The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath by Jo Gill

Author:Jo Gill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

8

CHRISTINA BRITZOLAKIS

Ariel and other poems

Ariel, the slim volume of poems published posthumously under Sylvia Plath’s name in 1965, has become an iconic document in twentieth-century literary history, a status underlined by the most recently published edition, which restores the selection and sequencing of the poems Plath left at the time of her death in 1963 (A Rest.).1 Ariel is closely identified with the disturbing power of a poetic voice whose reverberations were felt to be, from the outset, distinctively, even scandalously, female and embodied.2 The ‘Ariel voice’ seems to trope a return of the repressed, at both the personal and the political level. For the volume’s first readers, of course, this voice was marked above all by its proximity to her suicide, and was apprehended as a psychic unleashing or release. Reviews frequently invoked a ‘breakthrough’ in style: a discovery, or recovery, of a liberating immediacy of feeling. This binary model of Plath’s poetic development, grounded in a biographical narrative, was partially undermined by the appearance of the Collected Poems in 1981, which revealed the range and extent of Plath’s work, and the many continuities between The Colossus (UK 1960/US 1962) and Ariel (1965/1966).

That Plath’s style altered dramatically over the course of her career is undeniable. While she begins by exploring the possibilities and limits of the academic mode promoted by the New Critics during the 1950s, her poems move towards a mode of surrealism, replacing narrative sequence with a series of hallucinatory images, in language marked by a new rhythmic and colloquial freedom. While these stylistic shifts are sometimes described in terms of internalization, even in the early poems a concern with capturing the particularity of the natural object alternates with more allegorical elements such as the poetic ‘inscription’ to prior visual or verbal texts, or the psychoanalytically inflected address to a parent figure. The concept of the ‘breakthrough’ also risks occluding the many and varied discursive contexts of her work, which recent critics have gone some way towards recovering.3 Plath’s later poetry emerges from a particularly stark conjuncture between the discredited psychosexual and political discourses of the Eisenhower era, and the emergent feminist, ecological and disarmament movements. The arc of her development as a poet, within the short space of her writing life, represents a devastating critique of the postwar formalist lyric and a recovery of the wider cultural resources of modernism as critique.

Plath’s experiments with voice and persona resist the tendency to read her poems as a psychobiographical narrative of self-discovery. What is sometimes known as her ‘confessionalism’ is more usefully viewed, I shall argue, as a doubled discourse, which, while it may well draw upon autobiographical materials, withholds from both poet and reader any secure identification. For Plath, the psychic is always already a theatrical space, an ‘other scene’, layered with multiple texts and images. In spite of its apparent centrality, then, the location of the ‘I’ in these texts is unstable and duplicitous, and this instability or doubleness is often registered by critics as a threat, danger or negativity elided with femininity itself.

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