“The Grey Sky Lowers” - DiVA portal

“The Grey Sky Lowers”

The Uncanny in Five of Sylvia Plath’s Poems

Master’s Thesis

Author: Eva Stenskär

Supervisor: Jon Helgason

Examiner: Beate Schirrmacher

Term: VT22

Subject: Comparative Literature

Level: Advanced Level, 30 credits

Course code: 5LI01E

Abstract

This thesis investigates the uncanny (das Unheimliche) in five of Sylvia Plath’s

1962 poems: “Berck-Plage”, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Daddy”, “Fever 103°”,

and “Death & Co.”. Furthermore, it looks at how the biographical circumstances in

which the poet found herself while writing the poems, may have influenced them.

Drawing mainly on Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny” and the 2003 The

Uncanny by Nicholas Royle, this thesis examines a variety of elements in Plath’s

poems including, but not limited to, the beach as a liminal space, aposiopesis as

intellectual uncertainty and as an example of l’écriture féminine, thresholds in the

form of windows, shoes, and locked boxes, severed limbs as examples of Viktor

Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, Latin as a heimlich/unheimlich language, the

uncanny effect of darkness, silence, and solitude, the double as a harbinger of death,

the wish to both include and exclude the specter and that which is strange, and

breathlessness and euphoria as manifestations of madness. Furthermore, it examines

hitherto unexplored potential influences on Plath’s poetry, including but not limited

to, the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thérèse of Lisieux, Franz Kafka, and Knut

Hamsun. Because of the ambiguity of the concept of the uncanny, this thesis

incorporates a host of material such as taped interviews conducted by Harriet

Rosenstein, Subha Mukherji’s Thinking on Thresholds, Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to

Ourselves, and Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. In conclusion, this thesis argues

that the uncanny is an instrumental key to the comprehension of Plath’s late poetry.

Key words

Sylvia Plath, Ariel, Sigmund Freud, Nicholas Royle, Harriet Rosenstein, Uncanny,

das Unheimliche, Liminality, Darkness, Aposiopesis, Hauntings, Doubles.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincerest thanks to my supervisor, Associate Professor

Jon Helgason, for his invaluable guidance, expertise, and insights. I am also

indebted to my husband Fernando, our son Lars, and my mother Ingegerd. Lastly, I

would be remiss in not mentioning Mary and my dear friend Sandra.

Table of contents

1 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1

2 On the Issue of Biography & Previous Research ........................................... 6

3 “Berck-Plage” .................................................................................................. 11 3.1 The Beach as a Place of Liminality .......................................................... 12 3.2 The Beach as a Double ............................................................................. 14 3.3 The Black Boot & Severed Limbs ............................................................. 15 3.4 Death & Dying .......................................................................................... 18 3.5 An Uncanny Coda ..................................................................................... 21

4 “The Arrival of the Bee Box” ......................................................................... 21 4.1 The Grotesque ........................................................................................... 22 4.2 Uncanny Shakespearean Figures ............................................................. 23 4.3 Darkness ................................................................................................... 25 4.4 The Return of the Repressed ..................................................................... 26 4.5 Strangeness/Otherness .............................................................................. 27

5 “Daddy”: .......................................................................................................... 28 5.1 Buried Alive: The Crown of the Uncanny ................................................. 29 5.2 Aposiopesis & (Intellectual) Uncertainty ................................................. 32 5.3 Exorcism ................................................................................................... 34 5.4 Hauntings & Doubles ............................................................................... 35 5.5 Residues of a Train ................................................................................... 40

6 “Fever 103°” .................................................................................................... 41 6.1 An Uncanny Inspiration: Thérèse of Lisieux ............................................ 43 6.2 The Breathless Uncanny ........................................................................... 45 6.3 Uncanny Magic ......................................................................................... 47 6.4 Remnants of a Death Drive ....................................................................... 50

7 “Death & Co.” ................................................................................................. 51 7.1 Janus-faced Harbinger of Death .............................................................. 51 7.2 Birthmarks................................................................................................. 52 7.3 The Macabre ............................................................................................. 53 7.4 Liminality .................................................................................................. 54

8 Night Writing & An Uncanny Afterlife ........................................................ 55

9 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 59

10 References .................................................................................................... 62 Works Cited: ......................................................................................................... 62 Unpublished Material: .......................................................................................... 66

Appendices

“Berck-Plage”………………………………………………………………………67

“The Arrival of the Bee Box”………………………………………………………71

“Daddy”…………………………………………………………………………….72

“Fever 103°”………………………………………………………………………..74

“Death & Co.”…………………………………………………………………...…75

1(77)

1 Introduction

The poetry of Sylvia Plath is redolent with the uncanny. In her posthumously

published collection Ariel from 1965, she covers death, doubles, hauntings, ghosts,

fear, magic, severed limbs, and liminality – all of which are included in Sigmund

Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny”.1 The 1965 edition of Ariel, however, did not

follow Plath’s ordering of the poems; some poems were omitted, while others were

excluded.2 It was not until 2004 that Ariel: The Restored Edition was published, an

edition that not only follows Plath’s ordering but also includes the poems she had

meant it to include.3 The Ariel poems – regardless of edition – deal with horrors,

with the creepily strange, and the macabre. They often take place against ghastly

backgrounds, an empty house in which a woman has gone up in smoke, a hospital, a

windowless room, a distorted beach littered with limbs and “obscene bikinis”, a

black shoe in which a woman has been stuck. There are boots, deformities, moons,

tanks, babushkas, redcoats, and coffins, but also roses, acetylene Virgins, babies,

and high-flying queen bees.

Plath’s poems engage in the effort of making sense of darkness, of childhood

memories, and of the split part of ourselves, that we often shy away from.

Memories, nightmares, and real events are mixed, manipulated with and

unapologetically served up. In the introduction to the first publication of Ariel,

Robert Lowell calls the poems “personal, confessional, felt, but the manner of

feeling is controlled hallucination.”4

In “The Uncanny”, Freud investigates an area of the aesthetics he felt had been

neglected. He locates das Unheimliche, or the uncanny, in the domain of the

frightening, the scary and that, which causes terror.5 Freud had a certain amount of

base for his essay in its precursor, a 1906 essay by Ernst Jentsch titled “On the

Psychology of the Uncanny”, so he did not grasp the uncanny out of nowhere.6

Since the publication of “The Uncanny”, the concept has risen in importance in

areas such as psychoanalysis, philosophy, queer theory, and feminism. It has proven

especially useful as a theoretical framework for gothic literature. At the heart of the

uncanny is its intricate ambivalent meaning, for there exists a strange kinship

between unheimlich (uncanny) and its antonym heimlich. This kinship comes into

view when Freud looks closer at the lexicographical and etymological roots of the

German word. In what can best be described as a loop, Freud shows us that

unheimlich is a contradictory term that can merge and come to mean the exact as its

opposite heimlich, meaning something “belonging to the house, not strange,

1 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, New York 2003, p. 123. 2 Sylvia Plath, Ariel, New York 1965. 3 Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, New York 2004. 4 Sylvia Plath, Ariel, p. vii. 5 Freud, The Uncanny, p. 123. 6 Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, (2022-04-22).

http://www.art3idea.psu.edu/locus/Jentsch_uncanny.pdf

2

familiar, tame, dear and intimate, homely etc.”7 The conclusion is that the uncanny

carries with it shades of its opposite. Freud writes: “The uncanny (das Unheimliche,

‘the unhomely’) is in some ways a species of the familiar (das Heimliche, ‘the

homely’).”8 The uncanny, thus, is something threatening that has to do with a thing

once known yet forgotten or repressed, usually something from the childhood. The

uncanny may show its face in the meeting with a familiar face in a strange

environment, or vice versa, in the encounter with something strange in a familiar

environment. Strange phenomena such as hauntings, ghosts and doubles all belong

to the uncanny, as does a cluster of other characteristics such as madness, death and

dying, the inexplicable, darkness etc.

The applicability of, or rather the stability of, the concept of the uncanny was

questioned in a 1979 article in Comparative Literature Studies, titled

“Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny”. In it, Ellen Peel wonders how the issue of the

castration complex (another one of Freud’s uncanny elements) works for women.

Surely, Peel argues, the castration complex must look different for the person with a

penis than for the one without. And for those without penises, Peel writes: “Do other

things instead strike them as uncanny? To return to literature, would female and

male readers disagree on whether a work was uncanny? Does the gender of the

character matter? Does the gender of the author?”9 Peel’s questions force us to not

only continuously rethink what constitutes the uncanny but also remind us to be

aware of how theories and concepts are ever-evolving, just as our cultures and

societies are. In 2003, Nicholas Royle, Professor of English at the University of

Sussex, published The Uncanny, a work he calls “the first book-length study of [the

uncanny].”10 Royle brings the concept of the uncanny up to date, by introducing

both exciting ideas of what the uncanny might entail, as well as novel ways with

which to write about it. Some of Royle’s ideas include night writing, phantom texts,

and silence as uncanny.11 Freud was quick to realize the potential of using the

uncanny as a literary concept, towards the end of his essay he concludes: “The

uncanny that we find in fiction – in creative writing, imaginative literature – actually

deserves to be considered separately. It is above all much richer than what we know

from experience; it embraces the whole of this and something else besides,

something that is wanting in real life.”12

An important aspect of Freud’s uncanny is uncertainty, and while much of Plath’s

poetry indeed lands in a liminal state, I do not regard uncertainty as a necessarily

inherent element of the uncanny. Nor do I find arguments for this in Freud’s text. I

asked Nicholas Royle, author of The Uncanny, to further expand on this. He told

7 Freud, The Uncanny, p.126. 8 Ibid. p.134 9 Ellen Peel, “Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny”, in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol.17,

No.4, p.412, (2022-04-18). https://www.jstor.org/stable/40245653?read-

now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A990b31702aa646ed5f0c9d1b5a784ec4&seq=3#page_scan_t

ab_contents 10 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny, Manchester 2003, p. vii. 11 Ibid. 12 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 155.

3

me, that the dual qualit of heimlich/unheimlich hinges on how one conceives duality

in the first place, for instance whether or not one thinks of it as opposition or a

figure of complementarity. A similar notion is put forth by Jacques Derrida in

“Speculations – On Freud” in Oxford Literary Review, in which Derrida suggests

that the idea of “duplicity without original” is but one way of construing the

uncanny.13 What Derrida and Royle both imply is what I already implied myself, by

quoting Ellen Peel, that one must question the stability of the concept, that it is

changeable in nature, and therefore difficult to exact capture.

Plath’s work has received, and continues to receive, a great deal of academic

attention. But although so much of her work contain uncanniness, the uncanny has

never been the full focus of any Plath study. Certainly, individual aspects of it have

been touched upon before – most notably death, dying, and doubles – but the whole

of the uncanny has, to my knowledge, not. No holistic or exhaustive study on the

uncanny in Plath’s work exists. Moreover, nobody has looked at the uncanny

circumstances in which Plath found herself in the final six months of her life. She

composed the bulk of Ariel in the fall of 1962, in a big dark house in rural

Devonshire. Here, she lived alone with two small children, after her husband Ted

Hughes had left her for someone else, far away from many friends and family. She

wrote in the early mornings when it was still dark outside. The window in her study

faced a row of old headstones and the village church. Yet, no study exists that has

investigated the impact of this grim rather Gothic environment on Plath’s poetic

output from the fall of 1962.

Last summer Sotheby’s in London auctioned off a lot of about fifty items that had

previously belonged to Plath, raking in over $1 million.14 The object that drew most

attention was Plath’s deck of Tarot cards, which collected $200,000 – more than her

wedding ring, more than her family photo albums, more even than her letters.15 I

suggest this shows that part of our fascination with Plath relates to her fascination

with magic, witchery, and the occult, much of that, which we might file as uncanny.

In the summer of 1962, she built a divining bonfire in her backyard, to a friend

visiting in November the same year, she exclaimed that she had “discovered her call

for witchcraft”, in a letter she calls herself “clairvoyant”, friends mention her

affinity for dovetailings and auguries and when pondering her future, she used

bibliomancy to foretell it.16 In short, Sylvia Plath believed in the supernatural.17 The

Tarot cards were used for readings, but also as prompts for some of her poems,

13 Jacques Derrida, “Speculations – On Freud”, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 1978,

p. 84. 14 Carlie Porterfield, “Poet Sylvia Plath’s Wedding Band and Other Prized Possessions Net

$1 Million At Auction”, Forbes July 21, 2021, (2022-04-18).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/07/21/poet-sylvia-plaths-wedding-band-

and-other-prized-possessions-net-1-million-at-auction/?sh=554aad021143 15 Dan Sheehan, “Sylvia Plath’s tarot deck just sold for $200,000”, Lithub, July 21, 2021,

(2022-04-18). https://lithub.com/sylvia-plaths-tarot-deck-just-sold-for-200000/ 16 Plath, Letters Volume 2, p. 800, Rosenstein, “Roche, Clarissa, interview recording, part

two, 1973 November 20”, 1489: Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, ID:

v70cv, and Clark, pp 805 – 806. 17 Clark, p.739.

4

which shows a direct connection between Plath’s interest in the uncanny and her

poetic production.

It is therefore at the crossroads of poetry and biography, that I position my thesis. In

the introduction to her book Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, Julia

Gordon Bramer writes: “Plath’s interest in the occult has not been examined with

any seriousness.”18 I take this decree as my cue. I have chosen close reading as my

method to examine the poems I introduce below. A close reading will allow me to

access the poems in detail, it is a method that permits me to pay close attention to

the meaning and order of words, line breaks, potential patterns, and dashes, as well

as what may remain unsaid, such as words and sentences that have been removed.

While executing as in-depth an analysis as the given format permits, I hope to reveal

intricate details of the uncanny in five of Plath’s 1962 poems: “Berck-Plage”, “The

Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Daddy”, “Fever 103”, and “Death & Co.” These poems

all touch on elements Freud present in his seminal essay “The Uncanny”: liminality,

spectrality, hauntings, death and dying, rituals, repetitions, doubles, the governing

impulse to return, revenants, and the anxious yearning to be on the move. I mean to

compare these analyses with Plath’s biographical data. In my thesis I examine how

this interest of Plath’s colored her poetry, thereby trying to get a better

understanding of this largely unmapped side of it. I will explore the uncanny in five

of her poems, all written in the last eight months of her life: “Berck-Plage”, “The

Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Daddy”, “Fever 103°”, and “Death & Co.” The questions

I aim to answer with this thesis are: What motives and themes of the uncanny can be

found in these poems? Might the circumstances in which Plath found herself at the

time of writing these poems have influenced the uncanny in them? It is also my

objective to widen Freud’s concept, which at times may read as narrow and

outmoded (e.g. the aforementioned castration complex, which obviously caters to

only one part or so of the population). Nicholas Royle, in his book, invites the

reader to look at hauntology and spectrality, for example, as additional elements of

the uncanny, and there might even be more to uncover.

For many years, the Plath estate made the publication of Plath biographies or studies

containing biographical elements, very difficult; any author interested in writing

about Plath’s life had to make big changes in the biographical text in exchange for

permission to quote snippets of her work.19 The object was to protect Plath’s

husband Ted Hughes from anything that could make his actions appear doubtful. In

2016, the head of the Plath estate, Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes’ sister, died and

passed the baton on to Plath’s daughter Frieda Hughes, a shift that has made writing

biographies and quoting Plath’s work much easier. Two years ago, in 2020, the first

full-scale biography of Sylvia Plath came out, Red Comet: The Short Life and

Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, written by Heather Clark.20 In 2017 and 2018

respectively, two volumes of Plath’s letters The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1:

18 Julia Gordon Bramer, Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, Nacogdoches

2014, p.x. 19 Paul Alexander, Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath, New York 1991, p. 2. 20 Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, London 2020.

5

1940-1956 and The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2: 1956-1963 were published.21

It is paramount for me, to make use of this relatively new, exciting material. Not

only Plath’s letters and Clark’s biography, but also an unpublished memoir written

by a friend who visited Plath during the time she wrote the poems I have chosen for

my thesis, and taped interviews with friends who knew and associated with Plath in

1962.22 These interviews were conducted seven to eleven years after Plath’s death,

by Harriet Rosenstein, an early Plath scholar, in an attempt at a biography. Some of

them are dated, many are not. Rosenstein never completed her project, most likely

due to the severe restrictions issued by the estate. In 2020, Emory University in

Atlanta purchased Rosenstein’s interview tapes and research papers. Soon thereafter

the tapes were digitalized and made available to the public through the university’s

library website.23

There is something uncanny about these recordings themselves. Firstly, they have

resurfaced after having been hidden for decades. Secondly, most of the people

interviewed are now dead, and here they are, caught on tape in the here-and-now of

the early 1970’s, talking about a person who had died ten years prior. Rosenstein’s

interviews cover a span of four years, from 1970 to 1974, and take place (or seem

to) in private homes, cafés, offices, even airports (one hears something that sounds

like airplanes taking off in the background). In some instances, these are sounds

from an era gone, when secretaries brought in tea on trays, rotary phones rang in the

hallway, and one sent children out to buy “ciggies”.24 Tea is poured into cups,

cigarettes are lit, there is rain smattering on the windows, scones offered, babies

crying, people coughing, dogs barking, all while Rosenstein keeps prodding and

digging. At times she turns her recorder off just when something interesting is about

to be revealed, “I won’t need to record myself,” she says, when she is about to tell

the other person something she has just learnt, and so a piece of the puzzle is –

infuriatingly – forever lost. Other times a word or an entire sentence gets lost, and

one must listen to a section over and over to make sense of it. Other times still,

Rosenstein is having trouble with the tapes and the voices begin to have that Donald

Ducky sound. What is fascinating is of course that these tapes are so uncensored.

Rosenstein is beguiling and her subjects open up to her. When we write we have

time to think about what we want to say, we can go back, we edit ourselves. These

voices, on the other hand, are unfiltered and unedited, people speak off the top of

their heads. When they cannot remember, Rosenstein desperately tries to jog their

memories. “Please try to remember,” she pleads. She frequently complains about

how Hughes and his sister Olwyn are treating her, worried over how the rules of the

21 Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1 1940-1956, New York 2017 and The

Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2, 1956-1963, London 2018. 22 Clarissa Roche, “Unpublished Memoir”, Smith College, Sylvia Plath Collection,

Northampton and Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, Rose Library at Emory

University, Atlanta. 23 When contacting the Rose Library at Emory University, one receives a username and

password that gives one access to all the tapes. While the username remains the same, the

password is changed monthly. [email protected] 24 Rosenstein, “Roche, Clarissa, interview recording, part two, 1973, November 20”, 1489:

Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, ID: v70cv.

6

estate will affect the outcome of her work. Some of the things discussed and

questioned have since been resolved through the publications of Plath’s journals and

letters. Others are irretrievably lost and remain unsolved mysteries. There are many

silences throughout the tapes, and in some of these, one can detect the ghost of

Plath. That is particularly so in the instances when Rosenstein asks about the

padlocked room at Court Green, the house in Devon where Plath lived and where

she wrote most of her poems. Whenever discussions near that room, it is as if

Rosenstein also nears the mystery itself – Plath’s poetry – and something

inexplicably happens. Silences lengthen, voices on both sides grow lower. But

Rosenstein rejects Plath’s ghost, or her own intuition, which must be telling her

what room this is. She continuously seeks to figure out where in the house this room

is situated and what purpose it served, it does not become clear to her that it is

Plath’s study, until a former babysitter of Plath’s informs her. Different voices give

different accounts. This is especially the case, when the divining bonfire or fires that

Plath engaged in during the fall of 1962 are brought up. These fires are mentioned in

several texts as well, and seem to pertain to one or several burnings of letters, notes

and manuscripts as well as loose stuff – hair, nail clippings and so forth – that Plath

performed in her backyard for divination purposes, and about which she is quoted as

having said “Truth loves me and truth comes to me”.25 The name of Hughes’ lover

supposedly appeared to her during one such fire, and Plath told several people about

it or word traveled by mouth, but different people give different names and

Rosenstein remains puzzled and confused. Throughout however, she is the intrepid

journalist/detective who tries to complete the puzzle without quite succeeding.

2 On the Issue of Biography & Previous Research

In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes writes the following:

Why do some people, including myself, enjoy in certain novels, biographies,

and historical works the representation of ‘daily life’ of an epoch, of a

character? Why this curiosity about petty details: schedules, habits, meals,

lodgings, clothing etc.? Is it the hallucinatory relish of ‘reality’ (the very

materiality of ‘that once existed’)? And is it not the fantasy itself which

invokes the ‘detail’, the tiny private scene in which I can easily take my

place?26

This quote highlights our fascination with literature’s “petty details”. For decades,

researchers and writers tried to keep the “petty details” of Sylvia Plath’s life out of

studies, articles, and books, but to no avail. Nothing could stop these details, that

were not so “petty” after all, from seeping in. For Plath did not write about some

abstract sunset or, as she explained in a letter, “about the birdies still going tweet-

tweet”.27 She wrote about her life, her daily chores and things that happened to her.

25 Rosenstein, “David Compton, interview recording, part two, 1973 December 7”, 1489:

Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, ID: v75fn. 26 Roland Barthes, from The Pleasure of the Text, in A Barthes Reader, Edited by Susan

Sontag New York 1982, pp. 408–414. 27 Plath, Letters Volume Two, pp. 874-875. Plath’s letters are almost always dated.

7

In an interview at the end of her life, she said “I think my poems immediately come

out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have”.28 The reason for the concern

about biography in Plath’s case, was that her suicide at thirty would overshadow her

poetry or cast foreboding spells over it, and of course her husband’s affair and his

dealing with her copyright. In later years, that has shifted to become a concern about

the pathologizing of her. But times have evolved, and the New Criticism of T.S.

Eliot, Monroe Beardsley, William K. Wimsatt et al, and their incessant push for

severing a literary text from its historical and biographical context, has long been

outdated. Proponents of New Historicism, a literary theory that developed in the

1980’s, maintain that rather than looking at a text in a vacuum, the cultural

conditions in which the text is produced must also be taken into account. This has

meant an opening up for the use of biography in analyses of literary texts. In an

article called “Introduction towards biography theory” Joanny Moulin states that

mentalities have revolved to the degree that “biography research writers no longer

feel obliged to justify themselves, and to vindicate the seriousness of their object in

a supposedly hostile academic context.”29 In yet another article titled “The

Transfiguring Self: Sylvia Plath, a Reconsideration”, Leonard Sanazaro does an

excellent job articulating the biography dilemma for Plath scholars:

Either the poems are thoroughly immersed in the poet’s biography and

rendered incapable of independent existence as works of art; or they are

defensively divorced from the poet’s life and interests, thus denuding them of

the important personal and world milieu in which they belong. (…) But in

either case, both excesses distort and fail finally to treat the emotional and

intellectual complexities of the poems themselves. When available, primary

biographical data surrounding specific poems can be used effectively to

illuminate their creator’s particular emotional concerns at the time of their

composition. This information, in conjunction with a detailed textual analysis,

can yield a greater understanding of the larger universal themes that run

throughout Plath’s oeuvre.30

I believe that a careful handling of Plath’s biographical information will not lead to

a romanticizing of neither her poetry nor her life but help read her poetry afresh.

Used with caution, a biographical lens can help shine light on research that has gone

stale. A honing in on Plath’s letters and the Rosenstein tapes, for instance, may

reveal new facets of the uncanny in Plath’s poetry.

Though perhaps more famous for her 1962 autobiographical novel The Bell Jar,

Sylvia Plath saw herself first and foremost as a poet. Born in Boston in 1932, she

began writing poetry already as a child, she excelled academically, and graduated

from Smith College in 1955. That same year, she was sent to Cambridge, England

28 Peter Orr, “A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr”, Modern American Poetry,

(2022-05-14) http://maps-legacy.org/poets/m_r/plath/orrinterview.htm 29 Joanny Moulin, “Introduction: Towards Biography Theory”, Cercles: Revue

Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone, Université de Rouen, 2015, p. 2. 30 Leonard Sanazaro, “The Transfiguring Self: Sylvia Plath, a Reconsideration”, The

Centennial Review, Vol.27, No. 1 (WINTER 1983), pp. 62–74. (2022-04-18). https://www-

jstor-org.proxy.lnu.se/stable/23739384?seq=1

8

on a Fulbright to continue her studies. It was in Cambridge that she met the poet

Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956. Plath and Hughes spent two years in the

U.S. (where Plath taught at her alma mater for a year) before heading back to

Europe. She published her first collection of poems in England in 1960, The

Colossus and Other Poems, to modestly good reviews. The couple first settled in

London but moved to a house in the country, Court Green, in the fall of 1961. A

year later, their marriage fell apart. Plath was left alone in their country house, and it

was in this house, that she wrote the poems that became Ariel. In December 1962,

Plath and the couple’s two small children moved into an apartment in a house in

London where previously W.B. Yeats had lived. Plath took her own life in this

apartment on February 11, 1963. Ariel was published in 1965.

Sylvia Plath is one of those poets who employ daily chores and objects in their

poetry but who do so with a twist. One may say she uses these chores and objects in

a Shklovskian sense; by violating the original purpose of a particular object or by

maneuvering events, she makes us see them afresh, albeit perverted. In the poem

“Cut”, for example, the speaker cuts her thumb while chopping onions in her

kitchen, the hinge on her cut finger becomes a door that opens to several violent

scenes from American history, in “Fever 103°” a high fever becomes a breathless,

journey from hell to paradise, in “Ariel” a horseback ride in the countryside turns

into a suicidal dash (or possible rebirth), and in the poems known as the bee suite,

the harmless act of beekeeping becomes witchlike rituals. Because Plath dated the

poetry she wrote in 1962 and because her letters from this time have been published,

it is easy to follow her whereabouts and lay side by side her poems and information

of her daily activities. The cut thumb incident is written about in letters and referred

to by friends, as is Plath’s horseback riding and her preoccupation with keeping

bees.

“Plath has become an industry,” declares Tim Kendall in the preface to his brilliant

work Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study, and an avalanche of studies has indeed been

published about her work.31 The limited scope of my thesis allows me to partake,

present and review only a fragment of it. Though I have not been able to find a

complete study of the uncanny in Plath’s poetry, studies exist that look at parts of

the uncanny in her work as well as material otherwise related to my research. Jon

Rosenblatt’s Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation is one of them.32 Rosenblatt

focuses on the ritualistic aspect of Plath’s poetry, and rituals are a part of Freud’s

uncanny. Rosenblatt, however, does not mention either the uncanny or Freud in his

book. Judith Kroll’s Chapters in a Mythology, is a relatively early work. Kroll

began conducting her research in 1967, and her book focuses on the theme of the

myth in Plath’s poetry. Kroll does not put Plath among the confessional poets, but

rather sees myth as Plath’s poetic impetus. Confessionalism, argues Kroll, “is

sensational enough to divert the reader from seeing deeper meanings.”33 Kroll also

does not mention Freud or the uncanny. What she does, however, is delve into the

themes of death and dying, which are integral parts of Freud’s uncanny. Jacqueline

31 Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study, London 2001, Preface. 32 Jon Rosenblatt, Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation, Chapel Hill 1977. 33 Judith Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, New York 1978.

9

Rose looks at Plath as a cultural phenomenon in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, she

also investigates how Plath’s widower Ted Hughes and his sister Olwyn changed

the narrative of Plath’s life and work by destroying some of her journals, averting

information and by changing the order of the poems in Ariel.34 In Sylvia Plath: The

Wound and the Cure of Words Steven Gould Axelrod uses a combination of

psychoanalytical, feminist and intertextual methods that I find intriguing.35

According to Axelrod, Plath herself was familiar with Freud’s essay, as she wrote

her honors thesis, “The Magic Mirror”, on the motif of the double in two of

Dostoevsky’s works, The Double and The Brothers Karamazov.36 It is the search of

Plath’s voice, that is at the foreground in Axelrod’s work. He examines how Plath’s

relationships to her parents impose themselves on her poetry, and finally links her

“discontinuous narrative of the double and her own fate.”37 The mirror is the focus

in Pamela Annas’ study A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath.38

Annas analyzes the mirror as an image in Plath’s work, she also looks at what Plath

sees in the mirror and the various personas she tries out in front of it. In Sylvia Plath

and the Theatre of Mourning, Christina Britzolakis investigates textual patterns in

Plath’s poetry, while also examining Plath’s story and her status as a cultural

figure.39 David Holbrook focuses on making a psychoanalytical reading of Plath’s

work in Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence.40 In Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel

Poems, Susan van Dyne goes against the trend of reading a master narrative in

Plath’s life and art, and instead looks at her poetry by examining the masks and

performances that Plath produced.41 She looks at revisions and re-readings and at

how Plath herself revised both her art and her life. Tracy Brain takes a fresh

initiative with The Other Sylvia Plath, in which she looks at how Plath has been

“packaged” throughout the years, what have the various dust jackets to her works

looked like for instance, what biographical information was included and so on.42

Brain also looks at the question of confessionalism in regards to Plath, and Plath’s

position in between the UK and the U.S. and how that affected her poetic as well as

her speaking voice. Kendall’s book, which I mentioned earlier, is one of the most

quoted; it reveals new metaphors, explains structural components, and offers

original insights, by focusing on Plath’s work as well as biographical information.

In Lynda Bundtzen’s The Other Ariel, the author compares the two different

versions of Ariel (the one which Plath herself has numbered and left in a binder on

her desk, and the one that Ted Hughes published in 1965), revealing how Hughes

version creates a very different, angrier and less hopeful narrative. Elena Ciobanu’s

34 Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Cambridge 1991. 35 Steven Gould Axelrod, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words, Baltimore 1990. 36 Axelrod, p. 196 and Nathan Smith, “How Sylvia Plath’s Rare Honors Thesis Helped Me

Understand My Divided Self: On the Poet’s Understanding of Dostoevsky – and Herself”,

Lithub, April 26, 2016, (2022-04-18). https://lithub.com/how-sylvia-plaths-rare-honors-

thesis-helped-me-understand-my-divided-self/ 37 Axelrod, p. x. 38 Pamela Annas, A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, New York 1988. 39 Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, Oxford 1999. 40 David Holbrook, Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence, London 1976. 41 Susan R van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems, Chapel Hill 1993. 42 Tracy Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath, New York 2001.

10

doctoral dissertation Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: The Metamorphoses of the Poetic Self,

finally, mentions the uncanny but in passing. She writes that: “[a]lmost all of the

(…) elements that produce uncanniness are present in Plath’s poetry.”43 I find

Ciobanu’s text exciting, as it explores the many levels of these transformations and

examines them in detail. Ciobanu often puts her finger at crucial points of the Plath

scholarship as well, concluding that it often has been unsuccessful due to what she

calls a failure to understand the basic essence of Plath’s poetic being. Ciobanu calls

for a new kind of aesthetics, with which Plath’s poetics can better be analyzed. This

kind of aesthetics, she argues, has yet to be invented. Because of the volume of

books, dissertations, and studies that have been written on Plath and her art, I have

had to narrow my outlook, and focus on a smaller number of Plath’s poems. I have

also had to carefully remain within the limits of the uncanny, so as to avoid slipping

into neighboring areas such as the fantastic, the grotesque and a more detailed sense

of the occult.

The uncanny is an operative concept in literary analysis, and it can take different

shapes as there are several ways to go about teasing out the uncanny in a text. For

reference, I will here mention a few. In “’So unreal’: The Unhomely Moment in the

Poetry of Philip Larkin”, S.J. Perry explores the boundary of what is real and unreal

in Larkin’s poetry.44 Larkin is known, Perry purports, as “a poet of the everyday”

with a “sober image” but through a textual analysis of several of Larkin’s poems,

stressing words and exposing hidden meanings, Perry shows that Larkin in fact is

rather unique, the very opposite of homely.45 In “Aporia and Spectrality in La Tierra

de Alvargonzáles”, Xon de Ros offers a critical analysis of a poem by Antonio

Machado, focusing not on a consistency of intention of the text, but its halting self-

contradiction and its uncanny spectrality.46 Finally, in my own magister thesis “Ich

weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten: Uncanny Space in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath”, I

analyze Plath’s poetry looking specifically at space as something threatening. 47 I do

this with the aid of Yi-Fu Tuan’s book Landscapes of Fear and Narrating and

Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by

Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu.48

43 Elena Ciobanu, Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: The Metamorphoses of the Poetic Self, Iași 2009, p.

139. 44 S.J. Perry, “’So Unreal’: The Unhomely Moment in the Poetry of Philip Larkin” in

English Studies, Volume 92, Issue 4, 2011, (2022-04-18). https://www-tandfonline-

com.proxy.lnu.se/doi/pdf/10.1080/0013838X.2011.574030?needAccess=true 45 Ibid. p. 432 46 Xon de Ros, “Aporia and Spectrality in La Tierra de Alvargonzáles” in Neophilologus 98,

565-579, 2014, (2022-04-18). https://link-springer-

com.proxy.lnu.se/content/pdf/10.1007/s11061-014-9394-4.pdf 47 Eva Stenskar, “‘Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten’ – Uncanny Space in the Poetry of

Sylvia Plath”, 2020 (2022-04-18). https://www.diva-

portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1462751/FULLTEXT01.pdf 48 Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear, Minneapolis: Pantheon Books, 1979 and Marie-Laure

Ryan, Kenneth Foote et al. Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory

and Geography Meet, Columbus 2016.

11

In this thesis however, I mean to look not only at uncanny space, but at everything

in the poems that can be thought of as uncanny. I also look at an entirely different

set of poems. Plath’s poetry is dense, and the images are tightly intertwined, making

it a difficult operation to isolate them, why I do not want to detach one element, but

rather look at them all, to keep the momentum. At times, one uncanny element is

introduced in a poem only to be picked up again (or mirrored) in another. Therefore,

I propose to include all uncanny elements in my thesis, perform a comprehensive

textual analysis and look at the poems chronologically to possibly create a sense of

narrative. I will look for the uncanny in the five poems mentioned above and

through a close reading, paying careful attention to individual words and phrases, as

well as the whole of the poem. At times I will put the poems in context with each

other and/or with surrounding texts to tease out as much of the mystery that is the

uncanny as possible. With surrounding texts, I mean not only other poems, journal

entries and letters but also texts that might have inspired Plath. I will, for example,

look at her poems with other literary texts in mind, some of which she owned,

others which she was surely familiar with. I will also examine how the study in

which she wrote her poems affected the poems, if at all, by looking at what she

wrote about her study and listening to what others say about it on the tapes. I

analyze the things she expressed interest in, in the fall of 1962, to see if these

interests are mirrored in her poems. Through my close reading I hope to uncover

new ways of understanding and reading Plath’s poems, and if not, at least to shed

some new light on them.

3 “Berck-Plage”

“We stopped for a French lunch in a sleepy town & drove to a superb beach, swam,

collected shells for Frieda & sunned,” writes Plath to her mother on June 29, 1961.49

The beach referred to is Berck-Plage in Normandy. The following summer, in 1962,

Plath fused the memories of the “superb beach” with what was unfolding in the

house next door to Plath and Hughes: the dying and subsequent death of their

neighbor Percy Key. During the spring of 1962, Plath had made continuous updates

on Key’s gradual demise in her journal, yet the finality of his death came as a shock,

and she used it as a catalyst for the long seven-section, 63-stanza poem. “July 2:

Percy Key is dead,” she writes. “He died just at midnight, Monday, June 25th, and

was buried Friday, June 29th, at 2:30. I find this difficult to believe. (…) I have

written a long poem ‘Berck-Plage’ about it. Very moved. Several terrible

glimpses.”50 And the poem, Plath’s longest and one of the least analyzed, is in truth

made up of several “terrible glimpses”, or “126 lines of seemingly unmitigated

malaise and funereal gloom” as Jack Folsom puts it in “Death and Rebirth in Sylvia

Plath’s ‘Berck-Plage’”.51 Plath’s husband Ted Hughes remembered the following

about their visit to the beach: “[W]e had visited Berck-Plage, a long beach and

49 Plath, Letters Volume 2, pp 628–629. 50 Ibid. p. 671. 51 Jack Folsom, “Death and Rebirth in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Berck-Plage’”, Journal of Modern

Literature, Vol.17, No.4 1991, p. 521.

12

resort on the coast of France north of Rouen. Some sort of hospital or convalescent

home for disabled fronts the beach. It was one of her nightmares stepped into the

real world. A year later – almost to the day – our next door neighbour, an old man,

died after a short grim illness during which time his wife repeatedly needed our

help.”52 As Maeve O’Brien observes in her dissertation The Courage of Shutting-

Up: Decisions of Silence in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Plath lifts “words from her

notes into her poem almost word-for-word. For example, her notes regarding the

two old books propping Percy’s chin are seen again in the line: ‘They propped his

jaw with a book until in stiffened’ awaiting rigor mortis in ‘Berck-Plage’.”53

The poem begins on the beach in France and ends at a newly dug grave site in

England. In his paper, Folsom argues that Plath in the poem takes on “the role of a

photo-journalist at the scene, keenly observing details with her camera and narrating

interpretive commentary.”54 In the first section, the speaker in the poem asks a

telling question: “Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?” This means something

is hidden, yet as I seek to demonstrate the supposedly hidden things are brought out

on full display in the blistering sunlight. This ties in neatly with Freud’s idea of the

uncanny as something that “applies to everything that was intended to remain secret,

hidden away, and has come into the open.”55

3.1 The Beach as a Place of Liminality In “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche”, Hélène

Cixous writes that “the Unheimliche presents itself, first of all, only on the fringe of

something else.”56 Cixous talks about the Unheimliche as a mental concept located

in the peripheries of “fright, fear, anguish”.57 However the same can be said of the

physical locus of the uncanny, as it too is situated on the fringe. We already know

that the poem “Berck-Plage” opens on the beach. The beach as a location is

indicated through the first eight lines of the poem:

This is the sea then, this great abeyance.

How the sun’s poultice draws on my inflammation!

Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze

By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.

Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?

I have two legs and I move smilingly.

52 Ted Hughes, “Notes on The Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems”, in The Art of

Sylvia Plath: A Symposium, edited by Charles Newman, Bloomington 1970, p. 194. 53 Maeve O’Brien, The Courage of Shutting-Up: Decisions of Silence in the Work of Sylvia

Plath, (2022-04-22) p. 59

https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.770514 54 Folsom, p. 523. 55 Freud, p. 132 56 Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The

‘Uncanny’)”. New Literary History 7, no. 3, 1976. 57 Ibid. p. 538

13

A sandy damper kills the vibrations;

It stretches for miles

Such an opening, I argue, puts the poem right on the beachy threshold, the strip of

space belonging neither here nor there, the Unheimliche place of liminality between

the sea (“this great abeyance”) and land, where the poem later fixes a hotel. In his

essay “’Full Fathom Five’: The Dead Father in Sylvia Plath’s Seascapes”, Peter

Lowe pushes the envelope further by establishing “the meeting of land and sea into

a frontier between life and death.”58 Lowe thereby puts the feet of the poem in two

different camps. In her essay “It Walks: The ambulatory uncanny”, Susan Bernstein

looks at the uncanny in tales by E.T.A. Hoffmann. 59 Bernstein notes how the

uncanny in these tales take the shape of an unexpected guest who suddenly appears,

doors thrown open, on the threshold, taking the people gathered in the living room

by utter surprise. Though Bernstein implies that the uncanny lies in the performative

act of the appearance, I argue that it is also the positioning of the guest’s appearance

that makes him and his appearance uncanny: Namely the threshold. A beach is a

threshold between two elements and as such a place of liminality, which indicates

uncertainty. The word “vibrations” is of interest also in conjunction to the idea of

the beach as a threshold. In Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive

Spaces, Subha Mukherji argues that thresholds are resonant, transitional spaces of

both unease and thrill. Spaces where “clarity, definition and interiority are just

beyond grasp.”60 Here, the “vibrations” are killed, as if no thrill or clarity can be

accessed.

This brings me to the lack of orientation as something uncanny. Originally the lack

of orientation, or intellectual uncertainty, was presented by Jentsch in his 1906 “On

the psychology of the uncanny”.61 Jentsch pointed at the uncanny as a space in

which we don’t know our way around. Nicholas Royle elaborates on this in his book

The Uncanny, where he writes that “[t]he uncanny has to do with a strangeness of

framing and borders, an experience of liminality.”62 If we view the beach as the

liminal point of departure, the bizarre sights that are about to be presented seem but

an obvious continuation: The uncanny must beget more of the same or it ceases to

be. Freud shows us this with an example from Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville

Ghost”, where the scary ghost loses all credibility once he has been exposed to

ridicule.63 It is the end of its uncanniness.

As I stated earlier, it is the circular character of the uncanny, its

Unheimlich/Heimlich aspect, that imbues it with its creepy personality. For instance,

58 Peter Lowe, “’Full Fathom Five’: The Dead Father in Sylvia Plath’s Seascapes.” Texas

Studies in Literature and Language 49, no. 1, 2007, pp 21-44,

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40755475 59 Susan Bernstein, “It Walks: The ambulatory uncanny”, MLN (Modern Language Notes),

vol.118, no.5, 2003, pp. 1111-39, (2022-04-18). https://www.jstor.org/stable/3251857 60 Subha Mukherji, Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces, London 2011,

p. xvii. 61 Jentsch, p.2. 62 Royle, p. 2 63 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 158.

14

a joining of two unlikely elements. Plath’s beach yields few “normal” beach props

such as parasols and beach balls. The only thing to establish its “beachiness” is the

beating of the sun and the girls selling ice cream. For the rest we are presented with

a distortion of a beach: “scorched hands” and “shrunk voices” apparently unattached

from their equally shrunken, severed bodies, and a black-clad sinister man with dark

glasses. The “electrifyingly-colored sherbets” seem to travel the air by themselves,

the beach is peopled by shadows of beings, giving the impression that the things

themselves are representing the people, who remain invisible. And when we are

introduced to typical beach paraphernalia, they are described with a twist: “breasts

and hips a confectioner’s sugar” and “obscene bikinis” that “hide in the dunes”,

turning the heimlich into something unheimlich. For the bikinis are “obscene” and

the sherbets are “electrifyingly-colored” and, as mentioned, seemingly travel the air

by themselves.

In this menacing landscape the blistering sunlight is not healing but “draws on [the

speaker’s] inflammation”, the sun does not tan but scorches bare hands and forces

the black-clad man to put on glasses. Meanwhile, the sea is not only an “abeyance”,

but retreats “many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress”. The “many-snaked” is an

obvious hint at Medusa, in whose decapitation Freud saw a symbol for castration.

“The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to

stone,” Freud writes.64 The last hissing sound “of distress” from the sea comes as a

warning. Breaking the silence of the sandy damper in the fourth stanza, it becomes a

foghorn, alerting both speaker and reader.

3.2 The Beach as a Double “Berck-Plage” has a distant cousin in Plath’s poem “Daddy”, which I will present

later. As locus, the ominous Normandy beach is the dark double of the beautiful

Cape Cod shore Nauset, the beach mentioned in “Daddy” and described as follows:

“Where it pours bean green over blue / In the water off beautiful Nauset / I used to

pray to recover you. Ach du.” Plath oftentimes mentions Nauset beach in letters

home. “I can’t wait to run up my beloved Nauset beach in the sun,” she writes to her

mother on March 15, 1957.65 On August 27, 1960, she again eulogizes it in a letter

home: “My favorite beach in the world is Nauset & my heart aches for it.”66 Ted

Hughes too wrote of his wife’s love for Nauset in several poems:

The waters off beautiful Nauset

were the ocean sun, the sea-poured crystal

Behind your efforts. They were your self’s cradle.

(---)

‘The waters off beautiful Nauset’.

Your intact childhood, your Paradise

(---) God’s own trademark67

64 Sigmund Freud, Freud on Women: A Reader, New York 1992, p. 272. 65 Plath, Letters Volume Two, p 93. 66 Ibid. p. 504. 67 Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, New York 1998, p. 186.

15

One beach on the coast of the Northeastern United States, the other on the coast of

Normandy, France. Both sandy, long beaches that, from different sides, face the

same Atlantic as well as each other, like the two profiles that make up the Rubin’s

vase, like doubles. The profiles are uncanny, because at first one may not see them

(the image is referred to as “vase”), but so is the part in between, which can be read

as a transitive, “threshold” space. Plath’s Nauset beach, in Hughes’ words: “That

‘jewel in the head’ – and your flashing thunderclap miles.” 68 And “Berck-Plage “in

Plath’s words: “A sandy damper kills the vibrations: / It stretches for miles.” Royle

connects the theory of the double with the concept of déjà-vu, which he suggests is

“a kind of verbal double”69 and one that gives but the illusion of something having

already been experienced70, yet one which, more than anything, yields uncertainty.

Freud refers to the double as “the uncanny harbinger of death.”71 Reading the beach

section from “Berck-Plage” is like watching a beautiful beach distorted through a

funny mirror. In Plath’s poetry the dark double of Nauset is Berck-Plage with its

parade of nightmarish paraphernalia. Of course, the phenomenon of the “double”

comes in many guises; from the Freudian Doppelgänger to the dramatic opposite of

oneself to evil or repressed characteristics.

3.3 The Black Boot & Severed Limbs Peter J. Lowe suggests that the American seascape is of such emotional importance

for Plath because of its link to the memories of her father (who died when Plath was

eight). Lowe adds that engaging with the dead father is risky. “For Plath, it means

confronting what she has believed to be ‘buried’.”72And the Atlantic may very well

be the place where the father can somehow be recovered, like a lost treasure.73 If

read that way, the Atlantic becomes the uncanny negative space between the

profiled beaches in the Rubin’s vase, to pursue that idea. As a child, Plath watched

her father’s health deteriorate, and during his final months she was sent to her

grandparents who lived near the beach.74 Thus the beach and the dying father are

linked. Ghosts also have a tendency to appear on borders. In an essay titled

“’Something Tremendous, Something Elemental’: On the Ghostly Origins of

Psychoanalysis”, Roger Luckhurst writes: “Ghosts haunt borders, As in the stories

of Henry James, they stand on thresholds, monitory absent presences that forbid

entry, or contemptuously turn their backs; when they show their face, barring the

door, it is enough to make you lose your self-presence.”75 It does not stop there,

though, because the ghost, Luckhurst continues, breaches boundaries (or they would

not be able to pass from death to life, presumably), therefore requiring a continuous

68 Ibid. 69 Royle, p. 172. 70 Ibid. 71 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 142. 72 Lowe, p. 29. 73 Ibid. p. 37. 74 Alexander, p. 29. 75 Roger Luckhurst, “‘Something Tremendous, Something Elemental’: On the Ghostly

Origins of Psychoanalysis”, in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, edited by

Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, London 1999, p.52.

16

restating of those borders.76 Returning to Freud, we find that “[t]o many people the

acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do with death, dead bodies,

revenants, spirits and ghosts.”77 If we are to imagine the ghost as a revenant, we are

imagining an individual who has died, that is who has been buried (hidden under

earth) but has returned in some capacity, we are indeed back to the idea of that,

which was intended to “remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open.”78

In “Berck-Plage” that, which was supposed to be hidden away but has come back in

the bright sunny daylight, is a foot. It is a well-established symbol of Plath’s

German-born father, whose death was precipitated by an amputation of the foot, and

whose gloomy persona frequently returns in her poetry: “This black boot has no

mercy for anybody. / Why should it, it is the hearse of a dead foot, // The high, dead,

toeless foot of this priest.” The foot or the boot in Plath’s poetry is often interpreted

as referring to her father. In an earlier poem “The Colossus”, the dead father figure

is portrayed as enormous yet still dismembered, and the speaker’s job is to glue him

together again, a Sisyphean task. In the poem “Daddy”, written a few months after

“Berck-Plage”, the father figure is an oppressive Nazi-powered revenant. This time,

the speaker has given up on pasting him together and is instead trying to rid herself

of him. In “Daddy” the father is symbolized by a shoe, and it is the speaker herself

who is the foot:

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

(---)

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal

The speaker in “Berck-Plage” is confronted with a similar image on the beach: It is

a foot, this time sheathed in a black boot. The black paternal boot conjures up

images of WW2, it represents power and dominance, even the location of the beach

– Normandy – supports this argument. Maeve O’Brien offers that because of the

remnants of Rommel’s Atlantikwall, which are scattered on the seafront, the poem

“can be read as Plath’s meditation on the mass deaths of the Second World War.”79

The hearse of the dead foot that is making its way down the edge by the water is not

only a ghost of the father or a revenant of a dead foot, but also harks back to Freud’s

visual of detached body parts as uncanny elements in themselves. According to

Freud, severed body parts, especially when credited with “independent activity” but

uncanny even when not – such as here, where the foot is inside a boot,– are highly

uncanny.80 Freud connects the severed part with castration. But perhaps more than

76 Ibid. 77 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 148. 78 Ibid. p.132. 79 O’Brien, p. 95. 80 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p.150.

17

that, the severed body part connects back to that which is familiar yet strange.

Lennard Davis writes in Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body:

The feelings of repulsion associated with the uncanny, das Unheimlich [sic],

the unfamiliar, are not unlike the emotions of the ‘normal’ when they are

visualizing the disabled. The key to the idea of the uncanny is in its relation to

the normal. Heimlich is a word associated with the home, with familiarity –

and with the comfortable predictability of the home. The disabled body is seen

as unheimlich because it is the familiar gone wrong. Disability is seen as

something that does not belong at home, not to be associated with the home.

Freud notes that the terror or repulsion of the uncanny is ambivalent, is found

precisely in its relation to and yet deviance from the familiar. 81

In “Berck-Plage”, these deformed bodies are thrust out into liminality. The booted

foot belongs to a priest:

The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest

Who plumbs the well of his book

(---)

While a green pool opens its eye,

Sick with what it has swallowed ––

Limbs, images, shrieks.

The priest/father figure has to take in the scene that greets him in spite of trying to

shut it out from behind his dark glasses: “While a green pool opens its eye, / Sick

with what it has swallowed - / Limbs, images, shrieks.” Folsom’s reading of this is

that one must don dark glasses “so as not to ‘see’ the unbearable.”82 And I agree,

dark glasses means one sees but sees things filtered. There is of course also the

notion of secrecy when one obscures one’s eyes or averts one’s gaze: Something is

hidden. There is yet another eye in the poem that has to take in everything, and that

is the eye in the third section. “This is the surgeon: One mirrory eye” here the

mirrory eye is a metonym for the surgeon as such. Because it is “mirrory”, this eye

has the power of duplicating, or making doubles.

The dead foot is far from the only severed limb in the poem. “Berck-Plage” is in

fact brimming with body parts seemingly detached from their host. Royle writes that

“[a] feeling of uncanniness may come from curious coincidences, a sudden sense

that things seem to be fated or ‘meant to happen’. It can come in the fear of losing

one’s eyes or genitals, or in realizing that someone has a missing or prosthetic body-

part, in the strange actuality of dismembered, supplementary phantom limbs.”83

From Hughes’ we have already been informed that the beach at the time he and

Plath visited, was fronted by a hotel for recuperating disabled people, so it is not

surprising to run across words like “crutchless”, “tubular steel wheelchairs”,

“aluminum crutches”, not to mention “Limbs, images, shrieks”. Even the mackerel

81 Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, London 1995

p. 141. 82 Folsom, p. 524 83 Royle, p. 1.

18

gathered by the fishermen are likened to “the parts of a body”. Though these body

parts are strewn throughout the poem’s first section, they are not commented on.

Later, once the poem has left the beach, there is also the image of a body being

turned inside out, with its internal organs exposed – only to a few lines later vanish

in the sun. And as mentioned, the mirrory eye is forced to witness:

This is the side of a man, his red ribs,

The nerves bursting like trees, and this is the surgeon

One mirrory eye –

A facet of knowledge.

On a striped mattress in one room

An old man is vanishing.

The priest on the beach has his double in the surgeon in the next part of the poem.

This double also encompasses the duality of the physical (surgeon) as well as the

spiritual (priest), which in turn ties in to how Freud describes das Unheimliche,

“two sets of ideas, which are not mutually contradictory, but very different from

each other.”84 While the priest “plumb[ed] the well of his book”, the surgeon is a

“facet of knowledge”. Both indicate knowledge, and with the subtle hint of the

priest as “father”, the surgeon and the priest/father both tie into Plath’s real father, a

prominent biologist. Also, when visiting Plath in November in 1962, Clarissa

Roche, an American friend, noted how Plath rarely spent time or showed interest in

spending time with other artists and poets but preferred to be around midwives and

doctors. “She seemed to have always latched on to these sorts of priests of the

body,” Roche guessed when probed. “It surely must have had something to do,

somewhere along the lines, with the death of her father.”85

3.4 Death & Dying Nicholas Royle talks about death as an uncanny departure from life, stating that

“’Departing’ on a journey is one of the commonest and best authenticated symbols

of death.” 86 Plath was certainly aware of this. Although she did not have Joseph

Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces in her personal library, she

owned other books by Campbell, and his theory of the prototypical hero and his life

as a journey, presented in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is very similar to the

Fool’s journey, the backbone of the Tarot cards’ story.87 “Berck-Plage” features

several signs of departure in sections four and five.

84 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p.132. 85 Rosenstein, “Roche, Clarissa, interview recording, part two, 1973, November 20”, 1489:

Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, ID: v70cv. 86 Royle, p. 227. 87 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Novato 2008 and SylviaPlathLibrary

on Library Thing, a catalog that includes books read by and reviewed by Plath but that may

not necessarily have been kept. Additional books are held privately and may not be reflected

in this catalog. (2022-04-18). https://www.librarything.com/catalog/SylviaPlathLibrary

19

The bed is rolled from the wall.

This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.

Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit

(---)

They (…) folded his hands, that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye.

(…)

The long coffin of soap-colored oak

Here, a bed has been rolled aside, showing movement. The dead person’s hands,

now folded, had been shaking “goodbye”, and the “vehicle” for departure – “[t]he

long coffin of soap-colored oak” has been readied for the journey. The scenes in

these sections illustrate departure. In section five there is an echo of the shaking

hands in the flutter of a curtain:

One curtain is flickering from the open window,

Flickering and pouring, a pitiful candle.

This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember.

How far he is now,

(---)

The elate pallors of flying iris.

They are flying off into nothing: remember us

The flickering curtain can be read as the waving of a handkerchief, emblematic not

only of farewell but also of surrender, surrender to death perhaps, surrender to

Freud’s Todestrieb, our drive towards death and destruction, with “drive” a faint

sign also of journeying. The pitiful candle can be read as a symbol for the life of a

man. Coming right on the heels of this flickering, is the repeated “remember,

remember”, like a magic incantation turning the flickering curtain/waving

handkerchief into a memento mori. Next, the repeated “flying”/ “flying off” is

further evidence not only of departure but of an upward bound departure, an ascent,

death. According to the book The Meaning of Flowers: Myth, Language & Lore,

written by Ann Field and Gretchen Scoble, the iris was named by the Greeks “after

their messenger goddess, who guided the soul to eternity after death.”88

The very last line of the fifth part also connects to journeys, with its reference to a

scenic rest stop, of the kind travelers delight in:

It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place

In an earlier poem, “All the Dead Dears” from Plath’s poetry collection The

Colossus, she muses over the uncanny talent of the dead:

88 Ann Field and Gretchen Scoble, The Meaning of Flowers: Myth, Language & Lore, San

Francisco 1998, p. 49.

20

How they grip us through thin and thick,

These barnacle dead!

(---)

From the mercury-backed glass Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother

Reach hag hands to haul me in,

The reaching of “hag hands” to “haul in” the person still alive is but exactly what

Freud meant when he wrote “it is not surprising that the primitive fear of the dead is

still so potent in us and ready to manifest itself if given encouragement. Moreover, it

is probably still informed by the old idea that whoever dies become the enemy of

the survivor, intent upon carrying him off with him to share his new existence.”89

In the beginning of “Berck-Plage” we are still balancing on the brink of something,

still in a state of liminality, a space which Mukherji in Thinking on Thresholds: The

Poetics of Transitive Spaces, refers to as at the same time uneasy and compelling.90

But now:

The grey sky lowers, the hills like a green sea

Run fold upon fold far off, concealing their hollows.

The border between sky and land is closing in and the hills are likened to a sea,

erasing the sense of two different elements.

In act IV of Macbeth, the apparition predicts that Macbeth will not be conquered

“until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him.”91 The

uncanny fulfillment of that prophecy comes, of course, when at last the trees “come

marching” towards Macbeth. In “Berck-Plage”, the sixth stanza’s second line tells

us that “the trees march to church”, signaling that with the church funeral, the dying

man is “conquered” and released into the other world. The following portray the

funereal: “The voice of the priest, in thin air/Meets the corpse at the gate”, “the

notes of the dead bell”, and, finally, the dead man who is described as “the groom

(…) he is featureless.”

The poem ends at the gravesite, where again the bodilessness or incorporeality

comes into play. Here six black hats rather than six black-hatted men gather: “Six

rounded black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood, / And a naked mouth, red

and awkward. // For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma. / There is no

hope, it is given up.” “The images merge here,” writes Holbrook in Sylvia Plath:

Poetry and Existence, “of a coffin going down into a grave.”92 I do not agree; rather

it is of special interest to note that the “long coffin” from part four never actually

gets lowered into the grave. The dead body is never laid to rest, and as such remains

in a state of liminality. The grave remains empty, possibly giving the reader a

ghastly reminder of other empty graves, such as the one of Jesus and Lazarus in the

89 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 149 90 Mukherji, p. xvii 91 William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, London 1995, p. 1061. 92 Holbrook, p. 260.

21

Bible. Instead “the hole” is being filled with “plasma”, which is, according to the

Merriam-Webster dictionary, “a collection of charged particles (as in the

atmosphere of stars of in a metal) containing about equal numbers of positive ions

and electrons and exhibiting some properties of a gas, but differing from a gas in

being a good conductor of electricity and in being affected by a magnetic field.”93

Though the character of plasma is somewhat uncertain, a for my reading even more

suitable, even more uncertain in character, is “ectoplasm”, a term coined by Nobel

Prize winner Charles Richet in 1894. Ectoplasm has become a frontrunner as a

ghostly material of interest to researchers of the paranormal, in The Encyclopedia of

Ghosts and Spirits, Rosemary Guiley describes ectoplasm as “[a]seemingly lifelike

substance, solid or vaporous in nature, which allegedly extrudes from the body of a

medium, and can be transformed into materialized limbs, faces or even entire bodies

of spirits.”94 This might suggest that plasma, or ectoplasm, can be thought of as a

phantomlike substance, the kind of essence we think of whenever we think of the

essence of a ghost. Something not entirely dead yet also not entirely alive, but

“lifelike”.

3.5 An Uncanny Coda Jack Folsom suggests “Berck-Plage” can be read as “a symbolic burial of the father,

in association with images of renewal out of the same red earth.”95 While I find this

plausible, I would like to offer another reading. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath,

Jacqueline Rose wonders whether it is possible “to read Plath independently of the

frame, the surrounding discourses, through which her writing is presented.”96 Part of

this “frame” is of course Plath’s suicide. Only a handful of people, now long dead,

read “Berck-Plage” while Plath was still alive, as it was first published

posthumously in The London Magazine in June of 1963. It is therefore near

impossible to imagine a reading of the poem independent of her tragic end. Readers

of the poem today may thus subconsciously supply it with an uncanny ending. The

“terrible glimpses” Plath writes about in her journal provide the reader with a

ghostly foreboding, and the empty grave at the end may be read as Plath’s own, its

“naked mouth, red and awkward”, waiting to shut itself around its proper occupant.

The penultimate line turns the plasma discussed above into a placeholder for the real

body of Sylvia Plath, and the very last terrifying line, makes her suicide as

inevitable as fate: “There is no hope, it is given up.”

4 “The Arrival of the Bee Box”

In the summer of 1962, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes bought bees and a hive. Not

long after, between October 3 and 9, Plath wrote a suite of poems she referred to as

“the Bee sequence”, inspired by her experience as a beekeeper. These poems are

93 “Plasma.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, (2022-04-18).

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plasma. 94 Rosemary Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, New York 2007, p.145. 95 Folsom, p. 532. 96 Rose, p. 69.

22

also inspired by her biologist father, whose expertise was bees. In Red Comet: The

Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Heather Clark writes that Plath with

these poems “resurrect[s] the ghost of the Bienen-König, Otto Plath.”97 The poems

all center on bees in various ways and are written in five-line stanzas. “The Arrival

of the Bee Box” is the second in the suite.

4.1 The Grotesque The speaker tells the story about her order of a box of bees, which has just arrived.

It is a poem fraught with symbolism and much of it is uncanny. The first stanza

looks like this:

I ordered this, this clean wood box

Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.

I would say it was the coffin of a midget

Or a square baby

Were there not such a din in it.

This opening evokes the uncanny. The speaker has ordered something that she

“would say” is a “coffin”; the coffin of a midget or “a square baby”, it points at

something quite fantastical. It is thus not the content of the box that is uncanny so

far, it is the very box itself. It is also an opening into the grotesque, about which

Michael Steiger in an article in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, argues

hinges on the terms “fearsome” and “ludicrous”.98 “I would say it was the coffin of

a midget,” Plath has the speaker comment. Well-versed in myths, Plath might very

well have been familiar with the status people with dwarfism enjoyed in the

Antiquity. They were thought to be connected to Egyptian gods. In a paper called

“Dwarfism in ancient times: from worship to rejection”, Hanna Grzesiak focuses on

Ancient Egypt where Bes, one of the most significant gods, suffered from

dwarfism.99 Grzesiak explains that little people were treated with dignity and

respect, and the god Bes was considered powerful.100 Plath may have used this to

convey the power of that which is inside the box. In a poem written the day after she

wrote “The Arrival of the Bee Box” – “The Swarm” – Plath mentions Napoleon

several times, even pointing out his “short back”, so power in combination of short

stature might have been on her mind. In “The Arrival of the Bee Box” she does not

seem to think “midget” is suggestive enough, because she quickly moves on and ups

the ante with “square baby”. In both cases, it is obvious that Plath wants us to see

97 Clark, p. 767. 98 Michael Steig, “Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis” in The Journal of

Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 29, no.2, 1970, pp/ 253-60, (2022-04-18).

https://www.academia.edu/7752049/Michael_Steig_Defining_the_Grotesque_An_Attempt_

at_Synthesis_pdf, p. 255. 99 Hanna Grzesiak, “Dwarfism in ancient times: from worship to rejection”, Interdisciplinary

Contexts of Special Pedagogy, 31/2020, p. 305. (2022-04-18).

https://www.academia.edu/45105742/INTERDYSCYPLINARNE_KONTEKSTY_PEDAG

OGIKI_SPECJALNEJ_Redakcja_naukowa_ANETA_WOJCIECHOWSKA_POZNAŃ_202

0 100 Ibid., p. 310.

23

the bizarreness of the box, its uniqueness, and its potential power – the power lies in

the fact that it is bizarre, strange, cannot be made head or tail of, i.e. its very

uncanniness – while also guessing at the horror it keeps inside. This way, ordinary

objects and events are imbued with the uncanny. The ordinary as uncanny is

something that Martin Heidegger discusses in “The Origin of the Work of Art”, in

which he argues that “[a]t bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary, it is

extraordinary.”101 This idea of the uncanny as the norm, is one that Plath conveys

through her poetry. One is reminded of the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and

his “Art as Device”, where he introduces the idea of defamiliarization. According to

Shklovsky, defamiliarization means artistically describing a common object in new,

inventive ways, thereby making the reader see it in a new light, or even really

seeing it, as for the first time.102 In the foreword to the 2004 Ariel: The Restored

Edition, Frieda Hughes writes about the importance of the sudden impact or blow in

Plath’s poetry, she notices how short and rudimentary Plath’s introductory

comments to her poems are and continues: “When I read them I imagine my mother,

reluctant to undermine with explanation the concentrated energy she’d poured into

her verse, in order to preserve its ability to shock and surprise.”103 The box, an

ordinary box, is seen in a new light, and is thus made seen. Similarly, in Culture and

Value, Ludwig Wittgenstein assigns the enchantment of a gift, for instance, with

where it appears. “[I]n the magic castle it appears enchanted and if you look at it

outside in daylight it is nothing but an ordinary bit of iron (or something of the

sort).”104 I have already pointed out, that the uncanny is tied to its locus. The

uninvited guest who suddenly stands on our doorstep on a rainy night when we are

alone at home makes for the uncanny, the same appearance during a busy daytime

when the house is full of people simply does not make as strong an impact. By using

words like “coffin”, “midget”, and “square baby”, the box becomes at once

fearsome and strange, in other words uncanny. What is more, the speaker has

ordered it, the choice of the word “order” here is tinged with the uncanny as well, as

if the speaker had ordered the uncanny, welcomed it or conjured it up from

something she has repressed.

4.2 Uncanny Shakespearean Figures In “The Arrival of the Bee Box” the relationship between the speaker and the boxed

bees hinges on enslavement and freedom, a choice the speaker must make. In The

Other Ariel105, Lynda Bundtzen links this poem and this theme to Shakespeare’s The

Tempest. This is an obvious link, the name of Plath’s collection, Ariel, already is a

hint at Shakespeare’s play. In the speaker of “The Arrival of the Bee Box”,

Bundtzen sees a person presented with a powerful fount of “honey-sweetness and

101 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, in Basic Writings, San Francisco

1993, p. 179. 102 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device” in Theory of Prose, Elmwood Park 1990. 103 Frieda Hughes, “Foreword”, Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, New York 2005.

p. xv. 104 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Chicago 1980, p.11e. 105 Lynda Bundtzen, The Other Ariel, Amherst 2001, p.133.

24

melodic song.”106 Bundtzen looks at the Latin word for honey bee, apis mellifera,

which means “[b]earer or producer of sweets”.107 Thus the speaker in the poem is

receiving something sweet. However, as Bundtzen stresses, there is also the crux of

how to deal with all this sweetness. Here Bundtzen draws parallels to the identity of

the poet, and her confrontation with poetic identity and “the burden of authorship

and control.”108 Does the poet own and control her poetic production, or does it own

her? Is the owning of it in reality a curse? The speaker’s relationship to the bees,

Bundtzen argues, imitates that of Prospero’s to Ariel and Caliban. I argue that the

power Prospero has is uncanny in that it is magic, which is one of the elements

Freud points at in his essay. Bundtzen sees in the speaker a Prosperean figure, that is

a master, though a reluctant master to the bees, unable to decide whether to use her

power or not: “I am not a Caesar,” the speaker says in the fifth stanza. Where

Prospero exercises his power, the speaker in Plath’s poem steps back, though the

tone is definitely that of a master’s: “I have simply ordered a box of maniacs. / They

can be sent back. / They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.”109

However, Bundtzen shows that they are both burdened with similar responsibilities.

The bees, Bundtzen points out, resemble Caliban much more than they do Ariel. In

the poem it is their “din” and their “unintelligible syllables” that stand out,

something Bundtzen compares to Caliban’s “You taught me language, and my profit

on’t / Is, I know how to curse.”110 There is no honeyed sweetness of bees in this

poem. Prospero finds Caliban “intractable and unteachable in learning language,

who ‘would gabble like / A thing most brutish’ (1.2.356–57), the question for

Plath’s speaker is, how will she ever extract honey – allegorically, poetry, and

meaning from this ‘din’”.111At the end of The Tempest, Prospero sets Ariel free, and

Plath’s speaker likewise promises, at the end of the poem, “Tomorrow I will be

sweet God, I will set them free.”

I propose that it also is possible that Plath was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s novella

Heart of Darkness when writing “The Arrival of the Bee Box”. In Conrad’s story,

Marlow is sent to Congo to retrieve the sick Kurtz and bring him back for the

company. Marlow’s entrance into the darkness of Africa to bring out the sick nearly

dead person that is Kurtz, is itself an uncanny tale. The mad Kurtz sits at the heart of

the darkness, the uncanny, threatening center to which Marlow must journey.

Similarly, Plath’s speaker has in front of her a locked box full of darkness. There

exist, I argue, parallels of Marlow’s journey into the dark center of Africa in Plath’s

poem. What is inside is the Unheimliche. It is too dark to see, the speaker puts her

eye to the grid but says “I can’t see what is in there.” There is no exit. There is also

the more obvious allusion to Africa and Conrad’s novel in lines like “the swarmy

feeling of African hands” and “[b]lack on black, angrily clambering.” The “[b]lack

on black” also in turn leads to another uncanny element, that of darkness, which I

will now discuss.

106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid.

25

4.3 Darkness Royle states that Freud’s uncanny is full of emissions and omissions.112 The

uncanny is that place in which we easily get lost, much like darkness itself. But

perhaps more than anything, the uncanny is about shining light onto something dark,

the very revelation of what was always in the dark. In The Resistance to Theory,

Paul de Man writes: “To make the invisible visible is uncanny.”113 Freud himself

writes that the uncanny “applies to everything that was intended to remain secret,

hidden away, and has come into the open.” It is clear then, that it has to do with

visibility and invisibility at the same time. The speaker in “The Arrival of the Bee

Box” states that she must live with the box she has ordered overnight: “I have to live

with it overnight / And I can’t keep away from it. / There are no windows, so I can’t

see what is in there. / There is only a little grid, no exit.” Both “overnight” and “no

windows” suggest darkness. The lack of windows is used also in “Wintering”, the

last poem in the Bee sequence. The second stanza of “Wintering” begins with the

following line: “Wintering in a dark without a window” and continues in the

following stanza: “This is the room I have never been in. / This is the room I could

never breathe in. / The black bunched in there like a bat, / No light”. The

windowless and exit-less space is dark, airless and associated with bats, which again

is reminiscent of a grave or sepulcher. The “no exit” might very well be a homage to

Jean-Paul Sartre, whose play No Exit tackles imprisonment and hell. The box also is

an uncanny miniature of the house Plath occupied, which Clarissa Roche in her

unpublished memoir describes as having “tiny windows [which] let through bare

squints of the mean November light, leaving [it] dark and sombrous.”114 It is not

easy to ignore this physical space, the very space Plath moved around in. Her friend

David Compton, for example, pins Plath’s interest in the occult on the house itself.

When questioned by Harriet Rosenstein, Compton says he was unaware of such an

interest of Plath’s, until it was revealed after her passing: “We didn’t really find out

until afterwards and we found out partly through things about the house.”115 He

continues to mention macabre newspaper clippings tacked onto the wall in Plath’s

study, the details of which I will discuss later. He and Rosenstein also discuss an

enlarged engraving – a “blow up” – that hung over the bed in Plath’s bedroom.

Rosenstein believes it is an old image from the Tarot deck, but Compton is less sure

and refers to it as “kabbalistic”. This brief conversation accentuates the point of

Freud’s uncanny. Into the Heimlich, that is “belonging to the house, not strange,

familiar, tame, dear and intimate, homely, etc” something Unheimlich, that is the

newspaper cuttings and the “kabbalistic” image, has been brought.116 Furthermore it

is impossible to not mention Pandora’s box here, which Christina Britzolakis points

out.117 In Greek mythology, Pandora receives a jar holding all kinds of evil.

112 Royle, p. 108. 113 Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis 1986, p. 49. 114 Roche, “Unpublished Memoir”. 115 Rosenstein, “David Compton, interview recording, part two, 1973 December 7”, 1489:

Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, ID: v75fn. 116 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 126. 117 Britzolakis, p.97.

26

Curiosity gets the better of her, she eventually opens the jar, and all the evil is let

loose on the world. The myth is known today as Pandora’s box.

4.4 The Return of the Repressed It is in the second stanza that the reader is informed about the box being “locked, it

is dangerous”. Curiously, it is not the content that is dangerous, but the locked box

itself:

The box is locked, it is dangerous.

I have to live with it overnight

And I can’t keep away from it.

There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.

There is only a little grid, no exit.

Locked up spaces, secret places… A lock, says Gaston Bachelard in his influential

study The Poetics of Space, “is a psychological threshold”.118 In a locked box,

Bachelard adds, we may conceal our mysteries.119 Locks keep these mysteries, these

secrets, hidden, much like the repressed childhood memories in one’s mind. The

uncanny threat in the poem, the “dangerous” box, connects to the danger of the

return of the repressed. What returns here is the repressed in the form of the bees,

memories of the childhood with the father, the Bienen-König. It may also be the

bees themselves, who hibernate or are “hidden” to resurface in spring. Freud refers

to what is locked as something “heimlich [that] also means ‘locked away,

inscrutable’.”120 And in “The Phantoms of Drood and Rebecca: The Uncanny

Reencountered through Abraham and Torok’s Cryptonymy”, Allan Lloyd Smith

makes the following observation: “The powers at the hollow center of the Silenus,

the pyramids, the cloisters, or the primitive self, which should ‘forever remain a

mystery to us,’ are reappropriated by scientific versions of recidivism and given the

shape of whatever society most deeply fears.”121 Lloyd Smith points at the power in

the return of that mystery. The power of the uncanny. In her poem Plath affixes the

word “locked” in close proximity to the word “dangerous”, which may connect it

with the uncanny element of being locked up, and the worst version of being locked

up is “the crown of the uncanny”, videlicet being buried alive, something I will

discuss more in detail shortly. Considering that it is a bee box also brings up, again,

the idea of the rising of the dead, as the hibernation of bees can be read as a death of

sorts. The box is a faint echo of the coffin in “Berck-Plage” and a forerunner to the

shoe-coffin in the poem “Daddy”, and potentially the bee box could be the coffin of

the resurrected bees. Bundtzen sees in the poem the sense of being locked in or

locked away as a mirror of Plath’s situation that fall.122 In a letter to her brother

Warren, Plath writes: “I am and have been an intelligent woman, and this year of

118 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston 1969, p. 81. 119 Ibid., p. 83. 120 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 133. 121 Allan Lloyd Smith, “The Phantoms of Drood and Rebecca: The Uncanny Reencountered

through Abraham and Torok’s Cryptonymy”, Poetics Today, Vol. 13, No. 2 (summer 1992)

p. 290. (2022-04-28). https://www.jstor.org/stable/1772534 122 Bundtzen, p. 109.

27

country life has been, for me, a cultural death. No plays, films, art shows, books,

people!... Now I am stuck; but not for long.”123 The poem’s “locked”, also creates a

border, a threshold, as it separates an outside from an inside. And borders or

thresholds are, as Subha Mukherji’s writes in her introduction to Thinking on

Threshold: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces, spaces associated with risk, unease and

transition.124 But there is also the excitement of the threshold, here it is verbalized

by the speaker who states that she “can’t keep away from it”. The thought of

“locked” as creating a threshold also brings back Plath’s padlocked study in the

house in Devon, one that had to be forced open after her death. Her study shut

everyone except Plath herself out, and she could not keep away from it. Like her

study contained secrets (in an interview with Clarissa Roche, Rosenstein mentions

that Plath’s study was filled with journals), so does this box contain something

secret, something uncanny (“a midget / Or a square baby”).125

4.5 Strangeness/Otherness The fourth stanza has the speaker say that “[i]t is the noise that appals me most of

all. / The unintelligible syllables.” The word “unintelligible” brings a sense of the

alien, a topic Julia Kristeva discusses in depth in Strangers to Ourselves. Kristeva

writes that Freud “teaches us to detect foreignness in ourselves.”126 If something

seems strange and uncanny now, Kristeva reasons, it means it was once familiar.

She argues that encounters with strangers bring the Unheimliche back to the

Heimliche, which in turn means that an encounter with “the other” is an encounter

with our self. Hence, in “The Arrival of the Bee Box” the encounter between the

speaker and the bees in the box is an encounter between the speaker and herself. The

African hands inside the box are but doubles for the speaker’s hands outside of it.

In the fifth stanza, the speaker lays her “ear to furious Latin” (referred to as “din” in

the first stanza), stemming from the “maniacs” inside the box. These “maniacs”

(synonyms of that word include “lunatics”, “freaks”, “fiends” all of which carry

various tones of insanity or madness) are speaking in Latin. In a YouTube

presentation called “Supernatural Vision in Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems”, Dorka

Tamás shows how Latin is linked to the church as well as the Devil.127 She points to

Brian Levack’s The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West,

in which Levack explains how during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “the

Devil allegedly used [Latin] to parody Christianity.”128 The language in Plath’s

poem is thus both “heimlich” and “unheimlich”, both something that is familiar and

good, and strange and evil. Consequently, there is in this poem on one hand the bees

in the box, the “maniacs” speaking the Devil’s language Latin, and on the other the

123 Ibid. 124 Mukherji, p. xvii. 125 Rosenstein, “Roche, Clarissa, interview recording, part two, 1973, November 20”, 1489:

Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, ID: v70cv. 126 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, New York 1991, p. 191. 127 “Supernatural Vision in Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems”, Dorka Tamás, (2022-04-18).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXcsGtoz2Zs&t=1s 128 Brian Levack, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West, New

Haven 2013, p.11

28

speaker who in the fifth stanza’s last line identifies herself as “the owner” and who

later, in the last stanza promises that “Tomorrow I will be sweet God. I will set them

free.” Latin, one may conclude, connects them.

5 “Daddy”:

“After supper one night she read me ‘Daddy’. ‘That’s quite a nursery rhyme,’ I

said, and we fell about laughing.129

Previously, I discussed the difficulty of analyzing Plath’s poetry without her suicide

in mind. In the essay “Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry”, M.L. Rosenthal puts a

name on the problem. He writes that Plath and her death are “forever

inseparable”.130 It is therefore a revelation to hear a voice like Clarissa Roche’s from

the quote above, offering a fresh take on a poem that has been examined and

interpreted maybe more than any other Plath poem. Clarissa Roche, a friend of

Plath’s, visited Plath in Devon from November 16–19, 1962, about a month after

Plath had completed the poem “Daddy” (October 12). Roche had not seen Plath

since their mutual days in the U.S. four years earlier and was surprised at the

woman greeting her at the rural train station in England. In an interview with Harriet

Rosenstein conducted in 1973, Roche remembers Plath waiting for her. “It was

foggy… sort of misty. She was on the platform with a huge umbrella. And that’s

when I first noticed she looked different because I had remembered her as being

blonde. And her hair was very dark. It was certainly a very different Sylvia in

Devon.”131 Roche continues to describe the dark, dreary house where Plath lived

alone with her small children since Ted Hughes had left her some time before. “She

was convinced… that somebody (…) come looking through the windows. She was

scared to death in that place. (---) She was terrified of something or other, I mean

physically frightened.” Roche also remembers a mysterious room in the house,

probably Plath’s study, white and monastic, and one that Plath kept locked at all

times. “It had red chairs in it, sort of Victorian, and there was a desk in there, and

she had gone collecting fingernail pairings [there] for her witchcraft.”132 In the taped

interview with Roche, Rosenstein adds that she has heard from someone else that

when this room was pried open after Plath’s death, a lot of journals were found

inside.

I argue that something of importance can be gleaned from this kind of information,

because like Elena Ciobanu, I believe that “[t]o engage in the still going on debate

about Plath’s art is to acknowledge both one’s fascination with Plath’s oeuvre and

one’s desire to contribute to the unlocking of some fundamental mystery that seems

129 Roche, “Unpublished”. 130 M.L. Rosenthal, “Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry”, The Art of Sylvia Plath: A

Symposium, edited by Charles Newman, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1979 131 Rosenstein, “Roche, Clarissa, interview recording, part two, 1973, November 20” Harriet

Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, ID: v70cv. 132 Ibid.

29

to be encoded in the American poet’s texts.”133 Voices like Roche’s aid us in that

unlocking because they give us a sense of the environment in which Plath wrote

what she called “the best poems of my life.”134 Voices like Roche’s reveal the

background to these poems. Dark, dreary English landscape, Dartmoor, a misty,

rainy train platform, the soon-to-be dead poet under a huge umbrella, the mysterious

closed room, the witchcraft, the spooky window-gazer. What Roche is offering us is

a classic Victorian gothic scene. Mere months earlier Plath had written happy letters

about laburnum trees and tea parties.135 Now in November, her husband is gone, and

she is alone in a big, old house in the middle of nowhere. The scene is ripe for the

kind of poems Plath came to produce that fall.

5.1 Buried Alive: The Crown of the Uncanny

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Like Plath is stuck in the dark house in Devon in the fall of 1962, the speaker in

“Daddy” declares she has been stuck in a “black shoe” for thirty years. The cut-off

foot, as I have already mentioned, an established symbol of the father in Plath’s

work, from “Berck-Plage”, has become likened to the way the narrator has lived for

thirty years, “poor and white”. Whereas in “Berck-Plage” the father was the foot

encased in the boot, here he is the shoe trapping the narrator – the daughter – who is

the foot. In “Daddy” it is the narrator who refers to herself as a cut-off limb, a foot.

In Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation, Jon Rosenblatt observes the

submissiveness and entrapment of the shoe.136 Meanwhile Pamela Annas in A

Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, sees the black shoe as symbol

for corporate man.137 Like Rosenblatt, I believe the shoe is an entrapment, but I

argue that it may be read as more than that. In this poem, I believe the black shoe is

the symbol of how the spectral father haunts the narrator, by enclosing her in a trap

that is also a grave. “Some would award the crown of the uncanny to the idea of

being buried alive, only apparently dead,” Freud writes, for: “[w]here does the

uncanny effect of silence, solitude and darkness come from?”138 Fear of being

buried alive, or taphophobia, has been explored perhaps most extensively in

literature by Edgar Allan Poe, who in stories such as “The Premature Burial”, “The

Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat” centers on premature burials. Plath

owned a book with Poe’s complete poems and tales and refers to reading it as

133 Ciobanu p.11 134 Plath Letters 2, p.861 135 Plath Letters 2, p. 780 and 786 136 Rosenblatt, p. 124 137 Annas, p. 139 138 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 150

30

well.139 When she studied at Cambridge, she wrote home about having seen the film

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a film that reminds her of

the subtle reversal between the worlds of sanity and insanity. Really wierd [sic]

and haunting. Somnambulist Cesars reminded me of those Poe horror tales

where decomposing men are kept alive by hypnotism, and the frustrating

cramped red-tape of the official business world recalled the surrealistic tales of

Kafka where it is realistically possible for a man to wake up in the morning to

find himself turned into an insect.140

Plath was clearly intrigued and possibly inspired by this. Plath’s friend David

Compton remembers seeing macabre newspaper clipping tacked to the walls of

Plath’s study in Devon, after her death. In an interview with Rosenstein, he expands

on this:

She had what would have to be called a morbid interest in the macabre. The

newspaper cuttings that she had up in her study for example. [---] from an

American newspaper of some young man whose mother had died, and he kept

her in the bedroom bringing her alive with electric shocks for so long that

neighbors complained about the smell. And there were one or two sort of

kooky things of this nature. I can remember […] from an American magazine

again about extensive plastic surgery, a woman had had a face lift and had

written a long article about precisely how many stitches and how much it had

swollen up and how it had hurt and how bruised and the conclusion at the end

was that it had cost her $30,000 and was well worth it […] there was a great

deal of hell in the middle… a great deal of comic horror…141

“[A] great deal of comic horror” is, I believe, of importance here. The mix of the

two supports Roche’s reaction to hearing Plath read “Daddy” out loud, and it also

hints at The Bell Jar, Plath’s novel, which tells the story of a horror-filled summer

for Esther Greenwood – a young, smart student – which ends in Esther’s suicide

attempt, a story that is full of dark humor.

I argue that the shoe in “Daddy” might be read as a black coffin with the “poor and

white” hostage stuck inside. The difference between the two is obvious however:

The coffin is closed whereas a shoe has an opening. The idea of the “premature

burial” was frequently used as a motif in fiction in the late 18th century, and

probably helped spark the invention and production of “safety coffins”, in which the

person who might have been accidentally buried alive could get out of his coffin.142

The black shoe is a “safety coffin” from which the speaker, the “white foot”,

resurfaces, or ascends, much as those in the graves I alluded to in my first chapter:

139 SylviaPlathLibrary, Library Thing (2022–04–18)

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/SylviaPlathLibrary&deepsearch=poe 140 Plath, Letters 1, p. 1003. 141 Rosenstein, “David Compton, Interview Recording, part two, 1973 December 7”, 1489:

Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, ID: v75fn. 142 Jan Bondeson, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, New York

2001, p. 121.

31

Jesus Christ and Lazarus, resurfaced, possibly rebirthed. The foot is, thus,

something heimlich (it was once a real foot belonging to a real man, the father)

which was then hidden (the foot was amputated, and the man died) and now comes

back as something unheimlich since it resurfaces from the grave, independent of its

host. Nicholas Royle recalls a case from 1996, when a woman in Cambridgeshire

was pronounced dead by her physician, only to be discovered later, by the same

practitioner, to be breathing in her body bag.143 This is a similar scenario to what is

happening in the first stanza of “Daddy”, where the speaker finds herself still

breathing (though barely) in her “shoe-coffin”. She may even have pronounced

herself dead in the shoe only to re-emerge, still breathing. Interestingly, the foot in

“Berck-Plage” was dead: “This black boot has no mercy for anybody. / Why should

it, it is the hearse of a dead foot.” It seems Plath picked up the foot again, stuffed it

into an old shoe and let it come out speaking. This time, however, in another voice.

In the following stanza, fragmented body parts appear. Christina Britzolakis writes

that “[t]he father becomes a scapegoat, ritually dismembered into metonymic body

parts such as foot, toe, head, mustache, blue eye, cleft chin, bones, heart and

resurrected in a bewildering variety of guise: black shoe, ‘ghastly statue with one

gray toe’, ‘panzer-man, teacher, devil, black man, Teutonic vampire.”144

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time ––

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one grey toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

In an earlier poem by Plath, “The Colossus”, the father is similarly severed. He is

portrayed as a giant statue that has come apart, and which the mourning daughter

seeks to repair. The father is pictured in shattered pieces – “your brow”, “the bald

white tumuli of your eyes”, “Your fluted bones”, “the cornucopia / Of your left ear”

– but these appear giant in comparison to the ant-sized speaker who crawls “[o]ver

the weedy acres of your brow / To mend the immense skull plates”. The idea of the

father figure as something that “once was”, some lost greatness that now exists only

as scattered remnants connects to Freud’s idea of the uncanny as something long

forgotten, “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well

known and had long been familiar.”145 The memory of the familiar is coming back

in haunting fragments, almost like nightmares one cannot remember as a whole.

This time, however, the speaker has neither intention nor desire to glue the broken

statue together again, that wish belongs in the past: “I used to pray to recover you. /

Ach du.”

143 Royle, p. 282 144 Britzolakis, p. 188 145 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 124

32

5.2 Aposiopesis & (Intellectual) Uncertainty The speaker stuck in the shoe states that she has been so terrified that she barely has

been able to breathe or sneeze for years: “For thirty years, poor and white, / Barely

daring to breathe or Achoo.” There are dashes in this poem that I believe signal

aposiopesis, a sudden breaking off in the middle of a sentence: “You died before I

had time –”, “Panzer-man, panzer-man, o You –”, and “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve

killed two –”, as if the buried-alive speaker is silenced mid-sentence. The

aposiopesis ties into Jacqueline Rose’s observation that while the poem is “in some

sense about the death of the father, a death both willed and premature, it is no less

about the death of language.”146 Rose points to the following lines: “The tongue

stuck in my jaw. / It stuck in a barb wire snare. / Ich, ich, ich, ich, / I could hardly

speak.” It is in the unfinished line breaks, in what is not said, that the uncanny

roosts. At a reading of Plath’s work at the New York Library in 1997, Jacqueline

Rose asked readers to pay attention to that which Plath does not say in her poetry,

that which is not figured; the stories, memories left out and what silences these

create.147 Allan Lloyd Smith posits that the uncanniness in a text happens “when

inner contradiction and semantic slippage create a sense of something not said, the

non-presence of the story to itself.”148 Those slippages, he argues, are

“discontinuities of meaning, phantoms” and they are what produce in us a sense of

the uncanny. This discontinuity of meaning borders the area of intellectual

uncertainty, that Freud mentions as uncanny. And as Royle also points out, “the

uncanny is essentially to do with hesitation and uncertainty.”149 In “Daddy”

language (which is connected to the father) produces fear in the speaker: “I have

always been scared of you, / With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.” There are

several times in the poem, where Plath uses German words, as if code-switching.

Plath grew up with a German-born father and a mother with Austrian parentage, and

while she did not grow up in a bilingual home, she must have heard a fair share of

German in her childhood. Here, however, as Rose mentions, language has lost its

meaning. It has become “gobbledygoo”, unintelligible jargon. This unintelligible

jargon has to do with childhood, a connection Britzolakis, who picks up on the

puerility of words like “gobbledygoo” and even “Achoo”, makes.150 In Sylvia Plath:

The Wound and the Cure of Words, Steven Gould Axelrod writes that it is the

patriarchal, analytical kind of language that the speaker not only does not

understand but resists and seeks to find a substitute for.151 The speaker says she

“began to talk like a Jew”, as if speaking the language of the other. This opposition

of the patriarchal language is discussed by Hélène Cixous in “The Laugh of the

Medusa”, in which Cixous encourages women to “break out of the snare of silence.

They shouldn’t be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the

harem. (---) Her speech, even when ‘theoretical’ or ‘political’, is never simple or

146 Rose, p. 225 147 O’Brien, p. 92 148 Allan Lloyd Smith, p. 285. 149 Royle, p. 1. 150 Britzolakis p. 182. 151 Axelrod, p. 14.

33

linear or ‘objectified’, generalized: she draws her story into history.”152 In “Daddy”

Plath clearly breaks out of the linear and simple, that which the speaker refers to as

being “stuck in a barb wire snare”, and not only because it is poetry, but because of

the kind of poetry it is. When Plath uses images from the Holocaust (as she does in

“Daddy”) and Hiroshima (as she does in “Fever 103°”, a poem I will discuss

shortly) those images in themselves are not uncanny, but by juxtaposing them in

poems like these, by threading them up on this language, they create an effect of the

uncanny. Again, here is a strong link to Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization. It is

as if Plath is using lumber meant for something else to build her poems. I argue that

Plath with “Daddy” presents her own answer to Cixous’ strand of feminine theory,

l’écriture féminine, by apposing what Tracy Brain in The Other Sylvia Plath calls “a

serious political project with the language and rhythms of the nursery rhyme.”153

This uncanniness has created, and continues to create, problems as it begs the

question: How should we read this poem? And how are we to understand the

discrepancy between Roche’s reaction to the poem when she heard it read in that

dark house in Devon in November of 1962 – “we fell about laughing” – and

subsequent much more somber readings of it? Maybe it is possible to answer such

questions only by acknowledging that a poem like “Daddy”, as Britzolakis puts it,

“operates in the modes of pastiche and parody” and “blatant theatricality and

unstable irony.” Elena Ciobanu begins her dissertation stating that “the essence of

[Plath’s] poetic being has remained fundamentally unapprehended, that the

necessary aesthetics we need in order to understand [her] poetics has not yet been

invented.”154 Meanwhile, Tim Kendall concludes his monograph Sylvia Plath: A

Critical Study with the words: “We are still learning how to read Plath’s later work.

Poetry offers few more challenging and unsettling experiences.”155 It seems that

before readers were supplied with the information about Plath’s fate, the poem had a

much lighter tone, as if her untimely death provided the poem with some of its

uncanniness (which I suggested in “3.5 An Uncanny Coda”). Or perhaps the answer

has to do with the “great deal of comic horror” David Compton saw in the

newspaper clippings on the walls in Plath’s padlocked study. However, as anyone

who has heard it can witness, there is nothing “comic” in the recording of Plath

reading “Daddy” (a recording made on October 30, 1962). In an essay titled

“Enigmatical, Shifting My Clarities”, Mary Lynn Broe calls attention to Plath’s

“unexpected and startling tones” in this recording, drawing a conclusion similar to

both Ciobanu and Kendall’s: “We lack a critical vocabulary for these rich tones. We

lack a critical vocabulary precisely because our society lacks any definition of

power which transforms rather than coerces.”156 I suggest that the uncanny, with its

liminality, its doubleness, its fluidity, and its haunting qualities, may provide us with

a clue as to how to think of such transformative power and how to forge such a

vocabulary.

152 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer 1976) p. 881. 153 Brain, p.22. 154 Ciobanu, p. 12 155 Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study, London 2001, p. 208 156 Mary Lynn Broe, “Enigmatical, Shifting My Clarities”, Ariel Ascending: Writings about

Sylvia Plath, New York 1985, pp. 80-81.

34

5.3 Exorcism Clarissa Roche never changed her reaction to “Daddy”. Years following the

Rosenstein interview, she confessed in a documentary about Plath, that she still

found the poem funny. “I howled laughing. I still laugh. Very, very funny.

Wonderful nursery rhyme stuff. Boot him out the door, ‘Out, out!’ Wonderful.”157

This echoes Jacques Derrida’s idea in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the

Work of Mourning, and the New International where he writes about hostility

towards ghosts, a hostility he claims is sometimes fended off with laughter.158 About

exorcism, or rather exorcizing, Derrida writes: “[It] conjures away the evil in ways

that are also irrational, using magical, mysterious, even mystifying practices.

Without excluding, quite to the contrary, analytic procedure and argumentative

ratiocination, exorcism consists in repeating in the mode of an incantation that the

dead man is really dead.”159 This the speaker does a number of times. “Daddy, I

have had to kill you.” “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two –”. “There’s a stake in

your fat black heart”. The lines “The black telephone’s off at the root, / The voices

just can’t worm through”, coming right before the killing of the two men, are

suggestive of something much more dire than disconnecting a telephone line. It

sounds as if the “I” of the poem is disconnecting somebody on life support, another

way of cutting the line and another way of saying the person is dead. Derrida states

that to exorcize is “to attempt both to destroy and to disavow a malignant,

demonized, diabolized force, most often an evil-doing spirit, a specter, a kind of

ghost who comes back or who still risks coming back post mortem.”160 This is what

I argue that Plath does in “Daddy”; not only does she destroy the great

father/statue/ghost by presenting him in pieces scattered about, she disavows him by

ascending from the paternal black shoe-coffin, she disavows his language and his

background. In a note Plath wrote as preparation for a broadcast of her poems, she

stated that the poem was

spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he

was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi

and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry

and paralyze each other – she has to act out the awful little allegory once over

before she is free of it.161

David Holbrook, on the other hand, does not read real exorcism in the lines:

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

157 Lawrence Pitkethly, “Voices and Visions, 9, Sylvia Plath”, New York: Center for Visual

History, 1994, (2022-04-23). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPFQOtGSr4o&t=2912s 158 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the

New International, New York: Routledge 1994, p. 47 159 Ibid. 160Derrida, p. 48. 161 Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, p. 196.

35

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Holbrook calls it “mere manic denial […] The magic belongs to infantile

omnipotence and magic, like a child driving nails into a doll in primitive hate

ritual.”162 Holbrook suggests the speaker simply wants to go on hating, the hating

itself being the point. I do not agree. Of course, in the poem, the hating becomes the

point, is the point, or at least the motor, because once that hate is caught in words it

is set and will remain red and hot. Real anger passes, poetic anger is forever. It

reminds me of a paragraph in Janet Malcolm’s book The Silent Woman: Sylvia

Plath & Ted Hughes, in which she writes that Plath is forever anchored in the

position she was in at the time of her death: “To the readers of her poetry and her

biography, Sylvia Plath will always be young and in a rage over Hughes’

unfaithfulness.”163 I propose the very act of writing it, is exorcism also. Ted Hughes

had suggested to Plath that if she wrote about her first suicide attempt profoundly

enough, she would conquer it, implying exorcism of sort.164 And in James Frazer’s

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, a copy of which Plath had

received in 1953, Frazer states that farmers wanting to get rid of vermin performed

exorcism at sunrise.165 Writing it on a piece of paper and putting it out in the field

before sunrise and “taking great care to keep the written side up.”166 This is very

much in line with what the Confessional Poetry movement, for instance, was all

about; writing as a way to deal with a trauma. With “Daddy”, Plath kept the written

side up. Never again did she use her father in her poetry.

5.4 Hauntings & Doubles Towards the end of Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,

and the New International, Derrida examines the German “es spukt”, as used by

Freud in the original German of “The Uncanny”. It is a difficult phrase to translate,

Derrida writes, because the verb spuken has no equivalence in French (nor in

English, for that matter). There is of course the English “to spook” but it does not

carry the same feeling, nor does it work the same way, “it spooks” is not the same as

“es spukt”. In “es spukt” there is no revenant or ghost, there is only an impersonal

action, that contains “the passive movement of an apprehension”, which, according

to Derrida, in turn holds a wish, to both welcome (include) and exclude the stranger.

“[A] stranger who is already found within (das Heimliche-Unheimliche), more

intimate with one than one is oneself, the absolute proximity of a stranger whose

power is singular and anonymous (es spukt), an unnameable and neutral power, that

is, undecidable, neither active nor passive, an an-identity that, without doing

anything, invisibly occupies places belonging finally neither to us nor to it.”167 In

both “The Colossus” and “Daddy” there is an urge to both welcome and exclude the

162 Holbrook, p. 177 163 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, New York 1994, p. 7 164 Clark, p. 905. 165 Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, London

1923, p. 531. 166 Ibid. 167 Derrida, p. 172

36

stranger “that is already found within”. In fact, the very beginning of “Daddy”

announces the idea of the double in the repetition “You do not do, you do not do”. I

aruge that the place Plath physically occupied in the fall of 1962, that Gothic setting,

the closed-in village, the dank house, and the way she lived while occupying it, the

padlocking of her study, the night writing, and so forth, left the door open for the

ghost to enter, as well as the German spuken. One does not have to look far in

Plath’s biography to detect a tendency to welcome and embrace the uncanny. In his

poem “The Table”, Ted Hughes writes about making a desk for Plath to write at, out

of coffin timber:

I revealed a perfect landing pad

For your inspiration. I did not

Know I had made and fitted a door

Opening downwards into your Daddy’s grave.

You bent over it, euphoric168

In “Daddy” it is to the head of the father, which rises out of “the freakish Atlantic”

that the uncanny attaches itself the strongest. It is an image of force. Similarly in the

earlier poem from 1957, “All the Dead Dears”, it is the uncanny image of the father

that is the most chilling: “An image looms under the fishpond surface / Where the

daft father went down / With orange duck-feet winnowing his hair –”. As I

mentioned earlier, both “Daddy” and the earlier “The Colossus”, show the father as

scattered fragments of what was once great, or at least large: “Marble-heavy, a bag

full of God, / Ghastly statue with one grey toe / Big as a Frisco seal”. Even in

pieces, the father’s powers are daunting. To display them, Plath reaches for images

from WW2. Plath calls the German language obscene, and it certainly becomes an

engine of horror:

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

(…)

With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

As in “The Colossus” where the speaker climbed ant-like over the father’s brow and

squat in the cornucopia of his ear, Plath plays with binaries in “Daddy”. These

create a somewhat uncanny sensation. For instance, the giant Nazi father hovering

over the Jewish daughter (the other), who is so tiny she fits in a shoe but who at the

end overpowers him with her weird luck, her Tarot cards, her gypsy ancestress and

her Jewish “chosenness”. The book Plath used to study her cards with, was The

Painted Caravan: A Penetration into the Secrets of the Tarot Cards by Basil Ivan

168 Hughes, Birthday, p. 138

37

Rákóczi.169 Plath might have recognized herself in the description of the Master

Gypsy as portrayed by Rákóczi, or fashioned the poem’s speaker after it: “It is the

Master Gypsy who must be sought and who is generally a woman in spite of her

title. She is not easy to meet, many caravans must be entered before she is found. If

recognized, the Master has to give the Wisdom and may not accept money for it.

That is the law.”170 This ties into the lines where the speaker refers to her “gypsy

ancestress”. In an interview with Rosenstein, Roche ponders Plath’s fascination with

“Gypsies” and her assertion that she had “Gypsy” blood: “Why she had to invent the

Gypsy… of course it never occurred to me it was an invention… I believed

it.”171Another example of a binary couple in the poem is the “fat black heart” of the

revenant in contrast to the speaker’s “pretty red heart”, this and the Nazi

father/Jewish daughter are parts of a belief system that occupied Plath in the fall of

1962. In interviews with Harriet Rosenstein, Roche mentions Plath’s obsession with

Jewishness and her dislike of her German heritage: “She didn’t like Germans.”172

And in her unpublished memoir of her friend she writes about Plath’s penchant for

magic and witchery:

In these last months she discovered her call for witchcraft, an art she practiced

exceptionally well. I remember no particulars, only the racy way she relayed

success. Sylvia made vivid, dramatic sport of her stories, trimming ghouls,

divinations, witchcraft, curses with zest and humour. The spell crept in

unadorned. She could neither explain nor describe it. She felt its malignancy,

its pull, which seemed to come from the parlour. Whoever put the spell on her

must have secreted something in there – in the fireplace? Would I be an angel

and look?173

The father/ghost in “Daddy” is also connected to the uncanniness of sorcery and

spells through its shapeshifting powers. Through the poem, the father figure changes

from being “a bag full of God” into becoming a Nazi, a swastika, and a vampire.

And just like the father/ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet takes over the protagonist’s

life, the revenant in “Daddy” takes over the speaker’s. Under his spell she has barely

been able to “breathe or Achoo”. And just like Shakespeare’s ghost fades “on the

crowing of the cock”174, so perchance does the ghost in “Daddy”, or at least the

inspiration or the Derridean idea of the welcoming of it. Plath wrote her fall 1962

poems in the early morning hours, before dawn. In a taped interview with Harriet

Rosenstein, a local friend in Devon, Elizabeth Sigmund, recalls: “She simply said ‘I

am writing dawn poems in blood’. She told me she was getting up at four in the

169 Basil Ivan Rákóczi, The Painted Caravan: A Penetration into the Secrets of the Tarot

Cards, The Hague 1954. 170 Ibid., p.7. 171 Rosenstein, “Roche, interview recording, part five, undated”, 1489: Harriet Rosenstein

research files on Sylvia Plath, ID: v6x1 172 Rosenstein, “Roche, interview recording, part five, undated”, 1489: Harriet Rosenstein

research files on Sylvia Plath, ID: v6x1 173 Roche, “Unpublished”. 174 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 1.

38

morning.”175 I want to pause at “poems in blood”, for Plath seems to have associated

her poetic outpouring with blood, thereby connecting it to something ritualistic. Her

study was done in red, with a “turkey red carpet” and matching red corduroy

curtains.176 The poetry she composed in this study was also filled with the word

“blood”, which appears fifteen times in Ariel (as opposed to just six in Plath’s

earlier collection The Colossus). In a poem titled “Red” from The Birthday Letters,

Hughes confirms Plath’s obsession with red: “The carpet of blood / Patterned with

darkenings, congealments. / The curtains – ruby corduroy blood. / Sheer blood-falls

from ceiling to floor.” This is, I suggest, another example of the environment

seeping into the poetry; from the padlocked, secret, blood-red study straight to the

red-hot poems of Ariel. Interestingly, the poems Plath wrote in London, just a month

and a half later, have none of the redness of the poems composed in her red study in

Devon. Her London study was also not red. “Blue is my new color, royal, midnight

(not aqua!)” she wrote her mother from London.177 The London poems all have a

much cooler texture and were also not meant to be included in Ariel. In the poem

“Kindness”, Plath links poetry to blood more directly in the famous line: “The blood

jet is poetry, / There is no stopping it.” Kendall points out that this shows poetry as

“violent, vital and uncontrollable” but it also shows its fatal element; “a blood jet

which cannot be stopped leads eventually to death.”178

Derrida wonders if it is possible to ask the ghost questions and proposes that it is

from the ghost “the ‘intellectual’ of tomorrow should learn (…) to live” by letting

“it” speak or by giving “it” back “its” voice.179 But for the speaker of “Daddy” to

survive, she needs to rid herself of the ghost, she needs to kill it. Plath the poet

seems to have had enough of the father figure as an inspiration as well, as he never

returns to her poetry in this shape. However, as Derrida states “a ghost never dies, it

remains always to come and to come-back.”180 Once the father/revenant in “Daddy”

is warded off, he bounces back in his new role as the “man in black with a

Meinkampf look”, the father/revenant’s double, at once heimlich as the father, yet

unheimlich because it is a not quite the father, it is a model of the father. This

ghostly comeback creates in the speaker a sense of déjà vu, and ultimately both the

ghost and its double must be, and are, exorcised.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two –

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

175 Harriet Rosenstein, Elizabeth Compton Sigmund Interview recording part 5, undated 176 Plath, Letters Volume Two, p. 665. 177 Ibid. p. 941. 178 Kendall, p. 190. 179 Derrida, p. 176. 180 Ibid. p. 99.

39

The second man, that “man in black with a Meinkampf look” is introduced in the

last lines of the thirteenth stanza: “I knew what to do / I made a model of you, / A

man in black with a Meinkampf look.” The color black is a common enough

emblem for the diabolic, but with “Meinkampf look”, Plath innovatively creates a

new image for evil, while keeping with the WW2 connotation. The speaker herself

identifies him both as a vampire and as a double of the father: “The vampire who

said he was you”. Freud points out that the double can be at once “an assurance of

immortality” and a “harbinger of death” in that it reminds us why we were

compelled to “repeat” or “double” in the first place.181 And Nicholas Royle adds

that the double always is “ghostly and cannot be dissociated from a sense of déjà

vu.”182 For what is déjà vu if not a double of what one has already either seen or

believes one has seen? This sense of déjà vu was maybe especially on Plath’s mind

as besides writing the Ariel poems, she was also working on a novel temporarily

titled Doubletake or Double Exposure.183 The speaker in “Daddy”, in an attempt to

“get back to” the dead father, meaning getting back to that which was once familiar

(the Heimlich original) creates a model of him (the Unheimlich double). Her

realization that she is stuck in the never-ending loop of Heimlich-Unheimlich, forces

her to put a stop to the repetitions and the doublings. The obscene German language

(the patriarchal language) is effectively terminated, as she tears off the phone from

the wall: “The black telephone’s off at the root, / The voices just can’t worm

through.” The statement of the speaker, made in the first line of the second stanza:

“Daddy, I have had to kill you,” concludes in the penultimate stanza with “If I’ve

killed one man, I’ve killed two –”. To get out of the loop, she turns the

revenant/double into a vampire, an entity that, unlike the ghost, can be killed. In the

final stanza there is no doubt as to whether the speaker has been successful:

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Freud points out that the double has to do not only with look-alike characters, but

also with the “the spontaneous transmission of mental processes from one of these

persons to the other – what we would call telepathy – so that the one becomes co-

owner of the other’s knowledge.”184 In “Daddy” the fact that the speaker herself

admits to creating the double out of the revenant, means she is also putting them all

in a three-way “telepathic” bind. There are three here, the “I”, the “you” and “the

man in black: “And then I knew what to do. / I made a model of you, / A man in

black with a Meinkampf look”. The uncanny element of the double is closely related

to, if not the same as, the uncanny element of repetition, and is usually something

visual, however Plath utilizes the uncanniness of repetition by almost compulsively

repeating certain words and sentences – “[i]ch, ich, ich”, “[a]n engine, an engine”,

181 Freud, p. 142. 182 Royle, p. 182. 183 Clark, p.736. 184 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 141.

40

“[a]nd my Taroc pack, and my Taroc pack – and this, coupled with the repetitive

“oo”-rhymes gives the poem not only its lilting nursery rhyme texture but also

creates a dreamlike echo effect, or gives it, as Pamela Annas puts it “the sound of a

heart beat”.185 Plath often used repetitions in her poetry. Tim Kendall writes that

“[f]ew critics have commented on the reasons for, and effect of, [her] tendency to

repeat.”186 However that is not necessarily so. In “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A

Technical Analysis” John Frederick Nims calls the compulsion to repeat “an

obsession”.187 David Shapiro in “Sylvia Plath: Drama and Melodrama” says the

device is used not for the sake of difference but “for the sake of copiousness and

abundance.”188 He calls it “abuse”.189 In Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems,

Susan R van Dyne claims that “[t]he repetitiveness of Plath’s language has struck

more than one critic as symptomatic of a disordered psyche and poetic

incontinence.”190 While I do agree with Nims, I find the pathologizing of Plath

unnecessary and outdated. Britzolakis likens the compulsive repetition to “a charm

or incantation.”191 And this I agree with. I also believe that the compulsive repetition

in Plath’s poetry mirrors her productivity at the time: According to letters and

witnesses, such as Elizabeth Compton Sigmund and Clarissa Roche, Plath’s getting

up at dawn every day to write was compulsive. Says Roche in the interview with

Rosenstein: “She said she had to do it: had to write. It’s like a shot in the heart stuff,

shot in the arm.”192 As most of Plath’s daily chores ended up in her poetry, it is

arguable that even how she executed them, compulsively, ended up there as well.

5.5 Residues of a Train Lastly, I would like to mention the image of the train in the poem, “An engine, an

engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew”, because it does appear to have something of

the uncanny about it, especially when one reads Ariel as a whole. In A Disturbance

in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Pamela Annas suggests that it is

incorporated in the rhythm of “Daddy”.193 And the oo-rhymes in “Daddy” certainly

creates a ghostly “choo-choo” sound, knowing it is the signal of a train heading to a

death camp. This is not the first (nor the last) train in Ariel, trains appear with some

frequency in Plath’s poetry, almost as if they advance through the collection moving

it forward. In “The Detective”, the train’s “shrieks” echo in the valley, “like souls

on hooks”, in “Getting There” the train is pushing forward unstoppable like some

beastlike animal across a war torn country with the speaker “dragging [her] body

quietly through the straw of the boxcars”, in a poem written around the same time

185 Annas, p. 142. 186 Kendall, p.148. 187 John Frederick Nims, “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Technical Analysis” in Ariel

Ascending, edited by Paul Alexander, New York 1985, p. 46. 188 David Shapiro, “Sylvia Plath: Drama and Melodrama”, in Sylvia Plath: New Views on the

Poetry, edited by Gary Lane, Baltimore 1979, p. 48. 189 Ibid. 190 van Dyne, p. 48. 191 Britzolakis, p. 182. 192 Harriet Rosenstein, Typed unpaginated notes. Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia

Plath, 1910–2018. Manuscript Collection No. 1489. Emory University, Atlanta. 193 Annas, p. 128.

41

but not included in Ariel, “Totem”, the engine is deadly, “killing the track” and

running away from it “is useless”, the speaker sees or imagines she sees images of

horror through the train window, a meat market, and “Fat haunches and blood on

their minds.” In “Sheep in fog”, another late poem not included in Ariel, the energy

crawls to a halt, here the train simply “leaves a line of breath”. In an earlier poem,

“Metaphors”, the train is the destination: “I have boarded the train there’s no getting

off”. These images of trains might be residues from images of the trains in Italian

artist Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings, which Plath had used as poetic inspiration for

some of her earlier poems. De Chirico’s work frequently depicts the uncanny:

Faceless figures, a bizarre stillness, empty plazas, looming statues, and long

foreboding shadows. Plath first mentions de Chirico in her journal in March of

1958: “We want to buy art books. de Chirico. Paul Klee. I have written two poems

on paintings by de Chirico which sieze [sic] my imagination – ‘The Disquieting

Muses’ and ‘On the Decline of Oracles’ (after his early painting ‘The Enigma of the

Oracle’.”194 She continues to copy quotations she believes come either from a prose-

poem by de Chirico or from his diaries. Quotations, she states “which have unique

power to move me”.195 She writes: “And everywhere in Chirico’s city, the trapped

train puffing its cloud in a labyrinth of heavy arches, vaults, arcades.”196 A paper

titled “The Uncanny: Disquiet in de Chirico and Plath” by Ritika Biswas,

investigates de Chirico’s “The Disquieting Muses” and Plath’s ekphrastic poem, but

as that particular painting features no train, trains are not mentioned.197

6 “Fever 103°”

When the astute Plath scholar listens to the October 30, 1962, recording of Plath

reading her poem “Fever 103°”, they notice Plath adding three lines between the

first and second lines of the third stanza.198 These lines do not appear in the printed

version of the poem, and they look like this: “O auto-da-fé! / The purple men, gold

crusted, thick with spleen / / Sit with their hooks and crooks and stoke the light.”199

When put back into their “proper” place in the poem, the first three stanzas read:

Pure? What does it mean?

The tongues of hell

Are dull, dull as the triple

194 Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, New York: Anchor Books, p.

359. 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid. 197 Ritika Biswas, “The Uncanny: Disquiet in de Chirico and Plath”, (2022-04-18).

https://www.academia.edu/28889413/The_Uncanny_Disquiet_in_de_Chirico_and_Plath

This is an unpublished paper that might not have been peer reviewed. 198 Sylvia Plath Reading “Fever 103°”, Tudor C, (2022-04-18).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eak2Tp1GNkA&t=65s 199 Brain, p. 28.

42

Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus

Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable

Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.

O auto-da-fé!

The purple men, gold crusted, thick with spleen

Sit with their hooks and crooks and stoke the light

The tinder cries.

The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle

There is no information as to why or when Plath discarded these lines, but the

removal creates a glitch in the poem, a hiccup. But because the poem moves at such

high speed from one image to the next, this missing step easily goes unnoticed.

However now that we have been made aware of the lines that were once there, were

written and read there, we become eerily aware of their absence. The nothing where

there should have been something creates a negative space. If you did not know

about its once presence, this uncanny hiccup would have been lost on you. Now, it

is the uncanny ghost you know is there but cannot see. In “Seeing Things and

Saying Things: Writing the Ghost”, Jenn Ashworth writes about not seeing things,

like ghosts.200 How can you tell it is there? By its various traces, for example the

door that will not shut, the sound of footsteps crossing the floor, the foggy mirror

and so on. In an article on Wittgenstein and the uncanny, Gordon C.F. Bearn

attempts to establish the difference between the words “eerie” and “uncanny” and

concludes that though they are related they are each other’s mirror doubles. Eerie is

the absence of what ought to be present, and uncanny is the presence of what ought

to be absent.201 And while this may be so, I argue that the presence of the traces of

the three missing lines makes this absence, this ghost, uncanny. The first trace can

be found where the lines were once inserted, where the idea of the auto-da-fé is

introduced. The opening to that introduction is still hanging there, twice repeated:

“the sin, the sin”, steering the mind towards the auto-da-fé and the punishment of

sins. The second trace is where the three lines once “landed”, and that landing has

been left just as intact: “the tinder cries”. Hearing Plath read the poem we

understand what we do not by simply reading it. We understand that the tinder that

cries is the wood at the base of the stake at the burning place, the sound of it

catching fire, the “snuffed candle” and its persistent scent is nothing but the burning

of the heretics’ bodies during the Inquisition. We see the splendidly clothed holy

men in purple and gold sit there with their staffs, poking the fire. “Working with

200 Jenn Ashworth, “Seeing Things and Saying Things: Writing the Ghost” in Writing the

Uncanny, edited by Dan Coxon & Richard V. Hirst, Liverpool 2021. 201 Gordon C.F. Bearn, “Wittgenstein and the Uncanny” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary

Journal, Vol.76, No.1 (Spring 1993) p. 33. (2022-04-18).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41178618?refreqid=excelsior%3A3347a442de0f516cbee77977

6922548b

43

traces lets us become a little unreliable ourselves,” Ashworth writes, “these bumps

in the night and rustlings in the chimney could just as easily turn out to be a case of

psychosis, paranoia, hysteria or guilt.”202 In the case of “Fever 103°” it is most

definitely the traces of a ghost we are dealing with. The uncanny ghost presiding

over the opening of “Fever 103°” is the burning flesh of the victims of the

Inquisition. Here it is difficult not to draw parallels to Plath’s interest in sorcery and

her belief that she had a special talent for witchcraft, not to mention the divination

fire(s) she lit at approximately the same time as she wrote this poem.

6.1 An Uncanny Inspiration: Thérèse of Lisieux “In many of Plath’s full-scale initiatory dramas, the self attains a superhuman

condition,”203 writes Rosenblatt. Though Plath is often thought of as dark and

depressive, her female speakers are mostly too busy being on the run, doing things,

going places, “rush[ing] into the sun, sky, or water to be reborn”, to give in to

dejection.204 Although I am not exploring the various personas in Plath’s poems in

this thesis, I find it conducive to examine any potentially uncanny sources of

inspiration for those personas. Especially if they have not previously been

investigated. The general opinion is that it is Mary the Virgin’s assumption, that is

the prototype for the speaker in “Fever 103°”. Britzolakis, for instance, writes:

“Among the explicitly theatrical incarnations assumed are the fin-de-siècle figure of

the dancer Isadora Duncan, and the Virgin Mary.”205 Also Kendall posits “an

identification with Mary”.206 But I will show how Plath drew her inspiration from

other, much more uncanny sources, that have gone undiscovered so far. I want to

begin by taking a closer look at the following stanzas from the middle and end of

the poem:

Three days. Three nights.

Lemon water, chicken

Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

Your body

Hurts me as the world hurts God.

(---)

I think I am going up,

I think I may rise ––

The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love I

Am a pure acetylene

Virgin

Attended by roses,

202 Ashworth, p.179. 203 Rosenblatt, p. 45. 204 Rosenblatt, p. 46. 205 Britzolakis, p. 141. 206 Kendall, p. 164.

44

By kisses, by cherubim,

By whatever these pink things mean.

Not you, not him

Nor him, nor him

(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) ––

To Paradise

In her December 31, 1958, journal excerpt, Plath recounts how she is reading the

autobiography of French saint and mystic Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), also

known as The Little Flower. Plath seems to have read up on the saint in other books

as well, because she mentions events like the anniversary of the canonization of

Thérèse, which can hardly have been witnessed by the saint herself. Fascinated with

– and perhaps also a little repelled by – life in a Carmelite convent, Plath fills page

after page in her journal of notes, copying sentences like: “Roses streamed from

Venetian masts outside & inside the Grotto itself. The Little Flower shrine was

smothered in roses of every hue.”207 The young Thérèse’s wish for her mother to die

– “because I want you to go to Heaven, & you say that to get there we must die!”–

and similar death wishes confuse and excite Plath, who continues to copy sentences

from the saint’s autobiography.208 She records the fasting periods of the convent,

what is said during Thérèse’s delirium, notes the saint’s worries about the purity of

the soul, and her devil-inspired fears. All this; the fasting, the delirium, the question

of purity, the death wish, the roses, maybe even Plath’s layman’s idea of

canonization, end up in “Fever 103°”. In Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of

Sylvia Plath, Judith Kroll explains that to Plath, whose mind was attuned to details,

“histories, dates, and names” nothing was ever just a coincidence, but rather

uncanny symmetries.209 This becomes particularly obvious when one reads her

journal. To read Thérèse’s words “All I want is a sign –”, copied in Plath’s journal,

is to understand that Plath is looking for one also.210 The roses associated with

Thérèse (the rose is her saintly attribute) creep up not only in “Fever 103°”, but in

other poems as well. In “Nick and the Candlestick”, they appear in the eleventh

stanza as: “Love, love, / I have hung our cave with roses,” an echo of the roses in

the saint’s grotto. In “Morning Song”, they show up on the wallpaper: “All night

your moth breath / Flickers among the flat pink roses.” In “Wintering” they are what

the bees taste after their long winter hibernation: “What will they taste of, the

Christmas roses?” In “Stings” the speaker enamels her white bee hive with them:

“White with pink flowers on it. With excessive love I enameled it.” Plath herself

embellished the house in Devon and much of what was in it – the children’s

furniture, her bee hive, the thresholds – with enameled roses.211 Her midwife

Winifred Davies told Rosenstein that Plath’s dream was to have her house look like

207 Plath, Journals, pp. 589–590. 208 Ibid., p. 590. 209 Kroll, p. 41. 210 Plath, Journals, p. 592. 211 Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage, London 2004,

p.173.

45

“one’s mental picture of a Devon cottage, you know with roses around the door.”212

And in “Kindness”, written just a week before she died, the roses appear as gifts:

“You hand me two children, two roses.” This last line perhaps lifted from the saint’s

autobiography: “I gave her two roses”.213

In her autobiography Thérèse also writes about a spiritual crisis in her life, her own

version of Saint John of the Cross’ noche oscura del alma, the dark night of the

soul, during which she experienced “the thickest darkness” which she likens to

traveling through a dark tunnel, “struggle and torment. [A] trial”, a loss of faith.214

There is in “Fever 103°” a similar sense of utter loss of faith, expressed in the

fixation on sinister historical events: such as the Inquisition and the Hiroshima

bomb. The snuffed candle can be read as a metaphor for that dark night of the soul.

6.2 The Breathless Uncanny Heather Clark calls Plath’s poem “Fever 103°” “one of Plath’s most iconic” and

Christina Britzolakis likens it to an “orgasmic rupture”.215 It is one of Plath’s

“speediest” poems, as it moves with great velocity, sweeping over history, almost

like an airplane speeding up the runway, impatient for take-off. And at the end the

poem does indeed take off and leave ground. The speaker barely has time to catch

her breath, leaving herself and the poem with a certain breathlessness. There are no

clear borders between the images, they are hooked into each other through a word,

but even that sometimes seems vague at best. The “snuffed candle” gives way to the

“low smokes roll”, and the word “roll” turns into the wheel that caught the scarf of

Isadora Duncan, killing her. “Low” in turn leads to “not rise”, and so on. It is the

seemingly intricate, non-stop activity of a mental process. October was also a hectic

month for Plath. “During the month of October, Plath wrote almost a poem a day –

one of the most extraordinary literary outpourings of the twentieth century,” writes

Clark. 216 In The Uncanny, Royle brings up literary examples, among them Knut

Hamsun’s Hunger, to point at the connection between starving and that, which

Freud calls manifestations of insanity. Royle refers to this writing as “breathless.”217

Hamsun lets his protagonist, who is starving, say: “I was drunk with starvation, my

hunger had made me intoxicated. (..) my laughter was feverish and silent, with the

intensity of tears.”218 Plath’s bookshelf shows that although she did not own

Hunger, she was familiar with Hamsun and owned his Growth of the Soil. Another

work that she on the other hand may well have read was Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger

Artist”, a work which she owned.219 Kafka’s story chronicles a hunger artist’s

212 Rosenstein, “Winifred Davies, interview recording, undated”, 1489: Harriet Rosenstein

research files, ID: v48qv. 213 Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux,

Washington 1976, p. 18. 214 Ibid., p. 211. 215 Clark, p. 783 and Britzolakis, p. 185. 216 Clark, p. 764. 217 Royle, p. 214. 218 Knut Hamsun, Hunger, New York 1998, p. 67. 219 SylviaPlathLibrary on Library Thing, (2022-04-18).

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/SylviaPlathLibrary&deepsearch=kafka

46

ritualistic road to annihilation through starvation, it has a performative aspect to it,

which can be found in Plath’s poem as well. Like Kafka, Plath focuses on the

isolation of the speaker in the poem. There is also, of course, the religious aspect of

fasting, and the clarity, energy, and awareness it can bring about. Thérèse of Lisieux

mentions in her autobiography, for example, that she had never felt as strong as

during her Lenten fast.220 After three days and three nights of only water and

chicken broth, the speaker in Plath’s poem suffers the same breathless intoxication,

the same madness, that comes with not eating. In “The Transfiguring Self: Sylvia

Plath, a Reconsideration”, Leonard Sanazaro identifies the speaker’s three day fast

with the Christ’s three days in the underworld before his final transfiguration and

ascension into paradise.221 In either case, these lines show a feverish euphoria

bordering on madness, it is as if the speaker is tripping over herself in her eagerness

to get ahead. She will not stop to think about what “these pink things” may mean,

and she will not be stopped either by a man, “[n]ot you, not him / Nor him, nor

him”:

By whatever these pink things mean.

Not you, not him

Nor him, nor him

(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) ––

To Paradise

The tossing off of selves on the go, leaves no time for hesitation. This speaker is on

the fly. In Hunger, a critic tells the narrator that the problem with his work “is

excitability. If you could only be a little more composed! There is too much fever all

the time.”222 There is too much excitability and fever in Plath’s poem also. “Several

patients afflicted with [nervous illnesses] make a quite decidedly uncanny

impression on most people,” writes Ernst Jentsch in “On the Psychology of the

Uncanny”.223 The speaker’s pent-up breathlessness is the result of the nervous dash

through the images of the first half of the poem. The tumultuous historical sweep

has taken its toll, now the speaker zooms in on her Self. Royle writes that “[t]he

uncanny can be felt in response to witnessing epileptic or similar fits, manifestations

of insanity or other forms of what might appear merely mechanical or automatic

life, such as one might associate with trance or hypnosis.”224 “Fever 103°”, with its

feverish ecstasy, could well be likened to such a trance or hypnosis, even fit or

manifestation of insanity. Though the speaker is addressing a lover, the focus is

fully on herself. “Darling, all night / I have been flickering, off, on, off, on. / The

sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.” “Fever 103°” is often read as an expression of

autoeroticism, but I argue that the off-on flickering followed by the ascent and the

flying beads of hot metal can suggest a cockpit’s instrument board in an airplane

220 Lisieux, p. 113. 221 Sanazaro, p. 70. 222 Hamsun, p. 95. 223 Jentsch, p. 13. 224 Royle, p. vii.

47

preparing for takeoff. There is a sense of revving up a motor in the following:

“[g]lowing and coming and going, flush on flush. / / I think I am going up.”

In the literary example that Freud builds the uncanny around, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s

short story “The Sandman”, the main character Nathaniel is driven mad through a

series of bizarre events and throws himself down a tower. His leap is not unlike the

speaker’s ascent in that both are a longing for dissolution. In “Fever 103°”, the

curious longing for dissolution, a subtle nod to the death wish of Thérèse of Lisieux,

is expressed with a violence bordering on madness. The violence can be found in

the fires that are mentioned throughout the poem; the fires of hell, the fires indicated

by “the tinder cries”, the fire associated with the Hiroshima bomb, the fire of the

speaker’s fever, but also the violent accident of Isadora Duncan’s strangulation.

This mix of confusion and furious violence is linked to poetic inspiration as well,

Robert Graves discusses it in his landmark The White Goddess: A Historical

Grammar of Poetic Myth, a book Plath was familiar with.225 Graves mentions a

people in Cambria called “Awenyddion” who, “roar violently, are rendered beside

themselves and become, as it were, possessed by a spirit.”226 The violent acetylene-

powered end of the Virgin, is one of many Plath poems that end in an ascent or

apotheosis, and it is the most spectacular.: “I am a pure acetylene Virgin”. Highly

flammable, acetylene can cause an explosion when mixed with air or oxygen. There

is an obvious release connected to this violence. In “The Sandman”, the protagonist

is driven mad and first tries to kill his girlfriend and later throws himself from a

tower, hinting at the impulse to destroy. Looked at in steps, this urge for destruction

is the first towards the ultimate release that is death, making it crucial to examine

carefully. Royle also points to a text by D.H. Lawrence, “The Reality of Peace”, as

an example of the excitability of violence: “I want to kill, I want violent

sensationalism, I want to break down, I want to put asunder, I want anarchic

revolution – it is all the same, thing single desire for death.”227 Echoes of this

sensationalism, this anarchic revolution can certainly be heard in Plath’s poem as

well, especially in the final stanzas. The wish for blazing sensationalism can also be

found in Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, where the protagonist Esther announces that she

is not interested in infinite security but wants something different: “I wanted change

and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows

from a Fourth of July rocket.”228

6.3 Uncanny Magic “Only a few remarks need now be added to complete the picture,” Freud announces

towards the end of “The Uncanny”, and adds “animism, magic, sorcery, the

omnipotence of thoughts, unintended repetition and the castration complex.”229 I

have demonstrated the uncanny absence (or presence) of the phantom text (or the

225 Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, New York

1966. 226 Graves, p. 77. 227 D.H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and other essays, New York

1988, p. 40. 228 Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, London 2013, p.79. 229 Freud, The Uncanny, p.149.

48

traces thereof) that is the three removed lines, the traces of Thérèse of Lisieux, and

the breathless violence that seems to fuel the poem, I will now look closer at the

uncanny element of magic, since it was much in the air that fall for Plath. Suzette

Macedo, a friend of Plath’s, says in an interview with Harriet Rosenstein: “[Plath]

wrote Ariel between the time when Ted left and… all of it was written in a state of

fever and possession. And she believed in possession.”230In her dissertation Ciobanu

finds allusions to the mummifying of the body in Plath’s very last poem “Edge”.

Ciobanu highlights the line “[f]lows in the scrolls of her toga” in the poem,

suggesting it refers to the shroud with which the corpse is covered prior to the

mummification process, and that the “illusion of a Greek necessity” indicates that

“the voice of the poem is aware that this body is not going anywhere, that it remains

here, in this very form, the only form in which it can fuse past, present, and future

and gain ‘an instantaneous immortality’.”231 I think this is an insightful reading, and

with it in mind I believe one may read a “reversal” of the mummifying in the

acetylene Virgin’s shedding of whore petticoat selves in “Fever 103°”. The woman

in “Edge” is, like Ciobanu says, not going anywhere, the poem is static and calm,

and she is dead: “The woman is perfected. / Her dead // Body wears the smile of

accomplishment. The illusion of a Greek necessity”. My reading of a reversal of the

mummification in the last stanza of “Fever 103°” also ties in with the more general

idea of the ending; the ascent, the move towards rebirth, the acetylene Virgin

certainly is going somewhere. There is a similar movement in the poem “Ariel”,

where the movement – as in “Fever 103°” – is rapid:

Something else

Hauls me through air –

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

White

Godiva, I unpeel –

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

Here too, is that speed and the shedding (“I unpeel”). In light of “Edge”, where the

dead woman folds her children “back into her body as petals”, the speaker in

“Ariel” as well as in “Fever 103°”, is excitedly performing a reverse action. Plath

wrote the following about “Fever 103°”: “This poem is about two kinds of fire – the

fires of hell, which merely agonize, and the fires of heaven, which purify. During

the poem, the first sort of fire suffers itself into the second. The poem is called

‘Fever 103°’.”232 What Plath does here, apart from pointing at “purify” and “fire” as

keywords, is articulating the duality and polarity of the poem; hell and heaven.

It was Ted Hughes who gave Plath the deck of Tarot cards (the ones auctioned off

by Sotheby’s in 2021). She received the cards on her 24th birthday, at which point

230 Rosenstein, “Macedo, Suzette, interview recording, November 27”, 1489: Harriet

Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, ID: v8ggs. 231 Ciobanu, p. 206. 232 Plath, Restored, p.197.

49

she also vowed to become a “seeress”.233 After Plath’s death, Hughes called Plath “a

mystical poet of an altogether higher – in fact the very highest – tradition.”234 There

is evidence that Plath used her cards as inspiration for poems, she wrote the poem

“The Hanging Man” with the Tarot card with the same name in mind. In “Plath’s

‘Ariel’ and Tarot”, Mary Kurzman argues that Plath used not only the Tarot cards

but Hebrew Cabala as inspiration.235 Author Julia Gordon Bramer has written a

book, Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, in which she decodes

Plath’s poetry with the use of Tarot cards, and Gordon Bramer is certain that Plath

listed her poems for her book Ariel according to the way the cards are ordered.236 In

“Fever 103°” there are elements that suggest Plath used the second card in the deck,

the Magician, as a source of inspiration. In The Ultimate Guide to Tarot: A

Beginner’s Guide to the Cards, Spreads, and Revealing the Mystery of the Cards,

Liz Dean writes that the key meanings of the Magician card are “[a]ction, creativity,

and success.”237 All these are included in the poem: The poem moves quickly from

one image to the next (action), the speaker goes through a transformation

(creativity), and finally there certainly is success in the speaker’s violent rise to

Paradise. In the card, the Magician holds a double-ended wand, which “reflects the

Hermetic concept ‘As above, so below’, or heaven and earth as mirrors.”238

Hermeticism was not unknown to Plath. Gordon Bramer suggests that Plath grew up

surrounded by mysticism and hermeticism; her mother had done her Master’s thesis

on Paracelsus and Plath herself had carved a Hermetic caduceus in high school.239

However, in the poem the fire of hell is dull (“[t]he tongues of hell are dull, dull”) as

are the tongues of Cerberus, unlike the Virgin on her way to Paradise, she is not

only pure but acetylene-powered, and, as Susan van Dyne puts it, “burns like a

blowtorch”.240 Van Dyne continues to summarize the end of the poem: “The final

spectacle of ‘Fever’ is also the signature of Plath’s poetics. These speakers all

predict their flight but defy us to follow it. In their incandescent mutability they are

unapproachable, what we notice is the mark they leave behind, the blinding

articulation of the body subjectively possessed.”241

Apart from the removed lines in the beginning of the poem, there is the uncanny

repetition of “the sin”. “After Freud, repetition will never be the same,” writes Hugh

Haughton in the introduction to the compilation The Uncanny by Freud (in which

the essay “The Uncanny” is included).242 Haughton theorizes that repetition, or

“unintentional return”, is linked to a sort of helplessness.243 As if being lost in the

233 Plath Letters 2, p. 4. 234 Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, London 2007, p. 258. 235 Mary Kurzman. “Plath’s ‘Ariel’ and Tarot”. The Centennial Review, vol. 32, no2,

Michigan State University Press, East Lansing 1988, p. 286. 236 Gordon Bramer, p. viii. 237 Liz Dean, The Ultimate Guide to Tarot: A Beginner’s Guide to the Cards, Spreads, and

Revealing the Mystery of the Cards, Beverly: 2015, p. 34 238 Ibid. p.36. 239 Gordon Bramer, p. ix. 240 van Dyne, p. 112. 241 Van Dyne p. 119 242 Hugh Haughton, “Introduction” in Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, p.li. 243 Ibid.

50

forest and in trying to get out returning again and again to the same spot. In “Fever

103°” the speaker gets stuck on “the sin”, which she obsessively repeats four times,

another word that is repeated is “dull”, which is impatiently spat out three times.

Repetitions in general have a strong connection to magic and religion too: The

Catholic novena, for instance, is a prayer repeated nine times during nine

consecutive days, there are also spells and magical incantations that build on the

repetition of a certain word or phrase. The repetitions here, however, are different in

texture. The idea of the sin is, after all, the spine of the poem, the repetition of it has

an uncanny echo effect, almost as if comes from a voice other than the speaker’s.

The repetition of “dull” has none of that.

6.4 Remnants of a Death Drive “Freud doesn’t explicitly name the death drive in ‘The Uncanny’ – that doesn’t

happen till the following year, with the publication of Beyond the Pleasure

Principle. But the death drive lurks, as if forbidden to speak its name, everywhere in

the 1919 essay,”244 writes Royle. Quite possibly the most obvious element featured

in Plath’s poetry is the death drive. It is also one of the most frequently analyzed.

Just like the Inquisition left traces of itself in Plath’s poem, so does the death drive

leave traces in Freud’s “The Uncanny”. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a slim

book that was published after his death, Freud argues that it is Thanatos (death)

rather than Eros (love, pleasure) that is the governing drive, in human behavior, and

that one of the ways with which we express this is through compulsive repetition.245

And compulsive repetition is indeed an element mentioned in “The Uncanny”.

Royle refers to the absence of the death drive as one of the “many silences in ‘The

Uncanny’.”246 Three lines in “Fever 103°” are finished with a dash, as if the speaker

cannot think of more to say: “Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a

lantern –”, “I think I may rise –” and “(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) –

”. As in “Daddy”, I would like to connect these instances of silence to a more

feminine way of writing. Patricia Laurence writes about “Women’s Silence as a

Ritual of Truth: A Study of Literary Expressions in Austen, Brontë, and Woolf”,

that it is time to recognize a female tradition of writing that encourages us to go

back and read again examples of writings that feature silence. Silence, Onedek

Laurence argues, need not necessarily mean “passivity, submission and oppression”

but rather “an enlightened presence.”247 She continues: “The silences represent

women’s different ways of feeling and knowing – perhaps silences hiding fears,

angers, taboo thought – as well as representing the available means of expression in

particular historical and cultural circumstances.”248 The three instances where the

speaker seemingly falls silent in “Fever 103°” certainly read more like

244 Royle, p. 86. 245 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principe, Mineola 2015. 246 Royle, p. 86. 247 Patricia Onedek Laurence, “Women’s Silence as a Ritual of Truth: A Study of Literary

Expression in Austen, Brontë and Woolf’, Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds.,

Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, Oxford University Press Oxford,

1994, p. 156. 248 Ibid.

51

empowerment, if not breathless, euphoric empowerment, than anything else. The

dashes follow the words “lantern”, “rise”, and “(dissolving old whore) petticoats”,

which in tandem reads almost like a summary of the poem’s ending: “A lantern rise

from dissolving old whore petticoats”. The silent dashes in Plath’s poem may thus

be read as active rather than passive spaces.

7 “Death & Co.”

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

These are the two first stanzas from a poem (479), by Emily Dickinson (1830–

1886), a fellow New England poet and one whom Plath admired.249 In Dickinson’s

poem Death is personified as a coachman and dying as departing on a journey.

During the rest of Dickinson’s poem, the speaker describes what she sees on this

journey. Plath’s poem “Death & Co.” might have been inspired by Dickinson’s.

Like Dickinson’s speaker, the speaker in Plath’s poem is visited by a personified

Death, but unlike Dickinson’s speaker, who quietly slips into Death’s carriage,

Plath’s poem is about refusal: “I am not his yet.” Though in the poem echoes of the

dead bell can be heard, Heather Clark calls it hopeful.250 I agree that there is some

energy in the poem, but the speaker folds at the end. Written between November

12–14, “Death & Co.” was the last poem Plath added to her Ariel binder. After mid-

November, her style of writing changed.

7.1 Janus-faced Harbinger of Death In previous analyses, I have touched upon Freud’s idea of the double as an

“uncanny harbinger of death”, and in “Death & Co.” that idea is certainly realized to

the fullest.251 Plath wrote that the poem was “about the double of schizophrenic

nature of death – the marmoreal coldness of Blake’s death mask, say, hand in glove

with the fearful softness of worms, water and the other katabolists. I imagine these

two aspects of death as two men, two business friends, who have come to call.”252

The poem begins with stating how “natural” this doubleness is “now”: “Two. Of

course there are two. It seems perfectly natural now.” The “now” is a clue; it tells us

that whereas it is natural now, it was not natural before. The Unheimliche has gone a

full loop and become Heimlich yet again. What was once unnatural is now natural.

249 Plath, Letters Volume Two, p. 916. 250 Clark, p. 809. 251 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 142. 252 Plath, Ariel Restored, p. 196-197.

52

As mentioned, Plath wrote the poem on November 12–14, a couple of days before

her friend Clarissa Roche’s visit, of which I wrote earlier. During that visit, Plath

told Roche that she found writing that fall not the least painful but “wonderfully

exhilarating, especially in these last weeks on her own at Court Green [the name of

the house] – though the truth is painful and ‘the truth comes to me in my poems.’”253

Roche, meanwhile, found the environment gloomy, the house “dark and sombrous. I

shuddered to think of Sylvia there alone.”254 It is on the background of gloom then,

that Plath conjures up the appearance of two strange businessmen. I propose these

two men may be read as one and the same, but Janus-faced. The double-faced

Roman god Janus was the god of doors and gateways, as well as daybreak and the

month of January, that is the beginning of things.255 This puts Janus on the uncanny

threshold, the intersection between the past and the present, the space of liminality,

the space of possibilities and unease. According to Leon Ashworth in the book Gods

and Goddesses of Ancient Rome, “[s]tatues of Janus show him with a key (for

opening the gates) [---] He was also the god of departure and return.”256 It is quite

possible to hold on to the image of Janus and proceed with Plath’s intention of the

“double nature”, especially since she refers to the nature as “schizophrenic”,

conceivably implying duplicity. Also, Freud indicates that the double not always

involves two people, but may be the self that duplicates, divides, and

interchanges.257

7.2 Birthmarks Plath then describes the two faces. The first one is inspired by the death mask of

William Blake. Blake was a source of inspiration to Plath at this time. In an

interview with Peter Orr recorded for the British Council’s The Poet Speaks series

on October 30, 1962, she states that: “Now I again begin to go backwards, I begin to

look to Blake, for example.”258 Blake, a visionary and mystic who was considered

mad during his lifetime, had a proponent in W.B. Yeats, whose poems and plays

Plath continuously returned to in the fall and winter of 1962, and in whose former

apartment she lived and died. A closer look at the eyes, which are “lidded / And

balled”, is an indication that they are closed, or at least cannot see. To be robbed of

one’s sight is something that Freud attaches to the uncanny, which obviously also

ties into his idea of the uncanny as not being sure about one’s way around things.259

Apart from the lidded, balled eyes the first figure “exhibits // The birthmarks that

are his trademark – The scald scar of water”. “The birthmarks that are his

trademark”, this particular line is, I argue, marks a return to Plath’s New England

roots. It breathes of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is simultaneously a wink to his story

“The Birthmark”, in which a tiny birthmark in the shape of a hand, spells deathly

253 Roche, “Unpublished”. 254 Roche, “Unpublished”. 255 Leon Ashworth, Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Rome, London 2006, p. 8. 256 Ibid., p. 9. 257 Freud, The Uncanny, p. 142. 258 Peter Orr, “A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr”, Modern American Poetry,

(2022-05-14) http://maps-legacy.org/poets/m_r/plath/orrinterview.htm 259 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 125.

53

doom for a young woman, as well as to his novel The Scarlet Letter, in which

Hester Prynne has to wear the scarlet letter “A” for the rest of her life, as

punishment for having sinned. In Plath’s poem the birthmark comes from a burn:

“The scald scar of water”. Clearly, the birthmark in the poem is used to identify the

person. The choice of the verb “exhibits” and the noun “trademark”, implies the

birthmark carries with it not stigma, but rather pride.

7.3 The Macabre I have already discussed what Plath’s friend David Compton called her “morbid

interest in the macabre”.260 In “Death & Co.” that interest shows itself in the

portrayal of Death, that double or Janus-faced figure, as a cannibal, pursuing his

prey. The last three lines of the second stanza and the first of the third read: “The

nude / Verdigris of the condor. / I am red meat. His beak // Claps sidewise: I am not

his yet.” Death here is likened to the condor, a vulture and the speaker likens herself

to “red meat”. The word “sidewise” makes the beak sound as if it belonged to a

deranged of face, as if Death’s features were distorted. Maybe the way we might

envision the face of an alien or that of the fantastical creatures in Hieronymus

Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. The speaker escapes however,

she bobs and manages to avoid his maw: “I am not his yet.” These lines describe a

beastly struggle, such as one sees in films about the animal kingdom. However,

Death is not an animal but rather a person, which steers the scene into cannibalism.

In a poem from The Birthday Letters titled “The Rag Rug”, Ted Hughes remembers

reading [Joseph] Conrad’s novels to Plath, while she worked on a rag rug. One of

the novels he read to her, was The Heart of Darkness, which in turn refers to

cannibalism. Thus, we know, that Conrad’s story was fresh in Plath’s mind. Though

Freud does not mention cannibalism in “The Uncanny”, he does so in Totem and

Taboo, in which he writes of it: “By absorbing parts of the body of a person through

the act of eating we also come to possess the properties which belonged to that

person.”261 The idea of Death as consuming the dying is certainly as uncanny. While

the speaker still dodges becoming a victim, Death appears to try another tactic, first

shaming the speaker into compliance, then baiting her. The next lines read:

He tells me how badly I photograph.

He tells me how sweet

The babies look in their hospital

Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck

Then the flutings of their Ionian

Death-gowns.

Then two little feet.

It is the honeyed siren-song of the macabre, yet it is within the realm of the

uncanny: The babies in what may be christening gowns, but dead, on display not in

260 Rosenstein, “David Compton, Interview Recording, part two, 1973 December 7.” 1489:

Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, ID: v75fn 261 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, New York 1940, p. 115.

54

the maternity ward but the “hospital icebox”, the morgue. Here again is a

mysterious box, much like the coffin in “Berck-Plage”, the shoe in “Daddy”, and the

bee box in “The Arrival of the Bee Box”. Babies are per usual put in a bassinet or a

pram, not a “hospital icebox”, thus the icebox is a Shklovskian device. Plath might

have called it a mortuary, or a morgue, but she chooses “icebox”. The content of this

icebox is uncanny, for the imagery of the babies also connects to Freud’s uncanny

through their doll-like appearance (they look “sweet”, a word that may connote

dolls). They look “sweet” – maybe they are not dead after all – one usually does not

describe dead people as “sweet” – maybe they are not even real. The frill at the neck

sounds strangely like a twisted rope, as if the children had been hung, or somehow

wrought. Freud quotes Jentsch, who writes about the uncanny feelings that arise

when one doubts whether or not “an apparently living being really is animate and,

conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate […] The

mood lasts until these doubts are resolved and then usually makes way for another

kind of feeling.”262 Plath cleverly retains the uncanny in her poem by never

revealing whether the babies are dead or sleeping.

7.4 Liminality The first face of Death was a cannibal, the next – introduced in the fifth stanza – is

something of an egotist. He smiles and smokes, his long hair is “plausive”, and he is

“[m]asturbating a glitter / He wants to be loved.” This is the “other” side of the

Janus face, or the double of the first person, or perhaps even the first person but

somehow altered or “interchanged”. Tim Kendall points out that “glittering” in

Plath’s poetry almost always signals “some kind of deceit or threat.”263 In this poem

it definitely does, for in the last stanza plus one line, the dead bell tolls.

I do not stir.

The frost makes a flower,

The dew makes a star,

The dead bell,

The dead bell.

Somebody’s done for.

The poem’s last verse moves the poem to the window. Like the threshold, the

window is a transitive space that separates the inside from the outside. It is easy to

imagine Plath looking at the window of her study in the countryside and watch as

the frost made a flower on it, even hear the bells from the neighboring church. In the

poem “Elm” from the spring of 1962, Plath writes about a tree that Hughes later

explains was a real tree positioned right outside Plath’s study window. In the

penultimate stanza of “Elm”, the speaker questions: “What is this, this face / So

murderous in its strangle of branches?” Rosenblatt suggests that the face is the

speaker’s own superimposed on the windowpane, the way it can do when dark

outside.264 What I mean to show with this is, that in “Elm” Plath sees both the tree

262 Jentsch, p. 7. 263 Kendall, p. 202. 264 Rosenblatt, p. 153.

55

through the window as well as her own face mirrored in the window. In “Death &

Co.”, however, her vision stops at the window. She can no longer see further. There

are seven months between the composition of “Elm” and “Death & Co.” In the last

stanza of “Death & Co.” the thrill or resonance that Mukherji proposes transitive

spaces bring about are no more. The window is no longer an enticing gateway but

an impenetrable albeit icily beautiful wall. The hopefulness from the third stanza is

gone.

At the beginning of this chapter, I contrasted Plath’s poem with a poem by Emily

Dickinson. Axelrod, on the other hand, compares it to Sara Teasdale’s poem

“Doctors”, in which a speaker/patient lies awake listening to two doctors, Pain and

Death, who talk about what cure she might need. I think it is a fruitful comparison,

especially since Axelrod discovers the following line in Teasdale’s poem “A Winter

Night”: “My window is starred with frost”, which is almost too close for comfort to

Plath’s “The frost makes a flower / The dew makes a star”.

8 Night Writing & An Uncanny Afterlife

Having now concluded my analyses of the five poems by Sylvia Plath, I would like

to bring my argument to a close by looking at when Plath wrote them. I also offer a

short reflection on her uncanny afterlife. In a letter to her former psychiatrist Ruth

Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher on the September 29, 1962, Plath describes her

situation that fall: “Tonight, utterly mad with this solitude, rain and wind

hammering my hundred windows”.265 It was in this, what Freud called “uncanny

effect of silence, darkness and solitude” that Plath wrote her Ariel poems.266 Freud

points out that the uncanny “would always be an area in which a person was unsure

of his way around.”267 In an embedded narrative in “The Uncanny”, he relates a

personal story about how he once read a tale in a magazine about a couple who

move into a furnished apartment with a strange table that has crocodiles carved into

it.268 In the evening,

[t]he flat is regularly pervaded by an unbearable and highly characteristic

smell, and in the dark the tenants stumble over things and fancy they see

something undefinable gliding over the stairs. In short, one is led to surmise

that owing to the presence of this table, the house is haunted by ghostly

crocodiles or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or something

of the sort.269

The Ariel collection is coming out of a similar kind of stumbling about over things,

things present or past, remembered or imagined: shoes, boots, coffins, boxes, roses,

beaches… Plath is trying to make sense of something obscure. In a letter to the poet

265 Plath, Letters Volume Two, p. 843. 266 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p.153. 267 Ibid., p. 125. 268 Ibid., p. x. 269 Ibid., p. x.

56

Richard Murphy on October 7, 1962, she describes her routine: “I get up at 4 a.m.

when I wake, & it is black, & write till the babes wake. It is like writing in a train

tunnel, or God’s intestine.” 270 In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath Jacqueline Rose puts

her finger on a line from Heinrich Heine that she suggests haunted Plath. It is a line

that I used as a partial title for my magister thesis: “Ich weiß nicht was soll es

bedeuten”. Rose argues that the line appears “as a refrain” and that it “can be read

twice over as the expression of an irreducible hesitancy in language – the

foreignness of the German, the incomprehension voiced by the content of the words,

the whole line appearing in Plath’s writing as the relic of a cultural memory which

she endlessly fails to retrieve.”271 While I agree with Rose, I propose the line

suggests a continuous hunt on Plath’s part, to make sense of memories in general,

regardless of cultural or linguistic background. Obviously, she was fluent enough in

German to appreciate the otherworldly, seductive quest in Heine’s wording. What

this haunting does, is it shows Plath’s continuous poetic rummaging.

In the poem “Wintering”, Plath writes about the experience of writing in darkness:

Wintering in a dark without window

At the heart of the house

Next to the last tenant’s rancid jam

and the bottles of empty glitters –

Sir So-and-so’s gin.

This is the room I have never been in

This is the room I could never breathe in.

The black bunched in there like a bat,

No light

But the torch and its faint

Chinese yellow on appalling objects –

Black asininity. Decay.

I argue that these stanzas may be read as a blueprint of how Plath wrote her Ariel

poems: While wintering in the darkness, she shone her poetic vision on the

“appalling objects” surrounding her. Ciobanu identifies this wish also: “The poet’s

struggle is to see, no matter how little. Nightmares are always preferred to the

terrible blankness of the mind.”272 Plath wrote at night, or the tail end of night, an

uncanny hour, a practice she referred to as “mad” in a letter home: “Every morning,

when my sleeping pill wears off I am up about 5, in my study with coffee, writing

like mad – have managed a poem a day before breakfast!”273 Maurice Blanchot

describes this particular time well in a chapter from The Space of Literature called

“The Outside, the Night”, where he examines the seam between dreaming and

sleeping, and where he states that night is when that what has disappeared appears.

270 Plath, Letters Volume Two, p. 846. 271 Rose, p. 112. 272 Ciobanu, p.107. 273 Plath, Letters Volume Two, p. 856.

57

In short, he examines the eeriness of the appearance of night. “In the night,

everything has disappeared,” Blanchot writes, and continues:

Here absence approaches, silence, repose, night. [---] But when everything has

disappeared in the night, ‘everything has disappeared’ appears. This is the

other night. Night is this apparition: ‘everything has disappeared.’ It is what we

sense when dreams replace sleep, when the dead pass into the deep of the

night, when night’s deep appears in those who have disappeared. Apparitions,

phantoms, and dreams are an allusion to this empty night. […] What appears in

the night is the night that appears. And this eeriness does not simply come

from something invisible, which would reveal itself under cover of dark and at

the shadows’ summons. Here the invisible is what one cannot cease to see; it is

the incessant making itself seen. The ‘phantom’ is meant to hide, to appease

the phantom night. Those who think they see ghosts are those who do not want

to see the night. They crowd it with the terror of little images, they occupy and

distract it by immobilizing it – stopping the oscillation of eternal starting

over.274

Plath’s poetry is about the appearance of that which has disappeared. In a letter to

her mother on October 21, 1962, she explains that the cheerful stuff that belongs to

daytime is not what she is looking for, instead she is hunting for the darker things,

for that which she calls (with emphasis) “the worst”.275 She writes: “Don’t talk to

me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen – physical

or psychological – wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet but the

full knowledge that somebody else has been there & knows the worst, just what it is

like.”276

Since her death in 1963, Sylvia Plath keeps enjoying an uncanny kind of afterlife.

“Sylvia Plath haunts our culture,” writes Jacqueline Rose in The Haunting of Sylvia

Plath.277 As I have shown throughout this thesis, Plath wrote about ghosts and

hauntings, but she has herself become a ghost, in the shape of various

representations; her writing, not just her poetry and her novel The Bell Jar, but her

journals, her short stories, and her recorded voice, even her clothes and personal

belongings. For a long time, her writing was compromised by alterations and

omissions made by the estate. These acts of violations added yet another layer to

Plath’s “voice”. “Plath’s writings and the surrounding voices stand in effigy for her,

they speak in her name. It is this effigy that haunts the culture,” Rose continues.278

What Rose calls effigy might perhaps be called double. Readers of Plath often

respond to this effigy or double in uncanny ways. The uncanny communicates in

strange coincidences and doubles, and telepathic sharing of feelings. The uncanny

feelings and reactions of Plath’s readers are the focus of Gail Crowther’s

274 Maurice Blanchot, “The Outside, the Night” in The Space of Literature, Lincoln 1982, p.

162. 275 Plath, Letters Volume Two, p. 874. 276 Ibid., p. 874-875. 277 Rose, p. 1. 278 Ibid., p.2.

58

dissertation The Haunted Reader and Sylvia Plath, in which Crowther explores

Plath’s readers and their various reactions, some of whom “feel they double with

Sylvia Plath”279 and Crowther includes photos of Plath’s hands and the hands of

those who believe they are Plath’s doubles. About this, Freud wrote: “[m]oreover, a

person may identify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self; or

he may substitute the other’s self for his own.”280 Others feel the need to make

pilgrimages to places where Plath lived or places she visited and wrote about, in

particular the house in Devon where she wrote most of her Ariel poems, or the

house in London, in which she died.281 Others still, researchers in particular, make

long trips to the archives that host not only Plath’s papers but also her clothes, her

hair, and personal belongings. In a short short story by Jorge Luis Borges called

“Borges and I”, Borges writes: “I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can weave

his tales and poems, and those tales and poems are my justification.”282 One might

say the same about the dead Plath and her ghost. The ghost of Plath sometimes

seems to peer over the shoulder of Plath the poet as she bends over her typewriter.

In the poem “Lady Lazarus” she writes:

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart –

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes

It is impossible not to have these lines in mind when one visits (or reads about

others visiting) those various archives, where one may look at and touch Plath’s

hair, which is kept in a long box at Lilly Library, Indiana University,283 or her

clothes. A glittery party gown of Plath’s is kept at Smith College, as is her girl

scout uniform, not to mention the desk top on which she wrote her poems (the one

about which Ted Hughes writes in “The Table”), as it is hanging on the wall in the

Special Collections Reading Room at Smith College. The grave of Plath is in

Heptonstall in the UK. This spreading about of Plath and her belongings, a

dismembering of sorts, is a ghostly echo of the broken father figure/statue in

“Daddy”, whose head is in the “freakish Atlantic” and whose enormous toe reads

as if it ended up in the San Francisco Bay. This “spreading of body parts” is also

reminiscent of the uncanny Medieval cults of venerating the relics of saints. In an

article titled “Relic Cults: Why Dead Saints Were So Important in the Middle

Ages”, Meagan Dickerson tells of how the remains of Saint Catherine of Siena are

279 Crowther, p. 59. 280 Freud, “The Uncanny”, p. 142. 281 Ibid., p. 82-83. 282 Jorge Luis Borges, A Selection from the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges, New York 1981,

p. 279. 283 Brain, p. 33.

59

spread across three separate churches; “her head and thumb are enshrined at

Siena”, her foot and three fingers lie in a church in Venice, and the rest of her body

is buried in Rome.”284 Dickerson states that though pilgrimages to shrines continue

to this day, they may seem bizarre to most of us. But to the medieval person “it was

considered entirely normal to stroke the bones of a long-dead saint whilst praying

to them to ask for their help”.285 Dickerson explains that churches during the

Middle Ages associated themselves with their own history through possession of

relics. Because of Plath’s popularity, her belongings keep changing hands through

auctions, such as Sotheby’s last summer. For “a charge, a very large charge” one

can now own Plath’s typewriter, her fishing rod, her necklace, her dress, not to

mention her $200,000 Tarot deck.

9 Conclusion

In my thesis I have performed a close reading of five of Sylvia Plath’s poems –

“Berck-Plage”, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Daddy”, “Fever 103°”, and “Death

& Co.” – all of which include several elements of the uncanny and all of which were

written in the same study during a five-month period in 1962. I have examined them

for various aspects of the uncanny. Through my analyses, I have revealed how

deeply entwined in the uncanny Plath’s poetry is. As my base for the uncanny, I

have primarily used Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny” and Nicholas

Royle’s more comprehensive work The Uncanny from 2003. I have also been

helped by a number of articles and papers written on the subject, among them

Hélène Cixous’ “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche”

and Susan Bernstein’s “It Walks: The ambulatory uncanny”. I have investigated the

poems through a detailed analysis of meanings of specific words and sentences. Into

my discussion, I have brought letters, journal excerpts, the Harriet Rosenstein tapes,

other works by Plath and works by others which may have inspired her, some of

which she herself owned or confessed in journals and letters as having read, some of

which she may not have been aware of at all. I have looked at what dates these

poems were written and at related material, such as letters and journal excerpts but

have used also interviews and recollections from others, as well as taken into

account the physical space in which she wrote, to support my findings. Of

importance to me has been the use of new, relatively new, and newly recovered

material, some of which has not previously been used in Plath studies.

Many of Plath’s poems are fixed on a threshold, such as “Berck-Plage”, others

balance precariously in a space of liminality, like “The Arrival of the Bee Box”,

which focuses on the border between inside and outside. Then there is the last

stanza of “Death & Co.”, with the image of the frosty flower on the windowpane,

yet another transitive space. In the poems “The Arrival of the Bee Box” and

“Daddy”, and to a certain degree even “Berck-Plage”, I show how Plath uses the

284 Meagan Dickerson, “Relic Cults: Why Dead Saints Were So Important in the Middle

Ages”, Ancient Origins, 2021-06-17 (2022-04-24) https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-

ancient-traditions/holy-relic-cults-0015461 285 Ibid.

60

threshold or border to create friction by focusing on entrances and exits out of

closed spaces such as a box and a shoe, from which a protagonist escapes or wishes

to. By positioning her poems in the transitional space Subha Mukherji argues is

imbued with both unease and thrill, I suggest that Plath might consciously be

seeking out the uncanny. These transitive spaces suggest something secret and

primitive. That is especially true with “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, in which the

box may be read as a space where the repressed dwells and from which it threatens

to emerge. The threat of the return of the repressed belongs to Freud’s concept of

the uncanny. This closed off space helps to shroud Plath’s poetry into something

enigmatic and inaccessible.

By finding a link between the poem “Fever 103°” and earlier journal excerpts about

the saint and mystic Thérèse of Lisieux, I have shown how Plath’s inspiration from

the mystic adds yet another layer of the uncanny. In her autobiography, Thérèse of

Lisieux discloses details from the convent about fasting periods and deliriums, and

these Plath uses in the poem. “Fever 103°” may also owe some of its inspiration to

books like Hunger by Knut Hamsun and “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka, both of

which deal with euphoria and breathlessness – states that fasting can bring about –

concepts Royle ties to the uncanny. Plath was familiar with both authors and

possibly both works.

Another uncanny element is intellectual uncertainty, and I argue that this uncertainty

can be located in what I refer to as Plath’s use of aposiopesis, that is a breaking off

of a sentence. The use of aposiopeses is most apparent in “Daddy”. The idea of

something cut-off and incomplete is also discernable in the severed limbs, which

occur primarily in “Berck-Plage” and “Daddy”. This in turn leads to the grotesque

and the macabre, topics of interest to Plath, and topics she also surrounded herself

with in her study. A friend recalls seeing macabre newspaper clippings tacked to the

walls of Plath’s study. This, I posit, shows that the uncanny at least to a certain

degree might be a conscious move on Plath’s part, rather than a coincidental effect.

The severed limbs are macabre, as are the allusions to midgets and square babies in

“The Arrival of the Bee Box” and the dead babies in “Death & Co.” I argue that one

may draw parallels here to Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization. By

distorting an object on purpose, the reader sees it more clearly. Plath, it can be said,

uses Shklovsky’s device to an extreme.

Darkness features in several of the poems I have chosen. I have juxtaposed the

darkness of the shoe in “Daddy” and the darkness in “The Arrival of the Bee Box”

with the house in which Plath lived (which has been described as dark), and the

padlocked study in which she wrote (which can be likened to a closed box), thereby

suggesting an area that may be fruitful for further study. I also point to the fact that

Plath wrote much of her poetry during the dark hours of the early mornings. I

thereby suggest that Plath was rather influenced by her surroundings. I have

uncovered that a ghostliness emerges out of this darkness, an idea I anchor in

Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and

the New International. There is the ghostly absence of the lines removed in “Fever

103°”, but also the ghost of the father in “Berck-Plage” and “Daddy”. Furthermore,

Plath’s friend Clarissa Roche remembers a spooky window-gazer while stressing

61

Plath’s affinity for the occult, adding to a sense of the uncanny. To conclude, I have

shown how the space Plath inhabited in the fall of 1962 and the way she lived and

worked in it, is directly mirrored in her poems.

The double, Freud claims, is a “harbinger of death”286 and there are several doubles

in these poems. For instance, I have pointed at how the beaches in two of Plath’s

poems can be thought of as doubles – the beach in “Berck-Plage” and the beach in

“Daddy”. The double is closely related to repetition, which in itself is a kind of

doubling, and there are many repetitions in Plath’s poems. These have various

uncanny effects, from creating dreamlike echo impressions, to suggesting

obsession/compulsion or even the before-mentioned aposiopesis.

Elena Ciobanu has stated that the kind of aesthetics needed to analyze Plath’s poetry

has not yet been invented.287 However, I believe that by continuously approaching

Plath’s poetry from a variety of angles we are in fact nearing an invention. As I have

shown in my analyses – through multiple examples – the uncanny is a more or less

constant companion in Plath’s poetry. I therefore argue that the uncanny is a key

step in the process that may ultimately lead to the invention Ciobanu calls for.

286 Freud, p. 142. 287 Ciobanu, pp. 11–12.

62

10 References

Works Cited:

Alexander, Paul. Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath. New York: Viking Press,

1991.

Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. New York: Random House, 1972.

Annas, Pamela. A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York:

Greenwood Press, 1988.

Ashworth, Jenn. Seeing Things and Saying Things: Writing the Ghost” in Writing the

Uncanny, edited by Dan Coxon & Richard V. Hirst, Liverpool: Dead Ink, 2021.

Ashworth, Leon. Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Rome. London: Cherrytree Books, 2006.

Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Barthes, Roland. A Barthes Reader. New York: Hill and Want, 1982.

Bearn, Gordon C.F. “Wittgenstein and the Uncanny” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary

Journal, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Spring1993) p. 33. (2022–04–18).

Bernstein, Susan. “It Walks: The ambulatory uncanny”, MLN (Modern Language Notes),

vol. 118, no. 5, 2003, pp 1111-39, (2022–04–18)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3251857

Biswas, Ritika. “The Uncanny: Disquiet in de Chirico and Plath”, (2022–04–18)

https://www.academia.edu/28889413/The_Uncanny_Disquiet_in_de_Chirico_and_

Plath

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Bondeson, Jan. Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear. New York:

Norton, 2001.

Borges, Jorge Luis. A Selection from the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Dutton,

1981.

Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. New York: Longman, 2001.

Britzolakis, Christina. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning. Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1999.

Broe, Mary Lynn. “Enigmatical, Shifting My Clarities” in Ariel Ascending: Writings about

Sylvia Plath, edited by Paul Alexander, New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Bundtzen, Lynda. The Other Ariel. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novatu: New World Library, 2008.

Ciobanu, Elena. Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: The Metamorphoses of the Poetic Self. Iași:

Demiurg, 2009.

Cixous, Hélène. “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The

Uncanny)”. New Literary History 7, no.3, 1976.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laughter of the Medusa”, Signs, Vol. 1, No.4 (Summer 1976).

63

Clark, Heather. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. London:

Jonathan Cape, 2020.

Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso,

1999.

de Lisieux, Thérèse Saint. Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

Washington: ICS Publications, 1976.

de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

De Ros, Xon. “Aporia and Spectrality in La Tierra de Alvargonzáles” in Neophilologus 98,

pp. 565–579, 2014 (2022–04–18) https://link-springer-

com.proxy.lnu.se/content/pdf/10.1007/s11061-014-9394-4.pdf

Dean, Liz. The Ultimate Guide to Tarot: A Beginner’s Guide to the Cards, Spreads, and

Revealing the Mystery of the Cards. Beverly: Fair Winds Press, 2015.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the

New International. New York; Routledge, 1994.

Derrida, Jacques. “Speculations – On Freud”, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 3, no.2, 1978.

Dickerson, Meagan. “Relic Cults: Why Dead Saints Were So Important in the Middle

Ages”, Ancient Origins, 2021-06-17 (2022–04–24) https://www.ancient-

origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/holy-relic-cults-0015461

Field, Ann and Gretchen Scoble, The Meaning of Flowers: Myth, Language & Lore. San

Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998.

Folsom, Jack. “Death and Rebirth in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Berck-Plage’”, Journal of Modern

Literature Vol. 17, No.4, 1991.

Frazer, James George Sir. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. London:

Macmillan and Co., 1923.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2015.

Freud, Sigmund. Freud on Women: A Reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.

Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. New York: Penguin Books Limited, 1940.

Gordon Bramer, Julia. Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath. Nacogdoches:

Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2015.

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

Grzesiak, Hanna. “Dwarfism in ancient times: from worship to rejection”, Interdisciplinary

Contexts of Special Pedagogy, 31/2020, p. 305. (2022–04–18)

https://www.academia.edu/45105742/INTERDYSCYPLINARNE_KONTEKSTY_

PEDAGOGIKI_SPECJALNEJ_Redakcja_naukowa_ANETA_WOJCIECHOWSK

A_POZNAŃ_2020

Guiley, Rosemary. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. New York: Facts on File, 2007.

Hamsun, Knut. Hunger. New York: Noonday Press, 1998.

Haughton, Hugh. “Introduction” in Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny. New York: Penguin

Books, 2003.

64

Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Basic Writings, San Francisco:

HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.

Holbrook, David. Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. London: The Athlone Press, 1976.

Hughes, Frieda. “Introduction” in Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition. New York:

HarperCollins, 2004.

Hughes, Ted. “Notes On the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems”, in The Art of

Sylvia Plath: A Symposium, edited by Charles Newman, Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1970.

Hughes, Ted. Birthday Letters. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998.

Hughes, Ted. Letters of Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 2007.

Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”. (2022–04–23)

http://www.art3idea.psu.edu/locus/Jentsch_uncanny.pdf

Kendall, Tim. Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study. London: Faber & Faber, 2001.

Kristeva, Julia. Stranger to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Kroll, Judith. Chapter in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper &

Row, 1978.

Kurzman, Mary. “Plath’s ‘Ariel’ and Tarot”. The Centennial Review, vol. 32, no. 2, East

Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1988.

Lawrence, D.H. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Levack, Brian. The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West. New

Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

Lloyd Smith, Allan. “The Phantoms of Drood and Rebecca: The Uncanny Reencountered

through Abraham and Torok’s Cryptonymy”, in Poetics Today, Vol. 13, No. 2

(summer 1992) p. 290. (2022–04–28) https://www.jstor.org/stable/1772534

Lowe, Roger. “’Full Fathom Five’: The Dead Father in Sylvia Plath’s Seascapes” in Texas

Studies in Literature and Language 49, no. 1, 2007.

Luckhurst, Roger. “’Something Tremendous, Something Elemental’: On the Ghostly

Origins of Psychoanalysis” in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History,

edited by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1999.

Malcolm, Janet. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes. New York: A.A. Knopf,

1994.

McKnight Hardy, Lucie. “Negative Spaces and Ambiguity: A Toolkit for Writing Uncanny

Fiction” in Writing the Uncanny, edited by Dan Coxon & Richard V. Hirst,

Liverpool: Dead Ink, 2021.

Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, “Plasma”, Merriam-Webster, (2022–04–18)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plasma.

Middlebrook, Diane. Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage. London: Little,

Brown, 2004.

Moulin, Joanny. “Introduction: Towards Biography Theory.” Cercles: Revue

Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone, Université de Rouen, 2015.

65

Mukherji, Subha. Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces. London:

Anthem Press, 2011.

Nims, John Frederick. “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Technical Analysis” in Ariel

Ascending, edited by Paul Alexander, New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

O’Brien, Maeve. The Courage of Shutting Up: Decisions of Silence in the Work of Sylvia

Plath. (2022–04–22)

https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.770514

Onedek Laurence, Patricia. “Women’s Silence as a Ritual of Truth: A Study of Literary

Expression in Austen, Brontë and Woolf”, in Listening to Silences: New Essays in

Feminist Criticism, edited by Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1994.

Orr, Peter. “A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr”, Modern American Poetry

(2022–04–18) https://modernamericanpoetry.org/content/1962-sylvia-plath-

interview-peter-orr

Peel, Ellen. “Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny”, in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 17,

No.4, p.412 (2022–04–18) https://www.jstor.org/stable/40245653?read-

now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A990b31702aa646ed5f0c9d1b5a784ec4&seq=3#pag

e_scan_tab_contents

Perry, S.J. “’So Unreal’: The Unhomely Moment in the Poetry of Philip Larkin” in English

Studies, Volume 92, Issue 4, 2011, (2022–04–18) https://www.tandfonline-

com.proxy.lnu.se/doi/pdf/10.1080/0013838X.2011.574030?needAccess=true

Pitkethly, Lawrence. “Voices & Visions, 9, Sylvia Plath”. New York: Center for Visual

History, 1994. (2022–04–23)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPQOtGSr4o&t=2912s

Plath, Sylvia. Ariel: The Restored Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1965.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London: Faber and Faber, 2013.

Plath, Sylvia. The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1: 1940–1956. New York HarperCollins,

2017.

Plath, Sylvia. The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2: 1956–1963. London: Faber and Faber,

2018.

Porterfield, Carlie. “Poet Sylvia Plath’s Wedding Band And Other Prized Possessions Net

$1 Million At Auction”, Forbes July 21, 2021 (2022–04–18)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/07/21/poet-sylvia-plaths-

wedding-band-and-other-prized-possessions-net-1-million-at-

auction/?sh=554aad021143

Rákóczi, Basil Ivan. The Painted Caravan: A Penetration into the Secrets of the Tarot

Cards. The Hague: L.J.C. Boucher, 1954.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1991.

Rosenblatt, Jon. Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Chapel Hill: The University of North

Caroline Press, 1979.

66

Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

Sanazaro, Leonard. “The Transfiguring Self: Sylvia Plath, a Reconsideration”, The

Centennial Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Winter 1983), pp. 62–74. (2022–04–18)

https://www-jstor-org.proxy.lnu.se/stable/23739384?seq=1

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. London: Leopard Books, 1995.

Shapiro, David. “Sylvia Plath: Drama and Melodrama”, in Sylvia Plath: New Views on the

Poetry, edited by Gary Lane, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Sheehan, Dan. “Sylvia Plath’s tarot deck just sold for $200,000”, Lithub, July 21, 2021,

(2022–04–18) https://lithub.com/sylvia-plaths-tarot-deck-just-sold-for-200000/

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Device” in Theory of Prose. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive

Press, 1990.

Smith, Nathan. “How Sylvia Plath’s Rare Honors Thesis Helped Me Understand My

Divided Self: On the Poet’s Understanding of Dostoevsky – and Herself”, Lithub,

April 26, 2016, (2022–04–18) https://lithub.com/how-sylvia-plaths-rare-honors-

thesis-helped-me-understand-my-divided-self/

Steig, Michael. “Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis”, The Journal of

Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 29, no. 2, 1970, pp. 253–60, (2022–04–18)

https://www.academia.edu/7752049/Michael_Steig_Defining_the_Grotesque_An_A

ttempt_at_Synthesis_pdf

Stenskär, Eva. “‘Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten’ – Uncanny Space in the Poetry of

Sylvia Plath”, 2020 (2022–04–18) https://www.diva-

portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1462751/FULLTEXT01.pdf

SylviaPlathLibrary, on Library Thing (2022–05–15)

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/SylviaPlathLibrary

PoetryPoemsPoets. “Fever 103–Read by Sylvia Plath” (2022–04–29)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO0SREXcSUs&t=33s

Tamás, Dorka. “Supernatural Vision in Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems” (2022–04–18)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXcsGtoz2Zs&t=1s

The New King James Bible, s.v. Acts 1:8 (2022–04–18)

https://www.biblestudytools.com/nkjv/acts/1-8.html

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Landscapes of Fear. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979.

Van Dyne, Susan R. Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems. Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1993.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Yeats, W.B. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIII: A Vision: The Original 1925

Version. New York: Scribner, 2008.

Unpublished Material:

Roche, Clarissa, “Unpublished Memoir”, Sylvia Plath Collection, Smith College,

Northampton.

67

Rosenstein, Harriet. Typed, unpaginated notes. Harriet Rosenstein Research Files on Sylvia

Plath, 1910–2018. Manuscript Collection No. 1489, Emory University, Atlanta.

Rosenstein, Harriet. “David Compton interview recording, part two, 1973 December 7”.

1489: Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, Emory University. ID:

v75fn.

Rosenstein, Harriet. “Macedo Suzette, interview recording, November 27”. 1489: Harriet

Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, Emory University. ID: v8ggs.

Rosenstein, Harriet. “Roche, Clarissa, interview recording, part two, 1973 November 20”.

1489: Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath Emory University. ID:

v70cv.

Rosenstein, Harriet. “Sigmund, Elizabeth Compton, interview recording, part five, undated”.

1489: Harriet Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, Emory University. ID:

v73st.

Rosenstein, Harriet. “Winifred Davies, interview recording, undated”. 1489: Harriet

Rosenstein research files on Sylvia Plath, Emory University. ID: v48qv.

68

Appendix 1

Berck-Plage

(1)

This is the sea then, this great abeyance.

How the sun’s poultice draws on my inflammation!

Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze

By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.

Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?

I have two legs, and I move smilingly.

A sandy damper kills the vibrations;

It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices

Waving and crutchless, half their old size.

The lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces.

Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner.

Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses?

Is it any wonder he affects a black cassock?

Here he comes now, among the mackerel gatherers

Who wall up their backs against him.

They are handling the black and green lozenges like the parts of a body.

The sea, that crystallized these,

Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress.

(2)

This black boot has no mercy for anybody.

Why should it, it is the hearse of a dead foot,

The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest

Who plumbs the well of his book,

The bent print bulging before him like scenery.

Obscene bikinis hide in the dunes,

Breasts and hips a confectioner’s sugar

Of little crystals, titillating the light,

69

While a green pool opens its eye,

Sick with what it has swallowed –

Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers

Two lovers unstick themselves.

O white sea-crockery.

What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat!

And the onlooker, trembling,

Drawn like a long material

Through a still virulence,

And a weed, hairy as privates.

(3)

On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering,

Things, things –

Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminum crutches.

Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk

Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles?

I am not a nurse, white and attendant,

I am not a smile.

These children are after something, with hooks and cries,

And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults.

This is the side of a man: his red ribs,

The nerves bursting like trees, and this is the surgeon:

One mirror eye –

A facet of knowledge.

On a striped mattress in one room

And old man is vanishing.

There is no help in his weeping wife.

Where are the eye-stones, yellow and valuable

And the tongue, sapphire of ash

(4)

A wedding cake face in a paper frill.

How superior he is now.

70

It is like possessing a saint.

The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful;

They are browning, like touched gardenias.

The bed is rolled from the wall.

This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.

Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit

Under the glued sheet from which his powdery beak

Rises so whitely, unbuffeted?

They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffened

And folded his hands, that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye.

Now the washed sheets fly in the sun,

The pillow cases are sweetening.

It is a blessing, it is a blessing:

The long coffin of soap-colored oak,

The curious bearers and the raw date

Engraving itself in silver with marvelous calm.

(5)

The grey sky lowers, the hills like a green sea

Run fold upon fold far off, concealing their hollows,

The hollows in which rock the thoughts of the wife –

Blunt, practical boats

Full of dresses and hats and china and married daughters.

In the parlor of the stone house

One curtain is flickering from the open window,

Flickering and pouring, a pitiful candle.

This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember.

How far he is now, his actions

Around him like livingroom furniture, like a décor.

As the pallors gather –

The pallors of hands and neighborly faces,

The elate pallors of flying iris.

They are flying off into nothing: remember us.

The empty benches of memory look over stones,

71

Marble façades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils.

It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place.

(6)

The unnatural fatness of these lime leaves! –

Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church.

The voices of the priest, in thin air.

Meets the corpse at the gate,

Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell;

A glitter of wheat and crude earth.

What is the name of that color? –

Old blood of caked walls the sun heals,

Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts.

The widow with her black pocketbook and three daughters,

Necessary among the flowers,

Enfolds her face like fine linen,

Not to be spread again.

While a sky, wormy with put-by smiles,

Passes cloud after cloud.

And the bride flowers expend a freshness,

And the soul is a bride

In a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless.

(7)

Behind the glass of this car

The world purrs, shut-off and gentle.

And I am dark-suited and still, a member of the party,

Gliding up in low gear behind the cart.

And the priest is a vessel,

A tarred fabric, sorry and dull,

Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman.

A crest of breasts, eyelids and lips

72

Storming the hilltop.

Then, from the barred yard, the children

Smell the melt of shoe-blacking,

Their faces turning, wordless and slow,

Their eyes opening

On a wonderful thing –

Six round hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood.

And a naked mouth, red and awkward.

For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.

There is no hope, it is given up.

The Arrival of the Bee Box

I ordered this, this clean wood box

Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.

I would say it was the coffin of a midget

Or a square baby

Were there not such a din it it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous

I have to live with it overnight

And I can’t keep away from it

There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.

There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.

It is dark, dark,

With the swarmy feeling of African hands

Minute and shrunk for export,

Black on black angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?

It is the noise that appals me most of all.

The unintelligible syllables.

It is like a Roman mob.

Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.

I am not a Caesar.

I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.

They can be sent back.

They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

73

I wonder how hungry they are.

I wonder if they would forget me

If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.

There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,

And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately

In my moon suit and funeral veil.

I am no source of honey

So why should they turn on me?

Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you

You died before I had time –

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one grey toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pour bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I ever could tell where you

Put your foot, your root.

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich. I could hardly speak.

74

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene.

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew,

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat moustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, o You –

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do

But they pulled me out of the sack.

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you.

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do

So daddy, I am finally through.

75

The black telephone’s off at the root,

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two –

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Fever 103°

Pure? What does it mean?

The tongues of hell

Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus

Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable

Of licking clear

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin

The tinder cries.

The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!

Love, love, the low smokes roll

From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.

Such yellow sullen smokes

Make their own element. They will not rise.

But trundle round the globe

Choking the aged and the meek.

The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,

The ghastly orchid

Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!

Radiation turned it white

And killed it in an hour.

76

Greasing the bodies of adulterers

Like Hiroshima ash and eating in

The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night

I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.

The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.

Three days. Three nights.

Lemon water, chicken

Water, water make me retch

I am too pure for you or anyone

Your body

Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern –

My head a moon

Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin

Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you. And my light.

All by myself I am a huge camellia

Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up.

I think I may rise –

The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene

Virgin

Attended by roses

By kisses, by cherubim,

By whatever these pink things mean.

Not you, nor him

Nor him, nor him

(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) –

To Paradise.

Death & Co.

Two. Of course there are two.

It seems perfectly natural now –

The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded

And balled, like Blake’s

Who exhibits

77

The birthmarks that are his trademark –

The scald scar of water

The nude

Verdigris of the condor.

I am red meat. His beak

Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.

He tells me how badly I photograph.

He tells me how sweet

The babies look in their hospital

Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck.

Then the flutings of their Ionian

Death-gowns,

Then two little feet

He does not smile or smoke.

The other does that.

His hair long and plausive.

Bastard.

Masturbating a glitter.

He wants to be loved.

I do not stir.

The frost makes a flower,

The dew makes a star.

The dead bell,

The dead bell.

Somebody’s done for.