Conflicts of a Gendered Self: A Consideration of Some Poems of Sylvia Plath

Abstract

Abstract

The poetry that Plath wrote embodies the interlocking of culture politics with the intimacy and domesticity of the female self. The late poems that she wrote a few months before dying, illustrates her interest in politics and the effects that socio-historical changes bring about in the lives of people. Her poem, “Ariel”( Collected Poems 239) well illustrates this. A late poem, “Ariel” was written after her separation from her husband, Ted Hughes. To Plath, patriarchy with its authority and expectations, regulated roles and conventionalism, is embodied by her dead father and her living husband. In “Ariel” the speaker, challenges the power of such an authority over an instinctual, precipitatious figure, particularly, a female figure. She begins the poem with the sentence “Stasis in darkness.”(CP 239) The stasis is brought about by the deadening conventions that resist her attempts at constructing her poetics. The resistance is thrust aside as the speaker immerses herself in the revitalizing energy of the horse she rides on, the animal that is “God’s lioness” (CP 239). The rider and the horse appear to rush in a blur, but even in the unity of movement, the rider cannot catch “the brown arc/of the neck” (CP 239). Perhaps the elusiveness of the horse’s neck, as they move at breakneck speed, signifies the intransigency of poetic expression. The rider sees “nigger eye/Berries” that “cast dark/Hooks” (CP 239), the fleshly experiences that stall her movement, hanging on to her. They fill her mouth, wounding her, becoming “black sweet blood mouthfuls” (CP 239). The speaker’s dark, injuring experiences are not rejected but are accepted as part of life’s encounters.