Ariel - Sylvia Plath: an Analysis

Hey y'all Pez here. Sylvia Plath is the woman in discussion today; a 1960's poet who grapples with the tension of being an artist, mother, wife, and ultimately, a woman within a patriarchal world. It is both poignant and triumphant, though, that her poetry was powerful enough to transcend the limitations of domesticity that she, and almost all women, were confined in. Given that she tragically took her own life by sticking her head in an oven, it makes Ariel all the more pertinent for us, especially men like myself, to read, as we still live in a largely patriarchal society.

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The anaphora “In a [forest of frost]…in a [dawn]” gestures toward the paradoxical tensions that Plath’s women – being both artist and mother – must try to reconcile, wherein the sacrificial dynamic between artistic fertility and autonomous self is often complicated by a strong desire for both. Across Ariel, Plath seeks to explore the immense power that is hidden in the “dark, dark” corners of the 1960’s female mindscape, an ominous force that is bred in wake of male oppression. Yet, the “smiling woman” who can harness her agony through performance may birth a legacy that transcends both herself and the patriarchy, as Plath attempts to subvert the boundaries of traditional womanhood.

The rhythmically cumbersome “unintelligible syllables” that the Bee-Box emits, a self-describing arcane and overwhelming notion, captures the possibly identity-engulfing nature of introspection that Plath’s women struggle with. Ostensibly, the speaker’s thoughts are framed as innocuous in the first stanza – “clean wood box”, an organic, safe characterisation – and perhaps even playful, suggested through the strong rhyme “square…chair”. However, Plath immediately undercuts such feelings of ease with the trapped, stabbing assonance of “din in it.” implying that this comfort is short-lived and only present from afar; the end-stop here, terminating the light-hearted poetic momentum, demonstrates that there are distinct sinister energies in proximity to the box. So, the speaker begins to lose the control she once had in opening line of the poem – “I ordered”, the pronoun indicating volition – for the anaphora “I can’t…I can’t” reveals that patient introspection is a foreign and potentially perilous act, indicated through her lack of certainty. Perhaps, then, the speaker may only access the deeper layers of her psyche through the precarious bargaining of her essence, as she presses her “eye” – ‘I’ – directly against the threatening “grid”, the pun here gesturing toward this metaphorical negotiation. Similarly, there is also a pun in the titular “Bee-Box” – ‘Be’ – signifying that perhaps there are two halves to the speaker’s identity: the turbulent contents of the box, and the inquisitive narrator that is trying to reconcile the disassociation between two. As she further introspects, the malevolent aura of the box manifests itself in “African hands”, its connotations of slavery implying an anarchical desire – augmented by the cutting consonants in “black on black” – to usurp the entirety of the speaker’s identity, a reflection also found in the “million soldiers” who stampede the speaker in Cut. Indeed, the forces within the box prove too overwhelming for the narrator to grasp, the frenzied peppering of caesuras in “Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!” becoming a poetic symbol for the utterly debilitated mental space of the narrator, an overwhelmed entity that has failed to reconcile the discordancy with her other half. Yet, the steady rhythm and lack of caesura in “If I just…turned into a tree” curiously captures a disturbing sense of solace at the brink of effacement, where the narrator has accepted her fate and is passively allowing the “bees” to consume the entire identity of the speaker. So, then, Plath seems to lament that under the pressures of society, it is perhaps less painful for women to acquiesce to effacement as “sweet God”, the repeated pronoun “I” partially emblematic of the agency the speaker once had at in the first stanza, than to try and rebel against the dark empire that is the “Roman mob”.

And yet, through embracing those transgressive traits that “terrify?–” – the enjambment augmenting the defiant power such rhetorical question holds – the female artists who endure their suffering, thus succeeding in taming the violent contents of their ‘Bee-Box’, bear the potential to weaponize creativity. By which, Plath appreciates its potential to birth art and children that may transcend the patriarchy’s corrosive confines. There is a sense of sadistic gratification the speaker derives from her repulsive “sour breath”, for she dares her audience to “Peel off the napkin” to self-inflict such onto themselves, the dragged assonance in “O my enemy” gesturing toward this caustic, mocking humour that is rife even throughout the poem. Certainly, whilst this mockery may corroborate the reductive stereotypes the crowd may force upon her, the very fact that they “shove in to see/” her perform – the abrupt enjambment amplifying their aggressive eagerness to witness – is an emblem of the speaker’s triumph and control. Perhaps, she welcomes the piercing pain inflicted by the “peanut-crunching crowd”, demonstrated through the cutting consonants, as she knows that her endurance of such suffering is ultimately the artistic lifeblood behind her “big strip tease.”, such intentional use of eroticism further empowering the speaker. Indeed, whilst the strong end rhyme in “I have done it again. One year in every ten” connotes the cyclical nature of her performance, so too does it immortalise the speaker’s identity: just as she suffers eternally, so too does her artistic brilliance forever echo a powerful legacy, reflective of the powerful anaphora “echoes! Echoes” in Words. Similarly, the beautiful “love gift” of a child in Poppies in October allows the speaker to extend her legacy. Here, the clean slate of the child offers opportunity to write fresh cultural scripts upon one that is unmarred by the asphyxiating “carbon monoxides” – such suffocation magnified by the harsh consonant ‘x’ – of the patriarchy. Whilst it is bleak that the child must face the toxic ideologies of society like their mother, symbolised through the spirited plosives contrasting the cold, dragged assonance in the titular “Poppies in October”, there is hope and potential victory in them embodying and perpetuating this legacy. Plath celebrates this optimism, a hope that many women hold on to amidst a bleak world that is so hostile against them. So, then, although the speakers’ artistic plight is agonising, perhaps resulting in their “skin and bone” perishing, the art and children produced may be able to transcend the bounds of physical life, eternalising a defiant legacy in rebellion against an uncompassionate society.

But Plath complicates such optimism regarding motherhood, the anaphora “I wonder…I wonder” indicative of the unabating self-doubt that pervades the female psyche during pregnancy, one that provokes apprehension about the integrity of the mother’s inhabitants. The sepulchral imagery in “coffin of a midget” conjures an unsettling atmosphere, representing the supposed child in a grotesque fashion which illustrates a gloomy narrative of maternity that jars against the rosy, playful representations – “Clownlike…gilled like a fish” – present in You’re. Such a disquieting notion is also reflected poetically, the speaker’s confident declaration of the perfect rhyme “Square as a chair” awkwardly contrasts the clumsy pararhyme between “midget” and “din in it. So, the speaker becomes mentally distant from her child, a great irony where the mother is physically closest to her fetus but cannot comprehend the box’s “furious Latin”, thereby eliciting feelings of insecurity for part of her identity as mother. Thus, the speaker becomes unsure of whether she can properly fulfil the expectations and desires of her child – “honey”, of which she is “no source of” – while the rhetorical question “why should they turn on me?” further exacerbates her anxiety in motherhood, alluding to perhaps a primally hostile relationship between an unfulfilled child and herself. Poppies in October extends this notion of distressed internal questioning, where the speaker even becomes unsure of her identity overall in presence of a perhaps parasitic child. Indeed, there are hints of great beauty with regards to how a mother’s heart “blooms” to sustain the life of her child – the dragged assonance here connoting lulling comfort – but, simultaneously, the child is directly siphoning the mother’s lifeforce. And, the child was “utterly unasked for”, the piercing consonants emblematic of how motherhood and childbirth were forcefully imposed upon women, perhaps Plath’s wider condemnation of an era where women did not have autonomy in regards to motherhood, an idea bolstered by the modal verb in “…mouths should cry open”, implying expectation. Ultimately, the speaker is left in a state of complete mental turmoil where neither the identity of the child nor the mother is secured, conveyed through the wailed assonance in “O my god”. Therefore, whilst much of the speaker’s anxiety is rooted in speculative paranoia, where the child has not been given a chance to flourish, Plath laments that regardless of the legacy that children may carry, the pregnancy that is necessary for such to even have the possibility of occurring is uniquely debilitating. And, most tragically, it is a process that women did not both societally and biologically, have absolute autonomy over.