562 The American Century: Literature since 1945love for me.” “The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,” she adds, “And comes
from a country far away as health.” The alternatives are familiar ones in American
writing: either to live in the world and accept the identity it prescribes, or to flee into
a state of absolute freedom. What is less familiar is that, here as elsewhere, Plath
associates these two alternatives, traditionally figured in the clearing and the wilder-
ness, with the absolute conditions of being and not-being. Fixity, in these terms, is
life; flight is immolation; freedom is the immediate metaphor of the hospital and the
ultimate metamorphosis of death.
“Dying / Is an art, like everything else,” Plath remarks in “Lady Lazarus,” “I do it
exceptionally well.” Her poetry is artfully shaped, setting stark and elevated imagery
of the sea, fire, moon, whiteness, and silence – all suggestive of the purifying, peace-
ful nature of oblivion – against figures of domesticity and violence – the pleasures
and the pains of living in the world. Everything is incorporated within a habit of
intense personal meditation, conversation with the self: “I’ve got to ... speak them to
myself,” Plath said of these later poems. “Whatever lucidity they may have comes
from the fact that I say them aloud.” The poems concerning the affections that tie us
to this world, like “Morning Song” (about the birth of her daughter), are notable for
their wry tenderness and wonder; those that describe the false self the world requires
us to construct, such as “The Applicant,” are, on the other hand, marked by a
corrosive wit; while the pieces that concentrate on the ambiguous nature of death
(“Death & Co.”) or the perfecting of the self in the experience of dying (“Fever 103,”
“Edge”) are more rapt and bardic, singed by the fire of prophecy. What characterizes
all this work, however, despite evident differences of tone, is the sheer seductiveness
of Plath’s voice: she conjures up the roots of her own violence, and the reader is
caught in the spell.
The artful way in which Plath immerses the reader in her experience is illustrated
by “Daddy,” a poem that in addition measures the distance between her use of the
confessional mode and, say, Lowell’s. “Daddy,” Plath said, “is spoken by a girl with an
Electra complex.” More to the point, it is based on her own ambivalent relationship
with her father (who died when she was still young), her tendency to recreate
aspects of that relationship in later, adult relationships, her attempts at suicide, and
her desperate need to come to terms with all these things. The secret of the poem lies
in its tension. There is the tension of the narrator’s attitude to her father and other
men, between fear and desire, resentment and tenderness. There is tension beyond
this, the poet intimates, in all human connections: the victim both detests and adores
the victimizer, and so is at once repelled and attracted by the brutal drama of life.
Above all, there is tension in the poem’s tone. The banal horrors of personal and
general history that Plath recalls are rendered in terms of fairy tale and folk story;
while the verse form is as insistently jaunty as that of the nursery rhymes it invokes.
This manic gaiety of tone, at odds with the bleak content, has a curiously hypnotic
effect on the reader, who feels almost caught by a contagion, compelled to surrender
to the irresistible litany of love and hate. Nor do the closing lines bring any release.
“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through,” Plath concludes, but the impression is
more that she is “through” in the sense of being over and done with than “through”GGray_c05.indd 562ray_c 05 .indd 562 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM