I am in limbo between the old world and the very uncertain and rather bleak new one (Wagner Martin120)
In search of an ego ideal, the poetess, despite living in a world of random and threatening events, has bravely experienced a kind of renaissance in both her life and works to encourage self-gratification. Longing for true fulfillment, Sylvia Plath finds it inescapably inevitable to initiate a metabolism that has become the motif of the Renaissance in most of her later Ariel poems. She, as “the Goddess of the cauldron of poetic inspiration” (Wagner Martin 114), pioneers the process of Rebirth by invoking the resurrection in her new collection of poetry, Ariel. The open suspense poems that have been derived from the interiority of her creator are a show fit to be deconstructed. The moral investigation of this challenging new world of poetry provides the essential setting for the character to extinguish her repressed cries and the agonies of her past. The arduous persistence in detail endows the poems with such vitality that readers become caught up in participating in both the objective and subjective atmosphere presented in these frames. In Ariel, Plath correlates the notion of Rebirth with motherhood and motherhood. The old self could be an example of maternal domination and contamination by others, while the emerging new self is free and liberated in contrast to the early dependent.
Maternity and maternity shock
Love sets you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your soles, and your bald scream
Take your place among the elements. (PC 156)
When one remembers the notion of Mother, the first projection that impresses is the devoted act of love and mercy. Given the fact that Plath’s bipolar disorder and postpartum depression intensified after her pregnancy, this matter could be seen as her agonizing attitude toward intercourse and her conception. She demands the contemplation that pregnancy is tantamount to losing one’s identity in some sense. Reproducing a creature that sucks its own blood and inherits some genetic characteristic is exactly the same thing called otherness that was widely 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 pregnant woman’s weight and a watermelon as a fetus. The cumbersome act of pregnancy has been grotesquely described in a riddle-like poem of “Metaphors” in nine syllables.
This uncontrolled outpouring of affection, as discussed in the previous chapter, could occasionally hinder the child’s progress, as the mother is severely fostering otherness within the child by feeding her own unfulfilled expectations and repressed desires. To establish the independent personality, the child has to kill the inner parenthood.
The mother’s chest is dry and rigid in Ariel’s poems. Her milk is the obvious source of the alterity that is injected into the child’s body through suction. On the other hand, Plath associates the idea of abortion with maternity and maternity, when the life of the embryo is taken and ended as alterity deliberately or involuntarily.
Thus, the parasite and host relationship of mother and child play the dual role such that once the mother is a host when the child is an embryo, otherness simultaneously draws nourishment from the mother’s blood, which which means that he allows otherness to enter his body and otherness. Another moment is when the child is a host and the parasite mother feeds the baby with her milk as alterity.
The old me is like a mother suffering from a fatal disease and giving birth to a new baby, as the new me and the real me would lead her to death. This idea of motherhood and rebirth encompasses most of Sylvia Plath’s poems when at the same time the concept of motherhood and its fertilization, patriarchal power and creation would be called upon to challenge. Since this birth is free from any coitus and meditation and more about giving birth and pregnancy is the mere right of production, acceptable to female entities in the factual norms, apparently this is what Plath might raise the question and sarcasm of the productive power of the Almighty and his guilt. and determination in the creation of the lord of creatures, human. In ‘Lady Lazarus’ she screams:
“From the ashes / I rise with red hair / And devour men like air” (Collected Poems 246).
This rise 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 spontaneously derives from her own yen and impulse. Elsewhere again in ‘Lady Lazarus’, the narrator assembles her body parts 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 to be skin and bone,/ Yet I am the same, identical woman” (Collected Poems 245).
If ridiculing such a magnanimous act of Rebirth and resurrection in a court kangaroo from 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 secular would be outside the scope of this discussion and would turn towards theological and religious doctrines and principles.
Regarding the counterparts of two competitive competing I’s, in the previous section it was argued that the old I is an adult and a mother, but here, on the contrary, one could consider the childish aspect of the old False I and the mature portrait of the new I. TRUE. What really matters in this metamorphosis is the process and the phase that the person has gone through and the freshness of the soul and the entity with a slate inside, removing all the black spots of the past.
The early me and the new me reborn
Ariel seemingly embodies Plath’s response to oppressive modern society. The artist’s self has the capacity to be promoted and therefore must necessarily be nourished in order to be reborn.
Whereas in the earlier poems the self was often represented in terms of its own possibilities of transformation, in the poems after the colossus the self is more often seen as trapped within a closed cycle. One moves, but only in a circle and continually back to the same starting point. More than the self and the world, Ariel’s poems record the self in the world. The possibilities of the self are intimately and inextricably linked to those of the world. [Italic mine] (Pamela J. Annas171)
The self encounters a kind of buffering effect from the world in order 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 mold the form of the self as ceramic molds clay.
The idea of Rebirth has come in the last lines of ‘Love Letter’ in The Collected Poems edited by Ted Hughes to attest to such a metamorphosis within the person:
Tree and stone glowed, without shadows.
The length of my finger became crystal clear.
I began to sprout like a March branch:
One arm and one leg, one arm, one leg.
From the stone to the cloud, so I ascended.
Now I look like some kind of God
Floating through the air in your soul change
Pure as a panel of ice. It’s a gift. (CP147)
‘One arm and one leg’ would here connote the Biblical allusion to the Day of Resurrection that all members would be associated as before. The repetition of ‘…one arm, one leg’ simply signifies the safety of the person and simultaneously the amazement of such recreation and Rebirth. Further, the most important thing is that ‘An arm and a leg’ could refer to something costly and expensive. This Renaissance has cost Plath ‘An arm for a leg’ for sure. She would have to pay exorbitant sums to obtain such a precious Renaissance.
‘From stone to cloud, thus I ascended’ specifies the moral elevation and greatness of such a Renaissance. It could be interpreted that the person’s soul has joined the divine entity that was childish and habitually believed to be located in the sky and behind the clouds.
‘Cloud’ also tends to flash the notion of fertilization and fertility since rain clouds are pregnant with rain and bring freshness and rebirth to all of nature.
‘Now I look like some kind of God’, in Greek mythology there are several symbols of God that exist for each element, better to mention Wind God, Fire Goddess, etc. But here, due to the act of creation, the person gallantly puts himself in parallel with the Almighty by applying bold statements and thus calls the entire creation in requisition and takes it for toil work.
The comparison and description of the character himself ‘to spring up like a twig in March’ could be as if he intended to defy nature with his own potential and aptitude for rebirth and metamorphosis which would be fully argued in the following section.