The Bee &
the Crown
The Road to Ascension in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath Biet & Kronan
– Vägen till upphöjning i Emily Dickinsons och Sylvia Plaths poesi Eva Stenskär
Estetisk-filosofiska fakulteten Litteraturvetenskap
30 p
Sofia Wijkmark
Morten Feldtfos Thomsen 21-06-11
Abstract
Though born a century apart, American poets Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath share several similarities: Both were born in New England, both fought for their rights by writing, and both broke new poetic ground.
In this thesis, I look at their poetry through a movement in space, which begins with the poets’ precarious position as societal outliers and ends with ascension. I examine what crossing the threshold meant to them, physically and metaphorically, and how it is mirrored in their poems, I look at how the physical space in which they wrote color their poetry, I examine windows as a space of transit, and finally I take a closer look at the shape ascension takes in selected poems. I propose this road, this movement in space, is mirrored in both Dickinson’s and Plath’s poetry.
I use as my method deconstruction, to uncover hints and possibilities. I scan letters and journals, biographies and memoirs. As my theoretical framework, I use Walter Benjamin’s ideas about the threshold as a place of transit, as well as his thoughts about the flaneur as the observer of the crowd, both of which are presented in The Arcades Project. To further examine the threshold as a space for pause, reconsideration, retreat, or advance, I rely on Subha Mukheriji and her book Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces. I further use Gaston Bachelard’s seminal The Poetics of Space to investigate the poets’ response to the physical space in which they wrote. I look at ascension through the prism offered by the ideas of Mircea Eliade as presented in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities.
Key words: Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Outsiders, Threshold, Space, Ascension, Windows, Performativity, Violence, Divine, Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard, Subha Mukheriji, Mircea Eliade, Suzanne Juhasz, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Interiors, Pathology, Ecstasy, Fear
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath 4
1.2 Previous Research and Theoretical Outline 7 2. Outliers: Are You a Nobody Too? 17
3. On the Threshold: The Bravest Grope a Little 30
4. At the Heart of the House: I Dwell in Possibility 40
5. At the Window: The Frost Makes a Flower 49
6. Performativity/Violence: The Piston in Motion 58
7. Title Divine: The Cauldron of Morning 66
8. Conclusion 74
9. References 76
1. Introduction: Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath
American poets Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) and Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) continue to fascinate. A few years ago, Dickinson was the subject for a major feature film titled A Quiet Passion (2016)1, starring Cynthia Nixon, and in 2019 Apple TV+ created a TV-series about her, the eponymous Dickinson (2019–)2. In 2003 Gwyneth Paltrow portrayed Plath in the biopic Sylvia (2003)3. One website has featured Plath-inspired fashion items.4 Both Dickinson and Plath have inspired composers and musicians: There is the 1950 Twelve Poems of Emily
Dickinson, Aaron Copland’s song cycle for voice and piano, as well as several songs mentioning Plath either in the title or in the lyrics, among them songs by Lana del Rey5 and Ryan Adams6. Books on such diverse topics as Emily Dickinson’s relationship with her dog7 and Sylvia Plath’s lipstick color have been published, the recipes the poets used for baking can easily be found online8 and are discussed in forums and zoom seminars along rumors of their love lives. What all this signifies is that both Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath are not just relevant today but have become part and parcel of our public consciousness.
Emily Dickinson’s poetic output is considerable; she was a prolific writer who composed close to 1,800 poems, although few were published in her lifetime. Most of her poems are undated, others have tried dating them by looking at what happened in her life, and by
connecting them to letters she wrote. Dickinson’s themes varied from death and religion, to love and nature. She wrote extensively about poetry, and the gift of poetry. She also wrote about her home, which is not surprising. The Emily Dickinson we think of today, may be Emily Dickinson the recluse, and it is true that she spent most of the latter part of her life not only in her house but
1 A Quiet Passion, Directed by Terence Davies, Hurricane Films, 2016
2 Dickinson, Created by Alena Smith, Apple TV+, 2019 –
3 Sylvia, Directed by Christine Jeffs, BBC Films, 2003
4 Christie Drozdowski “How To Dress Like Sylvia Plath”, Bustle, June 1, 2015,
https://www.bustle.com/articles/85992-sylvia-plath-inspired-outfits-so-you-can-learn-how-to-dress-like-your- own-inner-poet, Retrieved May 18, 2021
5 Lana Del Rey’s “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but I have it”, Norman Fucking Rockwell, Polydor Records, 2019
6 Ryan Adams’ “Sylvia Plath”, Gold, Lost Highway Records, 2001
7 Marty Rhodes Figley, Emily and Carlo (Charlesbridge, 2012)
8 Emily Walhout and Christine Jacobson, “Baking with Emily D.”, Houghton Library Blog, September 30, 2020, http://blogs.harvard.edu/houghton/baking-with-emily-d/ and Kate Moses, “Baking with Sylvia”, The Guardian, February 15, 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/fiction.sylviaplath Retrieved May 18, 2021
inside her bedroom. Thus, her home and her bedroom, as well as the door and window that provided her with contact with the rest of the world, were important to her.
Sylvia Plath did not find her true voice until the last year of her life. Her feelings of being different and her sense of standing on the brink is reflected in her poetry. At the time of her death, she had struggled for years to find her footing not only in poetry, but also in short stories and a novel. Her one novel, The Bell Jar (1963), was published only a month before her death.
Plath, who saw herself first and foremost as a poet, called it a potboiler. It is on her last,
posthumous collection of poetry, Ariel (1965), that her reputation rests. Ariel tackles father-hate, suicide, hospital visits, fevers, paralysis, and the Holocaust, with a fierce, controlled rage. But there are also tender poems, like “Nick and the Candlestick” (AR 47), about a mother nursing an infant and “You’re” (AR 77) a poem spoken by an expecting mother.
Although Dickinson was born a hundred years before Plath, the two are often linked. They share a set of similarities: Both were born and grew up in New England, both were women in a male-dominated world, they both had complex parental issues, they both fought for their rights by writing, they have both become feminist icons, both “were gifted students who came to their vocations early and as a result suffered increasing isolation from their peers”9, as Paula Bennett puts it in My Life a Loaded Gun: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1986), a textual analysis of the poetry of Dickinson, Plath, and Adrienne Rich.
Perhaps most importantly, they both broke poetic ground. Dickinson’s poetry is innovative in that her poems are disjointed and grammatically incorrect, with, as Dickinson scholar
Cristanne Miller points out in Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (1987), “metaphors so densely compacted that literal components of meaning fade”10, a few of her poems must
certainly have appeared racy at the time she wrote them, such as poem 269 – “Wild nights, wild nights” – with its erotic hints. Plath, meanwhile, broke ground because she wrote about topics that had been considered taboo to write about until then, such as masturbation, wanting to die, and female rage. Some of her poems “were regarded as dangerously extreme,”11 writes Plath scholar Gail Crowther in the recently published Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (2021). In both Dickinson’s as well as Plath’s case,
9 Paula Bennett, My Life a Loaded Gun (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 97
10 Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Harvard University, 1987), 1
11 Gail Crowther, Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (New York:
Gallery Books, 2021) 7
their poetry was initially fiddled with by editors before their posthumous publication. Emily Dickinson had sewn her poems into forty fascicles and put them in a chest of drawers in her bedroom, which is where her sister Lavinia found them after Dickinson had died. Lavinia handed the poems over to Mabel Loomis Todd, a family friend, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a friend and correspondent of Dickinson’s and asked them to prepare the poems for publication.
Todd and Higginson regularized Dickinson’s very particular punctuation, they also titled a few poems, and made word changes in attempts to improve on the rhythm of the poems – all to make Dickinson’s poetry appealing to as wide an audience as possible. It wasn’t until 1955, sixty-nine years after her death, that Dickinson’s poems were published the way she had originally written them. Sylvia Plath’s collection Ariel met a similar fate. Plath had collected and numbered her poems in a binder and left it on her desk. After her death this is where her estranged husband poet Ted Hughes discovered them. Prior to publication, Hughes cut a few pieces that he felt were
“openly vicious”12 and others that seemed “repetitive in tone and form”.13 He filled the empty spaces with poems Plath had not included in her binder.
Reading Dickinson and Plath side by side, I became aware of an upwards movement in many of their poems, which seemed to be connected to their feelings of being different. The same feeling Bennett mentions in the above quote. I began to view them as two women who also chose this isolation, found a way to use it, and out of it made a space for themselves to write.
I believe Emily Dickinson’s seclusion was an extension of her feelings of exclusiveness, she felt poetry was a gift she had been given by the gods, and she chose to live life according to that gift. She became a recluse who towards the end of her life rarely even left her room, for this she was known and talked about while still alive. In her poems Dickinson plays around with her strangeness, calling it “rich”, and viewing it as something positive.
One might say that Sylvia Plath also chose isolation; she was an exile who had willingly left the U.S., her native country, to settle with her British husband Ted Hughes in a small village in England. Unlike Dickinson she tried to overcome her isolation; her poetry reflects her efforts.
The road to ascension begins in the physical space in which the two poets write, and that physical space also colors the road. It is, after all, to this space they both retreated to create. To trace the movement towards this ascension, this rise, I follow their movement into that physical
12 Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen (Picador, USA 1995), 166
13 Ibid.
space, by analyzing their poetry – the primary texts – and by scanning other sources such as letters, biographies, memoirs, and journals. To my knowledge no such study exists.
In my thesis I trace a specific movement in a specific space and examine how that movement in that space is reflected in their poetry. What does the poets’ isolation look like?
How is it mirrored in the poetry? What gap do the poets straddle – metaphorically and literally?
Is the space in which they write portrayed in their poetry, and if so, how? What shape does preparation for ascension take in their poetry? And finally, how is ascension reflected in their poetry?
1.2 Previous Research and Theoretical Outline
A plethora of research has been conducted on both Dickinson’s and Plath’s poetry. So much, in fact, that the limited scope of my thesis does not allow me to partake, present, or review more than a mere fragment thereof. Therefore, I have restricted myself to research pertaining to the areas which I discuss; that means I use research relating to being an outsider, research relating to areas of threshold and space, research relating to the window as a transitive space, research relating to performativity and violence that can be found in certain poems, and, finally, research relating to the ascension in which these poems conclude.
Previous research that discusses both poets include Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s highly influential The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), which looks at mostly Victorian literature from a feminist
perspective and the above-mentioned close reading of their poetry by Paula Bennett in My Life a Loaded Gun: Dickinson, Plath, Rich, and Female Creativity. Gilbert and Gubar inspect the schizoid issue of Dickinson and Plath’s personas: “Emily Dickinson between the elected nun and the damned witch (---) and Sylvia Plath (who sees herself as both a plaster saint and a dangerous
‘old yellow’ monster).”14
As touched upon in my introduction, the feminist template has often been used in analyzing the poetry of both Dickinson and Plath, especially of the latter. There is Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson (1983)15, a collection of essays edited by Suzanne Juhasz, and Jacqueline
14 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale University Press, New Haven 1979) 78
15 Suzanne Juhasz, Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson (Indiana University Press 1983)
Rose’s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991)16, a feminist analysis of Plath’s poetry. The feature film about Dickinson mentioned in the introduction, A Quiet Passion, also offers a feminist aspect of the poet and her work. However intriguing, I have chosen not to look at the poetry from this perspective, but to focus on the movement in space and its reflections in the poems.
The following is a brief presentation of the studies, books, and essays I am using in my thesis. Richard B. Sewall’s enormous tome of a biography over the poet, The Life of Emily Dickinson (1994)17detailing her complex life, has been a cornerstone in most Dickinson research.
Sewall is also the author of the article “The Lyman Letters: New Light on Emily Dickinson and Her Family”18, first published in 1965 as a slender book. “The Lyman letters” consists of six letters from Dickinson to her correspondent Joseph Lyman, however these letters only exist in parts. A fresher literary biography is Emily Dickinson och vulkanerna (2019)19, in which Josefin Holmström visits Dickinson’s house and imagines her life.
In The Undiscovered Continent: Emily Dickinson and the Space of the Mind (1983)20, Suzanne Juhasz looks at the mind as a tangible place, a place in which to live, and examines how Dickinson describes that place. Jay Leyda follows the direction of a formulation of Dickinson herself: “Forever is composed of Nows”, by piecing together excerpts of diaries, journals, newspaper clippings, and letters creating a log with his book The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (1970).21 Robert Weisbuch and Martin Orzeck question Dickinson’s refusal to have her poems published and what it means for researchers today. In Dickinson and Audience
(1996)22 they discuss the fact that Dickinson’s poems were published posthumously even though she always shunned publication and left her poems in an unfinished state. Dickinson’s niece Martha Bianchi Dickinson shares detailed notes and memories from her aunt’s life in her book Emily Dickinson Face to Face: Unpublished Letters with Notes and Reminiscences (1932).23 Though scarce on Dickinson’s actual poetry, Millicent Bingham Todd’s Emily
16 Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Harvard University Press 1993)
17 Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1994)
18 Richard B. Sewall, “The Lyman Letters: New Light on Emily Dickinson and Her Family”, The Massachusetts Review Vol. 6 No.4 (Autumn 1965)
19 Josefin Holmström, Emily och vulkanerna (Stockholm: Norstedts 2019)
20 Suzanne Juhasz, The Undiscovered Continent: Emily Dickinson and the Space of the Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1983)
21 Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (Hamden, CT: Archon Books 1970)
22 Robert Weisbuch and Martin Orzeck, Dickinson and Audience (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1996)
23 Martha Bianchi Dickinson, Emily Dickinson Face to Face: Unpublished Letters with Notes and Reminiscences (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company 1932)
Dickinson’s Home (1955)24 gives a detailed tour of what day-to-day life was like for the Dickinson family, what was going on inside The Homestead when Dickinson lived there, and who the individuals in the family where and what they were doing. In Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar, Miller tackles the roots of the poet’s distinctive, ungrammatical work, something that also distinguishes David T. Porter’s work, Emily Dickinson: The American Idiom (1981)25, as he traces what it is that makes the poet so original.
Maryanne Garbowsky reads Dickinson from a pathological standpoint, in The House without the Door: A Study of Emily Dickinson and the Illness of Agoraphobia (1989)26. Whereas Jane Donahue Eberwein in Dickinson, Strategies of Limitation (1985)27, views the limitations – that is secluding herself, not leaving her house and, eventually her room, not meeting anyone face to face – as something Dickinson put upon herself to spark and carry out her own creativity.
Diana Fuss book The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them (2004)28, studies Dickinson’s room in the Homestead, its position, and its implications for her poetry. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted uses a linguistic viewpoint in The Voice of the Poet: Aspects of Style in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1968)29 and John Cody offers a psychological reading of her life and work in After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (1971)30.
Brenda Wineapple details the friendship and correspondence of Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson in White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2009)31. Higginson was a literary figure whose advice on her poetry Dickinson sought. A more concentrated effort is made by Xiao Situ in the article “Emily
24 Millicent Todd Bingham, Emily Dickinson’s Home (New York: Harper 1955)
25 David T. Porter, Dickinson, the Modern Idiom (Harvard University Press 1981)
26 Maryanne Garbowsky, The House Without the Door, A Study of Emily Dickinson and the Illness of Agoraphobia (Associated University Press, Salem, MA 1989)
27 Jane Donahue Eberwein, Dickinson, Strategies of Limitation (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987)
28 Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers That Shaped Them (Routledge, New York &
London, 2004)
29 Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, The Voice of the Poet (Almqvist & Wiksells Boktryckeri AB, Uppsala 1968)
30 John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1971)
31 Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York:
Anchor Books 2009)
Dickinson and the Poetics of Glass” (2012)32, which provides information on the importance of glass and windows in Dickinson’s poetry.
In her oft-quoted essay “Vesuvius at Home” (1976)33, Adrienne Rich discusses Dickinson’s seclusion as something the poet simply needed in order to create, and that creating too, was a need. She compares Dickinson to male New England writers and geniuses (and Rich points out that Dickinson not only was a genius but was aware of it, too), such as Jonathan Edwards, William James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the latter who also chose, to a degree, seclusion.
“Plath has become an industry,” declares Tim Kendall in the Preface to Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (2001)34, and an avalanche of texts is indeed continuously being published about her. Kendall’s study is one of the most quoted; it discovers new metaphors, explains structural components, and offers original insights by looking at her work as well as biographical
information available at the time. Judith Kroll’s Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (1978)35, an adaptation of Kroll’s PhD dissertation, examines – as the title indicates – the use of mythology in Plath’s poetry.
David Holbrook’s Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence (1976)36 uses psychoanalysis “and kindred disciplines”37 to examine Plath’s poetry. Meanwhile, Tracy Brain presents a different poet in The Other Sylvia Plath (2001)38, in that she looks at Plath the environmentalist, Plath’s relationship to works of Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf, and Plath’s approach to American and British culture. In Plath’s Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process (1988)39, Lynda K. Bundtzen continues the feminist concepts presented by Gilbert and Gubar. Charles Hamilton Newman’s The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (1970)40, offers several critics’ insights on the poet’s work.
32 Xiao Situ, “Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of Glass”, https://sites.udel.edu/mcses2012/papers/paper-iii/
Retrieved May 18, 2021
33 Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home”, Parnassus, vol. 5, No.1, 1976 http://parnassusreview.com/archives/416, retrieved May 18, 2021
34 Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (Faber and Faber, London 2001)
35 Judith Kroll, Chapter in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper 1978)
36 David Holbrook, Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence (University of London: The Athlone Press 1976)
37 Holbrook, Sylvia Plath, 1
38 Tracy Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath (New York: Longman 2001)
39 Lynda K. Bundtzen, Plath’s Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1988)
40 Charles Hamilton Newman, The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1970)
Jon Rosenblatt looks at Plath’s oeuvre as a ritual process, a personal transformation, which includes a symbolic death and rebirth in Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation (1979).41 In Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath (1985)42, Paul Alexander has compiled essays and memoirs on Plath and her writing. And Janet Malcolm turns the Plath/Hughes saga into a page- turning detective story, unraveling bits and pieces by interviewing people who knew Plath as well as Plath scholars in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994).43
Gail Crowther and Peter K. Steinberg’s These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath (2017)44 positions itself at the crossroad of Plath studies and archival studies. The authors reflect on what constitute an archive and how archival material still possesses traces of its formal owner.
Finally, I would like to mention that I have been aided by newly discovered and released cassette tapes, the cassette tapes from Harriet Rosenstein’s files on Plath, based on research conducted in the early 1970’s45, with interviews of people who knew Plath. These are held at the Emory University’s Rose Library.
Because my work skims several different areas – the poets’ sense of being different, the importance of threshold in their work as well as their lives; physically and metaphorically, the physical space in which they wrote, the performative element in their poetry, and ascension – I make use of several theories.
The ideas presented in German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s unfinished work The Arcades Project (1999)46 are guides in the chapters that cover the space of the threshold. The threshold, according to Benjamin, is a place both of transit – meaning a passage from one place to another – and exhilaration. As an example, he puts forth the arcades of Paris as an example of excitement and early consumerism. The Arcades Project is a study of the threshold as a place of beginnings, gates, transitions, doorways, frames, passages, and endings. It is an attempt to understand the relations between “public and private space, past and future, dream and
waking.”47 Walter Benjamin frequently referred to the “marketplace” as this threshold, where
41 Jon Rosenblatt, Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1979)
42 Paul Alexander, Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper & Row Publishers 1985)
43 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New York: A.A. Knopf 1994)
44 Gail Crowther and Peter K. Steinberg, These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath (Fonthill Media 2017)
45 Harriet, Rosenstein. Emory Library, the Keep. https://keep.library.emory.edu Retrieved May 18, 2021
46 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press 1999)
47 Jan Mieszkowski, “Art Forms”, in David S. Ferris, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 49
one can be seduced by the merchandise within one’s reach. The individual that occupies this transitory, fluid space is the flaneur, whom for Benjamin is the characteristic prototype for the urban, modern experience. From his position on the threshold, the flaneur scouts the
marketplace, observing the crowd, to which he does not belong, he weaves in and out of it. I utilize both Benjamin’s theories on the threshold as a transitory space full of exciting
possibilities as well as his theories on the flaneur as a mobile figure on the threshold in my thesis. Thus, I do not look at his ideas about the burgeoning Paris.
Gaston Bachelard’s seminal The Poetics of Space (1964)48 investigates our deeply personal responses to buildings, houses, and rooms – real and fictional – cellars and attics, and even drawers, chests, and wardrobes, all the nooks and crannies in a home. He examines them as places that act as canisters for our dreams and memories. Using a highly poetic language
Bachelard looks at how we perceive the space around us, how it affects us, and how our memory creates new, imaginary spaces out of our real, old ones. For Bachelard the house is our first universe, it is our notion of home, and it is the place where the intimacy and memory that are illustrated in poetry, is born. All present space invokes that original space. A topoanalysis of the sites of our intimate liveswould yield an understanding of the physical room as a container of compressed time. It is, Bachelard claims, what the room is for. I use Bachelard’s theories as a template to untangle what space means to Dickinson and Plath. For Dickinson, in particular, the house in which she lived and the room in which she sequestered herself, is mirrored not only in her poetry, but in letters and in how she views herself; she sometimes refers to herself as a house.
For Plath it is less so, but as I will show in this thesis, her poetry changes when her surroundings – especially the color of her surroundings – change and becomes dramatically different.
My chapter on the threshold relies on Subha Mukheriji’s Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces (2011)49. Mukheriji discusses the resonant space of the threshold, the place where one may pause, reconsider, retreat, or advance, noting that the threshold is the space where one is just within reach of something. The study consists of a number of essays that present case studies as well as theoretical investigations. Mukheriji’s book highlights the
threshold as a creative space in the arts, not the least literature. The threshold, Mukheriji writes,
48 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press 1969)
49 Subha Mukheriji, Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces (London: Anthem Press, 2011)
is both a fascinating yet risky space of transition50: “It is defined by a sense of contingency, and it shapes narrative into a structure of desire. The thrill and the risk, meanwhile, are
counterbalanced by the curious harmony of this tentative in-between space as, nevertheless, a cherished dwelling place, conjured up by the artist’s use of light and shadow and rhythm.”51 Mukheriji suggests a number of writers and artists have found the threshold a valuable metaphor for the creative process.52 The threshold figures both in the poetry of Dickinson and Plath, sometimes it is a place that the speaker of a poem wants to but is unable to traverse, as in Plath’s poem “The Moon and the Yew Tree” (AR 65), other times it is a threshold between light and dark, as in Dickinson’s poem 419 (THJ 325). But, as Mukheriji states, threshold meant
something else for the poets as well; for Dickinson it was a place she had to cross to get to the freedom she sensed in her own room, for Plath it meant finally getting through and finding her own poetic voice. It was a symbol for their creative process and a catalyst for creativity.
In her study The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (2008)53, Erika Fischer-Lichte tracks the roots of performative art and looks at the precarious balance between art and life. She begins by describing in detail a violent performance by Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, in which the artist abuses her body, seemingly without fear. The audience, Fischer-Lichte writes in the introduction, that the artist “betrayed no sign of distress – she did not moan, scream, or grimace. She generally avoided any physical sign that would express discomfort or pain.”54 Fischer-Lichte talks about art’s potential to transform both the artist and the observer. Fischer-Lichte goes on to explain that there have always been artists abusing their bodies and refers to fakirs and yogis, hermits, and ascetics. She also mentions religious men and women, such as saints and ascetics, who often were praised for the
unimaginable physical sufferings they exposed themselves to. As an example, she mentions the self-flagellations from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries55 which were performed en masse.
For nuns who performed self-flagellations, there was “a promise of transformation.”56 This
50 Mukheriji, Thinking on Thresholds, xvii
51 Ibid
52 Ibid
53 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (New York, NY: Routledge 2008)
54 Fischer-Lichte, Transformative, 12
55 Fischer-Lichte, Transformative, 13
56 Ibid
transformation is the one I look for, as I follow the poets’ movements from their feeling as outliers to their feeling of being elevated. Fischer-Lichte also delves into the fairground area, on the lookout for the artists that perform there; the sword eaters, the fire eaters, the tightrope dancers and so on, whose main object it is to defy danger. It is for the peak of danger the fairground audience is waiting. Fischer-Lichte writes: “These spectacles are not so much about the transformation of the actors, or even less so the spectators. They rather seek to demonstrate the unusual and mental powers of the performers and are intended to elicit awe and wonder from the audience.”57 This sort of self-harming performativity is most applicable to Plath’s poems, with their gung-ho violent activity, but also, though to a lesser degree, to some of Dickinson’s poems, in which she, albeit in her slant way, connects poetry with pain.
I use Mircea Eliade’s Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter Between
Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (1975)58, particularly the chapter that focuses on the symbolisms of ascension. Eliade is a good choice when it comes to Plath, who was interested in the occult and dabbled in Tarot cards, the spirit board Ouija, and bibliomancy. In Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, Eliade discusses the meaning of myth in relationship with reality, the repetitiveness of myth, and myth as “a true history of what came to pass at the beginning of Time”. 59 Eliade believes that the story of the mythic hero or god is a pattern we can imitate, or by telling the stories of their adventures we can access what Eliade obscurely calls “the Great Time”60, a time that differs from our
“profane time” in that it is “magic”.61 In the chapter I mentioned above, Eliade looks at the
“magic flight”62, that is the god-kings in different cultures, who flew through the air instead of walking. in different cultures. He mentions, for instance, Jesus’ Ascension, and a comparable event in China with the flying Emperor Shun.63 He further looks at yogis, shamans, and sorcerers all of whom had the ability to fly, but neither of whom claimed to be gods.64 John J. Collins and
57 Fischer-Lichte, Transformative, 14
58 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (New York: Harper & Row 1957)
59 Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, 23
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid. 99
63 Ibid. 100
64 Ibid. 101
Michael Fishbane discuss afterlife as a journey in Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys (1995)65, though I focus on their view of ascension as a reward for the righteous.
In the first chapter, I explore the poets as outliers. I discuss what their isolation looks like, how they were viewed by others in their time – as indicated by letters and journal excerpts – and how this sense of isolation is reflected in their poems. Next, I move on to the threshold as a resonant and compelling in-between space. I focus on the threshold as the physical space that separates and connects the poets’ study/bedroom from the rest of the house: For instance, how having a separated space in which to write made the poets feel, how they viewed this space, and whether it is reflected in their poetry. I look at the emotional aspect of being a person positioned on the threshold, not belonging to either side of it. I also briefly examine threshold from the viewpoint of moving from one style of writing to the next. In the following chapter I deal with the physical space the poets occupy. I examine what the physical space they occupied while writing their poetry looked like, and how this space and other physical spaces and places (rooms and houses) are mirrored in their poetry. Like the threshold, the window is a transitive space. In the chapter on windows, I look at how the window connects as well as separates. Here, I
investigate how Dickinson’s view through her window color and shape her poems, and I examine the different ways with which Plath uses windows in her poetry. Thereafter, I
concentrate on the urgency that haunts the poetry of both poets, the violent shape this urgency takes, and how this violence fuels and lifts the poems towards its final ascension. I also examine the performative qualities of this violence. Finally, I take a closer look at ascension and the different expressions it takes. I discuss similarities and differences.
As I follow the poets as they move through a physical space, which is then mirrored in their poetry, it become important to state what constitutes space and how it differs from place. “Space and place are basic components of the lived world,”66 writes geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in his study titled Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977). Tuan separates them by filing place as something that stands for security, and space as signifying freedom, which is what is much guided by our own perception. “Space” often indicates something more abstract, and only once we get to know it better can we define it, at which time it becomes “place”. It may also be
65 John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane, Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys (Albany: State University of New York Press 1995)
66 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspectives of Experience (The University of Minnesota Press 2001) 3
that once we give value to space, we see it as place, however one is needed in order to define the other. “From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa,” Tuan writes. “Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.”67
Throughout this thesis I use “space” rather than place. Dickinson referred to being in her bedroom (the room in which she wrote her poetry) as “freedom”68, and Plath referred to her study as “a haven, a real sanctuary”69, indications that they both associated their bedroom/study with openness, freedom, and movement, all of which are encompassed by space.
Emily Dickinson’s poems lack titles and have been numbered by both R.W. Franklin and Thomas H. Johnson. I am following the numberings of Johnson and quote from two different collections of Dickinson’s poetry The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)70 (which I shorten to CP in my text) and The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955)71 (shortened to THJ). I also cite from letters from The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (1986)72, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1965)73 and Open Me Carefully (1998).74
Sylvia Plath’s collection Ariel was first published in 1965. The edition I quote from here comes from the Ariel – The Restored Edition75 from 2004 (AR in my thesis). I quote from The Collected Poems (1981)76 (PCP in my thesis), her novel The Bell Jar (1966)77, and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts (2000).78 I also refer to her journals, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)79 and the two volumes of her letters,
67 Tuan, Space and Place, 6
68 Bianchi, Face to Face, 66
69 Plath, Letters 2, 891
70 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown 1960)
71 Thomas H. Johnson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson ((Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press 1955)
72 Emily Dickinson, The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press 1986)
73 Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge. MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1965)
74 Emily Dickinson, Open Me Carefully (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press 1998)
75 Sylvia Plath, Ariel – The Restored Edition (New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc 2004)
76 Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems (New York: Harper & Row 1981)
77 Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber and Faber Limited 1966)
78 Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts (New York NY:
HarperPerennial 2000)
79 Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (New York: Anchor Books 2000)
The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1 1940 – 1956 (2017)80 and The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2 1956 – 1963 (2018).81
2. Outliers: Are You a Nobody Too?
“I must tell you about the character of Amherst. It is a lady whom the people call the Myth. She is a sister of Mr. Dickinson, & seems to be the climax of all the family oddity. She has not been outside of her own house in fifteen years, except once to see a new church, when she crept out at night, & viewed it by moonlight. No one who calls upon her mother & sister ever see her, but she allows little children once in a great while, & one at a time, to come in, when she gives them cake or candy, or some nicety, for she is very fond of little ones. But more often she lets down the sweetmeat by a string, out of a window. She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.82
This quote comes from a letter Mabel Loomis Todd sent her parents in November 1881. Loomis Todd was new to Amherst and had just gotten a whiff of the town gossip. A year later, when she and her husband had settled into society and gotten to know the Dickinson’s, she confided in her journal: She writes the strangest poems, & very remarkable ones. She is in many respects a genius. She always wears white.”83
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson’s long-time correspondent, or “preceptor” as she called him, could not make head or tail of her either, when he finally met her face to face: “I never was with any one [sic] who drained my nerve power so much,” he recalled. “I am glad not to live near her.” He also called her “enigmatical” and “half-cracked”.84 These contemporary descriptions show that Dickinson was a myth in her own lifetime, and that that myth had been established before her poems were even published. “[I]n glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair… in a very plain & exquisitely white pique & a blue net worsted shawl.” This is Higginson’s first impression of Dickinson, as written in a letter to his wife in 1870. It sounds poetic, romantic, and fey, something that Rich, among others, in her piece on Dickinson, winces at85. But it does have a base in Dickinson’s poetry. And it does signal that
“wearing white” is one of the ways that sets Dickinson apart.
80 Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1 1940 – 1956 (New York: HarperCollins 2017)
81 Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2 1956 – 1963 (London: Faber & Faber 2018)
82 Sewall, The Life of Emily, 216
83 Sewall, The Life of Emily, 217
84 Sewall, The Life of Emily, 5-6
85 Rich, “Vesuvius”
Dickinson’s white dress has taken on enormous proportions in both research and the general imagination of her. It has, as Martha Ackmann states, “become an emblem of the poet’s
brilliance and mystery.”86 It is also one of the ways with which she herself views herself as different. In poem 271, Dickinson emphasizes the wearing of white as something mysterious and even appointed by God:
A solemn thing – it-was – I-said – A woman – white – to be –
And wear – if God should count me fit – Her blameless mystery – (THJ 193)
White is something solemn, and its importance is further underscored here by Dickinson’s putting “white” between her characteristic dashes, enhancing its meaning. In poem 365, she uses white to make a bolder attack, challenging the reader:
Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?
Then crouch within the door – Red – is the Fire’s common tint – But when the quickened Ore Has sated Flame’s conditions, She quivers from the Forge
Without a color, but the Light (THJ 290)
The soul is a “she” so hot she threatens to burn herself up. The reader, if he wants to advance needs to watch out, he better crouch “within the door”, best not to step inside at all.
The Master Letters are three letters by Emily Dickinson that are drafted, but possibly never sent, to an unidentified person greeted as Master. They remain mysterious not only because of the nameless addressee, but because of the obscurity surrounding when and how they were found. In the third Master letter, from the summer of 1861, Dickinson writes: “What would you do with me if I came ‘in white’?”87 In Isaiah 1:18, white indicates a purity of sins: “’Come now, and let us reason together,’ saith the LORD; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be like wool.” The color is in fact mentioned several times in the Bible, clothing and hair is often pure and white as snow, and comes
86 Martha Ackmann, “Emily Dickinson’s White Dress”, The Paris Review, February 25, 2020,
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/02/25/emily-dickinsons-white-dress/ Retrieved May 18, 2021
87 Dickinson, The Master Letters, 43
accompanied by a tremendous power, as in Daniel 7:9 – 10 where God appears in a dream:
“whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire. A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him.” Maybe Dickinson was alluding to her dress as both purity and power – not to mention the heat of fire – in her letter?
According to Jane Walk, the executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, the white dress is simply a common house dress, “the T-shirt and sweatpants of its day”88 an outfit
Dickinson began dressing in when she was in her thirties.89 In effect, Ward begs us to forget that the white dress means much more than that, it was probably chosen randomly with ease and comfort in mind. However, I do not want to drop it just yet. Apart from its Biblical associations with innocence and purity, prophesy, wisdom, and righteousness,90 white is also the color of a blank canvas. It is a non-color of sorts, suited for somebody who writes a poem like this:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell they’d banish us – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell your name – the livelong June – To and admiring Bog! (THJ 206)
Being nobody or the color white is the perfect blank on top of which one can create something, anything. If you are nobody you can become somebody.
The Dickinson family, whether they had a hard time accepting their middle daughter’s eccentricities or not, made the necessary adjustments to make her life (and thereby her writing) easier. She was her father’s favorite daughter, and as such was given the best room in the house.
Her sister took on the household duties she herself scorned, and Emily seems to have been doing exactly what she wanted (baking bread, making jellies, and growing exotic flowers in a
88 Jane Wald, “Emily Dickinson’s White Dress”, New York Botanical Garden Blog, June 4, 2010,
https://www.nybg.org/blogs/plant-talk/2010/06/exhibit-news/emily-dickinson’s-white-dress/, Retrieved May 18, 2021
89 Wald, “Emily Dickinson’s White Dress”
90 “Meaning of Colors in the Bible: The Color White”, Biblestudy, https://www.biblestudy.org/bible-study-by- topic/meaning-of-colors-in-the-bible/meaning-of-color-white.html, Retrieved May 18, 2021
greenhouse in the backyard, made especially for her, as well as writing) and not at all what she did not want (such as go to church or see anyone she did not want to see).91
In “Emily Dickinson’s Nursery Rhymes”, Barbara Mossberg points out that though Dickinson may not have had or felt she had much authority or power, “she at least can say ‘no’
to the demands her culture makes upon her and women in general.”92 She refuses church, she does not marry, and she does not join sewing or music groups. Her “No” becomes an invitation and a “Yes” to other things. Even though she clung to progressively smaller and more intimate spaces as she grew older, it does not appear as though she looked upon her seclusion as a place she hid in out of fear. In a letter to her friend Abiah, written around 1850, Dickinson writes “The shore is safer, A., but I love to buffet the sea (…) I love the danger!”93
In Emily Dickinson och vulkanerna, Holmström states that Dickinson’s “språkdräkt är klurig”.94 Were her poetry clothing, Holmström proposes, it would be asymmetrical and oddly made, forcing the wearer to figure out where to put their arms and how the fabric is meant to fall.
This is obviously not your normal clothes. The asymmetry to which Holmström refers, Brita Lindberg-Seyersted links to Dickinson’s favorite word “slant”, suggesting it triggers a “limping”
effect in her poetry, especially in her choice of binaries. “Instead of contrasts of the clearcut type black/white, we may find such as – to use the formula of black/white – set ‘black’ off against an adjective belonging to another semantic area, for instance, feeling (say ‘gay’) and ‘white’
accordingly against something like ‘sombre’.”95 Lindberg-Seyersted further notices that instead of polarizing “Duke” with “Beggar” and “Robin” with “Eagle”, Dickinson folds her words asymmetrically and matches “Duke” with “Robin” (in poem 1505).96
In poem 454, her reason for saying “no” is given an explanation. It is to make way for a gift – a “yes” – from the Gods. It is a gift that makes her “bold”:
It was given to me by the Gods – When I was a little Girl – (---)
I kept it in my Hand –
91 Rich, “Vesuvius”
92 Barbara Antonina Clarke Mossberg, “Emily Dickinson’s Nursery Rhymes”, in Suzanne Juhasz, ed. Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson, 60
93 Leyda, Years and Hours, 176 – 177
94 Holmström, Emily och vulkanerna, 77
95 Lindberg-Seyersted, The Voice, 106
96 Ibid.
I never put it down – (…)
I heard such words as “Rich” – When hurrying to school – (…)
And wrestled with a smile.
Rich! ‘Twas Myself – was rich – To take the name of Gold – (…)
The Difference – made me bold – (THJ 350)
This golden gift of difference – poetry – is what Dickinson believes sets her apart. In a letter to her best friend Susan Gilbert Dickinson, she divides people in those who are poets and those who are not: “fancy that we are the only poets – and every one else is prose,”97 she writes. Dickinson sets herself apart in poetry and in letters as well as physically when she closes the door to her room. She is in here in Poetry – everyone else is out there in Prose. “In her letters, Dickinson dissociates herself from her family by virtue of her poetic sensibility,”98 writes Mossberg.
“Prose”, Mossberg explains, means societal value, and conformity. “Poetry” stands for the direct opposite: freedom from societal constraints. Dickinson obviously sees her isolation from others, family, and friends, as something positive and exclusive.
In the final stanza’s final line of poem 640 – a poem which begins with “I cannot live with You” – the speaker concludes:
So We must meet apart – You there – I – here – With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer – And that White Sustenance – Despair – (CP 318)
Dickinson sees no need to intervene with prose, and the realization that few people are poets means she is an outlier. Fuss suggests that though the speaker is put “here”, syntactically she “is neither here nor there, but hovering somewhere in between, occupying a more liminal space.”99 A poem like 657, shows how she views poetry’s superiority in comparison with prose, she sees them both as houses, however one is better than the other:
97 Dickinson, Open Me Carefully, 9
98 Juhasz, Feminist Critics, 48
99 Fuss, Interior, 17
I dwell in Possibility – A fairer House than Prose – More numerous of Windows – Superior – for Doors – (CP 327)
As stated above, poetry is the positive binary to prose, it is not only more attractive, but has more windows and superior doors. Windows and doorways, as I will explain shortly, are spaces where thoughts tend to swell, which in turn gives further proof of poetry’s enormous possibilities.
In poem 613, prose becomes an outright punishment:
They shut me up in Prose – As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet –
Because they liked me “still” – (CP 302)
Here the speaker is being punished for being a poet, i.e., for being different, or being in
possession of the god given gift. In poem 1212 Dickinson examines the possibilities of a word in poem 1212:
A word is dead When it is said, Some say.
I say it just Begins to live
That day. (CP 534)
Thus, the word is something living, but this is the poetic word – since prose is something “still”, that is non-living. In a letter to her friend Joseph Lyman, Dickinson writes: “We used to think, Joseph, when I was an unsifted girl and you so scholarly that words were cheap & weak. Now I don’t know of anything so mighty.”100 Words are mighty, and so is the space where they are strung together into poetry as in poem 1767: “Sweet hours have perished here/This is a mighty room” (CP 714). Mighty also are those who string the words together (poem 454):
Rich! ‘Twas Myself – was rich – To take the name of Gold – And Gold to own – in solid Bars –
The Difference – made me bold – (THJ 350)
100 Sewall, “The Lyman Letters”, 774
The “alive” word searched for and culled for a poem, is different from the “still” word searched for and culled for prose. “There may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence.”101 Higginson urged readers of his advice column in The Atlantic Monthly, advice Dickinson followed with exorbitance.
In a 1962 interview with Peter Orr, Sylvia Plath pointed out the differences she had encountered between poetry and prose and lamented not being able to use ordinary (“still”) words in her poems:
I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in daily life, and I find this more difficult in poetry. Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you’ve got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you’ve just got to turn away all the peripherals. And I miss them! (---) I can’t put toothbrushes into a poem, I really can’t!102
Generally considered a kind of “kick-off” to her poetic outburst of 1962, Plath’s “Tulips”, a longer poem written on March 18, 1961, picks up where Dickinson left off, in that it points to the bliss of being “nobody”. The poem’s speaker is in a hospital room preparing for, and undergoing, surgery. The peaceful, white surroundings make her feel safe and she nearly succumbs to a longing for annihilation. However, a bouquet of red tulips reminds her of life.
I am nobody (…)
I have given my name and my day clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons (---)
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage (---)
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. (AR 18)
The tongue-in-cheek playfulness of Dickinson’s poem “I am Nobody, Who Are You?” does not exist here, but the concept is similar: The longing to efface one’s Self, to create a clean slate.
Dickinson in her white dress in her room in Amherst manages to do so, she successfully escapes
101 Wineapple, White Heat, 6
102 Deanna Souza, “A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr”, Modern American Poetry, February 3, 2014, https://modernamericanpoetry.org/content/1962-sylvia-plath-interview-peter-orr, Retrieved May 18, 2021
