Elvira Alicia García-Sainz
Stockholm. December 2011
Contents
1. Introduction
2. Sylvia Plath: a life of contrast
3. Sense of irony in the poem
4. Bibliography
Sylvia Plath poetry –painfully personal, raw,
often bitterly angry –is just as intense as she was.
Lynne F. Chapman (1994: 2).
1. Introduction
English literature is a source of pride and teaching in the international arena. Since the shortest and elegant verse written to the most rugged novel, this language across the geographical frontiers. English literature goes beyond the boundaries that exceeded the same language as much as they did the pioneers who left Europe and went to America or another continents to explore new horizons.
Also migration produces an interesting cultural exchange as well. Thus we see the legacy of a solid structure and exemplary narrative and a brilliant perfection. So, about English literature one can appreciate the different study criteria: by author or writer, group or country, nationality, date or place of birth, intellectual affiliation, even political.
Some English writers were not born in U.S. or British territory, as Doris Lessing (Cairo, 1933). In others, the comments run about the interest of the writers or the theme of their work, that was defining a personal style: The symbolism and fantastic vein of Edgar Allan Poe or aestheticism Irish poet and short story writer Oscar Wilde. How to measure the genius of Arthur Conan Doyle if not through his character Sherlock Holmes? The humor, tragedy and irony in the stories of Charles Dickens talk by themselves.
There is a long list. Writers with a precarious life while generating huge profits books after his death. It is one of the contrast, the life of a writer commonly involves the disparity between the quality of their work and the possibilities of to have a good economy.
In all this diverse field, Sylvia Plath is one of the English-language writers considered important in the twentieth century. I found two thick books about his life in the library of Sollentuna. This solved my question about what topic to address in this report written for English class in Sweden, among such broad convergence of interests around English language.
I read some poems of Sylvia Plath fifteen years ago, in the
Collected Poems. It was a strong writting, joining modern interaction between pain and clarity. And using by combination of traditional and "common" words even taking special care about cadence in the free verse.
This report try to approach a little into the meaning trough one of the poems of Sylvia Plath, "Stillborn", and how the ironical sense in her work is reaching the senses of the life of this writer, which opened a controversial discussion about literary canon, literary studies and some of the
uncomfortable issues for modern society. Here also appear sensible notion of the human condition linked to the challenges of life.
2. Sylvia Plath: a life of contrast
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts (October 27, 1932). Her life was full of little surprises, since she was very alert for to learn: she was three years old when she began to read. She started to write poems and romances sinces she was a student.
Her father, Otto, was a professor of entomology and her mother, Aurelia, a high school teacher of English and German. She had only a brother, Warren, and when he was born in 1935, she tried constantly to get the attention of her parents.
Her father died when she was still a child (1940) and her mother was hard in certain ways but she was always a big reference for Sylvia's behavior, even with a kind of dependence.
Sylvia went to study English literature in the Newnham College in Cambridge, supported by a Fulbright scholarship. She meet then the British poet Ted Hughes. She married him in 1956 and they had two children together. She was a teacher of literature, but she decided to stop to teach for to dedicate her life to the domestic and maternal duties since she considered one of them to be a mother, such a way to get a special value as a woman.
Despite all the great creative and intellectual qualities, Sylvia was pursuing for the shadow of the depression in different moments of her life. Sometimes her economic situation was decent, in others precarious too. During the period that she was living with Hughes, first in USA and later in England, both were involved in the academic and then the intellectual life in England, where they were winning prizes and participating in several cultural events, reading and discussing about poetry but at the same time starring in a veiled rivalry, because Hughes was at first better known for his work but over time she was getting more readers while his poetry was increasing.
They had a house in Devon when they went back to England in the 60`s. Their place was around four hours from London. “A big thatched cottage with over two acres of land in a small village named Crotton, fifteen or twenty miles away from the cathedral city of Exeter“, said Edward Butscher (2003). A little stability between the "ups and downs" in their lifes.
But the deeper problems had more to do with life than money. Some controversy appear when she tried to get rid off her tortuous feelings by the "liberation" resource of the poetry. One time she call her father a "vampire, a Devil, a Nazi" (in "Daddy", 1962).
Sylvia Plath had one suicide attempt at the age of twenty and, after the constantly bad feeling of her husband betrayal she finally ended her life in February 11th, 1963, in her house in London, shorter time before Hughes had left his family for to live with another another woman, Assia Wevill.
Assia Wevill commit suicide too six years after Plath's death. And Sylvia's son, Nicholas, in 2009. "It is impossible to know whether the loss of his mother, stepmother and half-sister by suicide in some way influenced the final gesture of Nicholas, a respected marine biologist of 47 years, according to his sister Frieda, struggled with depression", said Diogo Schelp (revista
Veja, april 2009).
3. Sense of irony in the poem
Sylvia Plath wrote different kind of texts. The following books by Plath are the most publicized, with the close resume of their editors:
The Colossus and Other Poems (1962). The Times Literary Supplement present it so: "Plath writes from phrase to phrase as well as with an eye on the larger architecture of the poem; each line, each sentence is put together with a good deal of care for the springy rhythm, the arresting image and ---most of all, perhaps--- the unusual word."
Ariel, written in 1962, was published in 1965 (after her death). The issues in this book are women's anger and sexuality in groundbreaking new ways. She became legendary in the 1970's, when a new generation of women, readers and writers, turned to her life as well as her work to understand the contradictory pressures of women in the 1950's.
The Bell Jar, first published under a pseudonym in 1963 and later issued under Plath own name in England in 1966 is an autobiographical novel describing an ambitious young woman's efforts to become a "real New York writer" only to sink into mental illness and despair at her inability to operate within the narrow confines of traditional feminine expectations.
Plath was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982. She participated as an invited editor in the review Mademoiselle.
The quality and originality of her poetry make her a poet over all the lines of her literary work. Many consider her a confessional poet, specially for the strong relation between the content of her poems as a kind of "testimony of life", not only of expression of thought. However, both, poet and poem are two creations that are going in a parallel way. This is one of the most important personal impressions after read and research about the life and work of this writer whose controversial heritage gives much to talk about.
So, at the same time the writing can have its own live, independent of the strong similar episodes in the life of the author. This thoughts feed the idea that trying to discover the psychological or sociological factors that moved her to commit suicide, for example, can be no more than a very interesting exercise of the experts in each field around the analysis of life and work of the future famous woman of one of the most difficult times that have been elongated to the existence of women.
In the ironical operation two opposing components can act for one result that can show, at the end, more influence of both "positive" or "negative" properties as integrated elements, but the result of join them can be not so predictable like happen with another literary resources like the satire or with the pure genres like the tragedy among the comedy.
Those parallel universes about the life of Plath and poetry are consistent with the importance of the ironical sense in the literature of the twentieth century in all the world. Because the irony join several two-rivers in unusual form by the poem or the literary piece, two rivers that aren't twin; two rivers with an opposition in meaning and the same force, covering diverse issues: tragic and well-expected motion of the similar stories and different between the writer and the universe of the writing, pain and sweetness, life and death, darkness and lighting, poverty and wealth.
This game of constant opposition is played in the poetry of Plath. We can comment how this ironical procedures are working in one of her poems, which she wrote in 1960 (Garcia and Arruda: 16).
Stillborn
These poems do not live: it´s a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough.
They little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn´t for any lack of mother-love.
O I cannot understand what happened to them!
They are so proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lunges won´t fill and the heart won´t start.
They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
Though they have a piggy and a fishy air –
It would be better if they were alive, and that´s what they were.
But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction.
And they stupidly stare, and do not speak of her.
In the first verse of Stillborn the poems got live, since the simple action of to be written and read it after that. However, the conclusion is that they are death. The poems are acting too like another "thing" in a wide ironical story, the story of the not born children or the children that were born death.
Going ahead in the poem, we can see that how is becoming the meaning of the "dead poems" such the dead children in the formaldehyde. The poem is related with the view across the visit to the Boston hospital when the writer saw the little bodies in the laboratory: dead, but they were alive before: the fingers had the normal size for a live child; a sad diagnosis, but there is a smile in their faces. They are waiting for the voice of the mother, as the voice of the love, but this voice is rejecting for the reality.
All this elements of the poem are the structure of the dual senses, the opposites marking and adding meaning. Since the first lines the general and metaphysical irony (Muecke: 1969) is getting relevance. The human condition, the weakness of the physical conformity against the strength of the non-coming or frustrated life. What happened to them? They are not fishes and they cannot survive, they can't swim. The beginning transform later the poem in a metapoem, since the poem is talking about itself, and talking about another poems ("this kind" of poems) as a fractal exposition. The irony in the poem is also verbal, specific and situational --referred to results different to the expectations. Those poems or children could be like anybody by the streets of the thinking, and with all the autonomy that they have, independent of the unsuccessfully attempt to live in a not nicely live than their actual nice, sweet and young image.
In July 1950, a fresh Sylvia wrote in her diary: "Maybe I will never be happy, but I am content tonight. Only an empty house, the warm and misty fatigue after planting strawberries in the sun the whole day. A glass of cold sweet milk and a little bowle with blueberries swimming in cream". A sample peaceful day in a glad period.
The conspiracy of the pain into a life with big possibilities of happiness or satisfaction was a constant in the poetry like in the personal life of Plath. Some of the changes that she experimented would show the contrast between a new point of view that she commonly had of the social issues and the conservative position that she assume sometimes and conducting herself into a hard stages. This "permanency of the opposition" show too the irony in the success around her and into herself. Some of her words, sentences, evidences of life and writing were adopted as a flag for to defend several rights, specially of women when a sexual revolution started. The woman inspired many people. Even sometimes the crude or rude reality was fighting against her wishes and even she would get a big place in the universal literature and the world society like she could get when she was a teenager and draw some of her purposes with the expression, instituting an ironic situation of her destiny, when she thought: "I love people. Everybody. I probably love them such to love a complete collection of prints. Every story, every event, every small talk, I see as a raw material. My love is not impersonal, but at the same time not fully subjected either. I would like to be all of them. An invalid, a dying man, a tramp, and then I would become myself again and write about my thoughts, my feelings as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life and that is the only one I am going to have. You can't study your own life with objective curiousness all the time." (Sylvia Plaths dagböcker: 20-22)
4. Bibliography
BUTSCHER, Edward.
Sylvia Plath. Method and Madness. A biography by Edward Butscher. Tucson: Schaffner Press, Inc, 2003, 408 p.
DE MAN, Paul.
Blindness and Insight. London: Routledge, 1983.
F. CHAPMAN, Lynne.
Sylvia Plath. Creative Education (col.). Italy: The Creative Company, 1994, 43 p.
GARCIA LOPES, Rodrigo and Mauricio Arruda Mendonça (transl.).
Sylvia Plath. Poemas. From
The collected poems of Sylvia Plath. Sao Paulo: Iluminuras, 2007. Note: "Stillborn" was placed first in p. 142 of
The Collected Poems. Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes (writers). Buccaneer Books, 1981. Original from Pennsylvania State University. Digitalized: 10 mar 2011. 351 p. ISBN 1568497032, 9781568497037.
GARCIA SAINZ, Elvira Alicia. Thesis.
La ironía en el Esperpento de Valle-Inclán: crítica social y política en Luces de bohemia. Mexico City: UNAM, 2010.
MUECKE, D. C.
The Compass of Irony, London: Methuen and Co., 1969.
V. KUKIL, Karen.
Sylvia Plaths dagböcker: Sylvia Plath dagböcker och anteckningar 1950-1962, Rebecca Alsberg (trasl.) Stockholm: Norstedts, 2003.
STEVENSON, Anne.
Sylvia Plath, ett diktarliv. Tr. of
Bitter Fame. A life of Sylvia Plath, Oslo: Forum, 1992, p. 226.
Reviews
Página 12
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/libros/10-4359-2011-07-31.html
12-12-2011
Veja, nr. 2106. April 1, 2009
http://veja.abril.com.br/010409/p_092.shtml
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Some links about Plath
Suman Agarwal, p. 120. Northern Book Centre, 1 jan 2003 - 174 p.
http://books.google.se/books?id=JAmoX4di8doC&pg=PA120&dq=Sylvia+Plath+these+poems+do+not+live&hl=sv&ei=qG7nTsidJ4qO4gS09dWDCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Sylvia%20Plath%20these%20poems%20do%20not%20live&f=false
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Linda Wagner-Martin (editor), p. 185.
Sylvia Plath. Col. The critical heritage.
Routledge, New York 1997. 332 p.
Presentation:
Sylvia Plath (1932-63). American poet and novelist, established her reputation by the courageous and controlled treatment of extreme and painful states of mind. The volume covers the period 1960-1985.
http://books.google.se/books?id=6bFTS6BcXP4C&dq=Sylvia+Plath+these+poems+do+not+live&hl=sv&source=gbs_navlinks_s
