Week 7: 16 & 18 May. Impediments to the Marriage of True Minds
Wednesday. Sylvia Plath, Poems 1959-1963: “Ode for Ted”(29), “Two Sisters of Persephone”(31), “Wreath for a Bridal”(36), “Electra on Azalea Path”(74), “The Colossus”(78), “The Hanging Man”(96), “Morning Song,”(107), “In Plaster”(110), “The Moon and the Yew Tree”(120), “Elm”(151), “Event”(156), “The Applicant” (189), “Daddy”(191), “Words” (234)
OPENING OF CLASS: play the voice of Sylvia Plath
transparency of couple
INTRODUCTION: WHY ARE WE READING THIS BOOK?
Recall the theme of course: Literature of Transformation: The Modern. What has been lost? The old social hierarchies of class, race and gender. What has been liberated?
THE COUPLE AS AN EGALITARIAN SOCIAL UNIT
I. SALIENT DETAILS, THE COUPLE: SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963), TED HUGHES (1930-1998)
[Introduce with transparencies]
1. Met in England, SP on Fulbright Fellowship
2. Famous party
3. Married on Bloomsday 1956
4. Moved to USA: academic jobs, 1957
5. Decision to become writers full-time, 1959
6. Return to England: birth of child, 1960
7. Move to Devon: restoration of house, infidelity, separation, Plath’s death
II. SP IS NOT A CONFESSIONAL POET:
1. After “Ode for Ted”: “Electra on Azalea Path” “The Colossus,” Bee Poems: Plath’s Modernist education provokes unsatisfactory identifications with literary female types
2. “Daddy”: Plath adopts a psychoanalytic perspective on female abjection and adapts the tradition of literary satire to image resistance to male dominance
III. “Daddy”: who he? “Daddy” [191] as Satire
In form, I will argue, “Daddy” is a satire. To quote [p 275], a satire is a literary work that diminishes its subject “by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn and indignation. [Satire] differs from the comic in hat comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire …uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself.” The butt of satire in “Daddy” is a set of roles reserved for the males in society, roles signified by the Latin root pater, which gives us “Papa,” “patriarch” and “patriot.” “Daddy” is caricatured in the poem as the type of punitive male authority figure whose license to be cruel to the child at home is seen as continuous with the legalized torture perpetrated by the State. His importance is both political and personal; and his victim, in this poem, is specifically female.
1. “Daddy” as the object of satire: Personification of traditionally male-dominant institutions: Religious, Military, and Educational.
a. A male with the attributes of a monumental god (“Ghastly statue with one gray toe/ Big as a Frisco seal, / And a head in the freakish Atlantic”)
b. German-speaking, and has the attributes of a Nazi military commander (“panzer-man, panzer man,” she calls him, “with your Luftwaffe, …your neat moustache and your Aryan eye, bright blue”)
c. A devil in the shape of a professor, “who stands at the blackboard…with a cleft in your chin instead of your foot.”
2. The speaker as satirist: voice of masochistic female self-knowledge
a. A female age 30 who has “lived like a foot” inside his “black shoe”—constructed to be walked on? Shaped by his pressure to conform? Formed in complementarity to oppression.
b. A female who has married the simulacrum of her father: “I made a model of you…and I said I do, I do”
c. A female who intends to kill the Daddy inside her, with the assistance of the community: “the villagers never liked you”
3. The matrix of language: “nursery rhymes” based on infant babble (oo-oo-oo) that fill the poem to the brim with word-play
- Full rhymes that occupy the ends of lines so emphatically: [stanzas 1-3] “do/ shoe/ Achoo/ you/ Ach, du”; [and from stanza 9, 2nd half of the 16-stanza poem] “through / two / through / through / two / I’m through.”
- “Near” –rhymes: most significantly, “jaw” “Jew”
- Internal rhymes: for example, the chime in that first line of “You/do/do/you/do/do,” and later of “boot” with “Brute”; and again later “knew what to do.”
- Eye-rhymes: words with double-o in them: even when they are not pronounced as ooo they say ooo to the eye: poor, foot, root, boot, look.
SYLVIA PLATH’S METHOD OF COMPOSITION
Ted Hughes, interview with Drue Heinz, re Sylvia: “Once I got to know her and read her poems I saw straight off that she was a genius of some kind. Quite suddenly we were completely committed to each other and to each other’s writing. …I see now that when we met, my writing, like hers, left its old path and started to circle and search. To me, of course, she was not only herself: she was America and American literature in person. I don’t know what I was to her. Apart from the more monumental classics—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and so on—my background reading was utterly different from hers. But our minds soon became two parts of one operation. We dreamed a lot of shared or complementary dreams. Our telepathy was intrusive….
Our methods were not the same. Hers was to collect a heap of vivid objects and good words and make a pattern: the pattern would be projected from somewhere deep inside, from her very distinctly evolved myth. It appears distinctly evolved to a reader now—despite having been totally unconscious to her then. My method was to find a thread end and draw the rest out of a hidden tangle.” [Paris Review, 1995, p. 77]
Week 7: Sylvia Plath 1