SOURCE: Manners, Marilyn, “The Doxies of Daughterhood: Plath, Cixous, and The Father.” Comparative Literature 48, no. 2 (Spring, 1996): 150-71.

[In the following essay, Manners examines similarities regarding images of paternity in the works of Plath and French feminist writer Hélène Cixous.]

As early as 1982 (English translation, 1984) Josette Féral called for comparative investigation of writers such as Sylvia Plath and Hélène Cixous, but until very recently, neither writer has been consistently and seriously considered as a literary figure (in the United States at any rate). Plath criticism, as Jacqueline Rose has exhaustively demonstrated, is so heavily invested in bitterly opposed biographical readings that the complexities of language, sexuality, history, and fantasy in Plath's texts have too often been ignored.¹ Cixous, on the other hand, has received attention primarily as a “French feminist” and theorist—even as a literary critic—rather than as a novelist and dramatist. Moreover, detailed analysis of her feminist theory has often been lacking in debates over her reputed essentialism. This situation too has begun to change recently with the publication of a number of texts examining a more inclusive range of Cixous's work (Morag Shiach, Lee Jacobus and Regina Barreca, and Françoise van Rossum-Guyon and Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz).

Féral based her proposal, as well as her readings of theatrical works by Plath, Cixous, and others, on the general premises of l'écriture feminine: a writing that “shatter[s] traditional discourse” (549), or, citing Irigaray, is characterized by “excess and disruption” (550). Although I find Féral's argument convincing I will begin at an even more preliminary, or rudimentary, level. I should like to draw attention to a conjunction of interests in Plath and Cixous—by examining a few of Plath's “father-poems,” not so much in strict comparison with, as in view of, an early Cixous novel, Dedans.²

Dedans, Cixous's first novel, was published and awarded the Prix Médicis in 1969 and translated into English as Inside in 1986.³ It investigates a daughter's obsession with her dead father. Such an “obsession,” along with an “obsession” with death, is generally believed to be at the very center of Plath's thematics (and, of course, her life). Whether there is actually a father at that center—or whether there is a center at all—remains highly debatable, but it can certainly be said that Plath wrote a handful of major poems which explore unsettling father-daughter relations.

The lives of Plath and Cixous resemble each other in certain respects. Both had fathers who died shortly before their daughters reached the age of ten (Plath was eight, Cixous nine), and both grew up acutely aware of languages. Plath's mother and father spoke German; her father majored in classical languages; her maternal grandfather spoke four languages. Cixous's mother spoke German, her father French, and she learned English as well. In the works of both Plath and Cixous there are not just one but a number of fathers and Fathers: these fathers are personal, loved, hated, poetic, psychic, social, surrogate, symbolic. Thus the father may range from an autobiographical reconstruction of Otto Plath or George Cixous to “les pères et les flics,” which Cixous comments upon in Samuel Beckett's texts (“Une Passion” 399), or to those Fathers who emerge in Plath's poem “Lady Lazarus” as Plath's “Herr God, Herr Lucifer” (Collected Poems) or in the form of the penis-as-bludgeon or enormous serpent-penis found in Cixous's first play, La Pupille.

The early death of the father is used by both writers to investigate death in general, with its potential for regaining a sense of oceanic unity, albeit at the loss of all else. Plath's and Cixous's writings on the father-daughter relationship exceed this theme, however; imaginary re-membering leads to reflections on language and on writing itself, to a questioning of power and authority, and to an implicit (and occasionally explicit) re-mythification of privileged daughters such as Electra. Plath's and Cixous's use of the Electra myth allows for, indeed seems almost to demand, critical investigation of the dichotomies active/passive, construction/destruction, power/helplessness, as these concern the daughter.

For Plath, attention to myth in general is suggested by a number of the titles chosen for her father-poems: “On the Decline of Oracles” (1957), “The Colossus,” “Maenad,” “Electra on Azalea Path” (all written in 1959).⁴ By the time of “Daddy” (1962), Plath's mythic and allusive structures change, at least as concerns the father poetry:⁵ Auschwitz and Hiroshima have become equally important. Cixous analyzes the Electra myth in detail in La jeune née (1975); in Dedans, however, she uses the titular thematics of inside/outside to explore not only the father-daughter relationship, but a daughter's relation to her extended family and heritage as well. This heritage necessarily includes an historical intersection with Germany and the death camps because her family is in fact Jewish.

Both Plath and Cixous treat the father's early death as a kind of primary trauma which is re-written into the painful coming-of-age of the daughter as writer, as she who assumes language and the use of words both native and foreign—although language(s) may appear to, and even may, master her own fictional female subjects. To a certain degree, both Plath and Cixous use a “father obsession” to overturn an old myth: “The old myth of origins / Unimaginable” (Plath, “Full Fathom Five”). In classical tragedy Electra may be read as one stage of the historical establishment of patriarchy over matriarchy and goddess worship (Graves, 62-64; Cixous, La jeune née 186-208). But Plath's and Cixous's manipulations of the “Electra complex” disinter the personal father—that memory of a father which becomes a fiction of the father—and at the same time attempt to bury the Father and his Law.

In both writers, the father's death leads to the daughter's physical and psychic retreat or exile into ambivalently-considered “interior” spaces. In both Plath and Cixous, the father is idealized excessively (although the self-conscious ways in which this idealization is then portrayed are much less predictable); the mother's role as wife and primary mourner is contested competitively; the mother's sexuality causes anxious concern whereas the sexuality of the father is cherished and privileged; both mothers and fathers are submitted to the rigors of love and hate. Both writers replace God/father/husband/lover in a series of substitutions which are at times deadly serious, at other times ironic and comical. Both Plath and Cixous emphasize almost surreally the disparity in size between father and daughter. Finally, both writers identify the dead father specifically with prison.

The first substitution (in Dedans and chronologically in Plath's poems), occurs when God's place is filled by the father: “You defy other godhood” (“Full Fathom Five”); “Je commençai par révoquer Dieu, dont l'inutilité n'était que trop manifeste, et je le remplaçai par mon père” (20-21; Inside 11). This preliminary, symbolic substitution opens up a position to be filled, a position of power, if not always of glory. Plath depicts the dangers of the desire to keep that position always filled: “Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you” (“Daddy”).⁶ What may not be so apparent, however, is that this space (of immense—indeed, mythical—strength), once opened, may then be filled by anything or anyone—including the writer herself, her own substitutions or projections, her imagination, her own Imaginary.

In order that the metamorphoses begin, the daughter must make herself very small in relation to the father (or make the father very large; both tactics are employed).⁷ The daughter shrinks even into the non-human: “Small as a doll in my dress of innocence / I lay dreaming your epic, image by image” (“Electra on Azalea Path”); “I crawl like an ant in mourning / Over the weedy acres of your brow” (“The Colossus”); “Mieux valait être chien, ou lézard, que moi-même. Mieux valait être poussière, chat crevé, ou noyau de pêche, qu'être la fille du mort. Plus j'étais réduite, moins la vie aurait de surface à lacérer” (28; Inside, 16-17). A shattered “proper” perspective distorts in more ways than one: the father expands also into the non-human: “Miles long / Extend the radial sheaves / Of your spread hair” (“Full Fathom Five”); “Il s'allongeait et s'étalait, il envahissait l'horizon et cependent je ne l'approchai pas. Peu à peu je cessai de vouloir l'approcher, it était devenu trop grand” (35; Inside, 21).⁸ The daughter is metaphorically as well as physically smaller than life: she becomes animal or insect or inert matter. The father, on the other hand, is larger than life in all senses: he replaces not only God, but Nature itself. In “Castration or Decapitation?” Cixous touches on the cultural significance of this disparity: “It's the classic opposition, dualist and hierarchical. Man/Woman automatically means great/small, superior/inferior … means high or low, means Nature/History, means transformation/inertia” (44).⁹ In Dedans and in Plath's poems, we find this “classic opposition” emphasized excessively, rendered almost unrecognizable and certainly unclassical—almost perversely “feminine,” some might say.

In the father-texts under consideration here, the burial site intended to contain father/God/Nature is envisaged, not surprisingly, as utterly inadequate:

I found your name, I found your bones and all
Enlisted in a cramped necropolis,
Your speckled stone askew by an iron fence.
In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead
Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower
Breaks the soil. This is Azalea Path.

(“Electra on Azalea Path”)¹⁰

La voilà, la voilà, c'est dans la troisième allée en haut, cinquante mètres après l'eucalyptus, à droite, on ne peut pas la voir, elle est trop plate, c'est la plus basse, toutes les autres sont plus hautes, il faut arriver au pied, à ses pieds, pour la voir …

—Que c'est froid cette pierre, que c'est petit! … Les autres te marchent dessus sans te voir ah ah.

(85-86; Inside, 55)

Actively and relentlessly playing with size and stature works against the “natural” Oedipal relation as well, a relation which in any case, for women, is already unnatural, is not the Same (Irigaray), and requires following a “very circuitous path” (Freud 199), as we shall see below. The identification of the father with Nature is a bit unnatural as well; when he becomes physically one with Nature, rather than overtaking it in a mythical manner, he not only loses stature but risks being trod upon. As God/Nature, he appears all-powerful, but association with Nature allows for some contamination, slippage into the unprivileged side of the oppositional couple, into passivity, the female, even into the smaller than human: “Il n'est pas mort ton fils. … Dans l'appartement, il y a une poupée en métamorphose, c'est pas mon père, c'est pas ton fils” (89; Inside, 57).

Relations with the father are further complicated by his association with the Law; or with one particular manifestation of the law, the prison:

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

(“Daddy”)

Even as prison, the father has his attractions, but he is eventually repulsed in these texts, and violently: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through”; “Pourquoi m'as-tu abandonnée? Salaud, salaud, salaud, salaud, salaud” (188; Inside, 123).¹¹ In Dedans (even in the first half of the novel, in which the protagonist is a child), an awareness of the ambiguous meanings of “inside” is apparent: “Le passé ne cache plus qu'il a été ma prison” (77; Inside, 49). In the second part of the novel, in which the narrator is an adult, the father “returns,” and acknowledges that life/death with him is a prison.¹² The father has indeed become something of a con artist:

—Viens, allons en prison, tous les deux ensemble, nous serons heureux, quand tu me salueras, je m'agenouillerai et je te demanderai pardon …
—Viens allons en prison rien que nous deux ensemble, et je te dirai tout, et tous les jours je te donnerai un autre nom, mais je serai toujours là et tu me diras tout”

(193-94; Inside, 126).

This father—if the voice is indeed even her father's (“C'est toi, dis-je?—Oui, c'est lui, dit sa voix. [Mais cette voix était … ?]”)—is a singularly ineffective manipulator, however; his tactics are progressively aimed towards the little girl whom the protagonist no longer is, or even recognizes clearly. This father is (also) Lear (V.III.8-9), speaking to a daughter who refuses to go on playing his Cordelia, that abject daughter, hanged in prison, neck/voice broken, silenced once and for all. Cixous later referred to Cordelia as one of the archetypal victim-positions for women in the theater (as characters or as spectators):

Who is this victim? She is always the Father's daughter, his sacrificial object, guardian of the phallus, upholding the narcissistic fantasy which helps the Father to ward off the threat of castration … If she is Ophelia, her body banned and her soul violated, she will never have lived. And if, like Cordelia, she finds the strength to assert a femininity which refuses to be the mirror of her father's raving, she will die. For in every man there is a dethroned King Lear who requires his daughter to idealize him by her loving words and build him up, however flat he may have fallen, into the man he wishes to appear …

(“Aller à la mer,” 546).

Cixous rewrites Cordelia in Dedans much as Plath rewrites Miranda in “Full Fathom Five”; both will have the last laugh in rewriting Ophelia as well.¹³ As Plath's speaker “would breathe water,” Cixous's defies the dangers of drowning: “Ma robe flotte et gonfle autour de mes cuisses, éclate de rire, fonce, verdoie sur les bords, écume au ras de mes genoux, je suis vêtue de mer et j'algue doucement mes cheveux verts” (206; Inside, 134).

But however much these texts speak to one another, there is no complete or absolute congruence between Plath's and Cixous's poetic narratives. A closer look at individual texts will help to show where divergences arise even within similarities.

In “Full Fathom Five” (1958), Plath identifies the father with the sea, as she had earlier in “All the Dead Dears” (“And an image looms under the fishpond surface / Where the daft father went down / With orange duck-feet winnowing his hair—”). The daughter-persona, although in “dry … exile” on his “kingdom's border,” reserves for herself the possibility of transgressing this boundary: “I would breathe water.” There are resonances of this transgression to be found in Dedans (“Je peux tout, il suffit de vouloir, l'air est pur comme l'eau. Ne sais-je pas nager?” 42; Inside 25), but that daughter discovers the leash and crashes back to earth. Other boundaries effaced in “Full Fathom Five” have to do with transgression of the conscious/unconscious and the “real world”/dream world (of the type which structure Dedans)¹⁴: the “old man surface[s] seldom,” but his surfacing is not their only means of contact; she herself can dive down: “Your shelled bed I remember.”

Surfacing and diving are common enough metaphors for the unconscious or dreams, certainly, but there are also epic or adventurous qualities in this poem which are too often neglected. “All obscurity / Starts with a danger,” the speaker announces, and “Your dangers are many.” The timid are advised against pursuing such dangers: “You float near / As keeled ice-mountains / Of the north, to be steered clear / Of, not fathomed.” She, and we, are already in deep waters. Critics often mention the inverted syntax of “Full Fathom Five,” but less often note that it can render meaning very nearly unfathomable:

                                                                                Miles long
Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives
The old myth of origins
Unimaginable.

The “wrinkling skeins” pose a real danger here: “skeins” would commonly be associated with hair, but this hair is not in skeins, but spread, radially. Certainly, some of the hair could be “caught” and “knotted” in “wrinkling skeins,” but “caught” applies equally well to “The old myth.” We are tossed about, from an old man of mythic proportions to the sea to hair to sheaves to skeins to an (other?) old myth—so entangled in “A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves / Crest and trough,” that we have no idea what “myth of origins” survives there (or where). Yet there is an “I” who “Cannot look much but your form suffers / Some strange injury / And seems to die: so vapors / Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.” An “I” at last—a life boat surely, or at least a raft—but this “I” possesses no enlightening vision. The “reappearance [which] / Proves rumors shallow” is a “form” which is compared to “vapors,” and looking causes a very “strange injury” indeed: disappearance of the form. Far from a mastering gaze which results in clarity and unravels confusion, this particular look causes the “vapors” somewhat paradoxically to “Ravel to clearness”; the object of the gaze, when scrutinized, simply dissolves. And the many “dangers,” it should be noted, are not posed directly to the “I” but to the “form”; furthermore, here as elsewhere the diction suggests the language of writing as well as that of mourning: “You defy questions; // You defy other godhood.” This “old man” might be an unruly god of poetry as easily as the father.

In “Full Fathom Five,” says Mary Lynn Broe, “we learn that the most vivid danger to Sylvia Plath's ideal world is anything that is identified with a distinct polarity, a precise fact, or one ‘scrutable’ dimension” (52). The old man is identified with the masculine principle:

Waist down, you may wind
One labyrinthine tangle
To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,
Skulls. Inscrutable,
Below shoulders not once
Seen by any man who kept his head

But here (unlike in Cixous's “Castration or Decapitation?”) both castration and decapitation are man's problem only; the female speaker has descended, has “seen” and yet “kept [her] head.” The god/father, associated with the flux of the sea, is also given the sea's destructive attributes; these attributes are portrayed in classical Freudian terms, but with a “labyrinthine” twist. He encompasses both rigidity and fluidity, both inscrutability and the power to destroy those who would read/see him: “… Such sage humor and / Durance are whirlpools / To make away with the ground- / Work of the earth and the sky's ridgepole.” Although “whirlpools” and “Durance” (in the archaic sense of duration: “archaic trenched lines … shed time … Ages beat like rains”) link the old man to the effacement of the polarity of earth and sky (with their respectively feminine and masculine connotations), “sage humor,” “durance” (in the sense of imprisonment), and “whirlpools” may remind us as well of the language of the poem itself and its many “dangers”: its images unclearly “seen,” its polysemy, its odd use of a recurring anaphoristic structure linked by prepositions (of, to, on) which provide both a sort of continuity (“To make away” “To root deep”) and a dislocation of idiom (“ice-mountains / Of the north, to be steered clear / Of”). The “sage humor” especially seems to belong almost entirely to the language of the poem rather than to the father/God. It applies equally well to the poem's evocation of the Oedipal relation (the father's—dangerous—sexuality, his enormous and engulfing size, his shelled bed) and to the poem's repudiation of castration—there is neither castration nor decapitation for the daughter here, though there is a dry exile. It is not seeing the woman's (mother's) genitals that triggers the castration crisis, but what lies below the father's “shoulders.” “Waist down,” he “may” be marked by “One labyrinthine tangle”—indicating on the one hand a very proper singularity and on the other a highly improper, Medusa-like profusion.

In “Electra on Azalea Path” (1959) the father is again associated with the sea, but here the boundaries transgressed are not water and air, but the human and non-human—and within the human, there is a scrambling of familial roles: “your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.” The confusion of categories is dramatically staged: allusions to myth are mingled with a narrative that investigates and winds its way around to determining who takes credit for control over life and death. Although at the beginning of the poem this god-like control is ostensibly left—or placed—in the father's hands (“The day you died I went into the dirt”), by the end of the poem the daughter takes all the blame, or credit, herself (“It was my love that did us both to death”). As is only fair: she has in fact constructed, or reconstructed, another myth of the Death of the Father—and of the writing of the Daughter. Again the mythical father is associated with the unconscious, with dreamwork, this time overtly: “Small as a doll in my dress of innocence / I lay dreaming your epic, image by image. / Nobody died or withered on that stage. / Everything took place in a durable whiteness.” But this Electra dreams her own epic (“I borrow the stilts of an old tragedy”), certainly not The Iliad or The Oresteia: “nobody died or withered.”

“The Beekeeper's Daughter” (1959) takes the “Electral” situation one step further: whereas “Electra on Azalea Path” blamed the mother for having thought the father was and died “like any man,” this text “electrifies”¹⁵ the sexual tension between daughter and father. Sensual references to smell and breath mingle with references to voice and sight: “mouthings,” “dilate,” “too dense to breathe in,” “Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds,” “death to taste,” “I set my eye to a hole-mouth and meet an eye.” A jumble of organs and body fragments (“many-breasted,” “heart,” “foot,” “heads,” “flesh,” “parings,” “finger”) mingles with a series of references to “boudoirs,” the father's “potency,” and the mother's inability to contest the daughter's—or the queen bee's—rivalry for the father.

“The Colossus” (1959) assumes an ironic position (which will be further elaborated in “Little Fugue,” and especially “Daddy”) regarding the greatness, in all senses, of the lost father. The tension here between a passive daughter- and active writer-figure tends to tip towards a writerly re-construction (away from the excavations of the unconscious and dreamwork of the earlier father poems).¹⁶ Self-conscious references to the babble of language begin with the barnyard noises in the first stanza; by the end of the poem, attention to language, sound, and silence involves only the speaker herself. She “no longer” listens for the sound of a rescuer “On the blank stones of the landing”; this blankness resembles “The bald white tumuli of [the colossus-father's] eyes.”¹⁷ Although the sun itself rises under the tongue of this father (who is “pithy and historical as the Roman Forum”), he is no “oracle,” nor is he in any way “pithy,” though he may consider himself a “Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.” After thirty years of labor, the daughter/restoration-artist is “none the wiser” regarding what (if anything) he may have to say. This dead language is phallic in image (“the pillar of your tongue”) and bestial in sound: “mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles.”

Failure, or refusal, to hear acquires significant value in “Little Fugue” (1962), in which the father's voice can only be seen, not heard:

Deafness is something else.
Such a dark funnel, my father!
I see your voice
Black and leafy, as in my childhood,
A yew hedge of orders,
Gothic and barbarous, pure German.
Dead men cry from it.
I am guilty of nothing.

Again language is associated with the dangerously phallic: the father cut sausages in California “during the Great War,” sausages which, to the speaker, resemble “cut necks / There was a silence!” Structurally, the latter phrase resembles “This was a man, then!” three stanzas later.¹⁸ Necks—with their throats and breathing, speaking and voice—also have a part to play in the general disability and dismemberment: “You had one leg, and a Prussian mind … Do you say nothing?” The daughter also has lost a leg of sorts—she is “lame in the memory.” To the daughter's “wound” I shall return shortly.

A certain preoccupation with lameness also marks Plath's “Daddy” (1962). The daughter has long been an entrapped foot in a black shoe; she is another sort of Oedipus in that sense, named by her crippling.¹⁹ In this text, all the earlier themes come into play: father as god, sea, and colossal statue (“Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, / Ghastly statue with one gray toe / Big as a Frisco seal / And a head in the freakish Atlantic”); tongues and language (“I could never talk to you. / The tongue stuck in my jaw. / It stuck in a barb wire snare. / Ich, ich, ich, ich, / I could hardly speak”); the daughter's work on the father's image (“I used to pray to recover you”); the father's sexuality (“So I could never tell where you put your foot, your root”); the daughter's victimization (“I may be a bit of a Jew. // I have always been scared of you, / With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo”).

In “Daddy,” moreover, Plath adds to the collection with the substitution of other men, the husband specifically, for the father: “If I've killed one man, I've killed two— / The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know.” In Cixous's Dedans, an emphasis on the “barbed wire” quality of the father's language (“Ces mots dans sa bouche étaient gracieux. Dans la mienne ces mots m'avalent la langue,” 198; 129) as in Plath's “Daddy,” is used to great effect in the delineation of a series of lovers/father-substitutes. This language emphasizes, and sometimes parodies, male discourse that has one overriding object—keeping the object in line: “Tu dois lire un peu plus de Marx” (165; Inside, 107), or “Mon dernier ami, celui qui vit, dit que je suis mapoulette, mabellechatte, macaille. Je n'en suis pas sûre” (170; Inside, 110). A particular lover (“un amant distrait qui parle à travers moi à quelqu'un qui est n'importe qui,” 176; Inside, 115) is notably and ridiculously “rigorous” in his lessons: “Il concevait des effigies corrompues qui me ressemblaient mal. Il m'expliquait: 1° ce qui est désirable; 2° ce qui est illusoire; 3° ce qui est pur; 4° ça” (178; Inside, 116).

One lover, the “last lover” is distinguished in Dedans as the “père-époux”; he is the only one whose primary objective is not necessarily didactic-sexual.²⁰ But to see in him an ideal synthesis, as does René Micha (116), is to confuse the sometimes naive narrator of Dedans with the text itself; this lover also receives his share of ironical treatment, as in the (classically parodied) argument scene:

Je n'ai rien, je voulais seulement me mettre près de toi.
—Mais nous sommes près, dit sa voix en dressant à la hâte des barricades.
—Regarde-moi, dis-je, regarde-moi.
—Pourquoi? Je te vois, je te connais. Qu'est-ce que tu veux?
La barricade monte, je ne le vois presque plus.

(174; Inside, 113)

The treatment of marriage (in death) with the father himself carries some ironic detachment as well: “Moi dans ma robe bleue d'autrefois, lui dans son costume de granit, nous formons le couple éternel” (208; Inside 135). Rigidity of the father, fluidity of the daughter: this is not a marriage that will last.

In both “Daddy” and Dedans, the daughter takes up her own language and speech and cuts off communication with the father (if only temporarily) in order to combat the power of the father and father-substitutes: in “Daddy,” “Ach, du” becomes “O You,” and the “telephone's off at root”; in Dedans, “je me réjouis de pouvoir parler, que j'aie dix ans, trente ans ou soixante, et de pouvoir dire merde merde merde à la mort” (208; Inside 135). But the emphasis on language begins long before the end. In Dedans, German is the mother's language, and the mother teaches a little English as well, but the language of writing, the language in which Dedans is written, is the father's language, French:

J'ai peu de mots. Mon père, qui les avait tous, est parti si précipitamment, qu'il n'a pas eu le temps de me les donner (53; Inside, 32).

Ma mère ne parle guère, de plus son language n'est pas le même que celui de mon père; autrefois ils ont dû échanger des quantités de mots, et elle a deux cahiers de vocabulaire remplis de mots de mon père, mais je les ai tous lus, et je les connaissais déjà.

(55; Inside 34)

To examine the highly problematic attachment to the father/Father and, after Lacan, the equally difficult entry into language, is in some ways also necessarily to re-think the Oedipal situation. As Cixous herself has pointed out:

Dedans was necessarily written within the father, in seeking him right up to death and revenant (coming back, ghostly). There is something simple and mysterious in the origin of a writing: “I” am in the father I carry within me, he haunts me, I live him. There is a rapport between the father and language, the father and the “symbolic.”

And the mother? She is music, she is there, behind, the force that breathes …

(“The Scene of the Unconscious” 4)

These Plath and Cixous texts do not represent simple Oedipal crises (whatever that can mean for girls and women), nor do they illustrate an “awful little allegory” of “a girl with an Electra complex,” as Plath would have had her BBC radio audience believe (Collected Poems 293, n. 183).

In La jeune née, Cixous has a great deal to say about Electra and her “complex”; the Electra myth heralds the “dawn of phallocentrism.” The Oresteia (very properly named) signals symbolically, if not historically, the grasping/consolidation of the father's power qua Father. The father now owns the children; he has control over the line: this is indeed, as Freud puts it, a victory for abstraction, and as Cixous reminds us, “Electra lights the path, makes way for patriarchy” (109). Plath's and Cixous's father-texts, on the other hand, work to dim the “path” and disrupt the line. In them, both the love and the disproportion are excessive, far too much, not in good taste; the father's language becomes the daughter's provenance; the science of beekeeping (Plath) and notebooks full of words (Cixous) are put to new uses—unscientifically, humorously, disrespectfully, poetically, and yes, mournfully too.

One of the divergences in Plath criticism is between (primarily) male psychoanalytic readings (following the orthodox Freudian model, as it has been adapted in the U.S.), and feminist readings (which in the U.S. have often rejected Freud entirely). These opposed readings tend, at times, to sound as though they are cut out of the same cloth, although one wears the proper side out, the other the reverse. That is, assumptions are sometimes much the same, although judgments are often bitterly opposed.²¹ “Plath”—the “truth” about Plath and all her personae—is firmly embedded at the center of these otherwise utterly divergent readings. I understand the historical and political necessity of such feminist readings of Plath (though I do not believe they are the only possible feminist readings of her); but as a feminist I also believe we must recognize that the biographical “necessity” that generally operates in Plath criticism leads to innumerable oddities. It seems to account, for instance, for Lynda Bundtzen's feminist and Freudian reading of Plath, which undoes itself on the same point. For all the meticulous care Bundtzen takes to demonstrate that Plath's poetry is not confessional, she continues to operate on the premise that Plath speaks through almost every “I” therein.²²

The questions raised by both Plath's and Cixous's father-daughter writings form one part of a discourse on female subjectivity. If Plath's lyric “I” can be said to raise a reader's expectations for a coherent and immediate subject-speaker, the same can presumably be said about the first-person narrator of an autobiographical narrative, such as Cixous's Dedans. These expectations operate even though Cixous's autobiographical “I” usually remains elusive, or solidifies momentarily only to dissolve once again. To what extent does the female “I” in and of itself necessarily cast doubt upon preconceptions about a unified, coherent, and, especially, masterful subjectivity? In the cases of Plath and Cixous, or at least in the works under consideration here, a number of issues are put into play which set the subject, or “any theory of the subject” (Irigaray), a-quivering. The sheer excessiveness of attention to the father, for example, serves a number of purposes: it oversteps the boundaries of Oedipal anxiety and propriety; it furnishes a useful smokescreen for the expanding significance of the daughter's voice; it re-enacts the circuitous coming-into-being of the female subject and demonstrates that she cannot, because of her difference(s), ever be the Self-Same. She must (also) be Other, therefore at once subject and not subject; she is never entirely subject to the Father's Law, whether that father be “her own,” Freud, Lear, Prospero, Polonius, or the Symbolic.

For Freud, “the third, very circuitous path” is woman's only road to “normal” female heterosexuality. “So divided in her mind” (198), her only other choices are the more straightforward oppositions of excessive femininity/passivity (“turning her back on sexuality altogether,” 198) or excessive masculinity/activity (which may “also” lead to “a manifestly homosexual object-choice,” 198). “In the case of boys the explanation is simple … With little girls it is otherwise” (194). Indeed this must be so because in order to negotiate “the third, very circuitous path” the girl must relinquish the pleasure of her clitoris “in favour of a new zone—the vagina” (194); she must practice, therefore, the prescribed gesture of clitoral effacement which Gayatri Spivak reads as fundamental for the economy of reproduction.²³

It is, I would argue, the “very circuitous path” of “normal” female sexuality and “normal” female speech/writing which Plath's father poems and Cixous's Dedans inscribe. Yet, unlike Freud's tracing of that path, these works uncover the tortuous perversity of that undertaking, that normality (“definitive femininity,” 201), by means of irony, exaggeration, and parody. By “acting out” that “development,” both performatively and hyperbolically, these texts undo that normality. The way they do so, however, is far from simple. For one thing, the relationship not only to the father but also to the mother is highly ambivalent. In Dedans, this ambivalence persists in the most “positive” as well as in the most “negative” reactions of the daughter towards her mother:

Ma mère ne parle guère, de plus son langage n'est pas le même que celui de mon père … Là où elle en sait plus que moi, c'est en anatomie et en physiologie. Bien que cela ne me serve à rien ici, je retiens ces mots par dizaines, pour lui faire plaisir … nous nous rencontrons ainsi aux articulations secrètes du Corps Humain.

(55-56; Inside 34)

Parce que je la hais, ma mère n'est plus. Ce que j'appelle la haine, c'est ce qui ressemble le plus à la mort, dans le monde où circulent les vivants; et la mort, c'est la disparition provisoire d'un être bien connu.

(66; Inside 42).

This ambiguity is less consistent in Plath's poems, where the mother is often elided or dismissed in one line: “Here is a queenship no mother can contest” (“The Beekeeper's Daughter”). Yet “Electra on Azalea Path” is notable for its quite thorough re-tracing of the “circuitous path”: intense love of and identification with the mother (“as if I came / God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly: / Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity. / I had nothing to do with guilt or anything / When I wormed back under my mother's heart”); separation from the mother and recognition of female “castration” (“that evil cloth / My mother unrolled at your last homecoming. … The truth is … at my birth cry / A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing; / My mother dreamed you face down in the sea” [Plath's emphasis]); turning away from and hostility toward the mother (“My mother said; you died like any man. / How shall I age into that state of mind?”); love of the phallus/father, and thus the beginning of the Oedipal complex (for Freud, “only too often a woman never surmounts it at all,” 199: “your hound-bitch, daughter, friend. / It was my love that did us both to death”). The poem ends with that tightrope-walking between activity and passivity, masculinity and femininity, which is the route the “very circuitous path” has led out into—Azalea Path perhaps (Plath's mother's name is Aurelia Plath).

The path of “definitive femininity” does indeed reveal itself to be a tightrope which Freud finds women commonly fall off: “I have refrained from touching on the complications which arise when a child, disappointed in her relation with her father, returns to the abandoned mother-attachment, or in the course of her life repeatedly shifts over from the one attitude to the other” (209). And the ambivalence, apparently all too common in the normal assumption of the feminine role, places women in approximation with the West's other Other: “In members of primitive races also we may say that ambivalence predominates” (204). T. Minh-ha Trinh has succinctly delineated the commonplace quality of this comparison in theories of subjectivity: “The domain of subjectivity understood as sentimental, personal and individual horizon as opposed to objective, universal, societal, limitless horizon is often attributed to both women, the other of man, and natives, the Other of the West” (373). Freud himself draws another, and similar, telling comparison: “Our insight into this early, pre-Oedipus phase in the little girl's development comes to us as a surprise, comparable in another field with the effect of the discovery of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind that of Greece” (195). “Electra on Azalea Path” follows and mocks Freud on this point as well, for it evokes not only the classical “origins” of Western culture (“your epic,” “the stilts of an old tragedy”) but points a hag-like finger beyond, to the West's repressed “pre-History.” There is blood everywhere: “the stain of divinity,” “bloody dye,” “drip red,” “[a]nother kind of redness bothers me,” “the flat sea purpled like that evil cloth.” Yet this blood is multivalent, comes from both Ends of History, and includes the “ersatz petals” of postmodernist pastiche as well as Graves's tripartite goddess.

There is no blood, however much it might be expected, at the site of the daughter's mutilation, a wound difficult to read without attention to irony: “I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, / My own blue razor rusting in my throat.” This is a death, like Cordelia's by hanging, for example, which should decisively cut off the female voice,²⁴ or which might function like the daughter's psychic death described in “Little Fugue”: “And you … Lopping the sausages! / They color my sleep, / Red, mottled, like cut necks. / There was a silence!” The “little creature without a penis” (Freud 200) must regress endlessly, as far as she can—from life to death, from speech to silence, from male to female—in order to (re)claim an incomplete castration; the daughter is she who has had to renounce what she never had (a penis) and yet remembers having (a clitoris). “I am the ghost of an infamous suicide”: the remainder of the penis and the little penis which turned out not really to be one. And yet this wounded ghost, this castrated creature, speaks. She may, if not kept to her proper “path,” even laugh:

Women have no choice other than to be decapitated … if they don't actually lose their heads by the sword, they only keep them on condition that they lose them—lose them, that is, to complete silence …

It's a question of submitting feminine disorder, its laughter … to the threat of decapitation … if masculinity is culturally ordered by the castration complex, it might be said that the backlash, the return, on women of this castration anxiety is its displacement as decapitation …

(“Castration or Decapitation?” 42-43; Cixous's emphasis)

What is at stake here, finally, is inheritance, that guarantee of accession to everything—from sexual pleasure to stable subjectivity to knowledge, to the power to symbolize and name, to property of all kinds, to privileged relations to both birth and death. To learn that one has no heritage is for Freud a matter of shame: “When the universality of this negative character of her sex dawns upon her, womanhood, and with it also her mother, suffers a heavy loss of credit in her eyes” (202).²⁵ In Cixous's Dedans, shame becomes the critical nexus point between the maternal and the paternal:

Quant à la honte, c'est ma force; je dirais même que c'est ma mère; je nais d'elle, j'ai honte d'elle, j'ai envie d'elle, j'ai peur d'elle; je pourrais dire aussi qu'elle est ma bien-aimée … je peux même dire que nous sommes aussi inséparables que la pupille de l'oeil et qu'Iseult la belle de Tristan. Elle est mon ouverture sur dehors, elle est ma lumière et mon apporte-mort; je passe par elle pour arriver à moi. Je lui dois même la découverte de mon anatomie … et conjointement ma découverte des lois sociales, des tables mosaïques et de mon sens de la propriété. Honte à honte, on m'a construite.

A ma première honte je fis rencontre de la fragilité mystérieuse de mon ventre, à ma seconde honte j'appris l'importance du sexe, et la nécessité dans l'un ou l'autre genre de se connaître soi-même en détail

(26; Inside, 15).

In a novel in which childhood “confusion” regarding inside/outside is associated almost exclusively with the father, this passage confuses the mother/father as well.²⁶ Shame is equated with the maternal, but the inheritance of mother-shame exceeds self-awareness of gender and sexuality (the mother's shameful inheritance, for Freud) and “bleeds” into the father's realm: law, society, property. That (mother-daughter) shame is figured both as positive (“Mais la honte a des bons côtés quand elle est forte,” 24; Inside 14) and as transgressing gender-specific boundaries. We see here as in “Electra on Azalea Path” a parody of Freud's path to “definitive femininity,” yet the twist that picks up and incorporates the mother into the “definition” finally pushes the formula inside out in its aggressive blurring of sex/gender boundaries. This transgression is repeated in the daughter's transformation of mirror-stage self- and gender-splitting into a self-conscious heterogeneity of gender:

On m'a dit: tu es, tu as, tu seras, regarde comme il est beau ce petit garçon dans la glace, qui est? … On me dit: coucou, c'est toi. Je l'ai cru, non sans regret et surtout non sans honte. (24; Inside 14)

Ainsi je sus qu'il y avait moi et qu'il y avait toi, et que je pouvais être l'un ou l'autre.

(26; Inside 15)

That Cixous is well-acquainted with Freud is never forgotten; that Plath was also is seldom remembered (except insofar as a reader measures her sickness or health, that is, the success of her Freudian treatment). Yet there are in these texts odd, perhaps “ghostly,” dialogues—with Freud, and with each other—that inflect the “circuitous path” to “definitive femininity.” For Freud, a girl's first “choice” leads to suppression of sexuality altogether (a “too feminine” state even for his tastes) and the second to an excessive masculinity which may lead “also” to the choice of a female love-object. But heterosexual woman is less stuck between a rock and a hard place (those phallic dichotomies which always amount to the same) than in the position of another lost little girl: this path is too small, this path is too big, but this path is just right. Except that the gymnastic contortions “the third, very circuitous path” requires are not quite right after all. They do, however, lend themselves to play, to the excessive overwriting and undercutting which mark parody, that anti-genre so infected by laughter—“laughter that breaks out, overflows … ‘she who laughs last.’ And her first laugh is at herself” (“Castration or Decapitation?” 55)—the last laugh, even of a truly “infamous suicide.”

Notes

1. Susan Bassnett was the first to point out the truth-seeking apparatus of the Plath industry; see also Manners. Jacqueline Rose's The Haunting of Sylvia Plath provided the first book-length study to question the Plath myth: what is it about Plath, she asked, that continues to produce such dread and desire in Plath's readers, critics, editors, family, friends? While Rose's overall argument is laudable and long overdue, some elements in its development are disturbing in their uncanny echoing of the very fascination she seeks to revise; in particular, she insists upon the exemplary applicability of Kristeva's theory of abjection to Plath's corpus, while dismissing with very little examination (and mentioning Cixous and Irigaray only briefly) feminists who valorize “the disordered, fragmented, shifting subjectivity which women oppose to a destructively linear world” (10; see also 26-28). Since I hope to delineate only a very few of the complexities of such a “position” in the case of Cixous, it seems necessary to draw attention to this double haunting in Rose's book.

2. The numerous thematic, narrative, and structural similarities that mark Plath's poems and Dedans are not to be found in a recent Cixous novel which also deals with the death of the father, Jours de l'an.

3. All page references to this translation will immediately follow those cited for Dedans within the body of the text.

4. This was also the year in which Plath wrote “The Beekeeper's Daughter” as well as the bulk of the father poems. She had gone back into psychoanalysis and in her writing was using personal material which had been dredged up once again.

5. “Medusa” is the title of one of her “mother-poems” at that time, however.

6. Helen Vendler says about these lines that “style turns to slashing caricature of Freudian self-knowledge” (9). Cixous's considerably more detailed treatment of this subject will be discussed below.

7. However, in “Maenad,” the third section of Plath's “Poem for a Birthday,” the father shrinks, and the daughter grows “too big.”

8. See also, in “The Beekeeper's Daughter”: “My heart under your foot, sister of a stone” (118); in “Maenad”: “When it thundered I hid under a flat stone” (133); in “Daddy”: “black shoe / In which I have lived like a foot / For thirty years” (222); in Dedans: “tandis que je lui posais les questions essentielles il grandissait, jusqu'à ce que son chapeau touche le ciel, mais sans que je me sente dépassée” (31; Inside, 18); “De plus je n'étais pas à la hauteur favorable, et je n'osais pas avouer à mon père qu'il était trop élevé ce jour-là” (32; Inside, 19); “le monde entier avec ses bois et ses collines, tous les états, les races, les climats, les noms de bêtes, les coutumes des peuples, mon destin et le nôtre, l'histoire et la géographie tenaient dans l'espace de ses bras, des fleuves me roulaient sans tumulte jusqu'aux courbes lisseurs de ses os, je connaissais tous les vertiges et l'univers était fait de la chair de ma chair” (34; Inside, 20-21); “Mon père était haut, plus haut que tous” (47; Inside, 29); “j'étais petite, je me diminuai encore, je me raffinai autour de mes os; plus mince qu'un serpent, plus douce que la peau d'une pêche je calculai ma tiédeur pour la confondre avec la Sienne” (81; Inside, 52); “j'apprends ma petitesse illimitée” (98; Inside, 63).

9. The opposition “Nature/History” seems to be a slip in this series (and exists in the French original, “Le sexe ou la tête?” as well), taking into consideration both its immediate context and Cixous's work elsewhere (La jeune née, for example, especially the beginning of “Sorties”): man is generally associated with History, women with Nature.

10. See also The Bell Jar 136, and Journals 298: “I found the flat stone, ‘Otto E. Plath: 1885-1940,’ right beside the path, where it would be walked over.”

11. Inside renders “salaud” as “bastard,” so the resemblance to Plath is much more striking in Barko's English translation.

12. In Hélène Cixous (1992), Conley suggests, without citing particulars, that among the oppositions questioned in Dedans, “paradise is prison” (13). The extreme ambivalence and ambiguity of the father's final call to prison “nous deux ensemble” (which constitutes the final paragraph of Dedans, 209; Inside, 136) might uniquely warrant such a claim. I find more convincing Shiach's argument that images of imprisonment (often associated with “inside”) throughout the text are associated with both confinement and security (73). Neither, however, takes into account the irony and parody which often characterize “prison” in this text.

13. Claudine G. Fisher discusses a related aspect of Cixous's inscription of Cordelia in other novels: there Cordelia both seriously and humorously signifies attachment to the father and tradition, “corde il y a” (31).

14. Conley believes that “Dedans poetically weaves an oneiric bloody fabric where the self metamorphoses itself unceasingly” (Writing the Feminine 27); “bloody” is not, however, an especially appropriate adjective for Dedans.

15. “Electric” is Cixous's phrasing in La jeune née (186-208; Newly Born Woman 100-112).

16. In a quite useful reading of “Colossus,” which positions the poem's concerns in relation to the (male) literary canon, Steven Axelrod argues that this tension between “the female ephebe['s] … silence and voice” (50) structures the poem; yet he reads its narrative closure so literally that he believes the speaker's original “scalding irony” finally disappears and that “Colossus” demonstrates its author's creativity while lamenting the incapacity of its invented speaker” (51). The hyperbolic staging of lines such as “A blue sky out of the Oresteia / Arches above us” or the lingering ambiguity of the final stanza's “My hours are married to shadow” casts doubt on the certainty of such readings.

17. As Cixous remarks concerning the traditional waiting-to-be-rescued position: “Sleeping Beauty is lifted from her bed by a man because, as we all know, women don't wake up by themselves: man has to intervene … She is lifted up by the man who will lay her in her next bed so that she may be confined to bed ever after, just as the fairy tales say” (“Castration or Decapitation?” 43).

18. We might also remember The Bell Jar, in which Buddy Willard's genitals remind Esther Greenwood of a turkey's neck and gizzards (55).

19. Judith Kroll discusses this crippling, in the context of a different argument (112-13, 124, and especially 248, n. 1): “When Plath said that ‘Daddy’ was about a ‘girl with an Electra complex’ she gave a clue to what may be a play on words in the poem. ‘Oedipus’ means ‘swell-foot,’ and therefore the speaker's identification of herself as a ‘foot’ may be a private way of saying ‘I am Oedipus’ and incorporating an allusion to the Electra complex into the poem.”

20. Compare with the others on 166 (Inside 107) and, especially, 177 and 179 (Inside 116-17).

21. Not always, however. Compare, for example, Edward Butscher, who seems generally an admirer of Plath and sometimes sensitive about the difficulties of her life as a woman (238, 266-67), although what he says about her may be utterly offensive at times (he comes very near saying Plath wanted to be raped [95] and insists throughout on the “bitch goddess” appellation, for example), and Harriet Rosenstein, whose “Reconsidering Sylvia Plath” is feminist, but who really does not approve of Plath.

22. At the beginning of Bundtzen's fifth chapter, for example, she justifiably states that she has “attempted to show the variety and richness of Plath's imagination—to explode the notion that her poetic world is narrow and solely concerned with self” (235), yet later in the same chapter (248, regarding “Cut”), she claims “With these final lines, Plath understands her self-amputation as an acting out of her self-hatred as a woman.”

23. Spivak argues that the clitoris is that excess/remainder which cannot be forced to serve a useful, (re)productive purpose. Irigaray argues instead (though with a similar effect in relation to Freud) for a multiplicity of female sexual “zones” that are effaced in Freud's insistence on the phallic Same as measure of all sexuality—male and female.

24. As Irigaray says of another “classical” female suicide, Antigone, “She will cut off her breath—her voice, her air, blood, life—with the veil of her belt, returning into the shadow (of a) tomb, the night (of) death, so that her brother, her mother's desire, may have eternal life” (219; Irigaray's emphasis).

25. See Irigaray's definitive reading of Freud on female sexuality, “The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry,” in Speculum; on the issue of “shame,” see 115.

26. Mairead Hanrahan argues a related point somewhat differently. She believes that “Part II situates the subject … in relation to the mother” (158); by “mother” here, she refers to a “feminine” or “maternal space … a space ‘between’” masculine and feminine, inside and outside (160-161).

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Cixous, Hélène. “Aller à la mer.” 1977. Trans. Barbara Kerslake. Modern Drama 27 (1984): 546-548.

———. “Castration or Decapitation?” Trans. Annette Kuhn. Signs 7 (1981): 41-55.

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———. “From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History.” Trans. Deborah W. Carpenter. The Future of Literary Theory. Ed. Ralph Cohen. New York: Routledge, 1989. 1-18.

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———. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

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