1 Who is the Deadmost (Plus Mort)?: Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath from a Kristevan Perspective. Areen Khalifeh Email: areen.khalifeh@brunel.ac.uk Department of English, Brunel University, West London Abstract: This paper compares Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, from a Kristevan perspective. It shows that the level of heterogeneity, which results from the investment of the maternal and the semiotic in the text, is more evident in Plath s work than in Sexton s. Plath s work witnesses transformation and jouissance unlike Sexton s which resists this maternal and semiotic irruption. Plath is looked at as a subject in process while Sexton is more or less a unitary subject. Abjection is used to show how the psychic borders of the two poets differ in the level of their fluidity and thus in their ability to invest the maternal in the text. This difference depends on psychological reasons related to the poets biographies. The poets, Sexton and Plath, have been connected by many critics, as well as in many minds, due to several factors. First, both were classified as confessional poets, along with Robert Lowell and others, since they exposed their personal emotions in their poetry. Second, both writers were friends. The first meeting which established their friendship took place in Robert Lowell s poetry class at Boston University. The brief but intense friendship, as David Trinidad describes it, influenced the work of both poets (29). The third and the most important factor of the Sexton-Plath dyad remains that both writers were obsessed with death not only in their poetry but also in their lives. They both had breakdowns and eventually committed suicide.
2 However, in spite of the friendship and the mutual influence and interests of the two women, each poet s work remains unique. This is not to equate the two poets achievements though. In fact, many critics see that Plath s poetry, especially her last poetry, surpasses that of Sexton without underestimating or minimizing the latter work (e.g. Hall 66; Alvarez, Sylvia Plath 62; Nims 138; Markey, A Journey 145). In fact, Janice Markey notices that even the most sympathetic critics find her [Sexton] lacking (A New Tradition? 101). Trinidad puts it shortly: Plath undid her [Sexton] in the end (29). It is true that Phoebe Pettingell sounds harsh when she declares: as the passing years provide a greater perspective on Plath s verse, it continues to look strong, while Sexton s sound dated the product of a dead-end movement, like imagism or beat poetry, has lost its momentum (18). However, what is interesting in her comment is her use of the word momentum which, I believe, comes from inside the poetry and not from outside factors. I see this momentum as precisely the anger or hate that Sexton talked about when she compared her poetry to Plath s in an interview with Barbara Kevles: Her first book didn t interest me at all. I was doing my own thing. But after her death, with the appearance of Ariel, I think I was influenced and I don t mind saying it. In a special sort of way, it was daring again. She had dared to write hate poems, the one thing I had never dared to write. I d always been afraid, even in my life, to express anger. I think the poem, Cripples and Other Stories, is evidence of a hate poem somehow, though no one could ever write a poem to compare to her Daddy. (13) What Janice Markey has noticed is true then: Unlike Plath, Sexton s anger is never clarifying; no sooner expressed, it is repressed, and the same emotional and intellectual impasse remains (A New Tradition? 116). This anger which is the thing that is unique to Plath and the ingredient that is [especially] missing from Sexton s early poems is what Kristeva calls negativity (Trinidad 28). Negativity is a release of controlled drive energy
3 (Lechte, Julia Kristeva 127). This violent energy expenditure (anal drive or death drive), as Lechte explains, becomes part of the signifying process as heterogeneity. That is, this discharge of drives (violent anger and hate in Plath s case) creates a dynamic, conflictual process in the text where a dialogue is initiated between the semiotic (le sémiotique) (the rhythmic pre-oedipal, pre-linguistic instinctual space which is maternal) and the symbolic (le symbolique) (the social and cultural law of the father). As Sexton s poetry, especially her early poetry, does not express this kind of anger, I would argue, the level of heterogeneity is less evident in her poems than in Plath s. The death drive is less released in her text and thus it has less transformation, positive destruction capable of changing, and jouissance if compared to Plath s. But that is not to say that Sexton s poetry is totally passive. Accordingly, I would call Plath who ventilates the death energy in her poetry more the deadmost (plus mort) and her unique voice the Siren voice of the Other, while Sexton would be the dead / less. Therefore, I would argue, that the work of Sexton and Plath does not have the same artistic value from a Kristevan perspective. Their poetic language is not the same in terms of dialogism and therefore the capability of transformation. Sylvia Plath will gain here the title of the "deadmost" as she is the one who is able to produce a dialectical masochistic dialogue between the bodily drives of the semiotic and the linguistic and the social of the symbolic effectively. Sexton's poetry, in contrast, is though seemingly revolutionary, hides beneath it consent to a hegemonic law and structure. Moreover, acts of death in Plath's work sometimes risks cutting the dialogue in her poetry and thus risks the life of the "I" and the other (the addressee) as the participants in that dialogue. Yet, this gambling with death is one way of forming temporary synthesis where a drastic change (a leap) happens. I would argue that transformation in Plath's poetry does not happen only as a result of the semiotic as sublimation (Aufhebung), rupturing and shattering of the thetic (the symbolic) but also
4 through stopping the whole process of interaction, the dialogue between the symbolic and the semiotic as an act of suspense, silence, absence and death. It is silence that opens a space beyond the text which brings an ultimate jouissance (Mitchell 37). This suggests that Plath is a subject in process while Sexton is more or less a unitary subject. Abjection is used to show how the psychic borders of those two subjects differ in the level of their fluidity and thus in their ability to invest the maternal in the text. Abjection is a process where the not-yet subject relinquishes the object-subject dyad of the mother and child. This is to form a border, no matter how tenuous, where the mother s improper, unclean body is jettisoned outside it in order for the subject to structure its identity as symbolic. This expulsion is not final though; the mother s abject body does not disappear forever. Like Freud s return of the repressed it comes back to haunt the subject, threatening her of pulverizing her borders (Gross 87). The difference of the level of resistance in Plath and Sexton s psychic borders depends on psychological reasons related to the poets psychological biographies which will be discussed separately. At the beginning of their work, Sexton and Plath are allies to their fathers. But while Plath leaves her proper borders to confront a mother outside, Sexton holds to her psychic shields and decides to stay inside as she fears facing an abject mother. This is done after a difficult separation which Sexton achieves from her first mother, Mary Gray (with whom she had an ambivalent love/hatred relationship), before establishing her Fortified Castle (Kristeva, Powers 46). This is explicit in three of Sexton's major poems The Double Image, The Division of Parts, and The Operation. In fact, a close look at Sexton's poetry would make one feel startled by the amount of two and three dimensional geometrical shapes there (houses, windows, doors, gates, boxes, blankets, etc.). These shapes relate to her relationship with her father and her mother, the
5 symbolic and the real. Although Sexton is loyal to her father and his city-state, she yearns for an archaic mother who, at the same time, threatens her by her ominous call. In defence against the call of the mother, Sexton builds different kinds of obstinate walls and thus they seem to belong more to the Euclidean geometry which is separated, segregated (Burgin 108). This is why we have less negativity in Sexton's work as there is resistance and less confrontation with the maternal, which cannot go through the walls of the city-state to achieve transformation. This means, of course, less death. And Sexton is, in this case, the dead/less. Therefore, the ability of showing violent fragmentation and dissolution of the I (her death) in poetry is less. If suffering and death are necessary for the gestation of works of art, then Sexton is more of a sufferer rather than a dead person in her work (Kristeva, Proust 10). In other words, she longs for death more than acting death and encountering it face to face. In spite of her desperate need for her lost mother, Sexton s fear of her mother s stifling powers is much stronger. Therefore, she erects walls and uses anything to shield and cover her from that omnipotent power, from the devouring body of her mother in poems such as Those Times, Three Green Windows, Killing the Spring, Leaves that talk, Briar Rose and others. For example, one can see this threatening, fascinating power encroaching from the outside in Leaves that Talk : They call, though I sit here sensibly behind my window screen. They call, even if I'm pinned behind bars. They call, they call their green death call. They want me. They need me. I belong lying down under them,
6 letting the green coffin fold and unfold above me as I go out. (21-28) Sexton s case is complicated by the discovery of a second mother (her great-aunt Anna Ladd Dingley) as a secret crypt buried in her psyche. In fact, Kelly Oliver refers to one of Kristeva's interviews concerning the relation a woman can have with her mother: One possibility is that she doesn't ever get rid of her mother. Rather, she carries with her this living corpse, the mother's body that no longer nourishes. Kristeva claims that usually women close their eyes to this corpse. They forget about it. And they certainly don't eroticize it. The other alternative is that a woman forms a defense against the mother. As a defense, some women devote themselves to the Symbolic order. (62) However, Sexton has two mothers. Therefore while choosing the second option; she has closed her eyes on her Nana s corpse to introject her later on, causing negativity to emerge albeit for only a short time. The psychological evidence of this hidden bond in Sexton s life was her lesbian relationship with her friend, Anne Wilder, and her abuse to her elder daughter Linda as a projection for her hidden sexual desire to her Nana. Therefore, while Sexton has been able to jettison one mother over her borders, she has not been able to do the same with her second mother, her aunt, Nana. There has been that Thing causing her sadness put in a crypt, engulfed in one of the secret rooms of her house (Lechte 34-35). This room is like that described in Sexton s short story, The Letting Down of the Hair : a room like the inside of a church bell. A chalice, a cave, a perch, queer [my italics] bird that I am. A hidden place inside of a seedpod (40).One can deduce then that the reason of her fear, which Sexton was
7 famous for, is not only a fear from an abject mother outside, but also a fear of separation from a second mother within. However, at the moment of the collapse of her borders in her poetry, Sexton manages to introject her loss and release her hidden passion for a lost mother as negativity in her poetry. The appearance of the maternal element, the abject, inside indicates the beginning of heterogeneity in Sexton's poetry and is observed in many poems, taking many forms (such as dung, a rat, Evil, a demon) in poems like Keeping the City, Is It True? The Hoarder, Demon and The Ambition Bird and others. For example, in The Ambition Bird : All night dark wings / flopping in my heart. / Each an ambition bird (16-18). In Sexton s poetry, although the maternal abject bursts in the text, especially at the end of her career, she immediately performs cleansing rituals as she seems to fear her heterogeneous body and heads to a symbolic father again. The fearful Anne has tried until the end to postpone any confrontation with the mother as bodily drives invested in the text. This is why one presumes she died out of fear in the end, which never stopped in her life and in her work. God, who appears at the end of her career as a stern symbolic father, might have given her unity but has never been able to relinquish her fear. In looking at Sylvia Plath s work and life, we will witness a braver subject in dealing with the mother and the father. Plath, unlike Sexton, does not hold onto her psychic borders, which are fluid from the start. In a dangerous step, she tries to get out of her father s shields in her first poetry about nature. This, of course, will endanger her position as a subject and her creativity. In I Am Vertical, for example, she declares: It is more natural to me, lying down. / Then the sky and I are in open conversation, / 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 (17-20). Finding the consequences of this act lethal and threatening to her creativity, the revolutionist
8 learns the secret of the game that she has to oscillate between her borders inside and outside to achieve her goals of getting rid of the father as well as experiencing the maternal jouissance brought by such a game. Plath s movements, which are both conscious and unconscious, take several steps. First, she turns from being a total Pharmakos (scapegoat) to the father into being a total Pharmakos to nature (mother). Second, she tries to create an other to get out of the passivity she created as a transitional step in poems such as In Plaster and Tulips where reciprocity begins: Their redness talks to my wound ( Tulips 39). Thirdly, her poetry witnesses violent heterogeneity (an oscillation between a mother and a father, between I and Not-I) mainly in Ariel in poems such as Daddy, Lady Lazarus and Purdah. This heterogeneity takes place not only within each poem, but also across poems, which enables her eventually of creating her own voice and getting rid of her father forever. Violent death becomes immense in her poetry and it takes various forms: cannibalism, burning, killing and shedding blood. What helped Plath to raise the level of her anger and thus her creativity is the permission of her psychiatrist, Dr. Beuscher to hate her mother. In this way, Dr. Beuscher allowed negativity to flow in Plath s body and in her text as heterogeneity. Paradoxically enough, what contributed to this treatment is Plath s husband, Ted Hughes, whose adultery with Assia Wevill increased the level of anger in Plath. This facilitated separation from her symbiotic relation with Hughes, which resembles her relation with her mother, and added to the heterogeneity of her poetry. Moreover, in her Journals, Plath accuses her mother of killing her father and fears that her mother will kill her husband the way she killed her father before (434). In seeking revenge from Hughes because of his infidelity, that is killing him psychologically, she has to identify with her mother, the killer, (433) while in killing her mother, as she wishes, she has to identify with her father. She admits though that in killing her mother, she kills herself (433). This family drama and changing of allies (identification)
9 is translated linguistically into Plath s work as a dialogue between the semiotic and the symbolic, between I and Not-I. In Plath s last poetry, the final confrontation with the mother as a pre-symbolic space results in jouissance and death as the last perfect act. This is clear in poems such as Words, Contusion, and Edge. In conclusion, Plath s journey, unlike that of Sexton s, has ended with facing a mother. Rather than resorting to a patriarch, Plath gets rid of him to achieve transformation and jouissance. Not afraid to die, she unleashes all her semiotic powers to reach originality and perfection in spite of the fact that this is a destructive act. This unleashing of the semiotic has been gradual. For, at the beginning there has been heterogeneity in play until the last explosion of drives. The difference between Sexton and Plath lies not only in the amount of the maternal and semiotic drives invested in the text, but also in the capacity of facing them.
10 References: Alvarez, A. "Sylvia Plath." The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. Ed. Charles Newman. London: Faber, 1970. 56-68. Burgin, Victor. "Geometry and Abjection." Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva. Ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin. London: Routledge, 1990. 104-23. Gross, Elizabeth. "The Body of Signification." Abjection, Melancholia,and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva. Ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin. London: Routledge, 1990. 80-103. Hall, Caroline King Barnard. Anne Sexton. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989. Kevles, Barbara. "The Art of Poetry: Anne Sexton." Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. 3-29. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror : An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. ---. Proust and the Sense of Time. Trans. Stephen Bann. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Lechte, John. Julia Kristeva. London: Routledge, 1990. Markey, Janice. A Journey into the Red Eye: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath - a Critique. London: Women's Press, 1993. ---. A New Tradition? The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich: A Study of Feminism and Poetry. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985.
11 Mitchell, Paul. "Reading (and) the Late Poems of Sylvia Plath." The Modern Language Review 100 (2005): 37-50. Nims, John Frederick. "The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Technical Analysis." The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. Ed. Charles Newman. London: Faber, 1970. 136-52. Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva : Unraveling the Double-Bind. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Pettingell, Phoebe. Poetry and Private Lives, New Leader 75.2 (1992): 17-18. Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. London: Faber, 2000. ---. Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber, 1981. Sexton, Anne. "The Bar Fly Ought to Sing." No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1985. 6-13. ---. The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton, 1981. ---. The Letting Down of the Hair. Atlantic Monthly (1972):40-43. Trinidad, David. Two Sweet Ladies : Sexton and Plath s Friendship and Mutual Influence. American Poetry Review 35.6 (2006). 21-29. Keywords: Mother, the maternal, the semiotic and the symbolic, abjection