Plath wrote “The Fifty-Ninth Bear” during her first week at Yaddo but felt only “disgust” for the “stiff artificial piece.”77 (It would be published in The London Magazine in 1961.) She spent hours in the library reading The Sewanee Review, the Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The Nation, Art News, and The New Republic. She made a point to read female writers such as May Swenson (whose birdwatching before breakfast made her feel lazy), Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford (Robert Lowell’s first wife), Iris Murdoch, and Eudora Welty, as well as Lowell, Roethke, Freud, Jung, and Paul Radin.78 She finally sat down with Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, and was impressed by her “fine originality, always surprising, never rigid, flowing, juicier than Marianne Moore.”79 All of it made her wonder when she herself would “break into a new line of poetry” that was not “trite.”80 In her journal she vowed to begin writing in the first person—to “forget” John Updike and Nadine Gordimer.81 While brainstorming on September 26, she wrote, “A mad story: college would-be suicide. A Double story: involvement with roommate.”82 It was the fourth time she had written about such a plot. All of these elements—the first-person narrative, doubles, and suicide—found their way into The Bell Jar.
In her journal, she remonstrated with herself for her inability to get outside her own subjectivity: “Always myself, myself,” as she put it.83 She sent stories to The Atlantic knowing that Peter Davison would reject them (he did, as well as Hughes’s “The Courting of Petty Quinnett,” that October). If only she could write “meaningful prose, that expressed my feelings, I would be free.”84 Even “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” was just a fantasy; she wished she could have made it “real.”85 Nearly all of the other poems she published that summer and fall appeared in the middlebrow Christian Science Monitor.
Her creative anxiety finally subsided on September 30 after she began a story titled “The Mummy,” a “mother story,” since lost, that she called “a simple account of symbolic and horrid fantasies.”86 She finished it on October 4 and was amazed at how her language dovetailed with passages she had read in Jung’s The Development of Personality, which she found in the Yaddo library.87 Jung’s book included case histories of mother-daughter relationships, and Plath was struck by how her “instinctive images” related to Jung’s “psychological analysis”: “The word ‘chessboard’ used in an identical situation: of a supposedly loving but ambitious mother who manipulated the child on the ‘chessboard of her egotism’: I had used ‘chessboard of her desire.’ ”88
Plath read Jung’s book, full of mother blame, at a crucial point in her poetic development. She was already attuned to Jung through Hughes and Dr. Beuscher, who considered herself a Jungian analyst. Now it was as if Jung had read her mind: “Mother,” he wrote, “projected all her phobias onto the child and surrounded her with so much anxious care that she was never free from tension.”89 Neuroses in children were “more symptoms of the mental condition of the parents than a genuine illness of the child.” Children “suffer from the unlived life of their parents” and the parents’ “repressed problems…secrete an insidious poison which seeps into the soul of the child through the thickest walls of silence.”90 And so on. Plath took several pages of notes on the “insidious” influence of mothers in the chapter titled “The Development of Personality,” including the following passage:
parents set themselves the fanatical task of always “doing their best” for the children and “living only for them.” This clamant ideal effectively prevents the parents from doing anything about their own development & allows them to thrust their “best” down their children’s throats. This so-called “best” turns out to be the very things the parents have most badly neglected in themselves.
Under this quotation, Plath quoted more of Jung’s words: “There is no human horror or fairground freak that has not lain in the womb of a loving mother.”91
Jung gave Plath permission, as Dr. Beuscher had, to blame her mother for her mental maladies. This was entirely in keeping with the psychiatric biases of the day. Jung’s book made Plath feel, she said, like a “victim.” “My ‘fiction’ is only a naked recreation of what I felt, as a child and later, must be true,” she wrote in her journal.92 Such permission seemed to release something in Plath, who was herself on the brink of becoming a mother and alarmed by Jung’s statement that “neurotic states are often passed on from generation to generation.”93 She dreamed that her own mother was “furious with my pregnancy, mockingly bringing out a huge wraparound skirt to illustrate my grossness.”94
The Development of Personality also contained a lengthy disquisition on “fidelity to the law of one’s own being” and standing apart from “the herd.”95 Those who achieved “greatness,” Jung wrote, have “never lain in their abject submission to convention, but, on the contrary, in their deliverance from convention.” Developing one’s personality was lonely, isolating work, Jung wrote, especially if one had a vocation: “He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths.”96 Jung’s ideas resonated with Plath, who had refused a comfortable life as the wife of Dick Norton or Gordon Lameyer, against her mother’s wishes and her culture’s expectations. It was a moral imperative, Jung wrote, to honor the “Promethean” and “Luciferian” aspects of her own personality. His ideas dovetailed with those of Lowell, Sexton, and Hughes, who all sought to break with convention in their work and their lives. These influences coalesced at Yaddo, where Plath, uninterrupted—finally—with a room of her own, found courage in “walking naked,” as Yeats once wrote. Soon she began to confront, rather than sidestep, her psychic pain in her poems.
Several were published that fall: among them “I Want, I Want” in the Partisan Review; “On the Decline of Oracles,” “The Death of Myth-Making,” and “A Lesson in Vengeance” in Poetry; “Yaddo: The Grand Manor” in The Christian Science Monitor; and “Two Views of a Cadaver Room” and “The Hermit at Outermost House” in The Times Literary Supplement. But she had not published a story since the summer of 1957, when “All the Dead Dears” appeared in Gemini, more or less a student publication. The only stories Plath could bear to reread now were “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” “The Wishing Box,” “The Mummy,” and “The Tattooist” (later retitled “The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle”). All the others, she wrote in her journal, were “duller than tears,” even “The Daughters of Blossom Street,” which she had thought her best story just a few weeks before.97 She was still reading Ted’s stories, typing up some of his manuscripts, and sending both their work to magazines. Her husband seemed completely free of “the phantom of competition” that plagued her, and she vowed to “forget salable stories,” like him. She would write about moods and incidents, like her search for Sassoon in Paris and her fever in Benidorm. She echoed Hughes when she wrote in her journal of her desire “Not to manipulate the experience but to let it unfold and re-create itself with all the tenuous, peculiar associations the logical mind would short-circuit.”98
October was largely a month of rejections. Sylvia wept when Henry Holt turned down her poetry manuscript, but she sent it to Viking the next day, and then to Farrar, Straus on October 30. Ted offered her some radical advice: “start a new book.”99 She was determined to do so, but the rejection sent her back into a black state. Even The New Yorker acceptance of “A Winter’s Tale” on October 7 (it was published on December 12) could not rouse her. Knopf rejected her children’s book The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit, about a group of Germanic brothers loosely based on her father’s family. She seemed to hit a new low in mid-October:
Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers’ beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass. Caught between the hope and promise of my work—the one or two sto
ries that seem to catch something, the one or two poems that build little colored islands of words—and the hopeless gap between that promise, and the real world of other peoples [sic] poems and stories and novels. My shaping spirit of imagination is far from me.100
Harcourt’s rejection of The Bed Book on October 19 made her even more determined to abandon her old manuscript. “Ted says: You are so negative. Gets cross, desperate. I am my own master. I am a fool to be jealous of phantoms.” But she could not shake her anxiety. She had forgotten all her Joyce and Plato; she needed to master German; she ought to get a PhD. Ted alone was her “salvation.” “He is so rare, so special, how could anyone else stand me!” she wrote in her journal. He seemed immune from the “vision of success” she held out for herself, “As if the old god of love I hunted by winning prizes in childhood had grown more mammoth and unsatiable still.” She told herself to “Keep away from editors and writers” and write for satisfaction alone. “Take a lesson from Ted,” still “the ideal, the one possible person.”101
Ted practiced deep-breathing and stream-of-consciousness “concentration” exercises with Sylvia in mid-October, and she was able to write two poems that “pleased” her: “The Manor Garden,” about her unborn child (whom she called Nicholas during her pregnancy), and “The Colossus,” on “the old father-worship subject.”102 These, along with “Medallion,” about a dead snake, would comprise the beginning of her new book.103
In “The Manor Garden,” Plath took a new approach to inheritance and birth, what she called the “Fable of children changing existence and character as absurd as the fable of marriage doing it. Here I am, the same old sour-dough.”104 Despite her professed enthusiasm for babies and beef stew, she feared the vortex of motherhood: “Must never become a mere mother and housewife,” she wrote in her journal. Now that Sylvia was actually pregnant, she admitted that she was scared of the “Challenge of baby” coming when she still had not fulfilled her literary potential. “I will hate a child that substitutes itself for my own purpose,” she wrote.105 Dr. Beuscher had warned her that she would most likely suffer from postpartum depression after her first baby if she “didn’t get rid of it [her depression] now.”106 She tried to focus on the pleasures, rather than the unknowns, of motherhood, but she could not help but envy the “Independent and self-possessed” May Swenson: “My old admiration for the strong, if Lesbian, woman. The relief of limitation as a price for balance and surety.”107
“The Manor Garden” is a dark twist on Yeats’s beneficent “A Prayer for My Daughter.” Plath hopes to bestow a blessing, but she cannot deny the forces that threaten her baby. The poem is modern, existential, and bereft, a Cold War pietà that borrows from Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi.” It begins grimly: “The fountains are dry and the roses over. / Incense of death.” Plath sees trouble ahead: “You inherit white heather, a bee’s wing, // Two suicides, the family wolves, / Hours of blankness.” Though the poem is set in Yaddo’s garden, it anticipates the lifeless garden of her late poem “Edge,” inhabited by “blue mist” “dragging the lake,” crows, worms, and “broken flutings.” “The Manor Garden” reflects Plath’s depressed state of mind and the fear of motherhood that surfaced in her nightmares of dead and deformed babies—intensified by Jung’s descriptions of monster children growing in the wombs of loving mothers.
“The Colossus,” too, subverts traditional expectations. It is an angry yet tender paternal elegy—a freer, less reverent revision of her earlier “Electra on Azalea Path.” The surrealist poem envisions a daughter-caretaker who tends to her father’s immense statue on a deserted island. Plath incorporates elements of The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver’s Travels (“Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of Lysol / I crawl like an ant in mourning / Over the weedy acres of your brow”) to create a proto-feminist elegy. This was the poem that the poetry critic Helen Vendler—who had joined Plath for stroller walks as an infant—would later declare Plath’s first real poetic triumph.108 Plath jettisons decorum with a vengeance:
I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It’s worse than a barnyard.
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.
“The Colossus” is a metaphorical rejection of all Fathers and their monumental authority. Plath mocks patriarchal tradition, which she cannot or will not master: the father’s language sounds like a series of grunts. She has traded elaborate, “glossy” lines for plainer diction, and dispensed with the self-blame of her earlier elegy for Otto (“It was my love that did us both to death”). Yet at the end of the poem, the daughter refuses to abandon the father’s stony legacy. “No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel / On the blank stones of the landing.” The lines suggest the loneliness of her mourning and, at the same time, the plight of the female poet who clings to the approval, and language, of her literary fathers. Jung had warned that such dutiful daughters would leave no legacy of their own. “The Colossus” and “The Manor Garden” offer neither comfort nor blessing to dead father and unborn child. They are the antithesis of the sentimental feminine homily. Finally, Plath was fulfilling her Jungian destiny, as she wrote in her journal at Yaddo that November, “To be true to my own weirdnesses.”109 These subversive, ironic poems helped free Plath to confront the taboo of her breakdown and suicide.
Sylvia enjoyed sketching the Yaddo greenhouse, a short walk down the hill from her studio.110 On October 22, she mulled over an idea during a walk with Ted: “dwelling on madhouse, nature: meanings of tools, greenhouses, florist shops, tunnels, vivid and disjointed. An adventure. Never over. Developing. Rebirth. Despair.”111 The next day they brainstormed on a single piece of paper. Several themes that found their way into Plath’s “Poem for a Birthday” sequence appear in Hughes’s handwriting: “Witch-burning,” “Change of vision of a maenad, as she goes under the fury,” “The stones of the city,” “Person walking through enormous dark house,” and “Flute notes from a reedy pond.” Plath noted the ideas she liked in a small square in the right-hand corner: “Maenad,” “The Beast,” “Flute notes from reedy pond,” “stones of city—the city where men are mended MOULTS,” “witch burning.”112 These would all become titles in the seven sequences that Plath called “a series of madhouse poems.”113
On October 23, Plath wrote that the poetic exercise she had tried the day before, which had begun in “grimness,” had turned “into a fine, new thing.”114 Between October 22 and November 3, she used the Yaddo greenhouse and tool shed to conjure the mental hospital in spare, arresting language:
This shed’s fusty as a mummy’s stomach:
Old tools, handles and rusty tusks.
I am at home here among the dead heads.
Let me sit in a flowerpot,
The spiders won’t notice.
My heart is a stopped geranium.
Several memorable lines from “Poem for a Birthday” would resurface, in slightly different guises, in her Ariel poems: “These halls are full of women who think they are birds”; “Now they light me up like an electric bulb. / For weeks I can remember nothing at all”; “My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs. / I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light.” In the sequence’s final, strongest section, “The Stones”—written in a form that gestures to Dantean terza rima—Plath faces her experience less obliquely. Using the same Swiftian, surrealist imagery she had discovered while writing “The Colossus” only a few days before, she describes the mental hospital as factory and assembly line: “This is the city where men are mended. / I lie on a great anvil.
”
A workman walks by carrying a pink torso.
The storerooms are full of hearts.
This is the city of spare parts.
My swaddled legs and arms smell sweet as rubber.
Here they can doctor heads, or any limb.
On Fridays the little children come
To trade their hooks for hands.
Dead men leave eyes for others.
Love is the uniform of my bald nurse.
Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.
The vase, reconstructed, houses
The elusive rose.
Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows.
My mendings itch. There is nothing to do.
I shall be as good as new.
As in the end of The Bell Jar, the final declaration of recovery is ironic and ambiguous: we are not at all sure the speaker is cured. Indeed, the surrealist fantasy and the explicit “weirdness” of the sequence suggest that perhaps she is not.115 In June 1961, Plath discussed “The Stones” on the BBC: the speaker, she said,
has utterly lost her sense of identity and relationship to the world. She imagines herself, quite graphically, undergoing the process of rebirth, like a statue that has been scattered and ground down, only to be resurrected and pieced together, centuries later. Her nightmare vision of waking in a modern hospital gradually softens as she recovers and accepts the frightening yet necessary ties of love which will heal and return her whole again to the world.116
“Poem for a Birthday,” “The Manor Garden,” and “The Colossus” show that children, fathers, and doctors are not to be idolized in Plath’s new poetic universe. They are harbingers of anxiety, infantilizing and fallible. These revolutionary new poems were a personal cri de coeur along the lines of Lowell and Sexton, but buttressed—as Hughes later noted—by surrealism, history, and myth.
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