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American
Romanticism Sample Student Research Projects 2010 |
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Veronica
12/10/10
The Dangers Of Home: Sylvia Plath’s Domestic
Gothic
Sylvia
Plath turned her anger, the terrors, and her experiences into poetry that
exhibited moods of entrapment, attacks, and death. Sylvia Plath “slices open,
exposes, dramatizes those terrors in order to face them” (Wisker, 104). Her type
of poetry is an extension of the Gothic, and a subset of the “The Female
Gothic”, which is composed of women writing Gothic texts, such as Charlotte
Bronte and Mary Shelley. She goes
one step further by merging and writing within a genre composed of both
Domesticity and Gothic conventions.
In Sylvia Path’s poetry, I will explore the way that she both used Gothic and
Domestic genres to create the Domestic Gothic.
The graduate literature course American Romanticism covered
Domesticity as part of the American Renaissance of Women’s Fiction. One of its
main stylistic elements is to employ sentimentality to describe events in the
domestic sphere. We also studied
other Romantic terms, such as the Gothic and the devices of the Gothic. Some of
the devices used to create the Gothic mood, are the setting which is usually
“haunted houses / castles / woods”, filled with “creepy or startling sounds”
such as “screams in the night, groans from unknown rooms”. There are also “repressed
fears & desires; memory of past crime or sin”, and images of
“death and decay” (White, web). Sylvia
Plath, at a much later time (1950-1960’s) uses a lot of Gothic devices to
provide a dark and threatening setting with a hostile feel, and apply it to a
domestic setting.
A large
majority of her poetry relates feelings and events in the household such as
cooking, childbirth, and marriage. Sylvia
Plath uses the European Gothic customs of “haunted houses,” such as Edgar Allan
Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, to describe her feelings of domesticity.
Sylvia Plath employs this type of Gothic, in a different way, most of her poetry
does not occur in a grand estate, or in a haunted forest but she tries to show
that other type of “ghosts threaten the feminine realm of the home, the proper,
or the domestic” (Britzolakis, 116).
Her
settings are in a modern home that would be normally considered nurturing, safe
and cozy but even this home setting is an “entrapment” and it “replaces
incarceration in castles and flights along dangerous tunnels” (Wisker, 107). Her
type of Gothic is not less impactful or powerful since “the house of family and
self come apart” just as in the “The Fall of the House of Usher” (Wisker, 107).
In Romanticism, there is a sense of a dreamlike or nostalgic
mood and Plath uses this but explores events that feel real, in the present, but
with a phantasmal quality. Plath’s work uses “fantasy, the surreal and horror to
express and critique contradictions of the everyday and the self” (Wisker, 104).
One of the reasons why domestic gothic is “threatening, deceptive, and
unreliable” is because part
of the horror comes from the idea that the “familiar domestic (mothers,
grandmothers, kitchens)”, the sentimental core of the home, becomes unfamiliar
(Wisker, 107).
Threats in domesticity texts usually related to threats coming
from outside the home, and threatening the current family unit.
Plath uses “images and tropes of the literary Gothic and horror as
metaphors to express hidden secrets” and hidden dangers from inside the home
(Wisker, 104). Plath is relating the dangers of a household, both physical and
psychological of being a wife and mother. She
uses the gothic as a technique to show the worries and fears related to domestic
life and the accompanying symbols.
It is not just the people or the home that is menacing in
domestic gothic, it also the symbols of domesticity, such as kitchen implements.
Plath “explores the disturbing side of domestic ‘bliss; the incarceration
and dangers kitchens, homes, of draining, mechanical roles for men and
women“(Wiskers, 107). Plath gives
cooking a “menacing edge, pushing domesticity into mythic domain” such as in her
poem “Cut” (Bryant, 23).
Cut 1962 (
excerpt)
What a thrill-
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge
Of Skin
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush
Sylvia Plath’s poem “Cut” is relating an incident in the
kitchen that results in cutting her thumb while cutting an onion. “Cut” is a
good example of Plath’s general outline for her domestic poems, where death
“inhabits poems that begin like domestic, occasional pieces but end in
terror“(Oberg, 180). Even in her
own kitchen, she feels threatened and sees the danger. The excerpt above creates
a detailed description of her accident, almost factual. The excitement and
lightness of the poem makes it seem like an observation, yet the sharp utensils,
and blood evoke certain images that most would relate to immense pain, maybe
even to torture. The rest of the poem takes a surreal turn as her thumb and the
blood starts mutating.
Her mutating “thumb stump” morphs into several people, who
“conjure images of war, celebration, sickness, and racial oppression” with
characters such as Native Americans and settlers, the British redcoats and the
Ku Klux Klan” (Wisker, 106). This
may be in an effort to relate her solitary experience in the kitchen to the
action in the outside world. The references to an outside world coming out of
her thumb make this “more than a kitchen accident, this is part of a domestic
incarceration threat” (Wisker, 106). There
is also an element of the “other”, mainly the incarcerator in this poem, as she
asks all of the characters that are coming “out of a gap” where the top of her
thumb used to be “Whose side are they on?”
The
woman, the “veteran” of her “own kitchen wars, the bloody thumb attests to the
inherent violence of food preparation” (Wisker, 106). The Gothic colors of war
are first represented by the bloodless skin “dead white” and her cut as the “red
plush,” and as time goes by, the dried blood is described again as it “darkens
and tarnishes.” Following the
war and violence spewing out of her thumb, symbols of death also follow. In
“Cut” Sylvia Plath is not only describing the violence of the kitchen but is
also “the inevitability of encroaching mortality” (Wisker, 106).
The violence and blood, is followed by a
statement of self-destruction, as “O my/ Homunculus” may refer to a small
version of herself in this war happening on her thumb. This version of herself
is killed, or at least is almost killed as she states “I am ill. I have taken a
pill to kill / the thin/Papery feeling.”
Death is a
recurrent image in a lot of Sylvia Plath’s poems, and sometimes it is slowly
brought into focus as the main subject as in “A Birthday Present.” Sylvia Plath
once more takes the familiar and joyous event of a birthday present and turns
into something Gothic. The details the excitement of guessing what her birthday
present is, is undermined by the fact that the present desired is death “If it
were death/ I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.”
The tone of the poem is very odd, it is
very destructive, and suicidal but it seems to have the same excitement
throughout even when talking about suicide “They are carbon monoxide./ Sweetly,
sweetly I breathe in,/Filling my veins with the invisibles.”
“A Birthday Present” uses the Gothic device of “haunting”
which is employed this case in unusual method, while doing routine domestic
tasks such as “Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, /Adhering to rules,
to rules, to rules.” During this time she “perceives the presence of a
supernatural being,” a presence in her kitchen, when she is “quiet at my cooking
I feel it looking, I feel it thinking” and “it does not stop, and I think it
wants me” (Bryant, 22). This feeling of a haunting, of a hostile force, is not
new to the woman in the poem, “It stands at my window, big as the sky./It
breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center” and
it has become a part of her world.
As the woman goes on guessing what her birthday present could
be, she keeps also listing ways of dying. A kitchen utensil at the end of the
poem is being imagined as the implement of death, “And the knife not carve, but
enter/ Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, / And universe slide from my side.”
The knife is not performing the familiar task of carving food but as a deadly
weapon as it “enter(s) “as “clean as the cry of a baby.” To describe cutting
into a person cleanly as a cry of a baby takes something sentimental and turns
into something deadly.
This poem is so peculiar in the way that it shows the two
extremes of death and domesticity. “A Birthday Present” is full of imagery from
the home, “flour”, “pearl button”,
“veils”, “curtains”, ”sheets”, “cotton”, “falling ribbons” and
“great-grandchildren” yet there is
just as much imagery of death and dying within the same lines such as “bones”, “
alive by accident” ,“death breath”, “last supper”, “carbon monoxide” ,“killing
my days”, and “congeal and stiffen” to name a few. Plath uses images that are
symbolic of domestic life and places them unconventionally next to items of
death and wraps them up in a poem about a birthday present.
In Sylvia Plath’s Poem “
The smothering of the atmosphere
and smell is part of “spatial
imprisonment and suffocation” of the
Gothic that Plath uses in several of her poems
(Britzolakis, 115).
The stench in the room continues as the smell in the room is grotesque
and unimaginable, “of fat and baby crap.” This stink in the room and the
husband’s ‘venomous floating head’ “who ‘slumps out for coffee’ in
The lighting in the house continues to provide the dreamlike
artificial mood, as it is described as flickering “The fluorescent light wincing
on and off likes a terrible migraine.“ Inanimate objects are given life as the
hissing potatoes almost seem to be on attack, and the “Moon/Dragged its blood
bag” adds to the mood of delusion and hallucination.
The objects in her home are surreal, the environment simulated and some
of her thoughts almost grotesque and primitively violent in “
The madness exhibited in a young girl, “Little unstrung
puppet, kicking to disappear-/Why she is schizophrenic,” is exaggerated since
she is probably just throwing a tantrum, but it continues with insulting the
child “You say you can't stand her,
The bastard's a girl.”
After reading domesticity texts, it is hard to imagine insulting your own
daughter but the poem goes beyond insulting the little girl by calling her crazy
and a bastard.
“
The dissatisfaction in “
Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
I
do not speak.
I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,
I am
packing the babies,
I am packing the sick cats.
This listing of things she is packing, is so negative since
she is “packing the babies” and “packing the sick cats” in the same manner. In
the same poem she portrays the collapse of the other woman “ I see your cute
décor/ Close on you like the fist of a baby/Or an anemone”,
this is a very unfavorable description of a “ fist of a baby” which is
usually thought of as a sentimental image.
Also, the fist is crushing the other woman, not as rock, or big object,
she sees it closing in on the other woman symbolizing a domestic idea “cute
décor”.
All three poems “Cut”, “A Birthday Present, and “
It is not just the entrapment of a woman in her home, or the
mundane tasks associated with running a home it is the realization of a woman of
what her married life has come to. It is very hard to analyze Plath’s poetry
without looking back and comparing it to the timeline of her life.
Even in her own personal journals she
lists domestic duties along with professional duties. Herself a contradiction,
in her diary, she states “Did
launder clothes yesterday. Must do handwash today. Go over Ted’s two stories.
Either draw or do German.” (Plath, 513) The ability to switch between all these
tasks that use different part of the brain, and different aptitudes, and still
be a lovely wife at home must have affected her writing.
Plath was bound by the double standard imposed on women
especially in the 1950’s. Sylvia
Plath’s poetry shows the restricting attitude toward domesticity and
professionalism and she “develops the domestic Gothic, expressing the
home-confined life of the housewife/mother. Imagery of split selves exposes the
constructedness, the performativity of gendered roles, the oscillation between
versions of self “(Wisker, 104).
She is living through struggle of her professional life, of marriage, the
realities of motherhood, and the feelings of a failed marriage after separating
from her husband.
Sylvia Plath was able to write, be a mother, and a wife in the
1950’-1960’s and she “would have been the first to admit that there were
multiple roles for women during the 1960s besides mother or not
mothering“(Wagner-Martin, 193). She was a published poet with friends and family
and kids but there was something else. The
opposition of the roles she tried to play and as she try to develop as a writer
and as a mother, she had “freed herself from her apprenticeship modes and was
writing in what seemed to be her true voice” but she was upset at “what she saw
as the betrayal of their life together-and her opportunity to become a good
writer- by her husband” (Wagner-Martin, 193-194).
Sylvia Plath’s own juggling of domestic, personal and
professional life may offer an explanation of the joining of Gothicism and
domesticity. Plath uses gothic to discuss subjects such as
“spinster/whore, conformist domesticated mother/daring creative artist” and
her ongoing struggle “between life and death”
(Wisker 104).
The almost mechanical tasks that Sylvia Plath encountered on a daily
basis, she wrote about and dramatizes.
It is all around her, in the kitchen, the kitchen utensils, her husband,
her bed, her windows and her children.
All of these fears are based on what “we desire: safety, mother, friends.
Our worst fears arise from dangerous domestic disillusionment.” (Wisker, 106)
I did not want to have to bring in too much detail of her
biographical life, but her poetry is so autobiographical. “I would have killed
myself gladly” in “A Birthday Present” represents a previous attempt, actually
several that are written in to some of her other poetry such as “Lady Lazarus.”
It is possibly telling of the oppression that she felt from the domestic life
she led, by the fact that her successful attempt was accomplished by
one of the items that represented domestic duties, her oven.
Britzolakis, Christina. “Gothic Subjectivity” Ed. Bloom,
Harold. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views.
Sylvia Plath.
Bryant, Marsha. “Plath, Domesticity, and the Art of
Advertising.” College Literature 29.3
(Summer, 2002): 17-34.
Oberg, Arthur. “Sylvia Plath and The New Decadence.”
Sylvia Plath The Woman and The Work.
Ed. Butscher, Edward.
Plath, Sylvia. The
Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Karen V. Kukil.
Plath, Sylvia. “Cut”
The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes.
Plath, Sylvia. “A Birthday Present”
The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes.
Plath, Sylvia. “
Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Plath’s Triumphant Women Poems” Ed.
Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. Sylvia Plath.
White, Craig Dr. “Seminar in American Literature Homepage.”
Website Accessed Dec 2010.
http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/5431rom/default.htm
Wisker, Gina. “Viciousness in the Kitchen: Sylvia Plath’s
Gothic.”
Gothic Studies 6.1 (May 2004)
103-117.
