On Plath

Plath has always been a pet poet of mine… When I was reading “Tulips”, several things struck me about the ways in which the body and its physicality are featured.

First, the palpable presence of the tulips is juxtaposed against the asexual, hollow body of Plath. “The tulips are too excitable”, she says, against “how white everything is”. “As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, this hands”—seems to suggest a certain sterility in her body.

Also, Plath gives up everything that normally defines a person: “I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses/ And my history to the anesthetist and my body to the surgeons”. I find these two lines extremely evocative. Here, by relinquishing her name and her day-clothes, she loses her identity and marks of civilization (in the clothes). She gives her “history to the anesthetist” and her “body to the surgeons”. Going back to what Grosz said about the inscription of history on bodies, here Plath loses both. She surrenders her “history to the anesthetist”—suggesting that she making null her history, numbing the who, what, where, when, how, of how she came to be who she is. By giving her body to the surgeons, it evokes an image of a body being susceptible to all forms of mutilation, scrutiny, modifications, etc. This must bring to mind Isserley in Michel Faber’s “Under the Skin”, where her body undergoes similar surgical procedures to become vodsel-like.

As Plath loses her name, her clothes, her history, and her body, her interactions with her surroundings become increasingly disembodied. Her head, propped “between the pillow and the sheet-cuff”, becomes an “eye”, a “stupid pupil” that “takes everything in”. The nurses become “gulls” and Plath only see them functionally—“doing things with their hands, one just the same as another”. Plath’s body becomes a “pebble”, something for the nurses and doctors to “tend”, like a garden. Thus there is the notion of the body as a passive receptor of what is administered to it—“they bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep”.

One of the images that is very poignant for me is that of the smiles in the photo. “My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;/ Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks” (emphasis mine). Here of course I suppose Plath is not masking her distaste for Hughes, saying his smiles are like “hooks”. The choice of the word “hooks” is very interesting. It reminds me of those hooks with pointed ends. When these hooks hook onto something, it latches on and the pointed ends prevent it from slipping out. Works like an arrow, I think. If you pull it out, it hurts like hell. I suppose here Plath is saying that her family’s smiles are her bane in a very bodily way—their smiles “catches onto [her] skin”. In other words, their smiles are sinister and painful physically.

Plath’s construction of her identity and her notion of self is also contingent on the stripping away of inscriptions on her body. In stanza 4, she is a “thirty-year-old cargo boat” who have been “swabbed clear”. The use of the word “swab” suggests that her corporeality is something to be tampered with, wiped, dabbed at—as seen already in stanza 1 earlier. Here, she is a “cargo-boat”. The emptying of her “loving associations—in other words, the objects which define her (and encumber her) are “swabbed” and “sink out of sight”, and then she feels free, “never been so pure”. She’s been stripped of her name, her clothes, her history, and her body; now she’s further stripped off her “loving associations”, i.e. inscriptions. The “teaset” may symbolize marriage, “linen” may symbolize wife/motherhood, and “books” may point to her career as writer/poet. As she becomes free of all these “associations”, she also becomes free, “never been so pure”, which kind of suggests that, in order to be liberated, one has to be free of inscriptions. Which again reminds me of Isserley at the end when she is finally ‘one with nature’.