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The Poetry and Prose of Sylvia Plath
are never angry. Sylvia Plath refuses to honor this concept of feminine
decorum and dares to express her negative emotions. “Beware . . .
Beware . . . Out of the ash . . . I rise with my red hair . . . And I eat men
like air” (“Lady Lazarus”). Plath chooses to be true to her experience and
to her art rather than to the traditional norms of feminine experience.
Plath’s anger gives her strength to face her demons: “Nightly now
I flog apes wolves bears sheep . . . Over the iron stile. And still don’t
sleep.” (“Zookeeper’s Wife”). But if Plath’s poetry is often an exorcism,
an effort to stave off madness, it also modulates longing and fear: “I am
inhabited by a cry . . . Nightly it flaps out . . . Looking, with its hooks,
for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing . . . That sleeps
in me” (“Elm”).
Critics frequently point out Plath’s love/hate for her father, but they
rarely mention her mother. This is a major oversight because the loss of
mother-love haunts Plath’s poetry and is the basic cause of her profound
despair: “Mother, you are the one mouth . . . I would be tongue to”
(“Who”); “The mother of mouths didn’t love me” (“Maenad”); “Mother
of beetles, only unclench your hand” (“Witch Burning”).
Born under the sign of Scorpio, Plath speaks of the “motherly
pulse of the sea” in an essay entitled “Ocean 1212-W,” 7 and here
she again laments her abandonment: “Hugging my grudge, ugly and
prickly, a sad sea urchin . . . I saw the separateness of everything. I felt
the wall of my skin: I am I. The stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion
with the things of this world was over.”
Plath was two and a half years old when her brother was born,
and like many sensitive children of that age, she felt replaced by her
brother and rejected by her mother. Her father’s death when she was
eight undoubtedly aggravated her already acute sense of loss. The
working through of Oedipal and sibling conflicts in Plath’s writing
is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, who wrote in her diary, “I used to
think of him (her father) and mother daily; but writing the Lighthouse
laid them in my mind. And now he comes back to me sometimes, but
differently. I believe this to be true—that I was obsessed by them both,
unhealthily; and writing of them was a necessary act.” 8
In addition to childhood losses, the conflict between domestic
and artistic interests, and the lack of financial security as well as
health problems undoubtedly left Sylvia Plath extremely vulnerable
to depression and suicidal impulses. Lacking favorable or at least
serious critical response to her work must have been difficult and