<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cSylvia Plath\u2019s Master Narrative: Developing her Poetic Voice\u201d<\/p>\n
Chelsea Sokol<\/p>\n
tvb681@mocs.utc.edu ; (901) 831-7655<\/p>\n
Seminar in a Major Figure: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes<\/p>\n
11 February 2014<\/p>\n
North Callahan Essay Prize Submission<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Undeniably, Sylvia Plath\u2019s final book of poetry entitled Ariel<\/i>, including the post-Ariel<\/i> poems added to the work by her husband Ted Hughes, marks her as a brilliant modern poet.\u00a0 However, while this late poetry is lauded as her best work, the themes and images she uses either resemble those from her previous poems or are not-so-subtle continuations of them.\u00a0 Consequently, language and style distinguish the Ariel<\/i> poems from Plath\u2019s preceding poetry.\u00a0 Though shaped and molded by poetic tradition, Plath finds her own poetic voice by denying the influence of this tradition, thus presenting a refreshingly organic, confident style.\u00a0 She quickly became a feminist icon, not only as a result of her suicide and the subsequent publication of Ariel<\/i>, but also because her new poetic voice related to and spoke for a previously silenced demographic.\u00a0 With unabashed self-interest, or, arguably, self-obsession, Plath tells a thematic master-narrative\u2014recognition of the self as inferior to a superior other, revolution or rebellion by this inferior self, and eventual reconstruction of a valuable, independent identity\u2014through direct, contemporary language and dramatic, associative imagery that reflects the resonating social reality of cultural displacement in a post-World War II society that attempts to reconstruct its own identity.\u00a0 By examining selections from her entire oeuvre, one can see that the transformative process of finding her voice through experimentation with language and imagery that parallels the struggle within Plath\u2019s master narrative to identify one\u2019s self on a personal and societal level.<\/p>\n Even in her early work, particular images surface that she revisits in different situations throughout her entire body of work.\u00a0 As Jo Gill explains in The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath<\/i>, while Plath\u2019s poetry from her years at Smith College \u201cprovide[s] evidence of Plath\u2019s long and intense apprenticeship and offer[s] insights into the early seeds of some of her later concerns,\u201d these poems lack the creative and emotional complexities of her later work (Gill 30).\u00a0 For example, Plath often relies on the sea-related imagery of her childhood and adolescence in coastal Massachusetts.\u00a0 In A Memory of Sylvia Plath<\/i>, a detailed autobiographical recollection of Sylvia Plath from Plath\u2019s roommate post-attempted suicide, Nancy Hunter Steiner describes Plath\u2019s emotional connection to the sea as her home.\u00a0 Steiner emphasizes the \u201cpoet\u2019s eye for the minutiae of nature and an ear tuned to the lyric cadences of their names\u201d that Plath naturally assumes even when giving a tour of the coast.\u00a0 Before Steiner ever actually saw an ocean, Plath had created one for her, \u201cso precisely did she describe the colors, the hubbub, and the throbbing, deep-summer tenor of the place\u201d (Steiner 49).\u00a0 Consequently, the sea or ocean can be traced throughout Plath\u2019s work, from Juvenilia<\/i> poems \u201cAquatic Nocturne\u201d and \u201cTwo Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea\u201d to later poems, such as \u201cFull Fathom Five,\u201d Point Shirley,\u201d and \u201cSuicide off Egg Rock\u201d (The Collected Poems<\/i>).<\/p>\n These \u201cseeds of Plath\u2019s later strengths\u201d manifest themselves especially in collections of sharp, fragmented images that evoke immediate raw, sensory reactions (Gill 30).\u00a0 In \u201cAquatic Nocturne,\u201d Plath paints an underwater watercolor with \u201cliquid indigo\/turquoise slivers\/of dilute light,\u201d\u00a0 \u201cgrapeblue mussels,\u201d and \u201cdull lunar globes\/of bulbous jellyfish\u201d that \u201cglow milkgreen,\u201d describing an ethereal unknown and pairing it with sound that is \u201cblunt and wan\/like the bronze tone\/of a sunken gong\u201d (The Collected Poems 305-306).\u00a0 She deftly transcribes her dramatic vision of the sea into an illustration made from words, using the \u201cpoet\u2019s eye\u201d that Steiner so clearly recalls.\u00a0\u00a0 While strikingly, hauntingly beautiful, this illustration remains simply a landscape, lacking emotional complexity or depth.\u00a0 However well this poem captures a pure experience through imagery and description, it resembles Plath\u2019s other early poetry in that it suffers from the constraints of poetic tradition, as the methodical structure and organization borrows heavily on the poets she admired and imitated, such as Auden, Roetke, and Poe.\u00a0 Steiner\u2019s explanation of Plath\u2019s writing process follows the same lines:<\/p>\n Sylvia constructed images as an engineer designs a bridge–with painstaking, almost<\/p>\n mathematical attention to every detail.\u00a0 She wrote slowly, plodding through dictionary and thesaurus searching for the exact word to create the poetic impression she intended…the words did not flow in a steady, effortless stream.\u00a0 They could be released only painfully, bit by agonizing bit, as though wrenched free of some massive blockage (Steiner 43-44).<\/p>\n Although Steiner\u2019s memories of Plath are tainted by hindsight, the Ariel<\/i> volume, and media attention, her explication aptly communicates the painfully contrived nature of Plath\u2019s early poetic voice, as if she is attempting to stitch together different aspects of others\u2019 voices\u2014and poetic identities\u2014that she admires.<\/p>\n If her very earliest poetry draws too much from previous poets, \u201cFull Fathom Five\u201d demonstrates a forced attempt to reject traditional form, causing her to make similar mistakes.\u00a0 In \u201cFull Fathom Five,\u201d Sylvia Plath speaks to an incarnation of a recurring father figure–this time the \u201cold man\u201d–in fifteen slant-rhyming tercets, repeating sea-related imagery, heavy consonance and assonance, and the concept of death and resurrection to which she would later return.\u00a0 Even the title of the piece insinuates the significance of sea imagery, referring to the scene in William Shakespeare\u2019s The Tempest<\/i> during the second stanza of \u201cAriel\u2019s Song,\u201d in which Ferdinand\u2019s father lies five fathoms under water and is transforming into a part of the sea, just as the speaker\u2019s \u201cold man\u201d does (The Collected Poems<\/i> 92).\u00a0 She implies the oppressive, dangerous nature of their relationship, ending with the contradictory \u201cFather, this thick air is murderous.\/I would breathe water\u201d (44-45).<\/p>\n For Plath, the sea not only represents life and eternity but also danger, violence, and death; however, the danger remains implied in \u201cFull Fathom Five,\u201d restrained until the final few stanzas.\u00a0 Even though the speaker explains that \u201c…All obscurity\/Starts with a danger:\/Your dangers are many,\u201d the explicit statement and the overuse of sea-image comparisons confines the poem to illustration as opposed to combining a variety of senses to complete an experience (16-17).\u00a0 Thus, \u201cFull Fathom Five\u201d appears as a painting, with Plath\u2019s audience distanced from the experience.\u00a0 Although certain images seem to imply danger or violence, as with the \u201cOne labyrinthine tangle\/To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,\/Skulls…,\u201d the reader remains acutely aware that, as with a painting, the danger rests safely within the confines of the page (34-36).\u00a0 Even over this distance, Plath communicates the definitive role of the \u201cold man\u201d as destructive superior\u2014a godlike being under whose authoritative power she necessarily suffers.\u00a0 Similarly, the form of the poem itself suffers under the pressure of thousands of years of poetic tradition.<\/p>\n Another recurring image throughout Plath\u2019s work begins in her Juvenilia<\/i>, with \u201cthe challenge of assembling fractured and statuesque figures, seen in \u2018Touch-and-Go\u2019 and \u2018Gold mouths cry\u2019\u201d (Gill 30).\u00a0 \u201cTouch-and-Go\u201d introduces a \u201cstatuary\u201d whose \u201cstaunch stone eyes\u201d watch silently as children playing in a park, and \u201cGold mouths cry\u201d describes a \u201cbronze boy\u201d who \u201cstands kneedeep in centuries,\/and never grieves\u201d (The Collected Poems<\/i> 302 and 335).\u00a0\u00a0 Both statues reveal the hardships of time and age forever frozen while the world around them changes.\u00a0 In her article \u201cThe Unitive Urge in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath,\u201d however, Pamela A. Smith states that \u201cdespite their success, the fusions in The Colossus<\/i> are evasive in that they attract a rather superficial attention to themselves\u201d (Smith 325).\u00a0 Much of Plath\u2019s pre-Ariel<\/i> poetry continues the \u201cshowy acrobatics, tense tightrope-walking, and tiptoeing bravado\u201d from her Juvenilia<\/i> period (Smith 325).\u00a0 With showy language manipulation and imagery, such as with the statues that must heroically experience eternity, Plath overzealously embraces ambitious themes.\u00a0 Because her language and images fuse together so impeccably, these themes become undermined by the inevitable transparency.<\/p>\n Plath\u2019s desire for unity is evident in form, content, and the overarching master narrative created by weaving repeated images and themes throughout her work.\u00a0 In her statues, Plath imbues an eternal and omniscient power, just as the obscure, unknown reaches of the sea glow as beacons of that same power.\u00a0 They embody the independent constant to which Plath clings, whether that constant takes the form of her father or poetic tradition.\u00a0 Thus, with both form and content, Plath forms the first act of her master narrative.\u00a0 Her Juvenilia<\/i> and other early poetry reflects a tenacious desire to assimilate herself into the life of the powerful Other, the \u201cold myth of origins,\u201d willing to forsake and sacrifice a life that she insists is fated to tragedy (The Collected Poems <\/i>92).\u00a0 The speakers of her poems from this period exhibit childish dependence upon and glorification of the Other, while her style displays juvenile inexperience, overusing similar images and focusing too intently upon recreating a visual scene.<\/p>\n However, \u201cThe Colossus\u201d reflects a dramatic change in Plath\u2019s relationship to the dominating independent constant, rejecting a sentimental or glorified depiction of the ancient \u201cColossus\u201d monument, or of the father figure, in favor of juxtaposing ancient Greek and Roman mythological allusions with crude images of barnyard animals and common household objects in order to demonstrate the decay of the Colossus\u2019s power and the resulting independence of the speaker.\u00a0 Using these images in conjunction with jarring consonance and descriptions of the speaker\u2019s janitorial failures, Plath\u2019s voice begins to finally break free of its previous restraints, or at least to recognize that her voice itself is restrained, and that her desire to reconstruct a poetic voice from the fragmented remains of others\u2019 voices was restraining her. \u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe Colossus\u201d demonstrates her realization that, like the ancient world, her inspiration and her muse died long ago, leaving only her colossal memory of him, or the power that she has imbued into the remnants of his image, to oppress her.<\/p>\n By degrading this unique representation of the greatness, power, and strength of the greatest ancient Western empires with language and style associated with all that is common, lowly, and mass-produced, the speaker frees herself from her own worshipful adoration.\u00a0 While it \u201cconsider[s] [it]self an oracle,\u201d the Colossus is nothing more than a representation of a long-fallen glory\u2014and even the last memory of these once-great civilizations will soon be gone forever, as the speaker is alone in her attempts reconstruct the past.\u00a0 She describes herself as \u201can ant in mourning,\u201d miniscule in comparison to the looming giant, wielding only \u201cgluepots\u201d and \u201cpails of Lysol,\u201d the ultimate contemporary repair agents; however, they are no match for \u201cthe immense skull-plates\u201d and\u00a0 \u201cthe weedy acres of [the Colossus\u2019s] brow\u201d (The Collected Poems <\/i>129).<\/p>\n The Colossus contrasts his predecessors from\u00a0 \u201cTouch-and-Go\u201d and \u201cGold mouths cry\u201d by avoiding the fa\u00e7ade of glory, honor, and heroism combined with happy children or nature.\u00a0 Plath\u2019s speaker \u201cshall never get [the Colossus] put together entirely,\u201d admitting the futility of her attempts at having \u201cpieced\u201d and \u201cglued\u201d the Colossus so that it is once again \u201cproperly joined\u201d (Collected Poems<\/i> 129).\u00a0 Although the speaker has clearly dedicated \u201cthirty years\u201d of labor \u201cto dredge the silt from [its] throat,\u201d all that \u201cproceed[s]\u201d from the \u201cgreat lips\u201d of the Colossus are \u201cmule-bray, pig-grunt, and bawdy cackles\u201d that reveal the true nature of this statue.\u00a0 It reflects the reality that Plath\u2019s speaker previously avoided by granting the statues, the \u201cold man,\u201d and the sea strength and power in being unknown and untouchable, idolizing them in upright glory rather than fallen, crumbling pity.<\/p>\n The ancient world of petty, cruel gods is not the only one to decay.\u00a0 By including modern-day household items, Plath establishes a sense of setting and time.\u00a0 She has come to recognize that she is ill-equipped for reconstructing tradition when her tools, meaning her experiences and her cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, reflect exemplary creations of a distinctly modern society.\u00a0 From her middle-class upbringing to the mere opportunity to be a woman poet and writer, Plath\u2019s entire identity rejects submission to and integration into the established voice of antiquity.\u00a0 While \u201cThe Colossus\u201d remains unsuccessful in attaining a poetic voice distinctly for herself, the acceptance of artistic tradition as dead demonstrates a significant development in Plath\u2019s process toward distinguishing herself from the other poets of her time and all those preceding her.\u00a0 Sylvia Plath\u2019s meta-narrative enters into its second act as she begins to revolt against the poetic tradition that restrains her creativity, realizing the need for an original, autonomous self.<\/p>\n In their article \u201cThe Drama of Creativity in Plath\u2019s Early Poems,\u201d Steven Gould Axelrod and Nan Dorsey emphasize that, \u201cin a sense, all of Plath\u2019s poems, early and late, comprise a single metapoem\u201d that \u201crefers not only to itself but to the imaginative struggle that creates it\u201d (Axelrod 78).\u00a0 While they meant to demonstrate that Plath\u2019s early poetry equals her late poetry in \u201cevok[ing] the drama of creative desire,\u201d the \u201cmetapoem\u201d that displays the \u201cimaginative struggle that creates it\u201d through the process of telling this overarching master narrative is also clearly visible when adapting a critical view of her early work (Axelrod 78-79).\u00a0 The stifling father figure does not disappear merely because she recognizes his power over her–he is a \u201chostile force who, in a recurrent signifier, \u2018stalks\u2019 her poetry like a potential rapist, jeopardizing her creativity and her life itself\u201d (Axelrod 79).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Even more than in the obviously father-centric poems, like \u201cElectra on Azalea Path,\u201d \u201cThe Beekeeper\u2019s Daughter,\u201d or \u201cLittle Fugue,\u201d the father figure recurs as any element, animal, person, or inanimate object that retains the potential to best, dominate, or subdue Plath.\u00a0 Until this point, Plath has been playing and creating in his colossal shadow, or the shadow of predominantly male poets and artists in a long history of patriarchal societies, because she has desired the dependency of a relationship in which she is dominated and submissive.<\/p>\n According to Heather Clark\u2019s The Grief of Influence<\/i>, Plath became fascinated with violence, domination, and the Nietzchean struggle for power and dominance, claiming that she obsessed over \u201cthemes of competition, erotic struggle, and violence\u201d as a student of Smith and Cambridge and, later, as a poet and as wife to poet Ted Hughes (Clark 45).\u00a0 Plath\u2019s submission is generally \u201cproven\u201d by her journal entries that value big, strong men who could dominate and victimize her.\u00a0 Her infamous meeting with Ted Hughes, detailed in her journals, includes her reaction\u2014\u201csuch violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists\u201d because he was \u201cthe one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words\u201d (The Unabridged Journals<\/i> 212).\u00a0 Furthermore, the couple seemed well aware of the publicly-accepted nature of their relationship, renowned for attending a New Year\u2019s Eve costume party as Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf (Clark 45).\u00a0 However, Clark further explains the problem with affirming Plath\u2019s penchant for submission: Plath\u2019s dominating personality and poetic power subverted the feminine stereotype of weakness, frailty, and dependence.\u00a0 Often overlooked in the scene of their meeting is Plath\u2019s own \u201cviolence,\u201d as she bites him \u201chard on the cheek\u201d and wishes to give herself \u201ccrashing, fighting\u201d to him (The Unabridged Journals<\/i> 212).<\/p>\n At the same time, Plath seems to have had a dramatically low threshold for withstanding pain, often conflating physical and emotional pain as a single, tortured experience.\u00a0 Underneath her desire for passion and violence lurked a fear of pain and blood, and of hospitals with which Plath associated the most painful memories of electroshock therapy\u2014of losing control over her body and mind.\u00a0 Red appears throughout Plath\u2019s poetry as an ominous sign of pain and violence that masquerades as bright and cheerful.\u00a0 In \u201cElectra on Azalea Path,\u201d she emphasizes the \u201cartificial red sage\u201d and the \u201cbasket of plastic evergreens,\u201d pathetic and paltry attempts at adding brightness and life to an area where an abundance of burdock, an Afro-Eurasian plant whose prickly burrs are large and spiked, underscores the harsh, uninviting natural landscape (23-24). While the plastic may not rot or die, the \u201crains dissolve a bloody dye,\u201d causing \u201cthe ersatz petals\u201d to \u201cdrip red\u201d–natural elements dissolving the man-made attempts at creating a pretense of vitality and positivity (26-27).\u00a0 The \u201credness\u201d of the \u201cersatz petals\u201d reminds the speaker of \u201canother kind of redness\u201d that \u201cbothers [her],\u201d which she addresses in the penultimate stanza (28).\u00a0 In italics, she references Sophocles\u2019s Electra<\/i> from the point of view of Agamemnon\u2019s daughter Electra. Pamela A. Smith quotes Stevens\u2019s explication Americans\u2019 poetic tendencies to fuse fiction and reality through violence:<\/p>\n \u2018It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without.\u00a0 It is the<\/p>\n imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.\u00a0 It seems\u2026to have<\/p>\n something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression<\/p>\n of it, the sounds of its words, helps us to live our lives.\u2019 But for Sylvia Plath the<\/p>\n achievement of \u201ca violence from within\u201d was fatal (Smith 337).<\/p>\n She explains that this understanding of internal violence as protection from an external reality does not extend to Plath\u2019s personal, internal violent nature.<\/p>\n Plath claims to have \u201cborrow[ed] the stilts\u201d of Electra\u2019s tragedy because her story truly is not as dramatic as Agamemnon\u2019s (32).\u00a0 She has not rescued her brother from a mother who killed her father and a father who sacrificed her baby sister; however, she identifies closely with the Jungian Electra Complex as a manifestation of her own tragedy that was just as fated or inevitable as Electra\u2019s doom.\u00a0 She has fused reality with fiction in an unproductive, harmful way.\u00a0 Although she desires the rawness and clarity of violence from either herself or an external source, she cannot incorporate it into her life without either being too close or too far from it.\u00a0 Like in \u201cFull Fathom Five,\u201d she dies without the pain as a result of not being challenged creatively and she dies with the pain by allowing masochistic compulsion to consume her life.\u00a0 She seems incapable of moderating her obsessions and unable to distinguish myth from reality.<\/p>\n In her pre-Ariel<\/i> poetry, Plath walks along the shoreline, struggling creatively as a result of the distance from her subjects that comes from forcing form and content to meld as one rather than allowing her familiar sounds and contemporary, colloquial language to naturally weave images and content together in order to create a full experience and communicate emotion and meaning.\u00a0 In Ariel<\/i>, however, Plath finally allows her poetry to pour from her, unrestrained by tradition, perhaps most obviously in \u201cDaddy,\u201d the pinnacle of her work and the beginning of the third act of her master-narrative.\u00a0 Plath organizes \u201cDaddy\u201d by images and sounds, with cinquains that return repeatedly\u00a0to \u201coo\u201d-vowel assonance, begun with the first lines of the poem: \u201cYou do not do, you do not do\/any more, black shoe,\u201d and continuing with internal and ending rhymes of the same sound (1-2). \u00a0The overall effect is of a cooing nursery rhyme, even using words like \u201cgobbledygoo\u201d to emphasize the childlike simplicity; however, juxtaposed with the seemingly simplistic, straightforward language and somewhat-structured rhyme \u201cscheme\u201d is violence.<\/p>\n After setting up an image of submission to the dominant \u201cyou\u201d in the first image–the speaker being trapped \u201clike a foot,\u201d \u201cpoor and white\/Barely daring to breathe or Achoo,\u201d with the father as the \u201cblack shoe\u201d–she immediately reverses these roles with the first line of the second stanza: \u201cDaddy, I have had to kill you\u201d (1-6). \u00a0Then, Plath refers back to the father as \u201cmarble-heavy, a bag full of God,\u201d a \u201cGhastly statue with one gray toe\u201d that evokes the statue image from \u201cThe Colossus\u201d (8-9). \u00a0With her explanation that \u201cDaddy, I have had to kill you.\/You died before my time\u201d before this reference, however, Plath implies that the roles have been distinctly reversed (6-7). \u00a0While in \u201cThe Colossus\u201d the speaker is realizing that she cannot recover the father figure\u2019s remains, the speaker of Daddy says that she \u201cused to pray to recover you,\u201d with this desire firmly rooted in the past (14). \u00a0The statue of her father is not beautiful or even colossal in any way–it is only \u201cGhastly\u201d (9). \u00a0Similarly, Plath uses the language itself to challenge the father figure\u2019s godlike superiority with \u201cAch, du,\u201d German for the familiar \u201cAh, you,\u201d placing herself as his equal (15).<\/p>\n Throughout the poem, Plath jumps from image to image associatively, returning to those that are either contemporary or allude to Nazi Germany in order to emphasize the nature of the speaker\u2019s relationship with this father figure as one in which she is a child and he is the authoritative dictator. \u00a0The speaker rejects her father, recognizing his oppressive, abusive, Nazi-like behavior, calling his language \u201cobscene\u201d and saying that it is \u201cchuffing [her] off like a Jew,\u201d her perception of him transforming from \u201ca bag full of God\u201d to \u201ca swastika\u201d with a \u201cbrute heart\u201d.\u00a0 The speaker no longer focuses on one image of the father figure, whether he be a sea-god, a colossal statue, or a maestro of bees.\u00a0 Although she repeatedly returns to the images that evoke the Holocaust, she also incorporates a variety of the images from her meta-poem, or master narrative, such as the \u201chead in the freakish Atlantic\/Where it pours bean green over blue\/ In the waters off beautiful Nauset,\u201d the \u201cGhastly statue with one gray toe\/Big as a Friscoe seal,\u201d and the \u201cbag full of God\u201d (8-13).\u00a0 Instead of using an entire poem to fuse a parallel between the oppressive, superior figure and her various images, such as those used in \u201cFull Fathom Five,\u201d \u201cThe Colossus,\u201d and \u201cElectra on Azalea Path,\u201d Plath compresses the images to metaphors within only a few lines that are concise, contemporary, and jarring.\u00a0 Rather than restraining her desire for violence, Plath lashes out with simple yet alarming language, vindictively usurping the superior figure by applying the unforgiving title \u201cNazi\u201d to identify in her mind a cause for rebellion.<\/p>\n In \u201cDaddy,\u201d Plath\u2019s speaker compares her separation from the father figure as that of \u201ca Jew\u201d being sent to \u201cDachau, Auschiwtz, [and] Belsen,\u201d Nazi concentration camps (33). \u00a0This imposed relationship of victimizer and victimized results in the speaker \u201cbeg[inning] to talk like a Jew,\u201d thinking that she \u201cmay well be a Jew,\u201d and, later on, asserting that she \u201cmay be a bit of a Jew\u201d (34-35, 40). \u00a0Her insistence on being a Jew is derived from his, \u201cLuftwaffe, [his] gobbledygoo,\u201d or the terrifying military hold that this \u201cpanzer-man\u201d with the \u201cneat moustache\u201d and \u201cAryan eye, bright blue\u201d has over her.\u00a0 According to his article “The Boot in the Face : The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath,\u201d Al Strangeways analyzes the significance of Plath\u2019s use of Nazi and Holocaust imagery, explaining at one point that \u201cthe Nazi system express[es] an extreme form of the character structure which we have called \u2018authoritarian\u2019\u201d (Strangeways 372).\u00a0 By applying this extreme symbol of authoritarianism as a contrasting, antagonistically superior and harmful dictator to her own relationship with her father figure, Plath\u2019s speaker also suggests some form of dictatorial auteurism imposed upon her.<\/p>\n The master narrative does not merely tell the story of her oppression by an individual, or even the oppression and annihilation of millions of people by National Socialist Party supporters.\u00a0 Paralleled to the world of explicit content, of biography, and of form is the world of Plath\u2019s dampened, restrained creative process and poetic voice that has long been forced to adopt the same mannerisms and techniques of antiquity\u2014of the ebbing and flowing sea god, of the crumbling Colossus, and of the authoritarian Nazi.\u00a0 While Al Strangeways believes that Plath\u2019s approach to the Holocaust lacks depth, seeming to shallowly abuse the image of Nazis and Jews to satisfy her own, selfish desires, claiming that \u201cRather, Plath combines myth and history (Electra, vampirism, and voodoo rub shoulders with the Holocaust)\u201d in a manner that makes \u201cthe history of Nazi persecution of the Jews [appear] almost one- dimensional in comparison to the flexibility of her treatment of the poem’s mythic and psychoanalytic aspects\u201d (Strangeways 378).\u00a0 In actuality, this sequencing of associative images from myth, history, and the modern era emphasizes the emergence of Plath\u2019s strong, independent new voice as, in one fell swoop, she drives a \u201cstake\u201d through the \u201cfat black heart\u201d of the chokingly oppressive pressure to write like her predecessors, completing the second act of her master narrative and simultaneously beginning the third.<\/p>\n As Jahan Ramazani has argued, \u201cDaddy\u201d is a culmination of the internal conflict between \u201csolicitous love\u201d and \u201cdismissive aggression\u201d that destroys the construct of her father as an omnipotent god (1148). \u00a0With this destruction of the father figure, the speaker in \u201cDaddy\u201d not only rejects sentimentality, but also mimics it with the childlike language for the sole purpose of undermining his dominant role. \u00a0She juxtaposes the childlike with rage and violence in order to usurp the dead\u2019s aggressive power over her, exorcising all the elements of stereotypically female \u201cconnectedness\u201d in order to subvert the \u201cgargantuan,\u201d authoritarian image of him (Ramazani 1151-1153).\u00a0 Her purposeful use of childlike diction only strengthens the transition from dependent child to independent adult.<\/p>\n After the second \u201cO You,\u201d this time in English, as if calling on a perhaps disquieting muse, the tone shifts from fear of the \u201cpanzer-man\u201d to a proclamation of the father as \u201cNot God but a swastika\/so black no sky could squeak through\u201d (46-47). \u00a0From this point forward, the description of the father is not merely one of a crumbling, decaying dominator but one of a brutal, evil \u201cFascist\u201d (48). \u00a0She describes him as a \u201cbrute\u201d with a \u201cbrute\/Brute heart,\u201d pulling in the image of a \u201cblack shoe\u201d from the first stanza with his \u201cboot in the face\u201d of the woman who \u201cadores a Fascist.\u201d \u00a0Although he lacks a cleft foot, the father is \u201cno less a devil\u201d than another figure–a \u201cblack man who\/Bit [her] pretty red heart in two\u201d (55-56). \u00a0The speaker refers to her period of idolizing this father figure as entirely in the past, with \u201cI made a model of you,\/A man in black with a Meinkampf look\u201d (64-65). \u00a0Thus, she recognizes that this \u201cbrute\u201d is a creation of her own imagination or memory after having failed to \u201cdie\/And get back, back, back to you\u201d (59-60). \u00a0Even though she also created a love of self-torture, she decides that she is \u201cfinally through\u201d (68). \u00a0This proclamation delivers the content of the third act of Plath\u2019s master narrative: she is finally free and independent of the negative influence that has controlled and tortured her.<\/p>\n She is not like the women in \u201cFull Fathom Five,\u201d \u201cElectra on Azalea Path,\u201d or \u201cThe Colossus,\u201d who have no power to fully separate themselves from the father figure. \u00a0Instead, this speaker has \u201ckilled two [men]\u201d–the \u201cvampire\u201d who \u201cdrank [her] blood for a year\/Seven years…\u201d and him (71-74). \u00a0Because she\u2019s \u201cput a stake in [his] fat black heart,\u201d the speaker is finally victorious (76). \u00a0When she says \u201cDaddy, daddy, you bastard, I\u2019m through,\u201d Plath\u2019s speaker finally distinguishes herself as not only being separate from the two men but also identifies herself as an adult, or at least as having stepped beyond the childlike stage of cooing \u201coo\u201ds to call him a \u201cbastard\u201d and kill the idolized, glorified \u201cmodel\u201d so that she can stand alone and independent (80).\u00a0 Similarly, she has created an independent voice for herself.<\/p>\n Only by denying and rejecting the influence of traditional poetic form can Sylvia Plath free herself from the pressure to construct an unattainable poetic voice that belongs only in the patriarchy of antiquity.\u00a0 Although she recognizes and uses traditional allusions and certain traditional poetic conventions, the root of her genius lies in her manipulation of these forms so that they bear new meaning while referencing the tradition itself; consequently, her poetic style demonstrates a flagrant rejection of convention. \u00a0Her Ariel<\/i> poems shine with direct, contemporary language and dramatic, associative imagery; however, the true masterpiece of Plath poetic lifetime is not Ariel<\/i>, nor is it her mythologized biography.\u00a0 Her true masterpiece can be seen only in the master narrative threaded throughout her entire oeuvre, as she embodies modernism not with immediate perfection but with scattered fragments of images and emotions that must be pieced together in a voice that embodies her own culture as separate and distinct from history.\u00a0 As a middle-class American citizen who lives in the period after World War II, Plath cannot turn to the male poets who lived during times of progress and improvement.\u00a0 She develops a violent, harsh, bitingly witty voice that rejects poetic expectations just as she overthrows the oppressive father figure, demonstrating through the process of creating this voice the societal need to construct a new voice for a modern age.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Works Cited<\/p>\n Axelrod, Steven Gould, and Nan Dorsey. “The Drama of Creativity in Plath’s Early Poems.”<\/p>\n Pacific Coast Philology<\/i> 32.1 (1997): 76-86. Print.<\/p>\n Clark, Heather L. The grief of influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes<\/i>. Oxford: Oxford<\/p>\n University Press, 2011. Print.<\/p>\n Gill, Jo. The Cambridge introduction to Sylvia Plath<\/i>. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge<\/p>\n University Press, 2008. Print.<\/p>\n Ramazani, Jahan. “Daddy, I have had to Kill You: Plath, Rage, and the Modern Elegy.”<\/p>\n PMLA<\/i> 108.5 (1995): 1142-1156. Print.<\/p>\n Smith, Pamela A. “The Unitive Urge in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” The New England <\/i><\/p>\n Quarterly<\/i> 45.3 (1972): 323-339. Print.<\/p>\n Steiner, Nancy Hunter. A closer look at Ariel: a memory of Sylvia Plath<\/i>. [1st ed.] New York:<\/p>\n Harper’s Magazine Press, 1973. Print.<\/p>\n Strangeways, Al . “The Boot in the Face: The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of<\/p>\n Sylvia Plath.” Contemporary Literature<\/i> 7.3 (1996): 370-390. Print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u201cSylvia Plath\u2019s Master Narrative: Developing her Poetic Voice\u201d Chelsea Sokol tvb681@mocs.utc.edu ; (901) 831-7655 Seminar in a Major Figure: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes 11 February 2014 North Callahan Essay Prize Submission \u00a0\u00a0 Undeniably, Sylvia Plath\u2019s final book of poetry entitled Ariel, including the post-Ariel poems added to the work by her husband… <\/p>\n