Two women, living consecutively, each chronicled their most precious views, senses, and perceptions utilizing an art form unappreciated in today’s world: poetry. They lived and they died, suffering through a world that did not meet their fastidious expectations, and that neither would forgive for its shortcomings. These two women each share a type of uniqueness that lends itself to poetic verse, and, unfortunately, also lives of deep despair and sadness. Each suffered because neither would conform to their times’ standards for women—standards that set expectations of passivity and servitude. In this way, they were stuck. Each was inserted, in part by volition and in part by context, between a rock and a very, very hard place. They chose to determine the course in which they would feel their pain, exercising the courage it takes to be different and substantial. Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson did not allow the pressures of the world to confine their minds in the manner most women of the age endured. Yet, neither enjoyed the kind of happiness one imagines for the best and the brightest of us all.
Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson were both born in Massachusetts. Dickinson was born in Amherst in 1830 and Plath in Boston in 1932 (Wider 2; Anonymous 3). Though each shouldered tragedy, their lives contain distinct differences from each other, not least of which culminated in Plath’s suicide in 1963. For the sake of chronology, however, a look here at the events in Dickinson’s life will now begin.
As recorded by Sarah Ann Wider, Emily Dickinson was born to Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson, the former a lawyer and the latter a homemaker. The concept of the latter is something that appears and reappears in Dickinson’s poetry and letters as a foreboding and life-nullifying role to be feared and avoided. She grew in a time focused on science, and attended a “one-room primary school” in Amherst before moving on to Amherst Academy where she had access to lectures in astronomy, botany, chemistry, geology, mathematics, natural history, natural philosophy, and zoology (3). After her time at Amherst Academy, she attended for one year the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before dropping out mysteriously—some suspecting at her father’s behest. She was labeled as one “without hope” in terms of her perspective toward the possibility of a Christian Lord while she was in seminary school, a label she continued to wear throughout her life, even as she watched those closest to her in her family become active members of local churches.
The next phase of her life really never ends. She becomes an entertainer of guests for her father and brother, a sort of tool to sustain their standing in society. However, over time she became more and more reclusive, and eventually did not serve this purpose. She demanded of her brother in her letters to him an intellectual honesty and standard that he was unable to attain to her satisfaction (he was a senator) (Wider 6). Eventually, her main source of communication with the outside world is via letter. There are periods spanning years in which she never leaves her home, and periods of even longer in which she never leaves the estate. She lives through her poems, and builds a small base of readers with whom she shares her work (still, via letter). She never actively pursued publication, and she never wanted fame. She died in 1886, never experiencing the success of her works firsthand.
According to a journal article retrieved from Gale Literary Databases entitled “Sylvia Plath”, Plath was born to a “college professor, Otto Plath, and one of his students, Aurelia Schober.” Her father died when she was 8 years old, an event and a relationship that colored her experience for the rest of her life. Plath had stories published and received recognition before she ever attended a university, and begins suffering from a severe depression once she starts her undergraduate degree. She wrote, “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it” (Anonymous 3). This is something that describes pretty accurately what is now known as bipolar disorder, a neurological dysfunction that was not treatable in the early 20th century. She, in 1953, attempts suicide, survives, is hospitalized, receives electro-shock therapy, and lives long enough to later finish her degree and write a work of fiction about the experience.
Plath married Ted Hughes, poet, after meeting him at Cambridge, a man who is known to have mistreated her throughout their life together. She became the mother of two before she endured a tremendous “burst of creativity that produced the poems in Ariel”, after which she ends her short life in 1962 by inhaling gas from a kitchen oven (Anonymous 3).
The sense that one gets after familiarizing oneself with these two creative souls is a sense of desperate isolation. Dickinson seems to have endured hers on terms she was much more comfortable with than Plath could or did. There are key poems that communicate their respective fates, and seem to encapsulate their very different, yet somehow kindred lives. This poetry is indicative of rebellion, reverence, deep ideals, and uninterrupted intelligence. To begin an analytical look at the poems of these two artists, starting with Plath and working backward toward Dickinson will provide an interesting vantage from which to view the increase in liberation Plath enjoyed as a woman in her era.
In a poem out of her last work Ariel, Plath describes her sense of impotence and isolation in her will to interact with a living world. “Paralytic”, on page 77, begins with Plath’s depiction of herself with her “…mind a rock / no fingers to grip, no tongue / My god the iron lung.” She describes how the iron lung will not “Let me relapse” and how the day “glides by” and the night brings “Tapestries of eyes,” providing the reader a frightening image of her paranoid sense of the world watching her. She explains that “Talkers” ask her “You all right?” while anonymous and without access to her “starched” breast—in other words, her heart. After a later mention of her daughters, she goes on to describe her sense of separation from the world: “Eyes, nose and ear / A clear / Cellophane I cannot crack”. She concludes the work by referencing the magnolia, “Drunk on its own scents,” and tells how it “Asks nothing of life.”
It is clear that she is unhappy, but without will enough or any avenue available to make the necessary changes her happiness required. She says the iron lung will not “allow” her to relapse, leading a reader to believe she would prefer that over her current state. She does not believe that anyone truly cares for her, or she would not label those who ask her if she is okay as anonymous talkers. Talkers connote people who are without action, in this case, people who would not truly act on her behalf but seem to ask after her condition to satisfy something within themselves. The most disturbing passage of the poem is the part that has to do with her daughters, with whom it is clear she is unable to connect as she so desires. She feels as if cellophane is between her and all she cares for. She is being kept alive, suffering, without the ability to do or to do say anything that would alter her condition. It is of no surprise that this is a woman who kills herself by sticking her head in an oven.
Plath registers her ill-will toward her father in one of her more famous works entitled “Daddy”. This poem is written on page 49 of Ariel, and addresses Plath’s half of the contempt she and Dickinson share for the male role models in their lives.The most revealing stanza reads as follows:
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you
I thought even bones would do.
The most apparent and disparaging sense one receives from this stanza is one of the very clearly mixed emotions she felt for this man. She calls him a devil and refers to him as a “black” man (one treacherous—not a racial reference) while describing her first suicide attempt as an effort to get back to him. Her life here is simply pouring into her work, the poems from this book are described by A. Alvarez as reading like written: “posthumously” (Anonymous 4).
Before switching gears, attention must be brought to a significant contrast, soon to be revealed as differing levels of vulgarity between Plath and Dickinson. A poem that can now signify well both the similarities and this key difference between Dickinson and Plath is Dickinson’s “Emancipation”, written here in full:
No rack can torture me,
My soul’s at liberty.
Behind this mortal bone
There knits a bolder one
You cannot prick with saw,
Nor rend with scimitar.
Two bodies therefore are;
Bind one, and one will flee.
The eagle of his nest
No easier divest
And gain the sky,
Than mayest thou,
Except thyself maybe
Thine enemy ;
Captivity is consciousness,
So’s liberty.
Does this poem, on page 147 of Favorite Poems of Emily Dickinson, not emote the key difference in a manner plainly enough to discern? How much more resigned is Dickinson throughout this work than Plath in those previously cited? Her reclusive nature protrudes itself into her views on the defense of herself. Here she proclaims self-defense as something that would be useless to her, as she does not identify with her body as much as she does with the spirit it creates. “Bind one, and one will flee,” she states. Whereas Plath cannot stop discussing her pains, Dickinson here explains all pain of this world as remote from her spiritual self. How reflective is this of a woman who scarcely left her estate throughout her adult life? She experiences all of the same tension as Plath, but resigns herself to it in such a way that awarded her longevity in comparison to Plath’s short, self-ended stint of existence.
Plath was published while she lived. She enjoyed attention in the world of literature. She enjoyed critical warmth and success. She lived in a time burgeoning with the still mystical and unrealized spirit of female liberation, and it seems to have both encouraged her fervor and tormented her soul. While Dickinson lived in a time in which a woman’s role had not yet begun a proper redefinition, and also while Dickinson made remarks about the homemaker’s position a woman was destined to take on, Dickinson did not so enjoy a flirtation with liberty as to allow it to overwhelm her sense of persecution as Plath seems to have done in her life. In either case, they both realize tragic existences of isolation and ingeniousness, neither able ever in their lives to enjoy their brilliance openly, and without constraint.
Works Cited
Anonymous. “Sylvia Plath.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006. Gale Literary Databases. Web.
Dickinson, Emily. Favorite Poems of Emily Dickinson. New York: Avenel, 1978. Print.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Print.
Wider, Sarah Ann. “Emily Dickinson.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 243: The American Renaissance in New England, Fourth Series 2001: 103-128. Detroit: Thomson Gale. Gale Literary Databases. Web. 2010.