The Imagery and the Symbols in the Blossoming Notions - Essay Example

? The Blossoming Notions: Sylvia Plath’s Daddy and Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck Female poets have a unique relation to language. It is the imagery and the symbols they use to describe their subject which often reveals their thought process and ultimately gives their work the weight of feminism with its exquisite taste and style. As much as she accepts the language that a female poet is given to communicate in, “she is also accepting a set of patriarchal, capitalist, racist, heterosexist assumptions which are built into the language and which, at the least, deny her an identity of her own” (Annas 10). Among the female poets who dominantly hold this place are Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. Plath’s Daddy and Rich’s Diving into the Wreck stand out for their feminist reading but also reveal the emotional and timid aspect of the speaker with a feminine tone. Sylvia Plath was not a common poet but a representative of the best modern feminist poetry for years to come. In order to analyze her positive literary qualities one needs to look deep into her literary achievements rather than her personal life and examine her works as the sole medium of communication in her life. Her literary aesthetic qualities have been overlooked in the past and her poems have been analyzed as a mere object of psychological and sociological aspect of her life (Bloom 49). What makes her stand out as an exceptional poet is her style of writing and the themes she touches upon while writing her poems. This is one perspective of viewing her work. One needs to maintain a balance while viewing her works and give credit to her works on an equal literary footing. Plath’s works embody a sense of pathological condition which encourages the reader to analyze it as a psychiatrist would assess his subject. Sylvia wrote many poems which reached fame in her life time. Among those, the one under discussion is Daddy. Here, Plath seeks to reject the definition of the “other” self which she embodies. There is agony and distress seen in this poem (Annas 15). In the case of Adrienne Rich, the speaker is seen struggling to put herself back together in an altogether new way. Her use of the metaphor androgyny which represents the characteristics of both male and female is not only unique but gives rise to the popular discussion about a woman wanting to be able to attain both a masculine and a feminine nature. The diver says, “I am she; I am he”, playing with the generic “he” and “s/he” while visiting an unknown territory for the purpose of exploration (Annas 17). The struggle for women’s right is the main theme of the poem and being a political poet herself, Rich displayed her affection for freedom and openly spoke about social justice. Diving in the Wreck is the title of the poem and also the title of the collection of poems which were released in 1974. Critics consider these poems to be the embodiment of feminism because in her earlier works she was only preparing her readers for what they would actually envision in this collection (Templeton 33). Her idea of the loss of female community finally expands to speak extensively about the conflicts females have to confront on a regular basis which include unsuccessful marriages and loss of creativity in the face of motherhood. At the surface level, the poem is about an adventurous voyage underwater where one can see sunken treasure, mysterious surroundings with dead bodies and sea creatures but there is more to this adventure if one takes a deeper look at the poem. The wreck enables Rich to talk about other issues at hand. She propounds on a notion of being a man and woman and also recollects the significance of the past with reference to solitude. With the theme of loneliness arrives the feeling of emotionality which brings the reader back to the starting point where he can detect a female voice in the lines. She exposes the readers with images like “shipwreck” and leaves the reader to broaden his imagination and take it as far as possible into real life incidents such as a broken marriage and unsuccessful career. Her method of playing with these images gently enables the readers to enjoy the rhythm and work his way through the subliminal messages she has beautifully woven in the verse. The speaker himself sounds like an explorer who has come to the destination with a purpose. He speaks in a matter-of-fact tone; “the thing I came for”. There is an eerie silence and again, "The wreck and not the story of the wreck.” “First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story…” The choice of diction conjures up an image of a bleak life surrounded with death. What follows confirms this feeling in association with abstract loneliness: “…the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.”(Rich) Similarly but on a different level, one is compelled to read Daddy with indifference refusing to connect the speaker with the poet herself but Plath’s interviews reveal a somewhat close connection of the speaker with the poem. The poem is a personal confession which mostly narrates Plath’s own miseries with respect to her father and her husband. However, on a second reading one can also visualize the word “daddy” as being generally used to refer to men in general (Kearns 76). “Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time-- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal” (Plath) Plath makes it agonizingly clear that it is “the quintessence of the Oedipal to be a warning that you will be damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. It appears to conjure obscene images as Sophocles’ Oedipus does when he is tested in confronting his own fate which heavily relies on his actions with or without which he would be doomed. The end is tragically sadistic both for Plath as well as the speaker who is accusing of two men in her life for making it miserable. The “vampire” who is understood to be her husband is someone who has drunk her blood and taken all the creativity from her life (Kearns 76). Plath is mainly always attempting to defy the course of nature and seems to fight till the last breath. Daddy seems to allow her to reveal her thoughts and share them with the people who still praise her for the insight it buries within it. The poem is more of an autobiographical account of venting her anger out on the men in her life. This is how Plath chooses her speaker to confront the patriarchal control in her life (Kearns 76). “Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw.” (Plath) This reveals her timid side as the speaker finds a way to talk to “Daddy” but she cannot because she does not have the guts. Her “tongue” is stuck in her jaw means she is helplessly silent. The speaker connects it with her father’s German origin and likens her misery with that of the Jews under Nazi rule. “But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do.” (Plath) Her state of helplessness is seen by her weakness depicted in the lines above. It reflects by the way that she describes her experience of being dragged from one place to another being bluffed and used. But her gesture towards her father is that of hatred and accusation. Words are the only comforting source of revenge that she can employ against her father. The concluding line “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through” best describes this feeling of confrontation towards her “daddy”. While reading the poems Daddy and Diving into the Wreck,one is able to see the loss of identity in the speaker who is distressed over herself for not being able to detect it. The speakers are portrayed feminine in ways which reflect their unreasonable and bad-tempered approach. They consider themselves helpless and beyond control in the aftermath of the distressful lives that they have spent and they are being nostalgic about their experiences revealing a timid yet independent aspect of their characters. The subject matter of both the poems revolves around life and its issues and thus makes them distinctive feminine works revealing the issues faced by females of the twentieth century. Works Cited Annas, Pamela. A Poetry of Survival: Un-naming and Renaming in the Poe try of AudreLorde, Pat Parker, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich. Colby Quarterly. Volume 18, no.1, March 1982, p.9-25 Bloom, Harold. Sylvia Plath. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989. Print. Kearns, Katherine. Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and Feminist Theory: The Search for Critical Method. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print. Plath, Sylvia. Daddy. Rich, Adrienne. Diving into the Wreck. Templeton, Alice. The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich's Feminist Poetics. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. Print. Read More