Plath and Rose, Fantasy and Interpretation

The sections of Jacqueline Rose's The Haunting of Sylvia Plath that we're reading are either introductory or pertain specifically to "The Rabbit Catcher" (pages 114-123; 135-top of 143); we aren't reading the section of Rose's book on the other poem assigned, "Daddy," which we might discuss on its own.

Plath's Life

If Betty Friedan is the critic of the feminine mystique, Plath is perhaps its poet—and I’d like “its poet” here to suggest both the extent to which Plath belonged to the set of sociocultural pressures described by Friedan, and the extent to which, as a maker or shaper of culture, a poet, she took possession of those pressures and, no less critically than Friedan, reshaped them in her art.

Sylvia Plath

The parallel between Plath and Friedan isn’t just adventitious. Both were from a young age prodigiously gifted and ambitious students, and both attended the Smith College that Friedan rather harrowingly describes as a place where all too many brilliant female minds ended up being squeezed into the circumference of an engagement ring and all that that signified for a woman at the time. Friedan graduated from Smith in 1942; Plath attended from 1950 to 1955. 

Plath took an extra semester to graduate because her time at Smith was interrupted by hospitalization following a suicide attempt in the summer of 1953 (she alludes to this in “Daddy” –“At twenty I tried to die”). After her graduation, she won a Fulbright Scholarship and went to Newnham College in Cambridge, England—the women’s college that Woolf refers to in Room—to study poetry. There, she met Ted Hughes, a Cambridge graduate and, like herself, an aspiring (and already quite accomplished) poet. They married in 1956.

Plath’s relationship with Hughes seems to have brought about as much happiness and as much suffering for her as any love can. They spent a few happy, early years teaching and writing in Massachusetts and then in England; in 1960, the same year that Plath published her first collection of poems, The Colossus, she and Hughes had their first child, a daughter. A miscarriage the next year was followed by the birth of a son in 1962. Later that year, Hughes began having an affair, and he and Plath separated, though they remained in contact. (Plath's daughter, in her introduction to the restored version of Ariel (2004), recalls that during much of the separation Hughes "visited us...almost daily, often babysitting when my mother needed time for herself"). Plath was now alone with two small children, and wrote some of her greatest poems during this period. In early 1963, she killed herself by shutting herself in a sealed room with the gas on. Still legally her husband, Hughes inherited control of her literary estate; he edited and saw into publication her final book of poems, Ariel, and (in 1981) her Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Plath and Hughes in 1956

Hughes’ troubled relationship with Plath in their final year and the in some respects obvious conflicts of interest for him in editing and selecting for publication Plath’s poems from that time, many of which are savagely and brilliantly critical of him, have often been pointed out by her later readers. He always maintained that the choices he made in editing Ariel (1965) were motivated by literary judgments and by his understanding of Plath’s own methods of composing and revising. (A ‘restored’ version of Ariel, based on Plath’s own last drafted table of contents, was published in 2004, so readers can now compare the two editions and judge for themselves. There’s no reason to entirely discredit Hughes’ intentions; he’s right to note that Ariel was still underway when she died, and that she had always continued revising other collections up until publication. The text for the ‘restored’ Ariel is certainly Plath’s last one, but it doesn’t necessarily represent her fully realized intention for the book.)

Jacqueline Rose: Fantasy and Intention in Plath's Writing

Before writing on Plath, Jacqueline Rose was already a prominent feminist scholar for writings on psychoanalysis; along with Juliet Mitchell, she played a crucial role in making pyschoanalysis newly and plausibly available to English-speaking feminists after its early rejection by many prominent second-wave writers.

Rose’s work on Plath brought her, after an initially amicable relationship, into conflict with Ted Hughes and his sister, who remained in control of Plath’s literary estate. (This is what she recounts in the introduction to her book). The point of contention between them was the extent to which Rose’s psychoanalytic readings of Plath’s poetry and fiction made claims about the sorts of desires shaping these texts that Hughes found biographically implausible, even insulting. Rose’s reading of female sexualty in “The Rabbit Catcher” was central to this conflict.

There are both literary and ethical issues at stake in the argument between Rose and Hughes. As Rose notes (end of page 10), her book on Plath intervenes in a long-standing debate among literary critics and theorists about the role that an author’s intentions and biography should play in the interpretation of works.

A backlash against biographical criticism at midcentury, most forcefully articulated in “The Intentional Fallacy” by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (N 1232-46), had made it common sense for literary critics to ground their interpretations in the text and only the text, without regard for the author’s intentions (and without any claim to characterize them). This orthodoxy both suited and clashed with psychoanalytic readings like Rose’s, which on the one hand pays exquisite attention to the biographical context of Plath’s poems, but on the other hand is in no way constrained by that context in its interpretive claims. 

Rose shares with Freud and with Sedgwick a conviction that it is sometimes possible to know a person differently, perhaps more fully, than she knows herself. This is true in Sedgwick's reading of (May's reading of) Marcher:

To speak less equivocally from my own eros and experience, there is a particular relation to truth and authority that a mapping of male homosexual panic offers to a woman in the emotional vicinity. The fact that male heterosexual entitlement in (at least modern Anglo-American) culture depends on a perfected but always friable [i.e. breakable, fragile] self-ignorance in men as to the significance of their desire for other men means that it is always open to women to know something that it is much more dangerous for any nonhomosexual-identified man to know. The ground of May Bartram and John Marcher's relationship is from the first that she has the advantage of him cognitively: she remembers, as he does not, where and when and with whom they have met before, and most of all she remembers his "secret" from a decade ago while he forgets having told it to her. ... As their relationship continues, the sense of power and of a marked, rather free-floating irony about May Bartram becomes stronger and stronger... Both the care and the creativity of her investment in him, the imaginative reach of her fostering his homosexual potential as a route back to his truer perception of herself, are forms of gender-political resilience in her as well as love. They are forms of excitement, too, of real though insufficient power, and of pleasure. (209-10, my italics)

We've seen some of the ethical perils of this sort of "cognitive advantage" in Freud's relationship to Dora. In Sedgwick, we can perhaps see the potential ethical value in such advantage. Yet this potential coexists uneasily with another value that Sedgwick would be the first to recognize, that of honoring a person's account of her own sexuality.

"The Rabbit Catcher"

"I tasted the malignity of the gorse / Its black spines /
The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers."

This is where Hughes and Rose come into conflict, though how necessary the conflict is is something we should consider. Plath was heterosexual, yet Rose studies moments from her journals and her poetry at which she imagines from a (straight) man's point of view, and thus as desiring a woman. Behind Rose's insistence on the significance of "fantasy" is the psychoanalytic premise that fantasy destabilizes identity, or at least the overly reified versions of it: fantasy is characterized by "fundamental ambivalence of sexual identity and place" (116). Hughes seems to have seen the rather polymorphous or bisexual reading of Plath's imagination in writing, and in "The Rabbit Catcher" in particular -- one of the poems that Plath had slated for inclusion in Ariel, but which Hughes chose to omit in his 1965 edition -- as a claim about her sexual identity. To what extent is this so in Rose's chapter?

Rose is also, of course, reading Plath against the grain of feminist scholars who might wish to emphasize a single identity in Plath's writing at the expense of others: the apolitical rather than the political, the victim of patriarchy rather than the male-identified aggressor. (One feminist claim about "The Rabbit Catcher," for example, is that Hughes excluded it from Ariel precisely because it identified him as the aggressor, as the rabbit hunter). How, then, does Rose wish us to understand Plath's fantasized identity in a poem like "The Rabbit Catcher"? (It will help to follow quite closely through chapter 4 her use of the word "protest" in thinking this through; what different protests are at issue here--what different things are being protested against?)

"Daddy"
Plath's father, Otto, born in a German-speaking family near the Polish-German border, came to the US in 1901 and eventually became a professor at Boston University; he died when Plath was eight, in 1940, leaving her mother to raise Sylvia and her younger brother alone. Otto Plath wasn't in any literal way a Nazi (nor was Sylvia Jewish), but his German origins are mapped in this poem onto an imaginary structured by the Holocaust. (Sylvia began studying German at different times in her life, but never fully learned the language; see Barbara Johnson's brilliant Mother Tongues on Plath's struggle with this paternal language).

A collage made by Plath in 1960. Rose
discusses it in on page 9.

Taking the Holocaust as a metaphor for her own suffering has, of course, not altogether endeared Plath to some of her later readers, yet this apparently disproportionate or excessive relation between the personal and the historical in Plath's writing is something Rose wishes to save for critical reflection: "Not just because the personal is political...but because psychic life in itself will not be relegated to the private, it will not stay in its proper place" (7). Plath's writing, on Rose's account, reveals "something of the way fantasy operates inside historical process" (7). We should note here that again in Rose "fantasy" is a term for instability, for what won't stay in place. If "The Rabbit Catcher" is a test case for the extent to which this is true about sexual desire and identity, "Daddy" is perhaps a test case for the slippage between the personal and the political. (The porous boundary between private and public is also, of course, central to Sedgwick's understanding of the "closet," and it's something we'll pay increasing attention to in the coming weeks as we turn to the essays by Amanda Anderson and Michael Warner & Lauren Berlant on our syllabus.)

Hughes did include "Daddy" in Ariel, and this in spite of the fact that those who knew Plath would recognize that the imposing, authoritarian father-figure of the poem had in many ways more to do with Hughes than with Otto Plath. (Sylvia was quite aware of psychoanalysis, and writes with the full awareness that the 'daddy' of the poem is a kind of Oedipal father-lover).

"Daddy," for obvious reasons, gained some currency as a poetic critique of patriarchy--Gayle Rubin even uses lines from it as section headings in "The Traffic in Women"--but we should look carefully at just _what_ that critique of patriarchy is, and at how to understand the relation in the poem between the personal and the historical, mediated by what Rose calls "fantasy." I'm eager to hear your thoughts and questions about it -- feel free to write about whatever interests or puzzles you in the comments.

I'll end here by glossing a few of the German phrases and other allusions in "Daddy":

Line
13     Nauset: a beach on the coast of Cape Cod
15     Ach, du: ah, you (German)
16     the Polish town: Otto Plath was born in Grabow
27     Ich: I (German)
33     Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen: sites of Nazi concentration camps for the mass-murder of Jews
42     Luftwaffe: air force (German)
45     Panzer: a tank
55-6  the black man who / Bit my pretty red heart in two: the biographical reference here is to Hughes
57     I was ten when they buried you: Plath was eight when Otto died in 1940; not sure about disparity
58     At twenty I tried to die: at age twenty, Sylvia overdosed on sleeping pills and hid in the crawl
         space beneath her mother's house, where she was eventually found still alive.
65     Meinkampf: My struggle (German), the title of Hitler's autobiographical manifesto

Postscript
Some follow-up to our discussion of "The Rabbit-Catcher" on Friday, by way of moving us towards a discussion of "Daddy" for next Wednesday (when we'll also look at Bersani, Nunukawa, and Gunn):

I want to take up the good sense, to begin with, of Amanda M's question (below) about how Rose gets to questions of "sexual oppression" from the first stanza; I'm a bit worried that we (or, I) rather leaped over the fundamental interest of that good question on Friday in talking about the _kind_ of sexual interest that Rose takes in these lines, which concerns the multiple directions (and emphatically _not_ just the "single" direction) of "force" in that stanza.

The prior question, though, is about why this stanza should be taken as sexual at all -- aren't we just looking at a natural landscape, a sea and some wind? It's important to concede, first, that nothing in the stanza warrants a sexualized reading. Rose's reading of the first stanza presumes, I think, a reading of the poem as a whole; it's only after we're aware of the more explicit sexual suggestions of the later stanzas -- "birth pangs," "little deaths," "sweethearts," "They excited him" -- that it makes sense to understand the "force" in the poem's first stanza as sexually tinged.

Even then, this sort of making sense may seem odd. Yet if Rose's procedure here is particularly important for reading a lyric poem, it's also important for reading _any_ text. The procedure can be described as a "hermeneutic [i.e., interpretive] circle" -- that is, a process of rereading in which, once we're conscious of the text as a whole, that knowledge of the whole is brought to bear on the individual parts of a text. (The term "hermeneutic circle" comes from the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method). Understanding any part of a text depends on understanding the text as a whole, and so a true reading of a poem like "The Rabbit Catcher" is fundamentally a rereading, a reading undertaken with a knowledge of the poem as a whole. The good sense of thinking about rading in this way lies, partly, in its fidelity to the way a writer works, which is with a (perhaps partial) foreknowledge of the shape of a complete text that informs each developing part of that text. In other words, when Plath begins writing a poem like "The Rabbit Catcher," she knows, even as she describes the quite asexual landscape of the first stanza, that it's going to be a poem about the relationship between a man and a woman, between herself and Hughes -- or, even if she doesn't know that when she begins composing, she'll wish to craft the text as a unified whole, one whose beginning anticipates its ending, and will revise it accordingly once she figures out what meanings are most central to it.

So, how does Rose get to "sexual oppression" from the first stanza? She doesn't -- nothing in that stanza clearly invites such an interpretation. She reads the "force" of that stanza in sexual terms only after having considered the poem as a whole.