Rebirth Prodigy in Ariel by Sylvia Plath

I am in limbo between the old world and the new very uncertain and quite bleak (Wagner Martin120)

In search of an ideal ego, the poet, despite living in a world of fortuitous and threatening events, has bravely experienced a kind of rebirth both in her life and in her works to exhort the gratification of her own self. Longing for real fulfillment, Sylvia Plath inevitably finds to start a metabolism that has turned out to be the Renaissance motif in most of her later Ariel poems. She, as “the cauldron goddess of poetic inspiration” (Wagner Martin 114), pioneers the Renaissance process by summoning resurrection in her new collection of poetry, Ariel. The open suspense poems that have been derived from the inner being of their creator are an appropriate spectacle to be deconstructed. The moral investigation of this new and challenging world of poetry offers the essential field for the person to extinguish the repressed screams and agonies of his past. The arduous perseverance in the details endows the poems with such vitality that the readers are caught in the participation of both the objective and subjective atmosphere presented in these frames. In Ariel, Plath correlates the notion of Renaissance with motherhood and motherhood. The old self could be an example of maternal dominance and contamination by others, while the emerging new self is free and liberated in contrast to the dependent first self.

Maternity and maternity shocks

Love set you in motion like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped you on the soles of your feet and your bald cry

He took his place among the elements. (CP 156)

When one remembers the notion of Mother, the first projection that impresses is the devoted act of love and mercy. Knowing the fact that Plath’s bipolar disorder and postpartum depression escalated after her pregnancy, this matter could be seen as her agonizing attitude towards intercourse and conception. It requires contemplating that pregnancy amounts to losing one’s identity in some sense. Reproducing a creature that sucks one’s blood and inherits some genetic characteristic is exactly the same so-called otherness that was thoroughly discussed in the second chapter of this thesis. In “Metaphors”, Plath applies a kind of metaphorical language to portray the person’s pregnancy. She indicates an elephant as a heavy pregnant woman and a watermelon as a fetus. The cumbersome act of pregnancy has been grotesquely described in a riddle poem of “Metaphors” in nine syllables.

This uncontrolled outpouring of affection, as discussed in the previous chapter, could occasionally hamper the child’s progress, as the mother is severely fostering otherness within the child by nurturing her own unfulfilled expectations and repressed desires. To establish the independent personality, the child has to kill the parenthood within.

The mother’s chest is dry and stiff in Ariel’s poems. Her milk is the obvious source of otherness that is injected into the child’s body by sucking it. On the other hand, Plath associates the idea of ​​abortion with motherhood and motherhood, when the life of the embryo as alterity is taken and ends deliberately or involuntarily.

Therefore, the parasite and host relationship of mother and child plays the dual role in a way that once the mother is the host when the child is an embryo, since the alterity simultaneously obtain nourishment from the blood. of the mother means allowing the otherness to enter her body and another moment is when the child is the host and the mother, similar to a parasite, feeds the baby with her milk as otherness.

The old me is like a mother who suffers a fatal illness and gives birth to a new baby, as the new and the real me would lead her to death. This idea of ​​motherhood and rebirth covers most of Sylvia Plath’s poems when at the same time the concept of motherhood and its fertilization, patriarchal power and creation would be summoned to challenge. Since this birth is free from any sexual intercourse and meditation and furthermore giving birth and pregnancy is the mere right of production, acceptable to female entities in factual norms, apparently this is what Plath might pose the question and the sarcasm of the productive power of the Almighty and his guilt and determination in creating the lord of the creatures, human. In ‘Lady Lazarus’ she yells:

“From the ash / I get up with red hair / And like men like air” (Poems collected 246).

This rising from the ashes is the parody of the day of the Resurrection, but she has not done it under the will and permission of her creator, but simply derived spontaneously from her own desire and urgency. Again in another part of ‘Lady Lazarus’, the narrator gathers the parts of her body as God has sworn and guaranteed in the Holy Book that he will do the same on the Day of Resurrection: “These are my hands / My knees. / I can be skin and bone. / However, I am the same identical woman ”(Complete Poems 245).

If such a magnanimous ridiculous act of rebirth and resurrection in a kangaroo court of a poem like ‘Lady Lazarus’ is not an act of defiance and supremacy, what could it be called then?

Calling Plath an atheist or considering his poetic style and subject matter as profane would be beyond the area of ​​this discussion and would turn to theological and religious doctrines and principles.

Regarding the counterattacks of two competing competing Selves, in the previous section it was argued that the old self is an adult and a mother, but here, on the contrary, one could consider the childish aspect of the old False Self and the mature portrait of the new Self. True. What really matters in this metamorphosis is the process and the phase through which the person has passed and the freshness of the soul and the entity with a blackboard inside, eliminating all the black points of the past.

The early me and the new me reborn

Ariel appears to embody Plath’s response to oppressive modern society. The artist’s ego has the capacity to be promoted and therefore must necessarily be nurtured to be reborn.

Whereas in the early poems the self was often imagined in terms of its own possibilities for transformation, in the post-colossus poems the self is more often seen as trapped within a closed cycle. One moves, but only in a circle and continuously back to the same starting point. More than the self and the world, Ariel’s poems record the self in the world. The self can change and develop, transform and be reborn, only if the world in which it exists does so; The possibilities of the self are intimately and inextricably linked to those of the world. [Italic mine] (Pamela J. Annas171)

The self finds a kind of buffering effect from the world to define itself and come to recognition. Obviously, the self finds its validity and meaning in the external world and its elements. Contemplatively speaking, the world and the environment shape the form of the self as pottery does clay.

The idea of ​​Renaissance appears in the last lines of ‘Love Letter’ in The Collected Poems edited by Ted Hughes to testify such a metamorphosis within the person:

Tree and stone gleamed, without shadows.

The length of my finger became brighter like glass.

I started to sprout like a March twig:

An arm and a leg, an arm, a leg.

From stone to cloud, I ascended.

Now I look like some kind of God

Floating through the air in my soul change

Pure as a panel of ice. It’s a gift. (CP147)

‘An arm and a leg’ here would connote the Biblical allusion to the Day of Resurrection that all the members would be associated as before. The repetition of ‘… an arm, a leg’ simply signifies the security of the person and at the same time the wonder of such recreation and Renaissance. Further, the most important thing is that ‘An arm and a leg’ could refer to something expensive and expensive. This Renaissance has cost Plath ‘An arm and a leg’ for sure. You would have to pay exorbitant sums to obtain such a precious Renaissance.

‘From stone to cloud, thus I ascended’ specifies the moral elevation and exaltation of such a Renaissance. It could be interpreted that the soul of the person has been united to the divine entity that infantile and habitually it thinks that it is in the sky and behind the clouds.

The ‘clouds’ also regularly shine the notion of fertilization and fertility, as rain clouds are pregnant with rain and bring freshness and Renaissance to all nature.

‘Now I look like a kind of God’, in Greek mythology there are several symbols of God that exist for each element, better to mention the God of the wind, the Goddess of fire, etc. But here, because of the act of creation, the person gallantly equates himself with Almighty by applying bold statements and thus calls all creation in requisition and takes it as work of fatigue.

The fact that the person compares himself and describes himself ‘sprouting like a sprig of March’ could be as if he intended to challenge nature with his own potential and aptitude for Rebirth and metamorphosis which in the next section would be fully argued.