TheDaak review

Ariel by Sylvia Plath, New York, HarperPerennial, Restored Edition 2004, 256 pages, 15.24 x 1.63 x 22.86 cm, ISBN-10: ‎0060732601, Price: 1248 INR

By K S Sanjana

The Dystopian visions of the Self in Ariel by Sylvia Plath

This is an excerpt from Sylvia Plath’s poem Lady Lazarus published in her collection of poems under the title ‘Ariel’ (1965) two years after her death. Plath’s Ariel is a reflection of her debilitating mental state right before taking her own life. That was not her first attempt at death, but her third and the final one. Ariel paints a dark, melancholic, almost tragic landscape for the reader. The writer A. Alvarez, writing in The Savage God, believed that with the poems in Ariel, Plath made “poetry and death inseparable”. The life of Plath, during the creative outburst that she had while writing Ariel, is significant to take into consideration – her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes had been in shatters. Left alone to fend for herself and take care of her two children, Plath was on the brink of a mental breakdown that would consolidate her legacy in the literary world. However, Plath’s poems transcend the boundaries that society set for her and many women like her. Her epistemic bickerings with the world around her on matters of selfhood, motherhood and what it is to lead a life full of exuberating pain poetically inflates everyday incidents into horrific experiences of trauma and despair. Her poems do not glorify death; rather, they pull the reader’s attention to explore life in its dreary state of affairs. Plath’s book Ariel is an assortment of poems that revolve around similar themes of death, longing and alienation, self-destruction and disenchantment with life. In one of the poems titled “Sheep in the Fog”, Plath uses a metaphor to indicate helplessness and confusion; she writes: ‘they threaten to let me through to a heaven starless and featherless, a dark water.’  These lines create a sense of unusual quiet in the disquiet of one’s mind. She also mentions how ‘all the morning has been blackening’– the imagery of blackening is usually associated with nights, but the use of the term here conveys bleakness and gradual deterioration of her mental state.         

The extract from the poem ‘Lady Lazarus’ mentioned at the outset vividly portrays her yearning for death. By the reading the poetry, a reader can feel one with Plath’s own attempts at suicide, one in each decade of her life. In the poem, she refers to Nazis and the Jews, using a holocaust metaphor to describe her angsty trials with death. Nazi-inflicted horrors culminated in a mass killing of Jews that was witnessed on the world stage. By likening herself to a victim of the Nazis, Plath recounts how the Nazis were rumoured to have used the skin, fat and ash after burning the Jews to make different products- a lampshade, soap and a ring, respectively. The use of imagery here draws a dark dystopian world that is a reality and conveys her gradual annihilation every decade. 

But Lady Lazarus rises again- ‘out of the ash I rise with my red hair’, and then she devours men like air. In the poem, her strong disgust for men and the society that sees her as an object is clear. In another famous poem, “Daddy”, she describes her complicated and troubled relationship with her father. It is no obituary to her dead father but an open letter of sorts that details how oppressed she felt in the relationship (Plath writes, ‘I have always been scared of you’). She also likens herself to a Jew and her father to a Nazi German. She uses Nazi symbolism to juxtapose the role of the oppressor onto her father and portray herself as the oppressed- ’I thought every German was you….You- not God but a swastika’ and ‘I made a model of you, a man in black with a Meinkampf look’. She even goes on to call him a fascist and how he is one of the reasons why she attempted to kill herself when she was merely ten years old.   

The poem “Cut” begins with the lines: ‘What a thrill— my thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone, except for a sort of a hinge…’ It likens the sensation of pain to the feeling of thrill and makes rather strange metaphors to describe the incident where she accidentally cuts her own thumb. The significance of the poem is not immediately clear and with every reading, the depth that Plath conveys through her words grows within the reader. She uses ‘bottle of pink fizz’ for her thumb and ‘soldiers in redcoats’ for blood. The use of striking colours is in stark opposition to the vulnerability and sadness one experiences while reading the poem. She further writes, ‘Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill.’ (Some have noted that she refers to her partner, Ted Hughs, as Homunculus). A ‘pill to kill’ indicating thoughts of self-harm lingers in the author’s mind and stays in the reader’s mind much after having read the poem.   

In the titular poem “Ariel”, Plath describes an early morning horse ride that gradually takes a more ethereal turn. She writes about stopping by to eat berries, but the very experience of eating them ‘hauls her through air’ and is unpeeling. This experience though beautiful, might be vulnerable and dangerous even as the dew that flies into the ‘cauldron  of morning’. This instability of emotions is expressed in many other poems in the book. Plath’s poems have a certain confessional quality that allows readers to relate to her emotions. Through these poems, the reader is left with an eerie sense of self- one that seems bothered by the words they read in the text, and the prompt after every poem to look inwards. This sense of helplessness and hopelessness creates a cynical view of the outside world.  Plath’s poem builds dystopian visuals that inject melancholia and make apparent alienation of the self vis-a-vis the world. The tendency towards self-destruction is evident in many of her poems. In their rawest form, Plath’s poems reveal the human nature that yearns for belonging and stability, yet is settled in a perpetually conflicting state.

In the poem Gulliver, Plath uses the famous tale of Gulliver’s Travels to discuss modern human bondage. She uses nature-clouds that freely go above Gulliver, who is instead held captive by the Lilliputians. This poem particularly seems interesting as it juxtaposes man and nature to reveal the tyranny of bondages that obstruct human freedom. One of the most gripping poems, “The Bee Meeting”, elucidates the fear she experiences from others. (‘Who are these people at the bridge to meet me?…In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection”… “they will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.’) The bees here symbolise the critical elements in society. In the poem, she writes- ‘I am led through a beanfield’… ‘Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat and a veil’, to express her passive conformity to society. There is a sense of uncertainty that the poet feels as she follows the villagers who are hunting the queen. There is a mythical, almost folklore element to this poem that creates a layer of mystery. The poet is finally exhausted by the constant uncertainty. In the concluding lines, Plath mentions spotting a ‘long white box’ that could probably be a coffin and being cold. The poem alludes to a larger theme about finding oneself in a society which promotes conforming and unquestioning behaviour. Lack of power, vulnerability and confusion about oneself haunts the poet as well as the readers. What does it mean to be their own person? Are we allowed to discover the version of ourselves? How do we manage to be ourselves while also co-exist with others? These questions that Plath raises continue to be perennially relevant. 

As a young woman, Plath’s poems illustrate the dystopia that one constantly feels and experiences in everyday life that is enabled in part through the workings of gendered prejudices that the society continues to hold. The negligent, controlling and abusive fathe and later husband legitimise her fears of losing control over her own life; the constant pressure of being a certain kind of woman conforming to the gender roles and norms restricts her from experiencing the freedom that she is denied in the patriarchal settings of the world. Thus, the dystopia of the self is not in isolation from the dystopian exterior where the gendered self finds itself at a disadvantage and deprived. It is an understated fact that societal norms and practices contribute to poor mental health in women.  In her other popular work The Bell Jar, Plath portrays what it means to be a woman in 1950s America. For instance, the social expectations of women to be chaste until marriage while allowing men sexual freedom lays bare the problematic notions about womanhood. 

The above mentioned themes in Plath’s writings present a dark and grim picture of human life and condition. However, it is in despair that creativity thrives. Plath’s poems read almost like a eulogy to herself- wanting death and destruction and being in awe of it. The condition in which her mind works against herself and her very being captures something intimate that speaks to an audience that finds itself equally tethered to uncertainty and hopelessness. The very being negates its existence to create an illusory purpose for itself, that is, to only deny any pleasure that comes with life. Plath’s poem compels us to think, ‘what is good in this life of bondage, slavery, oppression and pain?’ By using Holocaust metaphors, she aims to render the readers a reference point to her own emotions, thereby offering a hinge between the narrative of a tortured self and the harrowing political realities of the time. Having battled depression for three decades of her life, Plath’s loneliness and withdrawal from the world point to the alienation that one feels in the modern world. Especially in the more modern times of social media, where, despite connectivity, the lack of real connection to fellow human beings and to oneself reveals a more sinister way of life. The lack of real emotions and feelings that constitute the very being of human life is replaced by the illusory sense of ‘connectivity’. The number of friends on Facebook may not add or even account for actual friends in real life. Instagram makes us think that everybody is happy around us and has a fulfilled life, which might as well be just a veneer. It is almost paradoxical that the medium that appeals to us as enhancing human connection ends up heightening the isolation and reclusiveness one already feels. 

The dystopia of the self and the everyday is captured in Plath’s poems by laying bare the cruelty and injustice in life. It would be unfair to reduce Plath’s poetry to mere fascination with death and doom. The Plath one gets to know after reading Ariel is deeply sensitive, highly aware of her surroundings and her flaws, fragile yet brimming with creativity. She is a human, a woman who questions the control exercised in her life, the overwhelming and overpowering sway the men in her life had and the society that enabled it- caging her in her gendered boundaries. Poetry was the outlet to relieve her of the burdens of anxiety and depression, as she writes in her poem “Kindness”, ‘The blood jet is poetry, there is no stopping it’. This metaphor intrinsically intertwines suffering and creativity.  

It is almost ironic that Plath’s poems offer solace in discomforting thoughts of harm and vulnerability. In the impending doom, her readers distil the essence of profound emotions that ground them and find perhaps some meaning in the meaninglessness of life and existence. To conclude, in reference to her poem “Kindness”, Plath personifies kindness as a kind and nice woman who offers empathy to an unhappy speaker but is viewed suspiciously by the latter. Instead of kindness, argues Plath, it is love that can save an ailing soul. The author believes that niceties that come with kindness are not as deep as genuine love, which is a more authentic and meaningful bond, one that the poet feels for her children, her two roses. The poem was written by Plath only days before her passing. It is evident that Plath knew the remedy to the dystopia she felt and experienced- love, a meaningful human connection. Thus, there is in Plath’s dystopian vision of self, an intangible notion of love, one that craves belonging and embeddedness in the very being it attempts to negate.  

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