5/25/10 From the Barefoot Rank to a Female Poetic Tradition, Part 2

Schedule again:

• tomorrow, all oral interps.
• Thursday - no class. Will have office hours from 2-4.
• Friday - class at 3 PM; wrap-up and evals. Maps due at 3.
• revision of micro by Saturday at midnight.
• revision of paper by Sunday at midnight.

questions on schedule, oral interp, map?

Another View of Armor: Sylvia Plath

If we compare Sylvia Plath to, say, Bradstreet or even Dickinson, she might seem to have been in a very different position. Many of the legal imequalities for women had been overcome by the time Sylvia Plath came of age in the 1950's. Women could vote, they could attend university, they could own property. On the surface, Plath took full advantage of such opportunities and was the embodiment of success: went to Smith College on scholarship, where she was extremely successful: popular, excellent grades, many awards. Awarded a Guest Editorship with Mademioselle magazine. Went to Cambridge University on Fulbright Scholarship.

Beneath the surface, though, much conflict.

• She was ambitious, but conflicted about her options.
  • On the one hand, she was very aware of the constraints placed upon women:
    • from her journal: "I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day--spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free. . . . I want, I think, to be omniscient . . . .I think I would like to call myself 'The girl who wanted to be God.'"
  • On the other hand, she was very aware of her sexual desires, and unwilling to give up what she called in her journal "passionate physical relationships." She wanted both marriage and a career, and found them incompatible, given the roles of men and women: one "can only love by giving up love of self and ambition," she said.
• other strains as well, particularly with her parents. I'll come back to those later.
• Strains came to a head after Sylvia's trip to NY as guest editor for Mademoiselle. She expected the trip to be height of glamour and acheivement. In fact, however, she found the work demeaning, and the world of female glamour articificial. When she returned home, she found in addition that one of her stories had been rejected for publication, and that W.H. Auden, who was visiting Smith College, had called her poetry glib. She disappeared, was found under house surrounded by sleeping pills.
• Spent much of the next year institutionalized; electroconvulsive therapy. Eventually recovered, returned to Smith, graduated summa cum laude, went on to Cambridge where she married the poet Ted Hughes.
• At first, the marriage was helpful; it fulfilled her ambitions to be wife and mother, and Hughes, an older, more established poet, was a helpful critic.
• later, however, she began to feel that she was too much caught up in Hughes' life at the expense of her own; loved her children but found it difficult to write. Later still, Hughes had an affair, and eventually they separated. Separation triggered all the old feelings of abandonment that she had felt towards her father, about whom more later; moreover, with 2 small children to raise, she was more trapped than ever. At the same time, she was exultant, getting up at 5 in the morning to write poetry before her children awoke, writing some of the best poems of her life and knowing they were such.
• When winter came, however, coldest on record in 60 years, children constantly sick, she herself subject to fevers, stress increasing. suicide at age 30.

Most of this turmoil is quite apparent in her poetry--and for that reason it might seem odd to say that Sylvia Plath is at all doing the same thing as Marianne Moore. Temperamentally, Moore and Plath are nearly complete opposites. Plath is generally considered a "confessional poet," that is, a poet who uses intimate details of his or her life experience as the basis for their poetry. (Among the major poets in this school besides Plath are Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman.) This would seem the precise opposite of a persona, and indeed of the approach of donning "armor."

What I am proposing in this class is that Plath did in fact have a persona too, but that she had no distance from it--the persona was a mask but was also herself. Normally a persona allows some distance from the world; it allows one to pretend to be something one is not, and thus protect the inner self. Plath's persona allows distance too, but not from the world, rather from herself: it is a way of seeing herself, and thereby of seeing the world. In this way she, like Bradstreet and Dickinson, turns her disadvantages to her advantage--but at a terribly high cost.

Best way into this idea is through a poem not in our anthology, "The Applicant."

• There are various ways to look at the speaker of this poem, but let's start with an assumption: that the speaker of the poem is society in general. What does society want?
  • "our sort of person"
  • "do you wear"--why would it be better to be crippled?
• --> one way to look at this: society wants to make the applicant into a particular kind of person--the term we would use now is "social construction of identity." What kind of person does society want to construct? (Useful to distinguish between men and women here.)
  • suit is black and stiff (male)
  • woman as living doll
    • woman supposed to fill a lack
      • empty hand
      • hole-poultice, eye-image
• why "marry it"? : marriage as primary way identity is constructed

Consider how different a view this is from Bradstreet's and Dickinson's. Bradstreet, in talking about how Nature made women, is appealing to a natural view of gender; men and women simply are what they are. Her feminism, if you can call it that, consists in calling for men to see what women really are rather than how they wish to see them. Dickinson's view of gender identity is more difficult to see, but consider the stance involved in calling herself "nobody"; she sets herself very much apart from society. If anything, it would be the "frog" who would have to conform; the nobody can do as she pleases, because no one is looking. For Plath, society creates selves--and, evidently, not just the selves of highly public figures.

Suppose then, that Plath dislikes her gendered identity--e.g. her prescribed role as housewife and mother (when she wants a career). There is a kind of paradox implicit in this view: Plath is trying to rebel against the gender identity forced on her by society, especially by and within the institution of marriage. But her own identity has been constructed by this same society. So she has to get some distance from herself, while speaking AS herself. Hence what I'm calling armor: she writes about herself, very directly and personally, but as a persona.

"Daddy" (676-677):

• Nominally, this is a poem about her father, so let's get some background:
  • Father prof of entomology at Boston U, internationally known specialist on bees. Immigrant from German-speaking Poland--not German, notice, and not a Nazi, something to keep in mind. His personality was stubborn and authoritarian, a fact that factored very much into the kinds of conflicts I discussed earlier: her mother was ambitious for learning herself, but accepted without question her subservient place, so she projected her own ambitions onto her daughter. She was demanding.
  • when Plath was very young, father became ill. It turned out to be a treatable form of diabetes, but because her father was too stubborn to see a doctor until the condition was very advanced, he developed gangrene (hence the "one grey toe / Big as a Frisco seal" in the second stanza) and died when she was 8. His death left her with a very complicated mix of emotions:
    • sense of abandonment.
    • grief and anger mixed
    • fear of/attraction to loss of control
    • self-hatred; blamed herself for father's death
• From what we can see in the first two stanzas, why does the speaker need to kill her father? Begins with image of a shoe that doesn't fit. What's the shoe? self squeezed into mold again. Here not marriage but family .
• then 13: "used to pray to recover you." why? Possible to resolve this contradiction?
• 16-32
  • talking about visits that she made to Poland, where she tried to find her ancestral village (without success).
  • What's implied by her inability to speak her father's language? Why is the language of the poem the way it is (especially in, say, the first stanza)? if the narrator is shut out from father-language, what sort of language is available to her?
    • “barely daring to breathe or Achoo”—child-language
    • not just language, but vision: 51-57, black, pretty red heart; simplistic child-vision of the world. Why?
• 33-50 Her father was not German and certainly not a Nazi. So what is the point of all this Nazi/Jew imagery?
  • We saw in "The Applicant" a critical view of society's attempt to force people into certain roles. In this section of the poem, does the speaker accept her place or reject it?
• "every woman adores a Fascist"--why? Are we supposed to believe that Plath believes this?
• Plath’s own introduction when she read the poem for the BBC: “Here is a poem 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."
• ["bit my pretty red heart in two...bones would do" probable reference? Would "getting back" to her father be a good thing or a bad thing, from what we've seen?]
• 64-67 made a model of you: husband. What does this suggest about marriage in general, if anything?
• ending:
  • I’m through—meaning what? Telephone off at the root—what relationship with her father is implied? Successfully breaking free or just accepting that she’ll never understand or communicate or something else? shutting OUT voices now; why?
• vampire imagery at end—why? why villagers as opposed to herself?
• I’m through again—and again, meaning what? successful patricide or suicide?
• The danger in confessional poetry is that it becomes self-absorbed, self-indulgent or even exhibitionist. The best of such poetry, however, manages to transcend its personal focus to show that the private life that is being revealed is somehow typical of something wider. Does she succeed?

BREAK

Treasure-hunting: H.D. and Adrienne Rich

Plath died in 1963--just before the second wave of feminism. She is moving in the direction of second wave feminism in a lot of ways--in her criticism of gender roles, in her belief that gender is socially constructed--but she never does quite make the transition fully. The reason for that is simple: it didn't exist yet. She was extremely dissatisfied with the limitations of her role as a woman, but she thought of herself as being alone in that dissatisfaction. Again and again in her poetry she expresses that dissatisfaction by distancing herself from other women: in the bee poems in Ariel, for example, she portrays women as drone bees, "honey-drudgers," mindless good citizens who sacrifice themselves for the hive, while she herself wants to be a queen bee. But since, as we saw in "The Applicant," her sense of what a self is is of something constructed by society, she can never quite imagine what it would be like to have a fully genuine self.

To put all this in terms of a place in poetry as a whole, she has no sense of a female poetic tradition. She has no sense that "female identity" has ever been an issue for women before, and therefore no models for how to construct one. And because she sees herself as being alone, she also has no sense of trying to create a female poetic tradition for other women poets.

The two poets we're looking at for the rest of the day, H.D. and Adrienne Rich, are both very aware of their place within the poetic tradition, and both are attempting to make a place for themselves and other women within it. But they are also aware that the tradition doesn't have a whole lot of women in it, or didn't seem to at the time. So their strategy for finding a place in the tradition is to rewrite the tradition itself. This method requires a feminist stance--you have to be aware that the tradition is oppressive to you as a female poet, and you have to make a conscious effort to try to rectify that situation. That is not to say that the work that results from that stance will not have significance to both men and women. I'm calling this approach to the tradition "treasure-hunting"--looking for pieces of the tradition that can be transformed into something positive.

One of the ironies, of course, is that H.D. predates Plath by almost half a century. She was a modernist, writing at a time when an earlier version of feminism was in full swing, both in America and in Europe. By the time Plath came of age, most of these women had been forgotten, ignored, or misunderstood.

I have made this claim about H.D. before, so let me give you an example of what I mean.

This is from the headnote to H.D. in the 1973 Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. [ ] Goes on from there to quote WCW: [ ] After this there is a gushing tribute by H.D, to Pound, in gratitude for discovering her. There are excerpts from the The Walls Do Not Fall, one of her major late poems about World War II,but it is described as “a kind of dejection ode.” In general, she was treated as an example of an Imagist and a minor poet. Or poetess. Now, although her contribution to and involvement in Imagism is certainly recognized, it is her long later works, especially Helen in Egypt and Trilogy, that are taken to be her finest and most representative works.

Obvious sexism, but how did it come about? How did she come to be known as an Imagist and little more?

Began benignly, more or less; she was involved in Imagism from the outset. In late 1912, H.D. showed Pound some of her poems; Pound hastily revised one of them, “Hermes of the Ways,” and sent it off to Poetry (to which, you'll recall, Pound had declared himself "foreign correspondent") over the name, “H.D. Imagiste.” (It appeared in the Jan. 1913 issue.) Thus, Pound would claim later, imagism was conceived half-seriously as a way to get H.D. into print without having to finish a book.

The truth was something more complicated: Pound and others had been trying to formulate principles for a new poetry for some time; he had in fact called one of his own poems that he sent to Poetry, "imagiste" before he ever saw the poems by H.D. which he accorded that title. When Pound saw H.D.’s work, he recognized poetry that was succeeding at what he had been trying to formulate. H.D. has been treated as Pound's disciple, and to some extent she was, but in fact her writing influenced Pound too.

Anyway, the name of "Imagiste" stuck. Was Pound at fault? Not exactly; by the time her wrote this he was trying to disassociate himself from Imagism, quite clearly, and he was trying to debunk the movement. But his target here is not H.D., whose poetry Pound genuinely admired, but Amy Lowell and the numbers of people that flowed into the movement.

In any event, H.D. was stuck with the label of Imagist. This in itself was not enough to consign her to oblivion; many very noted writers followed from the Imagists. The problem was that, given the name, and given that fact that as a woman she was never really carefully re-examined as a writer, H.D. was judged AS an imagist and as nothing else. Hence the kind of comment by Blackmur, which is an attempt at a compliment, praising her for her economy of language, etc.; and hence the near-complete lack of attention paid to her long later works and her experimental fiction. There was a good deal of confusion, too, about the many references to Greek literature in her work; allusions were confused with a Greek "style", and it wasn't much noticed that H.D. was reinventing Greek mythology quite as much as she was borrowing from it. As I have said before, in the long works especially, her borrowings from Greek mythology allow her to construct a kind of personal mythology in which male and female principles are balanced. We don't have good examples of that kind of work, but we can see an example of her efforts at revising Greek mythology.

"Helen" (2.853)

• In tradition, quite a different picture: Helen the "face that launched a thousand ships"--an object of desire if not love. Why might she be considered an object of hate?
• Why would they love her if she were dead?
• How is the story of Helen useful to the Greeks?

transition to Rich: H.D.'s feminism derives from the first wave of feminism, beginning with the Women's Suffrage movement in the 19th C and continuing on through the twenties, a decade of profound experimentation with gender (especially in Europe).

Rich dates from the second wave of feminism, which began in the 60's, picked up steam through that decade, perhaps reaching the height of activism in the 70's, and continuing on to today despite the anti-feminist backlash of the 80's and 90's. Her own writings span a long period of time, dating from before the most recent feminist wave: first book, published in 1951, was not particularly feminist; displayed a mastery of conventional form; given critical accolades. For a decade or so after her marriage, she wrote relatively little while she assumed the roles of wife and mother; in 1963 she published Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, a book in which she begins to question female roles. In that book and increasingly thereafter, she begins to look back at both male and female writers and artists, examining and revising the tradition. The importance of these acts are made clear in "Writing as Re-Vision": she writes, "Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival." Recalling Plath, one might argue that "survival" is not merely a metaphor.

"Diving into the Wreck" (2.1450-1452)

• What is the wreck?
• st. 1: why does she have to enter it alone?
• 13ff: what is the ladder?
• 34ff: why does she almost black out? what is the mask, and what power does it give her? Why is the sea "not a question of power"?
• 52-70 what does she come looking for? What does she find?
• 71-77: why is she mermaid and merman?
• repeated images in ending and beginning: does she bring with her anything she didn't already have? What did the quest accomplish?

l