FREE ESSAY ON PLATH, SYLVIA

PLATH, SYLVIA

Even in her earlier poems, Sylvia Plath displays an unhealthy preoccupation with sex,
madness, morbidity and obscurity.
Discuss.
There seem to be a number of common themes running through all of Plath's poems, which
encapsulate her personal attitudes and feelings of life at the time she wrote them. Of
these themes, the most prevalent are: sex, madness, morbidity and obscurity. 
The whole concept of sex to Plath appears to be a very disturbed and resentful one. This
is conveyed strongly through the poem Maudlin (a poem about self-pity) in which Plath
evokes her bitterness toward masculinity with the aid of the two characters, the Virgin
and Jack. Jack is described as having a "crackless egg" and being "navel-knit" (ie: cold
hearted and impregnable). He is given an arrogant, macho image too: "With a claret
hogshead to swig, he kings it". Plath's sourness becomes apparent when Jack's lifestyle
of luxury is compared to the repressed and disturbed life of suffering which the
"sleep-talking virgin" leads. The idea of sleep-talking evokes her pain and suffering,
leaking from her subconscious. Her torment does not end on the inside however, according
to Plath who describes further physical and mental torture endured by women who painfully
beautify themselves for the pleasure of men like Jack: "at the price of a pin-stitched
skin fish-tailed girls purchase each white leg". Furthermore, Plath justifies the
virgin's choice to endure the pain: "The sign of the hag" (the virgins fear of aging). 
Another poem which is strongly sexually orientated, but in a more mechanical and lustful
sense, is Night Shift. The brute physicality conveyed through onomatopoeia in the poem
impregnates the feeling of primeval sexuality in which violence is interlaced. This
overall effect arises as a result of the images conjured up by words and phrases such as,
"heart, beating, drumming up, sound, ground, pounding, thudding source, vertical tonnage
of metal and wood; stunned the marrow, greased machines." Her feelings toward this kind
of intensely physical experience appears to be one of oppression arising from the male's
pleasure and female's pain. It is this bitterness toward males, which has been re-echoed
here as in Maudlin. 
Plath's second obsession is with madness. The clearest example of this is found in Miss
Drake Proceeds to Supper. The paranoia, constant delusions and obscure perceptions
described in the poem convey a deranged fear, which has arisen as a result of her
insanity. The tortuous and enigmatic adjectives used to describe furniture ("knotted
table and crooked chair") illustrates the obscurely twisted perception of Miss Drake as
she clumsily "lifts one webbed foot after the other", pretending she is a duck, "her
bird-quick eye cocked askew". The paranoia conveyed as "she edges with wary edge" through
the "perilous needles" which "grain the floorboards and outwit their brambled plan",
clearly shows her fear which is exacerbated from the impression given that she is small
and vulnerable, "footing sallow as a mouse". This and her detailed observation of the
"furred petals" almost incites sympathy for her as this mad woman is "ambushed" and panic
stricken by the "bright shards of broken glass".
Another disillusioned idea that Miss Drake has is that she is important. This is first
noticed in the title, which grandly encapsulates a mad woman stumbling to tea in a mental
institution but is reverberated through, "No novice in those elaborate rituals" and the
fact that she is wearing "purple" (a royal colour). The question that needs to be asked
is whether Plath is sympathetic or mocking Miss Drake. By depicting her as a feeble woman
being ambushed by splinters in the floor, one might be tempted to assume that Plath is
sympathetic toward Miss Drake, but having considered the banal diction and lack of
emotion and lyrical phrasing, it seems that Plath is more scornful than compassionate.
The concept of morbidity is another commonly found subject found in Plath's poetry. In
Suicide off Egg Rock, Plath draws us into the mind of a man as he jumps off a cliff into
the sea. All of the scenes that this man sees as he falls are pictured as incredibly ugly
and painful, reflecting his state of mind and his perceptions. Images such as "the
hotdogs split and drizzled", "children were squealing", "he smoldered, as if stone-deaf"
and "everything shrank in the sun's corrosive ray" are offensive and agonizing, thus
helping the reader appreciate and relate to his pain and punishment, which is described
as "a machine to breathe and beat forever". "Ochreous salt flats, gas tanks, factory
stacks", "his blood beating the old tattoo", "a mongrel working his legs to a gallop
hustled a gull flock to flap off the sandpitt", "his body beached with the sea's garbage"
and "flies filing in through a dead skate's eyehole" are all ugly and unnatural images
with an intensely negative undertone and a feeling of self-loathing. 
With this view of life, it is quite possible to understand why this man wants to kill
himself. Yet at the end, just before he hits the sea, Plath suddenly twists the whole
poem on its head by saying, "the forgetful surf creaming on those ledges". By adding this
beautiful phrase at the end, Plath includes a cruel irony: after searching for so long
for something positive and being unable to find it, he finally sees something possibly
worth living for.
All of Plath's poems contain some kind of obscurity but Resolve is the most interesting
as it centres around making common images appear obscure. When "two water drops poise on
the arched green stem of my neighbor's rose bush" as "a milk-film blurs the empty bottles
on the windowsill", it is unclear how these two things are connected until one realises
that they aren't meant to be related. It is this random obscurity that Plath seems to be
obsessed with in Suicide off Egg Rock, where the man sees many obscure images as he falls
and is "rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught".