Bodies melt, voices shriek; hooks pierce; human flesh is chopped, like meat, wrapped and unwrapped. People eat and get eaten:

My night sweats grease his breakfast plate
.....My ribs show. What have I eaten?

(“The Jailer,” 185)¹

People wait to be eaten:

I am red meat. His beak
Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.

(“Death & Co.,” 205)

Mothers beg for their babies to be saved from becoming food for others' cravings:

And my baby a nail
Driven, driven in.
He shrieks in his grease
O You who eat
People like light rays, leave
This one
Mirror safe, unredeemed. …

(“Brasilia,” 210)

But these mothers plea in vain to exempt their children from the violent oppression of the world:

It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat.

(“Mary's Song,” 208)

Images of tortured, cut-up, oppressed, and consumed bodies can be heard echoing throughout the poetry Sylvia Plath wrote during the last months of her life. These final lines to “Mary's Song,” in particular, with its singled-out body part (the heart), its reference to the atrocities of the Second World War, its speaker's sense of complicity in the war's horrors, and the ultimate inescapability of violence shown in its future tense (the world will kill and eat, regardless), becomes a coda to Plath's work. Taken together, these images show the acute awareness of violence that anguished Plath and gave her work its oft-noted intensity.

Less established (though hotly debated in Plath criticism) is the source of this violence and the intense horror it evoked in Plath's poetry. Lawrence R. Ries argues in his study of violence in contemporary British poetry, Wolf Masks, that the violence haunting Plath came from the intensified violence of the world around her, most explicitly from the Second World War. She and other poets writing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ries claims, were responding to a world littered with the ideological and physical debris of the war. These effects included “the destruction of millions of human beings, the ruins of a desecrated Europe, and … the distorted sensibility born in those who witnessed the death and violence of the war.”² The war itself, combined with the political tensions following it—the cold war—and the potential for nuclear annihilation of the planet that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made vivid, produced a world where violence in poetry was accurate, appropriate, and even called-for.

But Plath's use of holocaust imagery—the Jew, the Nazi, the concentration camp body which haunt her later poems—seems to come from more than a desire to translate the violence of the world that she saw around her. It was not, after all, the immediacy of the concentration camps and their horrors that compelled Plath to use these images and metaphors in her work; she wrote the bulk of these poems almost two decades after the war, and after a decade of writing poetry without a proliferation of Nazi images. The most often advanced competing interpretation of Plath's violent and fascistic images argues that while these are undeniably connected to her keen sensitivity to political horrors (not explicitly gendered), they are also inextricably tied to the immediate personal struggles she faced as a woman. Numerous critics and biographers have traced the split she apparently felt between the need to be the perfect 1950s housewife dutifully supporting her poet husband and her own desire to write herself successful—in her life and in her work.³ Some have argued that the political references in her poems are analogies to her own relation to patriarchy—that when, for example, she refers to Jews and Nazis, she is writing about her position as a woman in a male-dominated world.⁴ At second glance, even the Ted Hughes quote that Ries calls on to prove that “the violence of her poetry was a reaction to the violence of the world” hints at a gendered violence at the root of Plath's horror. Ries quotes Hughes as saying:

Her reactions to hurts in other people and animals, and even tiny desecrations of plant-life were extremely violent. The chemical poisoning of nature, the pile-up of atomic waste, were horrors that persecuted her like an illness—as her latest poems record. Auschwitz and the rest were merely the open wounds, in her idea of the great civilized crime of intelligence that like the half-imbecile, omnipotent, spoiled brat Nero has turned on its mother.

(WM, 36)

The concentration camps, in his simile, become “merely the open wounds” of an already-established murderous mutilation of a female body, the despot Nero's flexing of his political muscle by demanding that his mother be cut up so he can see her womb.

Reading patriarchy at the base of Plath's violence, however, poses some problems, as Jacqueline Rose notes in a piece on Plath and sexuality. Rose suggests that feminist readings of literature might circumscribe them, leaving out “the specific question of culture and history which seem to be raised by a writer like Plath.” She writes:

The paradox of a concept like patriarchy in this context, and Plath's work has of course been read as a protest against a patriarchal world, is that its very exhaustiveness can operate in the form of an exclusion of the immediate, albeit monumental, political history, even if that history could finally be explained within its terms.⁵

Rose's comments suggest that Plath's violence and intensity do not come solely from a sensitivity to Nazi violence and the horrors of a post-World War II world; but neither do they come solely from Plath's literal and metaphoric problems with her dead father, her poet-husband, and (as critic Steven Gould Axelrod has recently suggested) the patriarchal literary and poetic traditions in which she was immersed.⁶ “In relation to Plath,” Rose writes, “the line dividing sexuality and history simply cannot be drawn” (“SP,” 19). This interconnection seems accurate and also central to the poems Plath wrote toward the end of her life.⁷ Plath, I think, intertwined images of Nazi brutality with feminist protest not only as a way of registering the horrors of the death camps, and/or the oppression and circumscription of women's lives; her point was not even, as Axelrod posits, to show the “Holocaust and the patriarchy's silencing of women [as] linked outcomes of the masculinist interpretation of the world” (SP, 55)—a reading which subordinates anguish at political history to patriarchal protest, as Rose cautions against. Rather, in these poems, quests for power—a Fuhrer's or race's or a father's attempts to dominate—were and are so shockingly brutal not only to show a connection between fascism and patriarchy, but also and more strikingly, I think, to highlight the violence and disempowerment that quests for power and domination, in themselves, produce.

The profusion of bodies and body parts in Plath's late poems, and the violence that they register, works to articulate this position. One striking commonality between Nazi power and patriarchy is the emphasis both place on controlling bodies.⁸ Patriarchy has functioned historically, as various critics have demonstrated, by controlling and containing the female body.⁹ The fascism of World War II likewise reinforced the centrality of bodies, of actual physical flesh, in attempts to garner power. Nazism required the physical destruction of people's bodies, a destruction that was designed to lead ultimately to the eradication of an entire culture; Hitler's power was to be gained by destroying and mutilating human bodies so as systematically to remove an entire body of people from existence. Some have argued that this system was itself gendered; Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, a compelling study of the imagery and rhetoric surrounding the Nazi Freikorpsmen, for example, argues that these fascists operated out of a fear of female bodies and desire to escape women. (Theweleit traces in numerous Freikorpsmen posters, pamphlets, and writings a dread of being swallowed and engulfed, where women's bodies are, as Barbara Ehrenreich writes in her introduction to the study, “the holes, swamps, pits of muck that can engulf.”)¹⁰ But even without Theweleit's explicit equation of Nazi desire for power with the desire to control women's bodies, the Nazi desire to control bodies seems to suggest a gendered subtext, given the proverbial mind/body split in which women have become associated with the bodily and men with the loftier, philosophical mind. These two forms of oppression—fascism and patriarchy—then, converge in their insistent awareness of real, physical flesh and the power it wields. Nazism, because of its blatant, horrific, dramatic call for power and because of the violence (six million and more dead bodies) that this call required—becomes a fitting metaphor for the violence that patriarchal power demands; at the same time, images of patriarchal power enacted through careful control of women's bodies help to articulate the political horror of Nazism. Bodies violated and controlled in encounters with authority recur in Plath's late work: the gendered complaint of the Applicant's anatomized body, her glass eye and rubber breasts, echo in Lady Lazarus's lampshade skin, Jew linen face, and right foot paperweight. The common ground—the common horror—here, is authority expressed violently on oppressed bodies.

Sylvia Plath, though, wanted authority. She wanted to be an influential, respected, famous, successful, artist; she wanted the power wielded by successful artists, even while she recognized the violence that having power can entail. What her later poems chronicle, I think, is her attempt to grapple with the doubleness of her desire. Her “bee poems,” for example, present a painful awareness of this doubleness; the speaker's fascination with the control she can wield over the bees alternates with her terror at the harm they can do her. “Mary's Song” (208) illustrates the anguished complicity the speaker feels in a world where oppression has been carried on for thousand of years. “Lady Lazarus” (198) shows the bodily violence of her move into the oppressor position. The poems show authority expressed on others' bodies—cut up, made to crackle, killed; they show a poet grappling with authority in a world where to achieve power, as Hitler writes, “one is either the hammer or the anvil,” where “if men wish to live, then they are forced to kill others,”¹¹—and struggling, too, with the gendered, theoretical, implications behind these claims.

Bodies, then, in the later Plath poems, matter immensely. Open at random her collected poems from 1962 on and almost invariably a body or body part will appear on the page. A horrific fascination with the body's physical vulnerability becomes the subject of several poems: “Cut” (191) luxuriates in the image of a sliced finger: “What a thrill— / My thumb instead of an onion,” the poet writes. “Fever 103°” (188) anatomizes a burning, feverish body: “I am a lantern— / My head a moon / Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin / Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.” In “Paralytic” (217), the speaker imagines existence from inside an arrested body frame:

It happens. Will it go on?—
My mind a rock,
No fingers to grip, no tongue,
My god the iron lung
That loves me, …

In other poems, a heightened awareness of appearance and beauty emphasizes the physical. In “The Applicant” (182), the speaker inquires about the body of a “perfect” wife:

Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
.....A living doll, everywhere you look.

In “A Birthday Present” (173), a similar attention to beauty and female anatomy clothes a death wish:

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?

Other poems highlight bodies by illustrating the potential for their mutilation or dismemberment. In “The Rabbit Catcher” (164), snares constrict the rabbit and the poet; in “Berck-Plage” (167), body parts are washed ashore; in “The Detective” (174), the body is explicitly absent, its removal chronicled piece by piece; and in “The Jailer” (185), “Lady Lazarus” (198), and “Daddy” (183), power struggles are played out on someone's flesh. This insistence on the bodily continues throughout Plath's work in other ways as well—including the prevalence of wombs and babies, and the images of the crucifixion and of Jesus' body in it. All in all, a remarkable number of very different issues get worked out on bodies, both the speaker's own and others', all the way up to Plath's final published poem, “Edge” (224), where

The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment, …

Most of these bodies are featured in explicit or implicit struggles for control, for dominance, for authority. The Applicant's body, for example, needs to fit superior requirements. The speaker in “The Rabbit Catcher” becomes ensnared—constricted and strangled—by the hands encircling a tea mug. In a number of these power poems, images of bodily control merge with images of warfare and struggle for political control. “Cut” (191), for example, moves from the speaker's slicing of her thumb and the thrill it gives her to a struggle between a pilgrim and an Indian:

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.

From this one-on-one melee, the thumb becomes an army, the bodily mutilation of a lead-in to the specific warfare of the American Revolution:

Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

The cut then becomes, moving chronologically even, a reference to racial violence and the attempts white supremacists make for dominance in the United States:

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan. …

Cutting her own body, in other words—exercising a maiming control over it—spreads in the poem to increasingly diffuse violent struggles for power and dominance, struggles that have, in different forms, existed for centuries.

In “Fever 103°” (188), a similar collapse occurs between what happens to the poet's body and what happens during historical, political struggles for control, although here the violence of the world moves not from her thumb to the world but instead from the outside world into her body. Here, the poet refers specifically to the nuclear horrors that resulted from the struggle for political control of World War II: the “yellow sullen smokes” from the fever ravishing the speaker's body will, she is afraid, “trundle round the globe / Choking the aged and the meek” and turning orchids ghastly white with radiation. The fever then becomes “Like Hiroshima ash” and her head “a moon / Of Japanese paper, … Glowing and coming and going.” The poet's feverish head, then, comes to contain the infinitely incredible violence of Hiroshima.

The most arresting—and certainly the most well-known—occurrences of a desire for power and control spreading violently between one body and the world, though, happen in the poems where Plath makes explicit references to the holocaust. In “Mary's Song” (208), violence to an individual body (here, Jesus, Mary's son) escalates into “This holocaust I walk in”; the poem makes explicit the escalation and proliferation of violence caused by subjugating a body. “The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat,” the poem opens, and then the fire that broils this Christ image becomes “The same fire / Melting the tallow heretics, / Ousting the Jews.” In this world where dominance and authority come to those who control others, in other words, the same violent force spreads over centuries, outward from one body: the Roman desire for power which required that Christ, the Sunday lamb, be crucified, then moves to melt Christians, the “tallow heretics” who insist on their belief in him; when authority has shifted to these Christians, the same fire—that which controls by cracking, melting, burning—then spreads to oust the Jews, to gas in ovens that “glowed like heavens” those who do not believe in Christ and who instead are blamed for killing him. This fire feeds on whatever bodies—signaled by the central, fleshy image of a lamb roast cracking in its fat, reinforced by the reference to the holocaust's glowing ovens—it can find. The poet returns to the scene, complicit in the burning oppression of these bodies over centuries, in the poem's final lines. “It is a heart, / This holocaust I walk in,” she writes, making the holocaust a body part, and a vital one, and showing herself to be walking in it. The poem's final line then circles back to the same horror that opened the poem, the Sunday lamb being consumed, “O golden child the world will kill and eat,” signaling the never-ending horror of this cycle of oppression.

In “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” a collapse between violent control of the poet's body, and violent control of bodies in history, becomes even more dramatic. These poems not only hint that the poet glows like Hiroshima, or walks in the heart of the holocaust, but enact a transformation of that body into an explicit agent of oppression. In them, the speaker moves from the position of the oppressed—the Jew, the mutilated concentration camp victim—to that of the oppressor, capable of killing and consuming others' flesh. “Daddy, I have had to kill you” says the speaker who “may be a bit of a Jew” in “Daddy”; “Beware / Beware / … I eat men like air” says the dead and dismembered—unwrapped hand and foot—Lady Lazarus, whose skin has glowed “Bright as a Nazi lampshade” and whose face is “a featureless, fine Jew linen” when she returns from the dead. This violent dichotomy—be oppressed or oppress, be controlled or control, be mutilated or mutilate—seems evident. The prevalence of this dynamic supports the idea that not only survival but power per se, in its many different forms, is a large part of what these poems embody and address.

In suggesting that the thrust of these poems has to do not only with patriarchal protest but also with the ways that power and authority are obtainable, I do not mean to gloss over the ways that the power struggles Plath writes about are explicitly gendered. The speakers, first, are nearly all female and speak to expose or get back at men: Lazarus has returned from the dead a “lady” who is ready to eat men. “Daddy”'s little girl wants to kill her fascist father. Mary, the mother, sings of the violence that men will do to her child. Plath also chooses particularly gendered metaphors of oppression to describe power struggle. As the poems quoted throughout suggest, oppression gets figured, in her dichotomies, as cooking or eating others; being oppressed means being eaten. Those in control are those who can eat or who can keep others from eating: in “Mary's Song,” the world will kill and eat Jesus, figured as a lamb roast. Lady Lazarus will return from being dismembered not to rip men to bits, but to eat them. The speaker in “The Arrival of the Bee Box” (177) contemplates the control she has over the bees: “They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.” The vampire who said he was Daddy drank the poet's blood for a year. “The Jailer” (185) has his breakfast plate greased by the sweat of the one he has imprisoned; his prisoner starves until his or her ribs show. In “Death & Co.” (205), the speaker is red meat. In “Brasilia” (210), a mother pleads that her baby be saved from oppression by begging that he not be eaten:

O You who eat
People like light rays, leave
This one
Mirror safe, …

Self-assertion, too, gets expressed in terms of this particular dichotomy of eating or being eaten. In “Ariel,” the speaker expresses her electrified, almost gleeful, suicidal drive by exclaiming she will fly into a cauldron—will assert herself by placing her own self in a cooking pot. Perhaps she will become food for others, but she will do it to herself. This eating, cooking, feeding, and food imagery abounds in Plath's poetry; women's cultural connection with food make it, I think, a particularly gendered way of expressing a desire for power and a fear of being overpowered. At the same time, though, describing power in terms of food and eating reinforces the centrality of the body in struggles for dominance. Food is the literal mainstay of the body, without which the body will shrivel and die. Still, then, what Plath ends up with is a structure where people—including women—can either oppress or be oppressed, and where either position gets marked on bodies. The move she makes in her later poetry, given this, seems entirely understandable. In one move she seeks to imagine women in the place of power, mutilating others' bodies; Lady Lazarus eats men, daughter kills Daddy. The power structure stays intact; she just imagines being the one in control mutilating others. In another move, she emphasizes the power of the oppressed, mutilated body. As she recognizes, the oppressor is entirely dependent on the oppressed. The torturer's power depends on the prisoner's body:

What would the dark
Do without fevers to eat?
What would the light
Do without eyes to knife, what would he
Do, do, do without me?

(“The Jailer,” 185)

The Nazi's power depends on the Jew:

So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.

(“Lady Lazarus,” 198)

The mutilated, oppressed body, in this formulation, is recognized as important: cut bodies, perfect dead bodies, feverish bodies, are authoritative texts to be read. This configuration flips the dichotomy of oppressor/oppressed, so the oppressed body ends up on the top. As a poet creating texts from pain, her mutilated body becomes a source and manifestation of her power. A. Alvarez, commenting on “Daddy,” notes how this dynamic works: “This is the strategy of the concentration camps. When suffering is there whatever you do, by inflicting it upon yourself, you achieve your identity, you set yourself free.”¹² As everyone knows, this is precisely what happens next: Sylvia Plath converts her kitchen oven into a gas chamber. Plath asserts herself by recreating fascist history and turning it against her own body; in both her poetry and her life, she adopts the fascist model of power.

I have been assuming that this system—power expressed through control of the body—is completely undesirable, especially for women, whose bodies are metaphorically and often literally the ones oppressed under it. But it is possible, I know, to see a system that makes bodies the locus of power as liberating for women. Promoting and empowering the (female and female-identified) body—the maternal, the sexual—is hardly a new feminist move; it has been the goal behind much of the so-called “French” feminist project of the 1980s.¹³ Neither, for that matter, is promoting the oppressed female body as a way of claiming authority for women particularly novel. Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies, written in 1405, presents women's experiences of torture and self-mutilation as proof that they (and because of them, women in general) deserve respect. Saint Catherine has her breasts torn off, and milk pours from them; the virgin Marina has her body stretched out and her flesh ripped off with iron hooks; the blessed Blandina is placed on a grill, roasted, and sliced.¹⁴ The women endure triumphantly, without flinching. By exercising control of their violently violated bodies, these women serve as examples of the authority of women's lived experience.

What interests me, finally, then, is Plath's inability to imagine any way out of this bodily bind, any way of asserting herself without reverting ultimately to a fascist—a violent, dichotimized—model for obtaining power, a model that, as Hannah Arendt notes, itself enables totalitarianism:

What totalitarian rule needs to guide the behavior of its subjects is a preparation to fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim.¹⁵

The nagging discomfort that tempers the awe that readers—including this one—sometimes feel in response to Plath's poetry may be in part the product of her (and our) failure to conceive a power and authority not based on a dichotomy, not requiring an overpowered body. Stunningly articulating this disease is, I think, as far as Plath got.

I wanted to look at this double bind, not to judge Plath and what she did, but to examine what I think she was saying and to wonder (and of course only speculate) why she—who was, according to Ted Hughes, so repulsed and horrified by violence and fascism—ended up writing the poems she did and dying the way she did. The difficulties that Plath embodied seem telling in ways that extend beyond the particulars of her poems and her life and death. Her attempt to figure and claim authority for herself, in the shadow—or at least the intense awareness—of fascism and the model for claiming authority it made vivid, parallels, in some ways, the solutions of other women writers and thinkers of this century, such as Virginia Woolf and Simone Weil; they too confronted fascism's threatened and actual disempowerment by killing themselves, although their conflicts with fascism were, to be sure, more immediate. Weil, especially, turned the very terms of the war against her own body. This brilliant French philosopher-scholar-mystic pleaded to join the underground in 1942, but her request to be parachuted behind Nazi lines was denied.¹⁶ Hitler's horrors had led her to turn from the ideological pacifism she had previously believed in; she was then denied the opportunity to become, in a sense, the oppressor—to fight Nazis and Nazism directly, to overpower them (to become, in Plath's poems, “Daddy”'s killer). Her move from there was to make herself into the oppressed and use her own oppression to combat the war. Weil starved herself to death when, diagnosed with tuberculosis and told by her doctors to eat well, she refused more nourishment (and took in even less) than what was allowed French troops at the front. In striving to confront the increasingly powerful fascism before her, she moved through the dialectic of options available to her (be the oppressed; be the oppressor; be the oppressed but claim it as powerful), and ended up subjugating her own body to death. Weil and Plath, confronted with fascism (for Weil, actual Nazi threat; for Plath, more metaphorically, the violence of gaining authority), turned its terms against themselves. The disturbing similarities between these responses point all the more urgently to the fact that Plath, and we, have yet to think of a notion of power, or of not-power, of something other than power, some way of existing together without requiring the overpowered, some notion of shifting, fluctuating self-assertions; of nonheirarchies, of something other than being on top, or validating the bottom, a space where bodies can move in and out of formation, and where, (say …), the movement itself is what keeps it together.

Notes

1. All Plath citations are taken from Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper & Row, 1981). The title, followed by the number of each poem rather than the page number, will be cited parenthetically after each quotation.

2. Lawrence R. Ries, Wolf Masks (New York: Kennikat Press, 1977), 8. Hereafter WM, cited in the text. Ries focuses on Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, and John Wain, as well as Plath.

3. See, for example, Sandra M. Gilbert, “A Fine, White Flying Myth: The Life/Work of Sylvia Plath,” in Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 245-60; Paula Bennett, My Life a Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); Mary Lynn Broe, Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Columbia: University Press of Missouri, 1980); Lynda Bundtzen, Plath's Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983); and Steven Gould Axelrod, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

4. See, for example, Carole Ferrier's “The Beekeeper's Apprentice,” in Gary Lane, ed., Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

5. Jacqueline Rose, “Sylvia Plath and the Obscenity of Literary Criticism,” 20; an essay written for the Oxford English Limited Conference, “Prohibited Pleasures,” May 1987. Hereafter “SP,” cited in the text.

6. Axelrod's recent Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words sees Plath's struggle with the patriarchy of poetic form and tradition at the core of her voice and vision. Further references to this work will be cited in the text as SP.

7. I have focused here on the poems Plath wrote from 1962 on, where I think these issues come together most dramatically and with an accelerated frequency that makes me think they were vital to Plath and what she was trying to express and to where she finally ended up. A number of her earlier poems also address these issues and use the images and metaphors I am talking about.

8. For a compelling discussion of ways the body figured, similarly, at the base of theoretical conceptions of both race and gender in America, see Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” Representations 24 (1988): 28-59.

9. See, for example, Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Margaret W. Ferguson et al., eds., Rewriting the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Stallybrass genders Bakhtin's analysis (see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984]) of the way unruly bodies in the Renaissance disrupted or subverted class structures, suggesting that a “female grotesque” could interrogate class and gender hierarchies alike. See also Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (New York: Feminist Press, 1973).

10. See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 1:xiii.

11. Gordan W. Prange, ed., Hitler's Words (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Public Affairs, 1944).

12. A. Alvarez,

13. I do not, however, think that the overall tenor of Plath's late poetry describes joyous female bodies, although one might well find flickers of this kind of joy in her poems; she was writing before that position had been clearly and loudly voiced and did not voice it herself.

14. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 222, 226, 241.

15. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 468.

16. According to Anna Freud, Weil's request was denied in part because she looked “so obviously Jewish,” as quoted in Robert Coles, Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987), 58, and in part, Coles suggests, because she was a woman (33).