Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel”

Abstract

Sylvia Plath’s posthumous collection Ariel1 was published in 1965 and rapidly transformed her life and life’s work into a legend which remains compelling, controversial2 and proleptically contemporaneous. She is postmodern in still being very much “one of us”:3 her work, as Jacqueline Rose’s recent title puts it, constitutes a “haunting” — and what haunts us most tellingly is the degree to which her domestic4-confessional, mature style operates as a kind of personalised fuse-box (the brilliance of those terminal flashings) for the highly charged tensions criss-crossing the interconnected networks of the “electric age”. As a particular style — the compressed, psychic scenarios, ostinato rhythms and precise, hectic images — her writing registers postmodernity as a site of decentred and fragmented selfhood where, nevertheless, the ontological fractures of the linguistic “subject” coincide with the fraught inescapability of agency (an experiential reality recently re-emphasised in the wake of poststructuralist scepticism).5 “To be, or not to be” in a mutating contemporary era …. and if so, what: mother, abandoned wife, harpy, man-eater, suicide, Electra or golden poet as Ariel? The selfhood wherein such tensions are played out comes earthed in crustacean sensitivity (the open-shut “seashell”) yet is also the self electric — a matter of “filaments”, “wires”, “short circuits”, “lanterns” (obsessed with telephones) and flickering dangerously “off,on,off,on”. The poems rehearse, with self-conscious fictive art, the possibilities of the split agent in the world after Hitler and Hiroshima, as felt in one young life. And the last choice of being — end game — preoccupied both the words and the woman: to “put out the light, and then put out the light”.