capture our attention because, ultimately, literature offers us les-
sons about our world, whether those lessons are tied to empathetic unset-
tlement or self-reflexive assessment. In examining how various theoretical
models approach trauma and healing and in analyzing literary representa-
tions of these, we are actively participating in ways of assessing our own
(and others’) responses to traumatic wounds, the process of which has the
potential to infuse work or agendas related to social justice concerns. By
becoming more aware of the sociocultural and medico-political dimen-
sions of trauma and by becoming more sensitive and prepared to receive
and validate narratives and depictions of such, even to a small extent, we
potentially place ourselves in a better position to activate and enable the
telling and dissemination of diverse stories about trauma and healing and
to support and rework support systems for trauma survivors.

Notes
1. In terms of poetic fabrication, note the discrepancy between the age of Plath’s
speaker when her father dies in “Daddy” and the age of Plath herself when her fa-
ther died.

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 139

 2. Freud sketches a profile of a melancholiac, someone who has lost “an ob-
ject of love,” to the point of “being [deeply] wounded, hurt.” Freud, “Mourning
and Melancholia,” in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology (New
York: Collier/Macmillan, 1963), 164–79 (166, 172). The symptoms he catalogs are
reminiscent of what we know of Plath’s ailments in her final months as captured in
memoirs, additional biographical accounts of people who knew her, and her letters.
Freud concludes that the deep wounding of melancholia causes the melancholiac
to submit to “a gratification of sadistic tendencies and of hate, both of which relate
to an object and in this way have both been turned round upon the self ” (172). He
views it as a condition in which one will give way to “revenge,” which “solves the
riddle of the tendency to suicide” (172–73).
3. Sylvia Plath, Ariel (New York: Perennial, 1999), 46. References to this text will
hereafter be given parenthetically.
4. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 69.
5. Felman and Laub, Testimony, 69.
6. Christina Britzolakis, “Ariel and Other Poems,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Sylvia Plath, ed. Jo Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 107–23
(111).
7. Felman and Laub, Testimony, 69.
8. Britzolakis, “Ariel and Other Poems,” 111.
9. Lisa Narbeshuber documents the desire of many Plath critics and readers to
make Plath whole and their inability to accept the late poetry as expressive of “a
fragmented conception of the self or consciousness.” Confessing Cultures: Politics
and the Self in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Victoria bc: els Editions, 2009), 9. Given
that fragmentation or fracturing of a unified self is integral to the ways in which we
understand trauma studies, across disciplines, it becomes more important to inves-
tigate what Plath’s poetry depicts in its representations of trauma. See Narbeshu-
ber, Confessing Cultures, esp. 2–10, for an overview of critics’ proclivities in reading
Plath’s persona(s) of Ariel or even Plath herself as a unified, whole self.
10. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992),
2.
11. A. Alvarez, in considering this poem, remarks, “Plath’s mellifluousness, how-
ever, is constantly brought up short by bald, desolate statements in a bleakly speak-
ing voice. . . . It is almost as though the poem were written despite herself.” Alva-
rez, The Writer’s Voice (New York: Norton, 2004), 33. He describes the yew tree as
“menacing,” which he thinks is fitting because the poem purports to treat “a state
of mind” (34). See pp. 33–35 for Alvarez’s recounting of what Ted Hughes told
him about the genesis of the poem as well as what Plath had to say about it in a

140 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

bbc interview. See Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems (New York: HarperPerennial,
1992), 291n153; and Plath’s 1962 essay “A Comparison,” in Johnny Panic and the Bible
of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts (New York: Harper Perennial,
2008),62–64, for further explanations of the yew tree. According to Plath,

I do not like to think of all the things, familiar, useful and worthy things, I have
never put into a poem. I did, once, put a yew tree in. And the yew tree began,
with astounding egotism, to manage and order the whole affair. It was not a yew
tree by a church on a road past a house in town where a certain woman lived . . .
and so on, as it might have been in a novel. Oh, no. It stood squarely in the mid-
dle of my poem, manipulating its dark shades, the voices in the churchyard,
the clouds, the birds, the tender melancholy with which I contemplated it—
everything! I couldn’t subdue it. And, in the end, my poem was a poem about a
yew tree. That yew tree was just too proud to be a passing black mark in a novel.
(“A Comparison,” 63)

What is telling about this passage is that Plath does not view the yew tree as some-
thing “familiar, useful, and worthy”: instead, it is a black mark that insists on its
presence in Plath’s atmospheric poem that purports to capture a state of mind.
12. A poem that was not published in the original Ariel volume is “The Jailor,”
composed on October 17, 1962, which invokes rape and other sexual violence and
captures the atmosphere of “The Moon and the Yew Tree” (October 22, 1961). Yet
“The Jailor” is not as elaborate in its atmospheric effects as its earlier counterpart,
though both document the emotional intensity of psychological and emotional
trauma. See “The Jailor” in Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, A Facsimile of Plath’s
Manuscripts, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (2004; repr., Lon-
don: Faber and Faber, 2007), 23–24; or “The Jailer” in Plath, Collected Poems, 226–
27; the spelling of the title differs slightly in these two volumes.
13. It is important to note early on the controversy surrounding the published
Ariel. In her compelling and still relevant essay “The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making
of the Sylvia Plath Canon,” Marjorie Perloff maps the differences between what
she dubs as Ariel 1 (Plath’s manuscript with her arrangement) and Ariel 2 (Plath’s
manuscript with editorial decisions made by Hughes, including omissions and ad-
ditions and a different arrangement). Perloff argues that the betrayal and abandon-
ment on the part of her husband was the biggest trauma of Plath’s life, especially
as she viewed him as perfect, and suggests that the facts of her husband’s infidelity
and desertion sent her into a downward spiral, one that is evidenced by her poetic
output. According to Perloff, “Ariel 1 ends on a note of hope. In Ariel 2, on the other
hand, the poems that make only too clear that Hughes’s desertion was the immedi-
ate cause of Plath’s depression are expunged; instead, the volume now culminates in

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 141

ten death poems, poems written, as it were, from beyond rage, by someone who no
longer blames anyone for her condition and reconciles herself to death” (313–14).
Perloff, “Two Ariels,” in Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic
Collections (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 308–33. How-
ever, Lynda K. Bundtzen cautions us against celebrating the optimism in “Winter-
ing,” the poem Plath intended to use to close Ariel, too much because she maintains
it is a poem that is more uncertain than many critics assume it to be. Bundtzen, The
Other “Ariel” (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 27–28. But she
concurs with Perloff when she states that Hughes’s infidelity “was more devastat-
ing than alarming” (29). Ultimately, Hughes, as the self-appointed editor of Ariel,
“presents us with a Sylvia Plath who is victimized by her time and place rather than
by a specific personal betrayal” (326). For my part, I see both readings as fair and ac-
curate: Plath’s poems reveal themselves to be both autobiographical and concerned
with events in the bigger world, the one outside of herself, as she herself maintains
in a bbc interview with Peter Orr. See “A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter
Orr,” Modern American Poetry Site, ed. Cary Nelson and Bartholomew Brinkman,
Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, http://www
.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/orrinterview.htm.
See the composition dates in Plath, Collected Poems, as well as an overview of
Plath’s and Hughes’s editorial intentions in Perloff, “Two Ariels,” and Wayne K Chap-
man’s archival piece “Last Respects: The Posthumous Editing of Virginia Woolf and
Sylvia Plath,” South Carolina Review 38.2 (2006): 65–71. See especially Bundtzen,
Other “Ariel,” in which she maps the literary history of Ariel. Bundtzen’s monograph
works in tandem with Perloff ’s essay. The composition dates of poems discussed in
this article (see Plath, Collected Poems, wherein the poems are arranged chronologi-
cally) are: “The Moon and the Yew Tree” (October 22, 1961); “A Birthday Present”
(September 30, 1962); “Daddy” (October 12, 1962); “Lady Lazarus” (October 23–29,
1962); “Ariel” (October 27, 1962); “Words” (February 1, 1963); and “Edge” (February
5, 1963). Plath died on February 11, 1963.
14. Britzolakis, “Ariel and Other Poems,” 116.
15. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 7.
16. Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Trauma: Explorations in
Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 183–
199 (194); emphasis in the original.
17. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 62, 63.
18. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000), 117.
19. Leys, Trauma, 117.

142 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

 20. Jane Hedley, I Made You to Find Me: The Coming of Age of the Woman Poet
and the Politics of Poetic Address (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 95.
21. An alternative edition of Ariel is Ariel: The Restored Edition, A Facsimile of
Plath’s Manuscripts, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement, with a fore-
word by Plath and Hughes’s daughter, Frieda Hughes. This edition follows Plath’s
vision for the order of the poems and restores a dozen poems that had been cut
from the original manuscript. This volume is also noteworthy because of its fore-
word: Frieda Hughes situates Ariel within her family history and contextualizes the
collection within Plath’s life and literary output. For an excellent critical companion
piece to the excised poems, see Bundtzen, Other “Ariel,” 37–100.
22. According to Lee Upton, the standard edition is the more remarkable of
the two:

[T]he first published Ariel is a more dramatic manuscript, its ending mirroring
the tragedy of Plath’s final decision about her own life. As a work of art it is more
powerful than Plath’s original manuscript by virtue of its inherent drama (which
is separate from its author’s fate) and its tonal richness. By incorporating the gla-
cial final poems with their undiluted, uncompromising austerity, Hughes gave us
an extended view of Plath’s range as a poet.

Upton, “‘I / Have a self to recover’: The Restored Ariel,” Literary Review 48.4
(2005): 260–64 (262).
23. In an account of the design of Ariel, Hughes explains that Plath remarked on
this conscious decision to open and close the poem with these words. Hughes quot-
ed in Bundtzen, Other “Ariel,” 15–16.
24. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Po-
etry in America (Boston: Beacon, 1986), 223.
25. Steven Gould Axelrod, “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath,” in The Cambridge Com-
panion to Sylvia Plath, ed. Jo Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 2006),
73–89 (88).
26. Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (Hampshire UK: Pal-
grave, 2003), 105; Wagner-Martin cites Mary Kurtzman regarding electroshock ther-
apy and separation from her children.
27. Wagner-Martin, Literary Life, 104.
28. Bundtzen, Other “Ariel,” 159, 160.
29. Hedley, I Made You to Find Me, 81.
30. Hedley, I Made You to Find Me, 99.
31. Hedley, I Made You to Find Me, 100; emphasis in original.
32. Hedley, I Made You to Find Me, 100.
33. Hedley, I Made You to Find Me, 101.

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 143

 34. Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 2001),
195.
35. Kendall, Sylvia Plath, 195–96.
36. See Fan Jinghua, “Sylvia Plath’s Visual Poetics,” in Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s
Art of the Visual, ed. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 205–22 (210).
37. See Heather Clark, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 168.
38. Kendall, Sylvia Plath, 205.
39. Kendall, Sylvia Plath, 207.
40. Kathleen Connors, “Living Color: The Interactive Arts of Sylvia Plath,” in
Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, 4–144 (114).
41. In Clark’s reading, “Words” addresses Hughes’s poetic influence: “[D]espite
her attempts to ‘disfigure’ his words, their echoes still rang in her ears.” Clark inter-
prets the poem as Plath’s statement that “the poetic venture has failed her.” Grief of
Influence, 169.
42. See Antony Rowland, Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Syl-
via Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-
versity Press, 2005), 28–61, for a strong discussion of the ethics of Plath’s appropria-
tion of Holocaust imagery, as well as for his sensitive readings of “Lady Lazarus” and
“Mary’s Song.” For a survey of responses to Plath’s Holocaust poems, see Amy Hun-
gerford, The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 24–45. And for an examination and close reading
of Plath’s Holocaust Ariel poems, see Matthew Boswell, Holocaust Impiety in Litera-
ture, Popular Music and Film (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 37–39, 41–56. For a particu-
larly timely analysis of Plath’s Holocaust poems and their relevance to a post-9/11
world, see Steven Gould Axelrod, “Plath and Torture: Cultural Contexts for Plath’s
Imagery of the Holocaust,” in Representing Sylvia Plath (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2011), 67–87. He treats mainly “Lady Lazarus” and “The Jailer.”
43. Axelrod, “Poetry of Sylvia Plath,” 86.
44. James E. Young, “‘I may be a bit of a Jew’: The Holocaust Confessions of Syl-
via Plath,” Philological Quarterly 66.1 (1987): 127–47 (132, 135–36).
45. Young, “I may be a bit of a Jew,” 130, 136.
46. Rowland, Holocaust Poetry, 29–30.
47. Britzolakis, “Ariel and Other Poems,” 108.
48. Bundtzen, Other “Ariel,” 49.
49. Boswell, Holocaust Impiety, 46, 51.
50. Perloff, “Two Ariels,” 315, 327.
51. Perloff, “Two Ariels,” 315.

144 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2

 52. For her part, Assia Wevill, the other woman, disavowed responsibility and
was even surprised that anyone should think she was to blame for Plath’s suicide.
According to her biographers, Wevill, in responding to a coworker’s sympathetic
“Oh, you must feel awful” comment upon learning about Plath’s death, opened her
eyes wide and said, “Why should I? It was nothing to do with me.” And, after read-
ing Plath’s last journal and recent manuscripts, Wevill was “surprised” and “shocked”
by what Plath thought and wrote about her. Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev, Lover
of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love (New
York: Carroll and Graf, 2007), 115, 117. In his recent memoir about Hughes and
Plath, Lucas Myers, a friend of Ted Hughes, surmises that Plath’s suicide “was not
brought on by sexual jealousy but by rationalized and frustrated possessiveness.”
Myers, An Essential Self: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Memoir (Nottingham UK:
Richard Hollis, 2011), 95. He speculates that Plath was narcissistic and did not view
anyone outside of herself: “She was the world and others were characters in it, not
inhabitants of it” (110). And Plath herself explains her desire to write about unsa-
vory topics in a letter to her mother dated October 25, 1962 (as she was in the midst
of writing “Lady Lazarus” and after she had finished “The Moon and the Yew Tree,”
“A Birthday Present,” and “Daddy”): “Now stop trying to get me to write about ‘de-
cent courageous people’—read the Ladies’ Home Journal for those! . . . I believe in
going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it.” Sylvia Plath, Letters Home:
Correspondence, 1950–63, ed. Aurelia Schober Plath (1975; repr., New York: Bantam,
1977), 564.
53. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (New
York: Anchor Books, 2000), 569.
54. See “A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview.”
55. It is useful to approach trauma from interdisciplinary approaches as Roger
Luckhurst does in The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008). He explains,
“Rival theories proliferate around the notion of trauma because it is one of these
‘tangled objects’ whose enigmatic causation and strange effects that bridge the men-
tal and the physical, the individual and the collective, and use in many diverse dis-
ciplinary languages consequently provoke perplexed, contentious debate” (15). He
advises thinking about trauma in a kind of poststructuralist, network systems meta-
phor because he traces the indebtedness of any understanding of trauma to many
diverse sources and influences. According to Luckhurst, in gesturing to Bruno La-
tour’s conceptual network metaphor, we might want to think about trauma studies
as “a knot because it helps to visualize the many heterogeneous elements it binds
together. The history of such a knot would be an act of unraveling, revealing how
the knot is ‘intensely connected to a much larger repertoire or resources,’” Latour
quoted in Luckhurst, Trauma Question, 14.

Goodspeed-Chadwick: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel 145

 56. Alexander C. McFarlane and Bessell A. van der Kolk, “Trauma and Its Chal-
lenge to Society,” in Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on
Mind, Body, and Society, ed. Bessell A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and
Lars Weisaeth (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 24–46 (33).
57. McFarlane and van der Kolk, “Trauma and Its Challenge to Society,” 45.
58 After completion of my Trauma Studies and Literature course, one of my stu-
dents sought and was awarded a position at a domestic violence shelter. She wanted
to put her skills and talents to use for the betterment of abused women and chil-
dren, and she attributed her compassion and enlarged worldview to the study of
trauma and literature. I am certain that she, as one individual, is making an inesti-
mable difference in the lives of many women and children.
59. McFarlane and van der Kolk, “Trauma and Its Challenge to Society,” 64.
60. Laura S. Brown, “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psy-
chic Trauma,” in Caruth, Trauma, 100–112 (106).
61. Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in Caruth,
Trauma, 61–75 (65).
62. Laub, “Truth and Testimony,” 63; emphasis in the original.
63. Laub, “Truth and Testimony,” 71.
64. Laub, “Truth and Testimony,” 67.
65. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 2001), 161.
66. Laub, “Truth and Testimony,” 69.
67. Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature (Malden ma: Blackwell, 2008).
68. Felski, Uses of Literature, 26.
69. Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick, “Derrida’s Deconstruction of Logocen-
trism: Implications for Trauma Studies,” in Theory after Derrida: Essays in Critical
Praxis, ed. Kailash C. Baral and R. Radhakrishnan (New York: Routledge, 2009),
264–79 (265).
70. Caroline King Bernard Hall, Sylvia Plath, Revised (New York: Twayne, 1998),
131; Bundtzen, Other “Ariel,” 12.
71. J. Hillis Miller, On Literature (London: Routledge, 2002), 79, 80.
72. Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed.
Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 89–136 (115).
73. Sylvia Plath, “Context: Essay, 1962,” in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,
65–66 (66).

146 Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 1:2