By studying Sylvia Plath poetry such like Nosferatu, Nightmare on Elm Street, its clear that this reminding us of monster of nightmares from medieval painting of torture and hell.Writing from the recesses of our dark imaginings, Plath brings us haunted,terrible figures of our shared fears.This is the stuff of horror, Gothic language and imagery. But, like all good Gothic horror writers – Poe, King, Stoker, Carter, Rice – Plath slices open,exposes, dramatizes those terrors in order to face them, refuse their power.In the decades following her death, critics of Sylvia Plath’s poetry tended to read the life and the poetry backwards, as if death’s fixed point put everything into perspective,defining her as only a highly-talented, golden girl suicide, and limiting the wayswe read her work, as evidence of a trajectory leading inevitably to that death. Such psycho-biographical criticism emerged also in response to Letters Home (1975) andThe Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000). Erica Jong recognises the consciousness-raising:‘these were deeply felt perceptions of a consummate artist who had made a journeyinto her own personal hell and was bringing back the truth that only a voyager of genius into the nether regions of the communal unconscious can retrieve.
Writing through Death
Gothic horror allows writer and reader to write/read through and face up to both the worst and the most beautiful, desire and fear, disgust and beauty. Plath causesus all to be more aware of the possibilities and the threats of the human condition.Her Gothic horror is explicable in terms of that developed latterly by other womenwriters such as Anne Rice who comments on the imaginative, liberating potential of her favourite figure, the vampire:
the fantasy frame allows me to get to my reality.
I’m telling all I know about everybodyand everything in these books.
It’s an irony that as I step into this almost cartoon
world, I’m able to touch what I consider to be real.
Both are ‘dealing with death at a symbolic and metaphorical remove. Plath’s ghosts are not from hell. Her version of the afterlife has nothing to do with religion, as is obvious in a rare narrative poem, ‘Dialogue between Ghost and Priest’ . A very solid Father Shawn meets a ghost one evening in the rectory garden. Father Shawn uses Thomas Hardy’s tones, dated, formal, but the ghost refuses to allow him the comfort of believing he comes from the nether regions of hell. Instead the ghost is alongside us in the everyday: ‘Neither of these countries do I frequent / Earth is my haunt’. This is a ghost who has suffered from love which still ‘gnaw[s] my skin / To this white bone’. Shawn’s sense that the ghost should rest eternal is refused by this atheistic phantom, as ‘There sits no higher court / Than man’s red heart’. In ‘November Graveyard’ Plath denies resurrection: ‘when one stark skeleton / Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet: / Flies watch no resurrections in the sun’ .
Plath’s death-dealings enable us to position ourselves in the world of the everyday accompanying the imaginary, equally real, filled with desires and fears. Prosaic ghosts have little place here; Plath’s street and graveyard world has pavings, forgetme- nots and medieval decayed corpses. There is no God or salvation. She is dubious, but awaits the revelation of the occasionally miraculous in the everyday: ‘Miracles occur . . . The wait’s begun again, / The long wait for the angel, / For that rare, random descent’ (‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’).
Meanwhile, the skull is revealed beneath the skin, in a way reminiscent of the hard-core gangster horrors of Tarantino or Coppola’s The Godfather, and the real life horrors of cannibalistic serial killer Ed Gein. In ‘Street Song’ people are no more than meat reduced, imagery familiar in the contemporary Psycho series and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Silence of the Lambs. People are disposable meat – a view deriving from the disgust of existential perception of the viscosity of the human. Plath’s protagonist is alienated from body and the world, finding it all predatory. These are horror images. They are also the images of alienation.
In ‘Lady Lazarus’ Plath works through her (ultimately tragic) arguments about rising from death, renewing life. Like ‘Daddy’, this powerful poem has an insistent rhythm and rhyme, celebrating how the speaker seeks power to defy death and cast off oppressive relationships with men and life. The colloquial conversational voice is that of a performer showing off, relating to a rapt audience her greatest daring acts, the scars of her earlier suicide attempts.Use of the first person ‘I’ throughout, emphasises showmanship. The side-show calls us as spectators, the ‘peanutcrunching crowd’, to marvel, pushing in to see her unwrapped, released from a mummified state, restored to life, the worms picked off her. It is a miracle to dice with death and pull through every decade: ‘I am only thirty. / And like the cat I have nine times to die.’ (‘Lady Lazarus’ ). An artiste in death, she claims
Dying
is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call. ‘Lady Lazarus’
Using the language of the huckster and performer, the narrator survives a deathdefying routine, luring us as voyeurs in her own life/death scenario. The charge we pay to see bits of her on show, a ghoulish celebration, is electric. She receives a bolt, revitalising her. Plath uses Nazi oppression imagery, addressing ‘Herr Doctor’ death, her enemy.
Horror and the Gothic enable Plath, and her readers, to explore, dramatise and confront personal and cultural contradictions, accepting nothing at face value. They act as a kind of safety valve. By means of embodying worst-case scenarios, labelling what lurks in the unconscious as fear, doubt or revelation, it is possible to face up to the worst, then to write it through, imaginatively overcome it and live on, aware, self-managed. In Plath’s work, the consistent need to imagine death is no disturbed prediction game. It is a genuine set of controlled, imaginative strategies, utilising the trajectory of a horror narrative. Perhaps as critics, Ted Hughes among them, have argued, Plath dangerously invested in these imaginative strategies too much, eliding life with art and ending one step too far, with a real suicide. This reading is consistent with Plath’s recurring death/horror then revival imagery, that of ‘Lady Lazarus’, of the phoenix renewing herself, celebratory in her own performativity, happy to play contradictory roles her own way, rising from the bed of ashes she has so carefully delineated, whose very domestic grate she has poked about in.
As a conclusion,Sylvia Plath is a consummate Gothic artist. She plays with gender roles, exposing and revelling in their contradictions, their performance. She spotlights the liminal, the boundaries, the animate/ inanimate, life and death held in balance. Facing up to the fearful attractiveness of death and its stasis, its artistic completion, provides the energy to rise anew (‘Death and Co.’, ‘Edge’, ‘Lady Lazarus’). Her early ‘Bluebeard’ rewrites the Gothic fairy tale of deadly domestic lies, and the protagonist’s rebellion, making statements about recognition, choices and empowerment. Perhaps she did not need the key to his study; certainly, she would not have needed it if she had felt comfortable in her own.
‘Lady Lazarus’ is Plath’s key Female Gothic poem. In it she dramatises women’s role as performativity, and successfully out performs. She also faces the otherness, the nightmare, death, head on, and revives, renewed. Gothic horror, carnival, saturnalia combine in its final challenge. From oppressive destruction, she insists on her own phoenix-like rising, a daring, harpy figure who challenges men and everything conformist and restricted.
