Ms. Prufrock in Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips”

 On April 16, 1962, Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother: “Got a sweet letter from Mr. Crockett today – evidently inspired by my New Yorker poem (which I haven’t seen, the magazines are late) about the appendectomy.”[1] [The poem, “Tulips” had been written a little more than a year earlier, on March 18, 1961, ten days after her discharge from St. Pancras Hospital where she had been treated for appendicitis.] Her letter, of course, suggests that the poem is autobiographical, in keeping with the sort of “confessional” poetry with which Plath became associated. But as contemporary critical opinion on Plath has matured, her poems are now more correctly perceived as imaginative creations that weave biographical experiences with myth, popular culture, and literary figurations, often in the service of themes that illustrate the cultural dilemmas of women. Thus, her incidental summary of “Tulips” (that it was “about the appendectomy”) may be taken as the kind of daughterly shorthand that prudently excludes the substance of more complicated testimony, as it has been frequently observed that Plath’s correspondence with her mother was often less than candid. One possible explanation for this ruse may be Plath’s apprehension that her mother would notice a resemblance to the ward in Newton-Wellesley Hosptial in which Aurelia herself had been hospitalized (characterized by Sylvia as the “grimmest I’ve ever seen”) and therefore conclude that the poet had portrayed her own mother as sterile and sexually dysfunctional. [See my discussion under Footnote “1”.]

 “Tulips” is rather, like many of her other poems, a biographical fiction and not a diary entry. We know this is true when we compare historical fact with the poem itself. Although the poem relates the private thoughts of a woman who is hospitalized in winter, as Plath was, the poem’s troubling discourse hardly resonates with either the tone or content of the letters[2] and journal entries[3] in which Plath contemporaneously recorded her stay at St. Pancras, for in those accounts she is mostly gregarious, sharply observant and emotionally balanced, at times a veritable yenta, save for a few complaints of pain and discomfort from her surgery and the close quarters of her accommodations.[4]

 Writing from her hospital bed to Dido and W.S. Merwin on March 7, 1961, a week after her surgery, she comments: “The funny thing is, I’m having more fun here than I have in months.”[5] She tells the Merwins that her diary is “brimming with notes” and that, though she’s in pain at times, the experience has been largely enjoyable:

Ted comes rushing in each day during visiting hours – loaded with creamy milk, fresh squeezed orange juice, V-8 & steak sandwiches – dying to hear the latest tales. I’m having my first real rest for a year & piling up a huge book of anecdotes, quotes & notes. My side hurts like hell but I am goddam cheerful that when I say ‘God, the codeine!’ in a noble whisper, I get it without a murmur. I eat all the food & ask for the scrapings from the pot (they’re very niggardly) which has permanently alienated the Country lady. The night your letter arrived, Dido, I had just refused a monstrous Rice Pudding. The sister thought I was suffering a relapse. Ted is incredible  . . . he works & manages Frieda & brings me stuff.[6]

Though Plath might have been putting on a brave face for her friends, her bubbly excitement at the latest tales, anecdotes, quotes & notes about the hospital staff and the patients seems genuine enough, not only for the prospect of entertaining Hughes, but as material for future short stories and poems. Her private journal entries at this time are also consistent with her letter to the Merwins.

 There are other notable discrepancies between “Tulips” and the historical record. Plath’s 10-day hospital stay occurred when London was experiencing unusually warm and dry weather.[7]. Plath’s own report to her mother on March 17, 1962, a day before she finished “Tulips,” stated: “Well, ironically, I enjoyed my hospital experience immensely, especially the spring-like afternoons in the hospital park & garden every day from my post-op day on as the weather was mild & sunny.”[8]. Yet how different is the “weather” in the hospital ward of “Tulips,” where we are told: “it is winter here,” “how white everything is, how quiet, snowed-in.” The speaker also appears to be bedridden and her hospitalization unrelieved by any excursions outside.

 Plath’s records also reveal that she shared a ward with a number of other patients. On March 1, 1961, she wrote to her mother: “I am in a modern wing of this hospital – all freshly painted pink walls, pink & green flowered bed curtains & brand new lavatories – full of light & air – an immense improvement over the grim ward at Newton-Wellesley were Ted and I visited you! The nurses are all young, pretty & cheerful – no old crotchety hags or anything. I am in a big ward, divided by a glass & wood partition with about 17 beds on my side” (emphasis supplied).[9]  In “Tulips” no other patients are mentioned and it seems as if the narrator is confined to a private room (“I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly”), enclosed by “white walls” and other sanitized images (e.g., “two white lids,” “white caps,” and “white swaddlings”). The speaker’s descriptions of her sterile surroundings are pointedly juxtaposed to the images of unbridled life represented by the sensuality of the red tulips. The polarity of these images highlights their literary attributes, which appear to be so much more purposeful when we consider the departures from the biographical record.

 A similar contrast manifests itself when we compare the speaker’s unsettling characterization of the photo of her husband and child (“Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks”) with the effusive adoration that Plath heaps on Hughes when he visits her:

Ted came last night. Precisely one minute after 7.30 a crowd of shabby, short, sweet peering people was let into the ward – they fluxed in familiar directions, bringing a dark-coated handsome shape. Twice as tall as all of them. I felt as excited & infinitely happy as in the early days of our courtship. His face which I daily live with seemed the most kind & beautiful in the world. He brought an air letter from the New Yorker for me with a $100 contract for letting them have “first reading” of all my poems for a year! The date of the letter was that of our first meeting at the Botolph party 5 years ago. He brought steak sandwiches & apricot tarts & milk & fresh-squeezed orange juice- I felt afterwards that if 1 said “For him- he will be on the other side”- I could go through anything with courage- or at least reasonable fortitude.[10]

 In a letter to her mother, she exalts in her temporary relief from the duties of motherhood (“Actually, I feel I’ve been having an amazing holiday! I haven’t been free of the baby one day for a whole year, and I must say I have secretly enjoyed having meals in bed, backrubs, and nothing to do but read . . . .”[11]). Yet she sympathetically observes how her husband has labored under the demands of solo parenthood for just this short while, the overall effect of which appears to reinforce the nuclear bond of their family: “Ted is actually having a rougher time than I – poor love sounded quite squashed yesterday ‘How do you do it all? . . . The Pooker [Freida Hughes] makes an astonishing amount of pots to wash . . . She wets a lot’ & ‘I seem to be eating mostly bread.’ I felt needed & very happy & lucky. My life – as I compare it to those in the ward about me – is so fine – everything but money & a house – love & all.”[12] No “smiling hooks” here.

 We see more contradictions in her descriptions of the nurses. At St. Pancras she writes:

I am immensely fond of all the nurses in their black & white pin striped dresses, white aprons & hats & black shoes & stockings. Their youth is the chief beauty about them – youth, absolute starched cleanliness & a comforting tidying-up & brow-smoothing air.[13]

The images of youthful beauty, the nurses’ dress of black shoes and white aprons and hats, with black and white pinstriped dresses, are, in “Tulips,” all clearly suppressed in favor of the bland, gull-like nurses of the poem, who are portrayed with a lyrical sonority and emotional tenor that emulates T.S. Eliot’s in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“:

The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

In the first two lines quoted above one feels that Plath is playing off Prufrock’s enigmatic aside: “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.” The nurses in “Tulips” are as divorced from the speaker’s suffering as Prufrock’s women are romantically unavailable to him. The similarity is even more striking when we observe that the nurses become “gulls” in “their white caps” (an obvious play on words) just as Prufrock’s women become psychologically transformed into mermaids “Combing the white hair of the waves. . . .”] We even find the patient’s exasperated expression, “So it is impossible to tell how many there are,” hearkening to Prufrock’s own, “It is impossible to say just what I mean.” Plath doubtlessly intended a relationship between the two poems which I discuss further in the second half of this essay.

 In these dramatic disparities between her life and the fictional content of the poem, as well as in her stylistic references to Eliot’s iconic masterpiece of modernist angst, Plath demonstrates an intention to expound a theme that extends well beyond her hospitalization at St. Pancras or the other hospitalizations that followed her suicide attempt in August 1953.[14] The figurative assemblies in “Tulips” are too purposeful and literate and therefore signify a cultural significance that exceeds the type of “confessional writing” which critical opinion had too long enshrined.[15] It is, rather, the kind of poem that Plath would revisit in different guises, as “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” which “should be considered no less sincere for being a performance, or for the fact that the persona is a wildly exaggerated, parodic portrayal of one aspect of Plath’s mental history.”[16]

*       *       *

 In Chapters in a Mythology, Judith Kroll offered interpretations of Plath’s poetry based upon the mythological schemes described in The White Goddess (by Robert Graves), The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, African Folktales (by Paul Radin), and work of C.G. Jung., among others.[17]  Kroll’s purpose was mainly to refute those critiques that had lumped Plath’s poetry with that of “confessional poets” like Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. Rather, Kroll argued, Plath’s poetry ingeniously wove personal biography into these mythical models and achieved a poetry of greater purpose. Myth bestowed literary, psychological, and historical significance on the events of the day, be they pedestrian or extraordinary, and its use was, by that time, a recognized modernist technique that had been previously employed by James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Kroll, however, did not explore Plath’s use of Freudian models, which is surprising in light of Plath’s interest in Freud, a fact particularly noted in her BBC Radio commentary on “Daddy” which Plath described as “a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex.”[18] In “Tulips,” Plath appears to be working from a Freudian script for neurasthenics, particularly the kind of condition that was popularly known as a “nervous breakdown” at a time before drug therapies and sexual liberation offered therapies to the psychological problems many women faced in a sexually repressive culture.[19]

 In the introductory chapter of Totem and Taboo (1913) [whose subtitle was “Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics”], Freud contended that aboriginal “totems” — objects that embodied the spiritual being or emblem of a tribe or family — arose from an extreme “avoidance“ of incest, where men and women would physically shun relatives of the opposite sex. This avoidance, he believed, was the effective repression of sexual desire. Though modern societies had since transcended avoidance behavior, Freud postulated that neurotic patients had regressed and were unable to repress their desires. Developing these themes in the balance of his treatise, he considered other elements such as taboo (which incorporates the sacred and profane), ambivalent emotions, animism, and thoughts of omnipotence, concluding with an exploration of the Oedipus complex which, he argued, was the basis of all religion. In documenting his thesis, Freud relied upon Frazer’s anthropological work in The Golden Bough — a text with which Plath was also familiar, partly because it became required reading after Eliot referred to it in his “footnotes” to “The Waste Land”. Although Freud’s Totem and Taboo has since been largely rejected by anthropologists, it remains a fascinating example of Freud’s use of sexual repression to explain certain psychological complexes. Of course, Freud’s earlier work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), was the first to make the connection between dream symbolism and the repression of sexual desire, and therefore Totem and Taboo appears to be an effort to discover cultural reasons for repression.

 By the early twentieth century, Freud’s influence had become so widespread that the psychological significance of surrogate sexual images was regularly adopted by various artists, particularly in literature and the figurative arts.[20] Flowers became a recognized vehicle for referring to female genitalia. Yet there were other predicates for floral symbolism in the literature of the 19th century, particularly the Victorian classics: John Henry Ingram’s Flora Symbolica: or the language and sentiments of flowers (1869) and Kate Greenaway’s Language of Flowers (1884), which Jacqueline F. Eastman discusses in her essay on James Joyce’s use of flower imagery in the “Lotus Eaters” section of Ulysses (another text that Plath could be expected to know intimately):

Ingram’s Flora Symbolica indicates that “tulips” bear the message “declaration of love.” Thus Bloom’s floral passage opens with the thoughts of “tulips,” for Martha’s letter, in which for the first time she coyly evinces an interest in sex, is a “tulip” itself. But Joyce has coupled the word “tulips” with the adjective “angry”: “Angry tulips with you” (U5.264) . . . . Her anger would appear to be a posture, a falsely modest response to proposed sexual activities, which from Bloom’s own thoughts we may deduce to be sado-masochistic in nature: “Go further next time. Naughty boy: punish: afraid of words, of course. Brutal, why not? Try it anyhow. A bit at a time” (U5.272-74). Martha’s desire to “punish” Bloom suggests to him that she is willing to enjoy his proposals. Thus the image of “angry tulips” communicates far more than the conventional “declaration of love”; it also suggests what it sounds like—”two angry lips.”[21]

 As Joyce, Plath similarly uses floral symbolism in conjunction with sacred and profane imagery in order to portray the sexual subcontext of her speaker’s thoughts. This manifests itself in a conflicted struggle of the speaker’s experience, whether it be in the schema of color (white vs. red), sound (the quiet of the ward vs. explosions of the world beyond), activity (peacefulness of sedation vs. animalistic and excitable tulips), or the very act of breathing (oxygen v. the suffocating scent of the tulips).

 To the same degree, the sexual repressiveness of traditional Christian religion, symbolized by the interior “winter” and the sterility of the ward, is extended by figurative references to the Communion tablet and the virginal (and barren) nun. These are placed in opposition to the pagan naturalism of the rite of spring which we associate with the renewal of life and love, represented here by the feral sensuality of the irrepressible tulips (“The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; / They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat”). The tulips serve as a pagan totem of fertility, thus the narrator’s neurotic rejection of them as an “awful baby”. Religious imagery reinforces the cultural sanitization of the woman’s sexual identity with such lines as “I am a nun now, I have never been so pure” and “I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted / To lie with hands turned up and be utterly empty.” To have one’s hands “turned up and utterly empty” means there is no danger in being observed touching oneself, recalling the sacred figure of the “white saint” of “On the Plethora of Dryads.”[22] Aspirations of spiritual purity parallel the sanitized purity of the hospital, which we commonly associate with mortality’s prime theater of operations and death’s doorway. Here the “peacefulness” of mortal purity is proximate to the serenity of Heaven:

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

Plath strikes a similar note in “Barren Woman,” who is “Nun-hearted and blind to the world,” and akin to a sterile virgin spurning the temptations of the sensual world.

 In “Tulips,” in contrast to the morbid peacefulness of the anesthetized senses are the “excitable” tulips that intolerably arouse the narrator’s emotional responses:

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle, they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

* * *

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.

These lines deliberately emphasize negative images of feminine existence, be it in color, scent, sound, child-bearing, and even the vaunted subtlety of feminine wiles. The line, “Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds,” uses the tacit emblem of menstrual blood to figure another type of “wound.” The “sunken rust-red engine” (whether interpreted as clitoral, vaginal, or sexual response in general) has been repressed and now feels threatened by being teased back to life. Here, normal human sensibility is subverted to the point that smiles become painful “hooks.”

 Among other things, “Tulips” is Plath’s response to the sexual repression of women and the remedies offered by the medical profession,[23] which, as a first order of business, administered medications designed to subdue a woman’s sexual responsiveness:

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.

In extreme cases, lobotomies were administered to pacify “oversexed” women.

 The conflicting figurative scheme of “Tulips” primarily reflects the dislocation of the inner sensibility of the narrator, whose sexual frustration, much as Eliot’s Prufrock, finds expression in surreal projections that rise to the pathologically neurotic.  Indeed, we can push the point further by considering the narrator in “Tulips” a J. Alfred Prufrock in feminine guise, a Ms. Prufrock. In this way, a brief comparison of the two poems may be profitable, not so much as to draw out their superficial resemblances, but where the comparison can provide assistance to a closer reading of “Tulips.”

  The narrative approaches in “Prufrock” and “Tulips” have remarkable similarities and differences, beginning with the use of the pronouns “I” and “you.” Some critics have considered Prufrock’s use of “I” and “you” as indicative of a dialogue with himself, similar to that of Wallace Stevens and his “internal paramour,” but the “most obvious and least fogbound interpretation of the pronouns” is that “the ‘I’ is Prufrock and the ‘you’ is the reader.”[24] Plath’s “you” also stands apart from the narrator. Yet the association between narrator and reader in “Tulips” is not intended to ultimately connect the two as Prufrock does with his use of “we,” whereby the reader is “not just a spectator but a participant in Prufrock’s world.”[25] Instead, in “Tulips” the speaker’s troubling visions are disclosed in confidence to a “you” that seems more like a psychoanalyst, as “Herr Doktor” in “Lady Lazarus.”

  In “Prufrock” we read the tedium of life through the obituary of the romantic instinct:

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
 “That is not it at all,
 That is not what I meant, at all.”
* * *
I grow old … I grow old ..
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

In “Tulips,” Plath’s nameless narrator is afflicted by neurotic obsessions that bespeak the loss of personality through psychosexual displacement:

I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
* * *
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.

        Neither Eliot’s Prufrock nor the speaker in “Tulips” is able to name the source of their interior conflict, but both personalities manifest the aberrant projections of a subverted sensibility. Prufrock’s discontent with the tedium of modern life — where his life is measured out in coffee spoons and half-deserted streets harbor insidious intent, where he views himself more an officious and expendable Polonius than a heroic Hamlet, where real women offer no more romantic refuge than imagined mermaids — is hardly distinguishable from the ravings of the speaker in “Tulips,” who is under siege by the smiling hooks of her husband and child, the cut paper shadow of herself, and the excitable tulips in various forms (a dozen red lead sinkers, an awful baby and an African cat) and then only able to find intermittent release in drugs and religious aspirations.

 Prufrock “has lived the narrow, constricted life of empty form, a meaningless existence that shuts out reality,” and hence lacks the “courage to be” and suffers a “crisis of existence.”[26] Plath’s narrator is similarly isolated and also suffers an existential crisis, where human connections have become unbearable, even as they are impossible to elude. The reality of community and companionship in “human voices” that ultimately undoes Prufrock is comparable to the various forms of love associated with family and romance that Plath’s speaker transforms into “smiling hooks,” an “awful baby” and “a sunken rust-red engine.” As the tedium of everyday life malingers in “Prufrock,” when transferred to the hospital ward in “Tulips” it is replete with barely-restrained tensions that would burst forth but for bright needles and therapies of the hospital staff.

 The narrator’s hospitalization in “Tulips” is, according to Eileen Aird, a “welcome one of snowy whiteness and silence, in which the woman grasps eagerly at the ability to relax completely because nothing is required of her.”[27] But as the speaker’s responses are defensive ones, they are no more truly “welcome” than the consequences of Prufrock’s emotional isolation are to him. The line, “I have nothing to do with explosions,” is especially telling. While other critics have interpreted the line as the speaker’s desire for peacefulness, it pointedly refers to the fact that “shell shock” was the most common cause of mental breakdowns for men, and the narrator’s negation, as Freud maintained in his eponymous essay, is tantamount to a form of admission that, instead, she has a female version of shell shock.[28] Women who suffered a nervous breakdown in the early 20th century, especially in the post-WW2 period, were most commonly diagnosed with sexual hysteria.[29] The speaker’s unidentified “wound” is more likely a psychological one whose center is the “two lips.” [“Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds” uses a term of art (“correspond”) that Freud often employed when making connections between the neurotic impulses and sexuality.]

 But it would be as wrong to confine this narrator’s problems to sexual repression, just as it is incorrect to say that Prufrock’s troubles are solely sexual. An even more pervasive malady was identified by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique:, a text published in February 1963 (2 weeks after Plath’s death):

 If the secret of feminine fulfillment is having children, never have so many women, with the freedom to choose, had so many children, in so few years, so willingly. If the answer is love, never have women searched for love with such determination. And yet there is a growing suspicion that the problem may not be sexual, though it must somehow be related to sex. I have heard from many doctors evidence of new sexual problems between man and wife—sexual hunger in wives so great their husbands cannot satisfy it. “We have made woman a sex creature,” said a psychiatrist at the Margaret Sanger marriage counseling clinic. “She has no identity except as a wife and mother. She does not know who she is herself. She waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive. And now it is the husband who is not interested. It is terrible for the women, to lie there, night after night, waiting for her husband to make her feel alive.” Why is there such a market for books and articles offering sexual advice? The kind of sexual orgasm which Kinsey found in statistical plenitude in the recent generations of American women does not seem to make this problem go away.

 On the contrary, new neuroses are being seen among women—and problems as yet unnamed as neuroses—which Freud and his followers did not predict, with physical symptoms, anxieties, and defense mechanisms equal to those caused by sexual repression. . . .

*  *  *

 Can the problem that has no name be somehow related to the domestic routine of the housewife? When a woman tries to put the problem into words, she often merely describes the daily life she leads. What is there in this recital of comfortable domestic detail that could possibly cause such a feeling of desperation? Is she trapped simply by the enormous demands of her role as modern housewife: wife, mistress, mother, nurse, consumer, cook, chauffeur; expert on interior decoration, child care, appliance repair, furniture refinishing, nutrition, and education? Her day is fragmented as she rushes from dishwasher to washing machine to telephone to dryer to station wagon to supermarket, and delivers Johnny to the Little League field, takes Janey to dancing class, gets the lawnmower fixed and meets the 6:45. She can never spend more than 15 minutes on any one thing; she has no time to read books, only magazines; even if she had time, she has lost the power to concentrate. At the end of the day, she is so terribly tired that sometimes her husband has to take over and put the children to bed.

 This terrible tiredness took so many women to doctors in the 1950’s that one decided to investigate it. He found, surprisingly, that his patients suffering from “housewife’s fatigue” slept more than an adult needed to sleep—as much as ten hours a day—and that the actual energy they expended on housework did not tax their capacity. The real problem must be something else, he decided—perhaps boredom. Some doctors told their women patients they must get out of the house for a day, treat themselves to a movie in town. Others prescribed tranquilizers. Many suburban housewives were taking tranquilizers like cough drops. “You wake up in the morning, and you feel as if there’s no point in going on another day like this. So you take a tranquilizer because it makes you not care so much that it’s pointless.”

 It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off.[31]

 “Tulips” manifests the debilitating malaise and self-effacement of women in symptoms eerily similar to those described by Friedan: “I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow” and “I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.” Without a separate identity, the consequent deprivations of personal privacy, possessions, and freedom naturally follow:

Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage—

I have let things slip, a thirty year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureau of linen, my books
Sink out of sight . . .

We are reminded that these were the days when a woman’s civil rights were still shamelessly abused by the patriarchal conventions of law and culture, as had been the case for thousands of years. The conditions that gave rise to the “feminine mystique” were not personal and confined to the speaker in “Tulips,” but should be understood to be representative of sentiments experienced by a community of women who, despite their intelligence and educational advantages, were largely confined to performing domestic services for the dominant male class. Ultimately, a personality so divided develops a schizophrenic worldview, as Plath broadly delineated it in “In Plaster,” a poem completed on the same day as “Tulips.” Therefore, the broader cultural problem indicated in “Tulips” reaches beyond this speaker and makes full recovery “a country far away.”

 The most remarkable lacuna in Plath criticism is the disregard of Plath’s use of tonality and how it works with her choices of form, symbol and prosody to effect the delivery system of the poems. The languid tone of “Tulips,” interspersed with moments of frustrated tension and drugged listlessness, expresses the speaker’s psychological isolation and her unnerving struggle to assert control over her emotions.  We feel this struggle in her intensive self-scrutiny (lying in “between the pillow and the sheet-cuff / Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. / Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in”), where the use of the singular “eye” (or “I”) that has to take in everything is the metaphor for the omnivore, the hunger of the id that cannot be restrained, which Plath harmonizes with the overwhelming tulips that open “like the mouth  of some great African cat.”

 Despite the clarity of the poem’s tone and overall theme, too many critics have ingenuously read the ending lines as indicative of imminent recovery[32]:

I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

The poem is not a plotted story containing a Turandot about-face. It is a moment in time. The narrator’s tears are not those of joy, but those born of a tragic awareness of her own psychological and cultural imprisonment, one that we also find at the end of “Prufrock,” and hence a true recovery that would normalize her sensibility lies “far away.”

_____________________

[1] Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol II (1956-1963), Eds. Peter P. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (HarperCollins  2018), 759 (emphasis supplied). In this essay, I try to show, in part, the disparity between Plath’s own hospital experience (occasioned by her appendicitis) and the narrative description in “Tulips” in order to support the argument that, rather than a “confessional” discourse, the poem attempts to treat more serious themes concerning the cultural and psychological conditions under which women labored, particularly in the 20th century. During her hospitalization at St. Pancras, Plath wrote to her mother on March 1, 1961, observing how her ward was in a “modern wing of this hospital – all freshly painted pink walls, pink & green flowered bed curtains & band new lavatories – full of light & air – an immense improvement over that grim ward at Newton-Wellesley where Ted & I visited you!” Again, on March 6, 1961, Plath observed again how “your ward at Newton-Wellesley was the grimmest I’ve ever seen!” In her journals, Plath confides to her therapist, Ruth Beuscher, that her mother is loveless, sexually repressed, and sterile, traits that bear a striking resemblance to the character in the poem. Lastly, Aurelia Plath suffered ulcers for many years when prevailing medical opinion considered the condition to be stress-related rather than (as later discovered) one caused by a bacterium treatable with antibiotics. When “Tulips” was finally published a year after the March 1961 correspondence, Plath may have wanted to purposely describe the poem (at least to her mother) as one about her own hospital experience rather than her mother’s in order to save her mother the embarrassment of being the subject of a poem that might be perceived to contain such personal revelations. I do not contend, however, that the poem is really about Aurelia and not Sylvia, but that Aurelia may have been a likely model for the poem’s narrator.

[2] Ibid.  582-589 (Letters to Aurelia Schober Plath, dated March 1 and Match 6, 1961; letter to Edith Hughes, dated March 6, 1961; and letter to Dido & W.S. Merwin, dated March 7, 1961)

[3] Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Ed. Karen V. Kukil (Knopf Doubleday 2007), 599-607.

[4] Though Plath had lately suffered a miscarriage — tenderly memorialized in “Parliament Hill Fields” (February 11, 1961) — she seems to have worked through her feelings of disappointment by the time she was admitted to St. Pancras Hospital on February 27, 1961. We can see this in the reassuring intrusion of her biting irony, which  makes itself known at opportune moments throughout her letters and journals. Even as she records instances of pre-operative anxiety, they are not without their black humor: “now I’m really prepared for the slaughter – robed loosely in a pink & maroon striped surgical gown, a gauze turban & a strip of adhesive shuts off the sight of my wedding ring. The little nurse was snippy when I asked how long the operation took. Oblivion approaches. Now I’m close enough. I open my arms. I asked to have my flowered curtains left drawn – the privilege of a condemned prisoner – I don’t want the curious gossipy well-meaning ladies peering for signs of fear, stupor or whatever.” Journals, 602. Such feelings would have been (and still are) normal for anyone undergoing surgery, but these feelings dissipated once the surgery was successfully completed: “Three days since my operation & I am myself again: the tough, gossipy curious enchanting entity I have not been for so long. The life here is made up of details. Pretty pleasures and petty annoyances. Tuesday I was so drugged I knew nothing and nothing bothered me. Wednesday the drugs wore off and I felt sick and resentful of the lively health of the ward. Today I threw of [sic] my fetters – got up to wash and had my first laborious goat shit, changed my hospital pink & red flapping jacket which left my bum bare to my frilly pink & white Victorian nightgown.” Ibid.

[5] Letters, 588. It makes perfect sense that Plath’s journals and correspondence portray her hospital experience at St. Pancras as a happy vacation, as it was clearly a relief from the drudgery of her duties as a mother and housewife at 3 Chalcot Square in London, the sour taste of which Hughes himself sampled during Plath’s brief hospitalization.

[6] Ibid.

[7] The conditions in London in March 1961 were warm and dry, in fact one of the warmest on record for 100 years. https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/mohippo/pdf/q/b/mar1961.pdf.

[8] Letters, 590.  Later in the same letter Plath writes: “The weather is amazing; real June days.”

[9] Letters, 583-584  (emphasis supplied).

[10] Journals, 601-602.

[11] Letters, 584.

[12] Journals, 605.

[13] Journals, 604.

[14] After her suicide attempt, Plath was hospitalized at Newton-Wellesley Hospital from August 26 to September 3, 1953, then moved to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston until September 14, 1953, when she was admitted to McLean Hospital in Belmont and treated until sometime before Christmas, 1953.

[15] See, e.g., http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/tulips.htm, which contains extracts of criticism on “Tulips” by Jeannine Dobbs, Eileen M. Aird, Margaret Dickie, Charles Molesworth, Barbara Hardy, Richard Grey and Renée R. Curry, all of whom conflate Plath, the author, with the character in the poem.

[16] Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (Faber 2001), 155.

[17] Judith Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Sutton Pub. Ltd. 2007)(originally pub. by Harper & Row, 1976).

[18] Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, Ed. Ted Hughes (Harper & Row 1981), 293.

[19] Though “neurasthenia,” as it was medically known, was “first described in 1869,” it’s rise, evolution and eventual disappearance in or about the 1960’s seems to coincide with the rise of U.S. middle class in the Twentieth Century until drug therapies became a routine treatment of hypertension, depression, anxiety, compulsion, hypochondria, trauma, schizophrenia, and related personality disorders. [O. Henry wrote, perhaps insensitively, about neurasthenia in a humorous short story entitled, “Let Me Feel Your Pulse, with the notable observation: “There is nothing more alarming to a neurasthenic than to feel himself growing well and cheerful.” If this illustrates anything, it is the intolerant attitude the average American held toward the condition.] For further reading see, Megan Barke,  Rebecca Fribush &  Peter N. Stearns, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture,” Journal of Social History, Volume 33, Issue 3, 1 March 2000, 565–584. https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article-abstract/33/3/565/957477?redirectedFrom=PDF

[20] See Susan Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (University of North Carolina Press 1993), 84-85.  Plath’s use of Freud, Jung, Lacan and others was probably a more common methodology than previously suspected. For example, on Plath’s “Ocean 1212-W,” Van Dyne writes:

In her story of the birth of the poet, the bartering of symbolic equivalents is knowing and calculated. Plath scripts this moment according to a paradigm Freud and Lacan have taught us to read: her fall into self-consciousness (“this awful birthday of otherness”) spells the end of her “beautiful fusion with the things of this world,” marks her as an individual (“I felt the wall of my skin. I am I”), yet also indelibly inscribes her loss. The burden of the piece is to illustrate how the loss of the mother’s breast prompts her entry into language, whose pleasures give her “a new way of being happy.” To compensate for an identity structured by lack, loss, and rejection, Plath substitutes her election as a poet. Even without Aurelia’s scrupulous corrections to the facts of these events, Plath’s cues throughout the narrative announce that this autobiography is a carefully reconstructed, even mythologized fiction.

[21]  Jacqueline F. Eastman, “The Language of Flowers: A New Source for ‘Lotus Eaters’,” James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Spring, 1989), 379-396, 386.

[22] The Collected Poems, 67-68 (1981). The poems begins:

Hearing a white saint rave
About the quintessential beauty
Visible only to the paragon heart

The “paragon heart” imports one of the highest purity capable of perceiving “quintessential beauty.”

[23] See, generally, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Deidre English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (The Feminist Press 1973).  In respect to “Tulips” this observation is particularly apt:

Passivity was the main prescription, along with warm baths, cool baths, abstinence from animal foods and spices, and indulgence in milk and puddings, cereals and “mild sub-acid fruits.” Women were to have a nurse – not a relative – to care for them, to receive no visitors, and as Dr. Dirix wrote, “all sources of mental excitement should be perseveringly guarded against.”

[24] See John Haverson, “Prufrock, Freud and Others,”The Sewanee Review, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Autumn, 1968), 574-576.

[25] Ibid. at 576.

[26] Ibid. at 578.

[27] Eileen Aird, Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work (Harper Collins 1975), 72.

[28] Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” Standard Edition, 19: 233-239 (1925).  http://faculty.smu.edu/dfoster/English%203304/Negation.htm

[29] Megan Barke, Rebecca Fribush and Peter N. Stearns, “Nervous Breakdowns in 20th Century American Culture,” Journal of Social History, Volume 33, Issue 3, 1 March 2000, 565–584.

[30] Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique (W.W. Norton & Co. 1963), 29-31.

[31] See, e.g., Barbara Hardy, “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: Enlargement or Derangement” in The Survival of Poetry: A Contemporary Survey, ed. Martin Dodsworth (London: Faber & Faber 1970), 164-87 (” the poem enacts the movement from the peace and purity of anesthesia and feebleness to the calls of life. . . .The poem opens out to our experience of sickness and health, to the overwhelming demands of love, which we sometimes have to meet”) ; Eileen Aird, op. cit. at 73 (“she merges from the world of whiteness and silence to a not unpleasurable anticipation”).

© 2019 Steven M. Critelli All rights reserved.