Transforming the Law of One: Anne Sexton and Sylvia

Plath from a Kristevan Perspective

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

By

Areen Ghazi Khalifeh

School of Arts, Brunel University

November 2010

ii

Abstract
A recent trend in the study of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath often dissociates
Confessional poetry from the subject of the writer and her biography, claiming that the
artist is in full control of her work and that her art does not have nave mimetic qualities.
However, this study proposes that subjective attributes, namely negativity and abjection,
enable a powerful transformative dialectic. Specifically, it demonstrates that an emphasis
on the subjective can help manifest the process of transgressing the law of One. The law of
One asserts a patriarchal, monotheistic law as a social closed system and can be opposed to
the bodily drives and its open dynamism. This project asserts that unique, creative voices
are derived from that which is individual and personal and thus, readings of Confessional
poetry are in fact best served by acknowledgment of the subjective.
In order to stress the subject of the artist in Confessionalism, this study employed a
psychoanalytical Kristevan approach. This enables consideration of the subject not only in
terms of the straightforward narration of her life, but also in relation to her poetic language
and the process of creativity where instinctual drives are at work. This study further applies
a feminist reading to the subjects poetic language and its ability to transgress the law, not
necessarily in the political, macrocosmic sense of the word, but rather on the microcosmic,
subjective level.
Although Sexton and Plath possess similar biographies, their work does not have
the same artistic value in terms of transformative capabilities. Transformation here
signifies transgressing of the unity of the subject and of the authoritative father, the other
within, who has prohibitive social and linguistic powers. Plath, Kristevas the deadmost,
successfully confronts the unity of the law, releasing the death drive through anger.
Moreover, Plaths psychic borders are more fluid because of her ability to identify with the

iii

pre-Oedipal mother. This unsettling subject is identified by shifts in texts marked by

renewal, transgression, and jouissance. Unlike Sexton, Plath is able to achieve
transformation as she oscillates masochistically between the inside and the outside of
her psychic borders, and between the symbolic and the semiotic. Furthermore, this enables
Plath to develop the unique Siren Voice of the Other.
In comparison, Sexton, the dead/less, evades any confrontation with the maternal
and the performance of death in her poetry. Her case is further complicated by the
discovery of a second mother. As a result, passivity becomes a main characteristic of her
work. This passivity remains until the maternal abject bursts in her text and she reacts to
this by performing cleansing rituals, and gravitating toward a symbolic father. Without the
dynamism of transgression, Sextons work is heterogeneous but does not achieve ultimate
transformation and jouissance.
Confessional poetry, in this sense, takes on a new dimension. The life stories of the
poets become important not for their pejorative, pathological aspects that focus on
narrative mimesis, but rather for their manifestation as an aesthetic process. The subject of
the writer becomes important as an aesthetic identity in the poems, which are rooted in real
life. The main concern then becomes the aesthetic transformative dialectic between the
semiotic and the symbolic in her work of art.

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Contents
Abbreviations.......vi
Introduction...1
I. Overview....1
II. Theoretical Background11
A. Kristeva: General Perspective.11
B. Criticism of Kristevas Feminist Theory.....15
C. Kristeva and the Socio-biographical...19
D. Different Speaking Subjects...............................................................................22

III. Kristeva, Sexton, and Plath.28

IV. Method and Outline.37
Chapter 1: Sexton, the Ouroboros ........40
1.1 Law of One: Starting with the Father..40
1.2 The Mother In Between...49
Chapter 2: Geometry and Abjection..55
2.1 Establishing Borders (Shields).55
2.2 Houses and Rooms...67
2.3 Proper Dolls and Holes.72
2.4 Windows and Other Barriers78
2.5 Borders in Myth and Fairytale..94
2.6 Outside Shields.99
Chapter 3: The Secret Within103
3.1 A Second Mother103
3.2 The Burst of the Abject..113
3.3 Purification Rituals.....130
Chapter 4: Hegira to the Name of the Father..140
4.1 Dying Whole...140
4.2 The Dead/less...148

Chapter 5: Plath the Pharmakos (Scapegoat)...............................................................159

5.1 Pharmakos to the Father..159
5.2 Pharmakos, Outside in Nature.....169
5.3 The Appearance of a Face (an otherness)181
Chapter 6: Subversive Heterogeneity192
6.1 Daddy, the Nazi . . . Mummy, Medusa192
6.2 The Siren Voice of the Other...205
6.3 Back Again From Medusa to Daddy210
6.4 Fragmentation of Time.215
Chapter 7: The Deadmost...226
7.1 Burning229
7.2 Cannibalism.234
7.3 Killing and Shedding Blood244
7.4 Veils251
Chapter 8: Last Confrontation......266
Chapter 9: Sexton and Plath..275
Conclusion: .. ..284
Notes.291
Works Cited.309

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Abbreviations
ASCP

Anne Sexton: The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton,

1981.

CP

Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London:

Faber, 1981.

The Journals

The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962. Ed. Karen V. Kukil.

London: Faber, 2000.

Johnny Panic

Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and

Other Prose Writings. 2nd ed. London: Faber, 1979.

Letters

Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Ed. Linda Gray

Sexton and Lois Ames. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Letters Home

Sylvia Plath, Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963.

Ed. Aurelia Schober Plath. 1st ed. New York: Harper &
Row, 1975.

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Acknowledgment

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Sean Gaston,

whose encouragement, guidance, wide knowledge and constructive criticism while I was
writing this thesis enabled me to develop an understanding of the subject. I am also heartily
thankful to my second supervisor, Mr. David Fulton, for his continuous support,
cooperation, patience and sound advice.
My deepest love and respect goes to my husband, Akram Mahmoud, who believed
in me and cared for our four girls in addition to his demanding job while I was away from
home for research. My love goes also to my daughters, Maya, Meera, Yara, and Tala who
were patient when I was not there for them. Moreover, I would like to thank my parents,
in-laws and all the other members of my family who supported me and helped take care of
my children.
I would also like o to thank Dr. Jessica Cox, Dr. Myrna Nadir, Emma Filtness, Alex
Osmond and everyone who has helped with her or his insightful comments. Lastly, but
most importantly, I am grateful to Philadelphia University in Jordan for sponsoring my
project.

Introduction
I.

Overview
An examination of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath from a Kristevan perspective will

help to establish their different psychological positions in life and in their poetry.
According to Kristeva, the subjectivity of the poet in her work of art is not discarded. On
the contrary, the instinctual drives released in the poets psyche lead to poetic creation and
transgression of the law of One,1 which is the patriarchal, monotheistic law as a social
closed system.
M.L. Rosenthal first coined the term Confessional poetry in 1959. At that time,
he used the term to describe a new poetry which, he believed, was therapeutic and
autobiographical as it put the speaker himself at the centre of the poem in such a way as to
make his psychological vulnerability and shame an embodiment of his civilization (69).
This definition was advocated by many critics. A. R. Jones, for example, described the
voice of Confessional poetry as the naked ego (30). In this sense, such poetry
constitutes a break from formalist, impersonal verse (Gill, Anne Sexton 10). Because of
what Hoffman views as the limited and pejorative sense of the term (687), especially
in the light of the high incidence of suicide among the Confessionalists, it has become
common practice to avoid associating this poetry with the subject of the artist. Rather, they
objectively studied the instability and the uncertainty of language, as well as the
indeterminacy of subjectivity removed from the subject of the artist who remains in control
of the work by employing deliberate literary strategy (Gill, Anne Sexton 11). This was
done under the pretext that in following the psychological claims of the traditional
characteristics of Confessional poetry one accepts the nave mimetic qualities of literature
and the transparency of language (Gill, Anne Sexton 15). However, those critics who
divorced the artist from her art in order not to fall into the trap of conventional

Confessional criticism, conferred a humanist intellect on the writer, or a holistic being, a

unified consciousness, and an integrated ego (Wright 409). Though the subject of the
poems they analyse is seen as part of the evolution of post-humanist thought, it seems that
this unified ego is not. In this sense, they treat the writer as a self who uses language to
convey ideas and means and intends what she says rather than a subject who is not
fully aware of all the phenomena that shape her (McAfee 1-2).
Although some of the studies that ignore the subject of the writer and her biography
are enriching, others fall into the trap of abstraction. For example, in his study of Anne
Sextons work, McGowan abandons the biographical approach altogether. Reiterating
Eliots famous doctrine of the impersonal,2 McGowan discards what he describes as the
selfishly solipsistic exercise (xi) to focus on the phenomenon of writing poetry as a
laboratory within language (viii). He contends that Sexton, along with the Middle
Generation poets, formed voices on issues including depression, psychosis, and trauma,
which, he suggests, preoccupied the American psyche but never the poets psyche (viii).
He dissects some of Sextons poems by applying different philosophical approaches, but it
could also be argued that what helps him in showing the dialectic of these poems is the
inherent contradiction in language itself, especially poetic language removed from any
constrictions in the poets life.
McGowan concedes that in his examination of Sextons work, he chose only a few
poems. In other words, he ignored significant aspects of Sextons life for the sake of
expanding some ideas in relation to her minor work. In his study, Sexton appears to be a
philosopher rather than a poet, let alone a human being who has experienced a traumatic
life. In addition, he claims that to study the personal grief of these poets means to nullify
the effect and impact that their poetic works had on the creation of new American poetries
(viii). With such an approach, subjectivity begins to look like an abject element that should
be abandoned. But for whose benefit?

The trend of looking at Plaths poetry objectively was initiated by Bassnett. Many
other studies continued to give Plath complete control over her work. For instance, Tracy
Brain, following in the steps of Markey, is concerned with environment, consumerism and
other cultural and political issues. However, Brains argument against biography as a
whole is suspect:
Plaths writing is sane in its argument and subject matter. Insistently, the
writing concerns itself with real political and material issues, with definite
situations [...]. Second, the writing is sane in so far as it is controlled,
methodical, and carefully wrought a circumstance to which Plaths
manuscripts in the archives testify. Both of these senses of sanity are the
very opposite of the myth of Sylvia Plath as mad, depressed and pouring out
her distress in an ink of blood. (37)
Implicitly, this argument divides not only Plaths work, but also her critical interpretations,
into two categories: sane and insane. This distinction is further articulated by Broe: Critics
have split between the speculative and the biographical; the craft followers and the cult
devotees; the mythmakers and the demythologists; those Gradgrindians who praise the
cast-iron discipline of her prosody and the necrophiliacs who probe the poems for
sufficient pain and suffering to require a deadly consummation (ix). According to these
critics, writing ones subjectivity and its trauma, and not the real material issues,
becomes insanity. To defend Plath one should strip her of her feelings and equip her only
with intellect. The question that arises here is whether poetry, like Plaths manuscripts in
the archives, should be sane (Brain 37). Moreover, do violence and blood not exist in
Plaths work, or should one close ones eyes on the insanity and see only the sane
things?
Many other works take a similarly objective approach. Strangeways stresses the
political element in Plaths work and emphasizes that Plath is the agent of her
psychoanalytic discourse. In Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Kroll
underscores the universality of Plaths poetry and mythologizes her life. Broe, Annas, and
Britzolakis also focus upon the self-reflexivity of the poets writing. However, the latter

admits that Plaths text can never be entirely disentangled from the narrative of her life
and death (Sylvia Plath 8). These studies repudiate what they view as an uninhibited
reading, dependent on biography, although the counter concern is that they ignore the
poets subjectivity, her expression of personal suffering. Moreover, it can be said that
studying poets beyond the personal might run contrary to their own intention. For example,
Sexton insists in an interview with Harry Moore: my poetry is very personal. In fact, she
goes further: Any public poem I have ever written, that wasnt personal, was usually a
failure (No Evil Star 50). Almost all of the studies which resist the personal in Plath quote
her famous comment in a BBC interview:
I think my poems come immediately out of the sensuous and emotional
experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries
from the heart that are informed by nothing except, you know, a needle or
knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and
manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being
tortured, this sort of experience; and one should be able to manipulate these
experiences with an informed and intelligent mind. (Orr 169)

While Plath is trying to diminish the role of personal anguish, the violent words reveal that
the larger things, the bigger things also hide suffering (Orr 170). All traces of
consciousness cannot be erased from Plaths work, but the personal must also be
emphasized.
It can be argued that in order to guarantee a concentration on the poets
singularity and subjectivity a turn towards psychoanalysis from a Kristevan perspective
becomes necessary. Kristeva relates the subject of the artist to her work of art. In other
words, Kristeva connects the poetry to the destiny of the writer, literally her suicide.
Similar pathological diagnoses of poets are given by, for example, David Holbrook, in
Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence, where he dubs Plath as clinically schizoid. He regards
her as having false maleness and promoting irrationality and paranoia (178, 246).
Furthermore, Butscher, in Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness, views Plaths work as a
reflection of her neurosis. However, to follow a psychoanalytic approach does not mean

only trying to understand the reason for the poets suicide, as Schwartz and Bollas claim:
to understand her suicide, we need to understand her work and life as unity (180). For
Kristeva, poetry does not follow mimesis in the conventional sense. Poetry is not simply a
mirror that reflects reality, but rather a cave of mirrors where subject and words are in
process and where there is a possibility for transformation: the subject does not suppress
her instinctual drives and thus is an unsettling identity, allowing the thetic (the symbolic)
to be breached (Kristeva, Revolution 57-61). Therefore the focus on the personal and the
biographical here does not mean a simple narrative of the life of the poet, but also
encompasses the signifying process. In other words, the evolution of the subject is
associated with the evolution of language.
In this sense, psychoanalysis seeks to understand not suicide, but rather the
subjects dialectic and the change that she can (as in the case of Plath) or cannot (as in the
case of Sexton) achieve in her work. This form of psychoanalysis preserves the singularity
among the poets labelled as Confessional. Moreover, psychoanalysis examines the
relationship between the poet and her poetic practice, this being what Stephen Spender
calls,

an

effect

of

controlled

uncontrolledness

where

consciousness

and

unconsciousness meet or rather are at odds (200, 199). This means that the poetry is not
necessarily seen as a race to the grave, but as language where instinctual drives are at
work. There might be consequences due to the release of these drives, but it is the process
that is of central interest. For example, Steven Gould Axelrods Sylvia Plath: The Wound
and the Cure of Words is a psychoanalytic study which focuses on both the poet and her
language rather than on her suicide. Moreover, Diana Hume Georges Oedipus Anne: The
Poetry of Anne Sexton is a feminist psychoanalytic study that shows balance in discussing
the poet and her poetry. The present study attempts a similar balance, using a
poststructuralist Kristevan approach and focusing on the personal, in its real and symbolic
sense, and its relation to poetic language and its instability.

In terms of psychoanalysis, instinctual drives, mainly the death drive, may bring
transformation and liberation (as in the case of Plath) which are of particular concern to
feminists. Many studies, especially those written by American authors, view her as a
victim of male, social, and historical oppression. For example, in the works of Annas,
Shook and Ferrier, Plath was regarded as a victim of the fifties and its ideology of the
family (Ferrier 215). In contrast, other feminists, such as Bundtzen in Plaths
Incarnation: Woman and the Creative Process, do not view Plath as a victim, but rather as
a poet liberating herself from patriarchal oppression through her writing (256). The
perspective of this study is that Plath was able to make a change on a psychic level only.
Moreover, to transform the law of the father can never be a total triumph since it threatens
the poets identity.
In comparison, Middlebrook and George in their introduction to Sexton: Selected
Criticism declare that almost all of the essays in the book are, despite their different
approaches, essentially feminist (xi). Sexton is interpreted by feminists primarily on the
basis of her extensive use of the womans body. In fact, some critics consider Sextons
biological material (talking about her breasts, her uterus, her abortion, her vagina,
menstruation, adultery, drug addiction, etc.) as distinguishing her from Plath by
demonstrating a stark contrast with patriarchal discourse. Ostriker, for example, although
deliberately pointing out that Sexton is not a fine artist (That Story 253), insists that:
Far more than Plath, Sexton challenges our residual certainties that the life of the
body should be private and not public, and that women especially should be seen
and not heard, except among each other, talking about their messy anatomies. We
believe, I think, that civilization will fall if it is otherwise. (252)
However, it can be argued that Sextons body poems are more an indictment of the self
than a tribute since they do not help to transform her relation to the father-figure. They
mostly show passivity and if they show power, it is only sexual power over men (H.
Norton 172). Liz Hankins comments on these body poems as follows:
In the process of defining herself, Mrs. Sexton comes to regard the female
body as an object which, she feels, is somehow owed to men. She, however

uneasily, comes to define herself by her sexual relationships with men and
by the extent to which her body is offered and used as a sacrifice. (515)
Helen Vendler, in The Music of What Happens, does not view Sextons biological
writing in any sense as innovative (301). She argues, however, that the difference in this
poetry lies in naming the occasion of the poem. Moreover, Vendler claims it is the feeling
of these biological acts and not the acts themselves that are of interest. For example,
masturbatory fantasy, she explains, has taken many forms in literature although it is not
explicitly named. This theory has strong validity. Plaths body, in contrast, is seen as an
emblem of pain and mutilation (Ostriker, That Story 251). However, this disintegrated
body, one can argue, is the sign of negativity that creates transformation. As Jacqueline
Rose has pointed out, it is a body [that] can be called feminine to the precise degree that it
flouts the rigidity (the masculinity) of the requisite forms of literary cohesion and control
(Haunting 28). Consequently, this study is not only interested in the biological sex of a
person, but also in the position that the subject takes up in language (in terms of either
identifying with the father or the mother), which determines her revolutionary potential.
The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that transgressing the law of One begins
in the personal. To achieve this, the study compares Sexton and Plath in terms of two
subjective attributes: negativity (the release of the death drive in the form of anger) and
abjection (the fluidity of psychic borders). It proposes that the more negativity, and the
more movement between the psychic borders that is, between inside and outside and
between a father and a mother the more the poet is able to transgress the law of One as
well as to create a unique voice.
Sexton and Plath have been compared by critics for several reasons. First, both
were classified as Confessional poets, along with Robert Lowell and others, because they
exposed intimate personal emotions in their poetry. Second, both writers were
contemporaries and indeed friends. Their brief but intense friendship, as David Trinidad
describes it, influenced their work mutually (29). In her memorial essay written after

Plaths suicide, The Bar Fly Ought to Sing, Sexton explains that she had known Plath
since they lived in the same town, but only had the chance to meet her relatively late: I
knew her for a while in Boston. We did grow up in the same suburban town, Wellesley,
Massachusetts, but she was about four years behind me and we never met (6). The first
meeting that established their friendship took place in Lowells poetry class at Boston
University. This was, Sexton notes, after Plath was married to Ted Hughes. Sexton
describes how, after Lowells class, they, along with George Starbuck, would
pile into the front seat of my old Ford and I would drive quickly through the
traffic to, or near, the Ritz. I would always park illegally in a LOADING
ONLY ZONE, telling them gaily, Its okay, because we are only going to
get loaded! Off wed go, each on Georges arm, into the Ritz and drink
three or four or two martinis. George even has a line about this in his first
book of poems, Bone Thoughts. He wrote, I weave with two sweet ladies
out of The Ritz. Sylvia and I, such sleep mongers, such death mongers,
were those two sweet ladies. (7)
The third and probably the most important factor of the Sexton-Plath dyad is that
both writers were obsessed with death. They both had breakdowns and eventually
committed suicide. In The Bar Fly Ought to Sing, Sexton refers to this mutual interest in
death: Often, very often, Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicides; at
length, in detail and in depth between the free potato chips (7). She adds: We talked
death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb.
Sucking on it!
However, in spite of the friendship and the mutual influence and interests of the
two women, each poets work remains uniquely hers. This is not to equate the two poets
achievements. In fact, many critics see Plaths work, especially her last poetry, as
surpassing Sextons, without underestimating or minimizing the latters work (Hall 66;
Alvarez, Sylvia Plath 62; Nims 138; Markey, A Journey 145). Markey, for instance,
remarks that even the most sympathetic critics find her [Sexton] lacking (A New
Tradition? 101), and Trinidad states bluntly: Plath undid her [Sexton] in the end (29).
Pettingell sounds particularly harsh when she declares as the passing years provide a
greater perspective on Plaths verse, it continues to look strong, while Sextons sound

dated the product of a dead-end movement, like imagism or beat poetry, has lost its
momentum (18). 3 What is interesting in Pettingells comment is her use of the word
momentum which, it can be argued, comes from personal factors. This lack of
momentum is seen as the antithesis of the anger or hate that Sexton talked about
when she compared her poetry to Plaths in an interview with Barbara Kevles:
Her first book didnt interest me at all. I was doing my own thing. But after
her death, with the appearance of Ariel, I think I was influenced and I dont
mind saying it. In a special sort of way, it was daring again. She had dared
to write hate poems, the one thing I had never dared to write. Id always
been afraid, even in my life, to express anger. I think the poem, Cripples
and Other Stories, is evidence of a hate poem somehow, though no one
could ever write a poem to compare to her Daddy. (13)

Therefore, there is truth in Markeys observation: Unlike Plath, Sextons anger is

never clarifying; no sooner expressed, it is repressed, and the same emotional and
intellectual impasse remains (A New Tradition? 116).4 This anger, which is the thing that
is unique to Plath and the ingredient that is [especially] missing from Sextons early
poems, is what Kristeva calls negativity (Trinidad 28), 5 a release of controlled drive
energy (Lechte, Julia Kristeva 127). The violent energy expenditure (anal drive or death
drive), as Lechte explains, becomes part of the signifying process as heterogeneity. That is,
this discharge of drives, expressed as violent anger and hate in Plaths case, creates a
dynamic, conflictual process in the text between the semiotic (the rhythmic pre-Oedipal,
pre-linguistic instinctual space, which is maternal) and the symbolic (the social and
cultural law of the father). As Sextons poetry, especially her early poetry, does not express
this kind of anger, it could be argued that the level of heterogeneity, and in turn of fluidity,
is less evident in her work than in Plaths. The death drive is released less in Sextons text
and thus it has less transformation (positive destruction, capable of change) if compared
with Plaths. Nonetheless, Sextons poetry is not totally passive, as shall be seen later.
Transformation, which brings pleasure and results from negativity, makes the
difference, this study posits, between Plaths and Sextons work. Transformation

10

represents a transgressing of the unity of the subject and of the authoritative, prohibiting
social and linguistic powers represented by the father. According to Kristeva, this must
begin with the disruption of the subject, which in turn leads to the disruption of the social:
there can be no socio-political transformation without transformation of subjects: in other
words, in our relationship to social constraints, to pleasure, and more deeply, to language
(Woman Can Never 141). Markey expresses this clearly in relation to language when
describing Plaths last poems: there is no distinction between the life-force in the
speaker/protagonist and the flow of creative energy in art (A Journey 143).
In Imaginary Incest: Sexton, Plath, Rich and Olds on Life with Daddy,
Swiontkowski argues that while Sexton and Plath are victims of their father, Rich and Olds
stand as rebels against him. She believes that these four poets write not of actual incest
with their real fathers, but rather they view him as a symbol of social and cultural powers,
against which they struggle. They desire the fathers creative potency (33). Although she
ranks Sexton and Plath as subordinate to the father, unable to free themselves from his
shackles, Swiontkowski uses a different expression to describe this relationship: Sextons
poetry seeks the fathers power to protect and affirm her; much of Plaths poetry seeks the
fathers power to advance her ambitions, to accept her as an equal (33). But to what extent
is the power needed to feel secure equal to the power needed to enhance an ambition,
which is already there? For this reason, it can be argued that Plath differs from Sexton in
her ability to confront the power of the symbolic father through negativity and abjection.
In contrast to Swiontkowski, Joseph contends that both Sexton and Plath are able to
eliminate the symbols of their social entrapment, namely the bell jar and the inverted bowl:
Plath through transcending the social and Sexton by glorifying the female body (8-9).
These two studies try to equate the two poets in terms of their success or failure. It can be
argued instead that Plath, unlike Sexton, was able to create a unique voice capable of
changing the law of One. Accordingly, the present study will call Plath, who expends death

11

energy in her poetry, the deadmost (plus mort)6 and her unique voice the Siren Voice of
the Other. On the contrary, Sexton, who does the same, yet to a lesser extent, without
achieving a similar change, will consequently be called the dead/less, depending on a
Kristevan approach.

II.

Theoretical Background

A. Kristeva: General Perspective

In her departure from traditional linguistic models and critical stances that advocate
rigid, systematic structures and ultimate rationality, Julia Kristeva seeks a language that
has transformative powers and heterogeneous character. One model for this is poetic
language. According to Kristeva, poetic language is not a series of rules in a rigid system
of signs, but rather one where the emotions and the dialectics of the subject [are]
inscribed against ordinary language and social constraint (Kristeva, Desire 25). Language
and the subject in this sense become inseparable: any theory of language is the theory of
the subject (Oliver xviii). The subjects drives and pulsions constitute the heterogeneous,
disruptive dimension of language (Moi, Sexual/Textual 161). The semiotic is the name
that Kristeva gives to these instinctual drives, especially the death drive that ruptures the
symbolic. This indicates that violence is the root of such language and its subject. This
violence is also evident in Kristevas definition of abjection, which is the necessity to
dissociate oneself from the mother by killing her: Matricide is our vital necessity
(Kristeva, Black Sun 27-28). One has to suppress drives in order to enter the symbolic.
However, they return violently to disrupt language and the revolutionary subject.
Moi defines the revolutionary subject as a subject that is able to allow
jouissance of semiotic motility to disrupt the strict symbolic order (Sexual/Textual 169).
This motility is poetic motion that marks the rupturing of the semiotic to the symbolic
through the appearance of and conflict with otherness, which causes musical rhythms.
Kristeva refers to motility in relation to the definition of the chora: a nonexpressive

12

totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it
is regulated (Revolution 25). According to Kristeva, motility is related to language,
especially to the rhythmic aspects of language, which are maternal.
A way of releasing the semiotic drive in the text is through negativity which masks
the death drive, the most important semiotic drive in Kristevas theory (Moi,
Sexual/Textual 169). The death drive is a term that was proposed originally by Freud in
1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to refer to the individuals instinctive propulsion
towards death, self destruction and the organic earlier state of things (18: 37-38). He wrote
of the opposition between this drive and Eros, the life or sexual instincts (18: 40-44, 25859). Lacan kept this definition unchanged (Lacan, Seminar VII: 211-12). However, he
stressed the linguistic aspects of the death drive through his famous proclamation: the
unconscious is structured like a language (Lacan, Seminar III: 167). Kristeva, who
borrows the definition from Freud, stresses the aggressivity of this drive and the biological,
corporeal elements that constitute the subject (Beardsworth 42). She also accepts the
Lacanian idea that ties the speaking subject to a paternal, symbolic law (Beardsworth
27). However, in contrast to the Lacanian subject, Kristeva argues that negativity, as the
released destructive drives, perpetuates tension and thus life and the transformation of the
symbolic law through the work of art (Revolution 70, 150). Language derives in this way
from the death drive (Moi, Kristeva Reader 129).
The discharge of the destructive, aggressive death drive can be detected in the
phenomenon of primary masochism where there exists an opposition between the death
drive and the life drive. Freud dealt with the question of masochism, a term which he first
encountered in the writings of Krafft-Ebing, in a number of his essays: Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality (7: 157-60), A Child Is Being Beaten (17: 179-204), and The
Economic Problem of Masochism (19: 159-70). According to Freud masochism is a
perverse pleasure sought by means of inflicting pain on the sexual object; it is an
extension of sadism turned round upon the subjects own self, that is, [a] sadist is always

13

at the same time a masochist (Three Essays 158-59). The impetus for masochism is
Oedipal conflict, especially as it is connected with the relationship with the father (the
childs passive position as an identification with the mother is nothing but a manoeuvre to
gain the fathers love) (A Child 126, 128). In his final essay, The Economic Problem of
Masochism, Freud proposes a new concept of primary masochism, a drive which has its
origin in the death instinct. Kristeva shares this idea with Freud. However, she opposes
Freuds concept of masochism as father-centred theory. She has redefined the mothers
role in masochism by locating this phenomenon in the pre-Oedipal stage where, in terms of
abjection, the mother is loved and hated, which creates ambivalence in the child.
Moreover, Kristeva does not look at masochism only as a sexual perversity but as an
aesthetic experience related to literary language and thus capable of transformation. Studlar
explains this position:
the masochistic aesthetic extends beyond the purely clinical realm into the
arena of language, artistic form, narrativity, and production of textual
pleasure. Emerging as a distinct artistic discourse, the masochistic aesthetic
structures unconscious infantile sexual conflicts, conscious fantasies, and
adult experience into a form that is not only a measure of the influence of
early developmental stages but also a register of the transformative power
of the creative process. (14)7
This masochistic reciprocity between the self and the other becomes important to feminism
when related to the Hegelian master-slave dialectic (Hegel 111-19),8 which according to
Kristeva, is irreconcilable. Lacan was one of the first psychoanalysts to adopt this concept
of dialectic that is positioned within the law. He emphasizes desire for that which is
lacking (petit objet a). Objet a is related to the concept of the real in Lacans theory. This
concept in particular went through many stages of metamorphosis: from connection to
biological need to concrete materiality and finally to what Lacan calls X (jouissance, death
drive) that exists elsewhere (Homer 84). It is the traumatic kernel (navel) of subjectivity
(Homer 84). Fantasy (as well as the objet petit a) is the way through which the subject
sustains [itself] in th[e] impossible scenario [of the real] (Homer 94). This lack is
referred to by Lacan as the phallus which stands for language, authority and law. As

14

woman lacks the organ that represents the phallus, she is considered a fantasy of what is
other than the law (Colebrook 168). The social discourse in this sense is primarily
patriarchal where women play the role of the slave. Although Kristeva follows Lacans
view that what is feminine is marginal, she stresses that the interaction between the master
and the marginal slave, between meaning and non-meaning, the speaking subject of law
and the repressed maternal body is still possible (Colebrook 168-69). In this way the
subject changes her position in the law to a revolutionary position, which can disrupt and
transform that same law.
Feminism in this sense takes a different track from previous schools. Kristeva, who
paradoxically does not regard herself as feminist, deals with the issue of feminism or
woman in two major essays: Womens Time and Stabat Mater. In the first essay,
Kristeva discusses three generations of feminism. The first movement, Liberal feminism,
seeks equality with men and aspires to gain place in linear time (Moi, Kristeva Reader
193). 9 This movement rejects characteristics that are traditionally considered to be
feminine or maternal. The second-generation feminism in stark contrast with the first
wave rejects linear temporality totally, focusing on female specificity. It seeks
intrasubjective and corporeal experiences left mute by culture in the past and believes
in Woman, Her power, Her writing (Moi, Kristeva Reader 208). This demand for
bringing difference beyond the very principle of sociality is for Kristeva a radical thought
enslaved to Patriarchy. A third generation, which is emerging, is against this stance of
reversal in the second wave and its lcriture feminine (Jonte-Pace 10-11). The third
position, which Kristeva adopts, sees that exclusive choices would not help the cause of
women. In her view, feminism can both work within the symbolic and yet challenge it at
the same time. Her Stabat Mater, which is divided into two parallel columns, reinforces
this idea although, at first instance and when looking at the left column, describing
Kristevas personal experience of childbirth, one thinks of the second-generation feminism
that Kristeva rejects. However, as Edelstein explains, the existence of the right column

15

which analyses the Christian discourse about the mother creates a dialectic with the other
column between the subjective and the social and the semiotic and the symbolic (31). The
essay becomes, in this sense, transgressive and heterogeneous, oscillating between culture
and nature, a WORD FLESH (Kristeva, Tales of Love 235).
In short, the third position highlights again what makes Kristevas work different
from that of Lacan. For while he focuses on the symbolic order covering the function of
language, she stresses the pre-verbal semiotic (Lacans Real) and its effect on language (A.
Smith 15). According to Kristeva, the unconscious, unspeakable drives manifest
themselves in poetic language, which speaks the unspeakable. Therefore, her theory
focuses on the voice, on speaking; even the silence of the semiotic which alternates with
the symbolic becomes spoken. However, the issue of silence as that which exceeds
language in poetry and which can be a means of power is still controversial in feminist
theory as a whole (Mahoney 603). This study looks at both speaking the unspeakable and
silence beyond the text as means of defiance against the law. Moreover, although this
thesis uses a Kristevan framework, it goes beyond this when the work of Sexton and Plath
indicate the limitations of this framework. This is most apparent in the case of the concept
of silence and the exclusiveness of the choices that Kristeva provides for the subject. This
will be further elaborated in the coming discussion and in the conclusion.

B. Criticism of Kristevas Feminist Theory

Kristeva claims consistently that she is not a feminist. Some critics even think that
she has a condescending attitude towards feminist movements and their political struggle
(Grosz, Sexual Subversions 93). However, on many occasions, Kristeva seems sympathetic
to the feminists concerns and the rights of women. For example, this is evident in her
essay Woman Can Never Be Defined (138) and in About Chinese Women (16). And
although she rejects traditional feminists waves in Womens Time, she places her
theory within and as a conclusion to feminist movements (Grosz, Sexual Subversions 91).

16

These contradictory views in Kristevas theory allowed severe criticism from some critics,
while others looked upon it as evidence to the openness of her writing to interpretation,
which challenges the law of One.
The works of Julia Kristeva remain controversial, especially in relation to
feminism. Kristevas feminist ideas were criticized as essentialist by well-known
feminists as they relate the semiotic chora to the maternal and to the feminine in general.
For example, Nancy Fraser disapproves of Kristevas quasi-biologistic, essentializing
identification of womens femininity with maternity (66). Judith Butler contends that
Kristevas naturalistic descriptions of the maternal body effectively reify motherhood and
preclude an analysis of its cultural construction and variability (80). Ahistorical,
biologically reductive, psychologically revisionist, universalist the list of crimes of which
Kristeva is found guilty, under the guise of essentialism, abounds, writes Tina Chanter
(182). Moreover, Elizabeth Grosz believes that although Kristeva describes maternity
using biological, physiological, and genetic terms, she refuses to define it as female on an
essentialist account (Sexual Subversions 81). The list of critics who accuse Kristevas
theory of being based on essentialist conception of maternity and femininity extends to
Kaja Silverman (125), Domna Stanton (176-77), and Teresa De Lauretis (174).
Furthermore, unsatisfactory to feminists is Kristevas emphasis upon sexual
difference, where female subjectivity cannot exist except within a patriarchal framework.
Sexual difference, according to Kristeva, destruct totalising identities and thus she relates it
to the concept of exile and foreignness. In a sense this means that women are not only
marginal, but also dependent on the phallic order to exist. In her article, A New Type of
Intellectual: The Dissident (Moi, Kristeva Reader 292-300), Kristeva explains the
relationship between sexual difference and marginality:
And what of sexual difference, of women, are they not another dissidence? [. . .]
Too caught within the boundaries of the body and perhaps also of the species, a
woman always feels exiled by those generalities which make up the just measure of
social consensus, as she does in relation to languages generalising power. That

17

exile of the feminine in relation to Meaning and to generality, means that a woman
is always different. (A. Smith 78)10
Grosz argues that Kristevas emphasis on the feminine as difference and differentiation,
the existence of the masculine and feminine within each subject as bisexuality, rather than
on the identity of woman is problematic for feminism:
[Kristevas] critical attitude to feminist texts is, I suggest, a function of the slippage
she effects from the concept of woman to that of the feminine, a displacement of
the question of identity by differentiation. This remains the most troublesome of
her various contentions regarding feminist theory and politics. By means of this
manoeuvre, she is able, on the one hand, to evacuate women of any privileged
access to femininity, and, on the other, to position men, the avant-garde, in the best
position to represent, to name or speak the feminine. (Sexual Subversions 95-96).
Moreover, some feminists attack Kristevas theory of not being useful for the
ambitious feminist politics as it offers no potential for transformation. Nancy Frazer, for
example, contends that Kristevas theory focuses on the intrasubjective conflicts rather
than on the social, pragmatic struggles of feminism (189). Also, Dorothy Leland believes
that Kristevas ideas about feminism leads to political pessimism as such ideas imitate
Lacans symbolic order, which is not susceptible to change (96). She also agrees with
Terry Eagleton and Toril Moi who condemn the anarchism and the disruptive libidinal
drives which Kristeva promotes, instead of establishing solidarity, meaning and institutions
(Leland 95-96; Eagleton, Literary Theory 190-91; Moi, Sexual/Textual 169). Fraser also
shares these views by claiming that neither her maternal essentialist feminism nor her other
extreme position of deleting the existence of women can be useful to political feminism
(67). Joining the two together, according to Fraser, is not of help either.
However, in defending Kristevas position, Kelly Oliver explains that while
American feminists view sex as biological and gender as culturally constructed, Kristeva
views sexual difference only as culturally constructed and the body only as representation
(156). Kristeva advocates a secular discourse about motherhood in order to establish a
fresh theory of alterity removed from any patriarchal and religious discourse (Oliver 156).
In other words, neither she rejects motherhood the way some feminist groups, particularly

18

Simone de Beauvoir, did nor does she accept its traditional representation (Tales of Love
234). Instead, she calls for a heretical ethics, a herethics where women/mothers are
separated from morality, which means evoking the semiotic in poetic text and allowing the
unconscious to speak its desires (Tales of Love 263). Kristevas declaration that woman as
such does not exist shows that Kristeva does not have a theory of femininity (About
Chinese 16), rather an anti-essentialist theory that locates woman in the marginal in
order to undermine the phallocentric order that defines woman as marginal in the first
place (Moi, Sexual/Textual 162). In this sense, the difference between man and woman is
a difference in the position, for or against the symbolic. This leads to the conclusion that
one cannot categorize all women under the same group. They are, in fact, different
according to the position they take in relation to the symbolic. Strengthening their bond
with the semiotic does not mean being more feminine rather it means dissolving gender
divisions (Moi, Sexual/Texual 164). The commonality between the semiotic and the
feminine is only their marginality and their capability of defying the law from that very
position (Moi, Sexual/Texual 165).
Many critics saw in Kristevas theory a possibility of change and political agency.
Jacqueline Rose, for example, believes that Kristevas work is important as it stands on the
border of politics, psychoanalysis and feminism. Kristevas feminism, according to Rose,
is promising for change in the field of politics. However, the idea of what is political has
changed as it is shifted from the social to the personal when politics opened itself to the
violence of the unconscious (Sexuality 150-51, 164). Jenny Robinson suggests that
heterogeneous spatialities, described by Kristeva, enable transformation (298). This
study, aligning with the second camp, also thinks that the semiotic is a source of dynamism
and thus change.

19

C. Kristeva and the Socio-biographical

Readers of Kristevas early work, especially The Ethics of Linguistics would realize
how much she is indebted to Russian formalist theory and futurist practice (Cavanagh 28385). With the formalists, particularly Roman Jakobson, she shares the interest of linguistic
aspects of poetic language and with the futurists their revolutionary ambitions. However,
from the outset, Kristeva does not separate poetic language from the social, political, or
psychoanalytic. By using Freuds revolutionary idea of the unconscious, she attaches the
poetic language to a speaking subject, her desire and pleasure. She also suggests a
revolution in poetic language leading to social change based on a sacrifice from the poets
side. Like Jakobson, she is fascinated by murder and suicide as themes not only in Russian
history on the eve of Stalinism and fascism but in all time (Desire 31). Suicide here is
not only literary but literal one as an act of revolution in the face of society: The poet is
put to death because he wants to turn rhythm into a dominant element; because he wants to
make language perceive what it doesnt want to say, provide it with its matter
independently of the sign, and free it from denotation (Desire 31). This means that
Kristeva fuses life and art and gives the artist the ability of transformation through drives.
In this sense, the poet becomes a threat to society and to her mental and physical health.
Clare Cavanagh gives a description of this rebel:
This poet is a linguistic daredevil, perched precariously on a tightrope that
stretches between sense and nonsense, cosmos and chaos, order and
insanity. Or, perhaps more appropriately, he is a linguistic terrorist and his
text is a poetic minefield which threatens the psychic, even physical
integrity not only of its maker and his audience, but of society itself. (293)
This means that by adopting an avant-garde revolutionary attitude, Kristeva is involved in
a dangerous business of pathologising creativity that glamorises the suicide of the poet. In
other words, she juxtaposes the success of the poet to her suicide. This is a double danger
for a female poet. This is because, as Oliver explains, in identifying with the maternal, the

20

man breaks through repression while the woman risks death or madness (109). A
warning of such danger is clear in About Chinese Women:
For a woman, as soon as the fathers not calling the dance and language is
being torn apart by rhythm, no mother can serve as an axis for the sacred or
the farce. The girl tries herself: the result is so-called female homosexuality,
identification with men, or a tight rein on the least pre-Oedipal pleasure.
And if no paternal legitimization comes along to dam up the inexhaustible
non-symbolized impulse, she collapses into psychosis or suicide. (41)
In her other works, Kristeva always discusses clinical cases of her patients while
discussing literary texts. Anne-Marie Smith argues how Kristeva transgresses the border
between the objective and the subjective, which she sees most obvious in Kristevas
approach to Nervals El Desdichado (68). Smith shows how Kristeva considers the
personal and the clinical besides her literary interpretation of his work:
It is a shock to those of us educated in the heydays of structuralism and
post-structuralism, who learned to ignore biography, both the writers and
our own, when writing academic papers. Kristeva ignores neither and
furthermore, she concludes the essay on Nerval with an interpretation of his
suicide. I asked her about this. Wasnt suicide outside the frame of
interpretation? Wasnt it even outside the frame of analytic interpretation?
That is the wager, Cest le pari, she replied. (68)
Some of Kristevas critics attacked this crossing over to biography, especially to the
suicide of the writer. Grosz, for example, suggests that psychosis and poetry for Kristeva
are moments of breakdown of identity (Sexual Subversions 48). Judith Butler also views
a problem in defining the semiotic as an emancipatory ideal as it cannot be maintained
within the terms of culture, that its presence in culture leads to psychosis and to the
breakdown of cultural life itself (80). Unfortunately, Kristeva herself emphasises these
complaints about her own theory by shifting her position dramatically in her more recent
work as she has become more loyal to a more conservative, Freudian psychoanalytical
practice. For example, William Watkin notices that while Kristevas main concern in her
first position was that of poetry dominated by a disruptive, violent semiotic at the expense
of the symbolic, her priority has since become that of healing and returning back to
paternal authority as foundation in her later work (88, 98). Rosi Braidotti also describes

21

Kristeva as a dutiful daughter because she thinks that in Kristevas recent work her
relationship to psychoanalysis becomes greater than that to feminism (238). This
dedication to more therapeutic ends stresses the critics doubts that Kristeva relates the
biographical and the pathological, especially the poets madness and suicide, to the
libidinal drives released in the poetic text and implicitly shows the invalidity of Kristevas
scheme of subversion: it is either the subject stays healthy or involves in a suicidal
revolution in poetry.
In spite of this embarrassing position that Kristeva puts herself in, some critics still
find in her theory a way of rational subversion. Allison Weir believes that Kristeva
differentiate between psychosis that breaks identity and renders coherent expression
impossible and poetry which is a capacity to give a coherent form and meaning, and
hence expression, to what is nonidentical and heterogeneous (172). Weir contends that
the semiotic is not repressed but always present in culture and art and that its presence does
not necessarily lead to psychosis (172). And although Rose understands that Kristevas
recent work suggest a race back into the arms of the law, Kristevas work and criticism
is marked by the opposite impulse of focusing on the semiotic (Sexuality 151). Rose
explains that Kristeva, in this sense, shows that identity is always partial and therefore it
faces a dual risk of either a total wreck of identity or a blind obedience to the law
(Sexuality 150). Identity is always implicated in both and that dynamism is the result of
this implication (Sexuality 150). This study also argues that the biographical is important
in approaching a work of art and despite the serious ethical implications this might bring as
is clear from the above discussion, the main focus should be on the heterogeneous,
dynamic, aesthetic process that transforms the law rather than on these implications. This
becomes far more important in the case of Sexton and Plath because of their suicide, which
can be easily confused with poetry. However, although the effect of poetry on real death is
not excluded here, the focus on its process and its ability of transformation becomes a
priority.

22

D. Different Speaking Subjects

The deadmost alone is capable of formulating something new and right belongs
only to the deadmost. (Kristeva, Desire 187)
One can logically deduce from this statement that there are different kinds of death
for Kristeva and, therefore, different kinds of speaking subjects. There are at least two
obvious kinds: the deadmost (plus mort) and what shall be called the dead/less. But
what are these from a psychoanalytical perspective? What is their position and effect in
poetic language and what characteristics of the text do they produce? Kristeva explains that
there are two choices for the speaking subject in a signifying process that underlies two
psychological positions:
Either he goes elsewhere, which is to say, beyond rejection into reality,
forever surpassing the trajectory of separation and scission, living it only as
the spin-off or side aspect of a commitment to the real where all the logic
of meta~ is reified []. In this case he places himself under the Law of the
father []. Or else the subject constantly returns to rejection and thus
reaches [] the schizoid moment of scission. (Kristeva, Revolution 156)
In other words, the first subject that Kristeva refers to is one that chooses to
identify with the father by suppressing the maternal. She is more or less the unary
subject (sujet unaire), whose social and family constraints block the heterogeneous
process (Kristeva, Revolution 173). Moreover, she produces a work of art that is more of a
structure than a practice. In this sense, her text lacks the transgression that goes along with
dynamism, which will, to a certain extent, deprive that subject of jouissance, which is
enjoyment and pleasure.11 However, according to Kristeva, sometimes when negativity (as
both facilitation and stasis) refuses to be stopped by specular identification, it explodes
unconsciously in the text in spite of all shielding against it (Revolution 124). Therefore,
this subject, and the text she produces, is heterogeneous but not to the extent of achieving
ultimate transformation and jouissance. Although jouissance may be present, it is not

23

revolutionary, because it is not a result of confronting the law of the father, for jouissance
is not (only) a certain transgressive relationship to the Law (Kristeva, Intimate Revolt 38).
For research purposes, this subject is termed the dead/less.
The second subject, the deadmost, is in process/on trial (le sujet en procs). She
is able to produce a heterogeneous practice (signifiance), in other words, a work in process.
This happens because of her ability to identify with the pre-Oedipal mother. Therefore, this
questionable, unsettling subject is identified by shifts and her text is marked by renewal,
transgression, and jouissance. This jouissance is not only oral, but also, and
predominantly, anal. Moi explains that the anal drive is translated in textual terms as a
negativity masking the death drive, and then it is analyzable in poetic language as [a]
series of ruptures, absences and breaks in the symbolic language, but it can also be traced
in [the poets] thematic preoccupations (Sexual/Textual 169). This is why Kristeva
focuses on the term deadmost as it signifies an oscillation between I and not-I, life
and death with more emphasis on the latter as a heterogeneous process in the text.
Violence and conflict then seem to be the characteristics of such a text. This violence does
not only belong to the content of the writers stories about her life, but also to the act of
symbolization, writing itself (Rose, Haunting 37).
The writing subject produces the deadmost, or the subject in process, in a
signification (Bedeutung) characterized by an irreconcilable heated dialogue (dialectic)
between the symbolic (le symbolique) and the semiotic (le smiotique). The result is a
signification that takes the form of a process. It is the 0-2 interval which Kristeva endorses
(where two is the transgression of the law), rather than the 0-1 interval (where one is law,
God), which she condemns, as it produces a hegemonic monologue of power and law. The
latter interval is a discourse that hinders or delays as much as possible the rupture of the
thetic (the boundary between the symbolic and the semiotic). That is to say, the realm of

24

the rhythmic, pre-Oedipal semiotic is capable of defying patriarchal culture and language.
Patriarchy is not an absolute power anymore.
The distinction between the deadmost and the dead/less can also be explained in
terms of abjection. Abjection relates to the psychic borders,12which, as well as the borders
of the clean and proper body of the two poets (Kristeva, Powers 108), differ in the level
of their fluidity, and thus in the poets ability to invest the semiotic and the maternal in the
text. The maternal is dealt with, especially in Sexton, mostly in relation to the abject the
impure elements, including dung, mucus, vomit and saliva (Wright 198). The abject is also
a negative and evil force that causes heterogeneity in poetry, and yet whose effect is
positive to the work of art. Both the psyche and the proper body are formed when the
filthy maternal body is repudiated. They are frontiers that protect the inside from outside
threats. The inside is the part that protects and shields the symbolic order from the
imaginary chaos outside (Moi, Sexual/Textual 166). The more the subject clings to these
shields, which belong to the symbolic, the more she is integrated. However, the
revolutionary subject, as in the case of Plath, oscillates between her borders inside and
outside. The difference of the volatility in these borders in Sexton and Plath depends on
psychological reasons related to the poets biographies.
Is it the drives (Trieb) quest for real death in the deadmosts poetic language or
the Lacanian quest for desire (manqu) which is never-ending? Although the writing
subject may be a bearer of death (Kristeva, Revolution 70), death is not a teleological
end in her poetic practice. On the contrary, in her artistic work, death is a synthesis that
leads to life, rebirth and resurrection. Continuous rupturing of the thetic in turn leads to
death, renewal and transformation. Death, therefore, is not an end, but rather a means. In
fact, it combines the purposive with the purposeless (T. Eagleton 113). However, this
process is not without dangers (Kristeva, Revolution 104). The purposive transformation
may, through excess, turn into purposelessness, which is an excessive purpose in
Plaths case, perfection.13 Accordingly, the subject in process who seems, for one instance,

25

to be heading to Blanchots promised land of Canaan (a goal) may in fact be heading, if

asking for the extreme, to the desert of nocturnal nowhere (71).14
The question remains whether this concept of the deadmost is relevant to poetry,
especially womens poetry, since it was mainly applied in Kristevas essay to polylogue in
the novel. Kristeva makes it clear in About Chinese Women, as Moi explains, that women
have two choices in terms of identification:
Woman is presented with a clear-cut choice: either she remains identified
with the mother, thus ensuring her own exclusion from and marginality in
relation to patriarchal society or, repressing the body of the mother, she
identifies with the father, thus raising herself to his symbolic heights.
(Kristeva Reader 139)
Although the womans identification with the mothers body excludes her from
social reality, that same action raises her to the rank of deadmost in reference to her
artistic production. While the homologous woman, the dutiful daughter to the father,
might be prized from a social perspective, she may not be identified as a perfectionist in
relation to her work and its capacity for achieving aesthetic transformation. However, in
works of art where subjects mostly hover between identities and non-identities, as well as
between identifications with the father and the mother, it is difficult to draw definite lines
between the daughter of the mother and the daughter of the father. From this studys
perspective, the most important indicator is the level of negativity and dialectic manifested
in the text and whether the subject is ultimately gravitating towards the father or the
mother. Moreover, the father and the mother should not always be understood solely as the
real parents of the poet. While the mother is also a pre-symbolic space, the father is the
imaginary father, who is a harmonious blending of the loving father and the oedipal
father in symbolic Law (Kristeva, Black Sun 23).
The question remains whether poetry, in general, and womens poetry, in
particular, are conflictual rather than dominated by the law of the One. Janet Rex observes
that Kristeva is more concerned with the narrative language of prose fiction due to

26

Bakhtins influence on her work (768).15 However, Margaret Dickie maintains that the
double-voice of contemporary women poets challenges Bakhtin because he sees poetry
as the genre dominated by a unitary literary language (Alien 301). Dickie, however,
sees Kristevas position as different from that of Bakhtin.
Moreover, Dickie argues that the confrontational, disruptive voices of womens
poetry bring change through what she calls alien language (using words that refer to an
alienating and destabilizing experience). Although Dickie may be right in regard to the
extension of dialogism and heterogeneity to poetry, one feels reluctant to accept her
generalization about women. Are all modern women writers equal in performing the task
of subversion? Are their texts equal in their level of heterogeneity and dialogism? From a
Kristevan perspective, they are not. Nevertheless, to individualize the experience of each
female poet does not mean to abdicate from the political agenda of women but rather to
deal with it on an aesthetic micro-level. As Nolle McAfee points out, we should start by
put[ting] our own house in order first (102). Political and aesthetic change will be
achieved in this case by individual female poets who are distinguished from each other
through dying differently. In her book, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Rose suggests that
it is not possible to read Plaths work in relation to literature that comes before her (12021, emphasis added); her work, as liberation from oppressive patriarchy, should not be
compared to previous literature written by women. However, this study considers it
legitimate to compare two contemporary poets, living under almost identical social
conditions.
In short, the difference between the deadmost and the dead/less is the level of
negativity and abjection, which is dependent upon the subjects choice of identification, as
manifested in their writing and the level of transformation and jouissance achieved. The
former is able to produce a masochistic, but effective, dialectic between the bodily drives
of the semiotic and the linguistic and the social of the symbolic. As a result, death, not only
as a motivating drive, but also as a performance in the work of art, will lead to change and

27

ultimate jouissance, that is, to die exceptionally well in ones work of art in order to
achieve both transformation, jouissance, and a unique voice. In this sense, her art is not
only that of dying, but also of killing (Axelrod 160).
Although Plaths poetry is dialectic (dialogic), acts of final death in the form of
transcendence risk cutting the oscillation in her poetry towards a pre-verbal space, towards
fusion with the mother. They risk the life of the I and the other, the addressee, as
participants in that dialectic. However, this gambling with death is one way of forming a
temporary synthesis in which a drastic change can happen. It could be reasoned that
transformation in Plaths poetry does not occur only as a result of the semiotic as
sublimation (Aufhebung), the rupturing and shattering of the thetic, but also through
stopping the whole process of interaction the dialectic between the symbolic and the
semiotic as an act of suspense, silence, absence and death. It is silence opening a space
beyond the text that brings an ultimate jouissance (Mitchell 37). 16 Although Jenny
Robinson might disagree with this kind of topography, since she believes that shattering
the symbolic and reconstituting subjects takes place within the space of the symbolic
[only] (291-92), it is tempting to create that space in Plaths text. In this context,
heterogeneity and the final silence in the poem are called the Siren Voice of the Other,
which is both a space and a voice. Kelly Oliver observes: It [the unconscious] points to
the maternal music in and beyond language (95, emphasis added).
The Greek mythological creature, the Siren, is used for three main reasons.17 First,
the Siren is feminine and so is easily conceived of as part of the semiotic chora, which has
the characteristics of the feminine, though it is not itself feminine. Second, the Siren lives
at the edge of the sea on rocky islands, which resemble the thetic border between the
semiotic and the symbolic and stand for the idea of a new space. Third, she sings, which
goes with the rhythmic characteristics of the semiotic, besides being deadly. Siren
originally meant a rope or a snare, which suggests how she is deadly for men and for
herself as well. Eventually, she becomes a dead creature, metaphorically speaking, because

28

she does not meet the men and communicate with them in a sexual dialogue. 18 This
Siren Voice of the Other is singing and silent, oral and anal, the spoor [. . .] of nonbeing and the want-to-be (Moi, Kristeva Reader 266).
Plath is able to evoke the maternal and the semiotic, which are linked in Kristevas
theory,19 in her work without totally rejecting the paternal symbolic, while Sexton remains
the dutiful daughter to her father until the end. Sexton needs the father as a shield to
confront an abject mother for the sake of a unified identity. However, her shielding from
an abject mother does not prevent her from longing for a pre-Oedipal connection with that
mother. Sexton also needs the shield to protect a secret that she hides, as shall be seen later.
For this reason namely the fear of facing death, represented by an abject mother, as well
as losing a second mother she remains mostly passive in her work. Plath, on the other
hand, looks death in the face and hence is able to defy her father. Therefore, Plaths work
transgresses the law of the father, unlike Sextons which resists the maternal and semiotic
irruption. Sexton, unlike Plath, fears motility and disintegration. Her father is her means of
security, and thus she cannot face him. In short, in comparing Sexton and Plath from a
Kristevan point of view, this study proposes that the level of negativity, which results from
the investment of the maternal and the semiotic in the text, is more evident in Plaths work
than in Sextons.

III.

Kristeva, Sexton, and Plath

Although Middlebrook and George suggest that Lacan and Kristeva can be applied to
Sextons work, theoretical approaches to her poetry have been restricted to Freud and his
followers (xx). To date, Sextons work has not been approached from a Kristevan
perspective as a full study. Kristeva has only been used by some critics to understand
Sextons relationship to language without relating this to her subjectivity.20 For example,
McGowan uses Kristeva, among other theorists, to argue that Middle Generation poets like
Sexton were not, in fact, writing their own stories as the title Confessional poets

29

suggests. He argues that their writing is selfless rather than selfish and solipsistic.
Therefore, he refuses to approach her work biographically. Instead, he explores the
dynamism (in Kristevan terminology an oscillation between the symbolic and the semiotic)
of Sextons work, and its ability to deconstruct masculine language from within.
Nevertheless, contrary to McGowans view, it can be argued that Sexton was, to an extent,
resistant to dynamism in her work.
According to McGowan, Sextons poetry asks fundamental questions through her
experiments in and with language about being, love and the aesthetic (23). This creates a
geographical space of grief where the subjects traumatic encounter with the world and
language is depicted. However, this traumatized position is not a psychological description
of Sexton. Rather it is, according to McGowan, an experiment with the space of the text
and, therefore, Sextons project is social, cultural (mainly American) and universal, but
never personal. It can be argued, however, that McGowans selective reading pulls Sexton
out of context. Such theorizing deprives her of expression and casts her over to the other
extreme of impersonality. For example, it is legitimate to read God in her poetry as the
Absolute (the maternal), as death itself. Nevertheless, how should God be read in the
presence of Sextons two mothers and her father?
In comparison, the relationship between Kristeva and Plath is more complicated.
Kristeva referred to Plath for the first time in her book About Chinese Women along with
Virginia Woolf and Maria Tsvetaeva. The aspect common to the three writers is that they
committed suicide. In her commentary, Kristeva seems to relate their personal deaths to
their writing as if the disintegration of their words is the cause of their suicide. Sean
Hands translation of this idea makes the connection especially clear: Once the moorings
of the word, the ego, the superego, begin to slip, life itself cant hang on: death quietly
moves in (Moi, Kristeva Reader 157). 21 Kristeva describes Plath in particular as
disillusioned with meanings and words, who took refuge in lights, rhythms and sounds: a
refuge that already announces, for those who know how to read her, her silent departure

30

from life (157). In The Other Sylvia Plath, Tracy Brain criticizes Kristevas reading of
Plath for not allowing new interpretations of the poets work (138). In fact, Kristevas
reading shares common features with the often criticized position of Alvarez, who regards
Plaths poetry as the reason behind her death: For Sylvia Plath it [suicide] was an attempt
to get herself out of a desperate corner her own poetry had boxed her into (The Savage
13-14). He generalizes that this is the whole nature of artistic practice:
for the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic; he is not
automatically relieved of his fantasies by expressing them. Instead, by some
perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expression may simply make
the dredged-up material more readily available to him. The result of
handling it in his work may well be that he finds himself living it out. For
the artist, in short, nature often imitates art. (53-54)
In one of Kristevas interviews, a slight change in her position can be detected. The
interviewer asks her if the artistic practice can save or destroy, and how one would draw
the line between the two possibilities. Kristevas answer this time puts her in a more secure
position than her discussion of suicide in About Chinese Women. She explains that art can
sometimes save the artist, depending on the individual case of the writer. Art, here, has
shifted from being a cause for suicide to being, partly, a means of salvation. She then
emphasizes the role of psychiatry and transference, and not poetry alone, in helping those
writers:
I would not employ the phrases being saved or destroyed by art,
because that is not exactly my metaphysical conception of aesthetic
practice. That said, for many writers, the experience of art was lived as a
salvation. I am thinking of someone like Dostoevsky or Kafka, in particular.
One can, however, give counterexamples to this; I am thinking of Nerval
whom I discuss in my book on melancholy [Black Sun] who was not
saved by art; that is, art did not stop him from committing suicide. We can
say the same about certain great women writers, like Virginia Woolf or
Sylvia Plath. More specifically, then, I think that aesthetic process, which
for psychoanalysis is a process of sublimation, consists in finding a certain
harmony of the most violent drives, the life drive and the death drive. This
Harmony is obtained through the powers of language; an everyday language
that, in the case of literature and poetry, is modified through music, through
the rhythms and rhetorical figures, through pleasure, is introduced into
signification that then brings about a sense of stability within (and with) the
crisis. By these means, the artist prolongs the conflict and is able to live
with it, but alternatively, such a harmonization can be very fragile, and

31

when it is not accompanied by what psychoanalysis would call a favorable

transference, destruction is inevitable. (Guberman 214)
In spite of this modification of Kristevas position, the writer as a person is still, in
her opinion, connected and psychologically affected by her work. In the foreword to
Kristevas Proust and the Sense of Time, Stephen Bann poses the question: Does this
mean the return of the biographical subject? He answers it immediately: In a sense, it
undoubtedly does (xi). For Brain this changed position cannot be satisfactory either since
her study is the other extreme, the totally non-biographical. Another advocate of the nonbiographical approach is Silvianne Blosser who, in her penetrating postmodern study, deals
with Plaths work and creativity as a work in process. She argues that Plath is developing
her materials and tools consciously, and so one understands that she might be a poet in
process, but not necessarily a subject in process who pour[s] out poems from the depth of
[her] unconscious, [her] drives and private agonies (156). Therefore, the semiotic in
Plaths early work is viewed by Blosser as decoration. In her later work, the irruption of
the semiotic threatens the creativity of the poet, but not necessarily her psyche. Blosser
views Plath as a poet who did not encourage a writing practice fuelled by the semiotic or
Lacans imaginary only (156). Instead Plath resorted to ungendered metaphors of the
open hand and closed fist to express a dialogism that is mainly evident in her prose,
and, to a certain extent, her poetry.
Blosser argues that for Plath, poetic form is not as satisfactory as that of prose. One
reason for this, according to Blosser, is that the semiotic completely takes over the poetic
text. However, one wonders where this irruption stems from if the unconscious drives of
the writer are not at work, as she claims. Although she suggests that dialogism can exist in
both poetry and prose, her discussion of the Baktinian chronotope of the threshold22 in
Plaths novel shows that the poem is incompatible with prose as a form of creativity (229).
Therefore, she believes that Plaths poems are unfinished work, a ledge from which
Plath was going to leap to other forms had she not died. Hence, the irruption of the

32

semiotic, according to Blosser, has no consequences at the end of Plaths poetry; in other
words, it is not a source of suffering or jouissance.
According to the current study, a psychoanalytical reading of the poems makes
biography indispensable. After all, Plath reminds us in Letters Home that Its funny how
one always, somewhere, has the germ of reality in a story, no matter how fantastic . . .
(87). Moreover, death in Plaths poems is considered as the death of the subject in process
in defying the father of the law and as a way of perfecting creativity rather than
contributing to her actual suicide. It is also the death drive in harmony, or rather in conflict,
with the life drive. Even if it happens to be Plaths death, it is the how rather than the why
that this study emphasizes. In other words, it asks whether she died confronting death or
out of fear of death.
Kristevas theories have been used by critics to interpret Plaths work. There are
three major contributions in this area. One of them is Nephie Christodoulidess Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking: Motherhood in Sylvia Plaths Work. Christodoulides applies
post-structural psychoanalysis and biographical criticism in relation to Kristevas theory of
subject formation to discuss motherhood in Plaths work. She reads Plath in terms of
abjection, rejection, and regression. According to Christodoulides, it is necessary to discuss
motherhood or the mother in process in order to save Plath from being labelled simply as
suicidal and father-obsessed. She argues that mothers in Plaths poetry oscillate between
authentication and non-authentication, between releasing their children into the symbolic
order and merging with them. Mother-personae try to reach autonomy and generativity
through motherhood, yet sometimes the task seems to be difficult and, therefore, neither
procreativity nor the existence of the baby can offer any solace. There is doubt,
Christodoulides suggests, about whether motherhood and creativity can thrive at the same
time (117). Moreover, she argues that motherhood can authenticate the mother when there
is a bond between her and her daughter in particular. The end of the book discusses
daughterhood in Plaths work as inseparable from the subject of motherhood for the

33

mother is ultimately a daughter as well. Christodoulides stresses the eternal love/hate

drama between mother and daughter where the daughter loves the mother, yet blames her
and fears the inevitability of becoming like her since she is but an extension of her (168).
As Christodoulides shows, mothers can be suffocating figures in Plaths poetry and,
therefore, the daughter struggles to release herself from the abject mother, a process which
seems to be impossible to achieve. For this study, the release from the mother does not
happen in the end, rather it is all part of the heterogeneous process of creativity, which is
an oscillation between a mother and a father.
Christodoulides focuses attention on real mothers rather than on the concept of the
maternal as a linguistic element and so sometimes Medusa becomes Aurelia, Plaths
mother. She concedes that her reading might be criticized as incompatible with Kristevas
theory, which concentrates, in Strangewayss words, on symbolic events (rather than on
concrete experiences of real mothers) (142). However, it could be argued that both the
social and the symbolic dimensions of the mother are important and that one should not be
excluded for the other.
In her insightful, pioneering book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Jacqueline Rose
views Plath as being not consistent (10): She writes at the point of tension
pleasure/danger, your fault/my fault, high/low culture (10). Her work, as well as her life,
is based on conflict, a dialectic without an end. This approach is closely related to the
current study in terms of the dialogic aspect of Plaths work and its rejection of the
traditional view of a unified identity in the conventional sense. However, this study focuses
on the dialectic from a Kristevan perspective as a heterogeneous interaction between the
symbolic (society, language, and culture) and the semiotic. What is cultural is inside and
not outside, as Rose views it. The dialectic, which is often presented between I and an
other (the addressee), reflects an inner conflict in the writing subject that is capable of
cultural and social transformation of the symbolic at the micro level. Moreover,

34

transcendentalism is viewed in this study not as a masculine project, but a momentary

defying silence and a reunion with the mother in absence at the end of that dialectic.
Rose resorts to Kristevas concept of abjection in discussing Poem for a
Birthday, suggesting that the sequence shows the permeability of boundaries [. . .] which
allow objects to pass back and forth across inner and outer space (Haunting 52).
However, as Strangeways notices, Rose only focuses on the subjects relation to the
physical world (Haunting 143). In other words, Rose concentrates on the concept of
negativity mostly in relation to nature. This study will refocus attention on to Plaths later
poems, which have a more violent level of negativity leading to transformation. Moreover,
her earlier poems about nature are mostly considered as failing to produce negativity.
In Reading (And) the Late Poems of Sylvia Plath, Paul Mitchell suggests a new
way of reading Plaths last poems: Sheep in Fog, The Couriers, Words, and Edge.
According to Mitchell, these poems are a challenge for the critic who tries to impose a
coherent meaning, what he calls, using Lacans terminology, a master-discourse, upon
them. He views Ted Hughess reading of Sheep in Fog as one example of this kind of
approach. Mitchell insists on regarding these poems as signifiance where the subject or the
work itself is under erasure. These poems are characterized by stasis rather than thetic
tension. Therefore, in Mitchells view, all the sound techniques used in these poems, such
as alliteration, assonance and resonance, no longer act to reinforce meaning. Rather, they
indicate the collapse of identity. For him, signification is on the verge of psychosis in these
poems. It is a moment of fusion with Kristevas primordial mother or what he sees as
Lacans objet a to achieve jouissance beyond the text. In other words, these poems become
an example of a genotext.23 Therefore, any attempt to read them in terms of autobiography
will, according to Mitchell, suppress the jouissance of the text. The last poems intensify
the role of silence [as inherent in language and as a textual space] [. . .] and thus expose the
instability of the phallic signifier (50).

35

A consideration of the poetic technique of silence beyond the text is essential to the
present study of Plaths early and late poems. It is used to expose the phallic instability
and, as a form of death, a temporary synthesis, a last word in an argument that
paradoxically leads to protest and thus change. Therefore ultimate jouissance is not
experienced only in her last poems but in some of the earlier ones as well. In his reading of
Plaths last poem, The Edge, Mitchell suggests that we are left with only jouissance
without identity. He emphasizes that the reading of the womans corpse in Edge can
never be given a master narrative. According to him, one cannot know for sure if the
womans perfection is actual or illusory. Yet is not judging the discourse as psychotic,
while giving an example of Kristevas patient Anne, an indictment of Plath herself as
psychotic? Does this not in a sense represent a master narrative?
Although not a Kristevan study, Strangeways Sylvia Plath: The Shaping of
Shadows dedicates its third chapter, The Psychoanalyzing of Sylvia, to discussing the
relationship between Plath and psychology. Kristevas theory takes up part of that
discussion. Rather than diagnosing the poets illness or imposing what Strangeways
describes as simplistic order on a work of art (159), she suggests applying psychology to
Plaths work without her being part of it. To paraphrase Matterson, Plath becomes the
agent rather than the object of her psychoanalytical discourse (817). This makes her in
complete control of her work as a non-suffering subject.
Strangeways uses Roses reading of Kristeva to examine Poem for a Birthday
both in terms of the subjects relation to the physical (which Strangeways sees as involving
too much abstract analysis) as well as ambivalent feelings towards her mother. It is
suggested that the often conscious conflict between masculine and feminine ideas
about her work as a writer results in a transcendence that is usually considered as a male
project (177). Strangeways argues that Plaths transcendentalism does indeed ultimately
serve masculinity as the poet loses her femininity to it (172).

36

For Strangeways, Plath did not agree with transcendence in solidarity with
Nietzsche, she did not believe in the otherworldly. If that was the case, why does Kroll
devote a whole book to Plaths interest in spiritual matters and superstition? And why
should Plath resort to the otherworldly in her later poetry which does not have the feminine
Romantic interests in the relational aim of living?
In contrast to Strangeways opinion, this study argues that transcendence in Plaths
poetry is maternal. It equals ultimate silence, a relapse to a pre-Oedipal position. This
silence creates a hole in the symbolic and cuts communication between the I and the
other only temporarily. It comes as a final word in an argument. Although deadly, it is a
hole that dissolves the symbolic father in the beyond. Therefore, it partakes more of
descendence than transcendence. It is committing suicide (silence) in the text as a protest.
Renewal takes place in speech again in a following poem. This becomes not only a hole for
reunion with the mother but also of separation on the way back to the symbolic. This
silence as transcendence, which silence[s] the (male) order of speaking, answers the call
of the mother though it kills the identity (Nikolchina 119). It is a silence that reaches the
ultimate limits of discourse, bringing transformation and jouissance (Nikolchina 119).
Although Kristeva is an advocate of immanence rather than transcendence or transparency,
Plath insists through her work that transcendence as ultimate silence is part of her unique
voice. Is not silence an aspect of the semiotic? Could it not be the maternal gesture that
allows to be (Nikolchina 133)?
The striking argument comes at the end of Strangewayss discussion, when she
simplistically turns all Kristevas project into something similar to T. S. Eliots auditory
imagination, which, she claims, Plath depended on as part of her male-established
literary arsenal (174). Not only that, she also claims that Hughes directly influenced her
use of free verse in her last poems: it was her male master Hughes who encouraged her
to write in freer rhythms, and Plath was keenly aware that such style would, in the
symbolic world of literary publishing make my name (173). Hughes, then, according

37

to Strangeways, is the source of Plaths later creativity. However, according to this study,
both the masculine and the feminine are emphasized as two reciprocal modalities.

IV.

Method and Outline

In general, this study combines poems according to chosen themes and images.

However, the chronology of the poems is not totally neglected. It is what Jo Gill describes
as a loosely chronological structure (Anne Sexton 2). This is because it is difficult, for
example, to decide on a precise chronology with regard to Sextons poetry as sometimes
what is written earlier in her career is published later (Gill, Anne Sexton 2-3). According to
Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames, between June of 1972 and October 1974, Sexton had
written three new books: The Death Notebooks, The Awful Rowing Toward God, and 45
Mercy Street, although these were published successively (Letters 390). Therefore, for the
two poets, loose chronological phrases have been used, such as in her early poems or
in the middle of her career (more in her transitional poetry for Plath) and in her last
poetry to indicate the progress of each poet.
The present study, which consists of nine chapters, traces each poets movement
from the beginning to the end of her work:
Chapter 1 discusses Sextons loyalty to her father. She begins and ends her work
with the father, and this structure may be termed the Ouroboros. In the middle of her career
the maternal enters. This structure is clarified, using three different poems: Music Swims
Back to Me, The Bells, and The Silence.
Chapter 2 demonstrates how Sexton erects symbolic shields by jettisoning her
mother over her psychic borders. She then takes refuge behind this armour for fear of the
haunting abject mother who is both abhorred and loved. In Sextons work, shields take
many forms, which are discussed separately. Behind them she shows total passivity and
hence an inability to change her relation to the law of the father. This is explained in
connection with Sextons fear of going out, which she faced in her personal life. While

38

Sexton holds to her psychic shields and decides to stay inside as she fears facing an
abject mother, Plath, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, tries to oscillate between within
and without.
Chapter 3 considers how Sextons case is further complicated by the discovery of a
second mother, Sextons aunt, as a secret crypt buried in her psyche. This adds even more
to her passivity and hinders her from any transformation in order to keep her regressive
relation with that crypt, which causes stagnation in her work. However, under the attack of
the abject mother from outside and the ability of Sexton to admit finally the loss of her
second mother, negativity appears ultimately in the poetry in the form of an abject burst.
Nonetheless, as soon as the maternal abject erupts in the text causing motility that has the
potential of change, Sexton performs cleansing rituals which are in the laws favour.
Chapter 4 explores the failure of Sextons cleansing rituals and her decision to head
to a symbolic father again for protection after the collapse of her borders. Her fears of
maternal persecution, confrontation, and disintegration make her unable to relinquish the
father as he provides support and psychic integration against the maternal. In this sense,
Sexton is called the dead/less.
In Chapter 5 it is explained that Plath at the beginning of her work is, like Sexton,
an ally of her father. However, in contrast to Sexton, from the outset Plath, as a
revolutionary outsider, tries to leave her proper borders to change her confinement under
the law of the father. Nevertheless, she succumbs to the allure of maternal nature
outside. In order to dispense with the passivity that resulted from fusion with nature,
Plath tries to create a hurting other and thus motility in her work in a transitional step.
Nonetheless, negativity, as conflictual reciprocity and dynamism, does not take place until
Plath is exposed to anger and shock. Only then is she able to discard her symbiotic relation
with the mother and father/husband to face them from the outside.

39

Chapter 6 analyses the most famous poem in Plaths oeuvre, Daddy, in order to
illustrate how she was able through heterogeneity and reciprocity to defy the father. The
violent, dynamic voice that defies the father through subversive heterogeneity and ends
with a defying silence is termed The Siren Voice of the Other. Another kind of motility
between presence and absence, and the symbolic and the semiotic, takes place not in single
poems but across poems. This movement between Daddy and Medusa, as well as in
other poems, is an oscillation between death as fusion with the mother and rebirth as a
separation towards the symbolic world of creativity. The same movement that shows the
split of the subject between the conscious and the unconscious can also be recognized in
Plaths attitude to time, which is used as evidence of negativity.
Chapter 7 presents the assortment of weapons which Plath uses in her art of
dying, especially in Ariel, to defy the father in an act of masochistic reciprocity and to
create her unique voice. In this sense, she is seen as the deadmost. Nevertheless, Plath
pushes things to the extreme, discarding the father and allowing the death drive to violate
her psyche.
Chapter 8 discusses the semiotic as it gains the upper hand in Plaths last poetry.
The discarding of the father and the excessive explosion of the death drive cause the
subjects identity to be erased under total jouissance. This is explained as a triumph over
the law of One, yet with deadly consequences as the unconscious takes control of the
poets psyche. A discussion comparing Sexton and Plath socially and psychologically is
conducted in Chapter 9, which closes by using two poems to illustrate the difference
between the two poets. This is followed by a conclusion emphasizing a new reading of
Confessional poetry, combining the personal and the aesthetic.

40

Chapter 1
Sexton, the Ouroboros
1.1

Law of One: Starting With the Father

This chapter discusses Sextons alliance with the law of the father, especially in her

relatively early work, which reflects her celebration of the unified ego/body. It also seeks
to emphasize Sextons identification with the law as an attempt to defend herself against an
abject mother, which will appear in between the beginning and the end of her work. It will
show that the structure of three of Sextons poems imitate the general Ouroboros-like
structure of her oeuvre. The following three chapters will discuss how Sexton establishes
proper symbolic shields in different forms after jettisoning the mother outside of them, and
the return of this abject mother to haunt Sexton. They will also analyse how Sexton hides a
crypt for her second mother inside her symbolic shields to introject it later, causing the
burst of the abject in the text. This is followed by a discussion of how she tries to perform
cleansing rituals to discard the abject and gravitate towards the Name of the Father again.
Anne Sexton, a middle-class suburban housewife from Boston without a college
education and a mother of two daughters, became a poet late in her twenties. After advice
from her psychiatrist to write poetry as a kind of therapy, followed by watching a TV
programme about writing sonnets by I. A. Richards, Sexton made up her mind to start a
career as a poet. From that time on, she was known as a Confessional poet, and considered
by many critics as the best writer on womens issues (Middlebrook, Housewife 493). For
example, Middlebrook asserts that No poet before her had written so frankly of the female
realm of family life, nor of its pathologies (Housewife 483). She hails Sextons voice as
distinctively female, and femaleness in her apprenticeship as an aspect of identity that

41

had, with great difficulty, been assimilated to the sense of authority necessary to mastery
(503, emphasis added).
However, there is something in Sextons work which resists her applauded
feminism and femininity. This is why Alicia Ostriker, for instance, adopts a more careful
evaluation of Sexton, when she suggests, in distinguishing between critique and
transformation, that she can penetrate, but cannot transcend cannot imagine
transcending a patriarchal theology that swallows her alive (What Are Patterns For?
495). She thinks that an intellectually devastating subversion is equaled and canceled by
an emotionally devastating submission in Sextons work (495). Furthermore, Joyce Carol
Oates compares Sextons poetry to a feminine image of flowers that lacks effective anger:
The poems themselves are small angry wounds that bloom, blossom fiercely, like
flowers yet like flowers, have no strength, no permanency (Anne Sexton 52).
Therefore, in spite of her contribution to feminism, Sextons work remains somewhat
associated with the father and his unity, especially at the beginning and end of her career.
In fact, Anne Sextons oeuvre evokes Kristevas concept of the bounded text,
which she introduced when discussing Antoine de la Sales Jehan de Saintr. In this novel,
the end of the narrative is given before the narrative itself even begins (Desire 42). Bruce
Morrissette, in reference to what he calls fictional topology, based on Robbe Grillets
Pour un nouveau roman, explains that [t]he novel, like the other arts, may anticipate
systems of thought, and in spite of many twists and turns, it ends with the primitive
image of the Ouroboros serpent biting its tail (56). Sextons work follows this pattern
since it begins and ends with a father. It literally starts by addressing her male doctor, Dr.
Martin Orne, and ends by addressing God. However, in between there is another story of
fear of and yearning for the maternal. Therefore, in spite of a level of heterogeneity, which
one can detect, especially in the last books, there is always a resort to unity in the end.
As a dutiful daughter and ally of her father, unity is essential for her if she wants to
be part of his symbolic order. For her to maintain a unified ego, she has to return to phallic

42

identification as a defence against the cause of her fragmentation and disintegration, her
primary identification with the archaic mother. The issue of patriarchal identification and
unity are intertwined in Sextons work. The celebration of her father is a celebration of her
unity and the celebration of her unity is nothing but a celebration of the father.
Paradoxically, this can be detected in Sextons most feminine poetry.
It is important to approach Sextons work from a psychoanalytical perspective at
first in order to resolve the confusion that some critics face when attempting to explain the
leap in Sextons work from the exceedingly mundane to the spiritual. For example, W. H.
Shurr views Sextons transition from a flamboyant self to Saint Anne as startling (184).
He wonders how one can find such traditional piety in the sophisticated lady whose
conversation was sprinkled with conventional obscenities, whose trademark was the everpresent pack of Salems (176). He refers to a photograph, which accompanies her work,
showing Sexton immaculately groomed, expensively dressed, posing against a
background that carries no suggestion of suffering or anguish. On the evidence of the
photographs, he elaborates, one might almost accuse Anne Sexton of self-indulgence,
of lacking any real mystical interests (176-77). He then relinquishes the contradiction on
the grounds that Sextons last poetry is a primordial climb, a leap of faith towards
what Emerson called magnanimity (189-190).
Shurrs reading neglects a possible focus on the father-daughter relationship and
God as representative of the law of the father. In fact, in many of her letters, Sexton
referred to her male friends and lovers as gods. For example, she used this title in talking
about Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and other poets (Letters 43, 45, 73). She calls them
gods because I am always saved by men who understand me better than I understand
myself (Letters 41). Moreover, she used this term to refer to her doctor analyst in such
poems as You, Doctor Martin and Flee On Your Donkey.
From this perspective, almost all of Sextons celebrations of her body are more or
less celebrations of her unity with the patriarchal order. This is most obviously seen in her

43

Love Poems (1969): The Touch, The Kiss, The Breast, Us, Mr. Mine and In
Celebration of My Uterus. The addressee in these poems, which describe Sextons
numerous affairs, is male (Middlebrook, A Biography 299). 24 Diana Hume George
emphasizes three voices in Sextons poems: the first is the womans, the second the
suicides and the last what she calls the makers. She looks at the makers voice as
positively building a whole body of love and the resurrection of the body in this life
(Oedipus 62). In contrast, it could be argued that these voices belong to only two
categories as result of a conflict in the speaking subject either to regress towards an archaic
mother or to separate from her and move towards the symbolic realm of the father and
keep intact under his law. The makers voice is viewed as belonging to the father as a
defence against a fragmenting mother.
The personas body in these poems is formed by a symbolic father since he
resurrects her into unity. In The Touch, the personas hand is sealed off / in a tin box
(ASCP 173). According to the female speaker, they have locked it up as a consequence
of its impairment. It is bruised, it lay there like an unconscious woman / fed by tubes
and was Nothing but vulnerable. As such, it is not an adequate image of unity. Then,
suddenly, all this became history and Your hand found mine. / Life rushed to my
fingers like a blood clot (174). In the final lines of the poem, the persona not only
celebrates the unity of her hand but also the unity of the two hands hers and her lovers
which make the kingdom reminiscent of the kingdom of God, strong and fortified. In
an interview with Gregory Fitz Gerald, Sexton comments on The Touch as a poem
related to God: The Touch shows something about my feeling that theres God
everywhere and I must have seen God and the kingdom, the eternal (195).
Two Hands (ASCP 421), a later poem in The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975),
calls forth the image of two hands which are at first separate. The first hand is ignorant as
a penny emerging from the sea, a new arrival from the realm of the semiotic chora of the
mother. Thus, Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is

44

not yet constituted as such (Kristeva, Revolution 25). The hand is still troubled with the
salt of its mother, / mute with the silence of the fishes, / quick with the altars of the tides.
Afterwards, God reached out of His mouth / and called it man. The subject is now named
and so belongs to the realm of the symbolic. Up came the other hand / and God called it
woman.
As in The Touch, unity is achieved in each hand and between the two hands:
The hands applauded. Although the persona admits that a body could be a prison for
some like the body of Christ, this situation is temporary until the triumph came. For
Christ, the triumph is death and joining God in his unified kingdom. This is equivalent to
the triumph that comes when male and female bodies cup together and let yourselves fill
up with sun. In this sense, Sexton, in what sounds like the first movement of equal rights
feminism (Colebrook 119), calls not only for the equality of hands but also for unity under
Gods kingdom, inviting the whole world to applaud and thus be unified in angel
webs. This shows Sextons search for unity with the masculine although it seems she is
celebrating her female body and sensuousness.
The same scenario is established in a parallel poem, The Kiss (ASCP 174). This
time, a mouth, like a cut, experiences a resurrection after a kiss. Again, it is a rebirth of
the body into the symbolic realm after relinquishing the mother: Its tearing old Marys
garments off. Mary could be the Virgin Mary or Sextons mother, Mary Gray. Here, the
carpenter is again at work with that useless part, which is now a boat quite wooden / and
with no business. Her lover, or her father, hoisted her, rigged her and she is his now;
[s]hes been elected. Her lover/father is simply an artist (a carpenter, a painter and later a
composer), [p]ure genius at work, and the female persona is nothing but his work of art
and hence belonging to the maker (175). He resurrected her from silence into life: Where
there was silence / the drums, the strings are incurably playing. Neither his work of art nor
his music, as a composer, is that of the semiotic but rather that of the symbolic order

45

creating unity. Therefore, the fire he has stepped / into is that of sexual desire and has
nothing to do with destructive jouissance.25
These poems, where the personae expose themselves in star fashion, remind one of
the celebrity lives which Sexton adored. She was something of an actress according to
those who knew her. In an interview with Barbra Kevles, Sexton referred to herself as an
actress in her own autobiographical play (27). Indeed, Middlebrook states that one
interviewer described Sexton as acting as if on stage (A Biography 312). Moreover,
Middlebrook refers to Marian Seldes, an actress herself, commenting on Sexton:
There was a great deal of what people think of as an actress about Anne.
She was a dramatic-looking person; her behavior was interesting; her laugh,
people would say if she was an actress, was a theatrical laugh. Oh yes, her
reactions were spontaneous and full, not guarded. She fit in with actors
instantly. (320)
Middlebrook also notes in her the charisma of the artiste with Sexton dressing in
beautiful clothes and traveling with an entourage (319). Jon Stallworthy used to call her
the Nefertiti of New England (Letters 318). This obsession with the role of actress, in
contrast to Sextons well-known fear, shows her need for an identity in the symbolic world.
This is why the persona in The Breast compares the size of her breasts to those of the
movie stars. She, like Sexton in real life, tries to please a father and makes sure that her
sex will [not] be transfixed (176). In very self-effacing lines, she says: I am your
mother, your daughter, / your brand new thing a snail, a nest. / I am alive when your
fingers are. The offering she is mad about is not what the lover offers to track me like
a climber, rather it is the offering of her body to burn like money under his power. One
meaning of the word offering is presentation, an outward show. Therefore, the theatrical
presentation which Sexton, the actress, likes to perform is nothing but an offering or
sacrifice to her father. The persona, as well as Sexton, becomes a sacrifice to her male god.
As Caroline King Barnard Hall has pointed out, these poems, as well as others such as
Moon Song, Woman Song, Mr. Mine, Barefoot, and You All Know the Story of

46

the Other Woman, indicate the lovers active power and the speakers passive waiting
(75). Maxine Kumin seems to share Halls opinion:
in Sextons poetry the reader can find the poet again identifying herself
through her relationship with the male other, whether in the person of a
lover or in the last, hasty, and often brilliant poems in The Awful Rowing,
which make a final effort to land on the island called God in the person
of the patriarchal final arbiter. (206)
Middlebrook, however, considers Love Poems to have deeper insight: Desire seeks
what has been lost forever, the unsymbolic experience of infant intimacy with a maternal
body (299). 26 There is another facet to this relationship and that is surrendering to a
symbolic authority. The words which are used to describe the relationship in these poems
are mostly those of construction, which is related to the symbolic realm rather than to
maternal fusion. For example, in Mr. Mine she uses a lot of images of creation to
describe the male lover: He is building a city, a city of flesh, he constructs me and
The time I was dancing he built a museum (ASCP 204).
Sextons relationship to the patriarchal authority is not even reciprocal in these
poems. As an introduction to Love Poems, Sexton quotes Yeats: I have lived many lives. I
have been a slave and a prince (Yeats, The Collected Poems 279-80). 27 Nevertheless,
there is no application of the fullness of this saying to the volume for almost always she is
the slave. There is only a quest for a male authority figure to love and trust (Kumin 206).
For example, in Us she rubs her lovers feet because I was your slave / and then you
called me princess (ASCP 202). In Moon Song, Woman Song she announces: I am
alive at night. / I am dead in the morning, / an old vessel who used up her oil. And to her
lover she says: You need only request / and I will grant it. / It is virtually guaranteed / that
you will walk into me like a barracks (ASCP 196-97). In You All Know the Story of the
Other Woman she concludes with the following lines: when it is over he places her, /
like a phone, back on the hook (ASCP 196). This is all enacted in full submission to her
father/lover without the least defiance.

47

In Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton, George draws parallels between
Sexton and Sophocless Oedipus, as read by Freud and Bettelheim. George tries to show
that Sexton struggled for the unconscious truth, especially in relation to her family
protagonists. Consequently, George views Sexton as a hero, like Oedipus struggling for
insight through blindness, rather than as a victim/victimizer, a Jocasta. She views Sextons
failure to save herself in the end as heroic and courageous. This death is a sacrificial role
on behalf of the lives of other beautiful women, imposed on her by her audience to purge
themselves of the one who has broken boundaries and violated taboos (21, xiii). One
cannot deny Sextons struggle at a certain phase in her career and her attempts to break the
boundaries and violate taboos, as George suggests, but it can be argued that she is not
successful in the end. In fact, Sexton is better at building boundaries than in breaking them.
This is why she succumbs to a God who declares her as his sacrifice, a role which seems to
suit her. In The Author of The Jesus Papers Speaks, Sextons God declares: we must all
eat sacrifices. / We must all eat beautiful women (ASCP 345). Sexton does not seem to
protest.
Another poem that many critics look at as a feminist achievement, but which hides
identification with the father, is In Celebration of My Uterus (ASCP 181).28 In this poem,
Sexton moves from, as it were, first wave to second wave feminism to celebrate the
uniqueness of her femininity and to emphasize sexual difference (Colebrook, 119, 127):
Sweet weight,
in celebration of the woman I am
and of the soul of the woman I am
and of the central creature and its delight
I sing for you. I dare to live. (183)
Here, the persona becomes godlike, a central creature. It is a relief, George comments,
to find the central creature singing to her soul in the absence of a savior always male,
always other, always externalized (Oedipus 67). However, the male exists in the

48

background, for the persona is identifying with his central position. She is welcoming the
roots that belong to him, and this is why she can be. This creates what Leslie Rabine, based
on her reading of About Chinese Women, calls the isomorphic structure of the symbolic
order, which generates homologous models. According to Rabine, this structure represses
the maternal function and suppresses woman under the law of One (43-45). According to
Kristeva, to eradicate this structure, it is essential to eradicate identity, even sexual identity
(Guberman 98).
The persona continues her celebration with an implicit invitation to her sexual
world: There is enough here to please a nation (182). In The Civil War, a poem written
at the end of Sextons career, the female speaker promises to build a whole nation of
God (ASCP 419). This poem begins with the romantic notion: I am torn in two / but I
will conquer myself (418). Not only she but also the personas God is torn. Nevertheless,
she will put Him together again (418). All united around her, she will sing an anthem,
/ a song of myself (418). The anthem, in In Celebration of My Uterus, is sung by a
womens chorus, the sacrificial beautiful women. The persona, on their behalf, carr[ies]
bowls for the offering / (if that is my part) (183).
Unconsciously or otherwise, this sacrifice is done for the sake of the sociosymbolic contract. At the end of the poem, she sings again and one wonders whether she
sings for the correct or simply the erect (183). She sings for a man that will tie her to
him forever. This recalls the lines of a later poem, When Man Enters Woman, where
Sexton celebrates a man tying a knot in a woman so that they will / never again be
separate (ASCP 428). In this sexual scene, God is there, a mentor, a perverse voyeur that
unties the knot after they are done. Jane McCabe put this in simple terms: for all the
ostensible glamour and sexual confidence in Sextons poetry, there is an increasingly clear
sense that her body is only hers and admirable when it is given to men (228).
In this godly patriarchal realm, deformity is not allowed for sacrificial bodies must
be proper. This faultless body looks like the one presented in It Is A Spring Afternoon

49

(ASCP 193). After describing the fertility and sexuality of a woman who has just left
childhood in this poem, Sexton suggests that [s]urely spring will allow / a girl without a
stitch on / to turn softly in her sunlight / and not be afraid of her bed (41-44). This
subject, which belongs to the symbolic realm where the blind men can also see, must
have a unified image in that Lacanian green green mirror (194). This gestalt, the
orthopedic form of [the bodys] totality, sacrificial and perfect, is offered on a golden
plate for the sake of the law of One (Lacan, The Mirror Stage 76-78).
Sexton has been loyal to the law of the father, which means having a unified
body/ego. This applies even to the most considered feminine poems. The relationship with
her father is not, as has been mentioned earlier, only a result of love and loyalty to him, but
also of the need to protect herself from an abject mother. This mother, as will be seen,
appears between the beginning and end of Sextons work. The next section will discuss
how three of Sextons poems imitate the general structure of Sextons oeuvre.

1.2 The Mother In Between

The notion of unity recurs in Sextons work. Does she belong easily to this
concept? Is there no heterogeneity in her poems whatsoever? Where then does her
suffering stem from? The answer to these questions can be found in one of her early
poems, For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further. This poem was written for John
Holmes, Sextons teacher in the first poetry workshop she attended on her psychiatrists
advice. In one of her interviews, Sexton admitted that Holmes criticized her poetry and
warned her friend, the poet Maxine Kumin, to stay away from her (Kevles 8). Sexton also
revealed that he asked her to stop writing what he thought was mad poetry. The answer
came to Holmes in the form of a whole poem and to the above questions in the refrain of
the poem: Not that it was beautiful, / but that, in the end, there was / a certain sense of
order there (ASCP 34).

50

The symbolic gives that sense of order, even if it does not give a sense of beauty, at
a point when the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us and that
cancels our existence (Kristeva, Powers 210). What is beautiful and alive for Sexton is
essentially abject and related to death, for death too is in the egg (The Operation 57).
In Fortress, Sexton addresses her daughter by referring to what is beautiful as deadly and
dangerous. The mole on her daughters cheek is an inherited [. . .] spot of danger / where
a bewitched worm ate its way through our soul / in search of beauty (ASCP 66).

This

maternal abject that Sexton tries to order will appear later in her work.
Sextons sense of beauty as being outside the law of the One is the beginning of her
narcissistic crisis, her suffering and alienation, before she thrusts herself back into Gods
arms. She will be, as she describes herself to the Kind Sir in Kind Sir: These Woods
(To Bedlam and Part Way Back), Lost and of your same kind (ASCP 4-5), search[ing]
in these woods, while afraid of course, finding nothing worse / than myself, caught
between the grapes and the thorns (5). The dilemma of being torn between a mother and a
father will mark the beginning of her crisis.
This structure of beginning and ending with the father while having the mother in
between as the reason for her crisis, resembles that of three poems: Music Swims Back To
Me, and The Bells in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), and The Silence in The
Book of Folly (1972). At the beginning of Music Swims Back To Me, the persona calls
for a Mister in a childish manner: Wait Mister. Which way is home? (ASCP 6). She
relies on him as a support in that desolate place where There are no sign posts. This dark
place is a private [patriarchal] institution where she longs for a sensorial timeliness
(felt time) (Guberman 235; Kristeva, Proust 7) although she is not allowed to return to
the maternal place, home. Therefore, music with its memories swims back to her.
Diana Hume George notices correctly that father-daughter rituals, especially
tinged with sexuality, take place in mediums usually fluid, although sometimes also in
music, fire, or flight (41). However, music here is semiotic since it is evoked by a radio

51

playing. Sexton explains the association between her mother and radios in her essay All
Gods Children Need Radios. After Mary Grays death from cancer, Sexton took her
portable radio, which she described as her [mothers] heartbeat, wherever she went,
especially to the mental hospital. The speaker of the poem liked [the music] and danced in
a circle for Music pours over the sense / and in a funny way / music sees more than I. / I
mean it remembers better (6). Music sees more than I because it also sees the not-I,
the Invisible, the Unnamable, and it remembers better because it takes one back to a preverbal space which belongs to ones history (Kristeva, Tales of Love 41).
While those feelings may sound nostalgic and relaxing in the midst of darkness,
they are equally threatening and horrifying, belonging as they do to a sinister space outside
the room: the stars are strapped in the sky and the moon, an appalling mother, is forking
through the bars to stick me with a different kind of music strong enough to pull her into a
state of amnesia (7). The moon lurks behind that jail, snatching the souls and, therefore, we
have the right not to believe the persona when she claims that she was not afraid. In
addition to Freuds famous formula of changing negation to affirmation when the
unconscious is at work (Freud 19: 235-39), one learns through reading Sextons biography,
as well as her interviews, that she is capable of telling lies. Sexton herself confesses, I am
known to lie, and I never let myself down (Middlebrook, A Biography 279). Her favourite
paradox, we are told, is In poetry, truth is a lie is a truth (Middlebrook, A Biography
258). Thus, in Sextons canon, [Lying] / Is an art, like everything else (Plath, Lady
Lazarus 245). The last word uttered by the persona is Mister? as if she is begging that
gatekeeper, as Middlebrook sees him, or jailer to stay since her fear of the outside is
unbearable (71). The poem starts with a father and ends with a father. Fear and loss
dominate inbetween.
Music swims back to her again in The Bells (ASCP 7). The music belongs to the
circus, which is frightening for a little girl. The speaker claims that she was not afraid
(which means that she was initially frightened) when her father was there to explain the

52

dangers of the world of the maternal carnivalesque: the three rings of danger. The
naughty clown / and the wild parade are more dangerous than the love rings of her father
which grew other rings around her (7-8) for the carnival challenges God, authority, and
social law, it is rebellious, threatening individuality (Kristeva, Desire 79). But her
God/father is strong enough to keep her safe. The music that belongs to the world of the
circus becomes her fathers music in the end:
I remember the color of music
and how forever
all the trembling bells of you
were mine. (ASCP 8)
Therefore, Today the circus poster / is scabbing off the concrete wall / and the children
have forgotten / if they knew at all, which indicates that a detachment occurred in the
personas psyche between the realms of the semiotic and the symbolic through the help of
her loving, authoritative father (A Biography 7). As a result, the music of the poetic
language here [does not] pluralize, pulverize and musicalize all the static socio-symbolic
features of the fathers world (Lechte 29).
The Silence further reveals the overall structure of Sextons canon, which takes
the form of white-black-white (ASCP 318). This poem is, in a metaphorical sense, more of
a painting than a poem, but it is a painting without vividness. There is, in the first stanza, a
room which is whitewashed, /as white as a rural station house. It is whiter than chicken
bones / bleaching in the moonlight / pure garbage. Furthermore, there is a white statue
and white plants /growing like obscene virgins scattered in the painting. It is a painting
with no sound and no life like those silent rubbery tongues of the virgins who say
nothing, although they are pushed out. Then, suddenly, a little black appears in the
second stanza, which one thinks will save the situation: My hair is the one dark, and My
beads too are black. Blackness increases in the third stanza and the words from my pen
fill that white room (319). Finally, zinging words violate the white silence of the

53

symbolic and add some negativity to the painting. Now, there is a silence of another kind.
It is like an enormous baby mouth that babbles a semiotic rhythm. It is also the
devouring silence which is death. However, at the end of the poem a white bird
peck[s] at the black eyes/ and the vibrating red muscle/ of my mouth.
White, according to Kristeva in Giottos Joy, is the white of dazzling light, a
transparent light of meaning cut off from the body, conceptual, instinctually foreclosed
(Desire 222). It could be argued that white in The Silence means the same as it belongs
to the symbolic father, only here it is connected to the proper body represented by the
white house. Black, on the other hand, is the cast of form, an undefilable, forbidden, or
simply deformable figure (222). Accordingly, it belongs to the archaic mother of death. If
white is the pure language of the symbolic system and black is the maternal semiotic which
Sexton tries to incorporate in order to add vividness and struggle to the scene, her efforts
are an absolute failure, a miscarriage (319). It is the victory of the white bird of the
symbolic in the end. In fact, if one examines the blackness, one finds that it is from a white
origin and thus not original. The personas hair, in the second stanza, is dark and charred
since it has been burnt in the white fire (318). Furthermore, the red colour one sees at the
end is the sacrificial colour of red. The white bird by pecking at the vibrating red muscle
of my mouth and at the black eyes, not only shows the authority of the symbolic order,
but also recalls Oedipus sacrificial blindness for the sake of the patriarchal city-state
(319). Oedipus becomes blind only because he transgresses the law of the city by killing
his father and marrying his mother, and it is only by his blindness that the law can be
restored.
In these three poems, as in Sextons oeuvre in general, the law of the father
functions as a parenthetical bracket for what takes place within her work. The
heterogeneity that appears in the middle and towards the end of her career is toned down
because of Sextons alliance with the father. However, this alliance is not motivated only
by an Oedipal love of the father (an Electra complex), but, as will be seen later, also by a

54

fear of facing an abject mother. The father is the lesser of two evils. The passivity in the
painting of The Silence, as well as in Sextons work, is due to the inability to move
across the borders which separate the father and the mother, the I and not-I. Pure
whiteness is death in life and pure blackness is simply death. Heterogeneity is the struggle
of both life and death. Before reaching this heterogeneity, which will be discussed in
Chapter 3, Sextons work remains generally passive. Both the rigidity of Sextons psychic
borders in the face of an abject mother, and her keeping a second mother as a secret, leads
to passivity in her work, preventing her from transgressing the father of the law. The first
reason for Sextons passivity and her inability to change the law of the father will be
discussed in Chapter 2, by looking at the separation, which causes suffering in her psyche,
between the father realm and the first mother in terms of psychic borders. By jettisoning
her mother over the proper borders, Sexton establishes strong shields to protect herself
from the return of this abject figure from the outside. Sexton rejects the idea of leaving
these shields in order to confront this haunting mother, and thus stays inert. The second
reason, as shall be discussed, is Sextons secret bond with a second mother, which
complicates things in her work as it adds to the passivity and later to the heterogeneity. By
keeping this second mother as a crypt in her psyche and refusing to abandon it, Sexton
remains passive. It is not until she admits the loss of this mother that mobility starts to seep
into her work.

55

Chapter 2
Geometry and Abjection
2.1 Establishing Borders (Shields)
In an interview which appeared in The Paris Review after she received the Pulitzer
Prize for poetry in 1967, Sexton talked at length about her transformation from a middleclass housewife to a successful poet:
Until I was twenty-eight I had a kind of buried self who didnt know she
could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didnt know I
had any creative depths. I was a victim of the American Dream, the
bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be
married, to have children. I thought the nightmares, the visions, the demons
would go away if there was enough love to put them down. I was trying my
damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up,
and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one cant build little white
picket fences to keep nightmares out. The surface cracked when I was about
twenty-eight. I had a psychotic break and tried to kill myself.
(Kevles 3-4, emphasis added)
However, building fences is precisely what Sexton did initially in her poetry in order to
keep the nightmares of the abject mother out. The creation of strong psychic borders,
which also indicate a proper body in alliance with patriarchal law, will be a defence against
Sextons fears of an abject mother. The cracking of these borders will be witnessed later as
the beginning of heterogeneity in her poetry.
Abjection, one of Kristevas most important concepts, is discussed most fully in
Powers of Horror. Abjection is a process where the infant starts to separate from her
mother for the purpose of forming the selfs border: We may call it a border (Kristeva 9).
This happens when the mothers unclean, improper body is jettisoned outside the symbolic
order so that the subject can structure its identity. In other words, it is a process where the
not-yet subject relinquishes the object-subject dyad of the mother and the child, the realm
of plenitude, of oneness with our environment, and the semiotic chora (McAfee 45). This

56

separation takes place before the thetic phase of the mirror and the subjects castration. It is
a rejection of ones corporeality, animality and materiality represented by the mother in
order to enter the realm of the symbolic.
However, this expulsion is not final. The mothers abject body does not disappear
forever. Like Freuds return of the repressed it comes back to haunt the subject,
threatening to pulverize and obliterate its borders (Grosz, The Body 87). The subject is
thus threatened with being engulfed in an abyss, a void. This is horrifying for the subject as
much as it is fascinating horrifying in that it threatens the subjects symbolic unity and its
position in language, fascinating in that it promises merging and confusion with the archaic
mother and the freedom of incestuous prohibition. This situation is what Kristeva calls the
double-bind where the ambiguity is between inside and outside, nature and culture,
subject and object, self and other (About Chinese Women 76).
Relying on Mary Douglas Purity and Danger, Kristeva discusses in Powers of
Horror demarcating a clean proper body, the social body, away from pollution and
defilement, what she calls the abject. The abject is which is dirty and impure, what
incorporated and expelled from the body: food, faeces, urine, vomit, tears, spit (Grosz,
Sexual Subversions 72). The dirt is not an intrinsic quality in what is considered abject,
rather, Grosz explains, it is what causes disorder in a system: Dirt signals a site of
possible danger to social and individual systems, a site of vulnerability insofar as the status
of dirt as marginal and unincorporable always locates sites of potential threat to the system
and to the order it both makes possible and problematizes (Volatile Bodies 192). The
demarcation, becomes important, in this sense, as it separates culture from nature, in
linguistic terms, the symbolic from the semiotic, and in psychoanalytic terms, child from
maternal/feminine body.
To dispose of the impure and the unclean and to suppress the feminine become
essential for protecting the unity of the speaking subject. However, what is excluded

57

always hovers at the borders of the body threatening this unity with fragmentation and
dissolution and provokes a reaction, such as horror, fear, or disgust, recalling a state prior
to signification. The abject elements haunt the subject because she has to face them after
they have been cast from the social world causing her a trauma. By invoking the Dionysian
festival, Kristeva relates the disintegration of both body and identity to the dissolution of
the symbolic order and language in a dancing, singing, and poetic animality (Revolution
79). In art, abjection is seen as semiotic drives penetrating the poetic text, exactly as the
abject traverses the bodily zones, such as, the mouth, the anus, and the genitals. Both the
abject and the semiotic are revolutionary elements since they are maternal and feminine.
They disturb the identity, the authority of the law, and language. Experiencing the abject in
poetry brings fear but also jouissance and breaks down the boundaries of the subject
towards what is heterogeneous.
In his illuminating essay Geometry and Abjection, Victor Burgin narrates the
history of geometry from the cosmology of classical Greece, through the Middle Ages, to
Euclidean geometry and then modern and post-modern geometry where space becomes
psychical space. Burgin then comes to the conclusion that no subject is without a boundary
that is, without a space. However, he argues that Kristeva takes us to a space prior to
Lacans mirror stage where the ego will take its place as a Gestalt, to a space with
uncertain boundaries. Therefore, he reaches another conclusion: that the origin of
geometry is abjection (115). It is of utmost importance, however, to understand geometry
here in a non-Euclidean sense. In other words, it is important to understand it as a
psychical space that is ready to collapse in what Kristeva calls the degree zero
spatialization (122).29 It is a mutation of space (119). It is geometry.
A close look at Sextons poetry can startle one with the number of two and three
dimensional geometrical shapes it contains. These can relate to her relationship with her
father and mother, the real and the symbolic. Although Sexton is loyal to her father and his

58

city-state, she yearns for an archaic mother who, at the same time, threatens her with an
ominous call. As this chapter will discuss, in defence against the call of the mother, Sexton
builds different kinds of obstinate walls which initially seem to belong more to a Euclidean
geometry that is separated, segregated (Burgin 108). This is why there is less negativity
in Sextons work as there is resistance to and less confrontation with the maternal, which
cannot go through the walls of the city-state to achieve transformation. This, of course,
means less death and Sexton is, in this case, the dead/less. That is when the maternal
element or the semiotic is resisted to enter into the psychic borders and thus into poetry.
Therefore, the ability to show violent fragmentation and the dissolution of the I, that is
her death in poetry, is less.
The dead/less is passive because she resists confronting the other in conflictual
reciprocity in order to make a change. In other words, she longs for death more than
achieving death, especially in relation to an other, and encountering it face to face. Thus,
in spite of a desperate need for her lost mother, Sextons fear of the mothers destructive
powers prevails. Therefore, she erects walls and uses anything to shield and cover her from
that omnipotent power, from the devouring body of the mother. Her father, though
sometimes symbolically castrating and frightening, is, nonetheless, her only support and
defence against the mother. Consequently, his city-state, his walls and his ghetto are
welcomed by the daughter. Unable to confront her mother or father, she has small chance
of transformation.
Disability and fear of confrontation can be detected in Sextons life as well as her
poetry. For example, after her breakdown, she had become acutely fearful of mingling
with strangers: even the prospect of leaving her house now terrified her (Middlebrook, A
Biography 42). Furthermore, her psychiatrist, Dr. Orne, commented that Anne used a
metaphor for the comfort she needed in order to discuss things effectively in treatment: she
called this having room. Paradoxically enough, the poet who is known more than any
other Confessional poet for exposing herself in her poetry, sexually speaking, wrote once

59

to her psychiatrist that she feared exposure of every kind (Middlebrook, A Biography 44,
127). Only her closest friends, Middlebrook reports, knew how terrified she was when
she opened her car door and stepped away from its protective frame into the midst of
strangers (Middlebrook, A Biography 127). She was also afraid to face her audience,
despite her well-known and successful theatrical readings: they actually scare the shit out
of me! But it is money and I have to have it [. . .]. Fear, always fear (Letters 163).
Above all, and surprisingly enough, since she was often suicidal, Sexton
acknowledged her fear of facing death: I worry about the minutes before you die, that fear
of death. I dont have it with the pills, but with a gun [referring to Hemingways death]
thered be a minute when youd know, a terrible fear. Id do anything to escape that fear;
death would be a friend, then (Middlebrook, A Biography 216). This no longer remains a
surprise when we understand that Sexton wants to die peacefully without pain: Killing
yourself is merely a way to avoid pain (Letters 232). She wants to die with the least
confrontation possible, especially with the maternal.
In Sextons poetry, and in opposition to that maternal horror, we see houses, walls,
ceilings, rooms, doors, windows, gates, boxes, coffins, prisons, beds, shoes, life jackets,
blankets and many other shields. However, it is important to consider the first difficult
separation that Sexton achieved from her first mother, the real and the symbolic, before
establishing her Fortified Castle (Kristeva, Powers 46).
This separation is explicitly represented in three of her major poems: The Double
Image, The Division of Parts, and The Operation (ASCP 35, 42, 56). Although
Melanie Waters suggests rightly that these poems show abjection, as it means the fragile
borders of subjectivity between mother and daughter, especially in The Double Image,
and the leakage between inside and outside (216, 212), it can be argued that this
uncontainability is a first step that Sexton takes before establishing her strange
containments later on (218). For at the end of these poems, Sexton shows a successful
separation from her first mother before she proceeds to erect her walls.

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The Double Image is a poem loaded with guilt and blame (ASCP 35). Sexton,
estranged from her daughter for three years because of her mania, blames herself for her
daughters illness. Later on, Sextons own mother blames her daughter for her cancer,
brought on, she claims, by Sexton trying to commit suicide. This, unsurprisingly, makes
the daughter feel very guilty: an old debt I must assume (36). In trying to rehabilitate
herself, the persona comes to live with her mother: too late, to live with your mother.
Thus we have the dilemma of the poem: And this is how I came / to catch at her; and this
is how I lost her (37). A Fort/Da game, which is negativity as love and hate of the mother
necessary for the onset of subjectivity, is established between them. In fact, Fort /Da
(German for gone/there) was a game played by Freuds grandson to express his anxiety
about his mothers absence. Freud talked about this game in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle. It is a game of disappearance and return where pleasure is attached to the
second act, which is the return of the mother (Freud 18: 15). This game shows how
symbolic language gives presence to objects and feelings. But most importantly this game
represents the relationship with the mother, who can be gone but is still present in language
as play (Freud 18: 14-15). Kristeva explains that the child deals with the experience of the
loss of the mother through the imagination and then through language (Black Sun 6).
A strange solution to this comes from the two parts of the conflict and is indicative
of Sextons later obsession with geometrical shapes. It comes in the refrain of the poem: I
[or she] had my portrait done instead. The persona as daughter chooses to petrify her own
powers and imprison herself in a portrait. The picture implicitly belongs to the symbolic
father although the mother is the one who asked for it to be done: I am a picture (just I
was Gods picture in the medieval space of emplacement) (Burgin 112). The persona in
that portrait holding my smile in place, till it grew formal evokes another scene in her
childhood in the church where they locked us up /row by row, like puritans or shipmates
(ASCP 37).

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The personas portrait is then hung in the chill / north light, matching / me to keep
me well. The mother, in what seems a defiant act, had her portrait done and hung on the
south wall, opposite her daughters portrait. When they are portraits, they are separate, but
when the portraits turn into mirrors, fusion takes place:
And this was the cave of the mirror,
that double woman who stares
at herself, as if she were petrified
in time two ladies sitting in umber chairs.
You kissed your grandmother
and she cried. (ASCP 41)
The confusion here is not only with the mother, but it extends backwards to a grandmother
and forward later to the little daughter of the persona who could not cure or sooth the
pain caused by her mother (42):
I, who was never quite sure
about being a girl, needed another
life, another image to remind me. (ASCP 41-42)
However, the persona, as a daughter, is able, albeit only partly at the beginning, to
overthrow and outgrow that alluring yet horrifying relation to her mother:
In south light, her smile is held in place,
her cheeks wilting like a dry
orchid; my mocking mirror, my overthrown
love, my first image. She eyes me from that face,
that stony head of death
I had outgrown.
The artist caught us at the turning;
we smiled in our canvas home
before we chose our foreknown separate ways. (ASCP 40)
The Demeter-Kore (mother-daughter) dilemma, as Stephanie Demetrakopoulos likes to
refer to it in her archetypal study, comes to an end with the daughter managing to separate

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completely from her mother in pain and anguish (118). This is again emphasized in The
Division of Parts.
The Division of Parts also discusses Sextons separation from her mother. It
begins with the death of the mother on Good Friday, leaving an inheritance for her three
daughters: I am one third / of your daughters counting my bounty (ASCP 42). With the
personas usual guilt, the inheritance settle[s] on me like a debt. The mothers
belongings are obstacles, gifts I did not choose. She is in her grief left in a doublebind: I fumble my lost childhood / for a mother and lounge in sad stuff / with love to
catch and catch as catch can (44). Sometimes, however, in the poem, she withdraws from
her sadness: Time, that rearranger / of estates, equips / me with your garments, but not
with grief and I planned to suffer / and I cannot (43). Moreover, to emphasize the
detachment from her emotions, she refers to her mothers house as your house.
The love/hatred relationship toward her rival mother continues:
Since then I have pretended ease,
loved with the trickeries of need, but not enough
to shed my daughterhood
or sweeten him as a man. (ASCP 44)
The persona here identifies the mothers death with Christs sacrifice, which reminds her
of The clutter of worship / that you taught me, Mary Gray (43). It is not orthodox
religion that the mother wants her daughter to follow and so the daughter prefers her own
version of that religion, as Margaret Honton explains it (102). The mother would like her
to follow the grotesque metaphor of Christ, which belongs in the realm of ghosts where
she now exists and from where she haunts her daughter (46):
Divided, you climbed into my head.
There in my jabbering dream
I heard my own angry cries
and I cursed you, Dame
keep out of my slumber.

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My good Dame, you are dead. (ASCP 45)

She is haunted by Black birds (43), pecking at her window, or sometimes her mothers
dangerous angels, whose walls creak exactly like the psychic walls of anyone who will
adopt the maternal religion they call for, letting the semiotic in: Anne! Convert! Convert! /
My desk moves. Its cave murmurs Boo / and I am taken and beguiled (45). Because she
cannot succumb to her mothers will and her haunting presence, she will adopt an orthodox
religion belonging to the symbolic father. For all the way Ive come / Ill have to go
again if she does not follow the religion of the father (45). All her efforts at detachment so
far will go to the zero degree of fusion with the mother for she is still walking now on a
way formed from a single, continuous, surface which is not separated yet (Burgin 108).
She has not erected firm borders yet. The poet Maxine Kumin, Sextons friend, describes
the God and thus the religion that Sexton sought: The God she wanted was a sure thing,
an Old Testament avenger admonishing his Chosen People, an authoritarian yet forgiving
father decked out in sacrament and ceremony (200). Sexton describes the religion she
would like to convert to in her poetry as follows:
Instead, I must convert
to love as reasonable
as Latin, as solid as earthenware:
an equilibrium
I never knew. (ASCP 45)
This is the religion and love of the father. More precisely, it is the love of the conglomerate
father or what Freud calls a father of individual prehistory (Freud 19: 31) and which
Kristeva renamed as the imaginary father that will initiate her movement away from the
mothers stifling powers to the realm of the symbolic (Kristeva, Tales of Love 26).
In a last affecting moment of detachment, where Sexton is at her best, one feels an
acceleration of movement, through the acceleration of words, towards separation. The
persona, in an absurd amalgamation of love and hatred, is sucking what she can from her

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last fusion, feeling the harshness of separation before it happens, saying goodbye in the
most affectionate way to the lady of my first words, the babbling words of the semiotic
chora:
Now it is Fridays noon
and I would still curse
you with my rhyming words
and bring you flapping back, old love,
old circus knitting, god-in-her-moon,
all fairest in my lang syne verse,
the gauzy bride among the children,
the fancy amid the absurd
and awkward, that horn for hounds
that skipper homeward, that museum
keeper of stiff starfish, that blaze
within the pilgrim woman,
a clown mender, a doves
cheek among the stones,
my lady of my first words,
this is the division of ways. (ASCP 45-46)
The division from the mother is re-emphasized in The Operation in All My Pretty
Ones (ASCP 56). This poem is closely related to Sextons biography. It depicts again the
ambivalent feelings she harboured towards the death of her real mother from breast cancer.
However, Sextons relationship with her mother had become complicated even before her
mothers death. One can detect many of her contradictory feelings towards her mother in
Middlebrooks biography. At one point, Sexton admits, I know I was dependent but
Mother didnt want to be motherly. I clung to her (Middlebrook, A Biography 37). At
another, the relationship between the two becomes competitive, something which began in
a minor way during Annes childhood, especially in terms of writing poetry (45, 101). In
one of her sessions with Dr. Orne, Sexton said regretfully that Mother doesnt think I
wrote them [referring to her poetry] still (101). She both wished and feared her mothers

65

death: Part of me would be free if she died. It would also be awful I would dissolve
(47). She put it simply: Mother makes me sick but I love her (46-47).
In her letters too, Sexton expressed her ambivalent feelings toward her mother. For
example, she wrote to W. D. Snodgrass in 1959: She is in the hospital with cancer now in
her liver, stomach, lungs, and bones . . . (I feel guilty. Remember the letter I wrote you
about hating her) . . . What do we do with our old hate? (51). In another letter to Anne
Clarke in 1964 she wrote: for me she is a big something . . . a something I love and hate
and still react and talk to (230). In a letter to her daughter Linda in 1969, Sexton added the
element of fear which became prominent in her later poetry: Even if I say my mother was
mean, I still love her and anyhow she wasnt that mean. I exaggerate everything I fear
(339).
In The Operation, the persona, who is in need of an operation, recalls the death of
her mother, who is back to haunt her life: the historic thief / is loose in my house / and
must be set upon. (57). Successful in expelling the thief, the persona maintains her unity
and the place of haunting changes to the outside:
The rooms down the hall are calling
all night long, while the night outside
sucks at the trees. I hear limbs falling
and see yellow eyes flick in the rain. Wide eyed
and still whole I turn in my bin like a shorn lamb. (ASCP 57)
Nevertheless, the persona is still longing for fusion with her mothers body which is torn
from hers and jettisoned outside:
I plunge down the backstair
calling mother at the dying door,
to rush back to my own skin, tied where it was torn. (ASCP 58)

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In the last lines of the poem, as in The Division of Parts, the separation from the mother
is complete and the persona is initiated into the symbolic world. The game she is to play is
that of hide and seek:
Alls well, they say. They say Im better.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
Time now to pack this humpty-dumpty
back the frightened way she came
and run along, Anne, and run along now,
my stomach laced up like a football
for the game. (ASCP 59)
This discarding of the mother is considered a release which facilitates the allegiance
to God that appears later in her work. The evidence of this release appears in another poem
written early in Sextons career (1959) called My Friend, My Friend where the persona
declares clearly: Watching my mother slowly die I knew / My first release (13-14).30
Elsewhere, this death seems to be a matricide, as in Christmas Eve: Then I thought of
your body / as one thinks of murder . . . (ASCP 140). Heather Cam argues convincingly
of the debt Plaths Daddy (CP 222) owed to Sextons My Friend, a poem she
encountered during one of Robert Lowells workshops at Boston University or after class
in personal meetings with George Starbuck and Sexton in the Ritz bar. Cam also notices
that while Plaths Daddy portrays a mutually destructive relationship with her father,
Sextons poem, in an Ouroboros fashion, turns back on itself, taking the reader back
through the poems closed circuit of guilt (431-32). Moreover, according to Cam, in spite
of Sextons claim that she has no special legend or God to refer to, her sense of guilt, the
need to forgive and be forgiven, and her feelings of release caused by her mothers death
shows the opposite. She is totally submissive to this Nazi God as she insists on her
Jewishness in the poems refrain: I think it would be better to be a Jew.
The symbolic shelters that Sexton constructs after her separation from her mother,
whose death facilitated the procedure, represent her body-ego. This proper body initially

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shows a rigid psyche towards the return of the repressed, the abject mother. Later on,
another reason appears for holding onto these shields: the hidden crypt for Nana, Sextons
aunt, who is considered a second mother to Sexton. These shelters, which proliferate in
Sextons poems, take many forms. The discussion of these can be divided into five major
themes and images. The first section will discuss protective boundaries of houses and
rooms. In the second section, proper dolls will be discussed, as they relate to this symbolic
rigidity, and holes, which are supposed to be an escape from rigidity, but which sometimes,
for Sexton, are impenetrable. The third section will discuss windows and other barriers.
The fourth will discuss shields in myths and fairytales while the last section will aver that
in some of Sextons poems, even when she is outside, she is using some sort of shield.

2.2 Houses and Rooms

Sexton shields herself from the powers of the mother jettisoned outside the borders
of the self in a house which initially belongs to the symbolic. Diana Hume George
similarly views houses in Sextons work as a symbol of the psyche and body. However,
she makes a more social reading of houses as feminine places where mothers live, where
daughters become wives and mothers, into which men enter as into an alien land (Oedipus
62). The present study will argue that, apart from this social perspective, houses in Sexton
are places shaped by the father. In fact, they are proper psychic borders shaped by the
symbolic. Therefore, mothers/women are pushed back to the margins, leaving the centre of
these symbolic houses/city-states. Hence, for women to remain integrated they have to be
loyal to the father. To go outside is to be threatened by the abject mother. In other words, if
the house is a body, it is the clean and proper body which belongs to the law of the father
(Kristeva, Powers 108). A description of such a body occurs in the Housewife: Some
women marry houses. / Its another kind of skin; it has a heart, / a mouth, a liver and bowel
movements (ASCP 77). This body is integrated and clean: The walls are permanent and
pink. See how she sits on her knees all day, / faithfully washing herself down.

68

Sexton seems to differentiate between a house and a home. A home, it can be

argued, refers to the mother and this is why she has never been at home in life, as the
epigraph at the beginning of Old Dwarf Heart indicates (ASCP 54). In a letter to
Anthony Hecht, Sexton seems unable to explain clearly the difference between the two.
However, if one looks closely at her words, one can understand that house is for her a
place of hiding from a threatening outside, while home is a situation she feels or she
desires to have and which seems to elude her:
You remember I said I didnt feel at home in life, well that was almost
always any life not just the outside world more the outside than my
house here. But sometimes, all my life really, Ive stayed home hiding from
the world. Hiding is different from being at home. (Letters 123)
In another letter to Carolyn Kizer in 1959, she described herself in terms of house hiding:
I am kind of a secret beatnik hiding in the suburbs in my square house on a dull street
(Letters 70-71). The hiding place of the house is paternal since it is the only place she has
with protecting borders. It is a place for the sensible people, as she puts it in a letter to her
poet friend Philip Legler:
He [Sextons husband] is with the world. I am not of it whatsoever. You?
Perhaps only your wife is of the world. And maybe you and I are
otherworldly poets, to be exact. Poets, cant live for/ die for/ live with/
breathe in nothing but themselves they need the sensible people, the
roots, the down the house world of people. (Letters 293)

Moreover, in January 19th in Scorpio, Bad Spider, Die: The Horoscope Poems (ASCP
591), Sexton defines home in maternal terms. It is home that she has to leave and forever
long for in order to enter a symbolic world of sexual difference:
I leave you, home,
when I am ripped from the doorstep
by commerce or fate. Then I submit
to the awful subway of the world, the awful shop
of trousers and skirts. Oh animal bosom,
let me stay! Let me never quit
the sweet cereal, the sweet thumb! (ASCP 594)

69

When Sexton refers to her childhood, there is always a house: A thousand doors ago /
when I was a lonely kid / in a big house [. . .] (Young 51). Furthermore, in Eighteen
Days Without You, December 16th, she describes her confinement in the house as a
child, projecting that onto the addressee: Once upon a time / you grew up in a bedroom
the size of a dime / [. . .] / Longing for country you were penned / into city (ASCP 218).
She is in her fathers city-state. In Mr. Mine, the male lover builds the speakers
body: He is building a city, a city of flesh (ASCP 204). She also may be in the dead city
of my marriage (The Break Away 525), longing for country, a home. She continues to
narrate her confinement in December 16th:
Once upon a time
I was the only child forbidden to climb
over the garden wall. I didnt dare to speak
up over the Victorian houseful of rare antiques.
My dolls were all proper, waiting in neat rows.
My room was high ceilinged, lonely and full of echoes. (ASCP 218)
This detention goes back to a real incident in Sextons childhood. One of her most
persistent memories was of being locked in her room as a toddler by a folding gate drawn
across the doorway (Middlebrook, A Biography 7). The room was high ceilinged and
papered with a pattern of red roses. Tall windows looked onto trees outside. Little Anne
sometimes hid in the closet as she feared the roses on the wall. Middlebrook argues that
Sexton used images of this old memory very effectively in her poetry (Middlebrook, A
Biography 8). However, it can be argued that this imagistic pattern haunts her poetry not
only as a memory but as something she still lives with. In fact, as an adult, Sexton imitated
this pattern by choosing to lock herself literally in her house (Middlebrook, A Biography
49). Sexton used these images to express terror for what is abject outside, which she can be
protected from only by a barrier: the window from the trees, and the closet door from the
roses. For Sexton these barriers had to be strong and thus unified. The regressive state
behind these barriers expresses a further relationship with her second mother, as shall be

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seen later. The state of being hidden behind a barrier, fearing what is outside and
clinging to the crypt of a second mother inside is what makes Sexton and her poetry
generally passive. Even when Sexton depicts creativity in her poems, she uses the same
enclosed imagery which shows the difficulty of abandoning this passivity.
That Sexton uses an enclosed image to express her creativity is clear in For John,
Who Begs Me Not To Enquire Further (ASCP 34). In this poem, we have the most
peculiar image of the source of her creativity which summons a scenario of confinement.
It is an inverted bowl over the personas head or, to be more precise, it is the head which is
made of glass like a bowl. Therefore, unlike Plaths famous bell jar in her novel of that
name, Sextons bowl is immobile. It is a fixed part of Sexton and thus not choking,
whereas Plaths bell jar threatens although its movement up and down brings mobility and
heterogeneity to her work. For this reason, negativity as rage struggles to occur in such
poetry:
I tapped my own head;
it was glass, an inverted bowl.
It is a small thing
to rage in your own bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself;
it was you, or your house
or your kitchen. (ASCP 34)
The persona adds a layer to that cracked bowl to fasten it and give some sense of order to
her creativity. While one sees Plath in her poetry shedding a lot of her skin, one sees
Sexton fixing more skin around her creativity, clinging to her borders. This coverage
reinforces the subjects unity since it hides the fragile cracks in Sextons psychic borders
underneath. The reason for this weakness that Sexton is hiding will be revealed in Chapter
3 in relation to Sextons second mother.
I will hold my awkward bowl,

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with all its cracked stars shining

like a complicated lie,
and fasten a new skin around it
as if I were dressing an orange
or a strange sun.
Not that it was beautiful,
but that I found some order there. (ASCP 34-35)
There is no violent reciprocity between the two separate worlds. Sexton dreams
that the words of her poem written in her own room will be physically assertive as she
describes them in the letter written on June 6, 1960 in Letters to Dr. Y.:
Words waiting, angry, masculine,
with their fists in a knot.
Words right now, alive in the head,
heavy and pressing as in a crowd.
Pushing for headroom, elbowing,
knowing their rights. (ASCP 563)
However, her words are passive without reciprocal love because they have been produced
in that narcissistic room:
A word, a sunflower seed.
One we would surely overlook.
So easily lost, a dead bee.
So vulnerable.
She is already trampled, that one,
having traveled so far from the heart.
She weighs so little.
She is so light and vulnerable.
She is the dead bee called love. (ASCP 563)

A more detailed analysis of this locked creative room where the abject maternal is
not allowed in will be discussed under Windows and Other Barriers and also in relation
to Sextons fusion with her aunt in the next chapter. In what follows, Sextons stubborn
walls are projected onto her dolls. She uses the word proper to describe them: My dolls

72

were all proper (Eighteen Days Without You 218). Even the holes which are supposed
to be a way of escape from this incarceration sometimes turn out to be impenetrable.

2.3 Proper Dolls and Holes

Sexton talks a lot about dolls in her work, as a way of projection, and of her failed
efforts, as a result of fear, to help them escape their imprisonment. Like her, the dolls
welcome confinement instead of facing an abject mother outside. Holes are usually the
dolls and Sextons way of escape. However, even holes sometimes become impenetrable
and imprisoning in her poetry exactly like her other shelters.
Sextons dolls, like her house (body) are clean and proper. They are Gods dolls
falling out of the sky (The Falling Dolls 486). In All Gods Children Need Radios
under the subheading Little Girl, Big Doll, Sexton describes her dolls as both a replica
of herself and as whole proper dolls, especially that big doll, her size, which resists death,
at least for a while:
I had a Dye-dee doll myself, a Cinderella doll with a crown made of
diamonds and a Raggedy Ann with orange hair and once on my sixth
birthday a big doll, almost my size. Her eyes were brown and her name was
Amanda and she did not welcome death. Death forgot her. (For the time
being.) (27)

Those Times . . . in Live or Die (1966) portrays another house where the little girl
is imprisoned in a labyrinth of enclosures with the same proper dolls (ASCP 118):
At six
I lived in a graveyard full of dolls,
avoiding myself,
my body, the suspect
in its grotesque house.
I was locked in my room all day behind a gate,
a prison cell.
I was the exile
who sat all day in a knot. (ASCP 118)

73

This scene of entrapment depicts the grotesque spectacle that the child Anne surveyed
painfully. However, as Robert Boyers notices: Though her past is a nightmare of grisly
proportions, she cannot evade its urgent appeals to her consciousness (209). Sexton starts
to erect these same barriers that seem to victimize her in order to evade the spectre of
violation which haunts her (Boyers 210). The statement [s]he delights in stillness, but
fears everything is a precise description of Sextons relation to her entrapment (Boyers
209). For this very reason, it is rare that Sexton erupts with fury. Another scene in the
same poem refers to this multiple prison:
When I wanted to visit,
the closet is where I rehearsed my life,
all day among shoes,
away from the glare of the bulb in the ceiling,
away from the bed and the heavy table
and the same terrible rose repeating on the walls. (ASCP 119)
Even if the entrapment among shoes here recalls that of Plath in Daddy, where she
exists in the black shoe of her father, [b]arely daring to breathe or Achoo (CP 222),
Sextons poem lacks vindictiveness or even anger (Johnson 91-92). This appalling
pattern of confinement is repeated in many of Sextons poems. As Sexton is projecting her
feelings onto her dolls, she is, like them, so well made, so perfectly put together, and
born quietly and well (ASCP 119). No matter how hard she tries, the me who stepped
on the noses of dolls just couldnt break them. They stayed unified and integrated. This
is reminiscent of the formal and proper life enforced on the Harvey family members
especially by Sextons father, Ralph Harvey, who, with the blessing of his wife, loved
appearances. For example, he enforced a dress code upon his daughters and himself, and
he never sat down to dinner without a jacket and a tie (Middlebrook 9). It was even worse
in public.

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The Falling Dolls, (posthumously published in 45 Mercy Street, 1976) presents

what seems like a dream of dolls falling from the sky by the thousands. The child
persona look[s] up in fear and wonder[s] who will catch them (ASCP 486). The real
fear, however, comes from not knowing their destination and their destiny. Are they going
to land outside in the haunting abject mothers realm where they will be mutilated and
sooty or in the fathers protecting, albeit castrating, realm? The maternal destination is
depicted as ghoulish:
The leaves, holding them like green dishes?
The ponds, open as wine glasses to drink them down?
The tops of buildings to smash in their stomachs
and leave them there to get sooty?
The highways with their hard skins
so that they may be run over like muskrats?
The seas, looking for something to shock the fish?
The electric fences to burn their hair off?
The cornfields where they can lie unpicked?
The national parks where centuries later
theyll be found petrified like stone babies? (ASCP 486-87)
She struggles to catch the dolls in her arms to protect them from disintegration. All they
need is to be dressed up and shielded from what is maternal. This recalls the humiliation,
which Sexton and the persona of her poem Those Times . . . felt when her mother
undressed her. The unshielded and undressed dolls are destined to be smashed on the roof.
Although she is trying her best to keep her dolls safe and sound, she is still anguished as
her rhetorical questions reveal:
and I dream, awake, I dream of falling dolls
who need cribs and blankets and pajamas
with real feet in them.
Why is there no mother?
Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky?
Was there a father?
Or have the planets cut holes in their nets

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and let our childhood out,

or are we the dolls themselves,
born but never fed? (ASCP 487)
The question Why is there no mother? suggests that she is mournful, though safe, for
having no mother. In using the present tense to ask about the mother, the persona confirms
that the mother does not exist in her world, and in using the past tense to ask about the
father, affirms that he is the origin of those dolls or we that are born but never fed
(487).
However, if the origin of these dolls, under any circumstances, is the impossible,
engulfing, maternal holes, this justifies the personas longing. In Those Times, Sexton
refers to a hole: and all that would remain / from the year I was six / was a small hole in
my heart, a deaf spot, / so that I might hear / the unsaid more clearly (ASCP 121). That
hole in her heart belongs to her longing for a pre-linguistic maternal space where the
rhythmic, onomatopoeic, babble [. . .] precedes the symbolic and hence unsaid (M.
Eagleton 217).
Morrissette explains that while the hole per se is not exactly a topological figure, it
becomes one upon the passage through it, or the establishment around it, of groups of
elements that have been suppressed within the hole or that are used to fill it with true or
false content (48). For Sexton, the hole is the forbidden outside and is her way out of
life. It is the orifice of the maternal mouth and anus. In this sense, it is the opposite of the
topological shapes she uses as symbolic armours. However, according to Morrissettes
definition, sometimes even holes in Sextons poetry represent topological figures as they
become impenetrable. A description of such a hole occurs in Angel of Hope and
Calendars, part four of Angels of the Love Affair in The Book of Folly (1972):
That hole I crawl into with a box of Kleenex,
that hole where the fire woman is tied to her chair,
that hole where leather men are wringing their necks,
where the sea has turned into a pond of urine.

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There is no place to wash and no marine beings to stir in. (ASCP 334)
The voice exists only out of this hole, not in it, and thus there is no change once you enter
it: Your voice is out there. Your voice is strange. / There are no prayers here. Here there is
no change. It is obvious then that the hole for Sexton is not a place for exit, for freedom
out of her geometrical shapes. Rather, it becomes itself a prison, which adds to her
passivity. It is the hole of despair where she is not brave. The hole is nothing but her
creative room which she cannot rage in. This will be understood fully, as mentioned
earlier, in relation to her second mother, a situation that constitutes another reason for
Sextons inertia.
The longing for the abject mother is shown as the personas pining to leave her
confining house: and yet I planned such plans of flight, and
I sat all day
stuffing my heart into a shoe box,
avoiding the precious window
as if it were an ugly eye
through which birds coughed,
chained to the heaving trees. (Those Times . . . 120)
The window leading outside is tempting, as well as ugly, deformed and haunting like those
flowers on the wallpaper which remind her of her outcast mother. Whether she knew it or
not, in the end, as at the end of her career, Sextons persona would get rid of her mother
forever: I did not know that my life, in the end, / would run over my mothers like a
truck (121).
Again, in the Sixth Psalm of O Ye Tongues (ASCP 405), the child Anne is
delineated as locked in with her imaginary twin and ally, Christopher, projecting her
dreams of deforming her proper dolls and escaping (Ostriker, That Story 268):31
Anne hides inside folding and unfolding rose after rose. She has no one. She has Christopher. They sit in their
room pinching the dolls noses, poking the dolls eyes. One

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time they gave a doll a ride in a fuzzy slipper but that was too
far, too far wasnt it. Anne did not dare. She put the slipper
with the doll inside it as in a car right into the closet and pushed
the door shut. (ASCP 405-6)
The mutilation of the dolls and their escape far, too far, although safely inside a slipper,
is frightening for the little Anne. She does not dare go outside and, therefore, goes further
into the closet and shuts the door again. Anne and Christopher find an alternative, in the
end, to their escape towards a mother in one towards God. In the Tenth Psalm God was
as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us / and therefore we did not cringe at the
death hole (ASCP 413).
Yet Gods symbolic love is not as liberating as it seems. In Jesus Unborn (ASCP
343), we see Christ shutting Marys life and body as if with a heavy door: Now we will
have a Christ. / He covers her like a heavy door / and shuts her lifetime up / into this dumpfaced day (344). Sexton seems not to care about this and she decides in Is It True? to
wear God as a house (ASCP 446):
I wouldnt mind if God were wooden,
Id wear Him like a house,
praise His knot holes,
shine Him like a shoe.
I would not let Him burn.
I would not burn myself
for I would be wearing Him.
Oh wood, my father, my shelter,
bless you. (ASCP 449)

Sextons projection of her feelings onto her dolls shows her own obsession with
being a proper unified self, and her fear of taking trips far away from her fortified borders.
The holes, which should be means of escape, turn out to be impenetrable in her poems
because of Sextons inability to abandon her passive situation behind her shields.
Therefore, it seems that until this moment, the Fort/Da game of a fluid movement between

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inside and outside has not begun. The game of owls and ice against poor mice and
birds where Owls force mice into the open. Owls thrive / The ice will do the birds in, or
come unglued is not yet due (Eighteen Days Without You in December 7th 210). In
the following section, Sexton is made to keep inside her house, looking through precious
windows to the outside before being forced out there (Those Times 77).

2.4 Windows and Other Barriers

Jo Gill views the windows and the suburban American houses as barriers between
the private and the public in Cold War America. However, she does not ignore the fact that
they are also a border between the self and the other. She defines this feared but
welcomed presence outside as perhaps Sextons depression or her muse (Anne Sexton
68). However, this feared and loved presence lurking outside these borders could also be
read as Sextons abject mother, as shall be discussed in this section. Gill speaks of the
permeability of these borders, giving some lines of Whats that as evidence: Before it
came inside / I had watched it from my kitchen window [. . .] (ASCP 25). However, this
means that there is a before for this permeability, which are the inflexible borders that
extend through Sextons poems.
Windows become an ambivalent motif of both horror and love in Sextons work;
they provide a shield against the abject mother from behind which she is able to peep out
and communicate her longing. In Killing the Spring, she looks at the horror outside
(ASCP 320):
From my gun-metal window I watched
how the dreadful tulips
swung on their hinges,
beaten down like pigeons. (ASCP 320)
A similar sinister scene can be found in Eighteen Days Without You in section
December 5th:
Now I feel my age,

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watching the feverish birds outside

pocketing grain in their beaks.
The wind is bizarre.
The wind goes boo, boo, boo at my side
and the kitchen faucet leaks. (ASCP 209)

In a 1962 letter to her friend, Brother Dennis Farrell, she expresses fear of maternal nature
outside her window: nature (out the window) becomes my enemy (Letters 143). On the
other hand, in The Break Away (ASCP 518), the scene becomes a dreamy one of love
and longing:
And I awaken quickly and go to the opposite window
and peer down at the moon in the pond
and know that beauty has walked over my head,
into this bedroom and out,
flowing out through the window screen,
dropping deep into the water
to hide. (ASCP 521)

This motif appears earlier in Three Green Windows (ASCP 105) where the
persona, Half awake in my Sunday nap, sees three green windows and declares: At
each window such rustlings! The scene outside is one of tactile love: The trees persist,
yeasty and sensuous, / as thick as saints. / I see three wet gargoyles covered with birds. /
Their skins shine in the sun like leather. Thirsty for that love, she dreams of the coming
summer as a mother putting her on her lap a reminiscence of their primal fusion in the
openness that does not know of cellars:
Soon it will be summer.
She is my mother.
She will tell me a story and keep me asleep
Against her plump and fruity skin.
I see leaves
leaves that are washed and innocent,
leaves that never knew a cellar,
born in their own green blood

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like the hands of mermaids. (ASCP 105)

From her cellar, she peeps out secretly lest her father knows, lest her mother knows, for
she would rather avoid any confrontation with either: secretly watching, secretly
knowing, / secretly naming each elegant sea (106). A similar room where the outside
mother is spied upon is also described in February 4th: a room with a wide window, a
spy hole, / on the sea scrubbing away like an old woman / her wash (ASCP 596-97). This
is her secret time of play: I am young and half asleep. / It is time of water, a time of trees
(Three Green Windows 106). The secrecy of the game sometimes takes the form of not
naming the names in order not to be discovered. In Love Song (ASCP 115), for example,
the little girl is depicted again shackled in her entrapment: I was / the girl of the chain
letter, / the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, / [. . .] / with her eyes half under her
coat, / [. . .] / with an old red hook in her mouth. Then she describes that lover who is the
only one capable of changing that prison with trap doors into sensorial love and freedom
though one doubts it is with nothing dangerous at all:
as soft and delicate as
an excess of light,
with nothing dangerous at all,
like a beggar who eats
or a mouse on a rooftop
with no trap doors,
with nothing more honest
than your hands in her hand
with nobody, nobody but you!
and all those things. (ASCP 116)
As gender is not mentioned here, one can read the lover as the mother. The secret
untranslatable language the poet uses to describe this elusive lover also leads to this
conclusion. The persona who is frustrated to name not only the emotion, but also the
beloved provides images to make the guessing easier. The mention of the ocean and

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music, which are archaic dispositions, and the dissolving of the lines of the poem into a
last breath of fragmented words enhance this reading of the lover as a mother:
Oh! There is no translating
that ocean,
that music,
that theater,
that field of ponies. (ASCP 116)

Now the romantic scenes outside the windows can reveal another face suddenly
where there are no secret games to play. In Mother and Jack and the Rain (ASCP 109),
the rain drops down like worms onto the room. This room is like the personas psyche
[h]aunted, always haunted by rain. And [t]hough rain curses the window for not letting
it in, the persona declares, let the poem be made and the room affirms / the words that I
will make alone without the help of the rain with its old unnecessary stories. For It [the
rain] spoke the unspeakable (The Break Away 520). The room of my own is not the
room Virginia Woolf dreamed of. It is a room where she can hear her father, the jailor and
the guard, kissing her through the wall (110). She can also hear her mothers heart
pump like the tides of the sea, calling for her, but she cannot respond, for her poem is to
be made only in a room. The anger, the death drive, of the maternal sea, which is the final
destiny of rain, is excluded from her poetry (George, Oedipus 34).
In the third stanza of Mother and Jack and the Rain, the father has been replaced
by a boy named Jack (George, Oedipus 35). It is true that water and rain surround them,
but this is not the mothers fluid. As George explains, The sexual encounters of Sextons
fathers and daughters take place in a medium of fluid, fire or music or flight (Oedipus 34),
and now she is a blind lake, instead of the sea that was her mother (Oedipus 35). Only
in travelling to the sea can she really be creative and haul the semiotic into her writing
room. However, she cannot and does not make that journey, protected by a father who
outlasted the weather, even though he is a drunkard. Whiskey fortified could refer to

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Sexton and her father, Ralph Harvey, as both were alcoholic in real life (Middlebrook 1314, 15, 210):
I made no voyages, I owned no passport.
I was the daughter. Whiskey fortified
my father in the next room. He outlasted the weather,
counted his booty and brought
his ship into port. (ASCP 110)
His ship is her ship, safe [n]ear land. Moreover, in order to produce her poem, she
intends to tread the mercantile land of her father by riding a horse and by trying her own
guitar (George, Oedipus 34). If riding the horse (which is a doubtful activity since she is
locked in the room) refers here to her creativity, it is unlike Plaths indefatigable hooftaps (Words, CP 17) or the fiery horse of Ariel (CP 239). It is rather like that horse
beaten by a phallic whip in her final sexually-connotative poem Love Letter Written in a
Burning Building (ASCP 613): the flames making the sound of / the horse being beaten
and beaten, / the whip is adoring its human triumph (614). And, therefore, their two
separate names might refer to her mother (who is now dead) and Father Jack (who is now
a priest) or to the mother and father as two separate parts of her creativity. She prefers to
keep them separated by the walls of her room. However, as usual, her yearning for her
mother, expressed here as bread an oral object that sets up archaic relationship between
the human being and the other, its mother (Kristeva, Powers 75-76) continues along
with her endurance: to conjure / up my daily bread, to endure, / somehow to endure
(ASCP 110-11).
The room of my own becomes The Room of My Life in The Awful Rowing
Toward God (ASCP 422). Here, / in the room of my life / the objects keep changing, the
persona claims. To a scrutinizing eye, however, they do not. It is a very boring room with
Ashtrays to cry into, / the suffering brother of the wood walls, and the books, each a
contestant in a beauty contest, / the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde.
Moreover, we have

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the sockets on the wall

waiting like a cave of bees,
the gold rug
a conversation of heels and toes,
the fireplace
a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,
the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,
the phone [. . .]. (ASCP 422)

These objects do not change. They are either waiting to do something or there are
movements and changes around them like the sofa and the rug, for example. Sometimes
even their movements are to create greater stability like the movement of the flowers
taking root in [the phones] crotch. The only two obvious movements are those of the
forty-eight keys of the typewriter and the doors / opening and closing like sea clams
under some force attacking from the outside.

However, the movements which result from mere suffering without the encounter
of death are monotonous and lead to no real change. The windows that drive the trees like
nails into my heart are still starving like the personas creativity. Her borders are very
solid, so there is no osmosis between the two worlds of inside and outside. They
cannot connect or communicate:
Each day I feed the world out there
although birds explode
right and left.
I feed the world in here too,
offering the desk puppy biscuits.
However, nothing is just what it seems to be. (ASCP 422)
Her objects, like the words of her creative writing, dream and wear new costumes, /
compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands / and the sea that bangs in my throat.
One wonders, however, how she or her words dream of change and are, at the same time,

84

compelled to such a dream. The answer to this paradox is that the compelling force comes
from some unconscious bangs under the pressure of such strong borders, while the
courage to confront a mother and incorporate her body in the written text to create violent
transformative heterogeneity is still a dream and so there is no real change. The dream is
there but the application is difficult, aside from a few exceptions.
In Wanting to Die in Live or Die Sexton again alludes to her creativity in terms
of her borders. She refers to her ambivalent love for the archaic mother as the unnamable
lust (ASCP 142). This lust keeps returning although she walks in her clothing protected
and unmarked by that voyage to that mother who is waiting for her to come out of her
prison toward a void, toward death:
and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison. (ASCP 143)

The prison is not only her body, but also masculine words. Thus the breath that she
wants to get rid of refers not only to the breath of life, but also to articulated language.
Sexton realizes that death has a different language, which is untranslatable: But suicides
have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools (142). In poetry,
it is the language where the mothers body exists in rhythm, echolalia and glossolalia and,
above all, silence: leaving the page of the book carelessly open, / something unsaid, the
phone off the hook (143). Suicides leave all material love (the fruit and the bread) in
the end to enjoy a greater lust for death. However, Sexton, who wishes to be one of the
dead, has not embarked on that journey yet as the beginning of the poem suggests. It seems
that Sextons archaic mother who is waiting for her to undo an old wound, is still
waiting. Sexton is not yet responding to her call.
The Witchs Life, whose protagonist cannot be fed by the maternal soup,
expresses the same obstinacy towards the realm of heterogeneous creativity (ASCP 423).

85

Again Sextons detachment from orality sets her text within the symbolic (Kristeva,
Desire195):
Maybe I am becoming a hermit,
opening the door for only
a few special animals?
Maybe my skull is too crowded
and it has no opening through which
to feed it soup? (ASCP 423)
In order to open the door she has three choices or, in terms of Sextons symbolic world,
three potential keys. The first key appears in Riding the Elevator into the Sky (ASCP
426). It is a very large key, / that opens something / some useful door / somewhere /
up there in Gods kingdom (427). The second key is that which the bird of The Ambition
Bird wants to be pressed into so as to unlock the Magi (ASCP 300). The origin of the
word magi is related to magic, a potent source of female power (Joseph 31).32 Sexton
always used the word magic to talk about her creativity. To unlock the magi, therefore,
means to allow the death drive in the form of anger and the maternal abject to seep into her
poetry and create a movement between the self and the other outside. This is most
probably one of the keys for which the narrator of Red Riding Hood was reproached by
her departed mothers soul for losing (ASCP 269). It is also related to a third kind of key
she can use, temporarily at least, to fill [the mouth] with words instead of my mother
whom I miss from now on more than ever: the keys of her typewriter (Kristeva, Powers
41). Yet, is Sexton capable of such a confrontation? In one typed confessional statement
written on 29 December, 1973, she expressed the difficulty of this task although she
resolved to keep trying. One wonders whether her poetic words could make her wish true
by dying inside without confrontation:
I am afraid to die. Yet I think it might do a few favors. If I COULD [sic] Id
just die inside, let the heart-soul shrink like a prune, and only to this
typewriter, let out the truth. I feel awfully alone crying in the bathroom so
no one need hear crying over these keys, where they sit as patient as an

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old granny . . . . . . . Can I save myself? I can try . . . I can keep right on
trying. (Middlebrook 381)

The harder the choice becomes the more she fortifies herself behind her walls and windows
and in her rooms. Leaves That Talk in 45 Mercy Street delineates Sextons aggravated
crisis profoundly. The call of the mother has become more seductive and more frightening:
Its May 20th and the leaves,
green, green, wearing their masks
and speaking, calling out their Sapphic loves,
are here here here
calling out their death wish:
Anne, Anne, come to us. (ASCP 540)
Nevertheless, she is persistent in wanting to remain shielded, and yet the suffering grows
wilder:
They call, though I sit here
sensibly behind my window screen.
They call, even if Im pinned behind bars.
They call, they call their green death call.
They want me. They need me.
I belong lying down under them,
letting the green coffin fold and unfold
above me as I go out. (ASCP 541)
The persona tries three solutions to counteract that voice. First of all, I flee. I flee
even further inside (541). Next, she shields her ears: I block my ears. Finally, she eat[s]
salami. By eating she is trying to appease her hunger temporarily for the ever lost mother
by incorporating an oral object. However, Sextons hunger persists throughout her poetry.
For example, in Flee on Your Donkey in Live or Die, the persona feels the same forceful
hunger for the mothers body that has no place, except in dreams of the primordial abyss:
I stared at them,
concentrating on the abyss
the way one looks down into a rock quarry,

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uncountable miles down,

my hands swinging down like hooks
to pull dreams up out of their cage.
O my hunger! My hunger! (ASCP 101)
The solution for hunger in Flee on Your Donkey, like that in Leaves That Talk, is to
eat. However, this time the meal is Gods finger, eaten as soon as he enters her shielded
fort:
I stand at this old window
complaining of the soup,
examining the grounds,
allowing myself the wasted life.
Soon I will raise my face for a white flag,
and when God enters the fort,
I wont spit or gag on his finger.
I will eat it like a white flower. (ASCP 103-4)
She will never spit or gag, eating Gods finger in an act of identification based on an
absorption, an oral assimilation of his body [as] a relief of oral sadism directed at the
archaic maternal body (Kristeva, Tales of Love 149). This represents the consumption of
the male body of Christ, as in the Eucharist, as a substitute for the mothers body. In
contrast, in Killing the Spring, where she rides a donkey, shielded with blinders, she
will vomit the food (ASCP 321). She is walking in a circle, a warm circle where she tries
to ride for eternity / but I came back and I swallowed my sour meat but it came back,
as we suspect the salami of Leaves That Talk would come back. She has to vomit the
food to establish [her]self and give birth to [her]self amid the violence of [. . .] vomit
(Kristeva, Powers 3). This means that the flight on the donkey will never be towards the
abject mother, and although it is a fleeing backwards, it may be towards the natural
conclusion of Courage where civilized death, without violent confrontation, opens the
back door and youll put on your carpet slippers / and stride out (ASCP 426).

88

The hunger and the consequent need for the mothers food, which Sexton, as well
as her personae, are deprived of, becomes urgent in Food in 45 Mercy Street:
I want mothers milk,
that good sour soup.
I want breasts singing like eggplants,
and a mouth above making kisses.
I want nipples like shy strawberries
for I need to suck the sky.
I need to bite also
as in a carrot stick.
I need arms that rock,
two clean clam shells singing ocean.
Further I need weeds to eat
for they are the spinach of the soul. (ASCP 488)

In spite of the long list the persona craves for, all she gets from the paternal symbolic
world are a dictionary to decipher and the reading [of] the paper without anything to
eat, leaving her mouth salty and unquenched (488-89). Here the mothers breasts have
clearly been removed. In fact, Sextons real mother, Mary Gray, underwent a mastectomy.
This memory seems to haunt Sexton, as she is losing her binding with her mother who is
here becoming a regulator, a law before the [symbolic] Law (Oliver 46) facilitating
Sexton into a language where milk is not available anymore. The maternal function that
foreshadows the paternal function facilitates the infants recognition of the paternal no or
the Name of the Father at the Oedipal stage (Oliver 47). In this sense, the mother is related
to the patriarchal, phallocentric order:
I am hungry and you give me
a dictionary to decipher.
I am a baby all wrapped up in its red howl
and you pour salt into my mouth.
Your nipples are stitched up like sutures
and although I suck
I suck air

89

and even the big fat sugar moves away.

Tell me! Tell me! Why is it?
I need food
and you walk away reading the paper. (ASCP 488-89)

Sextons attitude to food is as ambivalent as her attitude towards her mother. On the one
hand, in The Fury of Cooks, she asks for food: Give me some tomato aspic, Helen! / I
dont want to be alone (ASCP 368). On the other, she declines naming types of food
mournfully as in The God-Monger: who am I to reject the naming of foods / in a time
of famine? (ASCP 458). She will certainly never find the lost ingredient she is looking
for (The Lost Ingredient ASCP 30).
The last solution Sexton tries in Leaves That Talk is to turn on THE song of
THE LADY as a compensation for the lost mothers song, but the leaves song crawls
through / and into it and mixes like a dream in a dream (ASCP 541). They simply do not
shut up / They do not. Sexton admits that she is lured by that horrific seductive voice:
and yet I am in love with it for It has a body (541). Her mothers body, unlike her
proper body, is multiple and rich It has many bodies or maybe those bodies belong to
her women ancestors of the Mayflower (542). Nobody can stand against those
grandmothers who are malicious like ghosts, except a grandfather. Sexton used to have a
good relationship with her grandfather, Arthur Gray Staples, whom she called Comfort, a
term of endearment and with whom she shared a talent for creativity because he was an
editor and publisher (Middlebrook, A Biography 12, 5). In Leaves That Talk, the rescue
of this great father takes on a sexual dimension, which will kill the leaves of the semiotic
instantly and establish the symbolic creativity of the old man, leaving little Anne, as well
as Anne the poet, in ultimate despair in front of her need. Her tears are not polluting
although, like sperm, they belong to borders of the body (Kristeva, Powers 71). It can be
argued, therefore, that the purifying tears, along with her waking up, free her from the
dreamy realm of the mother:

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I dream its the fourth of July

and Im having a love affair
with grandfather (his real birthday)
and that the leaves fall off,
clank, clank,
crashing down like stones, New England
stones, one by one,
and in my dream
grandfather touches my neck and breast
and says, Do not be afraid!
Its only the leaves falling!
There are one hundred thousand woman cries,
tree by tree, and I scream out in my fear
that my green ladies are leaving,
my lovely obsessions,
and I need them.
I sob.
I wake up.
Kleenex.
Grandfather. (ASCP 542)
She is Rip van Winkle, but has anything changed? (542). Has she converted to her
mothers religion which is nothing but atheism? The answer is perhaps that someday she
will when she is faithless to the summer, her sunlamp God:
And from the window as I peer out,
I see they have left their cages forever
those wiry, spidery branches
for me to people
someday soon when I turn green
and faithless to the summer. (ASCP 543)

In one interview, Sexton confesses that she hears the voices of those leaves as part
of her religious visions: If you want to know the truth, the leaves talk to me every June
(Kevles 24). The voice of those leaves reappears in Letters To Dr. Y. luring her to get
out of her confining house (Letter on June 6, 1967):

91

I am the leaves. I am the martyred.

Come unto me with death for I am the siren.
I am forty young girls in green shells.
Come out of your house and come unto me
for I am silk and convalescent. (ASCP 571)

Will she ever be a martyr like those trees, going out to confront a mother and thus die?
Will she ever have their Siren Voice of the Other, a challenging transforming voice
where the maternal drives are heavily invested as a violent reciprocity between the I and
the other until death and silence prevails? There are many hindrances and the most
horrifying one is not a Nazi Daddy, like Sylvia Plaths, but rather a Nazi Mama (For
Mr. Death Who Stands With His Door Open 351) like the one in Letter December 4, 1967
in Letters to Dr. Y:
She is a commercial woman.
She waits at the gate.
She dogs me on the street.
She shuts me in a lavatory.
She is my other face,
grunting as I sigh,
vomiting as I chew. (ASCP 573)

However, she typically promises to keep her commitment to shields in the face of her need,
not to her doctor but to her mother (Letter August 24, 1964):
I will be steel!
I will build a steel bridge over my need!
I will build a bomb shelter over my heart!
But my future is a secret. (ASCP 567)
The father-figure here is Dr. Y who is her shelter and support. She is the irritating pearl
and the doctor father is her necessary shell (567). He is the one who can take the altar
from a church and shore it up. / With your own white hands you dig me out. / You give me

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hoses so I can breathe. / You make me a skull to hold the worms / of my brains (ASCP
568).
It seems that Sexton will remove her stubborn walls for no one except God. At least
this is her advice in The Wall (ASCP 443) for those who will be painted out with a
black ink (ASCP 446), which recalls the blackness in The Silence (ASCP 318), the
maternal semiotic ink that will add negativity to the poets work later on, and which is here
also an element of defilement. Her advice for those people, as she herself would obviously
do in the end, is to throw away the defilement and all the clothes which have been painted
with it, overthrow ones body if necessary - or the mothers body in writing for that matterand head towards God:
For all you who are going,
and there are many who are climbing their pain,
many who will be painted out with a black ink
suddenly and before it is time,
for those many I say,
awkwardly, clumsily,
take off your life like trousers,
your shoes, your underwear,
then take off your flesh,
unpick the lock of your bones.
In other words
take off the wall
that separates you from God. (ASCP 445-46)
And if the wall is to be removed, the prisoner who spent a very long time in her prison will
be blinded by the sudden light (445). This justifies the distress the earthworms would
feel if Christ should come in the form of a plow / and dig a furrow and push us up into the
day (445).
The moment for dismantling the wall has not come yet, and there is time for Sexton
to tell another lie, though this time it is a lost one. In The Lost Lie,33 the persona feels
rust in my mouth /the stain of an old kiss (ASCP 533). Her rigid features are caused by a

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lost love and this is why her heart is still there, / that place where love dwelt / but it is
nailed into place. However, because nothing is just what it seems to be (The Room of
My Life 422), the persona has to clarify the situation by saying that in fact the feeling is
one of hatred (ASCP 533). She feels no pity for these oddities, / . . . / For it is only the
child in me bursting out / and I keep plotting how to kill her. She plots to kill the nagging
child who wants to go outside. Empty of that woman full as a theater of moon (The
Lost Lie 533), the house where she roams is a dead house, the kitchen is frozen, the
bedroom is like a gas chamber, and the bed itself is an operating table / where my
dreams slice me into pieces. The problem is, to borrow a line from Old Dwarf Heart,
that even if I put on seventy coats I could not cover you (ASCP 55). It is the severe
love/fear disease of an old archaic mother:
Oh love,
the terror,
the fright wig,
that your dear curly head
was, was, was, was. (ASCP 533)

In conclusion, the windows and all other barriers in Sextons work have the
function of protecting her from an abject mother, who is nevertheless longed for. Sexton
tries to compensate for this loss by doing many things, especially by consuming food.
However, hunger remains Sextons main characteristic, as she is deprived of her mother by
the symbolic shields. In terms of Sextons creativity, the maternal and the semiotic are
excluded from these confinements, and thus heterogeneity is not achieved at this stage of
her work. In the following part, other shelters that Sexton is confined to and which she
delights in creating are found in many of the myths and fairytales of her poetry.
Simultaneously, these barriers are proper social prisons and welcomed shields, protecting
Sexton from a horrific fear of what lurks outside, the abject mother.

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2.5 Borders in Myth and Fairytale

The separation between the realm of the paternal inside and the abject realm
outside is further explored in Sextons poems of myth and fairytale. Where I Live in
This Honorable House of the Laurel Tree, presents the nymph Daphne imprisoned in a
tree by the patriarchal god, Apollo. She lives in her wooden legs and O / my green green
hands (ASCP 17). It is not only Too late / to wish I had not run from you, it is also
useless because he will honor her anyway by imprisoning her in his confinement, the
tree (17-18). It is because of his untimely lust that she tossed flesh at the wind forever
(17). The problem is that the trickeries / of need pain her everywhere. This need is not
directed towards the god Apollo, since need is not quite belief, as Sexton insists in With
Mercy for the Greedy (ASCP 62), but at an ever-lost mother due to Daphnes
confinement. Although the crown of honor bestowed on her by Apollo keys / my out of
time and luckless appetite, it has done her a favour by moving her fears of that same
source of need toward the intimate Rome of the myth we crossed (17-18). This is the
intimate city-state of her father where she can, though imprisoned, be safe.
Some of the reconfigured fairytales, which are sixteen stories from the Brothers
Grimm,34 show the geometrical aspect of Sextons inside/outside dilemma. The middleaged witch, me, who has The Gold Key for Transformations (ASCP 223), tells us at the
end of The White Snake that the hero of the story and the princess lived happily ever
after in their socio-symbolic marital confinement:
So, of course,
they were placed in a box
and painted identically blue
and thus passed their days
living happily ever after
a kind of coffin,
a kind of blue funk. (ASCP 232)

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Cinderella portrays the same patriarchal confinement: Cinderella and the prince / lived,
they say, happily ever after, / like two dolls in a museum case (ASCP 258). Although this
seems to be an unwelcomed social entrapment, in another poem, what is unsolicited is the
open door to the chaotic outside. In Self in 1958, Sexton becomes Cinderella-like
(ASCP 155), an eye-fluttering, smiling plaster doll, who is dressed in the proper
Magnin clothes and lives in a neat dolls house. This synthetic doll is asked to open
her doors as part of her social role in spite of the abject ruin and the fear this might
cause:
What is reality
to this synthetic doll
who should smile, who should shift gears,
should spring the doors open in a wholesome disorder,
and have no evidence of ruin or fears? (ASCP 155-56)
The tower of Rapunzel provides further evidence of Sextons confinement, which
is implicitly welcomed (ASCP 244). In the story of Rapunzel Mother Gothel, a witch,
has a garden locked to strangers and trades a transgressing couples not-yet-born baby for
her irresistible tubers. And so of course when it was born / she took the child away with
her. As the girl grew older Mother Gothel thought: / None but I will ever see her or
touch her. Therefore, She locked her in a tower without a door / or a staircase. It had
only a high window. This story could be read as an allegory of a mothers power to keep
the daughter fortified inside that stone-cold room, as cold as a museum (247). Although
the narrator, the middle-aged witch Sexton, realizes that A woman / who loves a
woman / is forever young (244-45), she lets the witchs heart wither at the end of the story
and the prince and Rapunzel get married.
It is interesting, however, that this witch, unlike the witches and bad mothers in
other fairy tales, is not doomed to a horrible death. For example, the stepmother of Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs dies after dancing in red-hot iron shoes, which tear her
feet ferociously (ASCP 228). The witch of Hansel and Gretel is pushed into an oven

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where her blood began to boil up (ASCP 289). In contrast, the witchs heart in
Rapunzel shrank to the size of a pin, / never again to say: Hold me, my young dear, /
hold me (249). Is it the utmost punishment for the witch to be deprived of Rapunzels
body, as Ostriker contends (That Story 258), or is it more Rapunzel being deprived of
the witchs body that is at stake here? If Sexton is projecting her relationship with her
great-aunt Anna Ladd Dingley (Nana), as the introduction to the poem suggests, then
Sexton would prefer her not to die: They would play rummy / or lie on the couch / and
touch and touch. / Old breast against young breast ... (245).
In fact, what happens in the poem has resonance in Sextons life: While they lay
together under Nanas blue bordered quilt, Nana would stroke Annes back and tell stories
or reminisce about old days (Middlebrook 15). In a recorded conversation (15 April,
1974) with Maxine Kumin, Elaine Showalter, and Carol Smith, Sexton talks candidly
about her close relationship with her great aunt (Showalter 133). Moreover, although a
controversial claim - Dr. Orne, for instance, believes it does not account with the facts Lois Ames, a psychiatric social worker and a very close friend of Sexton, could never
believe anything but that Anne was a victim of child sexual abuse by both Nana and her
father (Middlebrook 58).35 In spite of this, the story of Rapunzel ends with a prince who
saves her, and not with the Nana, who denied her boys: Many a girl / had an old aunt /
who locked her in the study / to keep the boys away (245). Nana, as will be discussed
later, adds to the complexity of Sextons psychic and aesthetic dilemma.
The last confinement that works as shield in Sextons reworkings of fairytales is
erected in Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) (ASCP 290). This story is about a king who
had a christening / for his daughter, but because he had only twelve gold plates / he
asked only twelve fairies (291). He forgot to invite the thirteenth. In revenge, his daughter
was doomed to sleep for a hundred years when she prick[ed] herself / on a spinning
wheel. The prophecy came true and a bunch of briar roses grew / forming a great wall of
tacks / around the castle (292). This story could also be viewed as an allegory of the

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abject mothers power as represented by the thirteenth fairy, who imprisoned the daughter,
notwithstanding her prior imprisonment in her fathers castle. The prison, prescribed by
fear of an abject mother, is not only symbolized by the wall of roses erected around the
castle, but also by the princesss sleep, her death. However, a prince comes to save the
princess from the powers of the abject mother and his magical kiss awakens her.
The dutiful daughter, Briar Rose woke up crying: / Daddy! Daddy! / Presto! Shes
out of prison! (293). However, the prison remains not the castle which appears to be her
safe haven, nor the wall of roses which disappeared with the princes kiss, but the fear of
sleep, a backward journey to an undifferentiated mother, which causes her to become
insomniac. She could not sleep without the court chemist / mixing her some knock-out
drops (293). In fact, Sexton herself had a problem with insomnia and used to take an
overdose of sleeping pills, or what she would call a bedtime cocktail of sleeping pills, to
overcome her sleeplessness (Middlebrook 26, 341, 378).
Nobody can save Sexton from entrapment except her incestuous, tyrannical father,
who is another form of imprisonment, albeit a more tolerable one. Unable to confront
either him or her mother, she is a Dy-dee doll in every hand (The Dy-dee Doll 355):
I was forced backward.
I was forced forward.
I was passed hand to hand
Like a bowl of fruit. (ASCP 294)
The last lines of the story are appallingly suggestive of incest where the father wins his
bowl of fruit:
Its not the prince at all,
but my father
drunkenly bent over my bed,
circling the abyss like a shark,
my father thick upon me
like some sleeping jellyfish.
What voyage this, little girl?

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This coming out of prison?

God help
this life after death? (ASCP 294-95)
Such a traumatic scene represents, as Sexton declares in Oysters the death of
childhood (ASCP 323). In the companion piece, How We Danced, instead of being wed
to a prince, the speaker is wed to her father: oh how we danced on the night we were
wed (ASCP 323). The incestuous scene finds concrete expression in the fathers arousal
and Sexton never seems to protest:
You danced with me never saying a word.
Instead the serpent spoke as you held me close.
The serpent, that mocker, woke up and pressed against me
like a great god and we bent together
like two lonely swans. (ASCP 324)
The most important thing about this incestuous prison is that it keeps her away from the
sight of her mother just like the tomb where the little girl of Arabia holds the moss of her
fathers dead skin:
It was only important
to smile and hold still,
to lie down beside him
and to rest awhile,
to be folded up together
as if we were silk,
to sink from the eyes of mother
and not to talk. (ASCP 26)
This can be read as expressing the Electra complex of a girl who wants to have her father
for herself. However, the relationship with her father can also be viewed as her only
defence against the abject mother. This is arguably why the persona surrenders to her
fathers abuse. Her relationship with her father is essential to protect herself from the
abject mother who always seems to pursue her: Mother, / each time I talk to God / you
interfere (Praying on a 707 378). She, in this sense, never fought against the violence

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done to her by a devouring father. The persona accepts it the way the ice baby, who is
as hard as a Popsicle in The Death Baby, accepts the deadly sexuality of the ten
Boston bull terriers, / ten angry bulls (ASCP 354-55). She surrenders passively to these
dogs that lick her until she becomes clean and then eat her up (355). Sexton never seems
to protest.
The symbolic shields that Sexton erects and which sometimes she seems to abhor
form an essential defence against an abject mother outside. These shields are nothing but
reflections of her identification with her father. For without her protecting father, who also
has a dubious face, she cannot defy the horror lurking outside. As a result, there is no
attempt on Sextons part to defy the fathers abuse for the sake of her own safety. In some
poems, even when the personae are outside, Sexton also tries to create some sort of
shield for delaying a close encounter with what she fears, as shall be discussed in the next
part.

2.6 Outside Shields

After all these confinements in geometrical shapes, one feels surprised to see Sexton
depicting some of her personae outside in, for example, The Boat, The Death of the
Fathers and The Consecrating Mother (ASCP 324, 554). As it is a daring act, Sexton
takes all possible precautions. In the former, the persona is sailing a boat with her father
and mother (ASCP 324). She is shielded from the sea, a symbolic mother, by two things.
First, she is in her fathers boat with an orange life jacket on. Second, her father is with
her and at the wheel of that boat. He sails fast with the boat dividing the sea. The power
of the daughter comes from the we, not the I: We are daring the sea. / We have parted
it. / We are scissors. (ASCP 325).
An angel appears warning her: [y]ou have no business. / No business here (325).
What makes the threat of the seas green room where the dead are very close tolerable
is her fathers closeness and leadership. The sea here is a place where there is no sign,

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only a pure flow of the semiotics destructive force. Thus, the leader Father cries for a
sign, a word from God. Kristeva summarizes this situation briefly: Thats what the
father means: sign and time (About Chinese 35). As a result, the sky breaks over us. /
There is air to have (325). The three protagonists are left at the end dividing our deaths, /
bailing the boat.
Another transitional poem is The Consecrating Mother (ASCP 554). The persona
stands before the sea, which is the place of handfuls of gods, instead of the one God
and his law that the persona believes in. The temptation of the sea is powerful: steamed in
and out and gasped upon the shore (555), but the persona does not lose herself to this
seduction: I wanted to share this / but I stood alone like a pink scarecrow (ASCP 554).
Moreover, ironically, she moves her shield, her mask, and sticks it on the faces of the sea.
The border is not violated yet: but I could not define her, / I could not name her mood, her
locked-up faces (ASCP 555).
Sexton seems to envy the people who have been able to cross the rolling sea with
their ships. The archaic mother is still [f]ar off from Sexton and her poetry. I wonder
how she had borne those bulwarks could be also read as projection, reflecting how Sexton
had borne all those shields (another meaning for bulwarks), which withheld her mother
from her:
Far off she rolled and rolled
like a woman in labor
and I thought of those who had crossed her,
in antiquity, in nautical trade, in slavery, in war.
I wondered how she had borne those bulwarks. (ASCP 555)
One feels the heaviness of the personas task of shielding herself in the face of [an] erotic
outburst (Kristeva, Tales of Love 323):
She should be entered skin to skin,
and put on like ones first or last cloth,
entered like kneeling your way into church,
descending into that ascension,

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though she be slick as olive oil,

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
with its one hundred lips,
and in moonlight she comes in her nudity,
flashing breasts made of milk-water,
flashing buttocks made of unkillable lust [. . .]. (ASCP 555)

The daughter who is loyal to her father to the end never puts a thumb on this
mother, in spite of the heavy seduction, for this sensual love that recalls the eroticism of
Song of Songs is nothing but death. As the beloved in Solomons Song states, [. . .] love
is strong as death (Kristeva, Tales of Love 93):
I am that clumsy human
on the shore
loving you, coming, coming,
going,
and wish to put my thumb on you
like The Song of Solomon. (ASCP 555)
It has been seen so far how Sextons stubborn psychic shields, which look almost
Euclidean, have helped to protect her from the attacks, as well as the seduction of the
abject mother, even if this means consigning herself to a patriarchal prison. This prison is,
paradoxically, a loving and a protective one. Even when Sexton is depicted as outside her
shields, she seems almost always to use some means of protection. In a dream she
describes such safe covering in her journey to the outside world:
Next I dream that I put on the love
like a lifejacket and we float,
jacket and I,
we bounce on that priest-blue.
We are as light as a cats ear
and it is safe,
safe far too long! (The Break Away 521)

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What helps Sexton hold on to these shields is not only the fact that she is a dutiful
daughter who wants protection from an abject mother, but that she also holds a little secret
behind her proper borders, which cannot abandon. This secret, as shall be discovered in
Chapter 3, is her second mother, her aunt, Nana. The divided nature of the witch in
Rapunzel makes it easier to understand the situation of the two mothers. This witch has
two faces. When she is outside the tower, she has the powers of an abject mother and so
looks like Sextons first mother, and when she is inside, she is Rapunzels secret lover and
resembles her second mother, Nana. The following chapter is going to focus on Sextons
pivotal relation to this second mother.

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Chapter 3
The Secret Within
3.1 A Second Mother
While Sexton is busy protecting her borders from without, threatened by an
abject mother, a horrific cancer starts growing within. This horror helps her later in the
initial collapse of her obstinate borders. However, although this inner horror is threatening,
it nevertheless holds the subject back from total absence and the dissolving of her identity
(Kristeva, Powers 53). Therefore, negativity starts to take shape in Sextons body and her
poetry, which witnesses an eruption of the semiotic and defilement.
Yet the question remains: what has helped to form the horror within and to
violate the strong borders of the dutiful daughter? It is simply the Nana-hex (ASCP 313),
for while Sexton has been able to jettison one mother over her borders, she has not
managed to do the same with the second mother, her aunt, Nana. Therefore, that Thing
(Kristeva, Black Sun 11) causing her sadness has been put in a crypt, engulfed in one of the
secret rooms of her house. However, at the moment of the collapse of her borders caused
by attacks from the outside, Sexton manages to introject her loss and release a hidden
passion for the second mother as negativity in her poetry.
The Thing was first used by Freud in his distinction between the presentation of
the thing and the presentation of the word. Feud argues that both comprise conscious
presentation while the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone
(14: 201). The presentation of the thing remains in a state of repression and is not put into
words (14: 202). To clarify Freuds concept, Lacan, defines das Ding, as the thing in its
dumb reality (Seminar VIII: 55). It belongs to the real as it is the beyond-of-thesignified (Seminar VIII: 54). It is the lost object outside language that no one will ever
reach and that no one will ever forget (Seminar VIII: 53). This concept is developed later

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into Lacans theory of the objet petit a, the lost object that must continually be refound
(Homer 85). Moreover, Lacan argues that the mother occupies the place of that thing
(Seminar VIII: 67). According to Kristeva it is an indefinable, unnamable feeling caused by
the loss of the mother, which severs the subject from the symbolic. Describing this
Thing, Kristeva says: [It is] the real that does not lend itself to signification, the center
of attraction and repulsion, seat of the sexuality from which the object of desire will
become separated (Black Sun 13). It is obvious from this quote that Kristeva has almost
the same definition of the Thing as Lacan. However, for her, the real can be recovered
after entrance to the symbolic world; it can penetrate language.
Kelly Oliver refers to one of Kristevas interviews concerning the relationship a
woman can have with her mother:
One possibility is that she doesnt ever get rid of her mother. Rather, she
carries with her this living corpse, the mothers body that no longer
nourishes. Kristeva claims that usually women close their eyes to this
corpse. They forget about it. And they certainly dont eroticize it. The other
alternative is that a woman forms a defense against the mother. As a
defense, some women devote themselves to the Symbolic order. (62)
However, Sexton has two mothers. Therefore, while choosing the second option, she has
closed her eyes on Nanas corpse, to introject her later on, causing negativity to emerge,
albeit for only a short time. Smith gives us a clear definition of the two concepts of
incorporation and introjection where the first means that the lost object is incorporated
into the self in a fantasy guarding against its loss and the second is the metaphoric
activity through which we acknowledge and symbolize loss (A. Smith 39-40).36 In fact,
Sextons double mothers allow for the doubleness of choices.
One of the notes that Sexton wrote on Dr. Martin Ornes instruction, commenting
on tapes that she recorded in treatment sessions, summarizes her psychological state:
I would like to lie down beside you and go to sleep, and you will never
leave me because I am a good girl. But I cant have sex with you because I
cant have sex with Nana. My father was a king. The king can have sex with
anyone. Dont say anything that will scare me or I will run away. I want to
run but I am scared. Dont move because I am scared of things changing. I

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am so scared that my fingers hurt, my arm hurts, my stomach hurts. I pass

out, for one thing, to get rid of my body. Im myself, I tell you, that means
my body is itself, that my soul has left it alone. I am going out of my mind,
is there no place that is calm, a pool of milk. I want my mother, I hate my
mother. Nana was safe. Nana was crazy. Daddy was drunk. I am a little
bitch. (Middlebrook 174)
The note reveals the three dimensions of Sextons dilemma: first, the incestuous, though
protecting, king father who is all-powerful (he can have sex with anyone); second, the
mother who is both loved and hated by her daughter; third, Nana who was safe. The
meaning of safe here could be interpreted as the crypt which Sexton has put Nana into
and from which she will not release her until later. Importantly, the note also conveys
Sextons inability to run away from her shields because she is scared of confronting
the mother, of letting the mother through her shields. She, therefore, is scared of things
changing. It is not only fear of an abject mother, but also of separation from Nana which
will bring change. Change here is negativity, the movement of a libidinal drive in her body
that corresponds to a movement of this drive in her poetry. This will lead to somatic and
symptomatic pains in the body, which Sexton used to get rid of by passing out. In fact,
Sexton experienced trances and dissociation very often, not only in her psychiatric
sessions, but also in her outside life (Middlebrook 39, 133). Her letters describe these
trances in detail:
I have blackouts. I dont mean I pass out. I mean everything goes black [. . .]
I was having them at least every day, sometimes seventeen a morning [. . .]
Ive had these blackouts and this heart condition for four years [. . . ] I
attributed it to anxiety and took seven 50 mg. Librium.
(Letters 364-65)
For Cynthia A. Miller these blackouts are a way of escaping the unbearable present as the
Sleeping Beauty in Briar Rose does to free herself from her father. However, as she
argues, Sexton is a prisoner of time (300). She cannot escape her past, present, or even
her doomed future. She cannot, therefore, move freely in her poetry and cannot transcend
or transform her situation.

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That Sexton had two mothers, who played different roles in her life and assumed
different linguistic positions in her poetry, is clear in her first short story Dancing the Jig.
Its beginning shows the protagonist dancing the violent semiotic dance of threatening
creativity, the dance of death, like the persona in The Red Shoes (ASCP 315):
What I want to talk about is dancing the jig. It is very strange to dance the
jig. I am doing it now. My hands jolt from my wrists, my elbows fly from
my shoulders, my head twists from my waist and my legs leap over the
people on the floor. Oh, I am dancing, dancing. Before this I was sitting on
the floor with the others. I am at a party. When they put the music on I
began to feel lively, very lively. My nerves began to tick like a French
clock, chimes rang from my fingers, my feet began to tap upon the floor and
my toes curled in my shoes. I was up on my knees with my hands swinging
out in frantic circles over my head and my head, itself, rolled on its hinges.
(146)
Although it seems she enjoys the dancing, she didnt like it. I didnt want to . . . She is
dancing (writing) in spite of her will over their silent faces (146). Jacqueline Rose shows
how the narrators desire to dance fuses with the memory of her early attempts to eat and
to speak (Haunting 35). The dance, as she suggests, takes us back to the early drama of
language where orality, that is eating and speaking, and dancing become one: I have eaten
the music, I must eat music and We are going back and forth, chewing, eating
(146,148, 152). However, this orality is threatening because devouring is related to the
mother who menaces her identity and is thus disgusting and engulfing. For this reason, she
tries to escape her by looking at the mirror-like napkin ring in order to identify with an
other: I look down at my napkin ring. I hold it like a mirror and an object of escape, an
object to see twice (149). However, the I shine soon turns to We shine because of the
fusion with the mother (149-50). The mother wrenches the mirror violently from her hand
to stop the act of separation: Oh! She snaps my fingers with her nails. It stings. She takes
the napkin ring and puts it beside her place and then puts my plate back in front of me
(150).
Although the mother is endangering the identity of the narrator through oneness
with her, it is the first identification with the mother which gave to her (took from her,

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hurled at her) the body of words (Rose 35). This is what causes heterogeneity in the work
of art where the maternal and the semiotic irrupts violently into language, causing
authentic creativity, dancing. However, if the dancer loses control in what Joan Nucifora
describes as frenzied movement, which equates artistically to the outpouring of words,
she risks losing her identity in that deadly act (312).
The narrator seems to like something else, besides her ambivalent feeling towards
dancing, and that is staring at a chair. This is a state of total fusion with the Thing, which
is the opposite of heterogeneity:
I am distant, as plain as a chair, as unmoved, as unnoticeable. The chair
says, dont look at me, I am nothing. The chair says, I stay the same, sit on
me, crack my legs, lean on my arms, but I will not move. Yes, thats just
what I like about a chair, about being a chair. But it doesnt work. The
opposite of chair is dancing the jig. (148)
She seems to realize that the problem involves taking this position against heterogeneity,
especially as it will affect her creativity: Thats my worst mistake, thinking I am a chair,
trying to stay fixed (149). This position makes her afraid since it represents complete
death to her identity, as well as for her creativity: I shouldnt try to become the chair.
Other people probably do it differently. But they are not afraid. Why did I say afraid. I am
not afraid (148). It is true that she fears this petrification, but what she fears more is a
separation from that position which means losing her hidden love, her second mother, and
being exposed to heterogeneous change (Quebe 321). It should be obvious by now that this
second position as a chair is not related to her first mother, but to her second one, Nana.
The narrator has incorporated her Nana who eats very nicely (who eats the narrator very
nicely) in a secret crypt in her psyche away from her first mother (151):
I wish Mother would smile. She is lighting a cigarette. Maybe it will be
easier now that she is done eating. Maybe if I could think of something else
something nicethen I would feel better. Nana! I am thinking of Nana.
Nana is nice. (151)
The narrator is finally able to jettison her first mother and successfully enter into
language by rejecting the food, by giv[ing] birth to [her]self (Kristeva, Powers 3): All

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right, Mother, you win! . . . I gag it out. I am still trying to chew although I am crying.
Win? Win what? I hear her through her cigarette smoke. She is turning away now (153).
Her identity seems fully established now as her mother leaves the scene. But has Nana left
as well? A negative answer comes at the end of the story. She is still hiding in the
narrators melancholic psyche. She, the narrator as well as Sexton, has the Thing and the
question remains whether she is ever going to give it up:
Ill look at that chair, at its color, the streak of its grain, the smooth
shadows, the stiff arms in their places, the four legs hitting the floor. I can
see it. I can see it double! It is fine. No one notices this. No one sees how it
is. It is a relief to dwell on ita perfect object. So fixed. So always the
same. (153)
The crypt of Sextons aunt is engulfed in one of the secret rooms of Sextons house.
This room resembles the one in Locked Doors (ASCP 442). It is a room of the
antinorm, the forbidden, the anomalous, the excessive, and the repressed: Hell (Kristeva,
Desire 215):
However, there is a locked room up there
with an iron door that cant be opened.
It has all your bad dreams in it.
It is hell.
Some say the devil locks the door
from the inside.
Some say the angels lock it from
the outside.
The people inside have no water
and are never allowed to touch.
They crack like macadam.
They are mute. (ASCP 443)
Once this room is open, the mute hell moves outside, ready for change and destruction.
Sexton has, therefore, been loyal to her borders not only because she identifies with her
father and fears what is outside, but also because she wants to hide the secret inside.
Although she wants to open the door for the sake of a dynamic creativity, relinquishing
passivity for conflictual heterogeneity seems very difficult:

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I would like to unlock that door,

turn the rusty key
and hold each fallen one in my arms
but I cannot, I cannot.
I can only sit here on earth
at my place at the table. (Locked Doors 443)
In her short story, The Letting Down of the Hair, forbidden love is made in the
same room. Sexton uses the tale of Rapunzel as a parable for the life of a poet, her friend
Ruth comments (42). The Rapunzel-like girl locked in a tower where there is only one
window from which to let out her very long hair, is seen by people in the process of drying
it. But one wonders why Sexton chooses a stone room where she hide[s] as the factory
of her poetry, the long hair? It is simply because she has hidden a secret there and
everything emanates from it and revolves around it: All the time of the child in me this
room was my secret, the dead maybe live up here (40). The relation of this room to
Nana becomes clearer when one considers the words Sexton uses to describe the room: a
room like the inside of a church bell. A chalice, a cave, a perch, queer bird that I am. A
hidden place inside of a seedpod (40, emphasis added). The femininity of the hair that is
sweeter and wetter when it is inside the room reflects an unconscious orgasmic desire for
Nana: There is so much hair, so much sucked-up honey, that I must wash it in sections.
The room becomes clammy like a sea cave, never dry (41). This receptacle represents the
womb that holds her it carries me (41) and the hair stands for the umbilical cord
that ties her to Nana: I have never cut my hair. Thats something you ought to know right
off. It fills the room the way ten giraffes would, twisting and twisting their long, innocent
necks (40). The single window is her only connection with the outside world to which she
is called by her first mother: the new leaves are green. They are my green ladies. They
sing. They call out to me (41). Therefore, it is only when she hangs her hair out of the
window to let it dry that it is given a life of its own away from Nana and into the world
of original poetry where motility exists: if there is a hopeful wind, the breeze takes it; hair

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by hair, yellow by yellow. As it dries it is owned by the wind; as it dries it moves swiftly
like a thousand minnows (42).
Although Kristeva asserts that the relation with the crypt cannot be eroticized as
has been mentioned earlier, Sextons case proves the opposite. In Black Sun, Kristeva
describes the females psyche that engulfs such a crypt as frigid: the feminine interior
(meaning the psychic space and, at the level of the bodily experience, the vagina-anus
combination) can then [be] the crypt that encloses the dead woman and conditions
frigidity (79). Contrary to Kristevas opinion, Sexton projected her hidden sexual desires
for her Nana onto her eldest daughter. Linda Gray Sexton, a novelist and a writer, recounts
the sexual abuse her mother practiced upon her in Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey
Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton. Linda claimed that her mother masturbated in front of
her while drunk. In a long letter written to Linda, who received it, upon the request of
Sexton, only after her mothers death in 1991, Sexton told her daughter that her therapist
thought their relationship was like hers with Nana. Anne Sextons homosexual relationship
with her friend Anne Wilder related in the book was another way for her to get Nana back.
Sexton was not able to commit symbolic matricide against Anna, her Nana.
Although one sees Sextons persona holding a knife in her armpit in Anna Who Was
Mad, she, loaded with guilt for her aunts derangement, does not kill but rather engulfs
her in her inner psyche and is in turn engulfed by her:37

Speak Mary-words into our pillow.

Take me the gangling twelve-year-old
into your sunken lap.
Whisper like a buttercup.
Eat me. Eat me up like cream pudding.
Take me in.
Take me.
Take. (ASCP 312)

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The complexity of this situation, namely Sextons admitting the loss of her aunt,
becomes clear when one examines the fifteen worksheets of Elizabeth Gone (ASCP 8),
an elegy for her aunt. As McClatchy observes, Sexton seems to have more trouble with the
later stanzas than the opening ones. This is because, he argues, as so often with
confessional poetry, the difficulties lie not in exposition but in resolution (52). However,
the problem is not only technical. It is the final decision to make Nana go or stay in her
prison that is at stake. If one compares the last two stanzas of the drafts, which were
condensed into one, with the final product, it is apparent how Sexton changed the
resolution to make it more elusive in relation to Nana. All the worksheets end by showing
a bitter struggle for separation from Nana. This is the third stanza from the last draft
available:
I strained you out, my mind was a press
That pushed out the way of your apple cheek face;
That spoke name, but no word for your flesh,
That forgot the cry of your palms caress.
Hard on each number day I fought
to grain you out, to shun you fresh,
When something cried. . . let me go let me go
This fight to push Nana out has been cancelled in the final version. Moreover, the last line
in the drafts last stanza looked like this: and somehow I cried. . . and let you go let you
go. In this line the I stands firmly in separation from the you which means that
Sexton introjected her loss, while in the final poem she uses the passive instead to have the
potential of hiding her Nana, Elizabeth, in her safe crypt again: Then I sorted your clothes
/ And the loves you had left, Elizabeth, / Elizabeth, until you were gone (26-28). There is
no clear opposition in the final choice. Getting rid of Nana, after all, is not an easy task for
Sexton. Among all of Sextons relations, her bond with her aunt seemed to be the
strongest. This is maybe why Sexton, in her essay Comment on Some Foreign Letters,

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which is also about her aunt, confessed: Some Foreign Letters still puts a lump in my
throat, I know that it is my unconscious favorite (Comment 17).
Despite the hurtful fact that [Nana] was an extension of myself and was my
world, Sexton manages in the end to admit to losing her (Comment 16). Among the
many guilt-ridden questions she poses in Anna Who Was Mad is a particularly important
one (312): Did I open the door for the mustached psychiatrist / who dragged you out like
a golf cart? This could be understood in two ways. First, on a literal level, Sexton feels
guilty for allowing Annas psychiatrist to take her away to a mental home. In fact, Nana
had really suffered a nervous breakdown along with a dramatic loss of hearing
(Middlebrook 15-16). Second, on a symbolic level, Sextons opening of the door to the
psychiatrist enables her to introject her loss, to let Nana out of her secret room, out of her
crypt. This expulsion threatens the stability of Sextons identity, as is obvious in The
Hex:
Every time I get happy
the Nana-hex comes through.
Birds turn into plumbers tools,
a sonnet turns into a dirty joke,
a wind turns into a tracheotomy,
a boat turns into a corpse,
a ribbon turns into a noose,
all for the Nana-song, [. . .]. (ASCP 313)
In spite of everything, Sexton who as she describes her position in the sixth and eighth
Psalm is locked in that dark room putting bones into place and hides inside
folding and unfolding rose af- / ter rose (ASCP 405, 408), has opened the door: For I am
not locked up. This will affect her creativity positively: For I am placing fist over fist on
rock and plunging into the / altitude of words. The silence of words (Tenth Psalm 411).
She will be like those people who accept the key given to them to unlock their doors: For
they open each door and it gives them a new day at the / yellow window (Tenth Psalm
412).

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It is clear from the previous discussion that Sexton was affected by not just one
mother, the abject mother, but two. There is a second mother, Nana, who is secretly
engulfed in Sextons mind, which adds to her passivity. Being unable to release Nana
affects Sextons creativity negatively. However, the release of Nana results in the
beginning of a dynamic heterogeneous poetry. The following discussion shows that Sexton
is able to introject the loss of her Nana and to get the secret out of the room, causing
temporary reciprocity in her work. She is successful in contradiction to the view of Hall,
who argues that Sextons loss of Nana was never resolved (5). As a result, the maternal
abject bursts into Sextons work, especially in her last books. Her safe, safe psychosis
which covered her face like a mask has cracked (Letters to Dr Y, July 21, 1970
578).

3.2 The Burst of the Abject

As Sextons proper borders are attacked by an abject mother outside, and as she
is able to introject Nanas loss, heterogeneity begins in her work in the form of the burst of
the abject. Thus, passivity is relinquished temporarily for dynamism, especially in her last
books. However, as shall be discussed, Sexton eventually performs cleansing rituals to
discard the maternal in favour of the father.
Sexton liked to quote Kafka in her interviews and readings (Kevles 28): A book
should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us (Kafka, Franz Kafka 16). This, Sexton
thought, was applicable to her art: And thats what I want from a poem. A poem should
serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us. Although she uses Kafkas statement as an
epigram for her second volume, All My Pretty Ones (48), it could be argued that it is more
applicable to her later writing when the borders collapse as a result of the maternal attack
from within and without. In a discussion of her earlier work, and in particular one
poem in All My Pretty Ones, Michael Burns has written: the lines [. . .] are like waves
within a large room; they turn back on themselves (132). If there was movement there, it

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was within frozen borders. It is only under the pressure of violent drives that Sexton goes
out: I was shut up in that closet, until, biting the door, / they dragged me out, dribbling
urine on the gritty shore (Imitation of Drowning 109).
In Ke 6-8018, 38 there is an early reference to that violent maternal language
(ASCP 140). The persona asks a Black lady who inked you in? This ink, like the lady,
is both a sweetener and a drawer of blood (140-41). In poetry, it is a hot voice, an
imminence and then a death, exactly like the Rorschach blot which the angels of The
Fallen Angels throw on the white sheet (ASCP 141, 430). And if the ink lady leaves,
what signs will remain? Surely, they are stale signs without defiling elements: Black
slime will not come of it, / nor backwash from the traveler (141). If that black lady enters
the sign, nothing will remain, an absence and a peculiar waiting for the mother that
has to be lost in order to imagine and name her (Oliver 85). Sextons decision has been to
restore the mother into words, pushing her like a needle in and out. With these bodily
words, the persona perjured her soul. And although these words will lead her to inherit
darkness, she will continue writing, dialing left to right, and struggling: I will struggle
like a surgeon. / I will call quickly for the glare of the moon. / I will even dial milk. / I will
hold the thread which will end in the sea (142). The burst of the semiotic, however, is
not complete since the persona still stands at the gate. Nevertheless, this poem gives an
indication of the burst of the semiotic later on in Sextons work.
Sexton, as she confesses in a poem to her daughter Joyce, has tried to look for
uncomplicated hymns but finds that love has none (A Little Uncomplicated Hymn
152). Negativity, the rejection of passivity in Sextons poetry, begins as a dream, a secret
hope of the inside that is violated by the woman-of-war outside her borders, a scene like
the one depicted in February 4th in Scorpio, Bad Spider, Die: The Horoscope Poems:
Its a room I dream about.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
There I was dragging the ocean, that knock-out,
in and out by its bottle-green neck, letting it chew

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the rocks, letting it haul beach glass and furniture sticks

in and out. From my room I controlled the woman-of-war,
that Mary who came in and in opening and closing the door. (ASCP 596)
Even in her dream, her grandfather, her little Superman, comes to the rescue as
usual and rocks her when the lighthouse flattens her eyes out (February 4 th 597).
However, in spite of the support of the symbolic father against the mother and the
vigilance of the daughter, Sexton confesses in Letters To Dr. Y. (March 14, 1964) that it
is difficult to play the role of the watchman for long: you are the watchman and you /
cant keep the gate shut (ASCP 566). The addressee (the watchman) here could be read as
Dr. Y, the father who is trying to protect her psychic borders, or as her resistant self
objectified. She and her father/doctor cannot stop her from dying (opening the gates).
However, this time there is another movement coming from the inside, which is the
beginning of her introjections of the secret crypt. Keeping the City in 45 Mercy Street
shows the persona as a vigilant watchman for her and her fathers city-state (ASCP 494).39
Despite her dedication of protecting the walls of her city, they crumble for the first time.
The attack comes not only from the outside but also the inside. At the beginning of the
poem, we see the watchman betrayed by something taking shape inside her chest and
trying violently to burst outside:

Once,
in August,
head on your chest,
I heard wings
battering up the place,
something inside trying to fly out
and I was silent
and attentive,
the watchman.
I was your small public,
your small audience
but it was you that was clapping,

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it was you untying the snarls and knots,

the webs, all bloody and gluey;
you with your twelve tongues and twelve wings
beating, wresting, beating, beating
your way out of childhood,
that airless net that fastened you down. (ASCP 494-95)

Helpless, the persona could not do anything in regard to this monstrous thing attacking her
fortified city, but commit herself to duty:
Since then I was more silent
though you had gone miles away,
tearing down, rebuilding the fortress.
I was there
but could do nothing
but guard the city
lest it break
I was silent. (ASCP 495)
The thing that is forming is very threatening and the persona wonders if her supporting
omnipotent God/father could bolster the unity of her identity and body and stops them
collapsing:
I had a strange idea I could overhear
but that your voice, tongue, wing
belonged solely to you.
The Lord was silent too.
I did not know if he could keep you whole,
where I, miles away, yet head on your chest,
could do nothing. Not a single thing. (ASCP 495)
The wings of the watchman, if she spoke, would hurt the bird of your soul / as he
nested, bit, sucked, flapped (Keeping the City 495). This bird still belongs to the realm
of silence, the pre-linguistic, for it is newly formed and so would be hurt by the symbolic
words of the poet that would not let it in yet. The I and the You here, like the semiotic
of the bird and the symbolic of the personas speech, are still treated separately as if they

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belong to two persons. Nevertheless, the persona wishes though for Sexton one might
doubt this wish or at least regard it as an intimidating wish for the semiotic to burst
within the symbolic like a missile from the spidery-mother-web, / burst from Woman
herself (495).
The city is waning under the attack and the watchman guardeth in vain, as the
epigraph of the poem shows, Unless the Lord keepeth it (494). But will the Lord do so?
The persona is not sure about the answer:
The city
of my choice
that I guard
like a butterfly, useless, useless
in her yellow costume, swirling
swirling around the gates.
The city shifts, falls, rebuilds,
and I can do nothing.
A watchman
should be on the alert,
but never cocksure.
And The Lord
who knows what he keepeth? (ASCP 495-96)
The appearance of the maternal element, the abject, inside, in Keeping the City,
indicates the beginning of motility and conflict in Sextons poetry. It can be observed in
many other poems, taking many forms. In The Poet of Ignorance, for example, it
assumes the shape of a crab which the persona tries to get rid of but to no avail (ASCP
433):
There is an animal inside me,
clutching fast to my heart,
a huge crab.
The doctors of Boston
have thrown up their hands.
They have tried scalpels,
needles, poison gasses and the like.

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The crab remains.

It is a great weight.
I try to forget it, go about my business,
cook the broccoli, open and shut books,
brush my teeth and tie my shoes.
I have tried prayer
but as I pray the crab grips harder
and the pain enlarges. (ASCP 434)
The persona interprets the crab as her ignorance of God for it is the cause of her
disintegration, which contrasts starkly with Gods guarantee of wholeness and unity.
In The Fallen Angels, the abject takes eponymous form. The definition of the
angels in the epigraph shows the heterogeneity they might provoke in the persona (ASCP
430): Fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost. In
relation to creativity, they will start to fill the white clean / sheet of paper with the
semiotic black ink, the Rorschach blot to shove the black on white with bodily drives
to produce a semiotized sign as well as a piecemeal body (Guberman 110), like that of
the fallen Humpty Dumpty:
For I am like them
both saved and lost,
tumbling downward like Humpty Dumpty
off the alphabet. (The Fallen Angels 430)
The persona tries to get rid of the angels as she has tried earlier to rid herself of the crab
and so each morning I push them off my bed / and when they get in the salad / rolling in it
like a dog, / I pick each one out/ just the way my daughter / picks out the anchovies (430).
Sometimes we see them comically wearing out their toes, / laughing like fish, wiggling
up life, going to the dentist or her class with the persona (430-31). At others, we see
them sucking the childhood out of the berries / and turn[ing] them sour and inedible in
an intimidating way (430). They insist on the personas company in all cases, until they
push her into the grave:

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O fallen angel,
the companion within me,
whisper something holy
before you pinch me
into the grave. (ASCP 431)
The bodily drive bursting inside the poet, and thus inside her writing, begins to take
another shape of the eponymous The Ambition Bird (ASCP 299): All night dark wings /
flopping in my heart. / Each an ambition bird. This maternal bodily force is artistic. It is
the creative semiotic thrusting forcefully and violently into the symbolic:
The bird wants to be dropped
from a high place like Tallahatchie Bridge.
He wants to light a kitchen match
and immolate himself.
He wants to fly into the hand of Michelangelo
and come out painted on a ceiling.
He wants to pierce the hornets nest
and come out with a long godhead.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
He wants to be pressed out like a key
so he can unlock the Magi. (ASCP 300)
This forceful, though creative, energy will bring two things: first, death, so all night I am
laying / poems away in a long box because it is my immortality box, / my lay-away plan,
/ my coffin (299); second, transformation and change, as the bird wants to die changing
his clothes / and bolt for the sun like a diamond (300).
Another form of that force is a group of gods, which oppose Sextons God (Gods,
ASCP 349). In The Consecrating Mother, the maternal sea says that she has a handful
of these gods (ASCP 554). After a long journey in Gods searching for the deities, the

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persona discovers that they were shut in the lavatory of her own house the whole time
(349). This is the place where the abject maternal elements of excrement and urine are
found and thus the creative world begins from the lavatory. For this reason the learned
books / and the print spat back at her and the great poet / [. . .] belched in her face
(Gods 349): they would not take those maternal bodily elements and the semiotic into
their creativity.
In an attempt to bring about that abject change that permeates the creative words of
the persona, The Hoarder makes the whole house a lavatory (ASCP 319):
There is something there
Ive got to get and I dig
down and people pop off and
muskrats float up backward
and open at my touch like
cereal flakes and still Ive
got to dig because there is
something down there in my
Nanas clock I broke it [. . .
.......................]
earlier it was the diaper I wore
and the dirt thereof and my
mother hating me for it and me
loving me for it but the hate
won didnt it yes the distaste
won the disgust won and because
of this I am a hoarder of words
I hold them in though they are
dung oh God I am a digger
I am not an idler
am I? (ASCP 319-20)

Here, the boundary of the personas doll is violated from all sides: it was earlier much
earlier it / was my first doll that water went / into and water came out of [. . .] (The
Hoarder 320). This is The Dy-dee Doll which Sexton once snapped / her head off / and

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let it float in the toilet (ASCP 355). The doll is not proper anymore, but she was a gloom
/ her face embracing / her little bent arms. / She died in all her rubber wisdom as she melts
(The Dy-dee Doll 355). The mutilation of the doll calls forth the mutilation of the doll
girls who were played with in The Red Shoes (ASCP 316): They tore off their ears
like safety pins. / Their arms fell off them and became hats. / Their heads rolled off and
sang down the street (316). Those girls are dancing the semiotic death dance of
creativity in the bloody red shoes that are my mothers / Her mothers before. / Handed
down like an heirloom (316). After all, Sexton was a pink doll with her frantic green
stuffing (The Love Plant 529).
The green stuffing inside is nothing but the maternal, which at the end, and after
being frozen for so long, is going to burst out like that freak but moist flower that starts
to crawl up my throat without the persona knowing that it would come to crowd me out,
/ to explode inside me [. . .] (The Love Plant 527). Sexton tries to kill the green stuffing
by swallowing stones, matches, and slender vials / with crossbones on them. / But it
thrives on their liquid solution (527-28). Her keeper/father, or her keepers, seem not to
be able to get a lawn mower / and chop it down (The Love Plant 528). This stuffing
will keep smothering her before [she] erupt[s]. This green lively eruption is nothing
but the heterogeneity that will be evident in Sextons later work.
Dismemberment, which becomes part of Sextons new heteronomy, is allowed into
many of her poems. For example, the protagonist of The One-Legged Man has given
away, planted, shipped off, and eaten his leg (ASCP 308). She also refers to Going Gone
where a man gives a crone parts of the female persona in a basket: plucked eyes, lips, two
hands (ASCP 311). Moreover, in One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three Eyes, the mother
protagonist loved only One-Eye and Three and she liked to poke / at the unusual holes
in their faces (ASCP 260-61). Two-Eyes was as ordinary / as an old man with a big
belly. In other words, what is normal without any abject distortion is without creativity
and, therefore, does not cause any interest.

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In other poems, The Dead Heart, Is It True? and Demon, the defilement
takes the form of evil or a demon (ASCP 439, 446, 549), which is for Kristeva synonymous
with the suppressed feminine (Powers 70). In Is It True? the persona kneels in front of
the Pope as he waved from his high window (ASCP 446). Unexpectedly, we discover
that this kneeling is not a result of her meekness, but rather of a pain in my bowels. The
feminine power of the maternal abject is what causes her submission. What occasionally
happens now to the persona is that the devil [. . .] crawl[s] / in and out of me (446).
Because of the burst of the maternal element, Sextons poems, like those in The
Dead Heart (ASCP 439), become EVIL, abject, stinking like vomit (440).
Furthermore, in Demon (ASCP 549), the pawned demon, / Yellowing with
forgetfulness of the personas creativity is getting out of hock (550). The undressed
demon which farts and giggles makes the persona frightened (550-51). Therefore, she
occasionally puts her hand over her mouth, covering you, smothering you / from the
public voyeury eyes / of my typewriter keys (550). And although this demon comes with
the dead who people my dreams and give sweets to the diabetic in me, she accepts it: I
will not cover your mouth since it adds to her creativity (550-51). After all, it, along with
the dead, gives bolts to the seizure of roses / that sometimes fly in and out of me (55051).
A dialogue is initiated between the persona and a priest regarding this evil in Is It
True? (ASCP 446). She tells the priest about the evil in her and he interprets it as a sin.
Refusing this definition of the word evil, she explains that it is not sin for Ive committed
every one but it is just something I ate (447). The reference to eating here relates to the
mother: by eating, the persona is incorporating her to her own body as well as her poetry.
Eating under these circumstances wields a [maternal] power that is as vital as it is fierce
(Powers 76). This evil lies to God and to love. This is something the priest doesnt
comprehend (448). He only understands evil as sin and hence he understands the persona

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when she tells him that she is going to pour gasoline over my evil body / and light it
(448).
The conversation continues with the persona now given the name of Ms. Dog. In
fact, this title, as Maxine Kumin explains, was used by Sexton to shuck the earlier
designations of Miss and Mrs. and as a reverse of the word God (207). In this way, Ms.
Dog could be understood as the heterogeneous feminine/maternal authority, opposed to
Gods. This is clear when the priest asks her, why is you evil? and she replies that it
climbed into me and that maybe my mother cut the God out of me / when I was two in
my playpen (448). Therefore, All is wilderness now and All is hay that died from too
much rain. She wonders if it is too late to open the incision and plant [God] there again.
The priest asks again, whose God are you looking for? Ms. Dog replies with an answer
that shows her need for evil as her God, where her typewriter is my church and its keys
are the altar (449). She requires a mother to devour and be devoured by her and for the
maternal semiotic to be played in her poetry as music:
a starving man doesnt ask what the meal is.
I would eat a tomato, or a fire bird or music.
I would eat a moth soaked with vinegar.
But is there any food anywhere [. . .]. (448)
However, God always appears to repair the persona who tries to wear him as a house.
Although she blesses all this and the lights for going on, she asks with astonishment
then why am I in this country of black mud? (449), a land where war is taking place, the
sun is black mud and the moon becomes a blood ball (450). But in Gods heaven, her
soul will give her a butter knife to scrape off [her] hunger and the mud, to get rid of
the maternal (451). This is perhaps why her tongue is slit. / It cannot eat (451).
Later in the poem, the dialogue with the priest becomes vaguer. She explains to him
why she called herself Ms. Dog: Because I am almost animal / and yet the animal I lost
most (452). Indeed Sexton writes in one of her essays: Dog stands for me and the new

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puppy, Daisy (All Gods 29). She has almost become an animal now because she has
allowed the maternal element into her poetry to compensate for the loss of her mother. This
inner animal is tyrannical and loving like God and so near to [Him]. Yet, it belongs to a
pre-linguistic space and thus lost from Him. Therefore, No language is perfect for it
cannot be wholly maternal. She only knows English but English is not perfect, for it
needs a mother tongue (453).
When the persona tells the priest that she is full of bowel movement, right into the
fingers, he shrugs (453). To the priest shit is good because expelling the maternal
element establishes oneself: dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I
am not and which permits me to be (Kristeva, Powers 3). To her, however, it is poison
as it stays in her body threatening her identity (453). It is true that Sexton had constipation
as a child and, as an adult, was constantly beset by fears of constipation (Middlebrook
238), but the problem here has become more extensive, encompassing her creativity. The
inability to expel dung from her body means that she cant push the poison out and is
therefore prevented from establishing herself: Thats why language fails. For the priest
shit is a feeder of plants, establishing identity and life, while to another [it is] the evil
that permeates them, threatening to pulverize not only the unity of that identity, but signs
used in her poetry as well. In this linguistic sense, God lives in shit means that the
symbolic poetry immersed in the heavy maternal substance may lead to its collapse. In this
scatological drama, the persona believes both opinions: the priests and the others.
In an interview, Sexton expresses the dilemma of writing about the experiences of
her life, which shows a contradictory attitude towards dung: There was a part of me that
was horrified, but the gutsy part of me drove on. Still, part of me was appalled by what I
was doing. On the one hand I was digging up shit, with the other hand I was covering it
with sand (Kevles 6). The repetition of words such as horrified and appalled show the
difficulty for Sexton not only of getting rid of dung, which is part of her body, the way
Nana is, but also in facing it from the outside, the way she faces her abject mother.

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Although covering dung alternates here with digging it up, which shows negativity, Sexton
will try to cover it permanently in the end as she gravitates towards a pure God.
The last form Sexton uses to personify the impure element of the mother is an
abject rat. The rat is a creature of nature rather than culture, who is crude and rude
(Juhasz 304). This rat is born in Rats Live on No Evil Star (ASCP 359), Sextons
favourite palindrome (Kumin 207). Since Eve gave birth to the rat, it is the defiled
feminine (360). The description of this rat is given in detail:
Eve gave birth to the evilest of creatures
with its bellyful of dirt
and its hair seven inches long.
It had two eyes full of poison
and routine pointed teeth. (ASCP 360)
Sextons panic when encountering this creature is depicted in Cripples and Other Stories:
I see dead rats in the toilet. / Im one of the lunatics (ASCP 160). In spite of this, Sexton
realizes from the beginning of her writing that the abject is important to her creativity. In
an early poem, With Mercy for the Greedy, Sexton defines authentic creativity partially
in terms of the polluted rat:
This is what poems are:
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongues wrangle,
the worlds pottage, the rats star. (ASCP 63)

Although all food is liable to become rancid and defiled, the cooked food (in Sextons
poem the pottage), which is treated with fire is more polluting for Kristeva, as she
herself explains:
In contrast to a ripe fruit that may be eaten without danger, food that is treated with
fire is polluting and must be surrounded with a series of taboos. It is as if fire,
contrary to what hygienist conceptions posit, far from purifying, pointed to a
contact, to organic food's meddling with the familial and the social. The virtual

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impurity of such food comes close to excremential abjection, which is the most
striking example of the interference of the organic within the social. (Powers 75)

Food, in this sense, becomes the abject other that threatens the identity. This cooked food
together with the loathsome rat are the fascinating elements of the mother needed in poetry
(Kristeva, Powers 75).The rat is represented again with the buried Christ of In the Deep
Museum, another early poem (ASCP 64). Christ is tolerant of the rat that licks his sores:
Whats that I hear, snuffling and pawing its way
toward me? Its tongue knocks a pebble out of place
as it slides in, a sovereign. How can I pray?
It is panting; it is an odor with a face
like the skin of a donkey. It laps my sores.
It is hurt, I think, as I touch its little head.
It bleeds. I have forgiven murderers and whores
and now I must wait like old Jonah, not dead
nor alive, stroking a clumsy animal. A rat.
His teeth test me; he waits like a good cook,
knowing his own ground. I forgive him that,
as I forgave my Judas the money he took. (ASCP 64)
Christ here seems to appreciate this other death [i.e. rats eating his flesh] not in relation
to God and thus not in air / in dirt (65). This Death is a return, with abjection and
jouissance, to [a] passivity status (Kristeva, Powers 63):
[. . .]. Under the rotting veins of its roots,
under the markets, under the sheep bed where
the hill is food, under the slippery fruits
of the vineyard, I go. Unto the bellies and jaws
of rats I commit my prophecy and fear. (ASCP 65)

Sextons rat sometimes become so abhorrent that the persona as a poet in

Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women would rather feel hungry and deprive
her poetry of the maternal element than face the rodent inside her (ASCP 537):
Now that I have written many words,

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and let out so many loves, for so many,

and been altogether what I always was
a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
I find the effort useless.
Do I not look in the mirror,
these days,
and see a drunken rat avert her eyes?
Do I not feel the hunger so acutely
that I would rather die than look
into its face? (ASCP 537)
It is worth noting that in most of the poems where a rat appears, Sexton refers to
Christ. Many critics have recognized Sextons ambivalent attitude in her poetry towards
Christ (McClatchy 264; Nichols 385; Ostriker, That Story 263, and so on). This
ambivalence stems from the fact that although he is for Sexton a unifying God, which
might help her to discard the rat, he is not a typical God even in terms of gender: I am no
more a woman / than Christ was a man (Consorting with Angels 112). For this reason
she identifies with him sometimes and other times she refers to him simply as God.
In one of her letters Sexton reveals her uncertainty about the figure of Christ: Oh, I
really believe in God its Christ that boggles the mind (Letters 346). In this context, the
dead Christian god plays the imaginary loving father without whom we are abandoned
[. . .] and possibly devoured by abjection (Oliver 83). For example, in Is It True? the
persona sees Jesus as her saviour from the land of mud she lives in and so [m]aybe my
evil body is done with (ASCP 454). However, Christ appears in the poem in the most
abject form:
Christ,
soiled with my sour tears,
Christ,
a lamb that has been slain,
his guts drooping like a sea worm,
but who lives on, lives on
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]

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despite it all. (ASCP 454)

Moreover, in Jesus, the Actor, Plays the Holy Ghost, Sexton depicts his
ambivalence in relation to his mother (ASCP 456). Jesus asks his mother to marry him
before the gulls take me out the door, in order to save him from different maternal
horrors he faces such as an imprisoning tree and an abject cockroach that he will face if he
goes outside. Yet he hopes for her other face, a place where There will be bread. / There
will be water (457). He asks her to let me in! so he can float in her belly like a fish,
for she is the only one not even God can do this capable of changing a false Messiah
into something true.
In her essay Radical Discontent with the Awful Order of Things, Estella Lauter
recognizes the previously discussed force, especially in Sextons last books. She points out
that this force which is personified differently by Sexton, both attracted and repelled her.40
Lauter does not make any attempt to define or analyse this force. However, she does
suggest that there are two major forces in Sextons work, one positive, the other negative.
She finds it ironic that Sexton worked more on the negative side: It is ironic that she could
recognize such figures well enough to allow herself to be propelled by them but could not
accord her more positive discoveries the same degree of validity (148). She gives as an
example of this positive dimension the personified feminine force of the sea in The
Consecrating Mother. She also mentions the woman who has survived her arduous
voyage and is now giving birth to a baby in the Eighth Psalm of O Ye Tongues. This
mother-female figure, Lauter asserts, takes on the qualities of the Great Goddess until in
the moment of birth, she becomes the creator of a new dawn in the world (154):
For the baby crowns and there is a people-dawn in the world.
For the baby lies in its water and blood and there is a peoplecry in the world.
For the baby suckles and there is a people made of milk for

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her to use. There are milk trees to hiss her on. There are milk
beds in which to lie and dream of a warm room. There are milk
fingers to fold and unfold. There are milk bottoms that are
wet and caressed and put into their cotton.
For there are many worlds of milk to walk through under the
moon. (ASCP 409)

Lauter overlooks the possibility that both what she calls negative figures and
positive figures are two faces of the same coin, the mother. Indeed, both of them add to
the heterogeneity of Sextons work. While milk is, for example, a binding medium
between mother and child, the abject is also related to the maternal body, the feminine
(Kristeva, Powers 105, 54), for what is inside the mothers body is desirable and
terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject (Kristeva, Powers 54).
In her essay Seeking the Exit or the Home: Poetry and Salvation in the Career of
Anne Sexton, Suzanne Juhasz shows that the existence of the rat in Sextons work
presents a conflict between the woman and the poet in Sexton as different selves. She
argues that the woman in her wants to get rid of that rat, while Sexton, the poet, knows
that it is important to the power of her poetry. This tension increases, according to Juhasz,
Sextons sense of fragmentation in her quest for wholeness. She, therefore, concludes that
Sextons poetry was not able to save her. It is difficult to deny the existence of conflicting
powers in Sexton, particularly in her late work. However, it could be argued that the
conflict is not between Sextons different roles as woman and poet. Rather it is in the
position she takes for or against the mother. She needs the maternal abject, and she wants
to dispose of it, producing a split in her subjectivity. Moreover, in spite of the
disfigurement Sexton faces, she is ultimately able to achieve unity under Gods
sovereignty. Therefore it is not the fragmentation in her poetry that is responsible for her
death but the fear of fragmentation.

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To conclude, Sexton, who was attacked from the outside of her borders by an abject
mother and who was able to introject her second mothers loss, finds herself and her
poetry full of the abject. This abject is presented in different forms as impure elements
and negative forces especially in her last books. As much as this abject is beneficial to her
generativity in the way it creates a higher level of heterogeneity in her work, it becomes
threatening to the unified identity that she once celebrated. In order to regain her
integrated ground, Sexton makes an effort to purify herself and her poetry of the abject
and then drift towards God.

3.3 Purification Rituals

When negativity reaches its acme in Sextons poetry and the speaking subject is in
danger of becoming polluted by the abject, Sexton begins her rituals of exorcism and
cleansing in the liminal space between culture and nature. She becomes a sacrificer who
gives up something of [her]self but [she] does not give [her]self (Kristeva, Revolution
75) to re-establish her oneness, the social symbolic coherence, sexual difference, and the
city of God with its prohibition of jouissance (Kristeva, Revolution 80). Through
purification rituals, Sexton tries to remove the abject, which prevails in her work especially
in her last books. By doing this, Sexton attempts to go back to her previous identity, which
was unified as it resisted the semiotic and took paternal support as its underpinning.
Attacked from the inside and outside, Sextons refuge is under great stress.
Irrationality has reached its peak. Her place of safety becomes like the house in May
30th in Scorpio, Bad Spider, Die: The Horoscope Poems (ASCP 602):
The house sinks in its fill, heavy with books;
in the kitchen the big fat sugar sits in a chamber pot;
in the freezer the Blue Fish vomit up their hooks;
the marriage twists, holds firm, a sailors knot. (ASCP 602)

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Sexton seems to be asking God to be patient with her for letting the abject in the form of
death in: Please God, were all right here. Please leave us alone. / Dont send death in his
fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.
There are no borders in this house and [t] here is no map (January 24th 594).
As a result, Sexton starts her mission of cleansing knowing the historic thief / is loose in
my house / and must be set upon (The Operation 57). In Courage, she gives the best
instructions to heal the wounds opened by the abject (ASCP 425). These instructions are
more or less like those given by the Lord God to Jesus in Jesus Summons Forth to
resurrect Lazarus whole (ASCP 341-42). They include covering and shielding after
cleaning and powdering the despair caused by disorderliness:

If you have endured a great despair,

then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed. (Courage 426)

The blanket that Sexton recovers here is connected with the one that her mother took away
in Hurry Up Please Its Time to wash the me out of it, to wash out her unified identity
(ASCP 390). The transformation here is not anti-thetic but rather a theological
transformation.
Sexton starts to wash the abject elements in her poetry one by one. As for the
ambition bird, she will get rid of it and get a new bird / and a new immortality box for
[t]here is folly enough inside this one (ASCP 300). She also disposes of the eponymous

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demon, which makes her an anonymous woman, by taking bread and wine. This will
let God out of my mouth instead of the demon (ASCP 551). The Eucharist sermon in
Demon not only replaces the demon with Gods body and earn[s] divine grace and
homologation with symbolic order (Kristeva, Tales of Love 248), but also by the act of
devouring, it removes the guilt from the archaic relation to the first pre-object (ab-ject) of
need: the mother (Kristeva, Powers 118). The woman will not be anonymous after that
for God is the Word that is coming out of her mouth.
An omnipotent God/father threatens Ms. Dog who is still questing for an incestuous
fusion with the mother in Hurry Up Please Its Time: oh water lady, / place me in your
cup / and pull over the clouds / so no one can see (ASCP 388). Ms. Dog, it seems, must
hurry up in adjusting the situation with God and in doing her cleansing rituals: Ms. Dog,
how much time you got left? / Ms. Dog, when you gonna feel that cold nose? / You better
get straight with the Maker / cuz its a coming, its a coming! (388). The refrain of the
poem emphasizes Sextons need for forgiveness: Forgive us, Father, for we know not.
She has to do the cleansing rituals not only because God is despotic, but also
because he is her only support in the face of a mother represented here as the moon:
Hear that, Ms. Dog!
[...............]
Them angels gonna be cut down like wheat.
Them songs gonna be sliced with a razor.
Them kitchens gonna get a boulder in the belly.
Them phones gonna be torn out at the root.
Theres power in the Lord, baby,
and hes gonna turn off the moon. (Hurry Up Please Its Time 389)
She is going to forget about her fishdom and the pleasuring seas, / the country of
comfort, / spanked into the oxygens of death and come back to God (Hurry Up Please
Its Time 392). In this life, people routinely do their rituals of cleaning the body and

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getting rid of excrement in order to establish their identity: To wake up is to be born. / To

brush your teeth is to be alive. / To make a bowel movement is also desirable.
The expulsion of waste products is especially important in the process of Sexton
establishing herself. This is clear in Baby Picture where Merely a kid keeping alive
gets rid of her violent fusion with the abject on a toilet seat (ASCP 362-63). In this,
Sexton is equating expelling excrement with survival:
I open the vein
and my blood rings like roller skates.
I open the mouth
and my teeth are an angry army.
I open the eyes
And they go sick like dogs
with what they have seen.
I open the hair
and it falls apart like dust balls.
I open the dress
and I see a child bent on a toilet seat.
I crouch there, sitting dumbly
pushing the enemas out like ice cream,
letting the whole brown world
turn into sweets. (Baby Picture 363)
The faeces going out will establish the girls clean and proper body once again. Kristeva
explains:
Contrary to what enters the mouth and nourishes, what goes out of the body,
out of its pores and openings, points to the infinitude of the body proper and
gives rise to abjection. Fecal matter signifies, as it were, what never ceases
to separate from a body in a state of permanent loss in order to become
autonomous, distinct from the mixtures, alterations, and decay that run
through it. That is the price the body must pay if it is to become clean and
proper. (Powers 108)
Only in this way can her fishdom turn into the kingdom and Ms. Dog into Ms. God
(Hurry Up Please Its Time 392, 395). Although Hurry Up Please Its Time starts by
presenting a wasteland in the manner of T.S. Eliots modernist epic (The Complete Poems

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59-75), it will end with a unified vision of life and hope. Moreover, by asking God for
forgiveness, she will turn from worshipping the question itself and its irresolute
vagueness (to ask and ask and ask) towards reaching an answer, an absolute signified (a
definite meaning that is opposite the process of questioning), a God (395). Therefore, at the
end of the poem, Ms.Dog is asked to get her flashlight to light the darkness she has been
living in and bring in the kingdom of God, the fathers symbolic.
Another attempt to clean up the mess of the abject, which violated Sextons work
appears in The Evil Seekers (ASCP 443). The poem explores the importance of
knowledge about evil:
but one must learn about evil,
learn what is subhuman,
learn how the blood pops out like a scream,
one must see the night
before one can realize the day,
one must listen hard to the animal within [. . .]. (ASCP 444)
Nonetheless, Sexton ends by affirming the need not only to hide evil and restrain it, but
also to conceal it completely. This is, Frances Bixler believes, where the irony of the poem
lies (212):
But even in a telephone booth
evil can seep out of the receiver
and we must cover it with a mattress,
and then tear it from its roots
and bury it,
bury it. (ASCP 444)

Even God himself, wishing for a body, is contaminated by Sextons abjection. He

will, like her, engage in cleansing rituals. In The Earth, we see that God envies the earth
and the body that belongs to it, even an abject body. However, he will purify that body:
He does not envy the soul so much.
He is all soul

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but He would like to house it in a body

and come down
and give it a bath
now and then. (ASCP 432)
This goes in conformity with the ceremony of the heart that swallows the tides / and spits
them out cleansed (432).
In this sense, one wonders if Sexton, all along, has allowed the abject in her work
to get out again in sacrificial, cleansing rites which strengthen the symbolic order instead
of transforming it. Thus the God/father may have a hand in all this, as is suggested in The
Big Heart where the persona admits his relation to dog thought (ASCP 462):
still God is filling me.
He is giving me the thoughts of dogs,
the spider in its intricate web,
the sun
in all its amazement,
and a slain ram
that is the glory,
the mystery of great cost, [. . .]. (ASCP 463)
The Fourth Psalm in O Ye Tongues shows Annes imaginary brother
Christopher helping her in her cleansing ceremony, which includes expelling dung and
having a bath: For I shat and Christopher smiled and said let the air be / sweet with your
soil and For I lay as stiff as the paper roses and Christopher took a tin / basin and bathed
me (ASCP 402). Furthermore, the persona, Anne, tries to go back to her vigilant
protection of the city and relinquishes the sleep of Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty): For I
was prodding myself out of my sleep, out the green room. / The sleep of the desperate who
travel backwards into darkness (403).
Anne and Christopher also swallow magic. They assimilate the maternal magic
only to expel it and hence Anne is delivered separate from the maternal body. 41 For this

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reason magic is related to Sextons creativity as has been mentioned earlier. Sexton used to
refer to her creativity as magic and wondered whether Thorazine was going to eliminate
that transformative power (Middlebrook 227). That this magic is related to the
incomprehensible maternal is clear from Sextons inability to define it in an interview with
Brigitte Weeks: I cant, but then Im not sure that I want to. Obviously it is your job to try
to analyze, but in a way it is mine to try to hide. I dont really know what the magic is as
I said before it begins with a kind of heightened awareness (116). Magic, for Sexton,
seems to be elusive but she can sense it in her poetic language. However, she thinks she is
able to harness it, although not often as she did at the beginning of her career. For in
response to the question: Is it difficult to discipline this magic into poetic form? she
replies: No, I often work to a very rigid form, although not so often as when I began
writing poetry. My conventions are my own, but if the magic is there I can work with
almost any form. It often changes with each section of a poem (116). According to
Kristeva, the subject learns to speak and fills her mouth with words in order to compensate
a lost mother. The link between speaking words and having a relationship with the mother
is the appropriation of an oral object. Instead of devouring a mother, one devours words:
Through the mouth that I fill with words instead of my mother whom I miss from now on
more than ever, I elaborate that want (Kristeva, Powers 41). That is, in language one finds
the lost mother: I have lost an essential object that happens to be, in the final analysis, my
mother, is what the speaking being seems to be saying. But no, I have found her again in
signs, or rather since I consent to lose her, I have not lost her [. . .], I can recover her in
language (Kristeva, Black Sun 43). Therefore, in terms of creativity, devouring magic
that Sexton refers to could be interpreted as devouring language, instead of the lost
maternal body, which delivers Anne into the symbolic world: [T]he symbolism of magic
is based on languages capacity to store up the death drive by taking it out of the body
(Kristeva, Revolution 244).42 This is why magic is considered in Fourth Psalm as cure,
as a kind of a purification ritual (403).

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In light of this, one can venture to suggest that Sextons choice of the long narrative
style in her poetry is not totally arbitrary.43 It is a way of devouring language not only to
compensate for a lost mother, but also to delay a frightening journey backward to a nondifferentiated mother in the crevices of silences such as Sleeping Beauty undergoes. In
fact, Middlebrook has identified the relation between Sextons creativity and the loss of her
mother although she has referred only to one period of the poets life, the autumn of her
real mothers death: Perhaps it was awareness of the imminence of a permanent
separation from Mary Gray that made Sexton avidly productive that autumn; the threat of
separation would always be the ally of her deepest work (89). However, one can suggest
that Sexton wrote not only to overcome a threat of separation, but also, and more
significantly, in order not to go back with the dead into silence.
We seldom encounter in Sextons work silence or transcendence as silence, as is
the case in Plath. Moreover, Alicia Ostriker discusses the ability of Sexton to penetrate
analytically but never transcend a patriarchal theology (What Are 495). Part of this
inability to surmount the father in fact stems from an unwillingness to face death, despite
the fact that in her poetry death is something to be longed for. However, outside her poetry,
Sexton confronted the silence of death involuntarily as something she desired, as much as
she feared, in the form of trances and blackouts. Usually these trances were silent, but if
Sexton did mumble something during them it would be a call to her Nana (L. Sexton 5859, 79).
The last thing to be exorcized in Sextons poetry is the rat. The rodent in the Tenth
Psalm is depicted as imprisoned in a picture, a geometrical shape, and then given a bath
by Anne and Christopher. Their God/father protects them during the ceremony:
For they hung up a picture of a rat and the rat smiled and held out his hand.
For the rat was blessed on that mountain. He was given a white
bath.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
For God did not forsake them but put the blood angel to look

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after them until such time as they would enter their star. (ASCP 412)

What is more, in Rowing, Sexton states bluntly that she will head towards God after a
final removal of the abject, the NaziJap-animal (Daddy Warbucks 544) with the
help of her stern God / father :
but there will be a door
and I will open it
and I will get rid of the rat inside of me,
the gnawing pestilential rat.
God will take it with his two hands
and embrace it. (Rowing 418)

Finally, Sexton will wash away all that is related to her before her final death. In
Clothes, she is preparing for a clean perfect death. She will be like a nice girl smelling
of Clorox and Duz (ASCP 381):
Put on a clean shirt
before you die, some Russian said.
Nothing with drool, please,
no egg spots, no blood,
no sweat, no sperm.
You want me clean, God,
so Ill try to comply. (ASCP 380)
If Rosemary Johnson had looked closer, she would not have launched her stern
criticism at Sexton: More are likely to ask if such messy preoccupations will remain to
stain the linen of the culture for long or whether good taste bleaches out even the most
stubborn stain eventually (387). In fact, Sexton has kept the linen of the culture clean,
removing at the end all of the abject stains which she tried for some time to incorporate
into her poetry.
After the burst of the abject in her poetry, Sexton relinquishes both her own and her
poetrys passivity to motility. Nevertheless, her attitude towards the law of the father does

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not seem to change as she performs cleansing rituals for the abject maternal element,
which only strengthen the law. Now that Sexton seems to have finished her task, she will
gravitate towards her father/God again to try to establish a unified subjectivity, which has
been fragmented severely for a period. However, this pulling towards the father again will
not be an easy task for Sexton.

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Chapter 4
Hegira to the Name of the Father
4.1 Dying Whole
In previous chapters, Sexton was viewed as an ally to her father, whose proper
shields were the only support against an abject mother residing outside, and the means to
protect the secret crypt of her second mother kept on the inside. As a result of the attack
of the abject mother from the outside, and the ability of Sexton to introject her second
mothers loss, the semiotic and the maternal burst in her poetic text in the form of
heterogeneity. Out of fear of this exploded negativity and its power of disintegration,
Sexton again takes a journey towards her father, represented by God, This is because
although Sexton wishes for an imaginary wholeness in the form of perfect death, she fears
the disintegration and mutilation which precedes death. In other words, she fears
encountering death and hence is termed the dead/less. Her journey toward God, who
manipulates her all the way, appears successful. However, fear of the persecution of the
maternal causes her death in the end, in spite of her resort to the symbolic.
Hegira is defined at the beginning of Sextons posthumously published work as a
journey or trip especially when undertaken as a means of escaping from an undesirable or
dangerous environment; or as a means of arriving at a highly desirable destination (ASCP
481). In her essay 45 Mercy Street and Other Vacant Houses, Linda WagnerMartin
defines Sextons hegira as a female one. She argues that the desirable destination for
Sexton is a maternal home where she returns to her own womanliness as her chief
identity (160). According to Wagner-Martin, Sexton remains outside an accepted
tradition, both geographic and poetic, searching for that home (161). It is true that Sexton

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longed for her mother and thus a maternal home. However, her final destination, after
searching for that lost place, has been her father/God. In fact, Wagner-Martin does not
differentiate between home and house in Sexton. In addition, Sextons geographical
existence outside in 45 Mercy Street, looking for the lost maternal home, is nothing
but a dream for the home which is unfindable for an entire lifetime (ASCP 483). And
since the speaker cannot find the address she is seeking, her journey through her memory
becomes unsuccessful (Hall 154-55). In fact, at the end of 45 Mercy Street, Sexton pulls
the dream off / and slam[s] it into the cement wall / of the clumsy calendar / I live in
(484). This means that Sexton goes back to where she started and does not reach her
desired destination where she can discard all of her fears and worries.
Accordingly, the undesirable and, most importantly, dangerous environment for
Sexton is where the maternal abject, which threatens her unity and her passivity, resides in
her poetry as well as her body. It is this pain of negativity she is now trying to escape: I
would sell my life to avoid / the pain that begins in the crib (The Big Boots of Pain
547). As she cannot find a maternal home where she can relinquish her pain, the highly
desirable destination becomes her father-figure (the Lord) who protected her once from the
mothers attack: Surely all / who are locked in boxes of different sizes should have their /
hands held. Trains and planes should not be locked. One should / be allowed to fly out of
them into the Lords mouth (Fifth Psalm 404). But would she be able to do that now?
While Sexton longs for a perfect death, my imaginary wholeness, which is a
fantasy of the reunion with the mother, a regression to a state before the symbolic and the
Oedipal father (Kristeva, Black Sun 29), she resists it because she does not want to
encounter the pain of disintegration before she reaches that state. This resistance takes the
form of clinging to another wholeness, which is that of the Lacanian mirror, and of trying
to lessen the pain by avoiding encounters (Lacan, The Mirror Stage 75-78). This
wholeness means the ability of one to see herself as a wholly separate being from the
mother, and thus her ability to see herself as all-powerful (Cranny-Francis 36). The mirror

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stage in early stages of childhood provides an example of an optical illusion of a unified

subject. Sexton realizes the awfulness of the perfection of death and the consequences of
confrontation. For instance, in Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women, she
depicts the horror of being whole in death: plant[ing] my fires underground / where none
but the dolls, perfect and awful, / could be whispered to or laid down to die (ASCP 537).
However, she still wishes for the perfection of that death. In Letters to Dr. Y, while the
leaves are calling her to death, she wishes to end as a completely integrated whole: I need
to be laid out at last / under them, as straight as a pea pod. / To die whole. To die as soft
and young as a leaf. / To lie down whole in that green gods belly (Letter, 5 May 1970,
ASCP 577). She also speaks of a unified body/ego: even as I rise from the sea, she is still
all woman, all there (Letter, 16 February 1960, ASCP 561). She wants the perfect death
but with the least confrontations and pain, with the lethal sleeping pills, the do die pills
(562). She needs an easy death without dangerous confrontations like those of the aerialist
whom she likes only to watch:
My manic eye
sees only the trapeze artist
who flies without a net.
Bravo, I cry,
swallowing the pills,
the do die pills.
Listen ducky,
death is as close to pleasure
as a toothpick.
To die whole,
riddled with nothing
but desire for it,
is like breakfast
after love. (ASCP 562)
Sexton, therefore, builds a shelter for her final death, which perhaps will protect her
from disintegration and pain. In The Break, she builds a death crche (ASCP 192), and
in the Tenth Psalm, she constructs funeral statuary with Christopher: For Anne sat

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down with the blood of a hammer and built a / tombstone for herself and Christopher sat
beside her and was / well pleased with their red shadow (ASCP 412). Furthermore, in
The Death Baby, she and Max have made a pact / [. . .] / To build our death like
carpenters (ASCP 357). Although Sexton is discussing death here, she uses the image of
the carpenter, the builder, which is, as Hall contends, a male role that the speaker comes
to assume (173), which makes her complicit with the father and his unity.
The perfection of death in Dreams from The Death Baby poems turns the
persona into a Popsicle (ASCP 354):
I was an ice baby.
I turned to sky blue.
My tears became two glass beads.
My mouth stiffened into a dumb howl.
They say it was a dream
but I remember that hardening. (ASCP 354)

The hard as a Popsicle baby is put in a refrigerator, an abject atmosphere where with its
glacial perfection it does not fit (354):
I remember the stink of the liverwurst.
How I was put on a platter and laid
between the mayonnaise and the bacon.
The rhythm of the refrigerator
had been disturbed.
The milk bottle hissed like a snake.
The tomatoes vomited up their stomachs.
The caviar turned to lava.
The pimentos kissed like cupids. (ASCP 354)

Escaping the abject force of the fridge, she surrenders to the masculine power of devouring
dogs at the end of the poem in conformity with her last choice in her poetry as a whole. In
Baby from the same sequence the persona rocks a perfect dead baby, this time a cherub
(ASCP 357). It is even more perfect than the ice baby of Dreams (ASCP 354).

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However, the persona worries about keeping the baby from breaking like the ice baby of
Dreams:
Death,
you lie in my arms like a cherub,
as heavy as bread dough.
Your milky wings are as still as plastic.
Hair as soft as music.
Hair the color of a harp.
And eyes made of glass,
as brittle as crystal.
Each time I rock you
I think you will break. (ASCP 357-358)
This worry about the state of the cherub, as a whole, is not only related to the beautiful
perfection of death, it also reflects, indirectly, Sextons concern about her unified ego and
hatred of the disintegration she has to face before death. The state of that frigid babys icy
eyes is very important in this context since it reflects the unity of the beholder as in the
mirror stage where the child (mis)recognizes its totality:
Glass eye, ice eye,
primordial eye,
lava eye,
pin eye,
break eye,
how you stare back! (ASCP 358)
Moreover, the persona and the dead baby with the rocking movement are
comforting each other (358). The addressee in We are stone. / We are carved, a piet
becomes important here as a companion, an other. The cherub is felt to be more than death.
It is somebody to soothe death, to lessen the fear. For Outside, the world is a chilly army /
Outside, the sea is brought to its knees. It is worth noting here that in some of Sextons
poetry, there is someone to die with like Christopher or Max, somebody who is not only an

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alter ego, but also a companion who would help overcome the fear of death. In one of her
letters to her husband, Sexton confesses:
I feel myself beginning to love you instead of just need you. I dont think I
have ever loved anyone in my life, not really just needed them, wanted
them to love me to possess me to become such a part of someone that I
could lose my frightened self. (Letters 24).
Throughout her life, Sexton was not able to go out of her house even to poetry
readings without a companion like her neighbour, Sandy Robart (Middlebrook 193-94).44
Sexton always felt threatened by her Nanas phrase No one came (Middlebrook 395).
She once told Anne Clarke, a friend and a psychiatrist, of the awfulness of dying . . . that
you must do it alone (Letters 229). In Imitations of Drowning, she is not only
frightened of drowning but of something else: Fear / of drowning / fear of being that
alone (ASCP 107). In her passive meeting with death, she will ask her friend Max to
Hand me the death baby / and there will be / that final rocking (49-51).
In Max, Sexton is seen again with her friend building our death like carpenters
(ASCP 357). In what seems a rather weak confrontation, because not pursued alone, they
have made a pact [t]o beat death down with a stick. Moreover, they have promised that
when the moment comes they will shoot words straight from the hip, / well play it as it
lays. Sexton also declares that when death comes with its hood / we wont be polite.
However, one feels tempted to read these last lines as one of Sextons lies or at least
exaggerations, for in Seven Times she lets death be impolite by showing power over
her (ASCP 356):
I died seven times
in seven ways
letting death give me a sign,
letting death place his mark on my forehead,
crossed over, crossed over. (ASCP 356)

Although dying as whole is an obsession Sexton lived with in her life, it is always a
conditional death. It must not be preceded by a disintegration which is the condition for

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heterogeneity in poetry and thus authentic creativity, and transgression of the law of One.
Her feelings towards this issue are described to Dr. Orne:
Im so fascinated with Sylvia [Plath]s death: the idea of dying perfect,
certainly not mutilated. . . . To lose your virginity is to be mutilated;
virginity is un-open, not yet spoiled. . . . Id rather die than have a breast
removed talk about mutilation! By the time they were done with my
mother or life was done with my mother or Nana! My father had this
thing about perfection, physical perfection that is Sleeping Beauty
remained perfect. (Middlebrook 216)
A disfigured body is what Sexton seems to be afraid of. She prefers her fathers unified
perfection and so remains his virgin, an object of his desire. In contrast, Jo Gill, in her
provocative reading of Sextons poetry, insists that nowhere in the work can we find a
vivid, unified, coherent self (Anne Sexton 99). She further argues that Sexton never
attempted to show such wholeness in her writing. Sexton, instead, used self-conscious
strategies of distortion, occlusion, and denial (Anne Sexton 4). Following Brains example
in approaching Plath, Gill, while emphasizing the heterogeneity and uncertainty of
Sextons work and the kind of Confessional poetics she uses, gives the latter unlimited
conscious power.45 While it is easy to agree with Gill about the heterogeneity of Sextons
work, especially in the last books, one could not agree with Gills presentation of her as
being, in Telephone, like Saussure theorizing and giving the reader a lesson about the
signifier and the signified.
Gill also claims that Sextons work anticipates recent poststructuralist practice. In
her argument, Sexton appears unified and coherent in explaining the incoherence of
language, controlling her material from which she is detached. Sextons unconscious
seems unimportant in such a drama. Although Gills discussion is convincing to an extent,
especially in relation to Kristeva, she ignores the personal element, which is important to
both Kristeva and Sexton. 46 Moreover, in discussing one important poem that shows
heterogeneity, Hurry Up Please Its Time, and which draws its sources mostly from
Eliots The Waste Land, Gill argues that the poem ends in uncertainty, while in a

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previously published essay, she notices something else:47 Finally, as these closing lines
avow, what ultimately unites Sextons poetics, and Eliots, is their shared anticipation of,
and subjection to, a greater will; their hopeful expectation that notwithstanding their
chosen paths, the kingdom of God, however queer, / will come. This comment which
goes with Sextons quotation from Kierkegaard at the beginning of The Awful Rowing:
But above all do not make yourself important by doubting is omitted in Gills book in
favour of uncertainty.
Moreover, Gill chooses to end her discussion with several poems from The Awful
Rowing Toward God, as well as Love Letter Written in a Burning Building, in order to
emphasize the uncertainty of Sextons poetics, but she avoids discussing the last poem in
that last book, The Rowing Endeth, which is almost unanimously agreed upon by critics
as a relapse in Sextons work. For example, Gregory Fitz Gerald, in an interview (1974),
seems unconvinced of Sextons winning the game of poker with God (192). Furthermore,
her close friend Maxine Kumin thinks that God or her Daddy left to Sexton out of The
Death of the Fathers held the crooked, winning hand (208). The most enthusiastic
feminist defenders of Sexton feel disappointed with this poem, regarding it as a kind of
submission to the father. Ostriker, for example, describes this ending as appalling
because the father (God) is atrocious, brutal, a betrayer (That Story 271). Furthermore,
Love Letter Written in a Burning Building, which was composed a week before Sextons
death, certainly shows an immolation of self without meaning it (ASCP 614). However,
although the persona is forsaking her companion lover Foxxy, she is still addressing him
and writing just for you, insisting on shielding herself out of fear of confronting death to
the end: I have on a mask in order to write my last words (613). She is also with
asbestos gloves (614). That is, Sexton refuses to relinquish her armours and masks to the
end, unlike Plath who, as shall be seen, sheds them to the point of total disappearance.
Although this is a cremation of love, Sexton still asserts the we of the lovers until the
end: but instead we seem to be going down / right in the middle of a Russian street

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(614). The building collapses involuntarily while she still holds onto the father/lover and
the flame of creativity is beaten with whips of fire rather than beating courageously like
Plaths horses.
As much as Sexton wishes for perfection and wholeness in death, she fears facing
degeneration before dying. That is, she fears the disfigurement brought by that encounter.
Her Whitmanesque celebration of the unified body at the beginning of her career is
evidence of an obsession of her unity. The burst of the abject in her poetry becomes fearful
to Sexton since it threatens her sense of completeness. As a dead/less, her fear becomes
urgent and she decides to journey toward God, her symbolic saviour.

4.2 The Dead/less

The burst of the maternal abject in Sextons work begins to threaten her identity.
The fear becomes so urgent that she wishes to die without facing death. Because of
Sextons fear of losing her unified self through the disintegration that comes from
encountering the maternal, she tries to restore her unity by journeying towards God. She
attempts to reiterate her first movement from the semiotic to the symbolic in a last effort to
gain safety. God, however, does not seem the right saviour for Sexton as he gets even more
authoritative at the end. He turns from being an imaginary father, stern and loving, into the
unyielding father of the law. Sexton dies even after reaching Gods island out of her fear of
the persecution of the maternal. She dies only in order to run from the persecution of death.
At the beginning of her book The Awful Rowing Toward God (416), Sexton quotes
Henry David Thoreau where he says: There are two ways to victory, to strive bravely,
or to yield. How much pain the last will save we have not yet learned (Thoreau 134). In
the end, Sexton chooses to yield, to be the dead/less, to cover and shield herself on the
battlefield. In Courage the eponymous virtue is a small coal / that you kept swallowing
(ASCP 425):
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,

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you did it with only a hat to

cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there. (ASCP 425)
The dead/less is the subject who resists the death drive, represented as anger, death, and
violence in her work of art and who fears confrontations in contrast to the rebellious
deadmost. In other words, she dies less than the deadmost, causing stagnation and
passivity, rather than movement in the poetic text and thus the inability of change. In terms
of abjection, oscillation between the inside and the outside of her psychic borders,
represented in her poetry by different geometrical shapes, is avoided. Silence, as the
ultimate revolutionary act, is less welcome in her text than that of the deadmost.
As the dead/less Sexton frequently refers to small deaths. In The Addict, it is
death in small amounts or little death in Red Riding Hood or dying a little in The
Evil Seekers or even dying for no reason in Killing the Spring (ASCP 166, 272, 444
322). She also confesses: Im on a diet from death although she promised to keep
practising it (The Addict 165). In Suicide Note, she confesses: I could admit / that I
am only a coward / crying me me me (ASCP 158). In her letters too she wrote about dying
in socially acceptable ways like drinking myself to death or taking sleeping pills each
day (Letters 97). Even early on in the poem The Starry Night, Sexton describes her
wish to be engulfed by sweet death: I want to die: / into that rushing beast of the night, /
sucked by that great dragon (ASCP 54). However, this engulfment is conditional: to split
/ from my life with no flag, / no belly, no cry. That is, she wants to die without
confrontation or pain.48 She wishes to die without the action, without the negativity in her
work that might disintegrate her body. Until negativity starts to creep in, passivity remains
Sextons main attribute. In this sense, Sexton identifies with the nailed Christ. I nailed my
hands, she declares in Killing the Spring, so that they would not reach out and speak. /
They could no longer get in the act. / They were fastened down to oblivion (ASCP 321).

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These battles with little death are supported by her father who always comes to
rescue her from the perils of nakedness and exposure although he himself has exposed her
sexually. His Phallus will be always the knife to kill the mother and thus make money, as
is clear from the unpublished poem The Thought Disease49: (I see s, that snake, that
swan, / with a knife you are money). As this money is related to the father, it is also
related to language: My business is words. Words are like labels, / or coins, or better, like
swarming bees (Said the Poet to the Analyst 12). This is why Gods opposite, Ms. Dog,
is fighting the dollars (Hurry Up Please Its Time 387). However, it seems that her
fathers dollars are indispensible, as becomes evident in Daddy Warbucks (ASCP 543):
You let me touch them, fondle the green faces
lick at their numbers and it lets you be
my Daddy! Daddy! and though I fought all alone
with molesters and crooks, I knew your money
would save me, your courage, your Ive had
considerable experience as a soldier . . .
fighting to win millions for myself, its true.
[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
and always came at my perils, the black Christs of childhood,
always came when my heart stood naked in the street
and they threw apples at it or twelve-day-old-dead-fish. (ASCP 543)
In The Awful Rowing Toward God, Sextons last published collection, her father
becomes God, and Sexton decides finally to row to his island. In Rowing, she reviews
the story of her life, placing herself in the position of a fender (ASCP 417). She is first
imprisoned in a crib of glacial bars, then comes the perfect dolls and the devotion to
their plastic mouths, and life with its cruel houses. Following that, there is the
beginning of the violation of those houses by her negativity: and then there were many
strange apparitions, / the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison / and all of that, saws
working through my heart. However, she decides to overcome her fragmentation and
make a hegira towards Gods island: but I grew, I grew, / and God was there like an island

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I had not rowed to. The problem is that in order to do so she has to cross the semiotic sea
as if reiterating her birth into the symbolic order: the oarlocks stick and are rusty / and the
sea blinks and rolls / like a worried eyeball, / but I am rowing, I am rowing. And though
the wind pushes [her] back and she is tantalized by the narcissistic fusion with the mother
and though I know that that island will not be perfect, the decision has been made to
discard the rat inside of me and row toward God (418). If the choice is between the exit
or the home (The Children 420), Sexton chooses an exit towards her father and not her
mother, although both are threatening.
The play of Sextons life was not active enough to reach a level of negativity that
would affect transformation in her work. In The Play, where Sexton is the only actor
in a solo act, she admits that [i]t is difficult for one woman / to act out a whole play
(ASCP 440). A prolonged dialogue has not been allowed between the different aspects of a
split personality. All she has been able to do is unsuccessfully keep up with her situation in
her life and writing: All I am doing onstage is running / running to keep up, / but never
making it. Although she stops running for a while to give an absurd speech which
shows creativity, the last lines of her play reveal a boring and less daring final choice:
To be without God is to be a snake
who wants to swallow an elephant.
The curtain falls.
The audience rushes out.
It was a bad performance.
Thats because I am the only actor
and there are few humans whose lives
will make an interesting play.
Dont you agree? (ASCP 441)
Without a God that is filling me, she will be back to her hunger for the archaic
mother (The Big Heart 463). In The Sickness Unto Death, when God went out of me
she saw only the little white dish of my faith / breaking in the crater because it contains
no food there from God and so I kept saying: / Ive got to have something to hold on to

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(ASCP 441-42). Trying to participate in a Eucharist to satiate her hunger, she fails: I who
wanted to crawl toward God / could not move nor eat bread (442). This is because her
house (body) has been full of bowel movement. Resolved to row toward God, she
indulges in symbolic oralization as Christ resuscitates her (Kristeva, Tales of Love 150):
So I ate myself,
bite by bite,
and the tears washed me,
wave after cowardly wave,
swallowing canker after canker
and Jesus stood over me looking down
and He laughed to find me gone,
and put His mouth to mine
and gave me His air. (ASCP 442)
After the disappearance of the self, it is only rescued by agape, unconditional spiritual
love, and thus Christ becomes a Third Party between the Self and its destructive hunger
(Kristeva, Tales of Love 140,149). In other words, Christ is the imaginary father, who, as
was defined earlier in Sextons discussion, operates as a conglomerate father-mother. The
annihilation is nothing but a step towards synthesis and integrity of resurrection,
reconciliation with God (Tales of Love 142). This Christian love, as Kristeva explains, is a
more-than-hunger in the Fathers bosom . . . [It is s]ublimation of homosexuality,
abduction of the mothers nourishing attributes, and subordination of imagination to the
sadistic protection of the One (Tales of Love 149-50). In other words, this symbolic
orality, represented by Christ putting his mouth to Sextons to nourish her, indicates love
of the ideal father. It is a symbolic identification that displaces the mother and protects the
law all at once.
At the end of Sextons life as play, she comes to the realization in Not So. Not
So. that I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God / I cannot move a finger /
without trying to touch God (ASCP 472). She feels that God is not indifferent to your
need (473). In Snow, Sexton sees hope everywhere and she attempts a symbolic

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orality once again by biting hope as bread (ASCP 467-68). Likewise, God gives milk /
and I have the pail (468). This androgynous God takes maternal traits to deny the mother
and subjugate the daughter sexually (Moi, Kristeva Reader 147). In About Chinese
Women, a full description of such a being is provided:50
But when this most wealthy Spouse desires to enrich and comfort the Bride
still more, He draws her so closely to Him that she is like one who swoons
from excess of pleasure and joy and seems to be suspended in those Divine
arms and draw near to that sacred side and to those Divine breasts.
Sustained by that Divine milk with which her Spouse continually nourishes
her and growing in grace so that she may be enabled to receive His
comforts, she can do nothing but rejoice. Awakening from that sleep and
heavenly inebriation, she is like one amazed and stupefied; well, I think,
may her sacred folly wring these words from her: Thy breasts are better
than wine. (Moi, Kristeva Reader 147-48)
This sexual relation between the father and daughter recalls the scenes between Sexton and
her inebriated father and grandfather, such as the one alluded to in
Daddy Warbucks, which takes the form of denial:
I never saw a man expose himself.
No. No.
I never saw a drunkard in his blubber.
I never let lightning go in one ear and out the other.
And all the men out there were never to come.
Never, like a deluge, to swim over my breasts
and lay their lamps in my insides.
No. No.
Just me and my Daddy
and his tempestuous bucks [.] (ASCP 544)
Rosenthal and Gall think that The Divorce Papers, which consists of seventeen
poems, represents the end of Sextons work (428-43). They argue that in this group of
poems she relies heavily on the actual story of her divorce and short-lived love affair
followed by suicide the following year. They suggest that Sexton was able to reject the
heterosexual relationship as represented both by the divorce and the abandoned lover. The
Red Dance, they believe, shows the resistance to male force where Sexton dances toward

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the perfection of death. However, Sexton, who has tried to divorce her father/spouse, as
the two critics suggest, seems always to get back to him in his role of a husband and God.
In Divorce, Thy Name Is Woman, she has attempted to divorce Daddy of the whiskies,
daddy of the rooster breath who would visit and then dash away / as if I were a disease
(ASCP 545). She has been divorcing him ever since and she is still divorcing him.
However, at the end of the poem she becomes like that Bride of God preparing the bed for
a final sexual act that, she hopes, will result in conception:
I am pacing the bedroom.
Opening and shutting the windows.
Making the bed and pulling it apart.
I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows,
waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home
and stuff me so full of our infected child
that I turn invisible, but married,
at last. (ASCP 545-46)

Sextons words of creativity at this stage, as her attitude to her father, are passive,
lacking destructive dynamism and violent passion that have the two faces of negativity:
power and dissolving of the ego (Tales of Love 79).This is what Kristeva calls demonical
Eros (Tales of Love 79). They lack the violent death drive and, therefore, cannot soar high
as happens in Words (ASCP 463):
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words are not good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren. (ASCP 464)
The passivity of her words stems from the fact that Sexton would not want them to
disintegrate under the pressure of the semiotic. For her, unity is more important than a
creativity which brings forth the destructive maternal impossible:

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But I try to take care

and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair. (ASCP 464)
These are Gods words, as is obvious in Frenzy where the persona defensively claims: I
am not lazy (ASCP 466). Every day, she types out the God / my typewriter believes in. /
Very quick. Very intense. This act puts her on the amphetamine of the soul. Therefore,
the heaven in the poem is a heaven of language, which is not heavenly at all. It is not a
place for a lazy subject, thus causing the angels [to] close the windows and not allowing
her to enter (467). The persona is begging for the windows to stay open because she cannot
survive without that heaven where objects of desire (petit objet a) belong, objects that will
compensate for the lost mother. As a result, the sea is not dying, the dirt that belongs
to the mother still has a life-wish, Christ, a loving father, can still walk in a symbolic
world where words like bees [are] stinging the heart all morning. But will the angels
consent to her soliciting? Will they allow the world of frenzy (the semiotic) to enter their
heaven? Will they keep their windows open? Yes, they will permit the dirt of frenzy to
come in for a while, exactly as the abject does in Sextons poetry, not to have freedom of
movement in the symbolic realm, but to be washed in an English bathtub.
The last act of Sextons hegira to the island of God has drawn close. It is a reentering into the symbolic through complete submission not this time to a loving father,
but to a more-or-less a Lacanian Name of the Father, a stern father, who resembles that
God of the Old Testament whom Sexton always admired. 51 In fact, Swiontkowski sees
Sextons father as Lacans symbolic Father, the absolute Patriarch and thus the
daughter [makes] no progress in relation to her father-imago over the course of the poetic
canon in relation to incest (141).52 Although one agrees with Lauter that Sextons choice
of God with feminine qualities in the end has to do with her inability to name the forces
and figures she discovered in her images, which are considered maternal, her final choice

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of a stern father without maternal qualities in The Rowing Endeth makes this scenario no
longer applicable (157).53
In The Rowing Endeth, the speaker seems to reach a safe place at the end of her
journey, the island of God (ASCP 473). She appears triumphant after her long voyage at
sea. But if one views God as a representative of the patriarchal system, The Name of the
Father or the symbolic order, then the island is the place where new suffering begins. It is
true that she suffered on her journey from the semiotic chora with blisters that broke and
healed/and broke and healed and salt sticking to my face and arms like/a glue-skin
pocked with grains of tapioca, but the suffering in that new world of the island is still
horrific or, at least, unpredictable. The subject moves from sea to shore, from the
imaginary to the real world. It is a process of giving birth to a new subject. But she is not
the only one to suffer for there are many boats moored / at many different docks. The
blisters and the salt sticking to her face could be seen as the dirt that comes with the baby,
emerging from the mothers body, a residue of that re-enacting of separation from the
mother. The newborn I, terribly exhausted, empties herself from my wooden boat to
the flesh of The Island where the thetic is separating the two realms.54
Sextons separation from the sea becomes important to enter the symbolic land of
the island. This is like a separation from the mother which is a vital necessity for acquiring
language where desire takes place. At that moment of entrance to language, Gods world,
the doors of desire open and play can it be true (474). She has been implicitly
raped and marginalized at the very moment she entered that world, an exhausted child. She
wins only because she has obeyed the order of the system and because I hold a royal
straight flush, which distinguishes her as part of this new system. Behind the use of a
technical term in poker, Sexton is suggesting, at a secondary level, the type of flush that is
caused by the sexual manipulation by God, and a process of cleaning she had to go through
to get rid of the residues of her attachment to the maternal world of the chora. He wins
simply because he has the power. His laughter is an indication of that power rolling like a

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hoop out of His mouth / and into mine. It has the power of a language that she must learn.
Yet, even when she tries to imitate him by producing the same laughter (language), still
freshly born, it echoes with the maternal sea, with what is absurd and meaningless. His
laughter is still stronger and what she thinks is our two triumphs is actually one triumph.
At the end she addresses God, calling him dealer for he surely is the one who deals the
cards. She admits full subjugation and love for your wild card, for his power which is
that untamable, eternal, and gut-driven ha-ha. It is the power of language which is
structured as desire. Therefore, the I in this poem seems part of an endless monologue of
hegemonic power, which is the symbolic Name of the Father.
If at the end Sexton has successfully rowed to her God to reside in his bosom or his
new house, the island, one wonders why she should kill herself. It is not difficult to
conjecture that the cause is again her fear of the Unnamable, that persecuting machine
which never stops (Kristeva, Powers 112). The land now, after what she has been through,
is little more than an island surrounded on all sides by the threatening maternal sea. As
always, her fear of persecution is the reason for her death. As Sexton puts it, [e]ven
without wars / life is dangerous (Hurry Up Please Its Time 393). And the best way to
end the fear is to die. Sexton sets out the formula for such a death in The Death King:55
Death will be the end of fear / and the fear of dying (ASCP 587).
Sexton also writes in her therapy notebook: I dont want to die of something Im
afraid of (Middlebrook 216). It is all about confronting the abject mother. In one of her
letters written in 1964, she admits: Im just a slob, myself . . . obsessional only when
confronted with terror and then I make up little magical acts to save me. Then she adds in
the same letter: how can this be done if there is no God? (Letters 234-35). Sexton might
have lived to the hilt in real life, as she confessed to her daughter Linda, but this is not
the case in her poetry (Letters 424). There she is the dead/less.
Sexton, therefore, tries to restore her once unified ego by searching for her father
who takes the form of God. She can then be rid of the maternal element and the semiotic,

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which threatens her with mutilation. The fearful Sexton attempts to postpone any
confrontation with the mother as bodily drives (anger) invested in the text. This is why one
presumes she died out of fear: but in the end its fear / that drowns you (Imitations of
Drowning 107).
In conclusion, Sextons work has enabled us to look closely at the central dilemma
of her life and creativity. Fear of facing an abject mother and of losing another have made
fighting back difficult. Her reliance on a father for her unity adds to the dilemma for he is
also the abhorred lover, who is the only support against disintegration, so she cannot
transgress his law and make any change. Robert Boyers, commenting on one of Sextons
poems, put it neatly: she cannot really fight back, but withdraws instead. She delights in
stillness, but fears everything (209). In her last poems, the maternal bursts in once the
shields of her psyche collapse and the secret mother is introjected. This is where
heterogeneity starts in Sextons work, a process which added to her fear. She decides to
journey toward God who might give her unity but who is unable to relinquish her fear.
Moving on to Sylvia Plaths work and life, we will notice a subject who is braver in
dealing with the mother and the father. Plath, unlike Sexton, does not hold onto her psychic
borders, which are fluid from the start. She is more of an outsider. This, of course, will
endanger both her position as a subject and her creativity. Therefore, she starts to open and
close her armour successively, trying to create heterogeneity in her poetry. Through this
subversive heterogeneity, she tries to confront a father in order to get rid of him, something
that also requires a constant confrontation with the mother. This oscillation between
mother and father (I and not-I), between motility and stasis, results not only in a
successful transgression of the law, but also in the discarding of the father in an authentic
creativity where the semiotic has the upper hand, but where death has to be confronted as
the last perfection.

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Chapter 5
Plath, the Pharmakos (Scapegoat)
5.1

Pharmakos to the Father

Sexton could not transform the law of the father in spite of the heterogeneity

manifested at the end of her career. She turned to the father despite that final explosion of
death drive in her text, which could have enabled her to change his law. However, her fears
prevented her from facing the father whom she needed for love and security against an
abject mother. On the other hand, Plath was able to transform this law of One in her final
work.
Sylvia Plath had a precocious talent, writing her first poem when she was only
eight. Although she had to cope with a traumatic event in her early childhood, which was
her fathers death, she nevertheless continued to pursue success: writing poetry and short
stories, winning prizes, editing magazines. Even her first attempt at suicide while she was a
student at Smith College did not stop her from graduating with honours. Her first book The
Colossus and Other Poems was written after a two-month residency at Yaddo Writers
Colony in New York in 1959, three years after meeting and marrying Ted Hughes, and was
published in England in 1960. This was when she was twenty-eight years old, the same age
that Sexton began her writing career. Sexton published her first collection of poetry the
same year as The Colossus, which made Plath jealous (Kirk 81). Only one year later, she
finished writing The Bell Jar. However, her real burst of creativity did not take place until
she had discovered her husbands affair with Assia Wevill. The resulting anger was
embodied in her final book Ariel, which is one of the most controversial, haunting, and
widely-read collections of poetry in the twentieth century. Sexton described Plath in these

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poems as riding straight out with the image-ridden-darer, Roethke [. . .]. Her poems do
their own work [. . .]. What matters is her poems. These last poems stun me. They eat
time (The Bar Fly 11).
This chapter will argue that although Plaths initial loyalty is, like Sextons, to her
father, she tries from the outset of her career to defy him and look for an authentic, yet
unconventional, independent voice. In a dangerous step, she tries to get out from behind
the shields which stand for the borders of her proper body and psychic borders. However,
these are dissolved into nothingness when she finally responds to the lure of the mother,
represented by nature outside. In this sense Plath turns from being a sacrifice to the
father to being one for the mother (nature). Nature is, according to Blosser and other critics
(74, 78), maternal in Plaths oeuvre. It threatens and lures the subject into full
disintegration, passivity and death.
Finding the consequences of this passivity inhibiting to her creativity, the
revolutionist, who tries to make a transformation, creates a hurting other, which might add
motility and vitality to her work. However, it is not until violent negativity moves in
Plaths body as a result of psychological reasons that she is able to release it in her work as
transformative energy. In this stage, which is embodied the Ariel poems, the subject of her
poems becomes one of process, mobile and non-subjugated. In its mobility, it oscillates
between I and other, the symbolic and the semiotic, presence and absence, writing and
silence. Negativity, as energetic movement away from passivity, is considered a kind of
creativity for Plath, who begins to realize the difference between her early and the later,
more dynamic work. She asserted the value of her last poems: I am a writer . . . I am a
genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make
my name (Letters Home 468). Many critics locate the achievement of Ariel in its supreme
energy. Markey talks about [t]he creative flow in energy (A Journey 138); Blessing
describes Plaths psyche as pure energy and her last poetry, using one of Roethkes
phrases, as rhythmical energy (58).

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The following chapters will discuss Plaths heterogeneous movement between I

and not-I as both conscious and unconscious. It is a reciprocity which rejects the unity of
the subject. This movement redefines the pharmakos as both inside and outside at the
same time. The pharmakos, which has many meanings in Ancient Greek (remedy, offscouring, that which is wiped off and the Forbidden Thing) played an important part
in religious rituals as a scapegoat (Nilson 87; Murray 51). This scapegoat, which can be an
animal, a criminal or a cripple upon which all evil is loaded is like a sponge that absorbs
every impurity (Nilson 87). Because of its impurity, the scapegoat was usually thrown
away, burned up, cast into the sea as a means of purification (Nilson 87).
In his essay Platos Pharmacy, Jacques Derrida uses the Phaedrus to show how
Platos use of the word pharmakon (both a cure and a poison) in different contexts is
related to the concept of writing. However, pharmakon, is not the only form of the word
used by Plato; rather there is a chain of pharmaceutical words: pharmakeia-pharmakonpharmakeus (129). According to Derrida, although these words appear often in Platos text,
he never uses the closely related word, Pharmakos (129). The Pharmakos, he explains, is
the evil and the outside that is expelled from the citys body proper (130, 133).
However, this representative of the outside is regularly granted its place by the
community, chosen, kept, fed, etc., in the very heart of the inside (133). This means that
the scapegoat is in fact situated on the boundary line between the inside and the outside
(133).
Kristeva has somewhat a similar perspective to Derrida, possibly owing to the fact
that his essay was published in Tel Quel (1968), which Kristeva as a member of the Tel
Quel group would certainly have read. She also views the function of the scapegoat as
simultaneously violent and regulatory (Revolution 75), on the border between the outside
and the inside. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva refers to this ambiguous situation as
abjection. The present study will deal with Plath from this perspective. After beginning as

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a scapegoat to the father (only inside) and then to the mother (only outside), she takes the
position of abjection, which is inside and outside at the same time.
The Pharmakos, in this new sense, is capable of challenging the father, who is
considered to be Kristevas imaginary father. He is the loving, loved and symbolic father
(the law), whose oppression is also an oppression of language. Transgressing the law of the
father is translated in Plaths work as dying and killing repeatedly and in a variety of ways
(burning, cannibalism, slaying and shedding blood, and the veil as weapon). Masochism
takes the new Kristevan perspective on the term as reciprocity, a master-slave game whose
energy is derived from the death instinct that challenges the law of the father. It is a
reciprocity which is not only manifested in the various acts of death in Plaths work, but
also in the oscillation between linear time (social, historical time, which is masculine) and
timelessness (which belongs to the semiotic, the feminine). This reciprocity enables her to
create her own unique heterogeneous voice, which is termed the Siren Voice of the
Other. It is a voice which shows a conflictual heterogeneity and which ends with a defiant
silence that pulls the communicators into a pre-symbolic space. Plaths oscillation ends
when she discards the father forever. The consequence is ultimate jouissance in a final
triumphant, yet deadly confrontation with the mother.
The Colossus (1960), Plaths first book, embodies her first steps towards this last
freedom. In an interview with Peter Orr, Plath comments on her earliest poems, in
particular her first book, in a surprising way: I cant read any of the poems aloud now. I
didnt write them to be read aloud. They, in fact, quite privately, bore me (170). Although
no one can deny the craftsmanship of Plaths earlier poems in fact, Sexton suggests that
they are nothing but form (The Bar Fly 9) it would appear that there is something
deficient in them. That is, they seem to lack an original, authentic voice that could be
described as Plaths. This is not to say that [t]hose early poems were all in a cage (and not
even her own cage at that) and that the later poems were all freedom in an authentic voice
(Sexton, The Bar Fly 9). The idea of a drastic difference between her first works and

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those completed just before her death has been promoted by such critics as Marjorie
Perloff (Sylvia Plaths Collected Poems 294), Al Alvarez (Sylvia Plath 58), Douglas
Dunn (51) and Peter Davison (39)). It could be argued, on the contrary, that there is a
continuity in her work, which, for example, Pamela Smith and John Frederick Nims, who
focus on technical aspects, have also detected (112, 136).56 In fact, without the daring first
steps in The Colossus, the later poems, especially those in Ariel, would have been an
impossibility.
In Plaths early poems, there are attempts to go outside the proper borders, which
keep her unified, in contrast to Sexton who took a long time to accomplish this. Plaths
efforts are sometimes manipulated and crushed by the symbolic father and his law, and
when she does go outside, she finds herself facing an archaic mother, represented by
nature. This revolutionary act of going further outside runs the risk of fusion with the
maternal Thing. As a result, we see Plath, or her personae, often going back to the
discarded symbolic armour, until, in the end, she is utterly lost in the maternal nondifferentiation of jouissance and psychic void, the depressive emptiness which entails
collapse of meaning. This fusion with maternal nature creates neutrality the boredom
that Plath describes in some of her poems and reduces the level of heterogeneity and
transformation that one finds in her early verse. However, the escalated level of
heterogeneity seen in the later work, especially in Ariel, may not have been achieved
without the initial efforts in the earlier verse.
Plaths Collected Poems (1981) begins with a piece based on Giorgio de Chiricos
painting called Conversation Among the Ruins (1927).57 In this poem, the abjection in
terms of the erasing of borders between the inside and outside prefigures what is happening
in the later poems. Christina Britzolakis has noted that it is not only the conventional
powers of eros that are responsible for the ruins in the poem, but also the clash of interior
and exterior, culture and nature, classicism and modernity (Sylvia Plath 196). In fact, the
poem establishes a dialogue between a female and male rival and between the semiotic and

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the symbolic where the borders between the inside and outside have collapsed. It is what
Rose describes as a battle over the meaning and possibility of poetry, of culture, as such
Dionysus versus Apollo, wild furies versus Grecian tunic and psyche-knot (Haunting 90):
Through portico of my elegant house you stalk
With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit
And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net
Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.
Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak
Above the appalling ruin [. . .]. (CP 21)
With the collapse of her borders, the outside landscape becomes part of the room where the
female sits: Fractured pillars frame prospects of rock. Although the female subject
seems, as Britzolakis suggests, a victim of the power of the male other, as she is [r]ooted
to your black look in a static, melancholic way (Sylvia Plath 196), the question at the end
of the poem opens the possibility of taking up dialectics once again. In fact, the last line
puts the narcissistic crisis of lost boundaries which the speaking subject is facing into a
question: What ceremony of words can patch the havoc? Is it a ceremony allowing her to
resume more fiercely the erotic mania along with the havoc of the master-slave game, a
ricocheting 58 between I and the other or to keep depressively static and in a final
ceremony of death, which are the only two paths open to the person and the poet (Kristeva,
Tales of Love 81)? Contrary to Britzolakis opinion, one can suggest that Plath was not
statically obedient to the male other, but rather was able to play the transformative
masochistic game.
At the beginning of her career, Plath, like Sexton, remains loyal to her walls and
her idolized father. In Pursuit, for example, a poem written shortly after Plaths first
meeting with Hughes, the persona is followed by a panther. The black marauder, the
lithe one with claws and taut thighs stands for both sexual fear and desire for her
victimizing male counterpart (Uroff 70; Hayman 95). In running away from the panther,
the persona actually runs towards his house: I shut my doors on that dark guilt, / I bolt the

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door, each door I bolt (22-23). The end is predictable when the male panther follows her
back to his territory: Coming up and up the stairs (23). The resulting sexual
consummation is a cannibalistic act where the persona is forced or even consents, to
sacrifice:
I hurl my heart to halt his pace,
To quench his thirst I squander blood;
He eats, and still his need seeks food,
Compels a total sacrifice. (CP 23)
Another sacrificial scene where the persona is totally submissive to the symbolic father,
who represents the law, is clearly evident in The Glutton:
He, hunger-stung, hard to slake,
So fitted is for my black luck
(With heat such as no man could have
And yet keep kind)
That all merits in being meat
Seasoned how hed most approve;
Bloods broth,
Filched by his hand,
Choice wassail makes, cooked hot,
Cupped quick to mouth;
Though prime parts cram each rich meal,
Hell not spare
Nor scant his want until
Sacked larders gone bone-bare. (CP 40)
The poem is all about He; the I is not there, except as food in the masters stomach.
He is totally in control, and the persona surrenders to him.
These sacrificial rituals are rooted deep in history: Insatiate, he ransacks the land /
Condemned by our ancestral fault, / Crying: blood, let blood be spilt; / Meat must glut his
mouths raw wound (Pursuit 22). These roots are also linguistic. It is the power of the
panthers voice that subjugates the persona and makes her vulnerable, accepting the deadly
sacrifice: His voice waylays me, spells a trance, / The gutted forest falls to ash (23).

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Moreover, in Firesong, there is another allusion to sacrificing the female persona, like
the animals of the poem, to the males burning flames, she will be snared where all most
fair / is tricked to falter in spilt blood (30). This sacrifice is again related to a masochistic
sexual scene where in full complacency, the persona is enjoying the deadly act, asking for
more blood to be spilt: brave love, dream / not of staunching such strict flame, but come, /
lean to my wound; burn on, burn on (30).
However, in Pursuit, Plath promises that [o]ne day Ill have my death of him
(22). This promise will later come true when the subject is able to take an active role in the
masochistic sexual linguistic drama. Such an outcome can be achieved when Plath uses
what Judith Kroll describes as the fascist sensibility in her early glorification of Hughes
(for example in Ode for Ted and Faun) to glorify herself (249). In other words, this
change takes place when Plath turns the monolithic, hegemonic relationship with the
father-figure into a violent reciprocity between two parts.
At first the powers of the male antagonist seem to control the borders of the female
protagonist. At one point his image glazes the window of my hurt (Winter Landscape,
With Rooks 22) and at another all the windows broke when he stalked in (The
Queens Complaint 28). Whether the windows or the walls, like those in Conversation
Among the Ruins, are in one piece or not, and thus whether the persona is within or
without, she is still the pharmakos of the terrorizing male state.
In Two Sisters of Persephone, there are two girls: one within the house and the
other without (31). The girl within works problems on / A mathematical machine.
Her labour is described as a barren enterprise as she works with abstract symbolic
numbers without being able to translate artistic space into numbers for the infinite, that is,
without being able to create an art permeated by music and rhythm (Kristeva, Tales of Love
323-24). This is why [d]ry ticks mark time. It is, as Kristeva describes it in her essay
Womens Time, obsessional time (Kristeva, Kristeva Reader 192), the linear time of
language that has the structure of a sentence and thus the true structure of the slave. The

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time that belongs to the girl within does not differ from the time that belongs to the girl
without although Plath describes it as ticks blown gold (32). This is because the girl
without bears a king, a phallus which emphasizes her lack. In other words, although
Plath seems to describe a better destiny for the girl who flourishes under the sun, the
reason for this prosperity is, in fact, complete submissiveness to the patriarchal symbol of
power.
Although the subject is seemingly not imprisoned, for she is neither within nor
without and thus is capable of linguistic creativity, this creativity may be considered to
lack authenticity since she has not been the one, until this moment, who is responsible for
pulverizing, semiotizing and transgressing the borders. It is the powerful male, and thus the
traditional symbolic realm, who is responsible for such creativity. The dilemma of an
authentic creative voice, which is paradoxically non-authentic from a conventional
perspective, becomes, in terms of abjection, clear in Tale of a Tub. The poverty of the
room, described at the beginning of the poem, assaults the ego (24), which itself
becomes poor, like the room, for the lack of an authentic maternal semiotic element: no
cracks that can be decoded. The persona feels guilty towards her creation sealed from a
true horror outside:
Just how guilty are we when the ceiling
reveals no cracks that can be decoded? when washbowl
maintains it has no more holy calling
than physical ablution, and the towel
dryly disclaims that fierce troll faces lurk
in its explicit folds? or when the window,
blind with steam, will not admit the dark
which shrouds our prospects in ambiguous shadow? (CP 24)
The personas nudity in the lavatory room, like the nudity of the walls inside, is poor
since it is also inauthentic: Yet always the ridiculous nude flanks urge / the fabrication of
some cloth to cover / such starkness [. . .] (25). The coat as a symbolic shield must always

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be there, disguising the constant horror in an act of linguistic sublimation and social
restriction: of many-colored fictions; we mask our past / in the green of eden, pretend
futures shining fruit / can sprout from the navel of this present waste (25). The mirror in
this room is a Lacanian mirror reflecting the personas symbolic ego, a mirror that shows
a public grin and repeats our name and hence the usual terror, a boring familiar
terror with no authentic thrill of creativity (24). Now water faucets spawn no danger and
each crab / and octopus [. . .] / [. . .] is definitely gone; / the authentic sea denies them and
will pluck / fantastic flesh down to the honest bone (25). No matter how the tubs surfaces
are blank and true, there is no compensation for the authentic lost maternal sea, which is
as a pre-symbolic space connected to death in the poem, and thus nudity in the room is not
authentic either.
The female speaking subject is dreaming of an authentic moment of creativity not
only by dissolving the borders (lines) of the tub, the room, or the coat, but also her own
bodys lines: can our dreams / ever blur the intransigent lines which draw / the shape that
shuts us in? (27-29). The poem ends with a dream of sailing in her own imaginative sea,
in her authentic ship, a moment of madness, death and jouissance.
At the very beginning of Plaths poetic work, her borders are proper, symbolic
borders like those of Sexton. The movement in and out of them is still under the control of
the patriarchal tradition. For Plath has to break through her unified borders in order to
achieve a singular unique voice and dynamism, which will transform her relation to the
patriarchal law. Plath, unlike Sexton, will try to go further outside her borders to face a
m/other presented as nature. However, this action will jeopardize her identity and her
creativity as the dreamed of encounter turns into full submission and passivity when Plath
surrenders to the lure of the archaic mother.

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5.2 Pharmakos, Outside in Nature

In order to transgress the walls and borders controlled by patriarchal power and its
literary heritage, Plath goes further outside to confront a m/other, to reach the edge of
death itself, which will ensure her authentic heterogeneous creativity and transformation.
In contrast to Tracy Brains assertion in her discussion of The Fifty-Ninth Bear that
many women do not feel safe enough in open spaces to commune, one to one, with
nature, and so are by necessity more tolerant of the intrusiveness of crowds (101), Plath
was, as Linda Wagner-Martin contends, an outsider and a rebel:
Even at fifteen and sixteen Sylvia saw herself as outside the mainstream of
society, and she worried about being out there. Whether she felt guilty [. . .]
or rebellious, she hid her feelings except in her writing. Throughout her life,
Sylvias writing expressed feelings she did not allow herself to admit
otherwise. (A Biography 51, emphasis added)
Wagner-Martin presents Plath as more of an outdoor girl and an outsider (A Biography
35,115). As Plath herself observed: Perhaps I was doomed to be on the outside (A
Biography 40). On 6 July, 1953 she wrote in her Journals: Stop thinking selfishly of
razors and self-wounds and going out and ending it all. Your room is not your prison. You
are (186). She adds in the 22 January, 1958 entry: Words, words, to stop the deluge
through the thumbhole in the dike. This be my secret place. All my life have I not been
outside? [. . . ] (318). In her Letters Home she describes herself as follows: Basically, I
think, I am an outdoor girl, as well as a contemplative sedentary writer (164, all
emphasis added). Wagner-Martin explains: Her attitudes were [. . .] too rebellious for her
to be part of the main stream (A Biography 61). Plath likens terror to being shut behind
doors where creativity is constricted. This is seen when she discovers her first pregnancy,
which she thinks will affect her writing. She recalls in her Journals: Remembering my
growing casualness about contraception, as if it couldnt happen to me then: clang, clang,
one door after another banged shut with the overhanging terror which, I know now, would
end me, probably Ted, and our writing and our possible impregnable togetherness (294).

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This suggests that creativity and going outside are related for Plath. As LindbergSeyersted demonstrates in Sylvia Plaths Psychic Landscapes, the outdoor settings in
Plaths poems are in overwhelming majority and these landscapes are not only physical
but also psychic (509). To confront a father and a mother outside and not inside is
fundamental to the creation of Plaths poetic identity.
In Black Rook in Rainy Weather, we see Plath further outside in what seems to
be a tentative search for heterogeneity in her art. In her search for a moment of inspiration,
she thinks of disquieting59 movements like the set[ting of] the sight on fire or an angel
that might flare any minute :
At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); skeptical,
Yet politic; ignorant
Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. [. . . .]. (CP 57)
This creative step was inspired by a black rook [a]rranging and rearranging its feathers in
the rain (56). The movement of arranging and rearranging evokes the dynamic movement
of heterogeneity in a work of art, which is again disquieting as Kristeva likes to describe
it in her essay Within the Microcosm of The Talking Cure.

60

She explains that this

disquieting heterogeneity, which can take different names in different theories, refers
always to something irreducible and a movement which defies patriarchal enclosure (40).
Plath wishes for such a movement to create reciprocity between her and an other. She
hopes for a miracle such as a backtalk / From the mute sky. For her it seems that the
most horrific thing is not horror, but fear / Of total neutrality, death in life and dull
poetry. However, Joanne Feit Diehl explains that although the verbs [s]eize and haul
that Plath chooses to characterize the moment of her inspiration register the rooks affect
upon her, they also show a resistance on her part to leaving her passive, neutral position

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(120). In other words, lively heterogeneity in her work remains a dream which Plath waits
for in Black Rook in Rainy Weather but which she will not achieve until later on:
Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The waits begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent. (CP 57)
Dave Smith has taken note of this ambitious search for energy and movement in her
early poetry, which paved the way for the Ariel poems, although he thinks she failed often
and her successes were often partial (274). Smith considers Black Rook in Rainy
Weather as an important poem in this respect: Evanescence wasnt enough for her
[Plath]; she had to be the flame and the radiance, the electrical horse (274).
In Street Song, Plath takes tentative steps further outside to achieve dynamism
and transformation. These are as much dangerous as ambitious. They involve facing horror
and being exposed to the maddening call of the mother:
Even as my each mangled nerve-end
Trills its hurt out
Above pitch of pedestrian ear,
So, perhaps I, knelled dumb by your absence,
Alone can hear
Suns parched scream,
Every downfall and crash
Of gutted star,
And, more daft than any goose,
This cracked worlds incessant gabble and hiss. (CP 36)
With her extreme artistic sense, the persona is the only one to feel panicked when she
smells the [r]eeks of the butchers meat and so by a mad miracle I go intact and
thereby keeping her ego from disintegrating. The abject scene of the chopped meat takes
her immediately to a primary scene of scission from the mothers body: And that great
wound / Squandering red / From the flayed side. She seems aware that only being loyal to

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the symbolic and what is reasonable can save her from such danger: Arming myself with
the most reasonable items / To ward off, at all cost, suspicions / Roused by thorned hands,
feet, head.
However, Plath still needs that dark side to gain [a]bsolute Power (Soliloquy of
the Solipsist, CP 37). In fact, the words absolute, too much, the best, perfect are
some of the most common in Plaths personal dictionary. At her school in Winthrop
records indicate that she maintained a straight A profile from the very beginning,
impressing her teachers with her intelligence and dedication (Butscher, Method and
Madness 11). Plath also excelled in every activity she participated in: She played tennis,
was on the girls basketball team, was co-editor of the school newspaper, The Bradford,
joined a high school sorority, Sub-Debs, painted decorations for class dances, went on
college weekend dates, was Lady Agatha in the class play The Admirable Crichton (Ames
152). Her life at Smith College and later in Cambridge was no less perfect with more As
and more poetry prizes. Moreover, her many dates were not simply for enjoyment. She
looked at them as a task that she must excel in and so she used to rank them (Wagner, A
Biography 48). Plath refers to herself as a perfectionist in many journal entries (144, 208,
386). For example, she writes on 1 October , 1957:
I cannot ignore this murderous self: it is there. I smell it and feel it, but I
will not give it my name. I shall shame it. When it says: you shall not sleep,
you cannot teach, I shall go on anyway, knocking its nose in. Its [sic]
bigger weapon is and has been the image of myself as a perfect success: in
writing, teaching and living. (618)
Her psychiatrist, Dr. Beuscher, recognized the perfectionism in Plath as an
obsessive pattern of unrealistic expectations of success (Wagner, A Biography 110; Letters
Home 128 ). Moreover, one of her boyfriends, Gordon Lameyer, described Plath as a
person who was anxious to experiment in extremis and to find out what enough was
by indulging herself in too much (39). Even her simplest acts, like laughter, took the
extreme form of being more frenetic than amused as her high school teacher, Mr.

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Crockett, noticed (Wagner, A Biography 45). In her essay America! America! Plath
criticizes American society for rejecting the too special as eccentric, and presents herself
as the dangerous perfectionist: The girls guidance councellor diagnosed my problem
straight off. I was just too dangerously brainy. My high, pure string of straight As [sic]
might, without proper extra-curricular tempering, snap me into the void (Johnny Panic
36).
The only way to achieve this extreme or absolute power is to confront what is truly
outside. The clever visual manipulation which Plath uses in the Soliloquy of the
Solipsist shows that her power is achieved by being a long way from the imprisoning
houses: I / Make houses shrink / And trees diminish / By going far (CP 37). Moreover,
in The Snowman on the Moor and Hardcastle Crags, the persona goes further outside
though she comes back at the end (CP 58; 62). In The Snowman on the Moor, there is a
post-battle scene of two unrelenting factions, a man and a woman. The female subject
draws the battle outside to her own territory instead of the male symbolic territory, his
house. Although she has been warned by the winter-beheaded daisies to keep indoors,
away from a landscape [o]f stark wind-harrowed hills and weltering mist, she does not
respond to their warning and makes her way to a liminal area, the worlds white edge
where she thinks she can call the forbidden maternal hell to subdue an unruly man /
And join her siege (CP 58-59). However, in the world of outside everything becomes
extreme. The male opponent turns into a monstrous giant. His roaring, it seems, reminds
her of his symbolic powers over the sounds of his Ladies sheaved skulls, his chittering
trophies who are dangling from that spike-studded belt (CP 59). Therefore, she goes
back in a state of mild obeying. Another reading could be that the girl confronts the
demon of perfection which threatens her being. Plath describes this beastly demon in her
Journals as a fearful stifling power that she has to fight: I have this demon who wants me
to run away screaming if I am going to be flawed, fallible. It wants me to think Im so

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good I must be perfect. Or nothing (619-20). However, Plath does not choose to fight this
abject beast after seeing its gruesome deeds. Humbled, she decides to go back.
In Hardcastle Crags (CP 62), the female subject again walks out of her house.
The further she goes, the more violent the natural maternal landscape becomes. Initially,
she walks through the threatening streets of the town, then moves on to an appalling
countryside where the last meaningful echoes of sound gives way to silence. In this
maternal place names do not exist. They have no bodies (houses) to materialize them: Nor
did any word body with a name (CP 62-63). The only thing she can hear is a horrendous
babel of engulfing yet fascinating sounds. In her journey to the edge of the night, Plath is
threatened by the dark maternal continent61:
The whole landscape
Loomed absolute as the antique world was
Once, in its earliest sway of lymph and sap,
Unaltered by eyes,
Enough to snuff the quick
Of her small heat out [. . .]. (CP 63)
However, before her disintegration into mere quartz grit in that stony light / She turned
back (CP 63). In Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work, Edward Butscher reads this
coming back as a courageous first step, refusing to be ground down to a skull by the
mindless processes of an annihilating cosmos (16). Contrary to Butscher, it could be
argued that in terms of the search for her own unique voice and for the sake of
transforming the law of the father, Plaths first step outside towards confrontation is
courageous. However, coming back each time she reaches the edge remains a condition for
being protected under the wing of the symbolic. And thus what Richard Howard calls the
spell, which is achieved through her initiation into deadly nature (84), breaks out in her
withdrawal.

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It is a sign of her extreme ambition that Plath breaks the condition of coming back.
Although in The Snowman on the Moor and Hardcastle Crags, she came back to her
proper borders, she will not perform the return anymore.

In her ambitious journey

outside, she surrenders to the powers of the archaic mother and thus is unable to achieve
the heterogeneity in her early work, especially in The Colossus, which will transform the
sacrificial law of the father. The Day in, day out becomes a day out (On the Plethora of
Dryads 67), making Plath a victim of the whiteness of annihilation rather than achieving
colourful transforming dialogic heterogeneity. This dilemma of going outside as a
revolutionary act and then turning back is expressed in Plaths Journals. In an entry on 29
March, she writes:
There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an
empty street alone. There is an off-focus light by the moon, and the
streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you
to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud,
softly, to see how it sounds:
I am walking down this street and I am being propelled by a force too
powerful for me to break because eighteen years of walking down streets
had chained me to the inevitable action of going from one place to another
and always repeating the circle or line and returning home without stopping
or wondering [. . .] but I could not turn and walk back . . . no . . . but some
night I will break these eighteen years of walking home and walk all night,
away from the magnet that pulls and attracts me like a scrap of metal . . .
and now I am walking again . . . but I will take this road instead of mine . . .
I will assert myself feebly and approach from a less frequented path [. . .].
(54-55)
Moreover, on 14 May, 1953, she writes: I wanted to walk until I dropped and not
complete the inevitable circle of coming home (184). Tim Kendall also notices that
Plaths personas are courageous pioneers, confronting landscapes (42). He goes further
by giving Plath the power of assimilating a destructive and violent environment as she
pushes the Emersonian definition of nature beyond its limit. According to Kendall, she
moves decisively away from an ideal nature,62 which is the antidote of culture and tradition
and a paradise that leads to self-awareness. Moreover, since he does not see Plaths nature
in the ideal Emersonian sense, he cannot envisage any kind of joy in her achievement: But
what is joy in Emerson is fatal inevitability in Plath (44, emphasis added). Plaths joy or

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jouissance, it can be argued, comes from this passive fusion with the mother, even if it is
threatening. The magnet that she tries to run from attracts her and terrifies her outside to
the point of surrender. This is why, in the early poetry, what is intended as a struggle
towards creativity and authenticity becomes a movement towards passivity.
Passivity in the work of art is expressed by Plath as too much thinness and total
disintegration. Although thinness, like silence, is generally beneficial to the work of art,
too much thinness is threatening. In The Thin People, for example, Plath becomes like
one of the scapegoats who are outlandish on the verge of disintegration, [m]eager of
dimension (CP 64).63 Those who are pale are martyrs in a hunger battle wearing an
insufferable nimbus. Their creativity only persevere[s] /In thinness, which is nothing
but thin silence in the text. In fact, Plath related fatness to lack of creativity (pregnancy,
as a sort of fatness, was sometimes an exception to this rule, as in Metaphors, for
example). In one of the entries to her Journals she complains: God, must I lose it in
cooking scrambled eggs for a man . . . hearing about life at second hand, feeding my body
and letting my powers of perception and subsequent articulation grow fat and lethargic
with disuse? (88). In another entry, she adds: otherwise, in the world of pies & shin beef,
I die. The great vampire cook extracts the nourishment & I grow fat on the corruption of
matter, mere mindless matter. I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live
(275). However, too much thinness might lead to a total silence and confusion with the
mother of non-differentiation. Thinness is related to barren perfection: She would rather
be dead than fat, / Dead and perfect, like Nefertiti (The Fearful 256). The poetic
subject, as well as her work, may turn into [a] thin, silly message, which is mailed into
space like that in Wuthering Heights (CP 167). In Plaths case, going further outside
in nature ends, and silence prevails as anaemic thinness, which means total passivity
instead of dynamism.
If the artist starves herself deliberately and so puts her signs at risk of dissolution,
such as the artist in On the Plethora of Dryads (CP 67) in order to devour words more

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wantonly, she should do this before they thin to nothing like the sheets in The Ghosts
Leavetaking (CP 90). 64 Those sublimatory sheets covering the emptiness of the presymbolic world speak the unspeakable: speak in sign language of a lost otherworld. The
sheets, which signify our origin and end, become the thetic, which brings the ambrosial
revelation between the two incompatible modes of time, the extra-phenomenal, timeless
semiotic and the historical symbolic. As the sheet ghost is saying farewell, the whole work
of art, along with the artist, is close to disintegrating into no-color void, a maternal
abyss.
The movement of the artist further outside without returning to the symbolic
borders, the sheets, starts to be clearly threatening for Plaths subjectivity as well as her
creativity. In I Am Vertical (CP 162) the speaking subject wishes to be horizontal in
relation to outside nature, to lie in death among the flowers and trees, exactly as in
Wuthering Heights where nature invites her to whiten my bones among them (CP
167). In linguistic terms, this is a wish to move from symbol to sign, from metaphor to
metonymy (Kristeva, Desire 38-40).

65

That is, it is a movement from what is

homogeneous, static and close-ended to what is heterogeneous, dynamic, and open-ended.

However, Plaths movement from an exclusive identification with what is masculine to an
exclusive identification with what is feminine in her early poetry represents a total
disintegration of identity. A complete union with the archaic mother is a personal death
wish that threatens Plath as well as her work. This magnetic lure to be united passively to
nature is a theme in Plaths early poems, such as Moonrise (CP 98). In this, a journey is
taken into the furthest boundaries of nature where the colours of that natural painting start
to collapse into sheer whiteness and thus the death of heterogeneity and transformation
occurs: White bruises toward color, else collapses.
This deadly passivity is like that in Blackberrying and Whiteness I Remember
where all colours spin to halt as whiteness. It is the whiteness of smothering nature: I
walk among them, and they stuff my mouth with cotton (Finisterre 169), and [t]he

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flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet (Last Words 172). Plath has always associated
colours, as opposed to whiteness, with creativity and life, as she states on 8 February,
1958: A new life of my own I shall make, from words, colors & feelings (Journals 327).
She talks about her creation as a wound and then invent[s] on the drop of a feather, a
whole multicolored bird (Wagner, A Biography 165). Colours are also associated with a
violence that leads to transformation: The colors assert themselves with a sort of
vengeance (Two Campers in Cloud Country 145). The problem is that if these colours
turn to a bad monochrome, as they do in the The Eye-mote, the parenthesis of
language which holds her identity firmly, though in an imprisoning manner, will be erased,
threatening her existence (CP 109). The bed of the hospital and the knife of the doctor,
which help extract the splinter at the end of The Eye-mote could be read linguistically as
the bed of sexual difference and the symbolic castrating paternal phallus, two conditions
for entering the parenthesis of the symbolic. They are the only cure for disintegration.
However, the persona still longs for a time prior to this restricted one, which is, in fact,
timeless and thus only a space:
What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind. (CP 109)
This merging with the whiteness of nature is what Butscher describes from his perspective
as a passive female speaker pounc[ing] almost joyfully upon vicious insights (The
Woman and the Work 21). Moreover, Robert Phillips, commenting on Plaths early poetry,
observes her obsession with this maternal deadly whiteness where there is no other(s), only
Plaths identification with the lower forms of natural existence, including, mushrooms and
moles, snakes and insects, stones and bones (191).

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The whiteness of death and passivity, which proliferates in Plaths early poems,
also enters Plaths only novel, The Bell Jar. Esther Greenwood, before her attempt at
suicide, is threatened with shrinking into nothingness, similar to that which ends Plaths
journey in The Colossus. In the bar scene with Doreen and Lenny Shepherd, she
experiences these feelings: I felt myself melting into shadow like the negative of a person
Id never seen before in my life (8) and I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot
against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground
(14). Furthermore, at the culmination of Esthers despair, Doreen asks her to go with her
and Lenny instead of attending the fur show arranged by the fashion magazine. Esther,
however, has something else in mind:
For a minute I was tempted. The show certainly did seem stupid. I have
never cared for furs. What I decided to do in the end was lie in bed as long
as I wanted to and then go to Central Park and spend the day lying in the
grass, the longest grass I could find in that bald, duck-ponded wilderness.
(24)
This dissolving takes place in other scenes where Plath looks at the process as equivalent
to the notion of purification. The I, no more connected to an other, becomes clean and
pure as a baby. For example, after witnessing a sexual encounter between Doreen and
Lenny, Esther takes a hot bath in what seems like one of the tubs she remembers having
come across before, a modern coffin-shaped tub.

In the hot water, she feels that

everything about her is dissolving (16). Another two scenes of purification take place when
Esther merges with things around her: one when she gulps hot broth after vomiting the
contaminated food she had earlier eaten at a luncheon organized by Ladies Day magazine.
In another scene, she skis down a slope where she merges with the natural scene around
her until the white sweet baby cradled in its mothers belly, and Esther ends the scene
with a broken leg (79). This allusion to the baby fusing with the mother suggests that
purification for Plath is nothing but a regression to an archaic state, in other words,
death.

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Merging with the mother (nature) is the consequence of her decision to go outside.
The fascination with the maternal and the dream of reaching the outer limits becomes very
powerful. However, Plath seems to realize that her closeness to nature and her wandering
too far outside the walls of her psyche will deprive her of what is essential to her writing:
A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earths
crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean
unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are
nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily
through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun
burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an
awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral
forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which
interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little,
then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonomous [sic] soil,
voiceless, faceless, without identity. (Journals 75).
The collapse of her identity when confronting nature motivates Plath into creating an
otherness, a face to encounter in reciprocity instead of falling, in the process of her
creativity, into the Nirvana of nothingness. At this point, the merging of the perceiver
with thing perceived, in what Eileen Aird calls the poetry of experience (19), is not, as
Charles Newman suggests, a triumph over Otherness, at least not at this stage where
the poet is starting her career and looking for an authentic voice (34). But it is a merging
with otherness and a loss of identity.
Moreover, Pamela Annas seems to look positively at Plaths early poetry of natural
landscape where she is still imagining forays across the boundary lines between self and
world and thus there is a possibility of choice and movement. In contrast, she argues
that in her later work, Plaths movement rigidifies as she enters the social and the
historical where she is trapped between exclusive alternatives and thus the possibilities
of transformation decrease (17, 161). What Annas describes as active movement in The
Colossus, according to this thesis, ends with a passivity that cancels any previous
movement. This is different from entering the social and the symbolic (as psychic and not
only as contemporary social landscape),

66

which allows a positive movement of

heterogeneity, rather than what Annas describes as an entrapment. The fluid boundaries

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of Plaths early poetry do not lead to actual or potential change, as Annas suggests, but
rather this overabundant fluidity leads to a merging with maternal nature. This fusion is a
psychic one in fact the distinction between psyche and nature [here] is a false one
(Rose, Haunting 52) with the archaic mother and thus the poet succumbing to the
passivity of that oneness which dissolves all residues of otherness.
At the beginning, and in a courageous step, Plath leaves her symbolic borders to
the outside nature to return to them again. However, in going further outside, she merges
with maternal nature in an act of total silence, whiteness, which threatens her identity and
brings silence to her creativity. In the absence of alterity, an encounter with the father in
order to effect change is quite impossible. Although these poems turn out to be
[s]tillborn (142), [t]he white stomach may ripen yet (Moonrise 98). In her attempt to
abandon passivity resulting from fusion with maternal nature, Plath tries to achieve
dynamism in her poetry by searching for an other within her psyche, as shall be seen in the
next section.

5.3 The Appearance of a Face (an otherness)

In her first poems, Plaths going outside without returning into the fathers
symbolic shield becomes threatening to her identity, as well as her art. Therefore, she tries
to create an otherness under the symbolic order so as to achieve a more productive
heterogeneity where suffering and hurt is a requirement. For example, in Two Campers in
Cloud Country (144), Plath realizes that the only assurance in the midst of an engulfing
nature is the existence of an other (Markey, A New Tradition? 88): These rocks offer no
purchase to herbage or people: / They are conceiving a dynasty of perfect cold. / In a
month well wonder what plates and forks are for. / I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me
Im here (CP 145).
Moreover, Poppies in July reveals the dilemma of a subject who wishes, under
the temptation of the total passivity and neutrality that she ran from in the first place, either

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to bleed or to sleep (203), in other words, either to achieve transforming authentic

heterogeneity, a violent intensity and vividness, what Markey describes as the flow of
creative energy in art (Markey, A Journey 143), where [t]he blood jet is poetry
(Kindness 269) or surrender to death. Plath is trying, by means of a transitional step, to
direct her aesthetic struggle towards the need to speak ones singularity (A. Smith 24)
and to achieve transformation through a violent erotic heterogeneity. This can be initially
done by creating an other that hurts as in Tulips, In Plaster and, later, Poppies in
July (CP 160, 158, 203).
Plath is trying to evoke a face, an other, for her to encounter instead of the
sweeping natural void. She seems to realize the importance of this step: otherwise there is
no i [sic] because i am what other people interpret me as being and am nothing if there
were no people (Journals 168). She borrows some elements from nature, like those
flowers, and tries to create a face for them in order to establish what Jacqueline Rose calls
a reciprocating activity (Haunting 133). But is she really completely successful in this or
is it just a transitional step for her later more intense poetry? Are the sexual encounters and
the hurts in these poems reciprocal? For example, in Poppies in July, the speaking
subject seems to feel no pain I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns and
the redness of the poppies turns colorless in the end (203).
Furthermore, the flowers in Tulips hurt the patient to life again where the
otherness of her husband and children in the photo next to her fails to do so. However, the
redness of the tulips which seems to initiate a dialogue with the woman Their redness
talks to my wound, it corresponds (161) threatens to engulf her. If heterogeneity is
achieved in Plaths poetry of nature, as Rose argues, and it is so to some extent, at least in
her transitional poems, it does not reach the same level as Ariel where the sexual
reciprocity is more violent and transformative. Moreover, if Plath in these early poems has
returned to the origins of language, the symbolic and its function as social code is less
apparent there. In fact, Plath, who has taken her way outside, turns from being a

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pharmakos to a father to just being one to maternal nature. Plath has tried to walk further
outside and encounter an archaic mother in order to establish a creative territory for
herself, such as the one in Letter in November with the colours red and golden. Unlike
the territory that Wagner-Martin sees as a feminine territory that dispenses with womens
need to be protected and housed by men, it turns out to be a circular abyss and a tomb (A
Literary Life 145). There is no hope for heterogeneity in this place of thick gray deathsoup, where [g]old leaves [are] metal and breathless and where all ends in the belly of
the Thing (Letter in November 253).
In fact, Plaths early poems, as Constance Scheerer observes, seem to ask Alan
Wattss question: How far out can I get? How lost without being utterly lost? (174).
Therefore, for Plath, it is no use looking only for a place; there is also a need for a face-toface encounter, to hurt and to be hurt by. In her Journals, we find evidence of a related
encounter with suffering: Ill be able, piece by piece, to face the field of life, instead of
running from it the minute it hurts (619). Further evidence of Plaths suffering in
encountering her other instead of passive perfection, is in the same entry of the Journal:
I must reject the grovelling image of the fearful beast in myself, which is an
elaborate escape image, and face, force, days into line. I have an inner fight
that wont be conquered by a motto or one nights resolution. My demon of
negation will tempt me day by day, and Ill fight it, as something other than
my essential self, which I am fighting to save [.] (620)
It is very important to observe how Plath relates creativity with that hurt: I am afraid. I am
not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a
mimicking nothingness. I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered (Journals 149).
She also declares: my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a
piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper (Journals 22).
Moreover, Plath underlines the importance of hurt in her creative reading: Read widely of
others experiences in thought and action stretch to others even though it hurts and strains
(47). It is clear then that creativity for Plath is the opposite of the passivity and total silence

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that she manifest in her early work. Alterity and heterogeneity, which causes motility and
pain, seems to be Plaths definition for creativity.
Although In Plaster Plath is being ironic, one can nevertheless detect beneath the
comic surface the recurrence of the important theme of otherness where the persona has the
new white self and the old yellow one (CP 158). The white one seems to belong to the
symbolic order, the yellow one to the maternal as she is abject, rotten and yellow. The
white self is the superior one, one of the real saints. Because she belongs to the
symbolic order, she doesnt need food since she will devour words instead. The
unbreakable white holds the yellow core from fragmentation. Besides, she is a true
pacifist, unlike the revolutionary maternal yellow (159). All she needs from the yellow
other is for her to love her: Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her.
Megan Becker-Leckrone explains that the subject, according to Kristeva, cannot love until
she enters the symbolic after separation from the mother (152). Love provides meaning
against fragmentation. The white part had a slave mentality to the law of the father as
she likes to please by being quiet, patient and passive. However, she has an important role
as she is responsible for the unity of the ego, [h]olding my bones in place so they would
mend properly (159). The abject yellow part, which belongs to the maternal or its
representative, is as important since it gives, paradoxically, beauty and soul to the artistic
work:
Without me, she wouldnt exist, so of course she was grateful.
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain,
And it was I who attracted everybodys attention,
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed. (CP 159)
A conflict is initiated between the two: In time our relationship grew more
intense. Nevertheless, when the white symbolic part, in search of immortality through
traditional creativity, does not firmly hold the maternal other, the abject part is dissolved
and absented. The yellow part complains about this: And my skin itched and flaked away

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in soft pieces / Simply because she looked after me so badly. / Then I saw what the trouble
was: she thought she was immortal. The symbolic self begins to wish for the death of the
abject maternal, using her dead face only for ornament necessary in traditional poetry:
And secretly she began to hope Id die. / Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover
me entirely, / And wear my painted face the way a mummy-case / Wears the face of a
pharaoh, though its made of mud and water. The abject yellow self cannot for the
moment exist without the symbolic for that would cause her disintegration:
I wasnt in any position to get rid of her.
Shed supported me for so long I was quite limp
I had even forgotten how to walk or sit,
So I was careful not to upset her in any way
Or brag ahead of time how Id avenge myself.
Living with her was like living with my own coffin:
Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully. (CP 159-60)
The struggle between the part loyal to the symbolic, on one hand, and the part loyal to the
semiotic and the maternal, on the other, is threatened by an overflow of the semiotic and a
violent burst of the maternal, dissolving the egos identity into emptiness:
I used to think we might make a go of it together
After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.
Now I see it must be one or the other of us.
She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,
But shell soon find out that that doesnt matter a bit.
Im collecting my strength; one day I'll manage without her,
And shell perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me. (CP 160)
What Butscher refers to as the rage of these poems, which he describes as not yet
complete, is the heterogeneity that increases in intensity with the evolution of Plaths
poems as she tries to create an other to encounter (Method and Madness 267).
The straight-A student of literature, who graduated summa cum laude, seems not to
be satisfied until this moment about her work. Plath realizes that she needs to raise the

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level of drama to an intense one of blood , lust and death. She, who asks, When will I
break into a new line of poetry? sees clearly what is required (Journals 516):
My main thing now is to start with real things: real emotions, and leave out
the baby gods, the old men of the sea, the thin people, the knights, the
moon-mothers, the mad maudlins, the lorelei, the hermits, and get into me,
Ted, friends, mother and brother and father and family. The real world. Real
situations, behind which the great gods play the drama of blood, lust and
death. (471)
The answer to the earlier question comes, as the quotation suggests, from a mining
of Plaths autobiographical background. Because heterogeneity is not only achieved
through intellect, but also genuine suffering, Plaths personal story becomes a vital element
in her writing. After the loss of her father, Otto, in 1940, when she was just eight, she was
unable to mourn fully, even in the many early father-oriented poems. This may be one of
the reasons why she tried to commit suicide during her time at Smith College in 1953.
However, with the help of Dr. Ruth Beuscher she was able to introject her loss and express
it in works of art. 67 The process began with the poem Electra on Azalea Path. Dr
Beuscher gave Plath permission to hate her mother as the one responsible for her fathers
death (Journals 429-431). 68 No one can deny the stifling powers of Plaths mother,
whether one looks at her real mother Letters Home is striking evidence of this or
simply the mother as a pre-symbolic space. Plath understood only too well the problem of
her particular relationship with her mother and its connection with her writing. She was
able, sometimes, to express her anger and hate towards her mother artistically:
But although it makes me feel good as hell to express my hostility for my
mother, frees me from the Panic Bird on my heart and my typewriter
(why?), I cant go through life calling RB up from Paris, London, the wilds
of Maine long-distance: Doctor, can I still go on hating my mother? Of
course you can: hate her hate her hate her. Thank you, doctor. I sure do
hate her. (Journals 429).
It is precisely for this reason that one can challenge Christodoulidess argument that Plath
suffered from a mothers clutch69 all through her poetry until she finally was able to
achieve separation in a single poem, A Birthday Present, where she experiences a final

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release that is also a rebirth (Christodoulides 191, 235). If one argues thus, it follows that
heterogeneity is not achieved until this moment and that Plath does not inhabit her voice
fully until she writes this particular poem. In addition, rebirth is as recurrent a theme in
Plaths poetry as is death: it is not a final moment. If birth and rebirth means entering the
symbolic, then Plath acts this process more than once. The movement that is recurrent in
Plaths later work is eloquently characterized by Blessing: But its the kinesthetic sense of
pitch and roll, the stomach-tilting sensation of that bottomless series of plunges, that we
experience most strongly. And the evocation of that sense is her particular genius (59).70
Mary Lynn Broe also views Plaths movement in her late work as a worship of kinesis, a
dialectic between inertia and energy. (182, 190).71 In fact, a subject in process, like Plath,
struggles with and against a mother, oscillates between mother and father, and creates a
dialogue between the semiotic and the symbolic: she is a moving subject. When Dr.
Beuscher allowed Plath to hate her mother, a process which the poet describes as [b]etter
than shock treatment, she allowed negativity to flow into her body and thus into her text
(Journals 429). Consequently, Plaths poems, especially those in Ariel, show this constant
oscillation between a stifling mother and a release into the symbolic. Plath expresses this in
two successive questions in her Journals:
How to express anger creatively?
Fear of losing male totem: what roots? (438).
Plath wants negativity (anger) in her writing where her bodily drives can be at work, but
without the semiotic being unleashed to cause destruction. This is why she needs to go
back to her roots, to her fathers totem. In other words, she needs to attack the father
but not to the extent of losing him, of losing his shields, her proper body and psychic
borders.
Paradoxically, what contributes to this kind of shock treatment in relation to her
mother is Ted Hughes, whose adultery increased the level of anger in Plath and added to
the dynamism of her poetry.72 Erica Wagner pertinently asks: would [Plath] have been the

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poet she was if she were godless, happy, quieted? (45).73 Plath incorporated her husband
into herself in a similar way as she did her mother. In her Journals, Plath shows the
strength of this attachment: I am so glad Ted is first. All my pat theories against marrying
a writer dissolve with Ted: his rejections more than double my sorrow & his acceptances
rejoice me more than mine - - - it is as if he is the perfect male counterpart to my own self
(271). In another entry she says: my whole being has grown and interwound so
completely with Teds that if anything were to happen to him, I do not see how I could
live. I would either go mad, or kill myself. I cannot conceive of life without him (274).
Her attachment to him becomes an obsession: I am superstitious about separations from
Ted, even for an hour, I think I must live in his heat and presence, for his smells and words
as if all my senses fed involuntarily on him and deprived for more than a few hours, I
languish, wither, die to the world (378). Plath used to think before her marriage that
finding the right counterpart would enhance the vitality of her poetry:
Sure, marriage is self expression, but if only my art, my writing, isnt just a
mere sublimation of my sexual desires which will run dry once I get
married. If only I can find him . . . the man who will be intelligent, yet
physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why
shouldnt I expect it in a man? (Journals 21)

However, reality did not live up to this expectation. Plath repeats in her Journals how
being far from Hughes affects her writing positively. For example, she writes in the entry
for Monday, 7 July, 1958:
I enjoy it when Ted is off for a bit. I can build up my own inner life, my
own thoughts, without his continuous What are you thinking? What are
you going to do now? which makes me promptly & recalcitrantly stop
thinking and doing. We are amazingly compatible. But I must be myself
make myself & not let myself be made by him. He gives orders mutually
exclusive: read ballads an hour, read Shakespeare an hour, read history an
hour, think an hour & then you read nothing in hour-bits, read things
straight through. (401)
Although she realizes Hughess negative influence on her writing, Plath is not able to hate
him as she did her mother. This was possible only when she was jealous:

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I identify him with my father at certain times, and these times take on great
importance: eg [sic] that one fight at the end of the school year when I
found him not-there on the special day and with another woman. I had a
furious access of rage. He knew how I love him and felt, and yet wasnt
there. Isnt this an image of what I feel my father did to me? (Journals 447)
One can feel the intensity of the bodily drives that afflicted Plath when she
discovered her husbands infidelity, and this precipitated their separation. His loss was then
sublimated in her writing, thereby achieving dynamism and transformation. Uroff contends
that Hughess adultery aroused Plaths poetic energy (144). But she also believes that after
this event Plath was able to regain her whole self, which Hughes had stolen. In contrast,
one could argue that his departure aroused negativity as a conflict with the other within
Plaths psyche. Moreover, in her Journals, Plath accused her mother of killing her father
and feared that her mother would kill her husband in the same way (434). In seeking
revenge against Hughes because of his cheating, she has to identify with the mother, the
killer (433), while in killing her mother, as she wished, she has to identify with her
father, even though she admits that in killing her mother, she kills herself (433). This
family drama and its changing of allies (identification) is translated aesthetically into
Plaths work as a dialectic between the symbolic and the semiotic, between I and not-I,
and between signification, which is composed of the two elements of the semiotic and the
symbolic, and silence.
This psychological drama is further apparent in Plaths 1962 essay about her
childhood, Ocean 1212-W. It is often referred to by critics in order to emphasize what
Plath terms the awful birthday of otherness, where [m]y beautiful fusion with the things
of this world was over (Johnny Panic 120-21) and initiation into language took place.74
However, although Plath is expelled from the sea, moving inland, the sea has become part
of her identity. Even if those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in
a bottle (124), preventing access to the sea, Plath photocopied the sea in her mind: Then
one day the textures of the beach burned themselves on the lens of my eye forever (114).
In Ocean 1212-W, Plath identifies with the sea creatures: Nobody taught me to swim. It

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simply happened (122). She also says: Would my infant gills have taken over, the salt in
my blood? (117). This identification with sea creatures re-emerges later as qualities of
dynamism and negativity like the beach swing which moves between land and sea, I and
not-I, father and mother:
Did my childhood seascape, then, lend me my love of change and wildness?
Mountains terrify me they just sit about, they are so proud. The stillness of
hills stifles me like fat pillows. When I was not walking alongside the sea I
was on it, on it, or in it. My young uncle, athletic and handy, rigged us a
beach swing. When the tide was right you could kick to the peak of the arc,
let go, and drop into the water. (122)
This swing best represents Plaths later work. It shows a dynamic movement which results
from an oscillation between the safe yet stifling symbolic land to the wild maternal realm
of the sea. In fact, Plath coded the sea for herself through her grandmothers phone number
Ocean 1212-W. This ensures that the sea can be captured in language and that change,
which she loves, as she admits in the above quotation, could be achieved (21-22). The
monkey, which the water throws to Plath as a sign of election and specialness, holds the
promise that she will not be forever cast out from the maternal in writing. It is a sign of a
coming heterogeneity in her poetry, the monkey being scarred and oddly foreign
(121).
At the beginning of her poetic career, Plath tries bravely to get outside her psychic
borders in order to escape her imprisoning situation under the law of the father. However,
she succumbs to a fascinating deadly maternal nature. This prevents her poetry from
becoming entangled in conflictual dynamism. In a further step, she tries to evoke a hurting
other to achieve heterogeneity in her work. However, she was not able to achieve a
transformative momentum until she released her hatred and anger both against her mother
and father/husband. The resulting suffering as released bodily drives will be more evident
in her future poetry, especially in Ariel, where her unique subversive voice develops.
Above all other Ariel poems, Daddy is the best example of this defying voice where
Plath plays the slavemaster game in sado-masochistic transformative reciprocity. Another

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kind of reciprocity, which will be discussed in the next chapter, shows a movement
between presence and absence, between the symbolic and the semiotic, and between
writing and silence across poems. The fragmentation of time is used as evidence to support
the idea of movement in Plaths poetry.

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Chapter 6
Subversive Heterogeneity
6.1 Daddy, the Nazi . . . Mummy, Medusa
Daddy, Plaths best-known poem, can be taken as an exemplar of heterogeneity
leading to transformation in Plaths oeuvre. Although this heterogeneity can be detected in
some early poems, Daddy and its subject as a subject in process remains the finest
example (CP 222). For instance, Jahan Ramazani shows that Plaths most important
contribution to the modern elegy is the poems harsh ambivalence, which renounce[s]
the submissive mourning commended by gender codes (1143, 1154). He sees Daddy as
the culmination of heterogeneity in her elegiac poems (1150). Daddy, as shall be noted
in this chapter, foregrounds Plaths unique dialectic, sadomasochistic voice which ends
with silence. This voice will be termed The Siren Voice of the Other. It exhibits not only
a movement between presence and absence, death in the realm of the semiotic and rebirth
in the realm of the symbolic, but also a movement between writing and silence. The
fragmentation of the subject as a result of these different movements is manifested in the
fragmentation of time, about which Plath was ambivalent.
Plaths father in the poem is viewed by Butscher and Holbrook as her personal
father, Otto Plath, or as a combination of father and husband by Wagner-Martin in Sylvia
Plath: A Literary Life. Other critics have argued that the exaggerated elements of
caricature and other linguistic elements prevent one from identifying the father of the poem
with her real father (Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath 123). The father of Daddy can also be seen
as Kristevas father of individual prehistory, the imaginary father, while never ceasing to
be Plaths personal father, as Rose and Parkin-Gounelas have suggested (Haunting 225;
222). One can agree that Plaths father is a combination of the imaginary and personal.
However, it should be emphasized that the version of the imaginary, symbolic father in

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Kristevas Black Sun is closer to Plaths version than the one in her Tales of Love. Kelly
Oliver explains the difference:
In Tales of Love Kristeva sets her loving father against Lacans stern
authoritarian father. By Black Sun they seem to be two faces of the same
father, or at least collaborators. Here, the loving imaginary father must not
only support the paternal function and the move to the Symbolic but also be
able to take the place of the stern oedipal Father. (77)
Without the loving father, one is to be devoured by an abject mother, resulting in
the collapse of language. This is close to what Plath felt after her fathers death: But with
your father dead, you leaned abnormally to the Humanities personality of your mother.
And you were frightened when you heard yourself stop talking and felt the echo of her
voice, as if she has spoken in you, as if you werent quite you (Journals 64). This loving
father paves the way for the stern Oedipal father (the father of the law), who in turn paves
the way for the subject to enter the realm of desire (Oliver 83). In other words, the
imaginary father prepares the child to enter the symbolic world dominated by the Oedipal
father whom the child will later encounter. This figure who is in fact a father-mother
conglomerate is capable of this by offering the child deep love (Kristeva, Tales of Love
40), which facilitates the childs separation from the mother to the Oedipal fathers world.
Therefore, without him, no identity can be established and no entry into language away
from an engulfing mother instituted. In Black Sun, Kristeva believes that the imaginary
father plays his part as oedipal father in symbolic Law, for it is on the basis of that
harmonious blending of the two facets of fatherhood that the child is able to connect
abstract signs to the affective meaning of emotion (23-24). Plaths father is indeed Janusfaced, both loving and stern. This is why she has ambivalent feelings towards him: He
was an ogre, But I miss him (Journals 431). As a stern father (as law) he is attacked by
Plath in order to transgress that law and transform it.
Rose argues that Plaths loss of her personal father is also a symbolic loss:
[Daddy] seems to be outlining the conditions under which that celebrated loss of the

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symbolic function takes place. Identity and language lose themselves in the place of the
father whose absence gives him unlimited powers (Haunting 227). This crisis of
representation, Rose argues, forces Plath to identify with the Jew, the oppressed
(Haunting 227). Gounelas takes Roses position but represents her argument in terms of
fetishization: 75 Like the fetish object, the word symbolizes the absence of a theorized
presence Daddy and so postulates presence as a veil over loss and unlimited authority
for the father (222). One could say that although the fathers power is immense, it is not
unlimited and that the poem shows reciprocity in relation to him, something that Plath
sought and which her personal conditions, namely her husband abandoning her,
aggravated. It is true, as Rose suggests, that the irruption of the semiotic in the poem as a
paternal alien tongue is threatening (Haunting 227), but, arguably, it is also transformative.
Moreover, the dynamism of the poem allows the Jew to become a Nazi in reciprocal
masochistic terms. That is, the oppressed (the passive) and the oppressor (the active) take
turns as in a sexual scene. Therefore, the veils that cover the loss are as deadly as they are
seductive and subversive. Put differently, the words where the semiotic erupts could
threaten the I of the poem, but they could also help in transforming it, as well as the law
of the father.
A more deterministic Lacanian opinion is given by Kathleen Lant, who sees Plath
as trapped within a system she could neither manage nor elude (664). Lant gives
language an unchallenged excessiveness of power over Plaths poetry: Plath was held fast
by the language which undid her. Plath was shaped and ultimately undone as was her
poetry by forces she could never surmount (665). She does not seem to allow any
moment of triumph, however scant, whether within or beyond language. Although it is true
that language or the law of the father is powerful, it can also be argued that Plath was able
to achieve transformation and jouissance. Despite the fact that this task is difficult and
threatening to the identity of the speaking subject, Plath accepts the wager.
Plath explains her own understanding of the poem in a reading for BBC radio:

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Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died
while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her
father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the
daughter the two strains marry and paralyse each other she has to act out
the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.76
In fact, Daddy shows an internalized dialogue (what Plath refers to as marriage and
paralysis) between an I and an other (you). However, the you can take the role of I
sometimes in an act of reciprocity. In fact, some of the entries in her Journals replace the
I with you to refer to Plath herself (e.g. 63, 67). This heterogeneous dialogue makes
the symbolic stern father defiable and modifiable, although with serious consequences.
The first lines in Daddy show defiance:
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. (CP 222)
The female subject shows her resistance by repeating twice to the symbolic, oppressing
and choking father, you do not do to his face. Repetition here is part of singing, which is
semiotic. She has once been denied the possibility of achooing but she is now doing so
using a nursery-rhyme (do, shoe, Achoo). As Kristeva puts it in The Ethics of
Linguistics, we have this rhythm; this repetitive sonority; this thrusting tooth pushing
upwards before being capped with the crown of language; this struggle between word and
force gushing with the pain and relief of a desperate delirium (Desire 28). It is a rhythm
that entails eroticism, pain and jouissance. Plaths opening lines work temporarily through
what Shuli Barzilai describes as a foreclosure of the paternal function, which enables the
subject to echo infantile discourse (300). However, this triumph does not last for long
because there is no struggle without the paternal function. Moreover, the word daddy
with its childish resonance makes the situation closer to that of addressing the personal
father whom the girl feels guilty for killing. As Freud shows, this guilt flows from her

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incestuous desire (Freud 19: 220). She used to pray to recover you, or the desire
repressed in her, to kill him once again in an act of sexual violence because you died
before I had time . This dash, as with many other dashes which Plath frequently uses,
gives space to the unconscious to speak its desire.
While the I speaks to the personal father, it also speaks to the imaginary one.
This father is Janus-faced. When he is love, he is dead. When he is God, he is the word and
the law and as such he exists (Oliver 83): Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, / Ghastly
statue with one gray toe / Big as a Frisco seal. This statue resembles its huge equivalent in
The Colossus (CP 129). It is the ugly deformed symbolic oppressor, but it is also Otto
Plath who suffered from a gangrenous, swollen toe, who is German in origin, and whose
head pours bean [bees], that is, his specialty is bees (Srivastava 126-28).
The oppression of the symbolic father is an oppression of language. Although
Plaths father is a German and she found it difficult to learn the German language, the
problem goes beyond that. The foreignness which she finds difficulty in dealing with is not
the foreignness of the German language, but rather the foreignness of the language of the
father, estranged from a killed love, what Rose calls an alien tongue (Haunting 227).
According to Kristeva, one is capable of translation and metaphorizing only by killing a
loving father, who is in fact a father-mother conglomerate as has been already stated
(Black Sun 42; Tales of love 40). Therefore, I used to pray to recover you also means to
recover love, the mother and lost jouissance. 77 However, being unable to translate is
threatening. In fact, Esther, the heroine of Plaths novel The Bell Jar, loses the ability to
read in her mental collapse, describing letters as untranslatable: The letters grew barbs
and rams horns. I watched them separate, each from the other, and jiggle up and down in a
silly way. Then they associated themselves in fantastic, untranslatable shapes, like Arabic
or Chinese (102).
What is left now are the powers of the law, a stern patriarch, a God who is
practising his hegemonic powers over the speaking subject and who tries to silence her: I

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never could talk to you. / The tongue stuck to my jaw / It stuck in a barb wire snare / Ich,
ich, ich, ich (CP 223). And between love and law, the subject suffers exile, as Full
Fathom Five shows: You defy questions; / You defy other godhood. / I walk dry on your
kingdoms border / Exiled to no good (92-93). As Kristeva explains in terms of abjection,
the subject in process asks, where am I? instead of asking, who am I? (Powers 8).
Therefore, I never could tell where you / Put your foot, your root, is, in fact, I never
could tell where I put my root. She is neither inside nor outside. The language of the
father is thus obscene, an engine which pulverizes the subjects love. In this sense, the
female subject identifies herself with the Jew, the oppressed. As a consequence, the father
is seen as a Nazi God, an oppressor:
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You (CP 223)
Why a Jew? asks James Young,78 why not a black slave or Russian Gulag or
Armenian? The answer, according to Young, is the visibility of the figure as a public
figure for suffering. Does this mean that the Jewish female I will succumb to the Nazi
male you masochistically and thus linguistically? Does this mean that the voice in the
poem turns out to be monologic? One might nod in affirmation, especially after reading the
following lines:
Every woman adores a fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you. (CP 223)
Gounelas reads the boot scenario, as well as the voices in the poem, as an alternation of a
masochistic Deleuzian eroticism where Plaths presentation of the foot moves between a
fetish object and a fetish objectifier (221). In other words, the foot or the shoe belongs at
one time to the father, who puts the boot in the face, and at another time to the girl who has

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lived like a foot / For thirty years, poor and white (222). Even the tongue stuck in the
speaking subjects jaw could be a masochistic act of defiance. An episode of a woman
whose tongue is swollen and stuck out is mentioned twice by Plath, once in The Bell Jar
(146) and once in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (21). This happens in the latter
because the womans husband invited his French-Canadian mother to visit them, although
he knows his wife could not stand her. This was for the protagonist an act of defiance: she
hated that French-Canadian mother-in-law worse than pigs, and her tongue was true to her
opinion, even if the rest of her wasnt (21). This means that the stuck tongue is not
necessarily forced by the power of the father but is an act of defiance, albeit unconscious
here.
However, this reciprocity of struggle, according to Gounelas, ends with the triumph
of the law in spite of the seemingly triumphant acts of the girl: this is an enactment of
projective identification, whereby the subject projects on to the other her unacceptable
aggressivity, only to find it thrown back at her with deadly force (221). Uroff also looks at
this scenario, as well as the reciprocity of torture in Daddy in general, as failing to
change anything for the girl and argues that her poetry is nothing but juggling images:
when she caricatures her father as a Fascist and herself as a Jew, she develops
associations of torture which are not exactly reversed when she reverses the identification
and calls herself the killer of her vampire-father (160). However, this study tends to agree
with Markey in A Journey into the Red Eye and Bundtzen in Plaths Incarnation: Woman
and the Creative Process when they argue that Plaths poetry is sado-masochistic where
womens compliance plays a significant role. What Plath has done to change this
subordination of women, according to Markey, is deflate prescribed femininity and show
romantic love as a myth. As for Bundtzen, Plaths ability for transcendence made her
triumph unquestionable. Both critics suggest that open rebellion has helped in renouncing
the negative powers of the father. However, unlike this study, both critics look at
masochism in terms of gender where, according to Bundtzen, there is tension between

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Plaths role as a woman and as a writer (19). Moreover, they do not look at Plaths voice as
singular, but applicable to all women, especially to female writers (Bundtzen 43).
In her Journals, Plath depicts a masochistic personal encounter resembling the
reciprocity in Daddy where the female Jew is not totally a victim:
with the good heavy weight of body upon body, arching, undulating, blind,
growing together, force fighting force: to kill? To drive into burning dark of
oblivion? To lose identity? [. . .] An easy substitute for bad slashing with
angry hating teeth and nails and voice: the curious musical tempo of hands
lifting under breasts, caressing throat, shoulders, knees, thighs. And giving
up to the corrosive black whirlpool of mutual necessary destruction. [. . .]
What is it but destruction? Some mystic desire to beat to sensual
annihilation to snuff out ones identity on the identity of the other a
mingling and mangling of identities? A death of one? Or both? A devouring
and subordination? No, no. A polarization rather a balance of two
integrities, changing, electrically, one with the other, yet with centers of
coolness, like stars. (105)
In this scene, Plath uses words that indicate not only her sexual relation to the other, but
also her poetic creation. She seems to be an advocate of a semiotic musical violent
voice, instead of los[ing] identity in total annihilation, although there is sometimes a
wish for this sensual mingling of identities. In other words, Plath seems to support a
dialogue between the I and the other, exchanging power for the sake of creativity: I
must find a strong potential powerful mate who can counter my vibrant dynamic self:
sexual and intellectual (Journals 173). 79 In the real world of her marriage to Hughes,
however, this ideal found expression not in a perfect balance of two strong personalities,
but in a sado-masochistic nexus. This kind of masochism manifests itself in art as what R.
McClure Smith calls subversive aesthetic masochism (393). Smith explains how
Kristeva collaborates in the subversion of the law of the father while attaining the pleasure
of the loss of a stable identity.80 Kristeva, she stresses, believes in the transformative power
of the creative process and its ability to defy the established hierarchies, and thus the
sexual perversity seen in the masochistic act goes beyond itself as a mobility and
heterogeneity in representation (392-96).

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In light of this, the line every woman adores a fascist does not only mean every
woman desires a violent man or it is identification with the fascist being what every
woman desires (either her total innocence or her total guilt), but it also means
something else (Rose, Haunting 233). Reading the line with an ironic voice helps the
female subject to get out of the choking circle of the father. This voice can be read
mockingly as surely, women adore a fascist, especially if he puts the boot in the face.
Then the comment comes with its repeated word brute to show that the previous
statement is just a mocking one, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you. 81 Moreover,
what Rose views as a partial, hesitant, and speculative identification with the Jew,
because of the difficulty of claiming rootlessness (Haunting 228), can also be looked at as
a deferral to the act of the orgasmic pleasure she will have at the end of the violent act of
reciprocal masochism: Death, like a final orgasm, like a full night, waits for the end of the
play (Kristeva, Tales of Love 215). This pleasure is delineated by Plath in her Journals:
Oh, I would like to get in a car and be driven off into the mountains to a cabin on a windhowling hill and be raped in a huge lust like a cave woman, fighting, screaming, biting in a
ferocious ecstasy of orgasm . . . (174):
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
I may be a bit of a Jew. (CP 223)
In this sense, she is not completely triumphant, nor completely a victim. Besides, usually
victims do not speak, but now the I has begun to talk like a Jew, a language most
probably different from that of the oppressor.
In Daddy, one of the most striking kinds of defiance comes in the lines: The
snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna / Are not very pure or true. H.C Phelps

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explains these lines as voicing rage against Plaths mother (249-50). He explains that
Plaths mother, Aurelia Schober, was of Austrian origin. She is, like the beer of Vienna
and the snows of the Tyrol, not very pure or true and hence she is reproached like the
father. But not pure is controversial here. For Kristeva, as has been stated earlier, what is
not pure, what is unclean is the abject maternal, the chora (Wright 198). It is not pure or
true from a patriarchal perspective, exactly as a Jew is for a Nazi. The female subject will
identify with this not pure and so she may be a bit of a Jew. What is maternal or
feminine, after all, has a voice in a father-oriented poem.
The dialogue continues with the personal father, the black man who / Bit my
pretty red heart into two (223-24). He is the father who caused the poems speaker a
psychosexual trauma while she was a child: I was ten when they buried you / At twenty I
tried to die / And get back, back, back to you (224). The father, who divides the girls
heart into two, is both a stern devil that must be killed and a loving father she wishes to
return to. At one point in the poem, Plath identifies this father with her husband. In fact,
Daddy was written on the day Plath learned of Hughess approval of divorce
proceedings after he had left her for several months and she, as a consequence, defended
against depression by almost literally throwing herself into her poetry (Axelrod 52). Her
husband becomes the vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, /
Seven years, if you want to know (224), and thus, as she puts it in The Colossus, My
hours are married to shadow (CP 129-30). Despite these gloomy lines, the defiance
continues in the dialogue with the symbolic father who stand[s] at the blackboard where
the symbolic is written (223). This tableau brings to mind a similar scene of the chemistry
teacher, Mr. Manzi, in The Bell Jar. Plath, expressing her hatred of chemistry with its rigid
formulas in comparison to Botany lessons with its leaves and diagrams of holes, evokes the
conflict between the rigidity of the symbolic (letters and numbers) and the semiotic (the
leaves and their holes):

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What I couldnt stand was this shrinking everything into letters and
numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the
leaves breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll
on the blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered
formulas in Mr. Manzis special red chalk. (29)
The redness of Mr. Manzis chalk becomes in Daddy a black charred swastika / So
black no sky could squeak through (223). The blackness of the swastika, the blackboard
and the man with a Meinkampf look (224) are to be defied by the female subject. The
father, in particular, is to be defied in two ways. First, the obscene word, bastard, is used
against him. According to Kristeva, obscene words bring jouissance as they cause mobility
in the poetic text through releasing bodily drives (Desire 143). This movement of
negativity caused by the obscene word appropriates the other (Desire 143). Second, the
voice of the words blackness is removed as she takes the black telephone off at the
root. In fact, in stopping the masochistic oscillation between the I and you, the
speaking subject is creating a moment of acting out (Kristeva, Within 38), cutting the
cables of linguistic exchange between I and the other, and creating an (orgasmic)
explosion which leads to transformation, ultimate jouissance and death: And I said I do, I
do. / So daddy, Im finally through. / The black telephones off the root, / The voices just
cant worm through (67-70) and Daddy, daddy, you bastard, Im through (80).
In this way Plath creates a space of silence, which she has already articulated,
beyond the text where the speaking subject can plunge into the pre-symbolic, the space of
the semiotic chora for an ultimate jouissance or, what Paul Mitchell calls,

pure

jouissance (49). In The Bell Jar, Esther dreams of this space between the black lines of a
story about a fig tree: I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you
crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under the beautiful big green fig tree (45).
Although the text of Daddy oscillates between I and not-I, there is a moment of
extreme not-I, a moment of death, which, paradoxically, stresses identity in a temporary
synthesis that leaves an imprint. Margaret Homans regards this silence as transcendental,
albeit scarcely articulable, against the objectification of the father (220). In other words,

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the female subject objectifies herself to destroy the self against the fathers objectification.
Homans states: Suppressing the power of the one who silenced her, she simultaneously
returns herself to the silence that the poem came into being to protest (221). However, this
is not the same forced silence that the poem begins with. This is a [g]reat silence of
another order (Little Fugue 37) where one fuses with the mother.
Axelrod regards Plaths poetry as a means to heal her private wounds and create her
own identity and voice in a paternal symbolic order, thereby negating the void and
marginality. This void and marginality are seen as silence and death, as opposed to
linguistic productivity and living. He argues that Plath managed to pass her body in
language, especially through orality, which indicates her earlier experience with her
mother and her need for love as well as oral linguistic capacity. In addition, he sees two
kinds of silence in Plaths work: one is political and the other linguistic and inherent, as
it plays dialectically with utterance in the dualism of language (20). The political is
manifested by the patriarchal order, silencing the oppressed woman, not only in the text,
but also in real life (Hughess manipulation of Plaths work after her death). The other
silence is that which dissolves the authors identity and is manifested as fragmentation or
contradiction (20). Axelrod considers both kinds of silence to threaten Plaths textual
creation. He contends that although Plath welcomed silence occasionally in her text, she
considered it generally an enemy. Plath, he thinks, was in search of her name and so
did not easily accommodate the intrusion of silence into her discourse, which would
make her a wordless thing in an empty place (20-21).82 Alternatively, it can be argued
that silence, emptiness and non-being, as manifestations of jouissance and transformation,
are an essential part of Plaths creativity in Daddy, as well as in other poems.
This moment of transcendence or, in fact, descendance (silence as fusion with the
mother) is not the I am, I am, I am of Suicide off Egg Rock (9), the iamb, lub-dub
of the heart (P. Smith 114), but rather when the heart stops beating for a moment. For this
reason, the female subject in Daddy becomes a Satanic version of God by blowing a

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black hole in what God has fashioned (T. Eagleton 97). This is similar to the image in the
seventh section of Berck-Plage: For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma
(17). This can be glossed by means of Kristevas formula: God does not exist I am
GodI do not existI commit suicide [silence] (Black Sun 186). Unlike real death,
which Kristeva refers to here, the suggested silence is part of the aesthetic process. It is a
temporary death, a return to the mother in an act of jouissance just to relinquish her once
again and return to the symbolic. The stake in your fat black heart becomes a stake in her
own heart to deflate it from the life of motility into a last word of silence (76).
Earlier Plath tries to create a we, the villagers, in order to take revenge on the
father, who is treated in this sense as a foreigner, a slave (Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves
20). But is she not also the foreigner persecuted by the law? And might not the villagers be
on the side of that law? (79). Could she not end this controversial scene in silence? Lynda
Bundtzen in The Other Ariel has noticed how in her creative competition with Hughes,
Plath constructed a kind of reciprocity between the two texts: Her words are on top and
one peeks at the other side, often finding her ink has bled through, indelibly splotching and
staining Hughess work (8). She always sought the last word in an argument too:
Plaths textual body is also hopelessly entangled with that of her husband,
Ted Hughes. Many of the manuscripts and typescripts for her final poems
are written on his backside, so to speak: Plath recycles old manuscripts and
typescripts by Hughes, and often she seems to be back talking, having the
last word in argument. (7)
The last word in Plaths argument in Daddy, as well as in many other poems, is
achieved by a defying silence.
Daddy shows an unprecedented subversive heterogeneity in Plaths work. In it,
Plath articulates reciprocity in dealing with both a loving and a stern father in a
slave- master manner. The father also stands for language. To defy him Plath has to use the
same oppressive language belonging to him, and sometimes she abandons language as a

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whole in an ultimate act of defiance. Both ways of defiance form what is termed in this
study The Siren Voice of the Other.

6.2 The Siren Voice of the Other

Both the violent silence at the end of Daddy and heterogeneity, the masochistic
linguistic tension (dialectic) in the text, are what is called The Siren Voice of the Other.
Plath, as the marginal Other, is capable of defying the symbolic order through this
dissident voice, which results from the violent eruption of the semiotic in the poem. In
other words, The Siren Voice of the Other is a subversive voice that belongs to the
revolutionary, marginal Other. This Other is marginalised as it lies in a space outside
borders of patriarchy. It is the phallocentrics Other

associated with the dark and

discredited negative side of every polarity, as body to mind, nature to culture, night to day,
matter to form and madness to reason (Connor 229). For Kristeva, this marginality does
not mean to place woman as second to the phallic position as is always the case, but rather
to undermine our most cherished convictions precisely because it situates itself outside
our space, knowingly inserting itself along the borderlines of our own discourse (Moi,
Sexual/Textual 149). Therefore, there is subversive potential of the discourse of the
marginal Other, as it refuses the concept of intrinsic identity and thus an intrinsic position
(Connor 229). Craig Owens views women in their marginal position as potent: Excluded
from representation by its very structure, they return within it as a figure for a
presentation of the unrepresentable (59). In its most revolutionary act, this voice reaches
silence, the unsaid.
The rhythms and themes of violence in Daddy, as well as in other poems, become
a special kind of singing83 that is threatening to the poets identity, as much as it brings
her jouissance; it is both a burden and a promise (Broe 58). Plath describes this kind of
singing in an interview of 1958, but can apply equally well to the poems of Ariel:
Technically[,] I like it to be extremely musical and lyrical, with a singing
sound. I dont like poetry that just throws itself away in prose. I think there

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should be a kind of constriction and tension which is never artificial yet

keeps in the meaning in a kind of music, too. And again, I like the idea of
managing to get wit in with the idea of seriousness, and contrasts, ironies,
and I like visual images, and I like just good mouthfuls of sound which have
meaning. . . . At first I started in strict forms its the easiest way for a
beginner to get music ready-made, but I think that now I like to work in
forms that are strict but their strictness isnt uncomfortable. I lean very
strongly toward forms that are, I suppose, quite rigid in comparison
certainly to free verse. Im much happier when I know that all my sounds
are echoing in different ways throughout the poem. (21)84
The technical and the extremely musical go hand in hand. The result is a free verse
where there is tension made by sounds echoing in different ways. Unlike Sextons
narrative style where music may be restricted, free verse is Plaths final choice for her
unique voice. As much as there is talk about technique and form in her comment, the
jouissance that she feels in this kind of singing is clear in the oral image of good mouthful
of sound, which has meaning until the extremely musical immerses her in complete
pleasure. In this way, Plath, the poet, is like the siren who sings until silence prevails by
killing the man she drags down into the depths of water. The sirens fate is death since
there is no other to sing for anymore. The power of this voice of the Other and its effect on
the ordered city state of the father is well depicted in Lorelei:
They sing
Of a world more full and clear
Than can be. Sisters, your song
Bears a burden too weighty
For the whorled ears listening
Here, in a well-steered country,
Under a balanced ruler.
Deranging by harmony
Beyond the mundane order,
Your voices lay siege. (14-23)

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However, even more effective than her song is her silence: Worse / Even than your
maddening / Song, your silence. At the source / Of your ice-hearted calling / Drunkenness
of the great depths (28-32). Pamela Annas correctly states that there are two kinds of
silence in Plaths poetry, one of which could be her own choice:85
This loss of a voice, obviously a crucial metaphor for a poet, can be seen in
Plaths poetry in two ways. It is something that might be done to her, and as
such is an expression of powerlessness. At the same time, it is something
she could choose as the price for her transformation, a risk she could take to
reach a reality outside her own sphere, outside of language. (61)
Many critics agree about the theatrical nature of Plaths work, and some emphasize
it as a psychic inner one.86 If what happens in Daddy is a stage show, then going into the
hiatus of silence is really going offstage. This movement off is like the act of drowning in
Full Fathom Five: Father, this thick air is murderous / I would breathe water (CP 9293). The speaking subject, muted now, has to reiterate her birth into the symbolic, to climb
on stage to breathe and act out again. Therefore, Plaths unique voice is not only
manifested in each poem, but also across poems where silence as transcendence lies in
between. For example, the drama of Daddy continues in its companion piece, Medusa
(CP 224), where the subject is still offstage or down under water the watery atmosphere
in Medusa is evidence of that as freshly separated from an abject mother and in a
defense against the emptiness of separation (Kristeva, Tales of Love 42). In other words,
in Medusa there is a separation from the mother and towards narcissism (identity) and
dynamism for the sake of transformation. At the same time, narcissism covers an abyss
where this identity is threatened with being engulfed (Kristeva, Tales of Love 42).
Medusa is considered Plaths real mother by many critics (Bundtzen, Plaths
Incarnation 91, 106; Butscher, Method and Madness 305-306). Some read the end of the
poem as indicative either of Plaths ability to get rid of her mother (Uroff 183) or inability
to do so (Christodoulides 228). Although Medusa was discussed earlier by other critics
in terms of Plaths poetic creativity, Christodoulides was one of the first to call her an

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abject mother in the Kristevan sense of the term. The daughter struggles against a stifling
mother, who in turn threatens to engulf her and is fascinating, as well as horrifying. This,
according to Christodoulides, reflects the love-hate relationship between Plath and her
mother. However, to understand Medusa as Plath disappearing in silence, offstage at the
end of Daddy, then trying to separate from her abject mother again gives the poem
another dimension. Frightened and overwhelmed as she is, she says: I didnt call you / I
didnt call you at all (CP 225). This is because the mother, powerful as she is, is the one
who calls the subject. This is what Kristeva describes as the call of the mother (About
Chinese Women 39). Nevertheless, by cutting the dialogue with the father and by creating
silence at the end of Daddy, Plath facilitates fusion with the mother, responding to her
call as she waits at the other end of the telephone line in Daddy: In any case, you are
always there, / Tremulous breath at the end of my line (225). After succumbing to the call
of the mother as fusion with her, the most important question posed by Plath is: Did I
escape, I wonder? Can Plath unbind herself from this sweet stifling fusion?:
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.
[. . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . ].
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta
Paralysing the kicking lovers. (CP 225)
Christodoulides reads Off, off eely tentacle! / There is nothing between us at the end of
the poem as the inability of the daughter to achieve freedom from her mother
(Christodoulides 191). One could argue, however, that the subject is able to get rid of the
stifling hold of the mother at least temporarily, to form an I again on stage. This is why
Medusas Old barnacled umbilicus keeps itself in constant repair, as the subject in
process keeps oscillating between I and not-I. Each time she wins her struggle with the

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mother, the victory is only temporary, as she relapses and returns to her again. If the
symbol of The Bell Jar is identified as the mother child matrix (Draskau 48) that is
stifling and choking, which in Medusa is equivalent to the ghastly Vatican, then in
Plaths poetry, as well as her novel, this bell jar keeps moving up and down until the end.
Christodoulides shows that Plaths mother, Aurelia, is victorious since she manages to
survive the difficulties in her life (227). Nonetheless, it is the subject who is able to
confront the abject mother and survive creatively for a while away from her. Whether it is
Medusa or The Disquieting Muses, whether a mother or a maternal literary heritage,
Plath is able to confront them and be separated from them. This will give her a unique
voice that will enable her to continue the process of transformation.
Oscillation between fusion with and separating from the mother, between passivity
and motility, is clear not only in the reciprocity of a poem like Daddy, but also the
movement between the two poems, Daddy and Medusa. This kind of movement
manifests itself in Plaths verse towards the end of her career. It is what other critics refer
to as the cycle of death and rebirth. Kendall suggests: Each poem offers a fresh start
where transcendence, silence, that happens at the end of each poem is a contingent or
temporary solution (159).This reveals Plaths work as the Kristevan body digitalized-in a
kind of off-on, off-on or open versus shut (Foster et al. 13, 18). It is like the feverish
quivering body in Fever 103 (CP 231): I have been flickering, off, on, off, on. It is
also like the red wall in Apprehensions: This red wall winces continually: A red fist,
opening and closing (CP 195). Moreover, [s]queezing the breath from the blood bells /
Of the fuchsia (Medusa 225) in one instance becomes [t]he blood jet is poetry
(Kindness 270). In the moment when [m]eaning leaks from the molecules and the
heart seems to come to a stop, [t]he chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats, /
The children leap in their cots. / The sun blooms, it is a geranium. / The heart has not
stopped (Mystic 269). This winking oscillation between disintegration and wholeness is
transformative, like making a colossus again by gluing it together, as in The Colossus,

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and identifying with it as in Daddy: But they pulled me out of the sack, / And they
stuck me together with glue (224). This is done just to destroy the colossus once again,
making silence only to start afresh. This alternation between I and not-I is put most
eloquently by Plath herself: I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one
vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug
succession. The pen scratches on the paper . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . I (Journals 34).
This entails one identification with the father (the I) and one with the mother (the
strokes).
After the dialogic heterogeneity witnessed in Daddy, Plaths silence at the end is
a final defiance against the father. Silence, which in Plaths later work comes to equal
transcendence, is a fusion with the mother. In order to free herself from this paralysis and
get back to the symbolic where dynamism is at work, she has to separate from the mother,
as in Medusa. However, this movement between passivity and dynamism, between
presence and absence, is not unique to these two poems, but is a general characteristic,
especially of Plaths later work.

6.3 Back again from Medusa to Daddy

The merger with, then separation from the mother in Medusa can be detected in
other poems where Plath asserts her rebirth, as she always asserts her death. The rebirth is
a movement from the semiotic to the symbolic, as, for instance, in The Rabbit Catcher,
Event, and The Stones in A Poem for a Birthday. Although the speakers of these
poems do not have the dynamism of Daddy and the later poems, they have the ability to
assert their continuing existence and self-hood as an act of defiance (Kendall 99).
The Rabbit Catcher (CP 193) is often approached in context of marital problems
between Plath and Hughes caused by his infidelity (Wagner-Martin, A Biography 205;
Stevenson 244-45). It is usually read as the ability of Hughes, as a representative of the
patriarchal system, to dominate her life. The reference to catching a rabbit Hughes was a

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keen hunter and the line And we too, had a relationship make this reading justified.
However, The Rabbit Catcher could be read as Plaths assertion of her identity in the
form of a rebirth, a movement from the semiotic chora to the symbolic. At the beginning
of the poem, the subject to be born is in a place similar to the semiotic chora where
[d]iscrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet
constituted as such and, in the course of his [her] development, they are arranged according
to the various constraints imposed on this body (Kristeva, Revolution 25). This is a place
where the subject to be born is still in a state of abjection and where that impetus, that
spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned.
Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places
the one haunted by it literally beside himself (Kristeva, Powers 1). Plaths delineation of
an undefined place of certain energy sounds like Kristevas definition of the chora:
It was a place of force
The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,
Tearing off my voice, and the sea
Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead
Unreeling in it, spreading like oil. (CP 193)
In this place the fusion is with the maternal as there is no other. The wind gags the
speakers mouth with her own hair. Moreover, when a voice tries to assert itself, it is torn
off. The reference to the lives of the dead in the sea seems to refer to the not-yet
constituted subject as it is still neither alive nor dead. In fact, the atmosphere where the
speaker appears to be is like a womb contracting for birth. Then begins the formation of an
other in the imaginary where the hurt is an indication of the beginning of ego formation: I
tasted the malignity of the gorse, / [. . .] / They had efficiency, a great beauty, / And were
extravagant, like torture (193). The subject is to be born in a few minutes after what Rose
describes as the activity of the mothers body in childbirth as it contracts and opens,
ushering the fetus into the world (Haunting 138). Kendall identifies this separation but not
the suffocating other at the end of the first stanza, which could be read as the mother.87 The

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hole which is made for birth is the same hole that the subject has blown in the text as
silence at the end of a poem such as Daddy, but this time to go out of silence into life.88

In The Rabbit Catcher, one sees suddenly the subject in a social context fully
born:
I felt a still busyness, an intent.
I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt,
Ringing the white china.
How they awaited him, those little deaths!
They waited like sweethearts. They excited him. (CP 194)
The poem ends with the idea that after separation from the maternal in order to reach the
symbolic world, the speaker has to face another dismal world of social constriction. She
has to confront her husband/father again and assert herself in this world, which is also the
world of writing:
And we too, had a relationship
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also. (CP 194)
The connections between them, which are too deep to uproot, are not only feelings that
Plath still has for her husband, in spite of his betrayal and considering that this poem was
written not long after she suspected him but also the language which is in his power.
The journey taken in The Rabbit Catcher resembles that in an early poem called
Channel Crossing where the [b]lue sailors are faced with the stark violence of the
sea (CP 26-27). The abject violence of the poem lays all walls waste until at the end
when all dangers end and we assume our names. Entering the symbolic world where
docks halt our brief epic, the sailors, though safe, are strangers in exile, facing a different
kind of horrors: we walk the plank with strangers.

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Event (CP 194), a poem written the same day as The Rabbit Catcher, further
discusses the marriage of Plath and Hughes in terms of death and rebirth. The event could
be read not only as separation from her husband, but also the subjects rebirth into the
symbolic, followed by death for lack of love, a m/other. The artist is subject to death but
also to rebirth (Kristeva, Revolution 70). This is why in Event the elements solidify
and [i]ntolerable vowels enter my heart (194). The child in the poem is juxtaposed with
the poets birth where a face must be created for him: His little face is carved in pained,
red wood. It [o]pens its mouth not only for food, but also its first vowels. The other
scene in the poem is that of death where I cannot see your eyes. There is this dissolving
of the other whenever love is not possible. Whether this is a separation from Hughes, as
indicated by the reference to the ring here, or from the child, it is a final one into death:
Where apple bloom ices the night
I walk in a ring,
A groove of old faults, deep and bitter.
Love cannot come here.
A black gap discloses itself.
On the opposite lip
A small white soul is waving, a small white maggot.
My limbs, also, have left me.
Who has dismembered us?
The dark is melting. We touch like cripples. (CP 195)
The black gap that discloses itself, the soul that is waving goodbye, the limbs which
have left me are all indications of this final descent into darkness. The apple bloom
fails to relieve the darkness in contradistinction to Aird (47). For it ices the night, that is,
freezing it as in a fatal atmosphere.
This cycle of death and rebirth is further related to the semiotic and the symbolic in
The Stones in A Poem for a Birthday (CP 136). It shows movement from

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dismemberment on the verge of the thetic (the threshold of the symbolic) to full birth into
the symbolic. One sees the subject falling out of light, most probably the light at the end of
the preceding poem Witch Burning, in order to enter into the stomach of indifference,
the wordless cupboard, the place of fusion with the mother [i]n a quarry of silences.
The people of the city state of the father not only hear it, but also fear engulfment from it:
The mouth-hole crying their locations. This is to take a revenge in return for the days / I
coupled with dust in the shadow of a stone (Witch Burning 135), in other words, living
under the shadow of a colossal father. However, she has kept struggling masochistically in
pleasure and pain My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs until she is lost
in silence (Witch Burning 136). Burned or engulfed in the cupboard of silence, she now
struggles to go back (Christodoulides 215). On the edge of the symbolic (the thetic)
This is the after-hell: I see the light, the old worrier or the old warrior is stitched
again from fragmentation into being to assert herself in the symbolic world of language
and confront the father-figure later on. There is nothing to do, it is claimed, but in fact
there is still plenty to do to achieve transformation, and yet there is nothing to do with this
bothering itch that will hurt as long as there is something to do.89
As has been discussed so far, Plaths negativity and angry feelings have been
released in the text. This results in an unprecedented motility in Plaths work which takes
shape in poems like Daddy, as a masochistic oscillation between I and the other. The
movement of Plaths work takes another form and that is movement between the realm of
the symbolic and the semiotic (presence and absence) either in one poem or between
poems. What many critics refer to as the cycle of death and rebirth in Plaths work is seen
in terms of the fusion and separation from the mother, from the semiotic chora to the
symbolic. The fragmentation in the subject of Plaths poetry, which is caused by her
movement, can be also detected in her attitude to time and its fragmentation.

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6.4 Fragmentation of Time

Just as Plaths subject fluctuates between two heterogeneous modes, the semiotic
and the symbolic, so does time; Plaths obsession with which evidences her ability to
achieve this heterogeneity. In Kristevas essay, Womens Time, she presents female
subjectivity as linked to cyclical time (that is, repetition), which is related to natural cycles,
gestation, biological rhythm, and monumental time (that is, eternity) all encompassing
and infinite like imaginary space (Moi, Kristeva Reader 191). In opposition to this is the
linear and masculine time of history, or the obsessional time as project, teleology, linear
and prospective unfolding: [. . .] as departure, progression and arrival (Moi, Kristeva
Reader 192). These modes are defined by Broe in relation to Plaths work as clock time
versus heart time (15).
Although the cyclical and eternal are related to the mother and thus bring
jouissance, they are inscribed within history. Kristeva stresses this earlier in About Chinese
Women: There is no time without speech. Therefore, no time without the father (35).
The woman or the mother is outside time and cannot enter to transform it as Truth unless
she is masked by it (36). Kristeva explains that the word temporality imperfectly fits the
feminine time, which is more space than time. It is anteriotemporal (Moi, Kristeva
Reader 192), a space where involuntary memory and sensations (colour, taste, touch and
other forms of experience) are regained by way of signs (Kristeva, Proust and the Sense
of Time 14, 25). Therefore, the non-temporal, which is perceived by the senses, is
embodied time (Kristeva, Proust 24). The eternal, for Kristeva, is a time of revolt
capable of transformation. In its extreme form, this becomes a time of death opposed to
the advance or increase of consciousness, as well as of life (Kristeva, Intimate Revolt
31).
As has been noted, Sexton is a prisoner of time like the protagonist of Briar
Rose, who cannot escape her present, past, or even her doomed future (Miller 300).

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Sextons inability to break free from her proper borders to confront an abject mother or
separate from another evokes stagnation in her work. Like a person who is pulled by ropes
in opposite directions, Sexton is immobilized, just like much of time in her work. No
wonder, then, that she refers to time in For Mr. Death Who Stands with His Door Open
as Nazi Mama and not as a father (ASCP 351). In contrast, Plath swings between modes
of time and thus brings change to her work. For her, time is in constant fluctuation and
cannot be seen as any positive movement toward a stable subjectivity (Strangeways
152).90 In her later poetry, however, death marks the disintegration of linearity into a presymbolic space of unconsciousness.
Plath expresses her obsession with time in a number of Journal entries. In one
entry, she shows her intolerance to the measured ticking of the clock (linearity) and its
capacity to destroy dreams and restrict creative thoughts:
... I may say that my philosophy has been deeply affected by the fact that
windshield wipers ticked off seconds too loudly and hopelessly, that my
clock drips loud sharp clicks too monotonously on my hearing. I can hear it
even through the pillow I muffle it with the tyrannical drip drip drip drip
of seconds along the night. And in the day, even when Im not there, the
seconds come out in little measured strips of time. And I wind the clock.
And I look at the windshield wipers cutting an arch out of the sprinkled
raindrops on the glass. Click-click. Clip-clip. Tick-tick. snip-snip. And it
goes on and on. I could smash the measured clicking sound that haunts me
draining away life, and dreams, and idle reveries. Hard, sharp ticks. I hate
them. Measuring thought, infinite space, by cogs and wheels. Can you
understand? (25)
Plath complains about measured time as it controls infinite space, the unbound time of
imagination and dreams. In another entry she writes: God, I scream for time to let go, to
write, to think (33). However, elsewhere in her Journals, she registers the importance of
time to her writing: Do I need to write anything? Or do I need time & blood? I need a full
head, full of people (308); and yes, obsessed, as always, with the vanishing of time!
(164). For if time disappears, this means the vanishing of ideas imperative to the writer:
Overwhelmed by lack of time, race of time, speed of time, I retreat into non-thought [. . .]
momentary ephemeral flashes of well-being and ill-being (92).

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Plaths short stories, too, are haunted by time. For example, the tyranny of linearity
is portrayed in a dream in Plaths story Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. The
dream is that of a Catholic man who fears death and going to hell, and analyzed by the
young assistant in the hospitals psychology clinic. It shows what real hell is: a gothic
interior in some monastery cellar, [. . .] and it was the Hall of Time, with the bodies in the
foreground still warm, discoloring and starting to rot in the middle distance, and the bones
emerging, clean as a whistle, in a kind of white futuristic glow at the end of the line
(Johnny Panic 22). The real hell for this religious man is the linear time that decays the
body. The different stages of the corpses as they appear in the dream emphasize the
importance of the body and its sensations to the man. Therefore, there seems to be a hidden
wish in this dream for a somatic time, for passion, forbidden a Catholic man.
Hanging on walls in these stories is the grandfather clock. This clock gap[es] at
[Elizabeth], speechless before the next reproving tick in Sunday at the Mintons (153)
and there is [n]o sound, except for the hollow ticking of the grandfather clock in Stone
Boy with Dolphin (300). This paternal clock conspires with the male protagonists. For
example, in Sunday at the Mintons, which appeared in Mademoiselle in August 1952,
Henry, who lives with his spinster sister, Elizabeth, and controls her life, is depicted in
terms of measured time:
She visualized Henry in the centre of the map, which was quartered like an
apple pie under the blue dome of a bowl. Feet planted firmly he stood with
pencil and paper making calculations, checking to see that the world
revolved on schedule. At night he would watch the constellation go
ticking by like luminous clocks, and he would call them cheerily by name,
as if greeting punctual relatives. (154)
Unlike her own luxuriant imagination, her brothers was mathematically calculated and
geometrically shaped:
Henrys mind, she was certain, would be flat and level, laid out with
measured instruments in the broad even sunlight. There would be geometric
concrete walks and square, substantial buildings with clocks on them,
everywhere perfectly in time, perfectly synchronized. The air would be
thick with their accurate ticking. (155)

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In comparison, Elizabeths world is dominated by the senses. It is a semiotized

world of art with its colored lights swinging and wavering, like so many lanterns
reflecting on the water, and pictures coming and going on the misty walls, soft and blurred
like impressionist paintings (155). In this feminine time colours, rhythms, and scents are
triggered in the memory by the various flowers and musical instruments mentioned: The
colors would be broken down in small tinted fragments, and the pink of the ladies flesh
would be the pink of the roses, and the lavender of the dresses would mingle with the
lilacs. And there would be, from somewhere sweetly coming, the sound of violins and
bells (155).
In the concluding part of the story, Elizabeth fantasizes about a secret wish for her
brother to drown in the sea, weighted down by his measurement tools: She envisioned a
green, aquatic Henry dropping through layers of clouded water like a porpoise. There
would be seaweed in his hair and water in his pockets. Weighted by the round gold watch,
by the white-faced compass, he would sink down to the ocean floor (158). In this
imaginary scene, his watch stops ticking and he is encompassed by Elizabeths destructive
art: The water would ooze inside his shoes and seep into the workings of his watch until
the ticking stopped (158). Unlike the female protagonist in The Wishing Box,
Elizabeth, at the end of the story, submits to the symbolic world of her brother, avoiding
death but living a death-in-life. By writing such stories, Plath seems to emphasize the way
the tyranny of linear time prevents the working of the imagination.
The power of the imagination is further explored in The Wishing Box. The story
is about Harold, who is able to dream and his wife, Agnes, who cannot. Their difference
echoes the competitive relationship between Plath and Hughes. The wife envies her
husband for his astonishing imagination and those colourful dreams, which were nothing
if not meticulous works of art (Johnny Panic 49). The cruel husband makes her conscious
of her problem. Although Agnes used to have fertile dreams in her more creative

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childhood days, she is now threatened by sheer silence in her head and loss of imagination
(50). Agnes reads anything to keep from facing the gaping void and as soon as she
lifted her eyes from the printed matter at hand, it was as if a protecting world had been
extinguished (53). For this reason Agnes seems to be overwhelmed by anything she
encounters: She felt choked, smothered by these objects whose bulky pragmatic existence
somehow threatened the deepest, most secret roots of her own ephemeral being (53).
Afterwards, we witness the release of Agness imagination which turns the story into
infinite emptiness, silence and death. First, time speeds up: she suddenly realized to her
terror that her eyes scanned five pages without taking in the meaning of a single word,
and when attending movies the fluid kaleidoscope of forms before her eyes lulled her into
a rhythmic trance (54). The physical time, which is constituted from divided days,
becomes an endless stretch of nullity:
the curtains of sleep, of refreshing, forgetful darkness dividing each day
from the day before it, and the day after it, were lifted from Agnes eternally,
irrevocably. She saw an intolerable prospect of wakeful, visionless days and
nights stretching unbroken ahead of her, her mind condemned to perfect
vacancy, without a single image of its own to ward off the crushing assault
of smug, autonomous tables and chairs. (54)
At the end of the story, her silence is a moment of triumph and death where eternal
dreams extend linear time. Her suicide becomes the only way to defy her husband and free
herself from the tyranny of temporality. Agness secret smile of triumph is also her last
smile in some country unattainable to mortal men (55).
Plaths poetry also refers to time fragmentation as related to the subjects
disintegration. Like the stories, some of these poems focus on the oppression of time and
nostalgia for an oblivious time. In Sonnet: To Time (CP 311), part of her Juvenilia,
linearity is presented as vanishing in spite of its dazzling albeit fake glamour: Today we
move in jade and cease with garnet / Amid the ticking jeweled clocks that mark / Our
years. Death comes in a casual steel car, yet / We vaunt our days in neon and scorn the
dark. The persona of the poem, like Sextons, is yearning for space outside the historical

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bars of the fathers city state. The persona is dreaming of eternity, an artistic time free of
the symbolic: Time is a great machine of iron bars / That drains eternally the milk of
stars. Furthermore, in Cinderella (CP 303), the persona is depicted in an eternal dream
world: The whole revolving tall glass palace hall / Where guests slide gliding into light
like wine; / Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall / Reflecting in a million flagons shine
(304). Then suddenly she, as one of the gilded couples all in whirling trance, is deprived
of the otherworldly dream when [s]he hears the caustic ticking of the clock.
However, in The Times Are Tidy (CP 107), one senses some appreciation of
linear time although it is nevertheless tedious, a stuck record. This positive reception is
clear in the lines: Historys beaten the hazard and, therefore, the children are better for
it, / The cow milks cream an inch thick. Additionally, in Years (CP 255), Plath
relinquishes her idea of an eternal space outside time, taking an opposite position. She does
not even seem to envy God for it. She insists that real life, negativity and creativity are in
the chronological here and now, rather than in the spatial cosmos, for it is only when
eternity is inscribed in the linearity of time that change can happen and motility be
achieved. Therefore, temporality in Plaths oeuvre is not only frozen, spatialized, or
oppressive, it is also transforming (Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath 52-56). The dynamism, which
she yearns for in her art, is depicted as the movement of the piston and the horse:
What I love is
The piston in motion
My soul dies before it.
And the hooves of the horses,
Their merciless churn.
And you, great Stasis
What is so great in that! (CP 255)
Moreover, Notes to a Neophyte, a piece of advice to a young artist (CP 306), emphasizes
the importance of time and dynamism in the act of creation:
it was a solar turbine

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gave molten earth a frame,

and it took the diamond stone
a weight of world and time
being crystallized from carbon
to the hardest substance known. (CP 306-7)
Although Plath sounds here like a believer in the divine creation of the universe, she
wishes in Sonnet to Satan to create a Doomsday of creativity (CP 323), a violent
heterogeneity which ends in total and perfect silence: Commanding that corkscrew comet
jet forth ink / to pitch the white world down in swiveling flood, / you overcast all orders
noonday rank / and turn gods radiant photograph to shade (Sonnet to Satan 323). Her
deepest wish is to stop time: O maker of proud planets negative, / obscure the scalding
sun till no clocks move.
But this extreme wish to freeze linear time, which adumbrates Plaths early poems,
is postponed until the end of her poetic journey. Dialectic oscillation between conscious
and unconscious time will take place before that moment. The journey through her poetry
is, in fact, a journey in relation to time. It is the journey of Giorgio de Chiricos trains,91 as
manifested in Getting There and Totem (CP 247, 264). It is a psychic journey from
whiteness in her early poems to a final whiteness and, in between, the bloody red atrocities
of negativity. In Getting There,92 the persona takes a linguistic position in the train: I
am a letter in this slot / I fly to a name, two eyes (CP 248). For Schwartz and Bollas,
this journey also starts with a departure from the beautiful fusion with the world that
must have supplied her [Plath] with psychic nourishment to some inexorable drive
presented by the train which merges in her language with her own driving rage (182-83).
Likewise, Aird suggests that it is a life journey that contains only blood, suffering, pain,
wars and screaming (85). In Getting There, when negativity begins in language, the
result is the disintegration of the subject, who is healed momentarily in a trainstop (CP
248). The atrocities of some war or other could be a result of negativity achieved by the

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movement of the train which causes pain and suffering: The men the blood still pumps
forward, / Legs, arms piled outside / The tent of unending cries / A hospital of dolls.
In order for the train of linear time to move, it is necessary to kill the mother which
will make the symbolic accessible. The body of the woman, considered an obstacle to the
trains movement, could be read, in this sense, as the mothers, which is paradoxically the
final destination of the train. Death is a temporary fusion with the mother followed by a
separation. This is why a baby is born out of the black car of Lethe at the end of the
poem (249). The violent heterogeneity, [t]he fires between us, is what prevents that
fusion for a while (249). Oppressed by linear movement, the persona dreams of a circular
feminine time, an untouchable place as an escape existing outside language: Is there no
still place / Turning and turning in the middle air, / Untouched and untouchable (Getting
There 249). In fact, Plath describes a feminine cyclical time within linearity in many
poems. For example, she uses the image of the menstrual moon as a symbol of fertility and
barrenness in poems such as The Munich Mannequins, Moonrise, and Three Women:
A Poem for Three Voices. Moreover, she oscillates between fecundity (in Morning
Song and Heavy Women) and sterility (in Barren Woman and The Munich
Mannequins). At times, she wishes for a frozen sterility in perfection outside language.
The train, however, like an insatiable animal, will not stop until it reaches the final
destination of death, which is also a rebirth. During this journey, the subject in process will
hold suitcases, similar to the ones in Totem, which are multiplied and split like her
personality or like the spider with many arms. The result of this is active creativity until
death circulates all (Totem 264-65).
Plath has to set out on the journey and ride the train or else remain in the state of
whiteness, witnessed in her early poems. Any delay could be disastrous for her creativity
although paradoxically the journey will end in death. Tracy Brain describes one of Plaths
collected images in a scrapbook, kept at the Lilly Library, as implying human beings
slavery to the age and its technologies, which we can also read as indispensability of linear

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time and language to her life and creativity: A horrified man in a savage landscape holds
his arms akimbo in desperate frustration as a train moves off without him. A wristwatch,
bigger than the man, hangs from a tree. The watchs face shows the time: 8:16. Below it
are the words . . . is much too late (Brain 93). Plath, it seems, must ride the departing
train, which will ensure her works will achieve the momentum and transformation. During
the ride she faces the law of the father in poems, such as Daddy, Lady Lazarus and
Purdah.
As the subject becomes almost ahistorical towards the end of Plaths career, time
starts to dissolve in favour of space and, in The Night Dances, it peels and melts like the
petals, like your gestures (CP 249). The smile and the dances will lose themselves
in space rather than mathematical time:
A smile fell in the grass.
Irretrievable!
And how will your night dances
Lose themselves. In mathematics?
Such pure leaps and spirals
Surely they travel
The world forever [. . .]. (The Night Dances 249-50)
The portrayal of the mother with her child is reminiscent of the kind of memory Kristeva
refers to in Stabat Mater: Concerning that stage of my childhood, scented, warm, and
soft to the touch, I have only a spatial memory. No time at all (Tales of Love 256). At the
end of The Night Dances, spatial memory reaches [n]owhere, which means
everywhere without any restricting borders of time. In the poem a lost maternal time is
only regained in an involuntary memory, perceived by the senses:
The comets
Have such a space to cross,
Such coldness, forgetfulness.

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So your gestures flake off

Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling
Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given
These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes
Six-sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair
Touching and melting.
Nowhere. (CP 250)
In Nick and the Candlestick, the mother addresses her son, saying, You are the one /
Solid the spaces lean on, envious (CP 242). But can she lean on space itself without any
solid phallic reference in terms of her creativity? The answer comes in Thalidomide (CP
252): in creating a frail maternal space without solid symbolic foundation, one ends up
with an abject form like that of the mutilated Thalidomide babies: All night I carpenter /
A space for the thing I am given, / A love / Of two wet eyes and a screech / White spit / Of
indifference! This kind of art is liable to annihilation: The dark fruits revolve and fall. /
The glass cracks across, / The image / Flees and aborts like dropped mercury.
However, before this space proliferates, the speaking subject is destined to live in
[d]oom of Exiles (CP 318). She has to swing forward [b]oth seraph song and violins
are dumb; / Each clock tick consecrates the death of strangers and [b]ackward we
travel to reclaim the day / Before we fell, like Icarus, undone. In All the Dead Dears,
the maternal is going to usurp the space between the tick and the tack of the clock (CP
71). The subject will fluctuate, accordingly, between dying in fusion with the mother(s),

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the outlaws, and living heterogeneity as cradles rock, which evokes the sense of time
passing.
In her essay A Comparison, Plath envies the novelist who, unlike the poet, has
enough time and space in the novel. Whereas the poet can take about a minute and her
poem is a door opens, a door shuts, the novelist has sufficient time to say whatever she
wants: Her business is Time, the way it shoots forward, shunts back, blooms, decays and
double exposes itself. Her business is people in Time. And she, it seems to me, has all the
time in the world. She can take a century if she likes, a generation, a whole summer
(Johnny Panic 56). Despite envying the novelist, Plath, [t]he poet [who] becomes an
expert packer of suitcases (57), demonstrates fluctuation between I and not-I, in the
compactness of her poems. In refutation of her own critical opinion, Plath was able to
create worlds between the tick and the tack of the clock in her poetry.93
The fragmentation of time between the conscious and the unconscious not only in
one poem, but also between different poems, along with Plaths short stories, provides
general momentum in her work. This is why she is considered a subject in process, capable
of transforming herself and confronting the law of the father. Plaths defiance against the
father will be discussed in the next chapter. Plath mainly achieves this by releasing death
into her work through a variety of means: burning, cannibalism, killing and shedding
blood, and by using veils. Death is freed not only as a drive in her work, but also a theme
and performance. For this reason Plath deserves the title of the deadmost.

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Chapter 7
The Deadmost
Plath started her journey by breaking her proper borders to encounter a m/other, but
ended in her passivity. Not surrendering to this passivity, she tried to evoke a hurting other
to wake her senses into reciprocity. However, it was not until negativity, a form of anger
and hatred directed at her mother and her husband/father, was released in her work of art
that a real transformation of herself and the law of the father began. In Daddy, for
instance, she defies the father by releasing anger. Other poems also exemplify her
movement between presence and absence, the symbolic and the semiotic, language and
silence. The release of the death drive as a violent dynamic force is evident in many other
poems. In them, she encounters death face to face. Therefore, the masochistic reciprocity
in Daddy is also shown in these poems.
The release of the death drive and the recurrence of many forms of violent death in
her poetry make Plath worthy of the title the deadmost. The deadmost is the
revolutionary subject, the subject in process whose text does not only witness the release of
the death drive, but also the recurrence of violence and death, which culminates in the most
deadly act, silence. She dies the most in contrast to the dead/less who dies less in her
work of art as she fears confrontations and thus disintegration. In terms of abjection, the
deadmost oscillates between inside and outside of her psychic borders, and between
the symbolic and the semiotic. This is why the deadmost is more capable of motility and
change, as well as creating a unique revolutionary voice.
As the deadmost she dies a great deal in her work for the sake of achieving
transformation and jouissance. This is why [d]ying / Is an art, like everything else / I do it
exceptionally well becomes a general dictum for Plath (Lady Lazarus 244). Plath states
in Tulips, I have nothing to do with explosions (CP 160), which makes her, according

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to Freud, unconsciously guilty of them. It makes her not only capable of the violence of
pulverizing the thetic, exploding the subject toward heterogeneous materiality and
shattering in the process, thereby reflecting her bodily suffering (Kristeva, Revolution
69, 211, 188), but also of creating ultimate silence as the most deadly act. In her poetry
at this stage, the subjects somatic drive is at its peak; it will take her to the heart of
jouissance and death (Kristeva, Revolution 179). This may be why Kendall views Plaths
poetry as at its best when death is present. When it disappears, the incandescent energy
of her poems loses its triumphant resonance (168).
In contrast, Sexton, as we have seen, resists the face to face encounter with death,
represented by the abject mother. This resistance is due to fear and the crypt she holds
buried inside her. It delays violent reciprocity in her poetry where the death drive is not
fervent enough to make transformation possible. In other words, Sexton does not have the
courage to encounter or perform death although she longs for it. And when the maternal
abject bursts into her text, she resorts to God to protect her. Therefore, Sexton deserves to
be given, in contrast to Plath, the title of the dead/less.
The deadmost, the [i]ndeterminate criminal, declares in The Jailor: I die with
variety / Hung, starved, burned, hooked (CP 227). In fact, in her work, generally, Plath
appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg (A Life 149). Rather than simply
being forms of torture, these ways of dying become her weapons as she dreams of
confronting the law of the father: All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations
/ An assembly-line of cut throats, and you and I (Waking in Winter 151). 94 These
destructive dreams together with the weapons are means to achieve a new identity and to
subvert the husband/father who ruthlessly hurts her, as in The Jailor:95 All day, gluing
my church of burnt matchsticks, / I dream of someone else entirely. / And he, for this
subversion, / Hurts me, he / With his armor of fakery (CP 227). To dispose of the law of
the father, of the symbolic order entirely is extremely difficult, if not impossible, in terms

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of her identity and creativity, for even confronting a mother is unattainable without the
symbolic:
I imagine him
Impotent as distant thunder,
In whose shadow I have eaten my ghost ration.
I wish him dead or away.
That, it seems, is the impossibility. (CP 227)
The hopelessness of the task can be looked at also in terms of amnesia. In relapsing into
the hole of silence, she actually falls into a beautiful blank where every fact of life is
being erased, threatening her identity, as characterized in Amnesiac. In order to
remember, she has to wear that symbolic (father/husband) mask in The Jailor, [h]is high
cold masks of amnesia (227). She moves from chosen silence to enforced silence,
forgetting about forgetfulness if she is to preserve her identity and creativity. And thus the
question what would he / Do, do, do, without me? (227) in The Jailor is also what do
I do without him? However, the deadmost dreams of this impossibility as the only way
of being free: That, it seems, is the impossibility. / That being free (227). Death with its
ultimate jouissance becomes, paradoxically, her life: Sweet Lethe is my life
(Amnesiac 234). She is, therefore, ready to die many times in a variety of ways to create
heterogeneity, ending it each time with the most deadly act, silence, until she reaches, at
the end of her journey, the impossible, freedom and final death.
One question remains: how could Plath, who was a pacifist, turn out to be the
violent deadmost in her art? One answer comes in a comment made by Wagner on
Plaths personality: There was a core of idealism to Sylvias often stubborn character, and
her anger usually flared when her ideals were not respected (A Biography 59). Plaths
poetry is further referred to by George Steiner as the Guernica of modern poetry,
thereby comparing it to a painting which is an anti-war symbol (218). However, reading
her poetry means coming face to face with horror and violence. One can understand this if

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one realizes that it is only through the clashing of horrors, which Picassos painting
presents, that the poet finds peace in the end. 96
The war launched against the law of the father, which is demonstrated in Daddy,
becomes apparent in other poems. Death, as a drive released in the text and as
performance, will take many brutal forms in Plaths poetry to achieve the transgression:
burning, cannibalism, killing and shedding blood, and using veils. By means of these
weapons, she becomes the tortured and the torturer, moving between the inside and the
outside of her psychic borders fluidly. However, Plaths project to defy the law exceeds
its limit in the end. The father is not only defied, he is also discarded. More importantly,
this defiance is related to Plaths process of creativity which is also jeopardized each time
she threatens the symbolic law.

7.1 Burning
Burning is the first method Plath uses in the masochistic transposition between
herself and the law of the father. In Burning the Letters (CP 204), as revenge for
Hughess deception, Plath puts all his correspondence into the fire. The letters, which
can also be read as writing symbols, belong to him. They are challenging ones and thus she
decides to exterminate them: I made a fire; being tired / Of the white fists of old / Letters
and their death rattle / When I came too close to the wastebasket. The subject tries to stop
the reciprocity of hurt between her and the letters: And here is an end to the writing, /
The spry hooks that bend and cringe, and the smiles, the smiles. The letters would flutter
off, black and glittering, they would be coal angels / Only they have nothing to say to
anybody. / I have seen to that. With her rake, she flakes up the papers, which, still
resisting, breathe like people, but she spreads them out to cool down in a pre-symbolic
space: Between the yellow lettuces and the German cabbage / Involved in its weird blue
dreams, / Involved as a foetus (204-5).

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However, despite this cremation, a root of the burnt letters, a seed, and a name
stays. Even the rain cannot extinguish the glow of the fire. Perloff (Sylvia Plaths
Collected Poems 301) and Van Dyne (Fueling 145-46) suggest that the remaining name
in Burning the Letters, which strikes Plath, is that of Hughess mistress as there are
many references in the poem to her origin, which was part German, part Russian.
However, it could also refer to the name of the father. The symbolic name is what remains
in the ash, albeit wilting: And a name with black edges / Wilts at my foot (205). The
poem ends with a red burst and a cry. The cry [t]hat splits from its ripped bag is like
that of the baby splitting from his mother into the world of the symbolic. The dynamic act
of burning here is not going to end with a final act of silence and sexual relief for her
veins glow like trees and rain extinguishes nothing (205). Although the dogs are
tearing a fox, in reference to Hughes, and although her cry will not stop / With the dead
eye / And the stuffed expression, but goes on / Dyeing the air, she is not successful in
defying the father/husband this time, for the name that belongs to him remains.
The immortality Plath claims at the end of Burning the Letters is a forced
artificial one, initiated by the name of the father. Therefore, the heat of the fire and the
smiles that appeared earlier in the poem (204) might turn into [t]he smile of iceboxes,
which annihilates me in An Appearance (CP 189). The woman in the latter poem turns
into a language machine devoid of the semiotic. The symbols coming out of her mouth like
kisses are devoid of any feelings: From her lips ampersands and percent signs / Exit like
kisses. She follows the social rules blindly as she is reducible to the domestic appliances
she operates and the repetitive functions she performs (Britzolakis 119). She is producing
art here, expressed in terms of clothes, but it is inauthentic. For it is true that she suffers to
produce these clothes (art) but they are only for the socially powerful. Therefore, the
automatic, mechanical speaker is subjugated to the linear time of her Swiss watch:
Is this love then, this red material
Issuing from the steel needle that flies so blindingly?
It will make little dresses and coats,

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It will cover a dynasty.

How her body opens and shuts
A Swiss watch, jeweled in the hinges! (CP 189)
The disorganization that she complains of is, in fact, too much organization. As opposed
to the authentic violence of the stars, which are flashing like terrible numerals, the
speaker is hypnotized into accepting a conventional kind of creative language: ABC, her
eyelids say.
As the subjects effort to defy the law of the father in Burning the Letters reaches
an unexpected result, she tries again elsewhere. Fever 103 (CP 231), for example,
shows how the heat generated by the illness becomes an element of defiance against the
father/husband as much as it is torturous for the subject. The masochistic dialogue between
I and you, who has been burning me with cigarettes (The Jailor 226), is most
obvious in the lines: Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God (CP 232). In this
sense, she identifies with God. However, with her dangerous satanic heat, which is also
creative, she becomes an evil version of God, burning the symbolic world:
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak
Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour. (CP 231)

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This is not the dull conventional hell of fat Cerberus, who is unable to consume the
sexual hurt of the speaking subject or cleanse her sin (231). The sin here is transgression
of the law of the father, which is also sexual transgression, an overwhelming release of
drives, unrestrained by the symbolic (Kristeva, Powers 121,123-24). It will, then, be
consumed totally not in the subjects feverish hell, but in her infernal paradise, her ultimate
evaporation and silence.

Before the ultimate death, as transcendence, negativity will be a burning personal

Hiroshima (Kristeva, Black Sun 236). Kristeva, like Plath, uses the political image of
Hiroshima to describe private pain. In this sense, destructive radiation is a metaphor of
psychic suffering that is also, like sin, transgressing the law: [g]reasing the bodies of
adulterers / Like Hiroshima ash and eating in. / The sin. The sin (CP 231). In these lines
there is an implicit threat to Plaths husband who could be the addressee of the poem.
Consequently, she has a readiness to be victimized, as Marsack suggests, and to defy, to
be the flames that burn (10). At one point, Plath declares herself a lantern, a hellish God
producing light by herself (232). Or she is a moon reflecting the light and thus passive and
oppressed although sexually attractive: My head a moon / Of Japanese paper, my gold
beaten skin / Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive. In spite of the implicit question
of origin posed here, the feverish female I is using her erotic heat and light to seduce the
male you before the huge camellia withers due to water evaporation. It is interesting
how flowers in this poem, namely the orchid and camellia, which usually connote women
as beautiful and passive objects, become huge and murderous with sexual appetite: Does
not my heat astound you. And my light. / All by myself I am a huge camellia / Glowing
and coming and going, flush on flush. As in Daddy, the female subject is trying to delay
the erotic pleasure for a greater relief in the end. In masochism, it is the moments of
suspense that are the climactic moments (Deleuze 30). Plaths use of tentative words
before her final evaporation indicates this kind of suspense: I think I am going up, / I

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think I may rise. The flickering between I and not-I ends with the subjects
transcendence (descendence) into a pre-symbolic paradise of silence: Not him, nor him /
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) / To Paradise. If [e]very womans a
whore (Lesbos 229), then in a communicative context between the semiotic and the
symbolic, shedding the whore petticoats and dissolving becomes an act of defiance against
the father who cannot touch her now. And thus, with the removal of the symbolic
parenthetical brackets, he, and all other lovers, will not go to paradise. He will not enjoy
the final sexual act because she has evaporated. This is why she is a pure acetylene /
Virgin. She will have her jouissance though in her paradise of ultimate silence.
Lady Lazarus presents a similar case where the female I describes herself as
[b]right as a Nazi lampshade, identifying with the Jew as in Daddy (CP 244). Then she
later declares, as she addresses the father in the shape of Herr Doktor, Herr Enemy: I
turn and burn / Do not think I underestimate your great concern (246). She reciprocally
burns both herself and the other. In fact, she cannot burn the other unless she herself
catches fire. The sexual movement, I turn and burn, is a condition for active reciprocity.
This seductive scene of mutual hurt turns into another scene of ash where the father is
taking his final breaths, dying with her: Ash, ash / You poke and stir. / Flesh, bone,
there is nothing there.
If the last act of burning to death is a microcosmic, personal holocaust or
Hiroshima ash (Fever 103 231), this is all done for the sake of transformation.
However, the subject in process, the deadmost, will keep burning and healing, back and
forth into a holocaust, as is clear in Marys Song: It is a heart, / This holocaust I walk
in (CP 257). Although this holocaust burns and ousts the Jews, [t]hey do not die (257).
The speaker, like them, will fight back in negativity, a pharmakos neither outside, nor
inside, but [o]n the high / precipice (257). The world that will kill and eat in Marys
Song will be burnt somewhere else:
Then hurl the bare world like a bluegreen ball

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back into the holocaust

to burn away the humbug rust
and again together begin it all. (Song for a Revolutionary Love 323)
The beginning needs two to perform it, an alterity where the semiotic and the symbolic are
in dialogue. For, as much as the deadmost is subjected to the terrors of the holocaust, she
is also like that witch who gazes into the furnace seeking beauty and jouissance: So I
stared in that furnace / where beauties char / but found radiant Venus / reflected there
(On Looking into the Eyes of a Demon Lover 325). This reciprocity will continue in
Plaths work as she defies the law of the father. Cannibalism is another vicious weapon she
will use to achieve transformation.

7.2 Cannibalism
In Powers of Horror, Kristeva discusses the concept of abjection. As has been
discussed earlier, abjection involves separation from the mother in order to establish
oneself. This separation is manifest in faeces expulsion. It is only with the repetitious act of
expelling waste that one can be. However, it is not only anality that makes I possible.
Orality, as the child separates from her mothers breast, can establish that I and her
position in language too. It is a switch from the orality of sucking and chewing
(incorporation and assimilation of the mother) to that of language (incorporation and
introjection) (Kristeva, Tales of Love 26). This is why orality, as separation from and
fusion with the mother, act as negativity (Kristeva, Revolution 47). In this sense,
cannibalism as a form of orality disturbs and dismantles the symbolic law of One.
One needs to devour the mother and assimilate her by devouring words or else one
will be devoured by her. But what does it mean to devour a father? Is it a victory or a
failure? It tends to be normal when the sexually powerful, symbolic father devours the
female speaker. When she devours him in acts of revenge, she tries to disempower and
dispense with him. However, in assimilating him, which is also erotic, she threatens not
only his borders, but her own as well. She risks her identity and creativity being engulfed

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by sameness. As a result, this form of cannibalism is repeated in Plaths poetry. This

Fort/Da game where separation from the mother (Fort) is introjection and the return and
reunion with her is incorporation (Da) keeps Plaths creativity not only dynamic, but
also transformative. In this sense, orality as cannibalism demonstrates both love for the
father and revenge on him in simultaneously assimilating and rejecting him as enemy. This
is what Rose calls protest and participation (Haunting 123).
Since the deadmost is like that suit in The Applicant, waterproof, shatterproof,
proof / Against fire and bombs through the roof (CP 221) not in the sense of resisting
being pulverized, but of being reborn again into the symbolic she continues her defiance
of the law of the father in other poems. Thus she is seen as being reborn again in Lady
Lazarus (CP 244): I have done it again. / One year in every ten / I manage it. Plath
wrote about feeling like Lazarus after her suicide attempt in 1953 (Journals 199).
However, the Lady Lazarus of the poem dies more frequently and in a more creative
fashion. The deadmost dies in a variety of ways in this poem: burning, cannibalism and
the use of veils in an attempt to defy the law of the father and achieve jouissance. As a
result, she is [a] sort of walking miracle. She can expire many times because like the cat
I have nine times to die. She therefore asks: Do I terrify?. Her versatile ability to kill
herself is also a condition for her creativity. Torn between the call of society and the
symbolic [t]he peanut-crunching crowd who had to call and call / And pick the
worms off me like sticky pearls and her pre-Oedipal mother I guess you could say
Ive a call she creates an outstanding art: Dying / is an art, like everything else / I do it
exceptionally well (245). The striptease act is both deathly she is skin and bone, Do
I terrify? (245, 244) and erotic:
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart
It really goes.

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And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood [.] (CP 246)
The connotations of charge here relate not only to the erotic and financial, but also to
drives. After all, negativity, for Kristeva, is a process of charges and stases (Revolution
28). The charges are quantities of energy which, move through the body of the subject and
which are arranged by family and social structures. Charges and their regulation are
articulated in the definition of the chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and
their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated (Kristeva, Revolution
25). The violent release of drives, especially the death drive, which are simultaneously
positive and negative, resembles an electric flow (Kristeva, Revolution 28). In her
Journals, Plath describes a similar electric flow which runs through her and controls her
life and poetry: It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous
positive and despairing negative which ever [sic] is running at the moment dominates my
life, floods it (395). In Lady Lazarus, after the aggressiveness shown by the release of
the death drive, she submits to the male addressee by admitting to being his opus, his
valuable (246). Some critics add that she is also his baby in the list of his valuable
possessions (Van Dyne 55; Schwartz and Bollas 187). However, the lines end with a baby
without a possessive pronoun preceding it: The pure gold baby / That melts to a shriek.
This semiotic scream might indicate suffering but also defiance (Kristeva, Black Sun 100).
After the immolation things begin once again: I turn and burn. However, the poem
concludes with a last word for the deadmost, who avenges the father-figure by eating
him in an act of cannibalism: Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like
air (247).
The terrifying figure appears earlier in Lady Lazarus metonymically as the full
set of teeth and [t]he sour breath that is indicative of her arising from the dead and of
cannibalism (244). Another image that points towards this act is the red hair of hell which

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will engulf the father in nothingness for [o]nly the devil can eat the devil out (Witch
Burning 135). The end of Lady Lazarus is controversial. For some critics, it is a
successful act of revenge against the male ego (Phillips 201), and the system of male
values (Bassnett 115). Moreover, Van Dyne specifies the male culprit of the poem as
Plaths husband (Revising Life 55). Other critics see the last scene of devouring as a
failure. For example, Ostriker views it as hollow because the reader realizes that the
speaker is powerless (The Americanization 102). Lant similarly regards the speaker of
the poem as vulnerable:
she has displayed herself not in an assertive way but in a sexually
provocative and seductive way, and - at the very end - she resorts to
descriptions of her appearance - her red hair - but not delineations of her
reality - her anger. She does not convince the audience that she is, in fact,
dangerous, for she must offer the female body as an object rather than assert
it as a weapon. (654)
For Lant, the poem shows the speakers susceptibility as too feminine and submissive
(653). Van Dyne, on the other hand, suggests that Plath was able to take revenge on her
husband and to appropriate his male powers to herself (Revising Life 55). Although the
power of the erotic act may sound masculine, it has its reverse side of dissolving and
merger with the m/other. Hence the devouring act at the end of the poem could be seen as
both a triumph and a threat to the speakers identity simultaneously, it is not either/or. It is
triumphant as it helps transform the subject and defy the law, even if that defiance is only
temporary. For this reason Britzolakiss suggestion that the attack on patriarchy is
undercut by the illusionistic character of this apotheosis which purports to transform, at a
stroke, a degraded and catastrophic reality is incorrect (Sylvia Plath 155-56). The stroke
that Britzolakis complains of at the end of the poem recurs in many others. Death in this
sense is therefore a temporary solution repeated after every masochistic encounter between
I and the other. However, it is not a monotonous repetition, for transformation brings a new
level of meaning each time.

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In fact, the last scene in Lady Lazarus is a reenactment of an early poem, The
Shrike (CP 42) where the wife envious of her husbands creativity turns into a shrike to
eat him:
With taloned fingers,
Shaking in her skulls cage
The stuffed shape of her flown mate
Escaped among moon-plumaged strangers;
So hungered, she must wait in rage
Until bird-racketing dawn
When her shrike-face
Leans to peck open those locked lids, to eat
Crowns, palace, all
That nightlong stole her male,
And with red beak
Spike and suck out
Last blood-drop of that truant heart. (CP 42)
The reciprocity never ends; we see Plath elsewhere not as a bird this time, but a
[c]arapace smashed and spread to the beaks of birds (The Jailor 226).
Kristeva associates cannibalism and the body with the maternal in her discussion of
defilement rites in Powers of Horror. She concludes that only in separating the speaking
being from what is polluted and from assimilation through cannibalism, can the body be
proper, protected, and powerful, that is non- assimilable, uneatable (Powers 78). The
reference to the initiated other as brother, when quitting cannibalism, evokes Freuds
primal horde where the other is constituted only when it challenges the homogeneity of
One (Lechte and Margaroni 94).97 If I give up cannibalism because abjection (from the
mother) leads me toward respect for the body of the other, my fellow man, my brother
(Kristeva, Powers 79), then the devouring act of the other is a fusion again with the mother
who engulfed me once like [t]he grave cave which ate my flesh (Lady Lazarus 244)
and who sometimes I wish would engulf me again, taking me away from the symbolic:
Mother, you are the one mouth / I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness / Eat me.

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Wastebasket gaper, shadow of doorways (Who 132). In the story Johnny Panic and the
Bible of Dreams, an engulfing pre-symbolic maternal space takes the form of a lake
stretching away in every direction, at the bottom of which exist dragons that belong to an
age before figuring out the wheel and the alphabet (19):
By this time, I already see the surface of the lake swarming with snakes,
dead bodies puffed as blowfish, human embryos bobbing around in
laboratory bottles like so many unfinished messages from the great I Am. I
see whole storehouses of hardware: knives, paper cutters, pistons and cogs
and nutcrackers; the shiny fronts of cars looming up, glass-eyed and eviltoothed. (20, emphasis added)
The lakes arsenal of weapons shows that it is only identification with the maternal that
enables the subject to defy the father later on. Thus Johnny Panic, or the Panic Bird,
which is viewed by Plath as stifling her creativity [. . .] it makes me feel good as hell to
express my hostility for my mother, frees me from the Panic Bird on my heart and my
typewriter [. . .] (Journals 429) can be seen, as in this story, as an essential part of the
creative process. Johnny Panic, or the Panic Bird, and his nightmarish world simply
cant resist melodrama. Melodrama of the oldest, most obvious variety. Johnny Panic
injects a poetic element in this business you dont find elsewhere. And for that he has my
eternal gratitude (22). This movement between stifling force and transforming radical
energy (Dickie, Sylvia 181) has been observed generally in Plaths work, which,
according to Buell, seems to oscillate between two kinds of extreme images, one kind
relating to herself as formed, fixed subject matter, and one kind relating to herself as
demonic creator (147). It is an oscillation between total non-differentiation with the
mother and negativity where Plath can identify with her as well as the father.
Eating men embodies a reaction against Plaths husband: The vampire who said he
was you / And drank my blood for a year (Daddy 224). Thus [t]he small dell eats what
ate it once (The Burnt-out Spa 138). Van Dyne looks at this relationship in the light of
Plath and Hughes duel for poetic survival as well as their marital life (Revising Life 42),
drawing evidence from her Journals: Do we vampirelike, feed on each other (260). It is

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also an attack against a father/husband who fed her deceit What have I eaten? / Lies and
smiles (The Jailor 226) and a predatory world O golden child the world will kill
and eat (Marys Song 257). The daughter/wife in turn engulfs him and the whole world
in the stomach of silence: Radiation turned it white / And killed it in an hour / Greasing
the bodies of adulterers / Like Hiroshima ash and eating in (Fever 103 231). In fact,
Plaths universe is ruled by a piranha / Religion (Nick and the Candlestick 241), a
brutal violent religion of devouring and being devoured (122). However, this is not, as
Kendall suggests, a masculinist religion (123), but an atheism which enables the
deadmost to swing between the maternal and the paternal. The shift of her position
allows for changing the position of the law as absolute.
However, the phallic power of cannibalism that the father and his law have is not to
be underestimated. Devouring is as much an act of assimilation (identification) with the
mother against the symbolic, as it is an encounter against her since the symbolic, paternal
prohibition already dwells in me on account of my learning to speak at the same time
(Kristeva, Powers 39). The father is King of the dish (The Beast 134) and All-mouth
(Dark House 132) who98
licks up the bushes
And the pots of meat.
He lives in an old well,
A stony hole. Hes to blame.
Hes a fat sort. (CP 132)
The silencing and castrating power of this father targets the daughters mouth and tongue,
her linguistic powers. The symbolic threat is summed by Kristeva as follows: I am not the
one that devours, I am being devoured by him; a third person therefore (he, a third person)
is devouring me (Kristeva, Powers 39). This is clear in The Detective where the
speaking subjects tongue is hung out: The mouth first, its absence reported / In the
second year. It had been insatiable / And in punishment was hung out like brown fruit / To

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wrinkle and dry (CP 209). Getting There, likewise, presents this power as symbolized
by the train, which is [s]teaming and breathing, its teeth / Ready to roll, like a devils
(39-40). The question posed in the poem What do wheels eat, these wheels / Fixed to
their arcs like gods [?] (248) is answered in Totem: In the bowl the hare is aborted, /
Its baby head out of the way, embalmed in spices, / Flayed of fur and humanity and
These are the people that were important / Their round eyes, their teeth, their grimaces /
On a stick that rattles and clicks, a counterfeit snake (264). However, the phallic train will
be eaten by the mother (death) as the early lines correctly anticipate: The engine is killing
the track, the track is silver, / It stretches into the distance. It will be eaten nevertheless
(264). In fact, eating and being eaten by a father and a mother is a gross eating game
(All the Dead Dears 70).
The primal power of cannibalism can be traced in Plaths biography and Journals.
Peter Davison, a young poet Plath once dated, described her appetite for experience in
his memoir as almost cannibalistic: Her quest for knowledge was voracious. I felt as if I
were being cross-examined, drained, eaten (Wagner, A Biography 123). In addition, one
entry in her Journals equates her voracious abilities with the castration of men: yet the
vampire is there, too. The old, primal hate. That desire to go around castrating the arrogant
ones who become such children at the moment of passion (200). In describing her first
encounter with Ted Hughes at St. Botolphs Review party, she wrote:
[. . .] I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed
me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off, my lovely red
hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like
I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he
barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek,
and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.
(Journals 212)
Plath transferred this scene of mutual cannibalistic violence to Stone Boy with Dolphin.
In the story, Dody, the protagonist, meets Leonard, who bent to his last supper,
devouring her (Johnny Panic 309). She responds in a violent teeth-clashing like a packdog, / Grinning over its bone of ivory (The Swarm 23-24):

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Teeth gouged. And held. Salt, warm salt, laving the tastebuds of her tongue.
Teeth dug to meet. An ache started far off at their bone-root. Mark that,
mark that. But he shook. Shook her bang against the solid-grained substance
of the wall. Teeth shut on thin air. (Johnny Panic 309)
Plaths violent and insatiable sexual desire is translated later as heterogeneity in her work,
thereby quenching her creative hunger: Oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big
smashing creative burgeoning burdened love (131).
Furthermore, not only does Plath bite the father-figure, but also the mother. Her
war is of two faces and I am all mouth (Who 131). The mother will devour and be
devoured mutually. This O-gape mother (the Moon and the Yew Tree 173) appears in
Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices as the earth mother described by the second
voice in the poem. Although she supports whoever identifies with her powers, she also
threatens to devour everyone eventually:
She is the vampire of us all. So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind. Her mouth is red.
I know her. I know her intimately
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly. She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end. (CP 181)
In one of her dreams, Plath described biting her mothers arm in an act of
assimilation: Dreams last night troubled: mother and Warren in puritanical, harsh, snoopy
poses. I bit her arm (repeat of my biting the delinquent), and she was old, thin, everywatchful [sic] (Journals 529). She becomes like the mouse that has gnawed the ankle of
the museum-cased lady in All the Dead Dears. One of Kristevas cases, Helen, describes
a dream in which she is invited to a cannibalistic meal at her mothers wedding and
devours the bodies and heads of the invited people as well as that of her mother (Black Sun
75). Kristeva explains that the devouring of the mother connotes possessing her, holding
her within oneself so as never to be separated from her (75). Hence Plath appears hesitant
in Medusa to feed on her mother as this would paralyse her or, as Van Dyne suggests in
Revising Life, initiate a similar appetite in the mother to feed on her daughter: Who do

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you think you are? / A Communion Wafer? Blubbery Mary? / I shall take no bite of your
body (Medusa 225). However, in Plaths dream or even in the case of the mouse, a little
bit is taken from the mother, which implies, one can argue, that the mother is not fully
assimilated in preparation for a separation later on. The biting of the hand is especially
significant for it indicates release from the hold of a constrictive mother.
This mutual act of devouring and being devoured is a linguistic one.
Christodoulides suggests that orality in Plaths work is associated with language
acquisition (92). 99 Kendall also contends that the mouth is a means of linguistic
communication (118). This open mouth devours and speaks as much as it is silenced or
chooses to become silent. Gubar, in comparing Plaths visual and poetic art, declares:
Unlike the separately enclosed women, many without mouths, in her
brightly painted Nine Female Figures or the harlequin-lipped woman in
Triple-Face Portrait, she was to be preeminently a poet, a speaker whose
lips opened to hiss and croon, cry and decry the garden of mouthings that
made and unmade her. (231)
Plath, Gubar argues, spoke about not speaking and, in doing so, wrote poems that are to be
recited aloud for the ear and not scanned by the eye, as Plath herself explains:
These ones that I have just read, the ones that are very recent, Ive got to say
them, I speak them to myself, and I think that this in my own writing
development is quite a new thing with me, and whatever lucidity they may
have comes from the fact that I say them to myself, I say them aloud.
(Orr 170)
Plaths cannibalism, after all, is nothing but an expression of that violent eagerness to
mouth her poetry, and thereby seek transformation. As the mouths of Thermopylae
suggests (Letter in November 254), Plath battles courageously against overwhelming
powers. It is a battle of reciprocity where there are probabilities of defeating and being
defeated. The sexual hot gates of Plaths Thermopylae is the vaginal mouth of birth and
death, of speech and silence.100
Orality in Plaths work assimilates as well as defies the other, especially the
father-figure. It is not only a fluctuation between authority and passivity, but also reflects

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Plaths creative practice in the sense of her ability in Ariel, for example, to articulate the
poems aloud and fluctuate between orality and silence. The next section will discuss
another violent way of defying the father-figure, namely killing and shedding blood.

7.3 Killing and Shedding Blood

In Plaths early poems redness appears only to change into whiteness or no colour
at all as in Blackberrying and Poppies in July (CP 168, 203). A wish in Poppies in
July to bleed or sleep is answered in her later poetry where blood becomes a symbol of
dynamism and creativity, a way of transformation and revenge against the father of the
law. For example, in Cut, Getting There, and Totem bleeding is embodied in a
dream of massacres (Three Women 180) and the world turns blood-hot and personal
(Totem 264). In a conversation with her friend, Elizabeth Compton, Plath called her late
poems dawn poems in blood, (Wagner, A Biography 223).
Plath referred to red as my color (Connors 114),101 preferring it for its vivacity
and the way it seemed to provide her with psychic comfort. In one of her letters she
writes: Its incredible to think that carpets can create a state of mind, but I am so
suggestible to colors and textures that Im sure a red carpet would keep me forever
optimistic (435). Even when she was a child, the red ink marks on her fathers corrected
papers fascinated her (Wagner, A Biography 24). Moreover, Bundtzen argues, Hughes felt
unsettled by Plaths use of red (198). In fact, he dedicated the poem Red at the end of
Birthday Letters to Plaths appalling love for this colour (Hughes 197), which symbolized
anger and revenge for her.
As Marckey notes, the red is of importance in the later poetry and often represents
vitality (120). Uroff agrees that this intensity is evident in the poems of 1962-63: [The]
black-and-white images are a temporary abatement of the blood red that bloomed in
Tulips and would flood the later poems (141). For Uroff the spilling of blood is a
symbol of the life force pulsating with a creative violence that outraged destruction

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(155). For Van Dyne it is the sign of the female body beyond her control, of female
victimization, as well as of her vivacity as a poet (Revising Life 145-49). Therefore, the
vitality or negativity presented by the flow of blood in Plaths poetry represents both life
and death as well as murder; it is fertility and sterility. Kristeva looks at blood from the
same perspective:
Blood, indicating the impure, takes on the animal seme of the previous
opposition and inherits the propensity for murder of which man must
cleanse himself. But blood, as a vital element, also refers to women,
fertility, and the assurance of fecundation. It thus becomes a
fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection where
death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality
all come together. (Powers 96)
Hence [t]he blood jet is poetry (Kindness 270). Creativity is a negativity that connotes
both murder and life where there is always violation of a logical conformity (Kristeva,
Powers 98). Plaths poetry seems capable of encompassing this contradictory formula.
If Contusion (CP 271), one of Plaths last poems, hinders the flow of the
maternal blood out of the body, Cut turns it on again. Both poems play the Fort /Da
game of presence and absence, the lub-dub of the heart. Contusion is a regression to
the non-identity of whiteness and death where the heart shuts and mirrors, which
reflect the other, are sheeted and signs, [t]he doom mark, diminish and eventually be
annihilated (CP 271).
Cut, on the other hand, allows the blood to gush forth (CP 235). The speaker
comes face to face with the maternal element, after accidentally slicing off the top of her
thumb while cutting an onion. The flowing of blood out of the phallic I of the finger
asserts her existence. The flap like a hat is the threshold between life and death, flesh and
blood, the outside and the inside: 102 Dead white, / Then that red plush. The thumbs
heart opens like a narcissistic wound:103 Little pilgrim, / The Indians axed your scalp. /
Your turkey wattle / Carpet rolls / Straight from the heart (235). As Plath remarked in

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Three Women (CP 176): It is a terrible thing / To be so open: it is as if my heart / Put

on a face and walked into the world (185).
A masochistic reciprocity begins between the little pilgrim and the Indian. If the
little pilgrim whose scalp was axed by the Indian stands for the I of the finger, then the
defiled Indian is the feminine other. In fact, the whole scene is a celebratory war of havoc
where Out of a gap / A million soldiers run, / Redcoats, every one. However, because of
the seesawing between identification with the father and the mother, no one is able to know
the true alliance of these soldiers: Whose side are they on? For I am the wound and the
knife (Baudelaire 340).104 The subject, as well as her writing, is on the border between the
symbolic and the semiotic, fluctuating between identities.
The gush of blood means creativity for Plath, but too much flow is destructive. The
speaker of Cut has to take a pill to relieve the pain from too much bleeding, which
results in a drifting towards the thinness of total destruction. The excessive violence is
represented by the Saboteur, the Kamikaze man. However, stopping the flow by using
Ku Klux Klan / Babushka is also destructive of the speaking subjects creativity
although it saves the I from the violence of the maternal element. This kind of dull
creativity formed by stopping the flow of the blood is presented as the darkened, dull stain.
The beating of the heart confronts a [m]ill of silence (236), the stopping of the blood
flow, which gives life to the finger and stresses the identity of the I. However, to stem
the bleeding could mean death to the poets creativity when it is faced with silence and
non-being, thump stump. It also means that the impure element will not flow out of the
body and hence the I will become a [d]irty girl. Life and death are combined in the
maternal medium of blood. The speaker, like the trepanned veteran, will never be whole
again.
Allowing too much blood to flow without stemming it with a moment of
conceiving silence is deadly as much as it is perfect. In The Munich Mannequins (CP
262), menstruation makes the woman perfect in regard to her femininity. We see a similar

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kind of infertile flow of blood in Childless Woman (CP 259): Spiderlike, I spin mirrors,
/ Loyal to my image, / Uttering nothing but blood / Taste it, dark red! But this pure
femininity is problematic. It is a threat to productivity, sexuality, and social conformity.
While all abject elements, which threaten the identity, derive from the outside,
[m]enstrual blood [. . .] stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social or
sexual); it threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and,
through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference (Powers
71). The Me and you in The Munich Mannequins are, therefore, the woman and her
mother, far from any sexual difference posed by the social and the symbolic.
Plaths poetry presents a lot of killing as a reciprocity between you and I. Plath
confesses, I dream of massacres and I should have murdered this, that murders me
(Three Women 180). This is clearly evident in Daddy where the speaker confesses: If
I killed one man, Ive killed two. She reacts to the black man who / Bit my pretty red
heart in two (CP 223-24). In Pheasant, however, there is presented one side of killing.
Plath begs a hunter, most probably Hughes, not to kill a pheasant: You said you would
kill it this morning. / Do not kill it. It startles me still (CP 191). The pheasant deserves to
live since [i]t is such a good shape, so vivid. / Its a little cornucopia. / It unclaps, brown
as a leaf, and loud. One feels the speaker identifying with the bird: [it] [s]ettles in the
elm, and is easy. / It was sunning in the narcissi. / I trespass stupidly. Let be, let be. The
reader is left doubting whether the hunter will listen to the speakers plea.
The poet, like the creative spider of Widow, would like to kill her husband in a
Fort/Da game:
Widow. The bitter spider sits
And sits in the center of her loveless spokes.
Death is the dress she wears, her hat and collar.
The moth-face of her husband, moonwhite and ill,
Circles her like a prey shed love to kill [. . .] (CP 164)

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Widow is a poem about the loss of a husband. However, what is most intriguing is
Plaths use of metaphors of writing in order to deal with this trauma, which gives the poem
a further dimension. In killing the husband, the patriarch of the symbolic, the creative
words will vanish into nothingness like a sheet of paper on fire. The dead syllable
vanishes to the pre-linguistic world of death:
Widow. The word consumes itself
Body, a sheet of newsprint on the fire
Levitating a numb minute in the updraft
Over the scalding, red topography
That will put her heart out like an only eye.
Widow. The dead syllable, with its shadow
Of an echo, exposes the panel in the wall
Behind which the secret passage liesstale air,
Fusty remembrances, the coiled-spring stair
That opens at the top onto nothing at all. . . . (CP 164)

The loss of the husband means the loss of language by which one, especially the poet,
orders her creative world into meaning. Consequently, she yearns to kill him [a] second
time, to have him near again . Only in reviving him again can she regain her body,
singing like arrows up to heaven (164). The husband is likened to a paper where she
laid his letters, till they grew warm / And seemed to give her warmth, like live skin. But
in the end, she becomes reified without him and his words, climbing the spiral stairs into
nothingness: But it is she who is paper now, warmed by no one. The widow is passive
without her husband. It is only in Daddy that the reciprocity of the persona does not
surrender to the husbands murder and thus creates her unique voice. After all, violence
and murder are also related to the act of poetic creation in Plaths art: 105 What inner
decision, what inner murder or prison break must I commit if I want to speak from my true
deep voice in writing? (Journals 469).

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In another act of violence, the speaker of Elm has to kill her mother (CP 192).
The stairs in Widow are transformed here into the ladder to Hades. The speaker, who
projects her dreadful suffering and pain onto a yew tree, is accustomed to this journey: 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. Her fear of the unknown is translated later into an internal fear:
I am terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me; / All day I feel its soft, feathery
turnings, its malignity (193). According to Uroff, in Elm Plath begins to explore her
destructive-self that will appear in the late poems (144).106 This inner self, Medusa-like, is
capable of destroying both her and others (Kendall 87): Its snaky acid hiss. / It petrifies
the will. These are the isolate, slow faults / That kill, that kill, that kill (CP 193).
Christodoulides suggests that this other self is the mother (219). But although she asserts
the impossibility of Plath escaping the stifling power of the mother, it can be counterargued that Plath is able to commit matricide momentarily and hence achieve linguistic
freedom. The speakers relation to the moon parallels what she is going to do with the elm:
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me / [. . .] / I let her go. I let her go /
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery (CP 192). Although there is a kind of
passivity in the statement I am incapable of more knowledge, the murderous cry that
inhabits her will be the angry voice of Ariel and the beginning of dynamism (193).
However, this voice would be impossible without killing, without being divided by the
isolate faults (lines of fissure)107 from that petrifying other.
The knife is Plaths most frequently used murder weapon. Killing with the knife is
both a necessity in separating from the mother into the world of the symbolic and a tool
which causes a wound in the subject simultaneously. For example, [t]he yellow knife in
By Candlelight (CP 237), which is indicative of the severance between the child and his
mother (Christodoulides 88). If the child wants to enter the world that kill[s] and eat[s]
(Marys Song 257), it has to commit matricide in order to be initiated into the symbolic.
In contrast, the knife used at the end of A Birthday Present shows how the subject is

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killed and enters the realm of silence as defiance against the symbolic. If the knifes
function is contradictory, this is because of the secret nature of murder. In A Secret,
Plath describes one knife as not harmful: A knife that can be taken out / To pare nails, /
To lever the dirt. / It wont hurt (CP 220). But the knife proves her wrong: Dwarf
Baby, / The knife in your back / I feel weak (220). A Secret appears to be an
incomprehensible poem, usually avoided by critics. However, it could be argued that this
unintelligibility is its aim. It has to remain a secret, a part of the horror of murder where the
taboo and the desired dwell in the same place.
A mirror in Plaths work can also be a murder weapon as it reflects an other and
provokes violence within the onlooker. In The Courage of Shutting-Up Plath wonders:
But how about the eyes, the eyes, the eyes ?
Mirrors can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms
In which a torture goes on one can only watch. (CP 210)
However, if the subject decides to go behind the mirror in an act of perfection, killing
stops:108
Like an Alice in distressland, the depressed woman cannot put up with
mirrors. Her image and that of others arouse within her wounded
narcissism, violence, and the desire to killfrom which she protects herself
by going through the looking glass and settling down in that other world
where, by limitlessly spreading her constrained sorrow, she regains a
hallucinated completedness. (Kristeva, Black Sun 74)

Thus killing is synonymous with the release of suppressed drives. Going behind the mirror
can also be a temporary act of defiance against the father, but then it achieves a different
kind of silence. It is [t]he courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery! (The Courage
of Shutting Up 209). For, although there is death behind these mirrors, there is also
freedom.
Burning, cannibalism, and killing and shedding blood have been discussed as
various weapons used in masochistic reciprocity against the law of One. The violent

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dynamism produced by these tools is immense, causing re-shaping of the symbolic and a
unique individual creative voice. The last violent tool evoked in Plaths poetry to defy the
father is the veil. It has been left until the end of the discussion because it is the least
obvious means of attacking the law of the father. The veil is almost always represented as a
feminine symbol indicative of submissiveness and slavishness. In Plaths case, however, it
is an important weapon that embodies defiance in her master-slave game.

7.4 Veils
An unexpected weapon in Plaths arsenal is the veil. Jeffrey Louis Decker uses
Kristevas concept of the veiled Phallic Mother in a political and cultural context as a
means of subversion and this can be applied to Plaths poetry. Decker argues that the veil
is simultaneously an oppressive inscription and a counter-construction of feminine
specificity that produces different subjectivities and, potentially, revolutionary agency
(185). In other words, the veil disrupts the law of the father despite the fact that it places
women in the impossible position behind the veil of signification (186). For the Phallic
Mother to gain her position in language, she must be veiled, whereas by lifting the veil in a
theatrical manner, she threatens the law of the father as well as this position:
she exposes the (im)position of the so called Phallic Mother. The aim of
unveiling the Phallic Mother is to exercise her signifying power and thereby
produce a jamming in the phallocentric machinery so that it
(mis)represents women as speaking subjects. This, in turn, might be
tantamount to dephallisizing the Father by revealing his arbitrary
foundation. (187)
The verb exposes highlights the parallel between being unveiled and nakedness.
The act of veiling and unveiling entails pleasure and pain, an oscillation between power
and lack, as well as between language and silence (188). In fact, the veil constitutes the
fetish object that compensates for the mothers lack of a phallus and covers behind it
jouissance, death and silence. This is not contradictory, as Decker explains, for Kristeva
stresses in Motherhood According to Bellini that the other face of a ravishing maternal
jouissance is its terrorizing aggressivity (Desire 263).

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Before one actually reads Purdah (CP 242), the visual aspect of the poems form
attracts attention. The use of the tercets and short sentences allow more silence into the
text. The enjambments affect the syntactic unity of the sentences, allowing the irruption of
the semiotic in the text. In order to create an alternation of language and silence in the body
of the poem, Plath tears apart the sentence in an act of linguistic suspense that is like a veil
being removed and resumed in an act of sexual seduction.
In Purdah, the womans alluring veil gleam[s] like a mirror. It is [a]
concatenation of rainbows (242, 243). She seems to belong to the symbolic, a possessed
jewel created from Adam. This is why she is agonized although Adams green side is
the only place where she can live and flourish (242). This erotic woman, almost invisible
behind her veil (My visibilities hide) is also sinister (242). She portends evil like the
moon, which in its appearance and disappearance each month is akin to the ominous
powers of the veil:
And should
The moon, my
Indefatigable cousin
Rise, with her cancerous pallors,
Dragging trees
Little bushy polyps[.] (CP 242)

Paradoxically enough, this veil is the only way that she can be visible in language. In
covering and sublimating the impossible, the lost mother, the subject is able to enter
language. Therefore, veiled as she is, she still belongs to the symbolic order: I am his. /
Even in his / Absence, I / Revolve in my / Sheath of impossibles (CP 243). Yet this is not
satisfactory for the ambitious and revolutionary artist who becomes like a parrot imitating
the paternal literary heritage: Priceless and quiet / Among these parakeets, macaws!

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Although it is usually seen as feminine, the veil is actually also symbolic. This veil
makes her one of the villagers in The Bee Meeting (CP 211): black veil [. . .] molds to
[her] face, they are making [her] one of them. It protects her from the bees, whose
energetic movement resembles the eruption of the semiotic. I am rooted, she proclaims.
In Purdah, however, the subject in process starts with a seductive, threatening veil
Veil stirs its curtain (243) and ends with deadly defiance when she removes it. The
theatrical striptease here resembles the one in Lady Lazarus. She unveils gradually in the
coldest, most cruel way, creating suspense and jouissance. The repetition of the word
unloose helps to create such an effect. Moreover, unveiling transforms the small
jewelled / Doll into a deadly unveiled lioness (CP 244). In a final act, reminiscent of
Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, 109 the woman unveils totally, unsheathed, killing her
bridegroom who was also once covered [i]n among these silk / Screens, these rustling
appurtenances (243). In fact, the act of unloosing the veil could be simultaneously read as
an undressing of the male, as Clytemnestra did to make Agamemnon vulnerable before
killing him. The shriek in the end is both sexual and deadly, and the cloaks hole of silence
is the only evidence of the crime. The last grand unveiling, or the act of jouissance,
happens offstage, beyond all signification. However, the [p]uppets, loosed from the
strings of the puppet-master (Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond 135), who [w]ear masks
of horn to bed until the big moment of unhusking and steering into the air, will reattach to
that string in another poem to play the Fort/ Da game of unveiling again.
In The Big Strip Tease: Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia
Plath, Kathleen Lant rejects the concept of nakedness in Plaths poetry as any sort of
triumph or jouissance. For her, the female body plays a specific and rigidly codified role
(628). She argues that nakedness is a source of power and joy only for male writers, and
that the naked body of the woman is vulnerable and susceptible to penetration and rape.
Holbrook goes further in his claims that Sylvia Plaths attitude to sexuality often belongs
very clearly to the age of a pornography explosion (265). In their discussions, they seem

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to dismiss any possibility that the exposure of the female body could transform the law of
the father. However, it could be argued that the movement between covering and
uncovering the body in an act of suspense, one that ends in a grand unveiling of ultimate
jouissance, is transformative and challenging.
Lady Lazarus further deals with the theme of veils (CP 244). In the poem, the
face of a Jew acts as a veil ready to be peel[ed] off into the appalling face of a Nazi
cannibal (CP 244). Nevertheless, the female speaker requires the featureless face for her
last act of jouissance and transformation. The final process of the subjects unveiling is
also a process of unpeeling the face of the I, which is like White Godiva, riding on
Gods lioness in Ariel (CP 239). The unpeeling is achieved out of energy expenditure,
a momentum, rather than out of passivity. It is the death of I that in its dying produces
rhythm. It frees the subject, as well as language, from denotation (Kristeva, Desire 31):
Something else
Hauls me through air
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel
Dead hands, dead stringencies. (CP 239)
This Godiva is reminiscent of Truth in Tiepolos painting Time Disrobing Truth. Indeed,
Kristeva maintains that truth as woman cannot exist without the veil of language, albeit
in a defying transgressive act (About Chinese Women 36). In Godivas case, nonetheless,
her grand unveiling, according to the legend, is in defiance of her husband.110 In Ariel,
her unveiled, moving body might be suicidal but it destroys men as well. Their corpses
appear in the drafts of the poem: Hands, hearts, dead men / Dead men / Hands, hearts,
peel off (Van Dyne, Revising Life 121). This deadly movement toward a fusion with the
mother is also an ultimate jouissance: And now I / Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas (239).

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The phallic arrow, the I, turns into [t]he dew that flies / Suicidal, at one with the
drive (239-40).111 The I evaporates [i]nto the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning to
fall down again as a rain of creative heterogeneity And now I / Foam to wheat and
back to the maternal sea (239-40). Reading the drafts of the poem provided by Van Dyne,
one notices that Plath used rain before changing it to dew (120). This is significant as
Plath is searching within her psyche for a transforming energy, a fruitful heterogeneity that
can change dew into wheat despite the fact that this same energy could be fatal. The
energetic symbol of the cauldron, which is talking and cracking in The Couriers
signals heterogeneity and dynamism (CP 247). It is the red / Eye symbolizing the
beating of the heart and the metaphor of metaphors, the sun (Kristeva, Tales of Love
213).
In the first essay of Desire in Language, called The Ethics of Language, Kristeva
explains how the poet is in a constant solar contest (29). I is bound to the sun, she
insists. In other words, I is the sun as it must master rhythm. This is where the poet is
part of the agency of the sun: Eye [I], the cauldron of morning (240). However, I is
also opponent of the sun, threatened by it because solar mastery cuts off rhythm
(Kristeva 29). This is where the pun on morning as mourning fits, as does the
description of the movement in Ariel as [s]uicidal (240). Therefore, this eternal
struggle embodies the poets struggle within and against the system of language (30).
The veil is also pivotal in A Birthday Present where the speaker examines a gift
and asks the male addressee: What is this, behind the veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful? (CP
206). Again, the veil is as seductive as it is threatening: But it shimmers, it does not stop,
and I think it wants me. It bears the same characteristics of the maternal sea, described by
Plath in Ocean 1212-W: Like a deep woman, it hid a good deal; it had many faces,
many terrible, delicate veils. [. . .] If it could court, it could also kill (Johnny Panic 117).
The suspense involved in delivering the gift as well as the veils that shimmer like
curtains is again both very erotic and masochistic (206), deadly before death happens: O

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adding machine / Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole? /
Must you stamp each piece in purple, / Must you kill what you can? (207). The suspense
here is similarly evident in the following lines: Let it not come by the mail, finger by
finger. / Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty / By the time the whole of it
was delivered, and too numb to use it (208).
Plath never makes a firm statement about this gift, not because she is unsure
whether what is behind the veil is masculine or feminine, as Lant suggests (651), but in
order to create, where the power of the paternal and the maternal are exchanged, an erotic
suspense in advance of a grand feminine moment of death and jouissance. In fact, one can
argue that the present is nothing but the shimmering veil itself, signifiers given by the male
addressee to the female recipient in order to subdue her. However, a seductive thin veil
could swell with dangers underneath: Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity and Is
this the one for the annunciation? (207, 206). For this very reason the male addressee is
terrified to give it to her, for the veil or what is behind it, which is in fact nothing, could
be a real threat. The veiled subject is no other than Salome with her dance of the seven
veils that will be the moving dynamite until the grand unveiling, killing the oppressing
onlooker:112 The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it, / Bossed, brazen, an
antique shield .
It is true that the veils were killing [her] days but they are also killing the fathers
days (207). It is only through movement between veiling and unveiling that subjugation to
the stereotypes of history where spilt lives congeal and stiffen can be challenged (208).
The grand unveiling allows the subject to escape completely into the timeless eyes of
death (208). This can happen if death does not occur prematurely before the whole process
of seduction has taken place, as when Isadora Duncans scarves (Fever 103 231), or her
veils for that matter, are caught in the wheels of her lovers car thereby preventing her
from achieving a grand unveiling.113 Not only by the oscillation of the veil will change
occur, but also by a last word of death, a grand unveiling in the poems final four

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stanzas, which is also a birthday of renewal and jouissance. Christodoulides reads the last
moment as triumphant because Plath was finally able to separate from her stifling mother
(235): And the knife not carve, but enter / Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, / And the
universe slide from my side (208). However, this moment is related to unveiling which
leads to the evaporation of signification and the universe as a whole. It is a last word of
silence in a masochistic battle rather than an initiation into the symbolic.
The clouds in A Birthday Present could be read as wan veils which can be easily
removed like cotton though they are deadly as carbon monoxide (207). Their coming
and going creates a movement similar to that of the veil: Clouds pass and disperse
(Elm 193); they are defiant, but they remain weak and transient: Im no more your
mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the
winds hand (Morning Song 157). In a manuscript draft of Little Fugue the mute
clouds are described as these fool-white motherly clouds.114 They, therefore, belong to
the semiotic in that they have no roots. As in Gulliver (CP 251), they have no
reflections and thus no identity, no strings attached, in spite of being free.
However, the clouds, which are silence after silence (Parliament Hill Fields
152), can add to the transformative creativity of the poet if they alternate, like silence, with
thick veils of blackness, the veils of the symbolic as in Little Fugue (187). The dialogue
between white and black in this poem is similar to that masochistic dialogue between the
Jew (The featurelessness of that cloud 187) and the stern black-hearted Nazi father. The
violence of this alternation produces horrific complications. / Finger-traps a tumult of
keys. At one point, the speaker says: I like black statements. These belong to the
fathers language, which is terrifying and rooted like the yew tree:
Such a dark funnel, my father!
I see your voice
Black and leafy, as in my childhood,
A yew hedge of orders,

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Gothic and barbarous, pure German. (CP 188).

Nevertheless, the itinerant clouds are also present, sharing in that horrific musical piece of
speech-silence and defying black veiling-white unveiling: Now similar clouds / Are
spreading their vacuous sheets (188). However, the end of Little Fugue sees the white
semiotic clouds prevail, an occurrence which equals a grand unveiling. This is
transformation, jouissance and morning (mourning), a last word of silence and death:
I survive the while,
Arranging my morning.
These are my fingers, this my baby.
The clouds are a marriage dress, of that pallor. (CP 189)
The arranging for mourning is in fact a regression to the semiotic chora. In Place
Names, Kristeva discusses the psycholinguistic development of the infant. She shows that
the use of the anaphoric demonstratives phenomenon (in Plaths poem [t]hese are my
fingers, this my baby) is part of other archaic vocalizations and echolalias which
constitutes the semiotic chora and which forms the basis for syntactic acquisition (Desire
287). When Plath defies the blackness of the father in Little Fugue, she returns to a
previous stage of infancy using the demonstratives these and this before evaporating
completely into the wandering veils of whiteness.
The theme of the veil is extensively used in the Bee sequence of poems, with which
Plath intended to end Ariel, both as a defying element and a way of creating her unique
voice (Van Dyne, Revising Life 136). In The Bee Meeting, only when the speaker is
veiled can she become one of the villagers. Without the symbolic veil, the speaking subject
is, in linguistic terms, unprotected, vulnerable before the attacks of instinctual drives (the
semiotic bees):
I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.

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They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear. (CP 211)

Though the symbolic veil is protective, it chokes creativity. The heavy veil prevents her
from running, that is, from being dynamically creative. She will be just like any of the
unrecognized villagers in The Bee Meeting under their veils, although they become more
protected in the face of semiotic attack (the release of death drive):
Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?
Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,
Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits. (CP 211)
If Plath dons the veils, she will suffer from a lack of freedom and individuality in
her poetry. And if she unloosens the veil and thus the roots of language, allowing in the
semiotic bees, she will have to run forever to protect her poetry from collapse and her
identity from being pulverized: I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me / With
its yellow purses, its spiky armory. / I could not run without having to run forever (212).
However, freedom from the veil of language into pure jouissance is her ultimate dream.
This is like the female bees dream of escaping from the wax box, their particular veil:
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins / Dream of duel they will win inevitably, /
A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight (212).
Another poem in the Bee sequence, The Arrival of the Bee Box (CP 212), shows
the speaker receiving a terrifying box similar to the veiled gift in A Birthday Present (CP
206). This box of language, which has sublimated and harnessed the semiotic drive, the
swarmy feeling in it (CP 213), acts as a veil which suffocates creativity, but protects the
speaker from the lethal drive:
The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I cant keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I cant see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit. (CP 213)

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For Bundtzen the allegory of this poem is related to Plaths confronting the problem of
poetic identity and the burden of authorship and control, of how writing can also be a
curse (The Other Ariel 133). The individual bees in the box are, as Bundtzen observes,
syllables that refuse to become words or sentence, to assume meaning (The Other Ariel
135). She also describes them as ink-blotted inscription that garbles language (135).
Without the box that holds them, they represent the instinctual drive of the speaking
subject unleashed for death. The inability to metaphorize and translate the bees language
threatens her creativity:
How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!
I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner. (CP 213)

Uroff summarizes the poems dilemma as inner turmoil and outer form: to open the box
[the form] is to open the possibility of attack by its contents (148). Thus the stricter the
form of the poem, the safer the poet is as she is not attacked by the death drive. However,
when Plath begins using free verse in Ariel, in comparison to her earlier more formal
forms, she opened herself to dangerous consequences. In The Arrival of the Bee Box, the
insects are depicted in terms of engulfing cannibalism, the swarmy feeling of African
hands that would snatch and devour her: I wonder how hungry they are. / I wonder if
they would forget me / If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree
(213). The aggressive nature of the semiotized syllables that nearly become one with the
drive threaten both the poets creativity and life. The bees connection to death is explored

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in an earlier poem in Plaths Juvenilia called Lament: The sting of bees took away my
father / who walked in a swarming shroud of wings (CP 315).
The owner of the bees, in The Arrival of the Bee Box (CP 213), decides not to
feed them in order to keep her creativity in check: [she is] in control (Stings 214-15).
However, she cannot resist the temptation to unveil them and, at the same time, herself.
For although they threaten the poet through their aggression, they are the only way to
artistic greatness (Axelrod 232). She knows that The Box is only temporary (The
Arrival of the Bee Box 213). She also recognizes that hiding behind the petticoats of the
cherry, instead of turning into a tree, to avoid the bees is far less protective than the
villagers thick black veil or the bee box (213). The thinning veil becomes increasingly
menacing, allowing the semiotic drives to flow more into the body of language. The cherry
tree will one day unveil its petticoats and hence she would have to run forever in a
different direction from that of the hives working bees, the agitated women: Will they
hate me, / These women who only scurry, / Whose news is the open cherry, the open
clover? (Stings 214). At the end of The Arrival of the Bee Box, she promises to
release the bees: Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free (213). This promise
challenges, as well as creates suspense, before the grand unveiling and release of the bees
sexuality. Yet delaying the action also reflects fear of the powers derived from unleashing
the instinctual drives.
This box, which is as much protection from the bee stings as it is suffocating to her
creativity, is described as a honey-machine (Stings 214). Bundtzen views it as a
poetic organism, primarily masculine and public, and historically recognizable (The
Other Ariel 137). For Uroff, moreover, the box is an emblem of survival and a possible
coffin (147). This status as coffin becomes manifest when the queen bee, which Plath
identifies with, is put in a box after the villagers of The Bee Meeting kill her. The
speaker wonders: Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they

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accomplished, / why am I cold (CP 212). In this sense, Plath shows veiling as a deadly
operation.
However, although the last choice of Plaths defiance is almost always a grand
unveiling, she sometimes depicts this process as humiliating and veiling, its opposite, as a
symbol dynamically related to language. Stings, for example, illustrates the importance
of the veil in gaining power and motility. At the beginning, it presents the queen of the
bees as weak and ill: she is old, / Her wings torn shawls, her long body / Rubbed of its
plush / Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful (CP 214). A Lady Lazarus, she
has been revived from death, exposed and wounded. And now she has to regain her covers
(her veil), lion-red body (215), and negativity in order to revenge her killing by the
symbolic engine of language.
This veiled body indicates that she has retained terrible, red sexual powers
in her nuptial flight (CP 215). Although, as Bundtzen observes, in terms of beekeeping the
queen can never have a second bridal flight, Plath insists on this in her poem (Bundtzen,
The Other Ariel 117). This is clear in her early draft of the penultimate stanza where the
speaker appears as subject to rebirth and death.115 Her wings of glass are an indication of
this destiny towards freedom and annihilation. The decision never to return means dying
unveiled, free of all forms of shelter, hives and linguistic veils. However, in changing her
drafts, Plath postponed this unveiling and the decision of never returning to the hive until
the final poem in the sequence, Wintering.
All father-figures must be excluded before the final departure from the hive of
language. The Swarm depicts Plath facing a patriarch instead of an engine (CP 215).
This black man has two faces, neither loving: one is of a beekeeper who shoots at the
black ball of bees and the other of the arrogant Napoleon who tries to conquer all (216).
In an act of revenge, the bees stinging the beekeeper become themselves a defeated
Napoleon. Plaths draft of Stings shows how the veil adds a further note of sexual
seduction: The black veil molds to your lips: / they think they must kiss you, they think

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death is worth it (Bundtzen, The Other Ariel 147). Edward Butscher reads the attacked
man as Hughes, who had left Plath, leaving her eager for revenge through poetry,
neglected in Devon (Method and Madness 320). Another reading is that in order to veil
him in death, the bees have to unveil themselves to death. Plaths revenge against her
father/husband is as dangerous for her as a bee shedding its sting because the shedding of
any relation to the symbolic powers of language makes death inevitable. The attack of the
father-figure, however, is not a triumphant final word of revenge since [t]he last badge of
victory remains with a pleased Napoleon at the end of the poem before his ultimate
Waterloo and Elbas evacuation in Wintering (217).
Plaths quest for a unique, transformative voice through a grand unveiling of death
away from the shelter of the hive takes place in Wintering (CP 217). Winter is the time
of hanging on for the bees (218). They must stay in the hive for survival. Nevertheless,
Plath refuses the confinement not only of the hive but also the cellar where the bees are to
be kept, another suffocating box where honey, as metaphor of creative production is:
This is the room I have never been in.
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint
Chinese yellow on appalling objects
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me. (CP 218)
If this is the room of creativity, it is certainly not a lively one. This is reminiscent of
Sextons attic where the bees have long ceased to move: as if words were counted like
dead bees in the attic, / unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings (Said the
Poet to the Analyst, ASCP12).116 It is true that honey is produced in this room, but it is a
refined, artificial Tate and Lyle where the semiotic vitality is reduced (the bees / So

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slow) and thus the poet surrenders, as [t]he cold sets in, to a suffocating passivity
inside, [f]iling like soldiers / To the syrup tin (CP 218).
However, at the end of the poem, the female bees make a drastic change by
excluding all males from the hive: They have got rid of the men, / The blunt, clumsy
stumblers, the boors (219). Moreover, in search of dynamic creativity outside that
room, the bees fly away from the hive, which could be a dangerous move as it is winter
time. The unleashing of the bees with their semiotic power from the veils of the hive is
deadly. However, this is a moment of freedom and ultimate jouissance (218):
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring. (CP 219)
This is, nevertheless, not a spring of womens liberation without consequences, as
Marckey and Uroff claim (A Journey 11; 146). A world without men and the hive (the
symbolic) is fatal although it is the only way of achieving freedom. For Plath, the spring of
her singular creativity is liberating, a jouissance that comes necessarily after the act of
writing. However, her sad tone reflects the truth of that liberation : Anyhow: by dint of
squandering some ink here, after counting your pages, you should see me through to the
spring, to my so-called liberty from what I seem to know, but for what I can only dream
(Journals 307).
The act of veiling and unveiling, which Plath uses against the law of One and for
creating her unique voice, has been last discussed. It reveals conflict between control and
the released drives of anger. However, the question is whether Plath succeeds in
challenging the father and his law in a risky step of grand transformation or is forced to
surrender to his powers. Unlike Sexton, who clung to the father until the end, Plath
through the violence set free in her work, defied and discarded the symbolic father,
sacrificing his love, in order to confront the oceanic pleasure of death. Although this is a

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transformative triumph it comes, nonetheless, with fatal effect. Berck-Plage could

function as a summary of Plaths work in the way it begins by magnifying and deifying the
black image of her father and ends with his funeral, which is hers too. The next chapter
will examine Plaths last confrontation with death, where the semiotic gains the upper hand
after abandoning the father forever. Ultimate jouissance, freedom, and triumph are
achieved, but with serious consequences. The next chapter presents a comparison between
Sexton and Plath.

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Chapter 8
Last Confrontation
By her ricocheting between I and not-I and allowing the semiotic to penetrate
her text, thereby formulating a transformative heterogeneity, Plath is able to dismantle the
law of the father. For this reason we no longer encounter the father and thus the
masochistic scenes of the early poems in Ariel. However, this triumph leads to the
disintegration of the I, which is no longer held together firmly by the symbolic. In these
poems, the semiotic seems to gain the upper hand at the expense of the thetic and
predicative constraints of the egos judging consciousness and set up a new formal
construct: a so-called new formal or ideological writers universe, the never-finished,
undefined production of a new space of significance (Kristeva, Desire 134-35). For Plath,
the most important thing about this new space is that it has no symbolic father. In an early
version of Sheep in Fog (CP 262), Plath ended the poem as follows: Patriarchs till now
immobile / In heavenly wools / Row off as stones or clouds with the faces of babies
(Kendall 190). Plaths patriarch is rowing off, unlike Sextons who is the one to be
rowed to. He becomes fixed and the only movement is through a maternal medium,
stones or clouds with the faces of babies, which will row off taking the father with them.
In the last version, however, Plath gets rid of any kind of movement that might imply
positivity and rebirth to state that her heaven is simply fatherless and, therefore, one in
which the semiotic will gain the upper hand (Kendall 190-91).
But what does it mean that the semiotic gains the upper hand? And is the whole
process intentional or not? If the semiotic does take control, this should not be considered a
total triumph. Many feminist critics, including Lynda Bundtzen, Susan Van Dyne, and
Elaine Connell, read Plaths dismantling of the father in this light. Rather, triumph and
terror have been oscillating within a masochistic relation with the other (Kristeva, Black

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Sun 166). However, after getting rid of the father, lethal consequences accrue. Although
the act of dismantling the father is indeed transformative, creating a new space of
generativity as well as freedom, it is also a threat to the subject in process. The speaking
subjects textual practice is that most intense struggle toward death (Kristeva, Revolution
180). The threatened deadmost, in her last encounter with the archaic mother (death) is,
nevertheless, immersed in absolute jouissance on her way to wholeness and perfection. She
celebrates reunion with the Thing as she confronts the silence of horror in [her]self and
in the world (Kristeva, Black Sun 41, 225). This is a primal form of triumph (Kristeva,
About Chinese Women 40). And if it is not a complete triumph, it is never a defeat
(Kendall 207; Hardwick 111).
How intentional is this process of dismantling the father and the consequent
irruption of the semiotic? In Revising Life: Sylvia Plaths Ariel Poems, Van Dyne, after
claiming Plath to be a transformative subject in process through Vesuvian rage, modifies
this to the assertion that Plath is a discerning subject in total control (3). She relies on
Plaths revised manuscripts to prove that her performances are always self-conscious and
frequently parodic, although she refers to Plath sometimes as culturally structured (47,
69). In her review, Bundtzen observes this contradiction in Van Dynes stance, which,
more than any other study, stresses the agency and consciousness of Plaths creativity.
However, the last poems, in particular, seem a hindrance to Van Dynes project as Plaths
agency evaporates.
This study neither dispenses with Plaths intentionality in processing her poetry,
nor does it claim she had total control over the whole process of writing. The ricocheting
between I and not-I entails both consciousness and unconsciousness. In fact, the issue
of agency in Kristevas work is a problem for some critics. For example, Toril Moi asks,
who or what is acting in Kristevas subversive schemes? (Sexual/Textual 169). She
argues that Kristevas focus on the semiotic as an unconscious pulsion excludes any
conscious decision-making. Although Kristevas position is not clear regarding this matter,

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as she sometimes overemphasizes the unconscious force, she does not seem to exclude
either the consciousness or the unconsciousness of the process. However, the more the
semiotic is unleashed in Plaths poems, the more unconscious drives are at work. But this
is not really the issue here. The most important thing in Plaths last poems is whether the
subject is able to confront the mother and the irruption of the semiotic face to face.
Calvin Bedient, in his disagreement with Toril Moi, asserts that the semiotic taking
the upper hand means that the unconscious semiotic becomes art itself (How I Slugged
646) and thus the subject is absented under the flow of the semiotic, a position also held by
Mitchell (39). In Plaths last poems, we witness the deadmost immersed in oceanic
jouissance on her way towards a total disintegration, where the power of language seems
to have utterly dissolved (Bronfen 95). We also see the I barely breathing like the
speaker of Paralytic:
It happens. Will it go on?
My mind a rock,
No fingers to grip, no tongue,
My god the iron lung
That loves me, pumps
My two
Dust bags in and out,
Will not
Let me relapse
While the day outside glides by like ticker tape. (CP 266)
The I of the last poems, beginning with Sheep in Fog and ending with Edge, is
barely raises her head above the deadly jouissance. The dying I is like the train in
Sheep in Fog at the end of its journey, which leaves a line of breath (4).
In Sheep in Fog, the deadmost speaker, unlike the arrow-like horse of Ariel,
is slowing down towards stillness, and this is expressed by the retardation of a different
horse:

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O slow
Horse the color of rust,
Hooves, dolorous bells
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,
A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart. (Sheep in Fog 262)
The slow horse becomes poetic words themselves, moving towards disintegration: Words
dry and riderless, / The indefatigable hoof-taps (Words 270). At the end of her journey,
Plath gets off her horse to walk on foot and encounter dissociated words: Years later I /
Encounter them on the road / Words dry and riderless (Words 270). On her bare feet,
she is heading towards her lost maternal paradise, a paradise without the father: They
threaten / To let me through to a heaven / Starless and fatherless, a dark water (Sheep in
Fog 262).
Plaths confrontation with the archaic mother in her early and last poems is
radically dissimilar. In the early poems her passive fusion with nature was an immature act
at that stage. She was only beginning her career as a poet, searching for a singular voice. In
the later poems, after her triumph over the law of the father and generation of the Siren
Voice of the Other, her perfection will be achieved in this last meeting. And after
combining the purposive with the purposeless, she turns into purposelessness, which is
paradoxically an excessive purpose, perfection.
Perfection is the last of Plaths achievements: it is death itself. Therefore, not only
does the creation of perfect aesthetic forms prove to be itself a source of death, but
death also becomes a source of aesthetic perfection (Bronfen 95). This why perfection is
terrible: It is the exception that interests the devil (Three Women 186). Its nature

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derives from the fact that it is sexually unproductive. It involves a homosexual feminine
pleasure with no children and eventually no words:
Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb
Where the yew trees blow like hydras,
The tree of life and the tree of life
Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.
The blood flood is the flood of love,
The absolute sacrifice.
It means: no more idols but me,
Me and you. (The Munich Mannequins 262-63).
Me and you is the daughter in her last jubilant confrontation with the archaic mother.
This incisively means the end of communication with the symbolic. Therefore, the
telephone receiver is back in its cradle. It is glittering like some dangerous weapon
threatening annihilation if not used: And the black phones on hooks / Glittering /
Glittering and digesting / Voicelessness. The snow has no voice (263).
The heart has not stopped yet (Mystic 268). Instead, there is a sweeping
identification with the beyond (Kristeva, Black Sun 136-37), a shedding of meaning and
desire towards perfection in death: I smile, a buddha, all / Wants, desire / Falling from me
like rings / Hugging their lights (Paralytic 267). Plath seems to realize the consequences
of perfection as she belongs to a nation which does not believe in the too much. This is
clear in her essay America! America!: Eccentricities, the perils of being too special,
were reasoned and cooed from us like sucked thumbs (Johnny Panic 36). This is not,
however, the perfection that Bundtzen describes as the social requirement for what it is to
be feminine, a requirement which seems inextricably associated with social constraints in
Plaths eyes (Plaths Incarnations 56). This is a perfection that aspires to wholeness in

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death and the breaking of all constraints. Plath writes: I love freedom. I deplore
constrictions and limitations. . . . I am not as wise as I have thought. I can now see, as from
a valley, the roads lying open for me, but I cannot see the end the consequences. . . .
(Letters Home 40). Plath, like the first voice in Three Women, does not wish perfection
for her child: I do not will him to be exceptional. (186). She sometimes seems to envy
those with modest hopes. Yet she cannot run from the fact that she is a perfectionist in
need of great love and jouissance, instead of mere tenderness, with a great voice of her
own although it is a silent one:
the ones
Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable
The humpback in his small, washed cottage
Under the spokes of the clematis.
Is there no great love, only tenderness?
Does the sea
Remember the walker upon it?
Meaning leaks from the molecules. (Mystic 269)
The leakage accelerates in the overall situation of retardation. This is akin to the tears
making a pool of eternity in Words where feminine stars rule forever. The leakage of
meaning and the draining of the ego result in a severance between the I and words.
These now sweep with their own momentum from the perfect poet to their destination in
the land of cockaigne (Johnny Panic 26):
The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock
That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.

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Years later I
Encounter them on the road
Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life. (Words 270)
Contusion delineates the beginning of the end: The heart shuts, / The sea slides
back / The mirrors are sheeted (271) and, finally, the woman speaker is perfected in
Edge (CP 272). Her accomplishments are the transformation of the law of the father, the
singularity of her art and ultimate jouissance. But the real final accomplishment of the
deadmost is death itself (Edge 272), which seems to take place on rather than offstage
in an illusion of Greek necessity. In fact, in her last poems, the stage is turned upside
down and the offstage becomes her arena where the act becomes a non-act, or rather a
sign of completion, a near-aesthetic harmonization of its fictious fullness, beyond
(Kristeva, Black Sun 73). The smile on her face is reminiscent of Agness smile at the end
of The Wishing Box: Her tranquil features were set in a slight, secret smile of triumph,
as if [she is] in some far country unattainable to mortal men. (Johnny Panic 55).
Now the speakers quest is over. Once her bare feet appeared in Johnny Panic and
the Bible of Dreams immobile: I cant keep my eyes away from the bare feet, and I find
myself glancing back from my typing every few minutes to see if they are still there, if
they have changed their position at all (21). Plaths bare feet have walked through her
poems, suffering because of negativity, until they reached Edge. The rose in the poem
was once in the bull of Bendylaw (CP 108): And the royal rose in the bulls belly. In this
image, the feminine relies on the symbolic to hold it in. Heterogeneity results from the fact
that the rose is buried in the darkness of the grave, but is also promising a flowery
resurrection, an alteration between death drive and life drive (Kristeva, Black Sun 155).

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Now, the rose is out of the bulls belly and hence lethal, folding everything in death. The
last sound we hear in Edge is that of the moon crackling before disappearing.
Significantly, in Plaths last poems the deadmost seems to have a prophetic
willingness to have a face to face confrontation with her destiny, which is no less heroic
than that shown in previous poems. The jouissance attained from this encounter is like that
attained from looking on the face of God: Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?
(Mystic 268). There is no remedy in this case but a total fusion with the Thing. For
Plath, [t]he girl who wanted to be God, a little god in my small way (Letters Home 40;
Journals 22) and thus nothing other than a radical, sullen atheist (Kristeva, Black Sun 4)
tries now to reach the throne of silence as a final step in her journey after her loudmouthed revolution:
I dont believe in God as a kind father in the sky. I dont believe that the
meek will inherit the earth: The meek get ignored and trampled. They
decompose in the bloody soil of war, of business, of art, and they rot into
the warm ground under the spring rains. It is the bold, the loud-mouthed, the
cruel, the vital, the revolutionaries, the mighty in arms and will, who march
over the soft patient flesh that lies beneath their cleated boots. (Journals 44)
That Edge is written on the reverse of a typescript of Wintering is significant
(Van Dyne 171). In the end, the taste of spring is an indulgence in jouissance before the
deadmost is swallowed by death and the flying bees of the semiotic turn destructively
against her. This recalls a scene described by Plath in one of her last letters to her mother:
Everything is breakingmy dinner set cracking in half, the health inspector
says the cottage should be demolishedthere is no hope for it, so I shall
have to do over the long, unfinished room in the house instead. Even my
beloved bees set upon me today when I numbly knocked aside their sugar
feeder, and I am all over stings . . . . (465)
However, Plath always reminds us of the importance of resilience. After her husband left
her, she wrote to her brother, Warren, emphasizing the importance of facing her destiny:
and you must help her [Plaths mother] see how starting my own life in the most difficult
place here not running, is the only sane thing to do (Letters Home 472). From the

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beginning, life is about confrontation: in my head I know it is too simple to wish for war,
for open battle but one cannot help but wish for those situations that make us heroic, living
to the hilt of our total resources. our [sic] cosmic fights, which I think the end of the world
is come, are so many broken shells around our growth (Journals 195). The magicians
girl who does not flinch in the blackout of knives never hides from the worst (The Bee
Meeting 212): I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it
(Letters Home 477).
In conclusion, Plath, unlike Sexton, ends her journey by facing a mother. Rather
than resorting to a patriarch, Plath rejects him to achieve transformation and jouissance.
Not afraid to die, she unleashes all her semiotic powers to reach originality and perfection
in spite of the fact that this is a destructive act. This unleashing of the semiotic has been
gradual. From the beginning until the last explosion of the drives there has been
heterogeneity in play. The difference between Sexton and Plath lies not only in the level of
the maternal and semiotic drives invested in the text, but also in the capacity to face them.
While Sexton surrenders to her fears and hides behind symbolic shields to protect her from
an abject mother, Plath courageously breaks those shields and oscillates in and out of them
to face the father of the law. And while Sexton chooses God at the end to protect her from
the released death drive that burst in her text after the break of her symbolic armour, Plath
abandons all traces of patriarchy to confront death with open eyes.

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Chapter 9
Sexton and Plath
In her essay, The Ethics of Linguistics, Kristeva launches an attack on traditional
schools of grammar. She is looking for a different practice that would allow the speaking
animal to sense the rhythm of the body as well as the upheavals of history (Desire 34).
She advocates a linguistics that is not separate from the subject and her social function. Her
theory declares the convergence of the social, political, psychoanalytic, and the aesthetic.
The subject is made and unmade by these different aspects. In Oscillation between Power
and Denial, Kristeva talks about the writing of woman as an oscillation between power as
an identification with the phallic and denial as fleeing from that same phallic. Then she
relates this writing to the social, not the whole social body that she focuses on in later
writing, as Strangers to Ourselves, but rather the family:
Women generally write in order to tell their own family story (father, mother and /
or their substitutes). When a woman novelist does not reproduce a real family of her
own, she creates an imaginary story through which she constitutes an identity:
narcissism is safe, the ego becomes eclipsed after freeing itself, purging itself of
reminiscence. (Kristeva, Oscillation 166)
Sexton and Plaths writing shows the meeting of the social, psychoanalytic and the
aesthetic in the story they tell about their families.
It is true that Plath dwelled on her fathers death for a long time Helen Vendler
reminds us that she wrote nineteen poems before her adult verse about her father (Coming
of Age 117) but she also was able to defy him in her later work. Plath first deals with her
fathers death in Electra on Azalea Path where she visits his grave for the first time to
mourn his loss. Then in The Colossus, he is perceived in magnified and God-like form
(CP 116, 129). Hughes was similarly a father-figure until, in later poems, such as Daddy
and Lady Lazarus (CP 222, 244), he is confronted and dismantled. As for Sexton, she

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started her work by addressing her doctor and psychoanalyst, then her lovers, and
incestuous father and ended with an inflated father-figure, God.
Approximately eleven years after Plath wrote her energetic, transformative
Daddy, Sexton composed two poems addressing her father, Daddy Warbucks and
Divorce, Thy Name Is Woman where the reader grows increasingly shocked by the total
submissiveness to an incestuous father (ASCP 543, 545). In fact, Sexton spent all her
journey in his velvet train:
and even my dog puts up his four feet
and lets go
of his military secret
with his big red tongue
flying up and down
like yours should have
as we board our velvet train. (Daddy Warbucks 544)
In Divorce, Thy Name Is Woman, she confesses that her fathers crime is not his incest
but that of leaving her. Therefore, she needs her mother in court not to witness their alleged
divorce, but to let her, as a rival, see their exceptional relationship:
I have been divorcing him ever since,
going into court with Mother as my witness
and both long dead or not
I am still divorcing him,
adding up the crimes
of how he came to me,
how he left me. (ASCP 545)
There is complete submission in these poems such as one cannot find in Plaths later work,
in spite of all the claims that she is also compliant to the father of her poetry.
Plaths literary relationship with her father changed after her husbands betrayal.
Following this crucial event, Plath started to attack the father instead of being submissive
to him. Hughes position as a writer and her real fathers position as a professor added a

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further dimension to the conflict. In this sense, the father stands for the symbolic and the
law, and fighting against him is not only inscribed in the personal, but also in language.
For Plath, Hughes/father is the lost love and the symbolic law that must be defied to find a
voice of her own. She sacrifices love for her father in order to defy him as law in the end.
Sexton, on the other hand, was the one who betrayed her husband. She had many
affairs, which her husband, Alfred Sexton (Kayo), knew about, and the most shocking was
with her psychiatrist. However, despite these extramarital relationships, Kayo remained
important to her as a loving and supportive husband. Although sometimes he was
aggressive to her, it was an aggression that, she admitted to her doctor, she needed (L.
Sexton 88). The reader of her daughters biography deduces that she even provoked such
fights. She wished him to act as a hurting other and beat her, the way her father had done
before, in order to wake her into life: When I feel depressed I keep wanting to hurt
myself, but he no longer [hurts me]: I need to be punished, then forgiven, [I] never realized
he was actually doing this for me (L. Sexton 110). However, this anger and conflict with
her husband was not reflected in her art. Forgiveness as passivity was important to her. Her
husband was also the symbolic father who protected her psychic borders from collapse and
made her feel secure. For this reason, Sexton used to panic when her husband, who was a
wool seller, like her father, went on a long journey: My father used to go on trips, just like
Kayo. I was brought up on this same cycle; Kayo calls on the same customers as my father
did, Kayo is now where my father used to go (Middlebrook, A Biography 166). This is
why, it is argued, she could not fight the father-figure in her work, not only for the sake of
incestuous pleasure with him, as seems always the case, or love for Kayo, but also because
she needs him for security and psychic integration. Kayo was important for her mental
health and, therefore, her women friends encouragement for her to divorce him was a
mistake that she later regretted. After her divorce, Sexton wrote: I am helpless and thirsty
and need shade / but there is no one to cover me / not even God (Divorce 513). In her
poetry, Sexton sacrificed defying the father as law for his love and security.

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Plath was also helped to subvert patriarchy by an ability to identify with her
mother. Critics have almost always focused on Plaths hatred for her mother, especially as
reflected in The Bell Jar. However, Aurelia was a high-minded woman who initiated Plath
into the world of poetry from early childhood. Wagner reports that: Aurelia systematically
and energetically recited poems and rhymes to her (A Biography 16). Reading Arnolds
The Forsaken Merman aloud, Aurelia provoked powerful responses in Sylvia: A spark
flew off Arnold and shook me, like a child I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into
a new way of being happy (Letters Home 32). Plaths mother projected all her ambitions
on her daughter and introduced her to a vision of an alternative way of life, other than the
phallocentric or the gynocentric (Joseph 19). Therefore, to identify with her mother in
writing poetry which is translated into unconscious pulsations was easier for Plath
than Sexton.
Sexton was not close to her mother, Mary Gray, as was the case with Plath and
Aurelia. Although unknown by the reading public, Mary Gray was a writer. However, she
did not try to encourage her daughter to be like her. On the contrary, she suppressed her
talent. On one occasion, Sexton wrote a poem that was published in the school year book,
which only evinced the reaction from her mother that she was guilty of plagiarism. This
event left Sexton scarred and their deteriorating relationship, as Joseph suggests, had the
effect of doubling the intensity of patriarchal oppression for Anne Sexton and reinforcing
the divide created by the father between the male and the female worlds (20, 19).
Accordingly, it was difficult for Sexton to identify with her mother and that was also
translated as fear of spasmodic force attacking her from the outside.
Plath wrote her first poem at the age of seven and from then on poetry became part
of her life. Her university education in literature, where she excelled, enhanced her talent.
As it grew, her poetry changed from imitating her predecessors to developing her own
voice. Therefore, whereas Plath wrote to be, Sexton wrote to live: Sexton thought of
death as an irrelevancy in her poetry, which is of life, whereas for Plath, death was the

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pivot of her poetry, the central myth, at the center of which she placed herself (Joseph
76). Sexton only started writing poetry intensively following her psychoanalysts advice at
the age of twenty eight.
Almost all psychological and social circumstances qualify Plath to be more in
conflict with the law of One than Sexton: the death of a powerful father, the betrayal of her
husband, and a love-hate relationship with a mother who was supportive and inspirational,
but also stifling. Plath is able to release her anal drive against the father despite the serious
consequences this might have on her psyche and her work. Sexton, as a result of her fears,
could not face a father whom she relied on for existence and security against an abject
mother. Furthermore, she could not handle the anger that might awake her from a dreamy
symbiosis with her second mother, Nana. And because of this fusion, she lived a regressive
life behind the fathers bars. Paradoxically, a lot of her poetry was a call for life, not death.
After all, the last poem from the suicidal thread in the third volume Live or Die comes
down on the final decision to Live.
Although Plaths and Sextons relation to death may appear similar, Sextons is
more passive towards death. She simply waits for it to come, a sleeping beauty. She does
not face it, question it, or even use it as a tool of reciprocity against others who cause her
pain. It simply employs its tools against her and she accepts that. In OH, Mrs. Death
seems in full control of Sexton (ASCP 302):
Meanwhile you pour tea
with your handsome gentle hands.
Then you deliberately take your
forefinger and point it at my temple,
saying, You suicide bitch!
Id like to take a corkscrew
and screw out all your brains
and youd never be back ever.
And I close my eyes over the steaming
tea and see God opening His teeth.

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Oh, He says.
I see the child in me writing, Oh.
Oh, my dear, not why. (ASCP 303)
According to A.R. Jones, the persona of Anne Sexton is essentially passive, a
patient rather than an agent, who suffers under experience. Indeed, passive suffering is one
of Anne Sextons main concerns (31). Plath, on the other hand, not only releases the death
drive in her work, but also uses death as a weapon against the other, especially the father,
in a sadomasochistic reciprocity of dying and facing death. She herself becomes an
implement of death. Plath writes: I feel like a very efficient tool or weapon, used and in
demand from moment to moment (Ames 172).
Sexton tries to resist anger. It is there sometimes, but never grows to a scream, a
harsh protest against the other, especially the father represented by different male figures in
her work. For example, in After Auschwitz, Sexton declares: Anger, / as black as a
hook, / overtakes me (ASCP 432), but when she tries to express this anger, it does not
come out full throttle:
Man is evil,
I say aloud.
Man is a flower
That should be burnt,
I say aloud.
Man
Is a bird full of mud,
I say aloud. (ASCP 433)
The refrain I say aloud, does not show Sextons anger as much as it points to her
suffocation. Some critics try to compare Sextons and Plaths anger. For example, Caroline
Hall claims that Sextons animus in The Doctor of the Heart is similar to Plaths in
Lady Lazarus (ASCP 301; CP 244). Although the two poems are analogous in form, they
do not embody the same level of anger. Sexton, as Sandra Gilbert correctly describes her,
is a watered-down Plath (165). Robert Mazzocco also notes that Anne Sextons sense

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of violence was always faltering. Violence seems never to have enhanced her work as it
did that of [. . .] Plath (175). If we compare The Doctor of the Heart to Sextons earlier
poems that address a doctor, it does sound angrier. Nevertheless, if compared to Lady
Lazarus the increase in emotion seems modest. The similarity between the two poems lies
only at the end of each:
Is there such a device for my heart?
I have only a gimmick called magic fingers.
Let me dilate like a bad debt.
Here is a sponge. I can squeeze it myself.
O heart, tobacco red heart,
beat like a rock guitar.
I am at the ships prow.
I am no longer the suicide
with her raft and paddle.
Herr Doktor! Ill no longer die
to spite you, you wallowing
seasick grounded man. (The Doctor of the Heart 302)
The final lines of Lady Lazarus as follows:
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.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

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[ . . ...........................]
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air. (CP 246-47)

Hall views the addressee in The Doctor of the Heart as an authoritarian

victimizer who is challenged by Sexton: Take away your knowledge, Doktor. / It doesnt
butter me up / You say my heart is sick unto. / You ought to have more respect! (ASCP
301). She argues that in this poem diffidence and subservience are gone and the persona
is rude, reckless, and unafraid of anger (117). Hall adds that Sexton may have found
safety in adopting childlike postures in earlier poems, but here she has developed a purer,
more courageous self-expression. But is not saying Ill no longer die / to spite you
childlike? (ASCP 302). If she really does not care about him, she will die, instead of
rejecting death to annoy him. He is still important to her as an authority and a loving other.
He is, after all, the doctor of the heart, as the title describes him. While he is the authority
of the poem, Lady Lazarus is the authority of Plaths poem. Hall claims that Plath
amplifies and reinforces Sextons poem, although Sextons poem is the later of the two.
She insists that both poems have the same defiant message to the doktor: go away.
Leave me alone. I mean to take care of myself (119). However, in Lady Lazarus, Plath
does more than that. She cannibalizes the doctor/father. Moreover, Halls contends that
each [poem] presents a red, fiery resurrection of the speaker, newly bold and
contemptuous (119). However, whereas the red-haired witch at the end of Plaths poem
swallows men, although such an act is dangerous for the personas identity, the red heart
of Sexton simply beats like a rock guitar and belongs to her doktor. The rocking of her
heart and being at a safe ship, instead of a suicidal raft, means that Sexton belongs to
life which also means that she is still under the doctors authority.

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The magic fingers of the witch-writer in Sextons The Doctor of the Heart
are not as dangerous as those of Plaths witch. In Her Kind (ASCP 15), this witch that
goes out only under the cover of night is pathetic: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of
mind. Although dreaming evil, she is, in fact, harmless, and simply whin[es] (ASCP
16). Even when she is in the woods, she finds a cave for shelter. The poem ends with a
seemingly courageous step towards death: A Woman like that is not ashamed to die. / I
have been her kind. However, Sexton uses the word ashamed instead of afraid. Ellen
Merriman Capo explains that shame requires an awareness of others as separate from the
self that others form an audience (36). Sexton is not ashamed of exposure in this sense,
but fear is something else. Capo asks: Why does one intuitively expect the last line to
read: is not afraid to die? (36). In fact, Greg Johnson unconsciously makes this very slip
when he quotes the line (85). Sextons fear of death, it is argued, is what prevents her witch
from saying the word. Capo asks again: Does brutal treatment which should call forth
anger or aggression produce submission in Sexton? (36). Capo refutes her own
uncertainties, which are justified, to view Sextons tone as not resigned but resistant. Since
Sexton is unable to face the abject and the sweeping bodily drives in her text, she resigns,
while Plaths witch remains unashamed and, not afraid, eats men like air.
As a result of her fear of an abject mother and of losing another, Sexton stands still.
The death drive does not permeate her poetry enough to make a dynamic movement
between her and the other, which can lead to transformation. And when dynamism appears
towards the end of her career, she tries to bury it. Crossing the frontier inside and
outside, Plath is able to show more violent reciprocity and oscillation between I and the
other and between presence and absence. Violent irruption by the maternal and the
semiotic makes her text flexible to change and revolt.

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Conclusion

By using a psychoanalytical perspective, this study demonstrates that in Sextons

and Plaths work transgressing the law of One begins in the subject. A Kristevan
perspective on psychoanalysis is pivotal for grasping the significance of the destabilization
of the subject and her identity in relation to the aesthetic process. It offers a model of a
subject in process, changing and capable of transformation, committed not only to a rigid
linguistic structure, but also emotion. It challenges a new trend of studies that ignores the
suffering and passions of the subject of the writer by treating her only as an intellect in
complete control of her work, thereby taking us back to an obsolete definition of the
subject.
Subjective attributes, namely negativity and abjection, can affect the poetic voice
and its ability to transform the law of the father. In the poetry of Sexton and Plath, the
greater the death drive in the form of anger and psychic fluidity, the greater the
transformation of the law. Negativity in Plaths work is more violent and transformative,
defying the other in reciprocity. She oscillates between I and the other, the symbolic and
the semiotic, presence and absence, and language and silence. This confrontational
dialectic, which is part of the signifying process, is defined as heterogeneity.
In terms of abjection, there is fluidity between inside and outside. Plath tried,
from the beginning of her work, to break down her proper psychic borders and move to the
outside. By becoming too ambitious as an outsider, she lost her borders completely. She
then regained them by the appearance of an other in her work. However, it was not until
personal anger seeped into her work that her unique voice was created and masochistic
reciprocity was able to change the patriarchal function. The death drive was released in a
violent momentum towards transformation, in stark contrast with Sextons fears of
confrontation. In comparison, Sexton is afraid to show anger or trespass beyond her proper

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psychic borders in order to confront outside an abject mother. She is also fearful of
abandoning her second mother inside. In other words, and in terms of abjection, her
borders are rigid where it is hard to move between inside and outside. When the
maternal abject bursts in her poetry involuntarily, she performs cleansing rituals and
gravitates to her father/God again for security.
It is necessary in this study to stress a new definition of Confessional poetry
depending on Kristevas psychoanalytic approach. In this new perspective, Confessional
Poetry is still regarded as biographical, but not in the pejorative sense of the word, which
focuses only on the pathological side of the story. Rather it helps to delineate the
potentialities of the writer and her creative process regardless of the personal consequences
of such writing. Moreover, this new concept of Confessional writing pays attention to the
uniqueness and singularity of each writer. It highlights differences among these writers
instead of similarities. After all, change starts within the particular subjectivity of each
poet. In fact, bracketing together Plath and Sexton as Confessional women poets affects
their individuality. For Plath, heterogeneity is the source of motility and creativity. In this
context, she is the Kristevan subject in process or the deadmost, oscillating between
identification with the mother and the father. Therefore, she is able to transgress the law by
releasing the death drive and facing death in a variety of ways. Her poetry is blood jet, a
creativity that connotes murder and life, violation and logical conformity, and a
masochistic fluctuation between the conscious and the unconscious.
Passivity is the general characteristic of Sextons work, unlike Plaths renewal and
love of change (Ocean 1212-W 122). As a result of her fear, Sexton cannot encounter
an abject mother. Neither can she defy a father who is responsible for the integration of her
body-ego against a disintegrating maternal. In this context, many obstinate shields, the
forms of which seem at first Euclidean, are discussed as proper borders which help Sexton
to relinquish her fears and delay the irruption of the semiotic and the maternal abject in her
text. The subject of Sextons poetry is thus termed the dead/less. She has less ability than

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Plath to express the violent fragmentation and the dissolution of the I (that is, her death
in poetry) while confronting the other. Although her text might be heterogeneous at times
because of the involuntary irruption of the semiotic, it is not enough to achieve
transformative jouissance. Sexton fears to defy anybody she needs or loves. In fact, she
sacrificed defiance of the law for love, for being in the symbolic. The unity of the body and
psyche is as important to Sexton as dying in perfection. Disintegration, which causes
change and motility, is terrifying for her.
Another aspect to consider in relation to Plath and Sextons poetry is feminism.
Kristevas position on feminism can be justified by an understanding of the poets work.
Although Kristevas feminist thought is rejected by some critics (Oliver 1), the notion of
the semiotic as a revolutionary aspect of her theory becomes important to artistic and
political change. Kristeva has been criticized for not advocating the political movements of
women (Fraser 60-67, Butler 81). She has also been criticized for focusing on the maternal
as deterministic, biological motherhood (Butler 80, Stanton 176-177). However, it is
through a microcosmic change that the political can take place. This is not to neglect what
is political; rather it is a matter of priorities. Changing the subject will definitely lead to
cultural change, as the subject is the basic unit of a culture. Moreover, it is not only the
biological mother that is essential for change, but also the feminine in general. As has been
demonstrated in Plath and Sexton, the feminine manifesting itself as the semiotic in
language, threatens the law. A woman can challenge phallic primacy if she releases the
power of her drives and involves herself in a master-slave transgressive revolt.
Some aspects of Kristevas theory, however, do not withstand the same scrutiny.
Although she may emphasize oscillation and heterogeneity, this study shows how her ideas
sometime fall into the trap of exclusion. Many times, Kristeva puts the subject in front of a
perplexing choice, which Plath and Sexton defy. For example, she underlines two paths for
the daughter: identification either with the father or the mother. She also pinpoints two
options: burying the crypt of the mother in the daughters psyche and thus resulting in the

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inability to mourn or introjecting it in order to be part of the symbolic, either a pull to death
or to life. In defiance of Kristevas system, Plath fluctuates between two identifications,
and Sexton adopts two mothers: one is thrown away and one is engulfed, while the father
works as a protection against the threat of the mothers.
Furthermore, where Kristeva stresses the spoken unspeakable, this study reassesses
the meaning of silence. Both can be seen as manifesting the subjects grief and her powers
of change. That is to say, although the semiotic defies conventional language, it is
manifested as language. Even silence is spoken. In this sense, Kristevas argument
resembles conventional feminist, psychoanalytical discourse where total silence is not
appreciated as power. However, Plaths poetry, especially in terms of transcendence, gives
thought to a silence beyond the text. This transcendence becomes a complete fusion with
the mother as an ultimate defiance of the law of the father in the signifying process, a final
word in an argument. This might be interpreted as a Lacanian way of seeing the feminine
completely outside of language. Hence, what is termed The Siren Voice of the Other
articulates the notion of voice and silence working together in the process of transgressing
the law. It is a violent, dynamic voice that defies the father through subversive
heterogeneity, resulting from the violent eruption of the semiotic and ending with a defying
silence. Therefore, the woman is not only capable of pulverizing the thetic, which reflects
her suffering, but also of creating ultimate silence as the most deadly act. This happens
when the somatic drive is at its peak both as pain and jouissance. Moreover, the singing
voice exhibits dynamism in each of Plaths later poems as a movement between presence
and absence, authority and passivity, as well as a movement between death in realm of the
semiotic and rebirth in the realm of the symbolic. It also represents a movement between
writing and silence across poems. Silence, therefore, is as authoritative and powerful as
voice.
For the first time, this study examines both Plath and Sexton from a Kristevan
perspective. In the past, discussion has focused predominantly on Sextons feminism.

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However, this study demonstrates how fear made her an ally of the symbolic. The
imaginary father that exists in Sextons work turns out to be, in the end, the Lacanian
Name of the Father. Furthermore, although other studies examine Sextons relationship
with her first mother and with her Nana, they do so separately. Here, they are discussed as
two forces pulling Sexton in different directions and thereby leading to her passivity: one
mother is jettisoned outside the symbolic border, returning as the repressed, while the other
is not abandoned. Such passivity in writing can be expressed in terms of orality. Sexton is,
generally speaking, hungry in her poems. She does not consume maternal food, although
she does sometimes eat to compensate for her abject mother being behind her bars. Instead,
she devours language, which justifies her long narrative style in contrast to Plaths free
verse. She is not as able, like Plath, to fall back into fearful silence because it risks losing
her symbolic protection. Plath is able, in contrast, to oscillate between writing and silence,
not only devouring words, as Sexton did, but also being devoured by an archaic mother.
Under the pressure of the abject mother from the outside and the introjections of the
mother inside, Sextons poetry witnesses the burst of the abject, defined in this study for
the first time as negative maternal forces. This ultimately brings positive change to the
poetry.
It is further demonstrated that Plath is able to defy the authority of the father and in
her final poetry the semiotic takes the upper hand. This is not a total triumph, but more a
pyrrhic victory with strong elements of defeat. While Sexton dies out of fear of death,
Plath dies confronting it. Previous Kristevan studies have focused on the relationship
between the daughter and her mother and children only, so neglecting the daughter-father
relationship. For the most part they did not see transcendence as positive, but as a resort to
patriarchy, away from maternal immanence. This study treats transcendence as silence, as
a fusion with the maternal, in an act of rebellion against the father and a final assertion in
an argument. The act is also considered threatening because it is a fall into a pre-linguistic
space, which means giving up language and the social world of meaning. Therefore,

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Plaths subject always makes a separation from such fusion in order to go back to
writing. Additionally, it is stressed, and this is also true for Sexton, suffering, and not
intellect only, is part of the poetic process. For Plath, furthermore, time is a manifestation
of this oscillation between consciousness and unconsciousness.
Plath committed suicide when she was much younger than Sexton (Plath died at the
age of thirty while Sexton was forty-six). Sextons clinging to the symbolic enabled her to
survive longer. Although this might be true for Kristeva and other critics, it has serious
ethical implications as it suggests the poet is in a race towards the grave that nature
imitates art. The primary concern here, nevertheless, is how the poet faces death in her
poems, not the reality of her suicide. In this sense, the authors experiences embedded in
the works become primary, and biographical information which may elucidate the works
becomes secondary (Miller 301). The personal does not necessarily mean, as some critics
try to claim, the focus should be on the life of the poet rather than her work. It is rather
seen through the work of art as different positions in language; it is indeed in the core of
the aesthetic process. Gill rejects personal readings of the poets since they imply that the
better poet is the one that has the fiercest of emotions at the expense of formal control
(Gill, Anne Sexton 12). Paradoxically, in spite of the intensity of emotions Plath releases in
her text, she has more aesthetic control than Sexton, whose loose craftsmanship,
particularly at the end of her career, has been criticized by many (Middlebrook, A
Biography 379-80; Ostriker, That Story 251; Spacks 188-89; Pollit 70). Jon Rosenblatt
observes that the wildness of emotion [in Plaths later work] is contained and channeled
through [different] structures (169). However, this control does not rely on the rigid forms
of her earlier poetry. Rather, Plath uses evocative language that does not interrupt the flow
of the poems. Therefore, Kristevas attempt to stress the syntactic elisions and the
dissolving and tearing apart of the symbolic thesis in poetic language does not mean, as she
tries to insinuate, losing control over form (Desire 134, 165). Plaths poetry witnesses this
controlled uncontrolledness of the death drive in her late poetry where the law of One is

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radically defied. [R]eady for enormity (A Birthday Present 207), she is the deadmost
and her voice is The Siren Voice of the Other.
In the light of this study, a new reading of Confessional poetry does not, therefore,
necessarily mean neglecting the personal history of the poet. Critical objectivity should not
be understood simply as ignoring the feelings of the writer and the narrative of her life.
The focus on the aesthetic process and the aesthetic identity of the writer as rooted in real
life can also guarantee objectivity. In reading Confessional writing and keeping all the
elements of poetry active, whether they be personal, social or aesthetic, the critic creates a
balance that may be lost if the personal is completely eliminated. This kind of reading
applies to all other Confessional poets, including male writers, such as Robert Lowell, John
Berryman, and W.D. Snodgrass. Male writers as well as female writers can defy and
transform the law of One by relying on the semiotic and its feminine characteristics.
Through tracing the process of the eruption of the semiotic in their texts depending on their
life story, one can follow their aesthetic evolution and its potential for transformation.

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Notes
Introduction

This law of One is equivalent to Lacans Name of the Father who is associated with the

instigation of symbolic law. See Lacan, Seminar III: 96.

2

Eliots impersonal theory of poetry (44) is discussed in his essay Tradition and the Individual

Talent. See Eliot 39-49.

3

Jane Hedley agrees that Sextons work is dated and that her historical moment has passed

(150).
4

Plaths question in her 1959 journal, What to do with anger? as Axelrod sees it was Plaths

key personal and creative question (110). In her anger, he explains, she was defying her literary
mother, Virginia Woolf, who did not advocate anger for women writers (110).
5

Negativity is an important Hegelian concept. However, for Kristeva, as Maria Margaroni

explains, the dialectic of the symbolic and the semiotic is never reconcilable, as is the case with
Hegel; the two modes are of antagonistic nature (6). For a detailed explanation of the term
negativity, see Lechte and Margaroni 18-23.
6

The deadmost (plus mort) is a term that Kristeva borrows from Sollers novel, H, in her essay

The Novel as Polylogue in Desire in Language.

7

Studlar explains this position in reference to Deleuze. However, McClure R. Smith does point

out that Kristeva and Deleuze have the same perspective on masochism.

The master-slave dialectic, which is also translated as Lordship and Bondage, comes from a

passage in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. This dialectic occurs when one self-conscious being
struggles with another self-conscious being. The result is that the winner becomes the master and
the loser the slave. This is a better choice than when the self ignores the other and thus supersedes
itself or when the self becomes paralysed by a mirror-like other. Although the master attains
ascendency because he fears death less, he depends on the slave for recognition and economic
production. In this sense, the slave becomes stronger until the painful struggle begins again, which

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eventually leads to a higher unity when both the master and the slave realize that they are
interdependent.
9

The essay entitled Womens time is also published in Kristevas New Maladies of the Soul
201-24.
10

11

12

Anne-Marie Smiths translation has been adopted for this passage instead of Mois translation.
This jouissance encompasses simultaneous sexual, physical and spiritual pleasure .
The psyche belongs to the symbolic. In order to be integrated, it repudiates the soma which,

nevertheless, threatens the borders of the cultural psyche afterwards.

13

Lilia Loman argues that although Kristevas project defines the death drive in terms of

ambivalent heterogeneous tension, life and renewal, she believes that there is a hidden teleological
approach underneath. Loman thinks Kristeva constantly implies the reduction of the author to a
non-being, an absence (87).
14

The two places that Blanchot discusses originally appeared in a passage in Kafkas diaries dated

28 January, 1922. For more details, see Kafka 407-8.

15

Julia Kristeva was one of the first to introduce Mikhail Bakhtins work to the West by writing her

essay Word, Dialogue and Novel, which was translated in Desire in Language. This essay draws
on two books by Bakhtin: Rabelais and His World and Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics. Kristeva
was influenced by the idea of dialogism presented in the latter book, where Bakhtin abandoned the
traditional static, mechanistic text for one which is disrupted and transformed by the other side of
language (Moi, Kristeva Reader 34). Bakhtin emphasizes that all relationships in the novel are
dialogic in character not only in relation to heroes but also in relation to every word of the novel,
making it double-voiced (Problems 40). The speaking subject, in this sense, becomes
nonintegrated, producing a subversive language that defies authority. This is where Bakhtins
dialogism coincides with his idea of the carnival and the Menippean text. In Reblais, Bakhtin
speaks about the language of carnival as a transformative one that threatens the law and prohibitive
discourse. He talks about the joy of change and renewal, a gay transformation and a laughter
that purifies the consciousness of men from false seriousness (Rabelais 83, 91, 141). Kristevas
reading of Bakhtins dialogue and ambivalence led to her own idea of intertexuality where poetic

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language is double. This means that any text is the absorption and transformation of another,
which gives space to a multiplicity of meanings (Desire 66).

16

Paul Mitchell applies this idea of a silence beyond the text only to Plaths last poetry.

17

The Sirens were mentioned in Homers The Odyssey. Living on an island, they were beautiful,

but evil creatures, who lured sailors to their death with their singing. Odysseus, however, outwitted
them by having himself tied to the ships mast and by plugging his mens ears with wax. For full
details of the story, see Homer 190-94. For definition of the Sirens, see Barber 240. For their use in
English literature, see Norton and Rushton 341-342.
18

As Viola Mecke observes, the attachment to the Sirens is based on a singing-listening

connection, i.e., it depends on communication.

19

For more about Kristevas association of the semiotic with the maternal and how it has been

attacked because of its seeming essentialization, see Lechte and Margaroni 24-25.
20

Paula M. Salvios Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance, for example, is a study that uses

Kristeva, Lacan, Morrison, Torok, and Winnicott, among others. However, her study is a
pedagogical one, which emphasizes the importance of the social and the personal in the process of
teaching, using Anne Sextons strategies as a teacher as a model.

21

For the purposes of this research, Hands translation in Mois The Kristeva Reader shows the

connection between the poetry and the act of suicide of these poets more clearly than Anita
Barrows translation of the same text in About Chinese Women.
22

23

Blosser defines this term in relation to prose as crossing over into new land.
A genotext is set in contrast to a phenotext, according to Kristeva. The phenotext is a structure

that is subjugated to linguistic rules, while the genotext is a process, which is a semiotic
disposition, constrained by the phenotext, exists within it, and breaks its rules. See Kristeva,
Revolution 86-89.

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Chapter 1: Sexton, The Ouroboros

24

Jane Hedley suggests that, more typically, the you Sexton conjures up is adult and male, a

father-doctor-mentor figure (25).

25

Desire is related to the symbolic order where meaning and structure take place, while jouissance

is an enjoyment that is related to the symbolic and its beyond, where meaning is on the verge of
collapse. Jouissance has to do with fusion rather than construction.

26

Jacqueline Rose has endorsed Middlebrooks opinion of Love Poems. However, she thinks that

although Sextons relationship with her daughter Linda might be an enactment of this longing for
the mother, its literality contaminates the dream. For more details, see Roses On Not Being.

27

Yeats learned this quotation from a Hindu friend, Mohini Chatterjee, who visited Dublin in 1885.

When Yeats asked him if he should pray, the Brahmin instructed him to say before going to sleep:
I have lived many lives, I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knees

and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again
(Ellmann 44).
28

For example, see Honton 115-20, and Hall 80.

Chapter 2: Geometry and Abjection

29

The degree zero of spatialization is a phrase used by Kristeva in response to Burgins paper at

a conference at the University of Warwick, May, 1987. To read Kristevas full comment, see
Burgins notes 122.
30

This poem is not published in The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. It first appeared in Antioch

Review 19 (1959) 150. It was collected by Middlebrook and George under the title Early Poems
in Selected Poems of Anne Sexton.
31

For Diana Hume George, Christopher is the male principle within Sexton. See George, Oedipus

81. The name Christopher could also refer to the poet Christopher Smart, whose way of writing

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poetry influenced Sexton in The Death Notebooks and whose life has some similarities with hers.
See Hall 144.
32

Magi is the plural of the Persian word magus which means a magician. See Serjeantson

228.
33

M. L. Rosenthal and Gall suggests that all the seventeen poems in The Divorce Papers refer to

the actual story of Sextons divorce in 1973, followed by a transitory love affair and then later her
trajectory towards suicide. They equate her success in renouncing the lover with the triumph of the
suicidal compulsion which dominates her last poetry (20). As these poems show a violent eruption
of death drive, they can be read especially The Lost Lie and The Love Plant as also
related to the maternal.
34

See Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm.

35

In her book We Heal from Memory, Cassie Premo Steele also believes that Sexton was a survivor

of traumatic childhood sexual abuse. Steele contends that Sextons life, as well as her poetry, is full
of signs which point to that trauma. However, through her poetry, Sexton was able to heal her
wounds and survive her trauma.

Chapter 3: The Secret Within

36

These terms originally belong to Sandor Ferenczi and were developed by Nicolas Abraham and

Maria Torok in their book The Shell and the Kernel. To review their definition of incorporation and
introjection in detail, see the two essays The Illness of Mourning 107-24, and Mourning or
Melancholia: Introjection Versus Incorporation 125-38.
37

The excerpt of the transcript of one of Sextons therapy tapes clearly shows her relation to Nana

and the difficult psychological decision she faced on whether to kill her. In this excerpt, Sexton
asks her psychiatrist: Why did I want to kill Nana? Then she later acquires: Why would I try to
become Nana? That does not make any sense: I try to become Nana in order to kill her? And the
doctor replies: in order not to lose her. Its what we do when we cant let people die. For the
whole excerpt, see Middlebrook, A Biography 401-3.

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38

The title of the poem is in fact Dr Ornes office phone number.

39

As the poem Keeping the City begins with the lines: Once, / in August, / head on your chest,

Scalapino suggests that the addressee is Linda Sexton. She explains, based on Linda Sextons
biography, that the head on the chest refers to a game the mother used to play with Linda called
play nine where Sexton used to put her head on Lindas chest, pretending that she is a little nineyear-old girl, and the latter pats her head, thereby anticipating a series of prospective sexually
abusive acts. For more details, see Scalapino 61-67. However, Scalapino notices how Sexton blurs
her identity with that of her daughter. Therefore, what happens in the poem can be read as what
happens within Anne Sextons own chest and not in the context of her relationship with her
daughter.
40

Frances Bixler also notices that knowledge of evil is the source for much of Sextons poetic

energy. See Bixler 217.

41

Kristeva explains the relation between magic and the semiotic and the maternal by stating that

[m]agic, shamanism, esoterism, the carnival, and incomprehensible poetry all underscore the
limits of socially useful discourse and attest to what it represses: the process that exceeds the
subject and his communicative structure (Revolution 16).
42

As has been noted earlier, Kristeva changed her position later about the ability of poetry to cure

the poet.
43

Middlebrook and George, in their introduction to Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, emphasize the

narrative voice of Sextons poetry which they see as a personal narration of the story of a character
named Anne. Storyteller, they say, was Sextons favourite label for her role (xiii). Moreover,
although McGowan argues that Sexton brings silence to her work as irruptions in her text which
makes the speaker, according to him, Kristevas bearer of death he believes that by producing
more and more words Sextons poems resist the abyssal moment at the end of language when the
individual passes from life into death, from the word into silence. In other words, she fills the
abyss with words instead of silence. See McGowan 104, 110.

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Chapter 4: Hegira to the Name of the Father

44

Other friends, who used to accompany Sexton because of her fear of going out alone, were

Maxine Kumin, Lois Ames, and Anne Wilder. See Middlebrook 196, 243, 237-39.
45

Philip McGowans Anne Sexton and Middle Generation Poetry: The Geography of Grief shares a

framework with Jo Gills book in that they both stress the consciousness of Sextons project which
tries to demonstrate the uncertainty of language. Both focus on the importance of Sextons words
which are not disconnected from her contemporary world and culture and not her personal world.
One can add the work of Melanie Waters to this line of critics with a new approach to Sexton.
46

See No Evil Star 50, 52, and 184.

47

The essay is My Sweeney, Mr. Eliot: Anne Sexton and the Impersonal Theory of Poetry.

48

Sexton used to suffer from immense fear of stomach ache as a result of chronic constipation. See

Middlebrook, A Biography 238.

49

This poem is quoted in Gills Anne Sextons Confessional Poetics 194.

50

See note 18.

51

Lacans theory was attacked by many feminists for, among many other aspects, not enabling the

woman to transgress the law. For more details, see Colebrook and Cranny-Francis.
52

In her book, Imagining Incest, Swiontkowski assumes that both Sexton and Plath were unable to

transgress their incestuous relationship with their fathers through their poetry, unlike Adrienne
Rich and Sharon Olds. Although the present study agrees with her opinion in connection with
Sexton, it finds the situation different in connection with Plath who was able to transgress her
relationship with her father.
53

Lynette McGrath also argues that God in Sextons late religious verse becomes all-inclusive,

literally omnipresent, Protean, androgynous, non-authoritarian. Even in The Rowing Endeth,

McGrath fails to see God as oppressive and argues that her union with Him is a liberating
experience of death. See, McGrath 146- 49. Her reading is close to McGowans in its reference to
God as the Absolute (death).

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54

It is worth noting that the island mentioned in the poem is reminiscent of Squirrel Island in Maine

where Sextons grandfather Arthur Gray Staples used to own a summer home, in which she and her
two sisters spent a happy childhood. This island is the place where the fathers of her personal and
mythic lives congregated (169). For full detail of this island and Sextons life there see Georges
article Anne Sextons Island God. Moreover, George in her Oedipus insists in a reference to the
island: The quest for the father-god appears to overwhelm the matriarchal deity whom Sexton
searched out with equal diligence but could not as clearly name (54).
55

Basing his discussion on Blanchots ideas about suicide in The Space of Literature, McGowan

asserts that Sexton recognized in her poetry the difference between death and dying and that
suicide comes as the final response to fear, not of death, but of dying, not of life, but of living
(128). It could be argued that this is something that Sexton not only recognized, but also lived.

Chapter 5: Plath, the Pharmakos

56

Pamela Smith believes that although Nims talks about the continuity between The Colossus and

Plaths later work, he uses pejorative words to describe The Colossus such as drudgery. This,
according to Smith, weakens his position. See Smith 112.

57

The reason for depending on the collection of 1981, rather than that of 1965, is articulated by

Hughes in the introduction to the former:

The Ariel eventually published in 1965 was a somewhat different volume from the
one she [Plath] had planned. It incorporated most of the dozen or so poems she had
gone on to write in 1963, though she herself, recognizing the different inspiration
of these new pieces, regarded them as the beginnings of a third book. It omitted
some of the more personally aggressive poems from 1962, and might have omitted
one or two more if she had not already published them herself in magazines so
that by 1965 they were widely known. The collection that appeared was my
eventual compromise between publishing a large bulk of her work including
much of the post-Colossus and pre-Ariel verse -- and introducing her late work
more cautiously, printing perhaps only twenty poems to begin with. (15)
Many critics feel that the poems not included in the 1965 Ariel were omitted by Hughes because
they refer to his infidelity.

58

Ricocheting is a word often used by Plath in her Journals.

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59

This is a word Plath employed in one of her early poems related to her creativity, The

Disquieting Muses (CP 74).

60

In this essay Kristeva states: it [heterogeneity] goes by various names according to the

conceptual framework of the theory that posits it and the level of its operation. But the name
always designates something irreducible, a disquieting heterogeneousness, outside the
transcendental enclosure within which we are otherwise constrained by phenomenology and its
relative, linguistics (40).

61

The expression dark continent was first used by Freud to refer to the ambiguity of the sexual

life of women. Kristeva refers to this term as maternal continent, a lost territory (Tales of Love
234). The original term is in Freuds Standard Edition vol. 20, 212.

62

Emerson discusses his ideal perspective on nature mainly in his essay Nature. See Emerson, 9-

39.
63

The eponymous thin people are seen as war victims by some critics. See, for example,

Britzolakis 207-8. The whole poem has also been dismissed as wholly psychotic. See, for
example Ostriker 101. Holbrook looks at it in both lights. He believes that the poem must be about
the victims of concentration camps if it is to be read sanely. However, according to him, it was
originally an insane poem. For full explanation of the poem, see Holbrook 243-44.
64

This poem alludes to a painting by Paul Klee entitled Departure of the Ghost.

65

In her essay The Bounded Text, Kristeva explains how, in the second half of the Middle Ages,

the ideologeme (a mode of textual organization) of sign replaced the ideologeme of the symbol. For
example, myth and epic are forms of the ideologeme of symbol since they are homogeneous,
universal, static, and close-ended. Kristeva describes this ideologeme as having vertical
dimension and is thus articulated as metaphor. The ideologeme of the sign, in contrast, is
heterogeneous, dynamic and open-ended. According to Kristeva, it has horizontal dimension and
thus articulated as metonym.

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66

Annas looks at the landscape in Ariel from a cultural rather than a psychological point of view.

Therefore the landscape is contemporary: an office, a battlefield or concentration camp, a kitchen,

a hospital where the female protagonist is entrapped (96).
67

Many critcs agree with this opinion. For example, see Hayman 41; Christodoulides 169.

68

In contrast to this opinion, Barbara Johnson argues that an ideal motherhood, as the very opposite

of violence, does not exist. Therefore we should not blame Aurelia Plath for falling short of that
ideal. Unless we stop blaming the mother, Johnson argues, we will not be freed from the
constraints of the ideal. See Johnson 93.
69

This expression was used by Plath to describe her relationship with her mother in the Journals

(447). Christodoulides used this expression later throughout her discussion of this relationship.
70

John Beer also views Plaths personality as mercurial and constantly changing; a dispersed

range of energies work in her psyche, as opposed to Ted Hughes, who has strong consciousness,
a well organized centripetal system, and a fixed identity (146, 155, 172). Beers argument is not
intended to prefer one poet over another, but to show how Plath and Hughes, as well as their work,
are different like their Romantic predecessors. Plath in her plays between stability and energy is
closer to the mercurial Coleridge, while Hughes is closer to Wordsworth (158). Beer shows how
Plath and Hughess difference initially served to complement each other, but that later on, it led to
the tragic consequences, as Plaths psychic condition after the separation. For the full argument, see
Beer 141-74.
71

This movement described by Broe is more to do with a technical poetic control achieved by Plath

in her late volumes, a conscious ability for protean emotional exploration. Therefore, this elastic
shifting is, in Broes view, not psychological. It is rather Plaths full control over her materials and
her ability to mould emotions into different forms. For this reason, Broe does not believe in a
biographical approach to Plaths work under any circumstances.

72

In her biography, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, Anne Stevenson argues that rage was

responsible for Plaths creativity. Anger in Plath is presented as antisocial behaviour and

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aggression and sometimes as demonic possession, due to her social isolation as a girl or her
fathers death, but never due to Ted Hughes or her mother (4). Hughess infidelity seems to be
completely blamed on Plath. Moreover, everyone, including Plaths family, friends and neighbours
seem to be the innocent victims of her insensitive, behaviour or her aggressive pen (266).
According to the present study, violence and anger might have their root in Plaths character, but
they find expression as creative vitality, energy and intensity rather than as antisocial behaviour.
Social pressures, it can be argued, intensified the level of that anger. Stevensons accusations
against Plath may be understood when one knows that she received significant help from Olwyn
Hughes, the literary agent for the Estate of Sylvia Plath, and thus one may doubt the ultimate
motives of her book. In her memoir, Plaths friend Jillian Becker shows how Stevenson, with the
help of Olwyn, manipulated the facts she had told them and how some of the main events she
narrated to them were deleted from Bitter Fame, while carrying other testimonies antagonistic to
Plath, like that of Dido Merwin. See Becker 55-56. Moreover, in his biography, Rough Magic, Paul
Alexander reveals a letter written by Ted Hughes in 1963 and deposited by Plaths mother in the
Lilly Library at Indiana University until the formers death. In this, Hughes himself confesses that
his madness contributed to Plaths depression and suicide (xvi).
73

Wagner takes these lines from a poem written by Ted Hughes entitled The Shot (Birthday

Letters 16-17). She argues that in this poem Hughes accepts the blame for Plaths death (45).
Although this might be true of this single poem, and of a few other poems, Birthday Letters as
whole tries to throw the blame on fate. Hughes is represented as the helpless husband dragged
involuntarily, along with his wife, to inevitable doom. While we might have a certain sympathy for
this opinion, we feel less so when Hughes throws responsibility on other peoples shoulders like
Dr. Ruth Beuscher, who is accused of practising destructive psychoanalysis with Plath in NightRide on Ariel (Birthday Letters 174). However, he was right to point that her art was made out of
a Mummy-Daddy duet (Birthday Letters 169):
Of Mummy Daddy Mummy Daddy
Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy
Mummy Mummy (Blood and Innocence)

74

For example see Rose, Haunting 146; Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath 44-45.

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Chapter 6: Subversive Heterogeneity

75

Freud defines the fetish as any non-sexual object, such as a foot or a piece of clothing, which

abnormally excites erotic feelings as an after-affect of some sexual impression in childhood. Freud
suggested that the fetish stands for the males fear of female castration. In other words, it represents
a womans penis, the absence of which is substituted by the fetish object. Freud only focuses on
perverted male behaviour when discussesing this term, but never that of females (as in the case of
Plath) or normal males. For more details on Freuds views on fetishism, see The Standard Edition
vol. 7, 153-55.

76

This interview is quoted from the notes in Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems 239.

77

Jahan Ramazani has argued for this primordial loss of the mother in Daddy as suggested by

Kristeva. (see Ramazani 1150). Some critics such as Bredsdorff, Jennifer Draskau explains, go
further and suggest that Daddy is nothing but a cipher for Mother (Draskau 93). As Plath
cannot attack her living mother directly, her feelings of hatred are canalized into the other dead
parent. Though Draskau believes that Bredsdorffs attempt to exorcize both parents at once in
Daddy cannot be fully successful, she agrees that Plaths ambivalent relationship with the mother
is what is responsible for the tension in her work. The present study agrees that that the daughtermother relationship is essential in Plaths work, but that it does not delete the role of the father and
the symbolic from Plaths work. Plaths father, and his later substitute, Ted Hughes, are also
essential in forming Plaths dilemma, the termination of which becomes the end of her career and
maybe the end of her life.

78

Many critics have protested at Plaths use of images relating to the Holocaust. For example,

George Steiner asks about the legitimacy of using such imagery by anyone not involved in such an
event (218). In fact, he accuses poets of larceny as they appropriate the Holocaust for their private
suffering. Irving Howe takes an even fiercer position than Steiner when he describes such
appropriation as monstrous and utterly disproportionate, refusing Steiners positive stance
describing Plaths Daddy as the Guernica of modern poetry (232-33). Seamus Heaney
criticizes Plaths poetry as rampage[ing] so permissively in the history of other peoples sorrows,

303
while Bedient describes Plath as climb[ing] to self-importance over the bodies of the dead (The
Government 165; Sylvia 5). In addition, Marjorie Perloff emphasizes the same idea of the
illegitimacy of identifying with the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust, describing it as a
hollow ring (Sylvia Plaths Sivvy Poems 173). After several decades, however, other critics
have moved on from previous opinions and started to look at the reference to the Holocaust in
Plaths poetry as part of a historical and linguistic discourse. For example, Jacqueline Rose insists
that the issue is not whether Plath has the right to represent the Holocaust, but what the presence
of the Holocaust in her poetry unleashes, or obliges us to focus, about representation as such
(205). Moreover, Antony Rowland views Plaths Holocaust poetry as an ethical response to
history and an artistic rupture sensitive to recent history (174, 176). He stresses the poets selfconscious, imaginative reflection on the event in poetry, which enables a better understanding of
Holocaust writing (177).
79

This reciprocity refutes Oates argument that Plath made poetry out of her paranoia, which set

boundaries between the I and the other, looked at as overwhelming, destructive, and engulfing.
For the full argument, see Oates 26-45.
80

In her article, Smith regards Kristeva has having a common perspective on masochism with

Deleuze. In fact, Deleuze opposes Freuds concept of masochism as a father-centred theory

(Deleuze 50-53). Gaylyn Studlar points out that Deleuze has redefined the mothers role in
masochism by locating this phenomenon in the oral stage rather than the anal and phallic phases
stressed by Freud (Deleuze 50-51, 54). The mother is looked at by Deleuze as a lover, as well as a
controlling object that creates ambivalence in the child (Deleuze 53). The conflict is pre-Oedipal
rather than Oedipal in this sense. This is where Kristeva and Deleuzes position meet. Moreover,
neither of them looks at masochism as only a sexual perversity but also as an aesthetic experience
related to literary language which is capable of transformation (Deleuze 13, 53-55, 58, 80).
81

In A Journey into the Red Eye, Janice Markey describes this line as a line of incomparable

irony, a view which feminists have adopted (77).

82

The last quotation in the sentence is taken by Axelrod from Becketts The Unnamable.

83

In Letters Home, Plath describes herself as a woman singer (256).

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84

This comment is taken from McClatchys essay Short Circuits and Folding Mirrors. McClatchy

explains that this interview was conducted by Lee Anderson on 18 April 1958; it is now in the Lee
Anderson Collection of Recorded Poets at the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings,
Yale University Library.
85

Pamela Annas talks about silence in this way only when discussing Plaths early and transitional

poetry and not her later poetry. The present study views Annass statement as applicable to all of
Plaths oeuvre.
86

87

For example, see Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath 18, 101.

Kendall states: Escape from the buffeting natural forces is represented as directly analogous to

the end of the speakers suffocating relationship with an unidentified other (98).

88

Plaths poems have been looked at by many critics as a chthonic journey, a cycle of death and

rebirth. For example, see Kendall and Kroll. Richard Allen Blessing, in discussing Kroll, views the
pattern of Plaths energies, unlike that on the chthonic journey, as being more violent, more
sexual, more perversely exciting (69). Linguistically, this is seen as a masochistic oscillation
between the symbolic and the semiotic.
89

Poem for a Birthday in particular, has been discussed in detail in terms of abjection by many

critics. For example, see Rose 40-63; Strangeways 137-51; and Christodoulides 205-19.
90

This idea about time was discussed by Strangeways in relation to one poem by Plath, Poem for

a Birthday, and not to Plaths whole work.

91

Plath was fascinated by the work of Giorgio de Chirico. She wrote poems in response to his

paintings, such as The Disquieting Muses and On the Decline of Oracles. Plath also used many
of his landscape icons in other poems, such as the train. She refers to this train in her Journals:
everywhere in Chirico city, the trapped train puffing its cloud in a labyrinth of heavy arches,
vaults, arcades (359).
92

Getting There is a poem usually approached historically rather than psychoanalytically by

critics. See Rose 148; Strangeways 103-4; and Uroff 154.

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93

When responding to Plaths essay A Comparison, Silvianne Blosser seems to agree with the

poet that prose is more adequate for expressing time and space and thus more able to create a
dialogue than poetry. Blosser uses a Baktinian term, which she modifies as chronotope of the
threshold, to pinpoint the ability of Plaths prose to show the crossing over into new land
(229, 217). In comparison, a poem, according to Blosser, is a closed fist and usually the break of
that fist comes at the end of Plaths poems to bring in light through a small crack. According to
Blosser, this dissolving at the end of Plaths poems is a crossing over to nothingness rather than a
new land. However, it can be argued that the movement between time and space, indicating the
movement between I and not-I, is heterogeneous in Plaths work and the movement of this
heterogeneity is not only in one poem, but can be found across many poems. Moreover, in her
essay Conversation amongst the Ruins: Plath and de Chirico, Britzolakis comes to the conclusion
that the work of both [Plath and de Chirico] can be described as a dream writing governed by a
tropology of spatial enclosure and mortification, and tied to an imaginary construct of lost time.
(182). However, being related to that lost time, which is obviously not time but space, endows
Plath with mobility and heterogeneity. Rather being just an enclosure tied to psychic prehistory,
her poetry is always an extending space to somewhere else. Moreover, although Britzolakiss
discussion suggests that there is a static enclosure in de Chiricos painting, it sometimes refers to
conflicting spatial instability and an oneiric subversive vision poised on a frontier between dream
and waking consciousness (169).

Chapter 7: The Deadmost

94

The second of these two lines continues as follows: An assembly-line of cut throats, and you

and I / Inching off in the gray Chevrolet, drinking the green [. . .]. As you and I stands at the end
of the first line it could be read as part of the list of nouns in the same line as well as the refrent for
the participle inching off.
95

The Jailor, a poem written after Plath knew about her husbands infidelity, was one of the

poems he eliminated when editing Ariel. The other two poems were The Rabbit Catcher and
Purdah (Axelrod 19).

306
96

Hammer believes that Plaths inner war is fundamental to the constitution of the self. See

Hammer 153.
97

Freud depended on Darwins hypothesis of a primal horde to explain the concept of totem. The

idea, put simply, is that the horde is controlled by a jealous and violent father who keeps all the
females for himself, depriving his sons of incestuous acts. One day the brothers kill and devour
their father, and civilization is established. The brothers institute a law against incest in order to
stop any potential struggle between them and to rescue the organization which made them strong.
See Freud vol. 13: 141-45.
98

Judith Kroll suggests that the source of Plaths presentation of All-Mouth is the African

folktale Mantis and the All-Devourer (Chapters in a Mythology 238 n.13) in Paul Radins book
African Folktales. This All-Devourer has many names; one of them is Father. He has a tongue like
fire and he licks bushes and many other animate and inanimate entities including people. He is very
heavy, so he often stays at home. For more details, see Radin 93-99.

99

Rose in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath also stresses the relation between orality and language:

language and orality run back into each other (31).

100

For more information about the battle of Thermopylae, see Herodotus, Book VII.

101

Connors quotes Plath from Box 6, among other boxes at Indiana University, which contains her

products. For more on Plath and colours, especially red, see Connors essay Living Color: The
Interactive Arts of Sylvia Plath, especially the section entitled Favorite Colors in Art as in Life
114-18.
102

Tracy Brain also discusses the poem in terms of abjection, as the blurring of borders between

friend and enemy, native and alien, inside and outside, and self and not self (74-78). However, her
reading of the poem is mainly cultural, presenting the idea of the foreigner within in relation to
the American and English identities.

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103

The narcissistic wound refers to this ambivalent state between the symbolic inside and the

semiotic outside. Writing this wound, as is the wound itself, is always on the border.

104

This line is translated by Higson in The Self-Torturer as: I am the gash, the dagger-spur!

However, the simple translation of Roudiez in Kristevas Tales of Love is used instead (340). For
the translation of the whole poem, see Baudelaire 82.

105

Rose is one of the critics who suggested the connection between murder and creativity in Plaths

work. For more details, see Rose, Haunting 37.

106

Kroll has the same opinion as Uroff. She thinks that Plaths Elm begins the voice of the Ariel

poems (47).

107

For the definition of fault, see Hoad.

108

In discussing mirrors in Plath, Pamela Annas views them as standing for an undefined and

dangerously shifting area of uncertainty and tension and if one passes behind them, a view she
holds in common with Kristeva, one will dissolve, losing a separate identity (2-3).
109

For the detailed story of Agamemnon, see Aeschyluss Agamemnon. The story is also narrated

by Zeus in Homers The Odyssey (see Homer 26).

110

For details about the story of Lady Godiva, see Mermins Godivas Ride.

111

Ann Keniston argues that the speaker of Ariel not only unpeels herself from what is dead in

her, but also from her femininity, and that the feeling of triumph in the end comes from its

sense of phallic, indeed military, trajectory (40). However, it can be argued that unpeeling, is a
kind of feminine unveiling that is deadly, as it is subversive, and from this comes the note of
triumph. Moreover, Blessing asserts that this motion that Plath celebrates is almost too intense to
be sustained, one that breaks down syntax (Foam to wheat) and takes in multitudes (a glitter of
seas). It is a rhythm that strains the pulse rate to its limits and beyond, that finally would do away

308
with all resistances and become pure doing at the end (65). This rhythm that shatters the syntax
resembles the work of the semiotic in the text. Therefore, the energy produced in Ariel is not
necessarily phallic, as Keniston suggests.
112

The Dance of the Seven Veils is believed to be the dance performed by Salome for her

stepfather, Herod, whom she asked for the head of John the Baptist. The story is described in the
Bible in Matthew 14 (6-11) and Mark 6 (21-28). The biblical story does not mention the name of
the dance. In fact, this name has appeared in art as an elaboration of the biblical story since the
advent of Oscar Wildes play Salome (see Wilde 380-414).
113

Isadora Duncan (1878 1927), U.S. dancer and teacher. A pioneer of modern dance, she was

famous for her free barefoot dancing. She died from strangulation when her long scarf became
entangled in the wheels of a car. See McKean, The New Oxford American Dictionary.

114

See Britzolakis 117.

115

The lines of the draft are as follows:

[I] have a self to recover, a queen,
That dreams of a second bride-flight
Her wings of clear glass,
Her banded body
More terrible than it ever was.
Deserting the nurseries, the workers,
The years. A glitter of dew
On blades she will not return to. (Bundtzen, The Other Ariel 117)

116

This room is also like the one depicted in Electra on Azalea Path where Plath resides for
twenty years after her fathers death:
The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard. (CP 116)

309

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