‘I do not fear it: I have been there’: Facing fear in Sylvia Plath Dr Rosie Lavan lavanro@tcd.ie

1. ‘I do not fear it: I have been there’: Facing fear in Sylvia Plath Dr Rosie Lavan lavanro@tcd.ie School of English Evening Lecture Series Trinity College 26 February 2019

2. I let her go. I let her go Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery. How your bad dreams possess and endow me. 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: All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart? I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches?— Its snaky acids hiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill. From Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 27-8. Elm I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there. Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, Echoing, echoing. Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? This is rain now, this big hush, And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic. I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. Scorched to the root My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires. Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs. A wind of such violence Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek. The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

3. Court Green, North Tawton, Devon.

4. I am made breathless by emotional vigor that is crafted by the writer to become calm, controlled, directed, and clear in its message. Frieda Hughes on Ariel, in Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, ‘P.S.’ section, 5. *** She had an instant special pass to the centre [. . .] This lightning pass through all the walls of the maze was her real genius. Instant confrontation with the most central, unacceptable things. Ted Hughes, introduction to Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (London: Faber, 1977), 15.

5. From ‘Lady Lazarus’ The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot – The big strip tease. [. . .] There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart – It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. From Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, 14, 15.

6. James Dean, photographed by Dennis Stock (Magnum Photos)

7. The speaker [of ‘Lady Lazarus’] is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman. Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, 196.

8. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs [. . .] I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers – goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help imagining what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world. [. . .] I’d stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of things I would never have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on [. . .] Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber, 1966), 1, 12.

9. This terse account of an American girl’s breakdown and treatment gains its considerable power from an objectivity that it extraordinary considering the nature of the material. Sylvia Plath’s attention had the quality of ruthlessness, and here—even more perhaps than in her last poems—imagery and rhetoric is [sic] disciplined by an unwinking intelligence. Stephen Wall (1966), qtd. in Linda W. Wagner ed., Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1988), 100.

10. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play. But the person in the mirror was paralysed and too stupid to do a thing. *** At first I didn’t see what the trouble was. It wasn’t a mirror at all, but a picture. You couldn’t tell whether the person in the picture was a man or a woman, because their hair was shaved off and sprouted in bristly chicken-feather tufts all over their head. One side of the person’s face was purple, and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow. The person’s mouth was pale brown, with a rose-coloured sore at either corner. The most startling thing about the face was its supernatural conglomeration of bright colours. I smiled. The mouth in the mirror cracked into a grin. A minute after the crash another nurse ran in. [. . .] Anybody could drop a mirror, I didn’t see why they should get so stirred up. Plath, The Bell Jar, 152, 188.

11. [. . .] when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right almost diagonally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew. Plath, The Bell Jar, 125.

12. What she presents us with [. . .] is not only the difference of writing from the person who produces it, but also the division internal to language, the difference of writing from itself. It is then all the more striking that so many critics have felt it incumbent upon themselves to produce a unified version of Plath as a writer and as a woman, as if that particular form of fragmentation or indirect representation were something which, through the completion of their own analysis of her, they could somehow repair. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 2nd edn. (London: Virago, 1996), 5. Sylvia Plath, ‘Triple-Face Portrait’ (1950-51)

13. Among the Narcissi Spry, wry, gray as these March sticks, Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi. He is recuperating from something on the lung. The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing: It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks. There is a dignity to this; there is a formality— The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending. They bow and stand: they suffer such attacks! And the octogenarian loves the little flocks. He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing. The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely. Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber, 1981), 190.