Joanny Moulin Ted Hughes, Alternative Horizons

TED HUGHES: ALTERNATIVE HORIZONS

CONTEXT AND GENRE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

  Series Editors: Peter J.Kitson, Department of English, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK William Baker, Department of English, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, USA

  Ted Hughes: Alternative Horizons

  EDITED BY

JOANNY MOULIN

  

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Published by: Taylor & Francis The Netherlands, Lisse

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ISBN 0-203-01798-6 Master e-book ISBN

  

ISBN 90 265 1973 7 (Print Edition)

ISSN 1573-2320

  

Contents

  Elmet Terry Gifford

  86 In Search of the Autobiography of Ted Hughes Diane Wood Middlebrook

  79 Ted Hughes’s Anti-Mythic Method Joanny Moulin

  60 Hughes & the Female Addressee Neil J.Roberts

  50 Drives & their Vicissitudes in the Poetry of Ted Hughes Axel Nesme

  Stephen Enniss

  Archive

  40 Self-Revelation, Self-Concealment & the Making of the Ted Hughes

  32 Poetry & Magic Ann Skea

  23 Ted Hughes’s Crying Horizons: “Wind” & the Poetics of Sublimity Christian La Cassagnère

  “Dead Farms, Dead Leaves:” Culture as Nature in Remains of Elmet &

  Series Preface

  14

  1 Complicated with Old Ghosts: The Assia Poems Carol Bere

  Gayle Wurst

  Poetry of Sylvia Plath

  1 Words to “Patch the Havoc:” The Imagination of Ted Hughes in the

  Leonard M.Scigaj

  The Deterministic Ghost in the Machine of Birthday Letters

  Joanny Moulin viii

  Foreword

  vii

  93

  “Earth-Moon:” Ted Hughes’s Books for Children (& Adults)

  Claas Kazzer 101

  Ted Hughes & the Folk Tale

  Paul Volsik 115

  List of Contributors

  125

  Works Cited

  128

  Abbreviations

  135

  Index of Names and Titles 138

  vi

  

Series Preface

Context and Genre in English Literature

  The aim of the Context and Genre in English Literature series is to place bodies of prose, poetry, and drama in their historical, literary, intellectual or generic contexts. It seeks to present new work and scholarship in a way that is informed by contemporary debates in literary criticism and current methodological practices.

  The various contextual approaches reflect the great diversity of the books in the series. Three leading categories of approaches can be discerned. The first category, consisting of historical and philological approaches, covers subjects that range from marginal glosses in medieval manuscripts to the interaction between folklore and literature. The second category, of cultural and theoretical approaches, covers subjects as diverse as changing perceptions of childhood as a background to children’s literature on the one hand and queer theory and translation studies on the other. Finally, the third category consists of single author studies informed by contextual approaches from either one of the first two categories.

  

Context and Genre in English Literature covers a diverse body of writing,

  ranging over a substantial historical span and featuring widely divergent approaches from current and innovative scholars; it features criticism of writing in English from different cultures; and it covers both canonical literature and emerging and new literatures. Thus the series aims to make a distinctive and substantial impact on the field of literary studies

  

Foreword

  The authors of this collection of essays have been chosen so as to span a large spectrum of approaches to the poetry of Ted Hughes, instead of favouring one line of criticism as opposed to others. The initial purpose of the project was to bring together writers whose divergent opinions and theories promised mind- opening contrasts. Although these authors are from five different countries, they belong basically to three critical traditions. Some markedly post-structuralist continental European papers turn resolutely to a close re-reading of the poetic texts themselves, and in so doing, serve, in part, as neutral ground for an encounter between milder representatives of the recent, and often opposed, tendencies in British and American critical readings. While most English experts often have a propensity for hagiography, the American reception of Hughes’s poetry has remained engrossed in, and conditioned by, a debate about his responsibility in the suicide of Sylvia Plath, sometimes at the excessive cost of no longer reading the poetry, except from this biographical vantage. But even here, new assessment is needed after Hughes’s own copious, albeit partial treatment in Birthday Letters of the issues involved in his life with Plath. However, the main argument of this book lies elsewhere, and is a theoretical one. Unsurprisingly for one who trained in social anthropology as well as in English literature in the Cambridge of the 1950s, Ted Hughes was a cryptostructuralist of sorts, at least until the late 1970s, but with a marked preference for Jungian theory, which implicitly dominates most of his ethics and

  

Weltanschauung. This helps to explain why, except in a few recent instances, the

  main body of existing criticism concerning Hughes’s poetry draws predominantly on Jungian psychology. This poses a problem of method, since, with varying degrees of intensity, criticism tends to relay the poet’s own critical discourse, not only without acknowledging the fact, but perhaps without even being aware of it. This is all the more striking considering that, as his career gathered momentum and he became an established figure, Hughes’s discourse became more and more overtly ideological. For all that, the essays collected in this book are not concerned with erecting a barrage of counter-discourse, but rather to avoid yet another critical pitfall, that lies in Hughes’s mostly involuntary tendency to push his readers to take sides and to enlist either as fans or as detractors. Over and against partisanship, the plurality of approach to be found in ix

  this collection should be seen as a search for different ways to steer Hughes criticism gently but firmly out of the ruts of certain well-travelled avenues. Impartial assessment is, to be sure, the best service that can be rendered to Hughes’s poetry, by helping to ensure that one of the most powerful poetic achievements of the twentieth-century is no longer stranded in biographical or psychological sands. This collection of essays is the first to be produced since the poet’s death and presents a good sample of directions in academic research devoted to the poetry of Ted Hughes at the turn of the century. It is meant as a continuation of Hughes studies and a tentative broadening of their perspectives.

  Joanny Moulin

1 The Deterministic Ghost in the Machine of

  

Birthday Letters

Leonard M.Scigaj

  “I looked for omens,” Ted Hughes writes, as he and Sylvia Plath enter their first rented flat in BirthdayLetters (49). But in Birthday Letters (1998) all the omens save Assia’s pike dream are bad omens. A pillowstain of blood, a gypsy’s curse, a ouija board, an earthenware head, a possibly rabid bat, a fox cub, a snake, ponderous astrology, and the word “Fate,” capitalized many times—all testify to a fatalistic inevitability. These are the “fixed stars” (118, 152, 188) that led to Plath’s suicide. For Hughes these “fixed stars” are the poet’s story, the one deep story at the heart of a lifetime that the poet expresses with a “thirst of the whole being. “But are Hughes’s “fixed stars” the same as the “fixed stars” Plath stated “Govern a life” in her late poem “Words” (CPP 270)?

  “Who has dismembered us” asked Plath, alluding to Assia, in her poem “Event” (195), written just after David and Assia Guttman Wevill ended their fatal weekend stay Court Green (21 May 1962). Hughes repeats the phrase in

  

Birthday Letters (133), but the dismembering persona is not Assia and the time

  Hughes refers to is not the spring of 1962. For Hughes the dismembering persona is Plath’s father, Otto Emil Plath, and the time is 1940, the year of his death. At this juncture Hughes’s interpretation of Plath’s life and career becomes obsessive, deterministic. In his 1995 essay “Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems and

  

The Bell Jar” (WP 466–81), Hughes argued that the primary revelation Plath

  experienced in writing her first novel was her fixation on her father’s death and his abandonment of her. This resulted not only in repressed anger at other males who might abandon her, for Hughes asserted that in writing The Bell Jar Plath also uncovered the source of her emptiness, a tendency toward violence buried deep in her German genetic roots. Though on the “upper level” of her mythology, asserted Hughes, Plath was certainly engaged in tearing free of those genetic roots with her death and rebirth poems in Ariel, on the “lower level” she succumbed to the “explosive experience” of her earlier attempted suicide, her desire to “annihilate herself” in a communion with her dead father, a desire falsely and inadequately subverted in The Bell Jar by scapegoating it into Joan Gilling’s hanging. The genetic determinism behind this interpretation of Plath’s demise, an unarticulated subtext in that 1995 essay, becomes Hughes’s primary theme in Birthday Letters.

2 L.M.SCIGAJ

  The central structural design of Birthday Letters concerns an obsessive equation of Otto and Sylvia Plath with King Minos and the Minotaur of Cretan mythology. In Apollodaurus, summarized by Edith Hamilton (151–2), Poseidon gives a bull to Minos, king of Crete, in order that the king sacrifice the bull to him. Instead Minos keeps it for himself, and Poseidon in turn punishes Minos by having his wife, Pasiphae, fall in love with it, producing the ravenous half-man, half-beast Minotaur. Minos directed his architect Daedalus to build a labyrinth to house the Minotaur. Once inside, no one could escape the labyrinth’s maze, and Minos used the structure to sacrifice captured enemies until the Athenian hero Theseus slays the Minotaur and finds his way out with the help of Ariadne’s thread. Hughes evidently sees in this myth a parable of how a self-centered, self- absorbed person becomes inattentive to the spiritual, obsessed with the covetous rational, and in so doing bestializes his or her instinctual life, creating chronic and self-destructive needs to overindulge in satisfying one’s passions. In this contemporary recension, Hughes casts Otto Plath as the self-absorbed Minos (133), given his autocratic pater familias behavior acquired from his Germanic roots. In her self-destructive indulgence in anger and emotional tirades, Plath apes her father as she becomes the Minotaur (120).

  But Hughes does not stop here. He adds a second level of genetic and cultural determinism. Otto himself is infected with fascistic faith in an all-powerful Ruler,

  

der Herr des Hauses (LH 13), and this has destructive consequences. So Plath,

  his offspring, exhibits in her destructive behavior that same genetic tendency. Her dreams in Birthday Letters are infected not only with corpses, but with “father- worship” and its particular Germanic legacy of Nazi horrors, the “Death-camp atrocities,” the “gas-chamber and the oven” (141–42). Otto’s brow is “Modified in Peenemümde/Via Brueghel” (179). Peenemünde is the village in the north of Germany where the Nazis researched and tested their V-1 and V-2 rockets, and the Brueghel alluded to is no doubt Peter Brueghel the Elder’s “The Triumph of Death,” a painting of carnage and slaughter that Plath meditated upon in her early poem “Two Views of a Cadaver Room” (CPP 114).

  Both World Wars deeply affected Hughes’s personality development. As a child Hughes heard endless stories of the dead and the survivors of World War I at family gatherings and at Sunday night dinners, for his father was one of only seventeen survivors of an entire regiment that went through its numbers three times at Gallipoli. Hughes was nine when World War II began, and his adolescence was molded in the food rationing, the stresses of the Blitz, and the daily news accounts of the fighting. German fighters flew sorties regularly over much of England, looking mostly for aircraft hangars and Rolls Royce engine factories, but also bombing many cities in the shires. Parachuted pilots already crisped by explosions and fires in their planes were not uncommon, as in Hughes’s early poem “The Casualty” in The Hawk in the Rain.

  In his poetry Hughes performed an important civilizing function by locating ways to control aggression. Though he once quipped that the machinery of religion was the traditional way to control violence (Faas 201), he shared the

  THE DETERMINISTIC GHOST IN THE MACHINE 3

  modernist view that myth in twentieth century literature performs that religious function for a populace less and less influenced by traditional beliefs. Hence, as I have argued in my 1986 and 1991 works, Hughes controlled aggression through meaning-bearing modernist structures developed from his storehouse of myth and cultural anthropology: the Lupercalia ritual and the poem as wolf mask in

  

Lupercal, the narrative of the adventure of the hero in Wodwo, the Zen

  Enlightenment of Part III of Wodwo and in the irony of Crow, and the psychology of alchemical transmutation to achieve the Jungian Self in Cave Birds. Often in these works—and especially in the Lupercal poem “Childbirth,” and the

  

Wodwo poems “Thistles” and “The Warriors of the North” —Hughes meditated

  on Freud’s theory of phylogenetic inheritance, of an aggressive taint in the blood, transmitted to each succeeding generation by one’s forebears, that can instigate violent actions (See Scigaj, 1986, 43, 95; 1991, 52–5).

  Hughes’s use of the Minotaur myth in Birthday Letters, however, is deterministic, not liberating. Genetic determinism is how Hughes understands his former wife’s bouts of sullenness, her hostility, anger, and her final act of self- violence. Otto’s hands are the hands of Fate manipulating Plath’s actions (184– 5), and those hands function as a perfect incarnation of a German death-wish, a cultural Ragnarok, in World War II. What Plath’s parents wanted from their daughter, insists Hughes, was “Thor’s voice” in the act of “Doing a hammer- dance on Daddy’s body/Avenging the twenty-year forsaken/Sobs of Germania” (169). Just as Sylvia “danced for (her) father/In the home of anger” (26) as a child, so the adult’s “flames fed on rage” (149), ultimately to unite with him (153) after convicting him of autocratic control in “Daddy.” Hughes views “Daddy” as both Plath’s love letter and her death-wish, her “Cupid’s bow” nailing her father to the town square “Stark naked full of those arrows/In the bronze of immortal poesy” (179). Every arrow becomes a poetic “star” in her “constellation,” though “it was/[Her] blood that dried on him” (180). Using her published poetry as evidence against her, Hughes argues that ultimately Plath really “wanted/To be with [her] father” (153) in a “wedding” foreshadowed by her summer 1962 interest in becoming a beekeeper (150). Plath’s analyst, Ruth Beuscher, convinced her that she had “instant access” to her creative energies (69), but what coalesced from “the core of [her] Inferno” (69) was “Germany’s eagle/Bleeding up through [her] American eagle/In a cloud of Dettol” (78), as the dead Otto rose in poetic form from the well at the center of the Devon house (137, 150, 152).

  Hughes convicts himself of complicity in the poem entitled “Error” (122–3). He romanced Plath into his vision of bucolic rural life as the ideal environment for raising a family and ensuring greater poetic productivity. Instead of going to sunny Italy on that Guggenheim grant, Hughes convinced Plath to sleepwalk into his “land of totems.” “Gallant and desperate and hopeful,” Plath followed, listening to her own gods, and arrived “soul-naked and stricken/Into this cobbled, pictureless corridor/Aimed at a graveyard” (122). So Plath in the winter of 1961–62 sat in a freezing house, without central heating, “Listening/To the

4 L.M.SCIGAJ

  leaking thatch drip” and “staring at that sunken church” just beyond the graveyard (122–3). Creating a bedroom in red (197–8) and planing an elm plank for her writing table (138) were other errors committed by Hughes during the move to Devon that only gave Plath easier access to her anger and her past, and thus a quickly opened door into Otto’s grave (138).

  But what of the genetic determinism that Hughes advances in his reading of Plath’s poetry and in the structure of Birthday Letters? A key term, deposited in the poem “Suttee,” is “gruelling prolongueur,” which Hughes uses to describe Plath’s resurrection from her first suicide attempt into the “labour-pangs” of a “child-bride” on the “pyre” of a new myth—a myth of suicidal devotion to Daddy (147–9). Hughes had used “gruelling prolongueur” in the Wodwo poem “The Warriors of the North,” to signify a Viking genetic inheritance of aggressive behavior in the North Country Englishmen that flowed into the Predestination of Calvin. To what extent can we accept this deterministic ghost in the structural machine of Birthday Letters? From her student days at Smith College until her death, Plath was an existentialist, wavering only between the agnostic and atheistic versions. As Sartre persistently argued, deterministic thinking is absolutely inimical to existential freedom, choice and responsibility.

  In The Concept of Mind (1949), Gilbert Ryle invented the term “The Ghost in the Machine” (15–6) to characterize the mistaken view, originating with Descartes and seventeenth-century mechanistic thinking, that the mind operates as a shadowy, unwitnessable realm that nevertheless partakes of the mechanistic logic that drives the body. Because “the physical world is a deterministic system, so the mental world must be a deterministic system” (20), and mechanists like Descartes were really reformulating the religious bogey of Predestination in the new scientific language of Galileo (23). Descartes placated his religious scruples by using mental conduct words in ways that suggested that the mind is a quasi- deterministic causal agent of human action. Thus the bodily machine was governed by its deterministically-inclined ghost, the mind. Using logic and linguistic categories, Ryle argues against this determinism throughout The

  

Concept of Mind. He affirms that dozens of mental conduct words used to signify

  intelligence (“clever,” “sensible” “stupid,” etc.) actually signify many different categories of dispositions, abilities, capacities, and qualities of character that may express themselves in observable behaviors under certain conditions or on certain occasions. We must reason back from observed behavior and recognize the element of freedom of purpose in assessing whether any dispositions or qualities of character have been employed, and this is not the same as attributing a fixed or deterministic cause of all behavior. Knowing “how” is a disposition that cannot be absorbed into knowing “that,” into knowing with causal certainty (45–6).

  Though a half-century old, Ryle’s argument is worthwhile today for its energetic indictment of reductionism. Humans “are not machines, not even ghost- ridden machines,” affirmed Ryle, and there is “plenty of room for purpose” (81), for discrete and differing responses to varying occasions, as well as for “learning

  THE DETERMINISTIC GHOST IN THE MACHINE 5

how or improving in ability” (59). “There are very few machines in nature. The

  only machines that we find are the machines that human beings make” (82). In

  

Birthday Letters Ted Hughes has created a machine of words, a labyrinth meant

  to reduce his former wife’s behavior to one deterministic cause, and in so doing deflect attention from his actions as well as reaffirm for one last time in print his male control of her actions.

  Through the obsessive emphasis upon the genetic determinism of Otto Plath’s anger and control, Hughes eliminates all other possible causes of Sylvia Plath’s actions in the last years of her life. What Plath learned in writing The Bell Jar was her fixed link to her father, according to Hughes, a link that electroconvulsive shock only temporarily numbed with its emptiness, and in composing the poems of Ariel Plath expressed that one inevitable wish—to merge with her father in a suicidal pyre. But by reasoning with Ryle, however, one could scrutinize Plath’s Journals, “The Magic Mirror,” The Bell Jar, the poems of Ariel, and instances of behavior in Plath’s last years, and locate responses to needs and desires other than a suicidal merging with her father, as well as recognize gains in her craft that reflect improvements in her abilities to comprehend social forces from a woman’s point of view.

  On five occasions in Birthday Letters (8, 18–9, 20–2, 25, 136), Hughes informs his readers that he has been rereading Plath’s Journals. In the first three occasions, Hughes is primarily interested in how Plath referenced early encounters with him —when he and Lucas Myers lobbed clods of mud at the wrong dormitory window (J 133), or her anticipation of his panther-like male prowess (131–4); how Plath perceived their first meeting at the infamous St. Botolph’s Review party (112–3), or how she was really on her way to find Richard Sassoon when she fell into Hughes’s arms and first made love with him (134–44). On the fourth occasion, Hughes alludes to her “juggernaut” of ambition that was meant to defeat “The grinding indifferent millstone of circumstance” (132). The last allusion to Plath’s Journals reveals that Hughes has reread a portion from 1961– 62, from writings that were supposedly either lost or burned, and remembered “what furies” she “bled into” that rag rug she labored over in the Devon home.

  None of these five allusions captures what Ryle would recognize as the main purpose of Plath’s Journals, the continuing reaffirmation of her existential (non- deterministic) “self-integral freedom” (31) and her desire to have her writing recognized as a career equal to that of any male: “I will not submit to having my life fingered by my husband, enclosed in the larger circle of his activity, and nourished vicariously by tales of his actual exploits. I must have a legitimate field of my own, apart from him, which he must respect” (35). This purpose could one day flower in Plath’s ideal of two equilibrated stars, her “two stars, polarized” (42–3), as in the “Excurse” chapter of Lawrence’s Women in Love. Why couldn’t Hughes balance his portrait of Plath with celebrations of that enviable ideal, however imperfectly realized in her actions and in the many hours of literary collaborations they no doubt shared at least during the early years of the marriage?

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  In “Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems and The Bell Jar” Hughes wrote that “The

Bell Jar is the story, in other words, from behind the Electroconvulsive Therapy.

It dramatizes the decisive event of her adult life which was her attempted suicide and accidental survival, and reveals how this attempt to annihilate herself had grown from the decisive event in her childhood, which was the death of her father when she was eight” (WP 468). This may suit Hughes’s deterministic purpose in Birthday Letters, but it does so by denying that the novel catalogued what must have been for Plath the tremendously liberating experience of bringing to the surface a past traumatic event in a way that revealed the social causes of her earlier demise—an American 1950s society organized and administered by males, where roles for women are secondary and where gender equality in the exercise of social and political power is impossible.

  The goal of liberation through knowledge, both self-knowledge and knowledge of society—what Ryle would see as non-deterministic improvement by developing one’s abilities (Ryle 59) —is the most pervasive theme in Plath’s work. This is apparent even in “The Magic Mirror,” her undergraduate Honors thesis on the Double in Dostoevsky’s The Double and The Brothers Karamazov. Plath’s central assertion here is that Golyadkin in the former novel commits suicide because he never recognizes that his double is his own creation, a crystalization of his own suppressed ambition. In the latter novel, Ivan has the chance for recovering his “health and integrity” because he is “an artist in his own right” who self-analytically recognizes both his responsibility for his bastard brother’s parricide and the Devil as his own projection of his worst ideas (“Magic Mirror” 43, 57–60). As in Freud, acknowledging the repressed and the traumatic can lead to liberation through self-knowledge. In her Journals Plath also records her jagged progress from late adolescence through early adulthood as a struggle with her own doubts and inner demons, a struggle which is also potentially liberating.

  

The Bell Jar is sometimes denigrated as a roman à clef, with its characters so

  satirically exaggerated that they suggest mean motives and limited creative abilities in its author. But like Brecht’s alienation effect, these one-dimensional satiric characters forestall empathy and keep the reader’s critical intellect alive. Of much greater importance are the events of the novel, events that Plath not only did live through, but which were typical of 1950s American culture. The events raise the reader’s awareness as they expose social forces within a society of male privilege where women are restricted and disempowered. Though Esther Greenwood’s visit to her father’s grave does appear just before the attempted suicide, the visit occupies only three pages of chapter thirteen (BJ 134–7). Its net effect is to make Esther realize that she can expect no help from parents, especially male parents, and that she must forego adolescent idols and make her own decisions. Esther is surprised at how ordinary her father’s grave is. Here she receives a healthy dose of adult realism as she revises her childhood perception of him from a godlike muse to an ordinary human. The fact that she can mourn his death at the conclusion of this short scene means that she is ready to move

  THE DETERMINISTIC GHOST IN THE MACHINE 7

  onward toward adulthood and accept responsibility for her own actions. Though Plath consciously presented her father in many early poems as “the buried male muse and god-creator risen to be my mate in Ted,” a remark she entered in her

  

Journals in 1958 (J 222), she does not develop Esther’s relationship with her

  father in the chapters before or after the graveyard visit in The Bell Jar, a work she completed three years later. No one will gainsay that Otto’s early death was “the decisive event of her childhood,” as Hughes insists, but if The Bell Jar were primarily devoted to exploring her relationship with her father, Plath would certainly have developed it into a major structural motif. In real life her father’s early death did leave her with feelings of abandonment that led to overdependence upon male figures and at times a treatment of males as surrogate father figures, but she was aware of this tendency in herself by 1959 (J 267, 278, 284), and this is NOT the central subject of The Bell Jar. The main character’s (and the reader’s) liberating growth in understanding the limitations placed upon women in a society of male privilege is the central focus of every Bell Jar chapter.

  Twice in chapter thirteen of The Bell Jar, Plath presents Esther Greenwood reading books on abnormal psychology shortly before her unsuccessful suicide event. Plath had read Eric Fromm’s Escape From Freedom (J 83–6) and consulted psychiatrists in the summer of 1953, in the weeks before her unsuccessful suicide attempt (LH 130). By 1958 Plath had found in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” a perfectly acceptable reason for her first suicide attempt, and it concerned her mother, not her father. She wrote that Freud’s account is “An almost exact description of my feelings and reasons for suicide: a transferred murderous impulse from my mother onto myself: the “vampire” metaphor Freud uses, “draining the ego”: that is exactly the feeling I have getting in the way of my writing: Mother’s clutch. I mask my self-abasement (a transferred hate of her) and weave it with my own real dissatisfactions in myself.” As Plath recorded this in her Journals (279), she emphasized that this is both a source of depression and “a changeable liability.” How to rectify the situation? Again notice the emphasis upon awareness promoting self- development: “Talking and becoming aware of what is what and studying it is a help” (J 279). Plath was to reuse that Freudian vampire metaphor later, in the

  Ariel poem “Daddy,” and for a similar liberating purpose.

  The real consciousness-raising purpose in writing The Bell Jar is Plath’s dawning awareness, conveyed in Esther Greenwood’s dry Salingeresque wit, that the causes for her first suicide attempt did not issue from an irreparable psychic wound, but were in large part the result of the stresses, thwarted desires, and lack of opportunity for equality in a 1950s American society of male privilege. Esther doesn’t want to become another self-abasing housefrau, like her mother or Mrs. Willard. She doesn’t want “infinite security” and the secondary role of being “the place the arrow shoots off from.” She wants “change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself” (BJ 58, 68). Similarly, she doesn’t want to learn shorthand to support herself after college; she “hated the

8 L.M.SCIGAJ

  idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters” (BJ 100, 62). But for a woman to achieve domestic and career equality in 1950s America was next to impossible.

  Like Plath, Esther Greenwood is an aspiring poet. Well, what are the possibilities for acquiring that “self-integral freedom” and equal opportunity for career advancement (J 31, 35) in The Bell Jar? Esther goes to New York having won a prestigious guest editorship at Mademoiselle, as did hundreds of American coeds in the fifties. Before long she bursts into tears while being photographed as a guest editor, simply because she is asked what career she desires, and she answers “a poet” (BJ 83). Esther has already learned from Jay Cee, her supervisor, that to be in the literary game is to exhaust oneself in dull days of routine editorial work, punctuated by vapid social events such as fashion shows and advertising or women’s products luncheons, and interrupted by inane meetings where one must stroke successful authors, almost all of whom are males. Being in the literary game means desexing oneself to the point of being an unlovely, driven Jay Cee, with “pug-ugly looks” (5), who fills out schedule cards (25) after spending years learning languages (27). Esther’s tears signify her recognition of the hopelessness of trying to fulfill her career ideals as a poet in this society. Here the only fact that Plath did not add was that most of the powerful senior editors above the Jay Cees in these slick magazines were males., veteran slicks writer and 1942 Smith graduate, was learning this in 1961, the year Plath composed The Bell Jar, as Friedan researched and composed the first text of the feminist movement, The Feminine Mystique (1963; see ch. 2, pp. 54–5). When not on the slow track to dull middle management jobs, the guest editors at

  

Mademoiselle are encouraged to waste their time accumulating free gifts and

  dressing up as dolls, only to be escorted by mysogynists like Marco, the Peruvian United Nations delegate, who throws Esther into the mud after tearing off the front of her dress (BJ 86– 9).

  Instead of the very minor graveyard scene, Hughes should have focused on Esther’s green dirndl skirt and white peasant blouse. When Esther, despondent at the hollowness of her Mademoiselle experience, rejects the New York literary scene that has ended her career dream, she tosses all of her new fashion clothing out the window during her last night in the city, and borrows from her friend Betsy a green dirndl skirt and white peasant blouse. Continuing this defiant attitude after she returns home, Esther wears the same outfit for the next three weeks, sees Dr. Gordon in that outfit a few days before he begins administering the electroconvulsive shock treatments, and wears precisely this outfit on the day of the attempted suicide (BJ 91–2, 104, 108, 137). This clothing motif suggests that balked career advancement in a society of male privilege causes the attempted suicide, not feelings of abandonment from a father who died more than a decade ago.

  Sexual experience has been throughout Western literature a vehicle for growth and self-realization. But in The Bell Jar Esther must struggle for years with the gospel of chastity advocated by her mother (65–6). One is either pure or dirty,

  THE DETERMINISTIC GHOST IN THE MACHINE 9

  like Doreen (19). Esther rejects an obvious potential husband in Buddy Willard, for his air of scientific superiority, his disdain of a poem as “a piece of dust,” and most of all, for his male double standard regarding sex (45, 56–9). Esther would like the same sexual freedom (63), but when she decides to allow Constantin, the one non-threatening male she meets, to seduce her, she falls asleep. Constantin wouldn’t work as a husband anyway, reasons Esther, for even such a nice person would expect her to live under the bell jar of gender inequality. Constantin would no doubt want her to spend her day washing dishes and making up beds (68). Marriage could only be Mrs. Willard’s dreary routine: “I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself” (68–69).

  Males remain in complete control throughout The Bell Jar. Even the joys of childbirth are not joys in this male-oriented society. When Buddy takes Esther to watch him carve up cadavers, she views a live birth in ways that anticipate Adrienne Rich’s exposure of male hospital practices in Of Woman Born. Immobilized on “an awful torture table with these metal stirrups,” the woman is given drugs to alleviate pain and put her to sleep, so she never experiences the joy of childbirth. For Esther this is “just like the sort of drug a man would invent” (BJ 53). When Esther finally allows the ugly, unguent Irwin, who takes pride in always seeming “to get on with the ladies,” to seduce her, the event causes an excruciatingly painful hemorrhage, evidently the cost for a member of a subordinate gender to become “part of a great tradition” (184–91).

  Dr. Gordon, the most powerful figure in The Bell Jar, misdiagnoses Esther— exactly what happened to Plath in real life—and prescribes outpatient electroconvulsive shock treatments. In real life a Dr. J.Peter Thornton, a psychiatrist recommended by the Plath family physician, prescribed these outpatient shock treatments before the suicide attempt, as is the case with Esther Greenwood and Dr. Gordon in the fictionalized Bell Jar account. This overwhelming display of male power, not Plath’s childhood memories of abandonment by her father, helped to precipitate the first suicide attempt. Paul Alexander, the Plath biographer who has researched this area of Plath’s life most thoroughly, noted that Sylvia was not given a muscle relaxant or anesthesia, supposedly standard practice, and was therefore nearly electrocuted. The immediate results were that Plath ceased communication almost entirely, and her sleeplessness converted to acute insomnia. After the first few sessions, Dr. Thornton went on vacation and left his assistant in charge (Alexander 119–20). In The Bell Jar, Plath conveys the utter impersonality of this decisive episode of her life through a light touch—Dr. Gordon’s inability to converse with Esther as a person. “They had a WAC station” at her college, he twice remembers—his sole pathetic attempt to relate to Plath’s personal situation (107, 118). The only tenderness Esther receives in The Bell Jar comes from her psychiatrist, Dr. Nolan —a woman (179).

10 L.M.SCIGAJ

  Many scholars, especially Lynda Bundtzen, have observed that composing

  

The Bell Jar was a liberating experience for Plath, an instructive exercise in how

  social forces affect individual behavior and judgment. One can readily see why Plath’s portraits of her father in the Ariel poems “Little Fugue” and “Daddy” differ so markedly from her early deifications of Otto. Having taken a more measured view of Otto as an ordinary person in the Bell Jar graveyard scene, Plath by the time of the Ariel poems has grown to an adult knowledge of the gender inequalities within American society and now views her father as symbolic of yet another control-minded male who restricts the development of women.

  In 1982, Hughes observed in his essay “Sylvia Plath and Her Journals” that in “Little Fugue” the ghost of her father suddenly reappears, after a two-and-a-half- year absence, for “a daunting, point-blank, demythologized assessment” (WP 187). Hughes sees this as the beginning of Plath’s final tailspin toward identifying with the “deathly woman” at the heart of “Elm,” which he argues develops into a deterministic resignation to the inevitability of suicide. In this essay, composed thirteen years before the “Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems and

  

The Bell Jar” essay, Hughes wrote that “An Appearance” (CPP 189), the poem

  Plath composed two days after “Little Fugue,” was “the most precise description she ever gave of The Other—the deathly woman at the heart of everything she now closed in on” (WP 187). “An Appearance” concerns Plath’s self-revelation of the super-efficient housewife role—so like her mother and the married women in The Bell Jar—that she could sink into as easily as a stuffed chair. Note that Hughes’s 1982 observation identifies Plath’s central problem as a tug-of-war with her maternal role, with her mother as model. This is far from the obsessive determinism of Otto Plath and German genetics that Hughes develops in Birthday Letters.

  One can view “Little Fugue,” composed on 2 April 1962, as the consequence of the more realistic view of the father in The Bell Jar, and as a prelude to the exorcism of the patriarchal imago inside the dutifully trained, once subordinated, but now rebellious 1950s woman persona of “Daddy.” Contrary to the god-like figure in the poems of The Colossus (1960), Plath’s first poetry volume, the father in “Little Fugue” appears as a gruff, grotesque autocrat, with a “yew hedge of orders,/Gothic and barbarous,” and the power to judge and decapitate, as in the memory of him lopping sausages “Red, mottled, like cut necks” (CPP 188). Even in memories that are two decades old, this is scary enough to induce guilt. The persona’s direct, calm reply, however, is that of an adult woman in control of her own life: “I am guilty of nothing.” The distance of time in the cold white clouds that spread their “vacuous sheets” and in the lameness of the persona’s memory becomes a saving buffer that ensures survival at the end of the poem. Hughes is correct: this is a “demythologized assessment,” but one that becomes an occasion for personality growth.

  In “Daddy,” written six months later (12 October 1962), one sees the consequences of that growth. The dominant imagery of the poem deliberately returns us to Plath’s 1958 Journals comment concerning Freud’s “Mourning and