Th e distinction between poiesis (i.e., poetic formation, making) and narration (i.e., telling or recounting) is elided in Ariel. Th e poetry within this collection presents a linked combination of poiesis and narration, prompting us to consider how the poetry might address epistemological or teleological issues pertaining to trauma and its representation in literature. Th is scenario arises out of a constellation of factors related to trauma, memory, and recollection. Along with the verity of real-l ife experience we encounter in Ariel, we also discover poetic fabrication as well as probable memory omissions in the poems.1 Yet the tenor or emotional intensity of the experience is captured in the formation or making of the poems, while the narrative quality of them att empts to serve as an anchor, grounding the emotional tenor in concrete images (i.e., the vehicle) that address or speak to memories. In Plath scholarship, especially with regard to Ariel, there will always be a fraught relationship between memory and trauma because we cannot ascertain the intimate autobiographical details of Plath’s life, as her husband destroyed her last journal.
Th e Ariel poems treat the memory of trauma, as we will note in “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree,” and grapple with trauma at close range, as we will observe in the October 1962 poems, most notably. Plath had tried to commit suicide prior to 1963, and her life, once her marriage became troubled, began to fi t the mold of what Freud defi nes as the “melancholiac.”2 Th e poems I analyze and discuss below are composed of images, representations, and stories of and about trauma. Th ey might also point to a partially damaged memory in the gaps and silences therein— or in the frozen fi xity in “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree” and the stunned fi xation of the victim in “Edge”— but these poems are counterbalanced by a poem like “Daddy.” What we will note in the analyses and discussions of the poems that follow is a tracking of spatial metaphors, metaphors that suggest fi xity, falling, cycling, and progressing. As I will elaborate, the stages of traumatic experience, specifi cally the “acting out” and “working through” responses that I see as characterizing the poetry of Ariel, are recursive in nature. Because “acting out” and “working through” can actually constitute recursive stages in traumatic experiences, the metaphors employed are not contradictory: they are simply not participating in or constructing a linear narrative. What follows is my att empt to elucidate the representations of trauma and the responses to it in Ariel.
“Th e Moon and the Yew Tree”
In “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree” the speaker delivers a landscape that is fi lled with despair and silence, underscoring the importance of a Gothic sett ing that carries insinuations of loss and death, signifi es decay, and communicates a sense of foreboding, accompanied by sinister associations. Th e poem begins by describing the emotional state of the mind. It is “cold and planetary,” with fi gurative black trees and blue light.3 Th is Gothic sett ing is replete with the presences of “griefs,” “spirituous mists,” “a row of headstones,” and a “yew tree” that “has a Gothic shape” (46). She cannot detect a path out of this place, one created by her own mind: “I simply cannot see where there is to get to” (46). Similar to what we know about post- traumatic stress, the speaker demonstrates that she is
the subject who lives in [trauma’s] grip and unwitt ingly undergoes its ceaseless repetitions and reenactments. Th e traumatic event, although real, took place outside the parameters of “normal” reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time. Th e trauma is thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during, and no aft er. Th is absence of categories that defi ne it lends it a quality of “otherness.”4
Th e speaker is in an almost otherworldly place that resembles reality but is uncertain, foreboding, and static; we shall see that the colors and images are repetitious, and the poem opens as it closes, with the speaker still locked within her mind, caught in the grip of trauma, as Dori Laub describes it in the above passage. Th e speaker can neither gain the critical distance that Dominick LaCapra understands as the hallmark of “working through” nor testify fully to an internal or external witness in order to re-e xternalize the event, which Laub views as the crucial component of healing, though this poem may have been an exercise for Plath herself to process some sort of “acting out” compulsion or participate painfully in a “working through” stage.5 However the case may be, what we do know is that the speaker makes no progress in this poem; she is left  in “blackness and silence,” a world that promises annihilation if the speaker cannot escape her “cold and planetary” mind (47): that is, a mind that is cold or numb and dominated by erratic and wandering thoughts. Moreover, “planetary” may also suggest the global level or impact of the psychological or emotional trauma on the speaker.
Th is interpretation of trauma in the poem, as a poem about a speaker who desires to tell her story about trauma but cannot and, instead, suffers as a traumatized survivor without an immediate witness, is one that is intimated by Christina Britzolakis and, indirectly, Laub. Britzolakis notes that “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree” reveals “psychic obstruction and ‘the unspeakable.’”6 In his work involving survivors of trauma, Laub tells us, “Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, had no ending, att ained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect.”7 Th e speaker in “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree” refrains from positioning herself literally in regard to time and place. She reveals it is an endless night and she is unable to return home (a place that would likely be the speaker’s destination, though she is forever detained from att aining a safe haven or a place of comfort in the poem because she is separated by metaphorical headstones, signaling death and the burying of something that should not be unearthed), and she has no knowledge of how to navigate or cut through the headstones to fi nd her way. Instead, she is caught in the grip of trauma, paralyzed by something that is only alluded to and never articulated for the reader or listener, possibly because to articulate it is to relive the traumatic experience.
“Th e Moon and the Yew Tree” pivots on feminine symbolism (i.e., objects that radiate with meaning while being couched in traditional gendered ways) through the gendered or coded image of the moon, which is a traditional marker of femininity in literature. As such, the poem appears to direct our att ention to feminized trauma: the yew tree points to the moon (46). In this barren psychic landscape, there is nothing healing or ameliorative, and the yew tree and the moon, the titular symbols of the poem, are signposts and indications that things are not right in this world. Th e yew tree directs the eyes of the speaker to the moon because the moon is a focal point of the poem. Most of the lines are dedicated to the moon or in some way allude to it, and this signaling of femininity underscores the gendered nature of the problem presented in the scenario of the poem.
Ultimately, the moon is of no help, though the moon should be nurturing because she has a maternal relationship with the speaker: “Th e moon is my mother” (46). Britzolakis comments that the “vaultlike, ‘Gothic’ yew tree, coded as a medium of transmission for ancestral and paternal voices, is lined up against the moon, token of ‘blank’ maternal mourning.”8 Th e speaker seeks out the help of saints and visits a church, but she fi nds that the saints are “stiff ” and the pews are “cold” (47). Perhaps most tragically, the “moon sees nothing of this” (47), and so the speaker is left  without a protector, social support, or a narrative (i.e., religious, cultural, familial) that could be of service to her in her traumatized state. In other words, the moon does not provide a way out of suff ering or a pathway toward healing (the moon is “no door” [46]). Moreover, the signifi cance of the moon may also point to the origin or nature of the speaker’s trauma. Th e moon possesses a female identity, and it is an entity that has a “face in its own right” (46), which suggests that the moon’s particular situation may not be so distant or distinct from the speaker as we might initially be inclined to think. Th erefore, it is important to note that the moon is frightened (“white as a knuckle”) and “terribly upset” (46). Th e speaker tells us that she lives where the sea follows the moon as if “a dark crime” were involved and the moon wears a face of utt er despair (46). With this revelation, we learn more about this world of ultimate silence and despair— the cause behind the deafening silence appears to be a “dark crime” that remains secretive because neither the moon nor the speaker is in a position where she can articulate or express more than what we have in this poem. Caught somewhere between “acting out” and “working through,” the speaker off ers us a scenario where the trauma story is incomplete, fragmented, and symbolic, but the trauma permeates every aspect of the poem/narrative and ends with much unsaid.9 As Judith Lewis Herman explains, the dialectic of trauma is such that, on the one hand, witnesses and victims want to deny the horrible events, and on the other hand, they want to proclaim them aloud.10 Th is dialectic likely traps the speaker of “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree.”11
Th e moon, in dragging the sea or some sort of baggage with it “like a dark crime,” falls into the “blame the victim” mindset that is so common for women who are victims of rape and sexual assault or other gendered societal violence, and this “dark crime” may be a euphemism for the trauma.12 We should keep in mind that a poem like “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree,” which was composed on October 22, 1961, before Plath learned of any marital infi delity, though she was suspicious of it and her marriage was troubled, and before she became a single mother of two small children, was writt en at a very diff erent time in terms of Plath’s perspective than the other poems I consider here, which were composed mostly in October 1962 and February 1963, days before Plath died.13 Yet we still see Plath struggling to articulate a response to trauma, whether it is a personal, local, or global one in nature, and that may be due, in part, to Plath’s sensitivity to trauma stories and to her own tragic past and outlook on life. It is usual in Plath scholarship that “feminist readings of Plath’s later poems have dwelt on their recurrent tropes of woundedness, bleeding, and mutilation as signs of an internalized violence” because these texts are such blatant cultural critiques of gender and gendered expectations (or they invoke them).14 Regardless of whether we want to align ourselves from the outset with feminist critics, the moon is quiet with “the O-g ape of complete despair” (46) and the speaker identifi es closely with the moon, so closely, in fact, that she considers the moon a blood relative, which may be an act of transference on her part. I maintain that the speaker, in oblique ways, is att empting to process an experience of trauma that is gendered as feminine in its violent impact on her.
Falling is a fi gure used to denote the feeling of being out of control, as brought about by the traumatic experience. Th e speaker in “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree” declares quietly that she has fallen, and she has fallen a great distance (46). Both Plath’s speaker and Cathy Caruth invoke the metaphor of falling to explore, as I read it, the slippage between the notion of the traumatic experience and the understanding of it; a metaphor for slippage is falling, but the fi gure also suggests what the traumatic experience feels like. Caruth explains that “the story of the falling body” is “the story of trauma, and the story of trauma is inescapably bound to a referential return.”15 In this instance, the survivor is caught up in the trauma to such an extent that her body is forever reliving the cycling story of trauma, a return to the site of injury, until she can work through it and produce a narrative that relieves her of the burden of reliving the story. Unfortunately for Plath’s speaker, she is trapped in the “referential return” to the site of injury and the subsequent falling that keeps her looking at the moon, a marker of the nature or a clue to the origin of her trauma. To compound the very dire situation of the speaker, the poem ends with the following line: “And the message of the yew tree is blackness— blackness and silence” (47). With this closing, we see that the speaker is unable to move beyond her traumatic history and is left  in the black landscape of her mind, with only occasional color or hope present.
Th ere is, indeed, some color present: the poem opens with a reference to light that is blue amid the blackness of the vast (“planetary”) night of the mind in the fi rst stanza, and it returns to those references and colors in the last stanza. At the end, we see that the clouds are “[b]lue and mystical over the face of the stars” and the “saints will be blue” in the church (46). Early on, we have a reference to ghostliness (“[f]umy, spirituous mists inhabit this place”), and the last stanza also underscores the mistiness or the inability to perceive or see clearly in this state or atmosphere (46–4 7). Th e vehicle—t he gothic, gloomy, foreboding night—f acilitates the tenor, the psychological mindset of a traumatized speaker. Th e sociohistorical and medico- political implications and ramifi cations of trauma, as suggested by Plath, are a changed worldview. As Kai Erikson maintains in his study of traumatized communities and individuals,
Among those shared perspectives [of survivors], oft en, is an understanding that the laws by which the natural world has always been governed as well as the decencies by which the human world has always been governed are now suspended—o r were never active to begin with. Traumatized people . . . look out at the world through a diff erent lens. And in that sense they can be said to have experienced not only a changed sense of self and a changed way of relating to others but a changed worldview.16
Erikson is clear that traumatized people suff er life- altering changes, and the transformations that take place in the lives of victims will cause social problems for communities. In “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree,” the speaker is never able to overcome the debilitating cycle of traumatic memories, and the poem formally mirrors it from the beginning of the poem to the end of it. As for the speaker herself, she is lost fi guratively in the misty, silent, mostly dark, and foreboding world, and her ability to be a productive member of society is severely circumscribed. It is important for us to consider representations of trauma because our initial responses are lessons to us in how we might react to or treat victims, but the formal study of trauma and literature enables us to become more sensitive and useful witnesses, as well as important parts of support systems for victims, once we bett er understand the various dimensions of trauma.
In thinking through trauma and representations, Caruth interrogates what trauma is, how it can be represented, and how it can be ameliorated. According to Caruth, “Th e breach in the mind . . . [is caused by] ‘fright,’ the lack of preparedness to take in a stimulus that comes too quickly. It is not simply, that is, the literal threatening of bodily life, but the fact that the threat is recognized as such by the mind one moment too late.” She adds,
As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumatic experience in the fl ashback can itself be re-t raumatizing, if not life- threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivors.17
Here Caruth shows us the medico- political facet of her theorizing: she argues that the mind cannot reconcile itself to the timing of the catastrophe and so the trauma still looms as a threat, one that can break down the brain if it remains a constant animator. Perhaps it is unsurprising that Plath’s late poetry carries a morbid note throughout: a tone of despair permeates “Edge” and “Words,” likely the very last poems she wrote.
Th e sociocultural implications of Plath’s work, I would suggest, are tied
to what Ruth Leys describes as the psychoanalytic agreement that “if narration cures, it does so not because it infallibly gives the patient access to a primordially personal truth but because it makes possible a form of self- understanding even in the absence of empirical verifi cation.”18 If the victim can articulate a narrative, can testify or witness to some extent, then she validates the experience for herself, which puts her on the pathway toward healing in the traditional trauma studies/healing paradigm, but she also provides an account that, if disseminated, allows for identifi cation and validation from other victims and nonvictims. As Leys traces the historical trajectory of traumatic cures, she explains that the construction of a “coherent narrative” by victims is critically important because of its “bearing on present and future actions.”19 For Leys, the sociocultural responsibility of future actions belongs to victims in this scenario, but we might also include nonvictims because, as I see it, trauma and healing are social justice issues that aff ect networks of people and communities, not merely isolated individuals.
I have explored in depth “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree” because it embodies the contemporary concerns and issues in trauma studies and it is representative of the type of poems in Ariel. As Jane Hedley puts it, “Plath would remain a poet of the image” from the beginning of her career until the end of it.20 Moreover, “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree” is not as routinely anthologized as, say, “Daddy” is, and scholarly examination of this poem might open up discussion of it in the classroom when Plath’s slim volume is taught instead of an anthology. From here, I will treat other representative poems that illustrate what Ariel does in connection with representations of trauma, and I have selected poems that work particularly well together in the event that scholar-t eachers may fi nd the threads that I will trace and braid together to be compelling and teach them in this grouping. I will close my discussion of Ariel poems by commenting on “Daddy.”
All references to poems will be to the standard American edition of Ariel, edited by Ted Hughes, which is the most widely available.21 I use this edition not only because of its accessibility for students (in terms of availability and price) but also because this collection foregrounds a powerful narrative of trauma.22 Th e fi rst word of the 2004 “restored” edition of Ariel is “love” and the last word is “spring,” and, from this structural move alone, the volume possesses a diff erent poetic and narrative trajectory (i.e., beginning with birth, as in the literal birth of her child, and closing with the hope of rebirth and rejuvenation in her rebirth as poet of Ariel) than its counterpart.23 In short, because the 1966 edition of Ariel is more established and more widely available than the 2004 version, which is very diff erent, I continue to teach with what I call the standard text, although it would be very easy to supplement it with the restored edition.
Th e Late Poems
“A Birthday Present” and “Lady Lazarus”
On September 30, 1962, Plath composed “A Birthday Present,” which anticipates the poems she would write very soon thereaft er (i.e., “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Ariel”) and the later poems (i.e., “Words” and “Edge”). Th e language of trauma is similar in “A Birthday Present” to the October 1962 work, and the calm and resigned voice anticipates “Edge” and “Words.” We know this poem is about trauma from the speaker’s announcement that she does not want much in the way of a gift  because she is “alive only by accident” (48). In Caruth’s schema of trauma, we might recall that, borrowing from Freud, the sense of the traumatic accident—o f being alive “only by accident,” of recognizing the traumatic impact a moment too late— defi nes trauma. Th e nature of the injury appears to be informed by an interpersonal situation, discord that has killed something in the home sphere. According to the speaker of the poem, there is something that stands looming in the window and breathes from the bedsheets, making its cold and lifeless nature known. We learn that this place is where “split lives congeal and stiff en to history” (50). In other ways, trauma permeates this poem through the fetishization of death: her demise appears to be the birthday present for which the speaker longs. She tells us that she knows why “you will not give it to me”: the addressee is “terrifi ed” because “the world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it” (49). Fully acknowledging that what she desires is destructive (to herself and others, physically and emotionally), the speaker understands the gift  is frightening and dangerous but wants it anyway. She will take it quietly and not aggressively, she explains. Th e controlled and quiet tone creates a particularly moving and painful ending when it is coupled with the content: a romanticization of the stabbing and subsequent death of the speaker.
LaCapra’s notion of “founding trauma” places in perspective the drama
of this poem, especially when it is read in tandem with the other poems in the collection. In “Lady Lazarus” the “founding trauma” is part and parcel of how the speaker identifi es herself: she deems herself a “valuable” that “melts to a shriek” and turns and burns, while eliciting “great concern” (9). Th e intensely serious tone here underscores the violence exacted upon the speaker, violence that she is forced to enact and repeat through her suicides, the repetition of which is symptomatic of trauma. Th e speaker “melts to a shriek” in “Lady Lazarus,” but the “world will go up in a shriek” in “A Birthday Present.” Both speakers suff er, but anger energizes and animates Lady Lazarus, spurring her on to retribution. Indeed, Lady Lazarus warns her audience repeatedly to “beware” because she will arise out of the ash and “eat men like air” (9). Lady Lazarus both threatens and exacts revenge: once a victim, she now becomes the victimizer or the aggressor, in keeping with the cycle of violence that oft en structures trauma stories. “A Birthday Present,” however, prepares us for the deep and dark resignation of the latest poems in Ariel.
“Ariel”
In the title poem, we get a cryptic and vivid portrayal of the female body in pain. Composed on Plath’s birthday in 1962, “Ariel” describes what psychological and emotional trauma can feel like. In the process of capturing a traumatic state, the speaker moves from stasis and inactivity to self- immolation. On the surface, this poem seems to address corporeality, and it does, in terms of embodied trauma. But it is too glib of a reading to consider only the physical body, the tortured body, of “Ariel.” Indeed, because the collection takes its name from this poem, we can be assured that the titular poem intends to address psychological states and emotional responses to life- changing events. Th e manner in which the speaker of “Ariel” considers her world confi rms this position: berries are not innocent fruit that beautify the external world; instead, they lodge their hooks into fl esh and cause the speaker to think of the berries as bloody bites (29). Th ere is the implication here that the speaker is metaphorically hooked, hooked by a force that determines her path. Caught in the grip of trauma, she is painfully hurtled to a climax in a way that suggests this trajectory, this “arc,” told as it is literally upon a horse by a speaker who will forever be unable to grasp the neck of the horse (29), amounts to an (over)determined trauma script. Hauled through the air, the speaker’s body begins to disintegrate, and she is transfi gured as she abandons her physical body. She becomes an arrow, one that is suicidal and “at one with the drive” into the sun, “[e]ye, the cauldron of morning” (30). Th is end ironically promises a bright, new beginning for the suff ering speaker, but it is undercut by the fact that the speaker abandons maternal responsibilities (the “child’s cry” [30]) and that she appears to be propelled by outside forces, not by her own will.
“Edge”
“Edge” is reminiscent of H. D.’s poem “Helen” (1928), a revisionist work in which beautiful Helen is despised and treated unfairly by all until she dies—n ot until her death can she be loved and valued in a patriarchal society. According to Alicia Ostriker, “H. D. implies that the beautiful woman is always hated by the culture which pretends to adore her beauty and that the only good beauty, so far as patriarchal culture is concerned, is a dead one.”24 What is more ominous about Plath’s work than H. D.’s is the heavy emphasis on the paradoxical positive associations att ributed to the dead woman and her two children in “Edge”: in contrast, H. D.’s speaker subtly laments the missed opportunity for the world to appreciate and love Helen, as, it is implied, she deserves. No such revisionist tendency is at play in “Edge,” in spite of the Greek allusions present. Th e logic of the poem stamps death on the woman’s perfection, ostensibly her accomplishment. She is “perfected,” albeit “dead.” Th e speaker reports that the “[b]ody wears the smile of accomplishment” (93). Even worse, her two dead children, additional losses, are coiled at her breasts. Th e imagery is that of a rose and its petals, even though the tone becomes dark and menacing when we are told that the garden harboring the rose “[s]tiff ens and odours bleed” (93). Th is scene is not an idyllic one in the spirit of Robert Browning’s “[a]ll’s right with the world!”: the deaths are supposed to be mourned and protested, as we detect from the diction, connotations, and implications of language. Although “odours bleed,” the moon, invoking the earlier “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree,” fi nds it cannot be sad as it stares from “her hood of bone” because “[s]he is used to this sort of thing” (94). What the speaker is actually saying, it seems to me, is that we should be mournful, that this situation is not normal and should not be naturalized as a result of desensitizing events or cultural norms. Other than an allusion to “Greek necessity” and its roots in a patriarchal culture, we are not told what has sent the female character over the metaphorical “Edge.” We are shown the aft ermath, the other side of the “Edge” instead.
Plath critics debate the signifi cance of the title and theme of “Edge.” Steven Gould Axelrod observes that “the woman and her poems pass over a fi nal precipice to silence.”25 Linda Wagner- Martin understands the woman as having traveled to “the edge of the known world”: she refuses to be hospitalized again or subjected to electroshock therapy and separation from her children. And so she escapes and succeeds in accomplishing what she set out to do, which might be att ainting “a mystical unity with the spiritual world.”26 Originally titled “Nuns in Snow,” the poem initially had nuns making a pilgrimage to view the dead woman’s body.27 Th e idea here is that we could mourn the loss of what this woman represents: she is worthy of a pilgrimage by nuns in the snow. Lynda K. Bundtzen notes that the woman’s body is “chastely closed to the sexual seductions of the garden” and that the “dead woman perversely resembles a Madonna, posed with a dead child at each of her breasts.” From Bundtzen’s point of view, the way that Hughes reordered Ariel, closing with “Edge” and “Words, “confi rm[s] once again the overall sense he has of Plath’s poetic trajectory as fatal and doomed.”28
With “Edge,” we see that Plath “was drawn to ekphrastic writing because she was a woman who played to the gaze, self-c onsciously and with considerable ambivalence.”29 Th e poem might be “a ‘notional ekphrasis,’ John Hollander’s term for the description of a ‘purely fi ctional painting or sculpture that is indeed brought into being by the poetic language itself.’”30 Asserts Hedley, “Th e poem will only tell us how this woman appears, what her posture and expression seem to be saying. Plath has thus declined to exercise the power that is given ekphrasis its traditional mandate and raison d’être—t he power of a verbal description to make a silent image ‘speak.’”31 As this critic suggests, we may have bought into the illusion “that how a woman looks will tell us all we need to know of her inner self.”32 Hedley reads the woman’s death as committ ed by her own hand, a suicide, as does Tim Kendall.33 Kendall gestures to manuscript draft s of “Edge” that show us the poem opened with “Down there,” and he reports that “the clinical examination of the terrible scene of suicide and infanticide below is shocking because of its distance.”34 He also points out that the speaker of the Ariel poems is a “protagonist,” presumably meaning that the speaker changes or is transformed in some way, and the speaker of “Edge” possesses a very diff erent voice from those in the other poems in the collection. In fact, for Kendall, the voice is separated from the subject.35 I take this separation of voice from subject as evidence that the speaker is “acting out” trauma, in the parlance of trauma studies, instead of “working through” it, which, I would argue, is what we see in the older poems, like “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” keeping in mind that working through is a recursive process. Tellingly, then, our Ariel speaker, as the “eye/I,” loses the “absolute power over the world it sees” by the time we get to “Edge.”36 In an autobiographical manner, Plath may have consciously alluded to Hughes’s own work in the imagery that is embedded in her “Edge” and “Words.” In her study on Hughes and Plath, Heather Clark notes that these poems, in addition to “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” contain elements that make it possible to read them as texts directed to or infl uenced by Hughes.37
We also do not see a speaker working through trauma in the poem that closes the standard American edition, “Words.” Rather, we are put in the position of witness to a voice that is acting out trauma. And we have come full circle: the voice that speaks of being caught in the grip of trauma in “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree” is the same voice in “Edge,” but in “Edge” there is a sense of fi nality that is colder and more hopeless—o r beyond hope— than in the earlier, though similar, poem.
“Words”
In “Words,” we have a resigned speaker, one who is utt erly detached from the world of Ariel. One critic interprets the speaker as professing to have litt le control over the style of the poem, and we can read this as a symptom of “acting out” trauma.38 As I see it, the horse is one metaphorical agent that propels the speaker in “Ariel” to a destructive future, and various fi gures in that poem suggest the impact of the almost deterministic traumatic forces on the speaker (and perhaps on Plath, too, in this instance). Th e speaker in “Words” is left  at the doorstep of a founding trauma that ultimately consumes her: her words are horses that are “riderless” (95). Although our interpretations diff er, Kendall and I agree that “Words” is a “conclusion” of sorts.39 Another critic draws a connection between “Edge” and “Words” by underscoring “the concept of astrological infl uences on humankind” in the last two lines of “Words” that feature the governing stars over a pool (95) and the “Greek necessity” of “Edge.”40
Ultimately, in this last poem of the collection, the speaker contemplates the role and power of words: what can they do? Th e fi rst stanza equates words to blows and echoes with meanings that carry on, reverberate.41 Th e second stanza is especially noteworthy from a trauma studies perspective. Th e sap cries/seeps like a wound, and the water/poem wants to show something of life, to refl ect it. But what the water can show, by the fi nal stanza, presents the most despairing lines of all, which close the poem. Th ere is no hope, no salvation, no metaphorical or literal spring: there is nothing to look forward to, nothing to be angry at, nothing to critique and rebel against, and the stark denotations and connotations of being at the bott om of a pool with fi xed stars overseeing one’s life are the coldest lines of Ariel.
“Daddy”
Being that the Holocaust and 9/11 are the two events that receive the most att ention from trauma studies scholars in the United States in the twenty- fi rst century, it is not accidental that Plath borrows imagery from the Holocaust in att empting to ramp up the emotional intensity of the trauma in her own mid-t wentieth-c entury work.42 According to Axelrod, “Some have praised these references to historical tragedy for their empathy, while others have disparaged them as appropriation. I think they may be better viewed as commemoration. Th ey resist the drift  to moral anesthesia and political amnesia.”43 James E. Young addresses the debate involving Ariel and its Holocaust allusions and forcefully argues that Plath uses current images in a traumatized/post-t raumatic world because she internalized public experiences and language and so ordered and understood her personal world within this framework before deploying or recasting this traumatic worldview in her poems.44 It may have been the case that Plath suff ered from a secondary identifi cation with war victims as a result of newsreel images and courtroom details about the Holocaust.45 Or perhaps we should read the Ariel poems that trade on what Antony Rowland calls the “icons of atrocity” (i.e., Holocaust imagery) as ones that are self- refl exively critiquing the sensationalism of media spectacle.46 In other words, trauma, implies Plath, should not be fetishized, which is quite an ironic stance when one considers the larger- than- life mythos revolving around Plath, the traumatic demise of her marriage, and her suicide.
“Daddy” is a poem about trauma and abandonment, what I call a “working through” poem, in LaCapra’s sense. In order to heal, in the classic trauma studies model, the traumatized speaker needs to tell her story, to construct a meaningful narrative about her experience in order to establish critical distance and be able to begin to put the past behind her.
Some readers fault Plath for “metaphoric excess, of irresponsibly exploiting the power of analogy, most notoriously in later poems such as ‘Daddy,’ which yoke together historical and psychic events.”47 But the genesis of this poem is one steeped in trauma: we have a speaker grieving for the literal loss of her father, the metaphorical loss of her husband, and the failure of the brutal, violent, and misogynistic men that Daddy represents to provide a safe world for the speaker, and, by extension, others, as att ested by the reliance on Holocaust allusions and the invocation of vampiric imagery.
For critics like Bundtzen and Marjorie Perloff , the demise of Plath’s marriage was the great traumatic moment that instigated “Daddy” and other poems like it. Bundtzen reads Plath’s lett ers to her mother as confi rmation of “Hughes’s sense that Plath could not tell the diff erence between husband and father in the fi nal months,” perhaps because she saw her father’s death as an abandonment or betrayal and viewed Hughes’s aff air as the same. Bundtzen cites the following passage (about Hughes) from a letter to Aurelia Plath as evidence of how Plath confl ated her father and her husband in “Daddy”: “I hate and despise him so I can hardly speak.”48 Of course, in the poem, the speaker talks to her father in apostrophe, stating that she could never talk to him easily or safely. On one hand, we have a speaker who is so traumatized that she has problems articulating herself as a subject: she stutt ers in enunciating the German word for “I.” On the other, we have a speaker who is the process of working through trauma and who does not yet have the proper vocabulary, the right language to testify or serve as witness to what has been done to her. In the next stanza the speaker famously characterizes herself as a Jew who has been rounded up and is headed to a concentration camp. Plath has her speaker assume the role of what she apparently perceived to be the ultimate victim of the twentieth century. We can think of the Ariel poems, especially “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” as dramatic monologues, as Matt hew Boswell encourages us to do in his study on Holocaust imagery. However, Boswell asserts, “in Plath’s Holocaust poetry, a certain reading of modern human history emerges: history as process, as machine, whose meaning is understood retrospectively, aft er Auschwitz, as Holocaust.”49 In some respect, because of the very historicity of her allusions, Plath’s work cannot escape an engagement with other para- literary discourses.
Likewise, we cannot avoid the interpersonal trauma in a microcosmic context that permeates this piece if we delve into Plath or Ariel criticism. Perloff  points out that the “black telephone” of “Daddy” is the symbol of spousal infi delity and betrayal: an overheard telephone conversation exposed the aff air between Hughes and Assia Wevill in 1962, months aft er Plath’s son, Nicholas Hughes, was born.50 Th is revelation may have been the deepest traumatic blow Plath would receive. According to Perloff , “Th e import of such an overheard telephone conversation can be understood only against the background of Plath’s total devotion to and dependency upon her husband: indeed, it is not too much to say that she worshipped him.”51 As such, “Daddy” tackles global traumatic events and local ones and melds them together in an unsett ling way— as is proper for literature of trauma.52
Various issues that fall squarely within trauma studies are addressed in “Daddy.” We have deep psychological and emotional injuries that are unhealed, intergenerational trauma, post- traumatic stress disorder and hypervigilance, and a narrative that engages in “working through” the trauma. Th e poem contains representations or traces of these features— and to my mind, we do not need to diagnosis Plath (as author of these poems) any further: as with her other poems, we can focus on the literary texts and examine what it is they display and show us about representations of trauma.
Th e embedded imagery off ers a picture of suff ering— torture— and serious emotional and psychological injury. Th ere is deep fear and anxiety about what Daddy or other men like Daddy will do next. Ostensibly, there are other men like Daddy, a dozen or two, perhaps, and the speaker appears to want to scan the horizon for Daddy, to sleep with one eye open.
Never being able to pinpoint his whereabouts or where the threats to her safety are, the speaker is left  voiceless. Th ere is a desire to speak that is shut down by the eff ects of the dysfunctional family romance, the trauma story that the speaker will persevere in telling. To embrace this scenario, one in which a woman must adore a Fascist and his brutality as fi gured in his brutish heart and his metaphorical boot in her face, a woman must internalize the historical, social, and cultural expectations of gender and assume a position of subservience in the face of masculine violence, power, and authority, leaving her disempowered and divested of authority. Th e extent of the trauma is most apparent in the Holocaust references, which are insistent and repetitive. Th ese shocking allusions to victims in connection with concentration camps convey what the speaker deems to be the emotional intensity of her fear and trauma. Th is passage also highlights the importance of language and voice in terms of identity: in speaking like a Jew, the speaker concludes that she “may well be” a Jew and can appropriate or commemorate Holocaust imagery and the tenor of that experience. Moreover, we also see that Plath assigns the speaker a victim’s position, but a position from which the story can be told. Trauma will not be that which is unspeakable here: it can be represented. And I believe that this last poetic stance is part of what makes “Daddy” a great poem. It can take traumatic experience and rework it through poetic distance to produce a poem about trauma: a poem that demonstrates how “working through” trauma can be fi gured.
“Daddy” possesses an insistent tone and is repetitive in its language and imagery, but these stylistic choices only enhance the obsessive and painful family romantic drama recounted. Repetition is quintessential of trauma, and we see the speaker of the poem engaged in working through her traumatic history of interpersonal relationships. She tells us in the fi rst two lines that the infl uence of Daddy (and all that he fi guratively represents) has ended or will end at her insistence. Daddy’s infl uence is weighty, implying that the memories and/or his presence are a burden: he is all-p owerful, “[m]arble-h eavy, a bag full of God” (56). In telling her story, the speaker is att empting to exorcise Daddy. At the end of the poem, we return to Daddy being metaphorically killed again and, this time, the husband is confl ated with him, and this utt erance underscores the desperate need of the speaker to testify and to put the story and the past behind her. Th ese last two stanzas bring us full circle to the opening, and the repetitive behavior (marrying a man who takes aft er Daddy, “I made a model of you” [59]) points to an intergenerational cycle of violence. Both Daddy and the husband are torturers: they have “a love of the rack and the screw” (58). In order to end this cycle, to move beyond it, the speaker has to metaphorically write off  Daddy, to break her emotional and psychological dependence on him. Th e last line of the poem promises that this writing off  and, therefore, leaving off  (literally and symbolically) will happen and may even have happened if this last line is a performative utt erance.
But in order to fi nalize a total rejection of Daddy and all that he represents, the speaker has to make sense of her trauma story. She has to reclaim her life, and she seemingly is empowered by testifying: she tells us twice that she is “through” with Daddy, although the fi rst is att ributed to the husband (“So daddy, I’m fi nally through,” a line that follows the marriage vows, “And I said, I do, I do” [58]) and the second is the powerful last line. Th is declaration of “I’m through” strikes me as a metonymy for “I’m working through this trauma and am on my way to being done with you.”
On the Real- World or Material Eff ects Th at Should Follow the Study of the Literature of Trauma
When I teach the literature and scholarship of interdisciplinary trauma studies, my objectives are for my students to become bett er critical thinkers and for them to become more sophisticated in their social and political engagements, to give them more critical thought. My students read the poems contained in Ariel and become engaged because they understand that this work is important. Perhaps Plath reveals why her literary output matt ers in her exhortation to herself in a journal fragment dated April 1, 1956: “you have seen a lot, felt deeply & your problems are universal enough to be made meaningful— WRITE— .”53 In a 1962 bbc interview, Plath says,
I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say that I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate, even the most terrifi c, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut- box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.54
In order to cultivate the “informed and intelligent mind” that discerns signifi cance, makes connections, and critically considers situations, my students read articles by a host of trauma studies scholars in diff erent disciplines, among them Laura S. Brown (psychology), Caruth (literature), Erikson (sociology), Herman (psychology), LaCapra (history), Laub (psychiatry), Leys (history), and Alexander C. McFarlane and Bessel A. van der Kolk (medicine and psychology).55
Studying trauma can eff ect real- world change, making the study of it across disciplines and professions an ethical and socially responsible project. Th ough confronting the traumatic experiences of others should be uncomfortable and even disconcerting, people who shut down or foreclose the stories of victims or the sociocultural ramifi cations of trauma and traumatized people create conditions or a climate that is “disastrous for a society,” according to McFarlane and van der Kolk, because the ramifi cations of untreated trauma include the victim turning into the aggressor and foreclosed pathways toward healing of victims that ultimately damage communities.56 One way to combat apathy, fear, or something in between is to foreground the importance of a literary study of trauma. As McFarlane and van der Kolk maintain, “[A]rtists have traditionally fulfi lled the function of holding up a mirror to humankind; they present the issues of trauma with a clarity that contrasts sharply with the traditional obfuscation of these issues in the fi eld of mental health.”57 Literary texts that represent trauma in some fashion participate in a larger sociocultural and, as McFarlane and van der Kolk assert, medico-p olitical conversation and agenda: considering what authors are communicating and how and why the representations matt er to us now reveals our own ideologies (and strengths and shortcomings) concerning our responses to the multiple dimensions of our world aff ected by traumatized people, including our role in the social, cultural, medical, and political support systems (or lack thereof) for victims. And it is important to recognize that one person can make a signifi cant diff erence.58
Perhaps one of the largest and most regrett able tendencies of our society is the “blame the victim” mindset. I would posit that studying the literature of trauma might counteract this tendency. Th e rhetorical move of “blame the victim” punishes society in the aforementioned ways, and it severely punishes the victim because the trauma will “invade and contaminate the survivor’s daily life.”59 McFarlane and van der Kolk, Brown, and Laub address this problem of placing blame on and expecting shame from the victim. Brown interrogates the consequences of this convenient mindset: “If we maintain the myth of the willing victim,” Brown tells us, “who we then pathologize for her presumed willingness, we need never question the social structures that perpetuate her victimization.”60 And Laub adds that, in his experience working with Holocaust survivors, victims who could not (re)construct their stories or did not have witnesses to listen to their narratives could come to believe that they, and not the perpetrators, were responsible for the inhumane crimes committ ed against them.61 We should come to the conclusion, then, that blaming the victim fosters the stigma att ached to trauma and victims and prevents any sort of empathetic unsett lement, which undermines compassion and sociocultural and political changes.
Without a listener, reader, or some sort of witness who will receive and collaborate in the construction of the trauma story, survivors cannot easily heal, according to the traditional model of trauma. Th e signifi cance of testifying and of listening/reading/witnessing is underscored by Laub:
Th e survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive. Th ere is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus come to know one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past against which one has to protect oneself. One has to know one’s truth in order to be able to live one’s life.62
Th e fundamental problem in “Th e Moon and the Yew Tree” is that the speaker clearly has a need to tell her story in order to come to know it (indeed, other, inanimate voices clamor to claim individual identities and rebirth: the bells, with their tongues, give their names, confi rming the story of the Resurrection), but she is impeded by ghosts (the “fumy, spirituous mists” around the headstones), and her only witness is another inanimate object, the moon, that she att empts to claim as a “mother” (46). Th ough Laub illustrates that one can use an inanimate object, like a photograph, and speak to it like a witness, what one is really doing in this process is creating an internal witness “who substitutes the lack of witnessing in real life.”63 But the moon in the poem appears to play some sort of part in the trauma story, and perhaps that is why she cannot serve as a witness for the speaker. Th e moon will not collaborate with the speaker in the creation of the testimony: the moon is unsuitable in the role of witness because the speaker states explicitly, “Th e moon is no door” (46), which I interpret as the inability of the speaker to work through the trauma without a witness (i.e., the door or way out is closed or closed off  for the speaker in this metaphorical poem about the landscape of the speaker’s mind). Th e inability to secure a witness and to construct a narrative about one’s traumatic experience results in one’s history being abolished and that, in turn, leads to “annihilation,” as we see in “A Birthday Present,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Ariel,” and “Edge,” and to the cessation of one’s identity, as we see in “Words.”64 In similar fashion, “Daddy” underscores the need to tell one’s story in order to work through and begin to move away from what LaCapra calls a “founding trauma,” that which becomes “the basis of an identity.”65 Th ese works att empt to give voice to a founding trauma, to work through it, and they become evidence of a reconfi gured identity. However, given her suicide, Plath was unsuccessful in working through trauma and putt ing it behind her. Ultimately, we see the need for another human to hear and witness one’s trauma story.
Th ere is something to be salvaged in accounts about trauma for both the victim and the witness, even when the witness is construed as the reader. According to Laub, the “joint responsibility” of the victim and her witness “is the source of the reemerging truth.”66 Th ese are truths that need to be constructed, (re)created in narratives that explore or explain painful and sometimes unfathomable psychological, emotional, and physical injuries. In Th e Uses of Literature, Rita Felski makes a persuasive argument about the complex role of recognition, “a cognitive insight, a moment of knowing or knowing again” for readers:
When political theorists talk about recognition . . . they mean something else: not knowledge, but acknowledgment. Here the claim for recognition is a claim for acceptance, dignity and inclusion in public life. Its force is ethical rather than epistemic, a call for justice rather than a claim to truth. Moreover, recognition in reading revolves around a moment of personal illumination and heightened self- understanding; recognition in politics involves a demand for public acceptance and validation. . . .
Yet this distinction is far from being a dichotomy.67
In agreeing with Felski, I want to emphasize the ability for ethical acknowledgment and social justice to work in conjunction with personal illumination and validation. We hope that no one can fully identify with the depths of despair that Plath’s speakers (and Plath) experienced. But literature is a multifaceted cultural artifact that allows readers to engage in “parsing the complexities of personhood,” in reference both to themselves and to others diff erent from themselves.68 It seems to me that the cultural work and importance of literature are also related to how we approach language and the ideas and representations therein and how literary texts mark and shape our world.
In accordance with Derridean logic . . . the importance of texts and textuality becomes vital to considerations of lived experience, or how one is to understand one’s world and embodied state because texts are also material embodiments that display the way we think.69
And Plath’s work is one that has exerted great infl uence: a steady stream of books and a 2004 biopic with a major fi lm company att est to both academic and popular interest in Plath and her work in the twenty-fi  rst century. New directions for Plath scholarship will undoubtedly continue: the fi ft ieth anniversary of Plath’s death is 2013, when all of Plath’s manuscripts in the Smith College archive will be made accessible, should there be anything left  that is still sealed.70 As it is, Plath’s star is one that has never dimmed in the literary marketplace, and new generation of students take to Ariel in fresh ways.
In his commentary on Derrida and literature, J. Hillis Miller argues that “the words of a literary world do not create the world they report, but only discover it, or uncover it, for the reader.” He elaborates that reading literature “is a way of being in the material world” because, by displacement, words “refer to social, psychological, historical, and physical reality.”71 Julia Kristeva asks us to consider the importance of literature, specifi cally poems, in relation to what is psychologically real and indebted to material reality and language: “Doesn’t poetry lead to the establishment of an object as a substitute for the symbolic order under att ack, an object that is never clearly posited but always ‘in perspective’?”72 According to Plath,
Certain poems and lines of poetry seem as solid and miraculous to me as church altars or the coronation of queens must seem to people who revere quite diff erent images. I am not worried that poems reach relatively few people. As it is, they go surprisingly far—a mong strangers, around the world, even. Farther than the words of a classroom teacher or the prescriptions of a doctor; if they are very lucky, farther than a lifetime.73
In this vein, we can learn many things from Plath’s Ariel: at a foundational level, we have the opportunity to investigate perspectives. In this article I extrapolate from the poems in order to gain insight into the various dimensions of traumatic experiences and responses to trauma. Th e politics inherent in such representations and their victims in literary texts should capture our att ention because, ultimately, literature off ers us lessons about our world, whether those lessons are tied to empathetic unsettlement or self-r efl exive assessment. In examining how various theoretical models approach trauma and healing and in analyzing literary representations of these, we are actively participating in ways of assessing our own (and others’) responses to traumatic wounds, the process of which has the potential to infuse work or agendas related to social justice concerns. By becoming more aware of the sociocultural and medico- political dimensions of trauma and by becoming more sensitive and prepared to receive and validate narratives and depictions of such, even to a small extent, we potentially place ourselves in a bett er position to activate and enable the telling and dissemination of diverse stories about trauma and healing and to support and rework support systems for trauma survivors.