[In the following essay, Schultz finds allusions to mythological images of motherhood and womanhood in “Edge.”]

As the last poem Sylvia Plath ever wrote, “Edge” is tempting to read as her final decision to commit suicide, especially with lines like, “We have come so far, it is over.”¹ But a close analysis reveals that the poem contains subtle, carefully constructed prosodic effects. Such poetic finesse would be difficult to affect from a stupor of suicidal emotion. Rather, the touches rendered to this poem encourage an intellectual, rather than purely emotional response. Such an intellectual approach to “Edge” reveals that this is a poem about contradictory expectations, about how two contrasting emotions can occupy the same space at the same time, how two contradictory drives can be pulling at a woman from opposite ends. Women are expected to be perfect sexual objects, but they are biologically designed to create life, give birth, nurture. Bearing children, however, wears the body down, destroys its perfection. These mutually exclusive expectations drive women to violent, desperate acts. Women are pushed to try to achieve perfection, but perfection denies what women are really about.

To gain access to “Edge,” it is essential to understand Plath's reference to mythology. Although she never tells us the name of a specific myth, saying just “The illusion of a Greek necessity,” line nine's reference to “Each dead child,” causes us to consider Euripides' tragedy Medea. At line twelve, Plath writes, “She has folded / Them back into her body as petals / Of a rose close when the garden / Stiffens and odors bleed / From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.” Here it is clear that Plath is alluding to Medea, who cut the throats of her own two children. In this setting, Plath's title, “Edge,” which is otherwise especially elusive, begins to take on a new meaning. “Edge” may indeed indicate a woman on the edge of completely breaking down. Plath may have felt herself slipping over the edge into despair, but “edge” in the context of the Medea myth must also signify the edge of a knife or sword blade.

Medea has a real relevance in Plath's life and would perhaps be a tale she would explore in connection with her grief and rage at being abandoned by her husband for another woman. In the play, just as in Plath's own life, Medea marries and then leaves her own country behind to live faithfully in her husband's country. Once they have made their home together and have two children, Medea's husband abandons her for another woman. Medea, who is an intelligent and powerful woman, decides to punish her husband. This character is appropriate for Plath's poetry since often the personae in her poems are women who are victims but who also at last find a way to fight back. Unlike Plath, however, Medea kills her own children to punish her husband, Jason. Although her main motivation is to deprive Jason of his sons, at one point in the play she tells the chorus that by killing them herself, she is really protecting them.

Women, my task is fixed: as quickly as I may
To kill my children, and start away from this land,
And not by wasting time, to suffer my children
To be slain by another hand less kindly to them.
Force every way will have it they must die, and since
This must be so, then I, their mother, shall kill them.(2)

(1211-16)

This sense of protection also appears in Plath's poem within the image of the closing flower. Although this poem never explicitly states that the woman has killed her children, by its association with the Medea myth, it is implied. Plath also leads us to believe that the woman has killed the children by making the woman active in line twelve. Plath says, “She has folded / Them back into her body.” She does not say, “They were folded / Back into her body,” as though death took the children from her. Instead, the woman has clearly caused this to occur. She has done the folding. Yet, rather than presenting the murder of the children as a moment of insanity, Plath has the dead children appear to be held close in a protective embrace. They are the closed petals of a maternal flower, protected from the night garden. Plath emphasizes this closeness by the phrase “rose close.” We are prepared for this type of internal rhyme from poems such as “Lady Lazarus,” where we find combinations like “grave cave” and “large charge.”³ Yet, the syntax leading up to “rose close” causes the reader to stumble over “close,” destroying the rhyme. We expect it to say that she folds the children “as petals / Of a rose, close to her.” Instead, however, we find that “close” is being used as a verb. Plath chooses “close” for its dual meaning of “to shut” and “to be near.”

In addition to fooling us with “rose close” in order to emphasize its dual meaning, Plath also sets up expectations for the reader within the first section of the poem, lines one through eight, which she turns upside down. “Edge,” unlike many other Plath poems, lacks repetition. Rather than lingering on ideas by repeating them, “Edge” maintains a fast pace throughout. This pace and these surprising turns occur in part because of line break. The poem begins with a complete statement. “The woman is perfected.” We wonder how this perfection has come about and what defines it. The next line answers that question in part: “Her dead.” Plath places this alone on a line to emphasize death. But at this point, it is not clear what the “dead” is or are. Is “dead” here singular or plural? Is “dead” a noun or an adjective? The possessive “Her” makes us think that the “dead” is or are something that belongs to her or that she is responsible for, like “her relations” or “her children.” By separating “dead” and “Body” the reader is at first inclined to read line two as something the woman cares for or nurtures. When we consider the traditional role of the woman, we expect to find perfection for her in reference to her duties toward others. The woman is perfected in her role as caretaker, for example. This woman, judging from line two, happens to care for the dead. “The woman is perfected. Her dead” and we might infer something like “are lined up neatly in their caskets.” But this strange joining of “Her” and “dead” is unexplained by the end of the line, so we rush on to find out the answer. “Her dead” … “Body.” Again it is interesting that “Body” comes at the head of line three. In this position, “Body” is emphasized. Again, the body is one thing which traditionally defines a woman—woman is a collection of body parts. And that sense is communicated here. This woman seems somehow separate from her body. It is her dead body which “wears the smile of accomplishment.” Plath does not say, “Now dead / She wears the smile of accomplishment.”

Plath again pushes the reader along in the fourth line. It begins, “The illusion of a Greek necessity,” but when we jump down to the next line, we realize that line five is a continuation of the thought begun in line four. So when we reach “Flows,” we again speed up. The next line, “Her bare,” recalls the form of line two, “Her dead.” Even though we have just read that “Greek necessity / Flows in the scrolls of her toga,” when we reach “Her bare,” we think back to line two and remember how we were tricked. Our eye falls upon this familiar pattern: two-word line; second line in a two-line stanza; begins with “Her”; ends with an adjective. The mind immediately recalls how the first instance of this pattern was resolved, and we expect the next word to again be “Body.” “Her dead / Body”; “Her bare / Body.” Such repetition would be consistent with Plath's development in other poems. But, Plath again tricks us. We rush down to the next line and instead of finding “Body,” which would again recall the view of women as sexual objects, or even finding “Breasts,” which she may also be preparing us for by her reference to a toga, perhaps tied loosely over one shoulder, Plath sticks “Feet” into first position. This is rather shocking to the reader. We were prepared to find her “Body,” but instead all we have is her feet. Here Plath reduces woman. The image begins with an entire woman, we assume body and soul. In the next stanza, woman is reduced to only a body. Finally, woman is only a part of that body. In “Daddy,” Plath describes herself as a foot.⁴ Daddy is a “black shoe / In which I have lived like a foot / For thirty years, poor and white.” She focuses on the feet in “Edge” because they carry the entire load, the body's full weight rests on the feet. Plath has the feet, which are the workhorse of the body, speak for the woman. The adjective “bare” here also alludes to the saying “barefoot and pregnant” versus “bare naked.”

The next section, between lines nine and sixteen, focuses on the children and her relationship with them. It is significant that Plath transforms the children here into flower petals. They are part of their mother; the most beautiful part. The image of the children, however, is dual. They are “coiled,” each is a “white serpent.” “White” joined with “serpent” is an especially stark contrast. There are only two colors mentioned in this poem, white and black. Judging from other poems by Plath, white and black both have a specific significance. In “Daddy,” for example, white is used only once and it refers to the speaker. She is “poor and white.” Daddy, on the other hand, is the “black man” with a “fat black heart.” In “Edge,” white refers to the children whom we assume are innocent, like the speaker in “Daddy.” Yet they are also serpents, “One at each little / Pitcher of milk, now empty.” We imagine a baby at each breast but also a serpent at each breast, sucking up her strength, emptying her.

Along with the image of serpents, Plath also brings helpless kittens to mind. “One at each little / Pitcher of milk,” makes us think of kittens lapping at their bowls. This may indeed have been intended, since she presented the same image overtly in “Lesbos.”⁵ “You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell! / You say I should drown my girl. / She'll cut her throat at ten if she's mad at two.” The reference in “Edge” alluding to kittens, if considered within the context of the kittens in “Lesbos,” also makes us think that killing the children was considered an act of kindness. Like Medea, she has destroyed the children before they could reach adulthood and experience real cruelty.

In addition to presenting two images of children, this middle section of the poem, lines nine to sixteen, also illustrates two contrasting images of motherhood. Children grow out of the mother's body and are a part of her. The mother loves and cherishes the children, but they also drain something vital from the mother. The children are like leeches, sucking out her vital fluids, but they are also kittens, helpless and gentle. The woman, who had been reduced to only the foot, is now an inanimate object, an empty drinking vessel. But there is perhaps a duality to this emptiness. The pitchers of milk may be empty because the children have consumed all the milk; but they may also be empty, because as occurs in lactation, when the milk is no longer removed, it is no longer produced. The pitchers are empty both because they have been consumed and because they are no longer needed. There are no longer any children to drink from them.

In “The Fearful,” dated November 16, 1962, Plath writes, “The voice of the woman hollows— / More and more like a dead one, / Worms in the glottal stops. / She hates / The thought of a baby— / Stealer of cells, stealer of beauty— / She would rather be dead than fat, / Dead and perfect, like Nefertit.”⁶ Here, when the woman is alive, she seems to be slowly worn down, more and more dead than alive. Having a baby would be another drain, hastening that decay. Yet, in this passage, in which death and perfection are joined as they are in “Edge,” death seems to be a sort of suspended animation, an end to the decay. But, on the other hand, in “The Munich Mannequins,” written January 28, 1963, Plath scorns this type of perfection.⁷ She begins with

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb
Where the yew trees blow like hydras,
The tree of life and the tree of life
Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.
The blood flood is the flood of love,
The absolute sacrifice.

She contrasts the fertility of motherhood with the barrenness of perfection and ends, “Voicelessness. The snow has no voice.”

In all three of these poems, “The Fearful,” “The Munich Mannequins,” and “Edge,” written between November 1962 and February 1963, Plath combines death, perfection, and motherhood. Perfection is always achieved in death and without children. Yet it is not clear whether perfection is really desirable. In “Munich Mannequins,” it is clearly not; barrenness is “voicelessness.” In “Edge,” her “Body wears the smile of accomplishment, / The illusion of a Greek necessity / Flows. …” But, significantly, it is only the “illusion”; it is not simply “a necessity.” And although there is no mention made of anything masculine in this poem, there is a dead woman, genderless children, and female moon, because of Plath's associations with Medea, the male role is implied. It is man who drove a woman to this point. It was Jason's disregard for his marriage vows to Medea even though she had been faithful, loved him, and bore him two children, which drove Medea to her violent acts.

“Edge” presents contradictory images of motherhood and forces the reader to examine the contradictory expectations women are expected to live up to. Women are designed to produce. Reproduction is a sacrifice that is built into them. Yet giving birth, nurturing and raising children also wear a woman's body down. Although women are expected to nurture and produce, they are also expected to be young, vibrant, beautiful, attractive to their husbands. But this type of physical perfection and child bearing are mutually exclusive, and having children is natural to women, perfection is not. In “Edge,” a woman has been driven to destroy her children and in so doing, herself. The flower of fertility closes, and she is perfected. “Her bare / Feet seem to be saying: / We have come so far, it is over.” In “Edge,” the moon looks on this scene and has “nothing to be sad about.” We are told, “She is used to this sort of thing.” Why is it necessary for the woman to achieve perfection? Are women regularly driven to the edge in this world, caught between their biological and social need to bear and nurture children and pressure to be the perfect sexual object? Plath ends only with the image of the moon, going on about her business, dragging the darkness along behind her.

Notes

1. Sylvia Plath, “Edge,” The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper, 1981) 272-3.

2. Euripides, Medea, trans. Rex Warner, The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, ed. Marnard Mack, 6th ed., vol. 1 (New York: Norton, 1992) 768.

3. Plath, “Lady Lazarus,” 244-47.

4. Plath, “Daddy,” 222-24.

5. Plath, “Lesbos,” 227-30.

6. Plath, “The Fearful,” 256.

7. Plath, “The Munich Mannequins,” 262-63.