W2A-007 Sylvia Plath-0.txt
SYLVIA PLATH: THE DOUBLE IN THE WOMAN AND THE USE OF IT IN HER WORK

Bernadette Fallon University College Galway

Abstract

My contribution to this publication first challenges the widely held opinion that Sylvia Plath was concerned only with self destruction in her work. It proposes the notion that the driving force in her poetry and prose is an affirmative, recreative one which overcomes male dominance in life and literature. Since Plath's work is based almost exclusively on autobiography, it is vital to take a look at the circumstances of the life which shaped the work. Therefore an outline of her life is presented, with an emphasis on my main theme in the chapter, i.e. the doubles and masks in Plath's life. This use of doubles in the life is next extended to her novel The Bell Jar and her last collection of poetry Ariel, where the doubles are overcome and ultimately the positive voice emerges supreme over the negative.

Sylvia Plath is known to many only as a cult figure who achieved her status with her suicide in February 1963. Looked at in this light it is inevitable that her poems are seen as self destructive death wishes and suicidal ravings of a woman determined to die. This is how Ariel, her last volume of poems written in the months before she died, is usually seen. Critics have observed that the circumstances of her death have been the main contributing factor in seeing her life and work as being morbidly attracted to her death.

It is true to say that some of the poems in this collection are quite depressing and death-related in themselves. Obviously poems written in the weeks immediately preceding her death reflect her suicidal tendencies at that time. But the strength of the book, and its main driving force comes from the "October" poems. Written in October 1963, they are the product of early morning writing sessions after her separation from husband, poet Ted Hughes.

These poems are positive affirmations of her new found independence. She had overcome her depression at the initial break up and had found a positive voice. They are poems of strength and rebirth. She was elated by them herself and although people do interpret them as destructive because of the references to death, it is not death as destruction that she is concerned with. Instead it is the death of the self which is necessary to preceded resurrection in a new recreated form. As she comments in one such poem, "Lady Lazarus," the dying and destruction are easy, it is the come-back and resurrection which are hard. But ultimately it is that resurrection which Ariel concerns itself with and this is the driving force of the collection.

Although Plath had been writing, both poetry and prose, since she was very young, her earlier style is very artificial and shallow. She aimed towards a commercial market, publishing pieces in magazines for payment - therefore her style varied to suit each particular magazine. Only in later years did she find an authentic voice (acknowledged also by Ted Hughes in his introduction to her Journals. Hence her appreciated work is not very extensive. Besides her collections of poetry she published a novel, The Bell Jar, in 1963, just before her death. This novel is famous for its detached, ironic account of her first breakdown and suicide attempt when she was twenty. Although written in a fictionalized form, almost all of the characters and incidents in it are real.

Her work is based almost exclusively on autobiography and familiarising ourselves with the facts of her life gives us a huge insight into her work. Aspects of her personality crop up constantly in her work - the most notable has to be the use of doubles.

In reading her journals, her poetry, her prose and reading various accounts of her life, it is easy to become bewildered by the array of personalities and conflicting doubles that one has to sift through to find the real Plath. There are so many different faces presented - the calm confident high achiever versus the scared berating voice of the journals; the Sylvia who loved life to the full versus the destructive suicidal case; the longing to be an ordinary housewife and mother versus longing to be committed only to her art.

So we can see that the doubles and conflicting selves are the real issue of Plath. This is the theme I wish to discuss, the double in the woman and the use of it in her work. In doing so I will take examples from her life, her novel The Bell Jar and her final poetry collection Ariel.

Sylvia Plath was born October 27, 1932. As the oldest child she was the centre of attention, particularly as her only brother Warren was a sickly boy. Her father Otto Plath insisted that his daughter be treated as a unique personality and she was encouraged to achieve perfection in everything she did. This is reflected later on in her life when she experienced severe mental distress if she could not live up to the high standards she set for herself.

In 1940 Otto Plath died after a long illness, leaving behind an eight year old daughter who had such h a strong emotional reaction to his death that it haunted her throughout the rest of her life. It gave her both material for her poems and at least one reason for her first suicide attempt. Although she was later to remark to friends in college that her father died while she still thought he was God, her attitude to him is not always this positive. At times she hates him for the all-encompassing hold he has on her that she cannot shake off - the Electra complex. Her attitudes to her father are traced and overcome in "Daddy."

The strange conflicting doubles that are so much a part of Sylvia become easier to detect once she leaves home for college in September 1950. In her letters home we see a cheerful optimistic Sylvia, displaying almost childlike excitement and loving everything. But this does not match with the tortured alienated voice of the journals as she constantly worried that her achievements were not good enough. Her desire to succeed meant that she studied constantly and kept to a rigid schedule. This rigid stance that she maintained in everything was necessary for her to contain the doubt ridden alienated Sylvia behind the calm smiling mask of the all round American girl. The evidence from her years at Smith College show these constant fluctuations of mood from ecstatic highs to depressing lows.

At the end of her third year in Smith she spent the month of July guest-editing an important American magazine along with 19 other students. Her experiences there are documented almost exactly as they happened in the first part of the The Bell Jar. She often received criticism from her managing editor and this shook her confidence immensely. It was the beginning of a downward spiral to her attempted suicide later in the summer.

The reasons for this attempt are apparently rather diverse. The atmosphere at home, and particularly her relationship with her mother during that summer of '53, is presented as somewhat stifling. This relationship appears very much the same love/hate one that she had with her father. Sylvia resented all the sacrifices her mother had made for her and felt that the burden of debt and gratitude it placed on her was overpowering.

Along with this resentment was her own sense of failure, loss of belief in her own self worth and her conviction that she was going mad. The account of the actual attempt in The Bell Jar is very poetic and is a further extension of the calm, often humorous way that she presents her whole breakdown experience. Again it is evidence of the double in Plath.

She returned to Smith College after Christmas, having spent the first part of the academic year recovering. She completed the second half of that year and returned in September for her final one. Her final year thesis is interesting in the light of Sylvia's own personality - it was a study of the literary doubles in Dostoyevsky.

After graduation she received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Cambridge, England. It was here that she met Ted Hughes and married him after an acquaintance of only five months. During this time she is happy in her letters home - they are filled with optimism and plans for the future. It can be seen however that Plath's feelings of strength are only evident in times of happiness when things were going well. She could not carry her growth into the low points - always floundering when a bad patch hit.

After her graduation from Cambridge the couple moved to America where Sylvia took up a teaching post in Smith. She quickly became frustrated with the job, however, as it left no time for the writing which was her main interest. So it was no surprise that she left Smith at the end of a year. She and Ted then devoted themselves to writing full time.

They moved back to England a year later where their first daughter Frieda was born in April 1960. Both this and the demands of their writing posed too many problems in a small London flat so in 1961 they moved to Devon. Although life here is painted in idyllic scenes at first by Sylvia, the marriage was in trouble by the following year and Ted Hughes finally moved away from his wife and (by now) two children in October 1962. Sylvia now rejects the country life she has previously adored and wishes to find sanity in London, away from this "cow life" that she says is slowly suffocating her. Her letters at the time are quite wild with plans, as if she was desperately trying to grasp something she could live for.

Because she could not sleep, a friend suggested that the write poems early in the morning. She followed this advice and out of it came the "October" poems. In these she rises above all the dependencies. These are interesting to look at especially for their feminist assertiveness but also for the part they play in her own personal struggle.

Feminists point out that self sacrifice on the part of the female is expected by society. It is taken for granted that it is right that women should sacrifice themselves to allow men to pursue their goals in life. Therefore the destruction of the stereotypical woman is necessary for the rebirth of the self in a new recreated form. This destruction and rebirth is away of overcoming patriarchy for the female. This is a central concern of the feminist movement. A destruction of the conventional social order, the male centred view of the world is necessary.

Sylvia Plath achieves this freedom from male domination, first in The Bell Jar by overcoming female stereotypical roles offered to her in the guise of various "doubles" for own personality and by doing so rejecting the niche that society has carved for her. This theme is developed further in Ariel where recreation is achieved in powerful new female forms.

In The Bell Jar we find interesting constructions of Plath's personality. Esther Greenwood, the heroine, is Sylvia. The other females in the book are all doubles for herself. There is Doreen, the bad side of Esther, who is quite lose with men, drinks a lot and is not worried about hard work. There is Betsy, the good girl representation, the homemaker personality of Esther. She is sweet and innocent, only wanting a nice husband and adorable children from life. The career choices are presented by Jay Cee, Esther's managing editor on the magazine, and the Russian interpreter. These doubles are not very attractive as women however, suggesting the disapproving eye society casts on women who choose traditionally male paths in life. The voice of society comes through in Mrs Willard and Mrs Greenwood, both warning Esther of the importance of a girl remaining a virgin for her husband.

This opposition of virginal purity versus sexual permissiveness is a main preoccupation in the novel. Esther wonders if she should remain pure for her husband or rush out to sleep with people just for the experience. She is dismayed at a society which accepts double standards as norm - expecting female purity while turning a blind eye to male sexual activities outside of marriage. It is represented in the way she builds up resentment towards her boyfriend Buddy after he had an affair with a waitress. She is not annoyed so much by his unfaithfulness to her but by his double standards - constantly pretending to be a virgin and expecting her to remain one also.

Here her mother is the voice of society or Esther's own common sense, pointing out the dangers of pregnancy. She gives Esther an article entitled "In Defence of Chastity,", basically saying that even if a man is not a virgin at marriage he will expect his wife to be one. Double standards have in this way been legitimised by society.

Esthers'doubles represent different sides of the purity/impurity debate - the choices are Betsy/Doreen polarities. Or should she turn pseudo-male like Jay Cee and the Russian interpreter? In fact she rejects all of the alternatives presented in the guise of doubles and instead undergoes a sexual liberation. Now she becomes the strong one in male/female relationships - previously deciding that she would "let" Constantin seduce her, she now meets Irwin and "decides to seduce him." Similarly when Buddy Willard visits her at the hospital it is she who digs his car out of the snowdrift.

As the doubles are created at the beginning of The Bell Jar, they are transcended by the end. Ariel goes on to achieve final and complete liberation from Plath's conflicting doubles. In her best poems she achieves this by freeing herself from male dependence. They are written during her most difficult period but she exteriorises inner feelings to achieve a universalised expression of freedom and finds her true poetic voice, free at last of the masks.

The Ariel poems contain many that are depressing in themselves. As it is published it ends on notes of despair and tragic finality - but this was not Plath's wish. Her intended arrangement began with the word "love" and ended with the word "Spring" - a movement through affirmation to destruction, then resurrection. It is the resurrection which I am concerned with. This should be, as Plath intended, the overall tone of the book. The memorable poems are those in which the self emerges triumphant and victorious, particularly in "Ariel" itself, "Lady Lazarus," "Daddy" and the "Bee" poems.

The best example we can take here is "Lady Lazarus." The very name Lazarus conjures up images of rebirth. The female here is destroyed, to achieve rebirth in a powerfully independent form - "eating man like air." Her death takes place in the poem but it is the death necessary to precede resurrection. Therefore it is not a suicidal death wish but a creative act of liberation.

The old self also dissolves in "Ariel" and "Fever 103." Strains of the previous impurity question arise in "Fever 103" where the woman here is purged and purified. Her old selves dissolve and she is pure and virginal at the end of the poem. In "Ariel" the woman and the stallion fuse for form one and the old self is destroyed. She is now the powerful one, she is the arrow, the shaping force of her own life.

"Daddy" is certainly an optimistic note in finally ridding herself of male domination. She shakes free of her father's shadow, that Godlike presence in her life, which took its form first in her father's expectations for her, then in his memory and finally materialised again in a human shape - that of Ted Hughes (she confided to her mother that Ted filled the huge hole that she felt in not having a father). In the poem the husband and father are merged and overcome. The fact that she seems to have shaken off her father mentally by cutting his memory off at the root, and physically in her separation from Hughes, is certainly an experience of rebirth for her.

One of her great achievements is that she does not deny her femininity, as some of her doubles have done, to achieve her liberation. In overcoming male domination she creates new female forms through which to achieve expression, e.g. lioness, queen bee, Lady Lazarus.

Sylvia Plath died by her own hand in February 1963. Finally the conflicts became too much for her, the masks she had employed as supports had failed her. But, as I have pointed out, she achieved freedom and rebirth in life while she lived. This is what we should remember her for, this is her legacy.
