Samuel Hynes

SOURCE: "All the Wild Witches: The Women in Yeats's Poems," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXV, No. 4, Fall, 1977, pp. 565-82.

[In the following essay, Hynes discusses the women in William Butler Yeats's poetry in light of Yeats's idea of the poetic muse as a sexual, maternally creative, and pantheistic force.]

"We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with." This is Yeats in a letter written near the end of his life, playing a characteristic lifelong role—the poet writing to a woman about men, women, and love. The generalization that he makes is not, of course, as universal as it sounds; but certainly it is true of Yeats himself: he belongs in the category of lovers of women, those men for whom the company of women is more important than the company of men. Everything that we know about his life, all the copious biographical records that he left, gives the same impression of a life defined and supported by relationships with women, from Madame Blavatsky and Maud Gonne at the beginning to Dorothy Wellesley and Margot Ruddock at the end. The published letters make this point very clearly: more than half were written to seven women. And of all his correspondence the most moving letters are those addressed during his last years to an old woman who had been his mistress forty years before—an intimacy sustained for all that time on remembered feeling alone.

For Yeats the interaction of the sexes was a source of energy, and a paradigm of that energetic conflict of opposites that he saw at the core of existence. "The polarity which we call sex," as he put it, was one of an infinity of polarities in existence, but for Yeats it was the most dynamic and creative one. His philosophic system begins with the copulation of God and woman, and moves by the interpenetration of opposites, and even after death there is the intercourse of angels. And as with the Creation, so with creation: sexual energy is a source of poetic energy, the muse is a sexual being.

I am concerned here not either with biography or with Yeats's philosophical system, but with poems only, and specifically with the women in the poems, though the roles that they play will obviously be related to Yeats's experience of and ideas about women. A reasonable place to begin is a poem about three particular women—the poem in Responsibilities entitled "Friends." "Now," Yeats begins, "must I these three praise." But he doesn't praise them, exactly: what he does is to justify his willto-praise, taking each woman in turn as a separate case of praiseworthiness:

One because no thought,
Nor those unpassing cares,
No, not in these fifteen
Many-times-troubled years,
Could ever come between
Mind and delighted mind;
And one because her hand
Had strength that could unbind
What none can understand,
What none can have and thrive,
Youth's dreamy load, till she
So changed me that I live
Labouring in ecstasy.
And what of her that took
All till my youth was gone
With scarce a pitying look?
How could I praise that one?
When day begins to break
I count my good and bad,
Being wakeful for her sake,
Remembering what she had,
What eagle look still shows,
While up from my heart's root
So great a sweetness flows
I shake from head to foot.

The three women here are all clearly actual people who were important in Yeats's life—Lady Gregory, Olivia Shakespeare, and Maud Gonne—but their specific identification is not crucial to the poem. What is crucial is the women's roles that they represent—and Yeats's attitude toward those roles. Yeats begins with the least complicated relationship—his long connection with Lady Gregory. Like other men of his time (or perhaps I should simply say like other men) Yeats was inclined to separate the intellectual from the sexual powers in woman, and to see the two together as a sure source of conflict. He describes his friendship with Lady Gregory as entirely a communion of mind with mind; it is therefore a comfortable relationship, and easy to praise: there are no conflicts and no impediments here, because there are no bodies.

The second woman enters the poem in a more complicated way, in the role of sexual priestess, the woman who initiates the poet into the rites of maturity and so frees him from the prison of his youth and releases his creative energies. As with the first woman her role in his life is positive but partial: the instrument of the first was mind; this woman is a strong hand—an instrument of physical contact. That contact was important, but it belongs to the past: initiation is a stage, not a condition; and when it is over what remains is only vestigial intimacy, based on sex recollected in tranquillity. Yeats seems to have had such an intimate friendship with Olivia Shakespeare, and of course he found it praiseworthy, since it too contained no present source of conflict and no emotional expense.

But the third woman is another matter, and it is her presence in the poem that gives it its strength. Biographically she is Maud Gonne, but she is Maud Gonne transformed and mythologized into a figure of female sexual energy. Note how she enters: first as memories of suffering and loss, and of her indifference, and then as the cause of present feeling—present wakefulness, present sweetness. Unlike the other two she is given no positive role in the poet's past; she is simply there, like a natural force, an erotic emotional center to be acknowledged. This sexual figure appears many times in Yeats's poems, in various forms: she is imaged as a lion, an eagle, a burning cloud, a tightened bow—all nonhuman, violent, kinetic things. When she appears as a woman it is often as Helen of Troy, a woman who in Yeats's mind was not an ideal of beauty, but a symbol of beauty's unconscious power: perfectly beautiful, but perfectly unthinking, and so potentially destructive, but unaware of her destructiveness—Helen, the burner of cities, a symbolic female figure of which Maud Gonne is also a type.

Another way to describe this powerful threatening figure is to say that she is a witch. Yeats said of Maud Gonne that "she had to choose (perhaps all women must) between broomstick and distaff and she has chosen the broomstick—I mean the witches' hats." Yeats's witches are not the grotesque creatures of popular mythology, but sexually powerful women: "All the wild witches, those most noble ladies," he calls them in a poem. Their wildness is potentially destructive (it is an attribute of Maud Gonne in several poems), but it is compatible with nobility and with great beauty, and it is a source of creative energy.

It is not so easy to praise this sexual witch as it was to praise the other women: "How could I praise that one?" Yeats asks. The answer is simply that he does: the ending of the poem is not a justification of his praise, but simply a rendering of the intense emotions that thoughts of this woman stir in his heart. Such feelings are a form of praise, and so is the poem that contains them. So, you might say, the witch who stirs these feelings creates the poem.

All three women in the poem are treated as active shapers of the poet's life: they have wrought what joy is in his days, and he exists as a poet because they have existed. (No man played so significant a role in Yeats's creative life.) But it is the third woman, the cause of suffering, who is Yeats's real muse, because she alone is a present source of feeling, and so of essential creativity. Because of her this poem about women and sex is also a poem about poetry.

Yeats usually worked from actual persons to general ideas, as he does in "Friends," but there is one poem about women that starts from generalizations: "On Woman" in The Wild Swans at Coole. The poem begins:

May God be praised for woman
That gives up all her mind,
A man may find in no man
A friendship of her kind
That covers all he has brought
As with her flesh and bone,
Nor quarrels with a thought
Because it is not her own.

Not, one must admit, a very enlightened view; "the polarity which we call sex" is here set in mind/body terms, with man supplying the thought, and woman clothing it in her flesh: Man brings, Woman gives. This is a conception of the relation between the sexes that Yeats expresses elsewhere, and we must take it to be a part of his whole attitude toward women—not so much an ideal perhaps as a commonplace male daydream of what an agreeable life would be, a fantasy of cheerful female subordination.

But as the poem proceeds, this daydream dissolves into a different image of man-woman relations, the love of Solomon and Sheba.

. . . Solomon grew wise
While talking with his queens,
Yet never could, although
They say he counted grass,
Count all the praises due
When Sheba was his lass,
When she the iron wrought, or
When from the smithy fire
It shuddered in the water:
Harshness of their desire
That made them stretch and yawn,
Pleasure that comes with sleep,
Shudder that made them one.

Sheba here manifests the qualities that Yeats praised in "Friends": she is wise, she is a maker, and she is a lover. With her, Solomon experiences that condition of perfect union that Yeats called Unity of Being. It is Sheba, then, rather than Helen of Troy, who is Yeats's ideal woman; being sexually powerful, she is a witch, but she is a positive one; and her union with Solomon, which is both intellectual and sexual, is an ideal relationship.

Yeats said that he had dramatized himself as a man in this poem, and he must have seen himself in the role of Solomon, grown wise while talking with his queens. But Yeats also enters the poem at the end in his own voice, to utter a prayer for love:

God grant me—no, not here,

But when, if the tale's true,
The Pestle of the moon
That pounds up all anew
Brings me to birth again—
To find what once I had
And know what once I have known,
Until I am driven mad,
Sleep driven from my bed,
By tenderness and care,
Pity, an aching head,
Gnashing of teeth, despair;
And all because of some one
Perverse creature of chance,
And live like Solomon
That Sheba led a dance.

These lines serve as a gloss on the preceding Solomon and Sheba passage. Yeats ended that account of perfect love with the shudder of consummation. But what happens then? The lovers reenter time, desire begins again, and the suffering that deep feeling brings returns. Sexual love is not a mode of being, but a dance: Unity of Being is achievable in the act of love, but it is momentary. Yeats expands on this point in another poem about these perfect lovers ("Solomon and the Witch"), which ends with Sheba crying "O! Solomon! let us try again." That is Yeats's point about sexual love: it is a continual trying again. The same is true of the creative act of the poet. So you might say that sexual love is the poem you write with your body; and that poems are the intercourse of the imagination with its muse. And indeed Yeats did say essentially that: "A man's work thinks through him," he wrote in his journal (1909). "Man is a woman to his work, and it begets his thought."

By the end of "On Woman" the tone has changed radically. By introducing the sufferings of sexual love in his own voice, Yeats has transformed his poem from a male daydream of easy dominance to a tense expression of sexual need. The sexes remain complementary—Solomon needs Sheba, and Yeats at fifty needs his rightful woman—but the woman's role is no longer a subordinate one; in the sexual dance, it is Sheba who calls the tune.

These two poems are useful because they develop in similar ways, beginning with relatively simple views of men and women, and moving to the assimilation of more complicated and contradictory feelings. The same could be said of the development of Yeats's whole career: it begins with conventional stereotyped expressions of sexual attitudes and grows in complexity of understanding right up to the great sexual poems of his old age. If this account seems to make Yeats's career one long study of women and sex, one need only point out that his muse was a sexual woman and that he was therefore doing only what a poet should, in devoting his life to the contemplation of her nature.

If we look at Yeats's early love poems—at poems such as "He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace," "He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes," and "A Poet to His Beloved" (all from The Wind among the Reeds, 1899)—we can see how simple and conventional his initial attitudes were. Though these poems were addressed to an actual woman, Olivia Shakespeare, during an actual love affair, there are no woman, no man, and no sexuality in them: the beloved is reduced to an inventory of poetical parts—long hair, pearl-pale hands, passion-dimmed eyes—and the lover is only a weary voice. In the first published versions of these poems Yeats gave his speaker various pseudonyms—Aedh, Mongan, Robartes, O'Sullivan Rua—as though to say, "Please don't think that this is me uttering these Pre-Raphaelite clichés." And indeed it isn't: it is a conventional poetical figure who is speaking to a conventional poetical figure, about a man/woman relationship that is also conventional. It is all made out of poetry.

Actual women, and actual feelings about them, begin to enter the poems in Yeats's next volume, In the Seven Woods_y written when Yeats was in his late thirties. It was a time for him of sexual deprivation: "Since my mistress had left me," he later wrote of this period, "no other woman had come into my life, and for nearly seven years none did. I was tortured by sexual desire and disappointed love." So the first real poems of love came not out of fulfillment, but out of loss and desire. And out of an increasing sense of Time. The relation between love and time is one that Yeats returned to throughout his career, and was still brooding over at the end of his life, in poems like the Crazy Jane cycle and "The Wild Old Wicked Man." It is no doubt an inevitable aspect of the theme of love—to love is to be aware of mortality—but for Yeats it was an especially insistent subject. For Yeats saw both woman's beauty and love itself as poignantly vulnerable to that mutability which was at the base of his tragic sense of life. Two poems in particular from In the Seven Woods introduce this theme: "Adam's Curse," in which love and romantic ways of loving wane like the hollow moon, and "The Folly of Being Comforted," a poem about the mutability of beauty.

One that is ever kind said yesterday:
"Your well-belovèd's hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seems impossible, and so
All that you need is patience."
Heart cries, "No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again. ... "
O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head,
You'd know the folly of being comforted.

This seems at first a conventional lover's protestation: don't try to comfort me with the effects of time; to me she is still beautiful—and still unattainable. But there are actually two comforts offered in the poem—the friend's attempt to comfort and the heart's response—and both are foolish. The lover will go on loving, and the wellbeloved will go on aging, and there is no comfort in either process. If she'd but turn her head the lover would see that he still loved her but he would also see that she was aging. Man and woman must live in time; neither love nor mortality can be altered by thinking about it.

The woman in this poem is sharply, even cruelly rendered: gray hairs and shadows are scarcely the traditional materials of love poetry. No doubt this is Maud Gonne as she actually looked in her late thirties. The identification is not important, but the actuality of the woman is; from this point on, the women in Yeats's poems begin to be real distinguishable people existing in the real world: Lady Gregory, Ann Gregory, Florence Farr, Mabel Beardsley, Maud Gonne's daughter Iseult, Eva Gore-Booth, and Con Markiewicz, and later George Yeats, Margot Ruddock, and Dorothy Wellesley. As they appear they begin to form a collective myth of female energy in its various forms—the child, the virgin, the witch, the wild woman, the crone: a configuration of female roles not unlike the myth of Robert Graves's white goddess. It is inevitably a man's myth, not simply because a man is the maker of it, but because in Yeats's mind the sexual interaction of male and female was a paradigm of the creative process; in these poems a cast of energetic women engage the imagination of the poet, and out of that engagement come the poems.

In the most powerful of these mythologized women energy is a kind of madness, and it sometimes seems that Yeats regarded madness as simply the superlative form of femaleness.

It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

These lines are from "A Prayer for My Daughter," but there are many other poems that make the same point: that in some "fine women" an excess of sexual energy deflects them from their true female functions into the alien world of history and action and into a kind of mad activity. Yeats's argument is that sexual energy (being natural and female) should ideally exist outside history (which is male). This is the essential male sexist assumption—that nature and history have gender—and Yeats was certainly sexist in his theorizing about women; but the actual women in his poems of this middle period do not conform to his theory: they are all in history, and passionately so. In poems like "No Second Troy," "Easter 1916," "On a Political Prisoner," and "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing" Yeats wrote about women who had turned their energies to public political ends; it was not the ideal role for women that he imagined, but it was a reality that he acknowledged, and to which he was attracted. Clearly he liked fine women, even crazy ones.

It seems at first surprising that though Yeats was a lover of women, he did not write many love poems to them (that is, if we take a love poem to be a private I-Thou communication, the subject of which is present feelings about the relationship). Even his poems concerning Maud Gonne are almost never love poems in this sense: instead they are poems about love, which is a very different thing. There are two sets of poems that Yeats grouped together that we might call his Maud Gonne cycles: one group, in The Green Helmet, begins with "A Woman Homer Sung" and runs through "Against Unworthy Praise"—seven short poems in all. The other, in The Wild Swans at Coole, begins with "Memory" and ends with "Presences"—eight poems. Neither is, strictly speaking, a cycle of love poems; rather both are concerned in different ways with loss, and so belong with Yeats's other meditations on the larger theme of the relation between love and time. In the first cycle the subject is the loss of the beloved, and the consequences of that loss for Yeats's poetry; the poems were written in the years following Maud Gonne's marriage, and together they constitute a sort of Yeatsian Dejection Ode, in which the muse withdraws her sexual energy and leaves the poet with only the lifeless matter of language. The point is made most clearly in "Reconciliation":

Some may have blamed you that you took away
The verses that could move them on the day
When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the
eyes blind
With lightning, you went from me, and 1 could find
Nothing to make a song about but kings,
Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things
That were like memories of you. . . .
But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,
My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.

Here the woman is clearly the muse whose presence lends the poet's verses their power to move. What is left when she goes is only the stage properties of poetry, which take such life as they have from memories of her. There is a paradox here, which Yeats repeated in his later poem on the same theme, "The Circus Animals' Desertion": poems are only dream versions of the reality of love. If one were truly loved, it seems, one would not need to write poems. Yet it is the loss of love that turns the poet to his poor words and barren thoughts, and so creates the poem of love out of its absence.

The second cycle, written some ten years later, focuses on the losses that time inflicts on the beloved: the loss of youth and beauty, the loss of reputation, the loss of authority in the world. Like the earlier poems they treat Maud Gonne as the muse, but a muse grown old, whose power to inspire is retrospective: "I knew a phoenix in my youth" is the refrain of one poem, but another repeats "vague memories, nothing but memories." It is appropriate and inevitable that Yeats's muse should age, for everything in his created world is subject to the same destructive power of time. "Everything that man esteems/Endures a moment or a day"—including love and beautiful women, poems and poets, civilization itself. From this point in Yeats's career (we are at 1917, his fiftysecond year, the year of his marriage) the powerful historical women begin to grow old and fade from the poems, and when they do appear, they do so in the role of powerless age: Maud Gonne in "Among School Children," Lady Gregory in "Coole Park and Ballylee," the Gore-Booth sisters in the elegy to them.

Love passes, the sexual energy of actual loved women fades—and what is one to make poems of then? Who will be an old man's muse? We can find a hint of a solution in a letter from Yeats to Olivia Shakespeare written in July 1926: "Some time ago you asked me for some love poems I had written. I did not send them because they want revision. They are part of a series. I have written the wild regrets, for youth and love, of an old man, and the poems you asked for are part of a series in which a woman speaks, first in youth and then in age." The two series to which Yeats refers are "A Man Young and Old," published in The Tower in 1928, and "A Woman Young and Old," published in The Winding Stair (1933). Yeats calls them love poems, but one must radically redefine the term to make it fit. For in these poems there is no identifiable I or you, only generic Man or Woman, old or young. Being stripped of specific human identity, the poems are also stripped of the trappings and consolations of romantic love: there are no pearl-pale hands and passion-dimmed eyes here, body appears as an unmodified noun, sex is violent, and old age is ugly. In these bare poems love is—not reduced, exactly, but rendered in its essential naked sexuality, whether felt or remembered. They are the love poems of the genders, not of individuals.

Like the earlier Maud Gonne poems, these are poems about love—the sufferings of young love, and the wild regrets of age. The poems of youth are passionate and harshly honest—the lover is a "lout," struck dumb by his heart's agony; the poems of old age have a Becketty savagery—intimate and sexual, but never tender. What they all have in common is a great fierce energy: even to the old man, love is a shriek, a blow, a harsh laugh, a thumping heart. They are energetic poems, and the source of the energy is sexuality.

Take for example one of the Old Man's songs, "His Memories."

We should be hidden from their eyes,
Being but holy shows
And bodies broken like a thorn
Whereon the bleak north blows,

The women take so little stock
In what I do or say

They'd sooner leave their cosseting
To hear a jackass bray;
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take—
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck—
That she cried into this ear,
"Strike me if I shriek."

The poem begins with a familiar theme of Yeats's later poems—his hatred of age and physical decay. The old body is an object of loathing—a broken thorn, a "sort of battered kettle at the heel," "a tattered coat upon a stick." But though age brings loss of sexual attractiveness (women, as he says here, take no stock in what he does), it does not diminish sexuality itself. There are great energy and great physicality in this poem, as there are in other poems of this time—"The Tower," for example, and "Sailing to Byzantium"—and though it begins in hatred and loathing, it ends in love. The poem turns on the words "And yet," and what follows provides a kind of balance: remembered beauty balancing present ugliness, sexual love balancing hatred. The beauty is once more Helen, the wrecker of Troy, woman understood as sexual power; but she is remembered not mythically but intimately, in a blunt physical way, as a passionate woman making passionate love.

The poem is called "His Memories," though there is really only one memory in it; but that one memory is rendered more vividly and immediately than the old man's present agedness is. The point made about old age is not very comforting: memory doesn't fade, nor desire diminish, and there will be no philosophic calm. Nevertheless in its frank celebration of sexual love the poem is curiously heartening, because it sounds honest: old age probably will be like that. It is a courageous statement for an old ailing poet to make.

But the most surprising thing about these late love poems is that in the second group Yeats speaks as a woman—in a woman's voice and with a woman's sensibility. His woman is passionately physical, takes pleasure in "lively lads," and enjoys her own body in a very unladylike, unrestrained way. She is also, like the Man, frankly and directly carnal. The seventh poem, for example, is a Yeatsian variation on the aubade from Romeo and Juliet:

"Parting"

He. Dear, I must be gone
While night shuts the eyes
Of the household spies;
That song announces dawn.

She. No, night's bird and love's
Bids all true lovers rest,

He. Daylight already flies
From mountain crest to crest.

She. That light is from the moon.
He. That bird . . .

She. Let him sing on,
I offer to love's play
My dark declivities.

Here darkness and the sexual woman have the last word, as they did in "Solomon and the Witch" (and don't in Romeo and Juliet). Love is play here, but it is serious play, and it is physical play: declivities is a topographical word, which makes the woman's body a little earth—and not in the lover's eyes but in her own.

In "A Woman Young and Old" Yeats had, you might say, become his own muse, by the extraordinary act of assuming a woman's private sexual identity as a poetic persona. Three years later he did it again, even more brilliantly, in "Words for Music Perhaps," a sequence of twenty-five poems of which fifteen are uttered by that same persona, the sexual woman. Of these, seven are Crazy Jane poems. Jane is a wonderfully rich character, but what she essentially represents in these poems is the changeless female principle, as Yeats understood it. Living as she does out of history, and subject only to natural cyclical change, she can express sexual energy even in old age (as Maud Gonne and Lady Gregory couldn't—at least not in Yeats's poems). To call her crazy is simply to recognize that, being the essential woman, she contains the generic madness of femaleness: she is the wild old wicked muse, the last of Yeats's witches.

The Crazy Jane poems, taken together, make an important point about the sexuality of Yeats's later poems. In the dramatis personae of the cycle there are three characters: two men, the bishop and Jack the journeyman, and one woman, Jane. Between Jane and the bishop a lively dialogue goes on; they are the antinomies of the poems—Sex and Anti-Sex. But Jack gets only one line to speak in the whole sequence—if indeed it is he who says wearily "That's certainly the case" during one of Jane's speeches. As the Lover he has virtually no existence independent of Jane—he is simply the sexual partner, the "solid man," who lives in Jane's memory rather as Helen lives in the Old Man's. But the energy of the poems comes from Jane alone.

One sees a similar assignment of energy in the "Three Bushes" cycle in Last Poems, where the Lady and the Chambermaid plan and comment on the sexual action, leaving the lover with nothing to do but perform his necessary act, utter a six-line song, and then go out and fall on his head and die. In both cycles it is the women who are the sexual dynamos, the initiators and the articulators of love's play; the men are there because the polarities of sex require them, but they are passive and mute.

The other poems of "Words for Music Perhaps" are in the mood of "A Woman Young and Old," though with perhaps a greater sexual tenderness in some (I am thinking especially of the beautiful little lyrics "Three Things" and "After Long Silence"). Once more Yeats insisted that these were "love poems." Writing about The Winding Stair to Olivia Shakespeare, he said: "'Crazy Jane' poems (the origin of some of these you know) and the little group of love poems that follow are, I think, exciting and strange. Sexual abstinence fed their fire—I was ill and yet full of desire." One recalls that time thirty years earlier, when Yeats was, as he said, "tortured by sexual desire" and writing the poems of In the Seven Woods. Like the others these are "love poems" only in the sense of being about the experience of love, especially of love remembered. It is appropriate that he should have written about them to Olivia Shakespeare, for to him she was the "woman young and old"—a woman then in her sixties as Yeats was, but also a woman remembered as young, the woman he had loved more than thirty years before.

Should we say then that Yeats achieved in the end an androgynous mind? Coleridge said that a great mind must be androgynous, and Virginia Woolf agreed. Certainly Yeats had a great mind, and in his last years he said that it was an androgynous one. In a letter to Ethel Mannin in 1935 he wrote: "You are doubly a woman, first because of yourself and secondly because of the muses, whereas I am but once a woman"; and in the following year he wrote to Dorothy Wellesley: "My dear, my dear—when you crossed the room with that boyish movement, it was no man who looked at you, it was the woman in me. It seems that I can make a woman express herself as never before. I have looked out of her eyes. I have shared her desire." And that is true—in his last poems he could do that. Yet for all that, he was scarcely what Virginia Woolf meant by androgynous. "It is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind," she wrote in A Room of One's Own, "that it does not think specially or separately of sex"; and "it is fatal," she thought, "for any one who wrote to think of their sex." Yeats did think specially and separately of sex, and thought about it a great deal. He believed in essential, antinomial sexual differences, and he thought in Man/Woman dichotomies (though he also believed in the equivalence of sexual pleasure, and in the power of Sheba to direct the sexual dance). In his own sexual orientation he was entirely masculine. But though a man, he was a man who loved women, and because he loved women, he could imagine their feelings—for isn't love just that, a living into another person's being?

Yeats's world moved by the interaction of opposites, and of these the most fundamental and fertile was the interaction of man and woman in sexual love, the dance of Solomon and Sheba. That dance is the essential act of creation, in which Self engages its own opposite, and becomes unified with it. "The marriage bed is the symbol of the solved antinomy," Michael Robartes says in A Vision. In this sense the dance is a marriage, a poem is a marriage, sex is a marriage. Even marriage is a marriage. They are all acts of the imagination, by which a self transcends its separateness by creating something more. In this process sex is a metaphor, and the sexual woman—old or young, historical or mythical, crazy or sane—is the muse of all creation. If that is true, then in his last years Yeats's imagination had become like a marriage bed—a coupling of male and female, a solved antinomy. Perhaps that is why those last poems are the greatest lyric poems of our time.

Sherry Zivley

SOURCE: "Plain's Will-less Women," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, 1981, pp. 4-14.

[In the following essay, Zivley examines works in which Sylvia Plath exhibited passivity and possible schizophrenia.]

When most people think of the poetry of Sylvia Plath, they think of "Daddy," of "Lady Lazarus," of "Lesbos," the Ariel poems of strong will and incredible energy. Such Plath poetry is often remembered as charged with dangerously high voltage. Nevertheless, much of Plath's poetry is extremely passive in tone and theme. Much of her poetry presents personae who are passive and helpless and who often yearn to achieve a state of even greater passivity and numbness.

Such helplessness and will-lessness have been discussed by most major psychoanalytic writers who agree that such passivity is a symptom of a human being in the throes of serious depression or schizophrenia.

In his early and major clinical studies of schizophrenia, Harry Stack Sullivan pointed out that a primary indicator of the illness is regression. Sullivan explains that the patient's "mental structure [is] . . . disassociated" and that "the disintegrated portions [of the patient's mental structure] may regress to various earlier levels of mental ontology." He explains, "This disparity of depths seems the essence of that which is schizophrenia, as distinguished from other mental disorders."¹ Recovery from schizophrenia, Sullivan points out, depends on the degree of hope the patient sees for the future. He says,

.. . the social milieu to which the patient has to return, has a great deal to do with his future. If . . . the patient . . . belie[ves] that he can circumvent or rise above environmental handicaps . . . his recovery proceeds.²

If a person is unable "to secure the requisite balance between desire and satisfaction, then he recoils from the world—either physically, by flight into the hinterland or suicide, or by the route of symbols, schizophrenia."³ Sullivan distinguishes between depression and schizophrenia:

While the true depressive is preoccupied with thoughts of the enormity of the disaster, of punishment, hopelessness, and the like the incipient schizophrenic is not the host of any simple content, but is burdened with pressing distresses, and becomes more and more wrapped up in fantastic explanation and efforts at remedy. The distinction is one fundamentally dynamic: Pure depression is practically a standstill of adjustment; the schizophrenic depression is a most unhappy struggle. Instead of literally or figuratively sitting still, these people are striving to cut themselves off from painful stimuli, escape the situation by mystic and more or less extraordinary efforts, and justify themselves by heroic measures.⁴

Sullivan explains that "in every case of schizophrenic illness there is found in the history of the individual a point at which there had occurred what might well be called a disaster to self-esteem," which in turn led them to experience panic.⁵ Having lost his self-esteem, the schizophrenic begins to experience feelings of helplessness and consequently will-lessness, which Silvano Arieti points out is a predominant symptom of schizophrenia. Many schizophrenics refuse to believe in the "influence of will on one's life." Arieti says,

. . . many schizophrenics believe that they do not live or will. They are lived, they are caught in a network of situations where other people, other facts, other events determine their life. They have no part whatsoever in determining the world but are reduced to the state of inanimate objects. If that is all their life is about, they either give up entirely or become even more passive.

They believe that other people .. . do have a will and determine the world. Such function is denied only to them, and therefore they cannot accept this deprivation. Inherent in their mental condition is this lifelong protest.⁶

If a person experiences a "complete loss of the capacity to will," he becomes catatonic; he not only loses his belief in his own ability to will, he loses the ability to even move his own body.⁷ Arieti explains,

During the catatonic illness the patient attaches a tremendous sense of responsibility to any manifestation of his will, even in reference to actions which are generally considered of little importance. Every willed movement comes to be seen not as a function but as a moral issue; every motion is considered not merely as a fact but as a value. Such an abnormal sense of responsibility reaches the acme of intensity when it becomes associated with delusions of negative cosmic power or negative omnipotence. The patient comes to believe that a little movement that he can make, by producing a change in the state of the universe, may be capable of harming his whole community or even of destroying the whole world.

Although he is not pyschologically paralyzed, he is, for practical purposes, petrified. Like a statue he cannot respond to people who touch him, bump into him, smile at him, or caress him. But unlike⁹a statue he hurts in the most atrocious way, having lost something more precious than his eyesight, the most human of his possessions—his will.⁸

It is obvious from these analyses that a regression into will-lessness has extremely serious consequences for anyone. Yet this is precisely the kind of regression demonstrated in many of Plath's poems, in which the personae either yearn for or have achieved extreme conditions of will-lessness.

Nearly all of these will-less personae are women, which is not surprising. Many of them suffer from what David McClelland and Norman Watt call "sex-role alienation," or an unwillingness to act out the roles or do the work ordinarily expected of women in our culture.¹⁰ Since these women are unable to balance their desires with the demands of their culture, they are much more likely to suffer from schizophrenia.

Many of Sylvia Plath's will-less women do manifest serious schizophrenic symptoms of will-lessness. These personae see absolutely no hope, no possibilities for their lives.

Many powerful and recurring images in Plath's poetry reveal the personae's frustration, helplessness, and fury. Some of these are images of a Jew in Nazi Germany, a prisoner in jail, a patient in a hospital, a queen bee in her hive, and other incarcerated characters.

In the imagery in which Plath identifies the persona's predicament with that of a Jew in Nazi Germany, the main implications of Plath's imagery of oppression appear. The speaker is trapped and hates her oppressor; she sees nothing but further suffering and death as her future. In "Daddy"¹¹ the speaker associates her father/oppressor with "the snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna," "a swastika," describes him with the words "your Luftwaffe," "your Aryan eye," and "Meinkampf look," and calls him "Panzer-man, panzer-man." He is himself like a Panzer in his obliteration of all vulnerable creatures who stand in his way. The speaker characterizes her father's egocentricity by his recurrent "Ich, ich, ich," and because of him she thinks the German "lanuage obscene." She is so fearful of him that she cannot speak; her tongue is "stuck in a barb [sic] wire snare." She epitomizes him as

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen
I begin to talk like a Jew
I think I may well be a jew.

She considers both her father and her husband (who resembles her father) to be her jailors, persecutors, and potential murderers. She appears to realize that her problem is that she seeks out dictatorial men and assumes a passive, scapegoat role in her relationships with them. Yet this intellectual recognition has not prevented her from becoming emotionally involved with such men. She says,

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

Plath's writing from the time she wrote The Bell Jar has portrayed women complaining bitterly of their submission to such male tyrants. Again and again she uses the image of the Jew in Nazi Germany to dramatize a woman's oppression by such men. In "Lady Lazarus" (A5-9) the speaker describes her skin as "Bright as a Nazi lampshade" and her face as "a featureless, fine Jew linen." No longer seeing herself as a complete human being, the speaker feels reduced by persecution to her physical elements: "a cake of soap/A wedding ring/A gold filling." She calls the men in her life "Herr Doktor," "Herr Enemy," "Herr God," and "Herr Lucifer" and warns them to "Beware/Beware." Yet the speaker is never seen turning her furious energy to freeing herself from these men. Instead, she merely explodes and vents her anger in what is probably merely one or more explosions in repetitive cycles of passively accepting abuse or domination, of getting angry, and of making threats. In "Getting There" (A36-39), the speaker imagines herself in Germany, surrounded by "Krupp [the munitions manufacturer], black muzzles" and says that to reach freedom, "It is Russia I have to get across . . . /I am dragging my body/Quietly through the straw of the boxcars." It would be such a long and demanding journey that she feels helpless to succeed. In "Mary's Song," the speaker's concern expands to include her child. She fears that either she or her child will become sacrificial lambs in "The same fire" that melts "the tallow heretics" and ousts Jews from their native lands. Suchimages may be excessively dramatic but they reveal how Plath apparently viewed marriage in the 1950's and early 1960's.

Plath portrays other helpless women as hospital patients. These women feel that they have lost their identities and that they are not completely human and alive any more. Many of these women even feel only partially animate. They feel helpless against the doctors who would purge them of their faults to turn them into ordinary women and submissive wives. In "Tulips" (A10-11), the speaker says,

I am nobody . . .
I have given my name and my day-clothes
up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist
and my body to the surgeons.

These surgeons "have swabbed me clean of my loving associations," and the speaker feels, consequently, "I am a nun now, I have never been so pure." In "Tulips," she feels reduced to only a part of herself, only "an eye between two white lids." In "Death & Co." (A28-30) the speaker is reduced still further and feels that "I am red meat," no more important than meat in a butcher's counter. Likewise the patient in "Paralytic" (A77-80) thinks of herself as merely a "Dead egg" And in "The Stones" (C82-84): the speaker feels that she is treated as if she were a piece of machinery being repaired or a jewel being chiseled by a gem cutter. In none of these poems does the speaker think of herself as having value to her family, to her doctor, or to the attendants in the hospital in which she finds herself.

One of Plath's most powerful images of a woman trapped in a role from which she cannot extricate herself and in which she feels controlled by society, family, and husband appears in her bee-keeping poems. In these poems, Plath shows the queen bee as doubly imprisoned by beekeeper and worker bees. In "The Beekeeper's Daughter" the queen is owned and controlled by the "hieratical" beekeeper, "the Maiestro of the bees" (C73). In "The Bee Meeting" Plath shows the queen bee as surrounded, trapped, and enslaved by thousands of worker bees. This queen is threatened yearly by the young virgin queens who "Dream of a duel [with the older queen] they will win inevitably" because she is becoming "old, old, old" and "exhausted" (A57). Likewise she is threatened in the poem "The Bee Meeting" by the bee-keeper who may search out and kill the old queen in order to replace her with a younger, stronger queen to guarantee the health of the hive. Like the queen, the female novice beekeeper becomes a scapegoat in "The Bee Meeting" (A55-57) in a village ritual she does not understand. In this poem the newcomer is outnumbered by other villagers and, unlike them, wears a "sleeveless summery dress' with "no protection" while "they are all gloved and covered." By the end of this poem, queen bee and novice beekeeper become fused into a scapegoat who is sacrificed in order that the hive and society may continue their traditional functions.

Still another image Plath uses to show the domination of a woman is that of the vampire and his victim in "Daddy" and other poems. In this image the woman feels that she is the victim of a parasite who drinks and depletes her lifeblood.

Plath occasionally shows persecution through images which portray the persona as a persecuted Christ. The speaker in "Apprehensions" identifies herself with Christ during his crucifixion. The protagonist of "Gigolo" (WT6) says "My mouth sags" like "the mouth of Christ." And another persona expresses "a terror/Of being off under crosses and a rain of pieties" (WT 3). These images portray a person who feels as helpless as someone being crucified would be.

A different image utilizes Christian tradition to portray woman's helplessness. The woman in "Getting There" (A36-38) thinks of herself as Adam's rib and says,

It is Adam's side
This earth I rise from, and I in agony.
I cannot undo myself.

Plath uses the image of a prisoner in jail to indicate some of her protagonists' feelings of helplessness. One speaker feels she is a captive of the devil, to the "Man in Black" in "the dim barbed wire headland of Deer Island prison" (C52). The speaker in "Daddy" believes she has been controlled and tormented for so long that she has developed "a love of the rack and screw." And in "The Jailer"¹² the wife complains (as a mere component of another person's body, she obviously feels helpless to will any actions of her own) of a variety of abuses from her husband, saying she has been "locked in," "drugged," "raped," "tortured," "hung, starved, burned, and hooked." In the process, her will has atrophied.

In many of these images that describe Plath's female protagonists' loss of freedom, the protagonist can anticipate nothing but death. The Jew in Nazi Germany, the queen bee, the vampire's victim, the crucified Christ, and others are reduced to corpses in the only peace that Plath offers these protagonists.

All of these personae appear to be unable to "circumvent or rise above [their] environmental handicaps," as Sullivan has said is common of schizophrenics. They are, consequently, unable to make any decisions that could make their lives more tolerable. Instead, like the patients Sullivan describes, they "become more and more wrapped in fantastic explanation and efforts at remedy." The very nature of the images with which they describe themselves are fantastic and extreme, and those personae who suggest efforts at remedy, like the speakers in "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy", vent their anger in wild threats but do little to change their predicaments.

According to R. D. Laing, a person who feels he lacks identity and autonomy "may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive .... He may feel more insubstantial than substantial."¹³ Such a person may experience what Laing calls "petrification and depersonalization." Specifically, he may fear "being turned from a live person into a dead thing, into a stone, into a robot."¹⁴ And in order to avoid being turned into an inanimate being by other people or external forces, he chooses to turn himself into an inanimate being. For such a person, Laing says,

Utter detachment and isolation are
regarded as the only alternative to a
clamor vampire-like attachment in
which the other person's life-blood is
necessary for one's own survival, and
yet is a threat to one's survival. Therefore,
the polarity is between complete
isolation or complete merging of
identity rather than between separateness
and relatedness.¹⁵

Plath not only uses a variety of situations in which one human being has totalitarian rule over another to portray the role of contemporary women; she also utilizes other images which portray her personae as helpless bodies or inanimate objects. These persons are completely devoid of will. They are like the schizophrenic patients Arieti describes who "believe that they do not live or will." In "Paralytic" (A77-78), the speaker says,

My God the iron lung
That loves me, pumps
My two
Dust bags in and out.

In such a predicament, as Plath says in "Edge," "The woman is perfected" only when she is dead and

Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusions of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Even worse off than the women Plath portrays as victims are these who are so helpless that they think of themselves as corpses. Although charged with less immediate emotional impact than the many images in which a female protagonist is compared to a sensate, suffering victim with whom the reader can empathize, much more chilling in their cumulative impact are the images in which Plath shows sensitive women reduced to inanimate objects. These women have numbed their sensations in order to endure their suffering or have had their wills broken by suffering. In either case they are completely defenseless and helpless. Plath describes these women with imagery that suggests that they are less than human. There is a skeleton which mimics the dead body of a once-living being, a mannequin that imitates human form, a mechanical watch, which has movement, and Plath's most frequently used inanimate image—that which is furthest removed from a human being—the rock or stone.

In "All the Dead Dears" the speaker describes her reaction to "a stone coffin of the fourth century A.D. containing the skeletons of a woman, a mouse, and a shrew" (C29-30), which she saw in the archaeological museum in Cambridge. Referring to "This antique museum-cased lady," Plath asserts

This lady here's no kin
Of mine, yet kin she is: she'll suck
Blood and whistle my marrow clean
To prove it. As I think now of her
head,
From the mercury-backed glass
Mother, grandmother, greatgrand-mother
Reach hag hands to haul me in;

Here Plath sees the dead woman as representative of all women and identifies with the corpse, feeling as dead and trapped as the mummy. In "The Rival" the speaker wakes in a "mausoleum" (A p. 48). And in "Tulips" she feels like a weighted body ready to be submerged, with "A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck" (A p. 11 ). The women presented as inanimate objects believe that they have no will power at all. Some are presented as dolls or mannequins. They still have the appearance of human beings but are treated as objects and lack both will power and feelings. In both "The Applicant" and (A p .4-5) the woman is kept in a closet and sold as one would sell a suit of clothes. She is called a "living doll," an automation that "can sew," "can cook," and "can talk, talk, talk," and that will serve as an inanimate "Poultice" or "image" to the man who purchases her. In "The Munich Mannequins" (A pp. 73-74) the prostitutes are described as mannequins, store dummies, old-fashioned dummies with heads and arms, but with steel rods instead of bodies, they are described as "Orange lollies on silver sticks." These mannequins seem immobile as they "lean tonight/In Munich" waiting to be moved about, dressed, undressed, and used by the men who purchase them. In "Amnesiac" the woman is called "The little toy wife" (WT p. 19). And in "Witch Burning" the woman becomes both doll and scapegoat because she is shown as a voodoo doll (CW p. 53).

No human qualities remain in the imagery of stones or paper that Plath uses to describe women. Such images suggest that these women have not only lost all will power, but also have become numb, dumb, and totally insensate objects. They are completely passive. They have given up. In "Tulips," the speaker says "My body is a pebble to them [the hospital staff], they tend it as water/Tends to the pebbles it must run over" (A p. 10). In "The Beekeeper's Daughter," the speaker complains to the beekeeper that her heart is "under your foot" and that she is a "sister of stone" (C73). In "The Rival" the speaker says her rival's first "gift is making a stone out of everything" (A p. 48) thus implying that she feels she herself has been turned to stone by her rival. In "The Stones" the speaker feels she is lying "on a great anvil" where a pestle is gradually diminishing her. She says "I become a still pebble . . . /In a quarry of silences" (C82). The speaker finds the peacefulness that comes with this stonelike numbness desirable and preferable to the suffering she has experienced when she still perceived her feelings. In "Lorelei" the speaker seeks both numbness and total oblivion, saying, "Stone, stone, ferry me down there" (C23). Again and again Plath uses the image of woman as stone. In "Leaving Early" the speaker says "We slept like stones" (CW p. 19). In "Love Letter" the speaker claims "then I was dead/. . . like a stone" (CW p. 27). In "Who" the pregnant woman insists, "I am a root, a stone, an owl pellet" (CW p. 48).

Plath often uses paper as an image to describe the experience of being insensate and disembodied. In "Cut" the speaker says she has a "thin/Papery feeling" (A p. 13). And in "Tulips" she calls herself a "cut-paper shadow" (A p. 11). The miscarrying secretary in "Three Women" believes she has become like men who are "like cardboard."

Other images of people as paper appear in "Crossing the Water" in which the people are described as paper dolls—"cut-paper people" (CW p. 56).

A particularly painful variant on the paper image is that of paper burning, an image in which the woman described is as helpless as paper, but who suffers from burning pain. The speaker in "Eavesdropper" (WT pp. 25-27) feels she is being held and destroyed by the eavesdropper, whom she describes as

one
Long nicotine finger
On which I,
White cigarette,
Burn.

And in another image, the paper is reduced even further, to ashes: a widow is described as "a sheet of newsprint in a fire" (CW p. 22).

In other images that connote helplessness, numbness, and often death or inanimateness, Plath describes women as "Jade" in "Purdah" (WT p. 40), and as ivory in "Childless Woman" (WT p. 34). In "In Plaster" the speaker is imprisoned in an alter ego who is like a plaster cast containing her. She feels she "shall never get out of this!" (CW p. 16). In "Love Letter" the speaker claims that she slept like "a snake" (CW p. 27). And in "Two Campers in Cloud Country" the speaker complains, "I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here." In "Face Lift" as the speaker is anesthetized. She describes her experience: "At the count of two/Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard . . ." (CW p. 5). In "Gigolo" the speaker claims to be merely a "Pocket watch" and says, "I tick well" (WT p. 6). Also in "An Appearance" the woman's body "opens and shuts—/A Swiss watch" (WT 10). These women retain no human qualities at all. They have become objects.

All of Plath's will-less and helpless women are potential candidates for or already suffer from, severe mental illness. They are likewise potential suicides, since they can see no possibilities for themselves other than lying down and playing dead. Perhaps they suffer because they feel entrapped or enslaved in their role as housewives. Perhaps they represent all twentieth century people—men and women. But, if Plath herself felt as her female protagonists do, if she felt as oppressed and dependent as they, if she thought there were as few possibilities for a woman living independently, one can see that such beliefs would have contributed to her own self-destruction. For all their fury and ugliness, Plath's images of oppression are primarily very sad: They show human beings for whom life is a living hell, and for whom the only alleviation of their suffering will come in death, which many, like the speaker in "I am Vertical," long for. She says, I am Vertical but I would rather be horizontal (CW p. 12). She yearns to be like the flowers and trees, wishing, first, for their respective "daring" and "longevity," and, then, for death. She says,

It is more natural to me, lying down.

And I shall be useful when I lie down
finally:

Then the trees may touch me for
once,
and the flowers have time for me.
CW p. 12) 

Here is the source of the fury and anger and helplessness: these women feel they have no worth, that they would be more useful as fertilizer for flowers and trees.

Plath's personae long for total passivity or death. They wish to become like the catatonic schizophrenic whom Arieti has described. According to Arieti, such a patient

. . . has a special type of schizophrenia which fortunately has become much less common in recent years in most parts of the world. At times after a certain period of excitement and agitation, at other times without warning, the patient slows down, reaching sooner or later a state of partial or complete immobility. He may become so stiff, rigid, and incapable of movement that he resembles a statue. He then becomes unable to move around and take care of his physical needs. He cannot dress or undress, does not have the initiative to feed himself in the presence of food or to talk in the presence of other people, nor does he answer questions. At other times, the patient is not so severely affected, but his activities are reduced to a minimum. He gives the impression of being paralyzed, but there is nothing wrong with his motor equipment, musculature, nerves, articulation, etc. What is disturbed is his faculty to will. He cannot will and therefore cannot will to move.

Before becoming acutely ill, the patient generally is confronted with a very important decision to make, or with a challenge for which he was not prepared. Such a task seems gigantic, impossible to cope with, and finally overwhelming to the patient.¹⁶

These patients usually had a parent who made all of their decisions for them. When the patients later had to make their own choices, they found themselves unable to act; if they acted, they were criticized and made to feel guilty. Catatonia is an avoidance of action in order to remove the panic connected with willed action. The panic, at first connected with one or a few actions becomes generalized. When it is extended to every action, the patient lapses into a state of complete inability to will and consequent immobility. At other times it is an obsessive-compulsive anxiety rather than a definite fear which does not permit the patient to move. Is it better to move or not to move, to talk or not to talk, to choose this word or another one? In the midst of this terrifying uncertainly the patient decides not to will at all.¹⁷

Many of Plath's personae are women who long for just such passivity. Yet they can be juxtaposed against other more famous Plath personae, like those in "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," who are screaming that they want more independence and that they are autonomous. It is not surprising that of Plath's many kinds of images of torment, oppression, and imprisonment, the most vivid and horrible are those which are neither symbolic nor metaphoric. These are the poems in which she attempts to realistically portray a wife or mother in a kitchen. These images are often hellish and nightmarish. In these examples, the woman seems more trapped, more frustrated, more in pain than in any of the images that reduce woman to a lower form of existence. These images are painful because, although helpless, the woman still is sensitive to her suffering; yet the suffering is compounded both by her inability to do anything about it and, often, by the fact that she is trapped in her suffering with children who are likewise suffering and whom she can do little for. As classic wives of the 1950's, they are dependent creatures who have abdicated all major responsibilities to their husbands. They have thus robbed themselves of independence, autonomy, and self-esteem. Thus, they have submitted to oppression and robbed themselves of their wills and their humanity.

In "A Birthday Present" the protagonist, while cooking, complains against having to adhere "to rules, to rules, to rules" (A p. 42) both in cooking and in life. In "Cut" the violence with which the protagonist describes her thumb which she cut while chopping onions indicates the hatred and violence she feels as she stands there working in her kitchen. She calls the thumb "Saboteur, / Ka kase man," recognizing that in cutting herself so often do, her anger against herself, attacking her thumb as "Trepanned veteran, / Dirty girl, / Thumb stump" (A p. 14).

The poem which may show the speaker's greatest anger and frustration at the imprisonment as a housewife, is "Lesbos." "Lesbos" (A pp. 30-31) begins with lines that reverberate with horror and describe a hideous scene:

Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is all Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent lights wincing on and
off like a terrible migraine,
Coy paper strips for doors
Stage curtains, a widow's frizz.

Meanwhile there's a stink of fat and
baby crap

(A p. 30).

The speaker goes on to describe the walls as "windowless" and providing no means for escaping or even viewing the outside world. Hers is a solitary confinement of the most intense sort. Consequently, she feels "silent" and in "hate"./hate/Up to my neck/Thick, "thick" (A 32), in a statement that perhaps explains why Plath shows many women as imprisoned and frustrated. They cannot find alternatives to the dilemmas in which they find themselves; therefore they hate their husband, their predicaments, their children, and, most importantly, themselves. They find no alternative to their roles as housewives because they lack the courage to live independently. As the speaker in 'The Bee Meeting" says, "I could not run without having to run forever" (A p. 57).

The speaker in "the Jailor" epitomizes the helplessness and fury of Plain's women personae. She claims to be jailed, "drugged and raped." She claims to have been tortured: "He has been burning me with cigarettes." She claims to have been starved: "My ribs show." She claims to being killed: "Hung, starved, burned, hooked!" She feels that her only chance of being freed is if her husband is "dead and away." But "That, it seems is the impossibility/That being free." And although the speaker insists that it is her husband that is responsible for her imprisonment, she reveals an even more important cause of her entrapment when she admits, "I am myself. That is not enough." The most important cause of her suffering is apparent here: She has no self-esteem and therefore she chooses to live in a situation in which she is abused. Similarly in most of the other images of oppression that Plath uses, the woman thinks of herself as helpless and passive. Plath recognizes that "Every woman adores a Fascist" but she fails to perceive that to "adore a Fascist" one must first loathe oneself. Consequently she blames the oppressor for her misery, but her only freedom must come from stopping being passive (and complaining about her helplessness and oppression) and taking some control over her life. She needs to choose to become a woman, a complete human being who can make decisions, act, and accept the responsibilities of her actions. Unfortunately most of Plath's personae choose to seek oblivion and insensateness and to think of themselves as prisoners, stones, paper, or other subhuman or inanimate objects.

NOTES

¹ Harry Stack Sullivan, Schizophrenia as a Human Process, 2nd ed. 1962; rpt. (New York: Norton, 1974).

² Ibid., p. 15.

³ Ibid., p. 96.

⁴ Ibid., pp. 114-115.

⁵ Ibid., p. 158.

⁶The Will to Be Human (New York: Dell, 1972), p. 48.

⁷ Silvano Arieti, Interpretation of Schizophrenia, 2nd ed. (1955; rpt. New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 211-212.

⁸ Ibid., p. 213-214. Arieti explains,

The fear of the willed action accounts for other characteristics of catatonia. The patient may not be able to will to act independently, but may still be able to accept commands for others. He may passively follow orders given by someone else because the responsibility will not be his: when he obeys, he substitutes another person's will for his own. When the patient is put into a given position, the will or responsibility of someone else is involved. If he wants to change his position, he has to will the change, and this causes anxiety or guilt. Thus the passivity to the suggestion of others is not an acceptance of power from others, as in hypnosis, but a relief from responsibility.

⁹ Phyllis Chessler, Women and Madness (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1972), quoting David C. McClelland and Norman Watt, "Sex Role Alienation in Schizophrenia," Journal of Abnormal Psychiatry, Vol. 73, No. 3, 1968.

¹⁰ Phyllis Chessler reports, p. 50, that in Dr. Shirley Angrist's 1961 study of female ex-mental patients she

. . . found that the rehospitalized women had refused to function "domestically" in terms of cleaning, cooking, child care, and shopping. The rehospitalized women were no different from the ex-mental patients in terms of their willingness to participate in "leisure" activities, such as traveling, socializing, or enjoying themselves. The rehospitalized women were, in Angrist's terms, slightly more "middle class and more frequently married than their non-returned counterparts." Further, the husbands who readmitted their wives expressed significantly lower expectations for their total human functioning. They seemed more willing to tolerate extremely childlike and dependent behavior in their wives—such as incessant complaining and incoherence—as long as the dishes were washed. These husbands also expressed great alarm and disapproval about their wives' "swearing," "cursing," and potentially violent "temper tantrums." Angirst, et al, "Rehospitalization of Female Mental Patients," Archives of American Psychiatry, Vol. 4, 1961.

¹¹ References to collections of Plath's poetry will be indicated by abbreviations of the titles within parentheses within the text:

Colossus (New York: Random House, 1962).

Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

Crossing the Water (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

Winter Trees (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

¹² Encounter XXI (1963), p. 51.

¹³ R. D. Laing. The Divided Self (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), p. 43.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 48.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 54.

¹⁶ Arieti, Will, pp. 211-212.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 213.