death between them in order to be able to mate the drone and form a new colony.

Transcription

1 Sylvia Plath s life and works were an incessant questioning about traditional roles and above all, pre-established roles imposed upon women in society. Part of this questioning consisted in a conflictive alternation between tolerance of tradition and resistance to it. The Bee Meeting is full of references to reality. Which particular reality does the poem deal with and how these references transform into figurative meanings? The Bee Meeting is a sixty-line monologue divided in eleven verse-paragraphs. The term bee meeting that appears in the title of the poem evokes the rhyming term bee-keeping which means apiculture. In fact, this poem is, on the whole, a description of a bee-keeping scene from the point of view of a feminine character. The poetic persona, after being put on a bee-keeper suit is led by other bee-keepers, to a wood in which they have a hive. She will witness the beekeepers manipulations on their hive. When the poem begins, the bee-keepers are already gloved and covered contrary to the poetic persona who has no protection. In the second stanza after being put on the white protective clothing, she compares to a milkweed silk. This kind of white protective clothing will be a motif throughout the poem. In the next stanza, for example, she focuses on the head protector worn by the bee-keepers: Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors, / breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits. Soon she will have their same physical appearance when she will be given a protector hat and a veil in the fourth stanza: they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat / And a black veil that moulds to my face, they are making me one of them. The white suit will appear in stanza 6, worn by the strange surgeon described as an apparition in a green helmet, shining gloves and a white suit, and in stanza 8 when the white suit will be compared to a cow-parsley a plant with white flowers. Other references to apiculture activity are present in the poem: in stanza 8, the speaker says: smoke rolls and scarves in the grove. This is a reference to the smoke produced by the bee smoker used to calm the bees which enables the beekeeper to open the hive and work in it without being attacked. In stanza 9, when the old queen bee is hunted, there are a reference to a process called supersedure in which an old queen is replaced by a new queen. Virgin queen s behavior is described in the next stanza: ( ) The new virgins/ dream of a duel they will win inevitably, a curtain of wax dividing them from the bright flight, / the upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her. This alludes to the fact that in a hive there are generally several virgin queens that are to fight to the

2 death between them in order to be able to mate the drone and form a new colony. But these literal references in The Bee Meeting may transform in the poem into figurative meanings as a way to think about women s alienation, paranoia and the futility of life. From this point of view, Plath may be a follower of a 20 th century literary trend in which writers, like Kafka, turned to the animal world to find esthetic materials of expression. Right from the beginning of the poem there is a conflict between the community and the individual. The poem begins with a meeting in a bridge between the poetic persona and the members of a village. Their roles are identified: Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the / Villagers / The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees. The name of each character is preceded by the determinant the, because they represent a particular institution of that community: church is represented by the rector who is a priest of the Anglican Church and the sexton who is a church officer. The church is in charge of marriage, of keeping and protecting social values and morality, of keeping also social rituals of life and death. Family and motherhood is represented by the midwife who enables childbirth. From this point of view, the young woman is also a character with a particular role. Although the role is not identified, the poetic persona will become aware of it when she will identify with the old queen at the end of the poem. She will realize that the queen bee has not that royal majesty of its name; that its role is strictly to be a reproducer. Therefore the poetic persona s role in society, like the role of the queen, is to be a mother, to live a life of seclusion, of procreation and of children rising until her death. A role imposed by tradition and necessary for the community regardless the woman s particular desires. It is striking the passivity of the character, stereotypically attributed to women. She accepts without resistance: for example in the stanza 2 and 5 she is dressed. In the third stanza the speaker says in the passive form: I am led through a beanfield. And once again in stanza 5, she follows resignedly the villagers: They are leading me to the shorn grove. As a matter of fact she is bound to be an instrument of its own nightmare, and she knows it: I cannot run she says, and two lines later she reinforces this idea: I could not run without having to run forever. In other words, if she decides to run she knows that there will never be a place where she can stay because everywhere her fate as a woman will inevitably happen.

3 Throughout the poem other characters-institutions will appear: the surgeon, the butcher, the grocer, the postman, in stanza 6. However the reader comes across a problem when the speaker entangles animal-humanized characters to her enumeration: the agent for bees and the secretary of bees. Given that in the poem bees are seen as members of an actual community with complex hierarchy, behaviors and rituals, these characters are somehow also institutions presented in an animal-human way. What is important here is to consider that for the poetic persona the differences between the human community and the animal community are irrelevant as long as both of them are communities with predisposed behaviors, with rituals passed from one generation to the other. In this sense, these two worlds are similar and can be, at least poetically, mixed. Besides the initial question, Who are these people at the bridge to meet me?, is asked in a way that evokes predisposition: they are to meet her, they are internally bound to do so. How do the scenes described in this poem become almost unbearably distressful? Indeed the poem becomes a menacing mental landscape. During her excursion to the shorn grove, places and things around her get particular and somehow distressing meanings. She and the rest of bee-keepers walk through a beanfield, as she says in stanza 3. In ancient Egypt and later in the Greco-Roman culture beanfields were the places where the dead awaited reincarnation. As a matter of fact, for them bean represented the embryo, the soul of the dead that are to reincarnate. From this viewpoint, the poetic persona, a feminine character of the poem who was dressing a sleeveless summery dress, unprotected, nude, virgin, young, is awaiting a symbolic reincarnation, a reincarnation in her preimposed role as a wife and mother. In this sense it is striking that after mentioning the beanfield the speaker insists so much on the word bean in stanza 4, after mentioning the terms Strips of tinfoil and feather dusters, connected with domestic activities stereotypically attributed to women: Strips of tinfoil blinking like people, / Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers, / Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts. As a matter of fact, flowers, that traditionally symbolize innocence and beauty, get distressful meanings in this poem like in the last line that has just been quoted. In bored hearts, the speaker puns with the word bored meaning weary and drilled, an allusion to heartbreaking and disillusionment of some marriages, like Plath s marriage with Hughes that ended in a separation when Hughes fell in love with Assia Wevill. Stanza four goes on with an image of red flowers that

4 is far from being pleasant: Is it clots the tendrils are dragging up that string? / No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible. But flowers can even injure the poetic persona: I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me. / With its yellow purses, its spiky armoury. Another plant that gets a menacing meaning in the poem is the hawthorn in stanza 5. In some cultures, the hawthorn, also called Maytree because it is a tree that blossoms in the first days of May, is a symbol of fertility and sexual union. Two characters were associated to the Maytree s blossoming: the May Queen representing the Goddess and Green May representing the spirit of new vegetation. However, in the puritan folklore, especially in Britain hawthorns symbolized completely the opposite. No marriage could take place between May and mid- June, because these two months were unlucky. For puritans, and Plath was a Bostonian raised in the Unitarian faith the blossoming of the hawthorn was a time of purification. That is why for puritan folklore the hawthorn symbolized chastity, austerity and cleansing. May Queen had to remain white, pure and untouched. Marriage, one of the duties of women in traditionalist ideologies, is presented thus as an event of bad omen announced by the sick smell of the hawthorn: Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick? / The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children. Besides in stanzas 5 and 6, troubling feelings are aroused by the lexical field of disease and decay: It is the hawthorn that smells so sick? / The barren body of a hawthorn, etherizing its children. / Is it some operation that is taking place? / It is the surgeon my neighbours are waiting for Somehow this ominous idea had been announced two lines before when the bee-keepers gave the poetic persona a fashionable white straw Italian hat/ And a black veil. At one level, as it has been said, it is a piece of closing to protect her from bee stings. But a black veil is also a symbol of mourning, of sadness, of death. Another social role representing an institution in society appears on this nightmarish stage: the surgeon who restores health wearing a green helmet. Perhaps the speaker talks about the tree surgeon because his activity is indirectly associated with bee-keeping. Anyway when the speaker wonders about the identity of the surgeon, it is striking that she enumerates three possibilities, three new roles in that village: the butcher, the grocer and the postman. The two first ones, provide the necessary food for subsistence. The last one delivers news. Is there some symbolic importance of bees in the poem? Sylvia Plath knew the bee-keeping world because her husband, the poet Ted Hughes began to keep bees in the summer of 1962, just at the end of their

5 marriage. However, in The Bee meeting, bees may also have a particular meaning. On the one hand, the notion of community is important to bear in mind because there is a long literary tradition in which hives of honey bees have been seen as actual societies with which writers have drawn parallels. In Plato, in Shakespeare or in Bernard Mandeville s Fable of the bees, human society was more or less compared to honey bees hives. Moreover there is another meaning that is connected with the meaning of beans, seen before. Egyptians believed that the bee was a sacred animal that bridged the natural world and the underworld, the world of the dead. This idea embodied in bridges, in hedges, in midpoints between two worlds is essential in Plath s poem. It is not by chance that The Bee Meeting begins at a bridge, or more precisely at the bridge. Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? This idea will reappear towards the end of the poem in which she decides not to move when the bee-keepers make the bee workers to come out from the hive. She decides to be like a personage in a hedgerow. A hedgerow is a line of close trees planted to mark a boundary of an area. Is the poetic persona a boundary between the human world and the bee world? As a matter of fact, a possible reading of The Bee meeting could be that this poem is full of midpoints. A poem in which the bee is animal that is halfway between this world and the world of the dead (the physically and morally dead); a creature that is halfway between humans and animals. A poem in which images are halfway between reality-literality and symbolism, between sanity and paranoia. But in Plath s eyes, what really constitutes the drama of this poem is that exactly at the center of these midpoints women, no matter how they can be represented (as virgin queen bees, old queen bees, or simply as real women), are fettered to a condition pre-established by a tradition that is completely unconcerned about their wishes, expectations and feelings. To read The Bee Meeting, it is important to bear in mind that Sylvia Plath is a feminine voice in the English literary scene. Only five years before the stormy 1968, The Bee Meeting portraits women s dramatic reality through a way that perhaps leads to the place where the great gods play de drama of blood, lust and death.