Lost in the Light Silence in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

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Lost in the Light

Silence in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

Fenella Collins-Smith, BA (Hons) English

12267287

Supervised by Dr. R.W.H. Glitz

Thesis submitted for a Masters in Comparative Literature

Graduate School of Humanities

University of Amsterdam

June 2020

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“It wasn’t the silence of silence.

It was my own silence.”

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Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to everyone who allowed me into their homes and gave me my own space to study

silence, in silence, during this lockdown. Thanks also to my supervisor who allowed me free roam of

a subject that has intrigued me for many years. I can confirm that this thesis is a total sum of my

independent research and that no other sources have been used other than those referenced in the

text. I hereby acknowledge that I have read the thesis guidelines for the University of Amsterdam

and take full responsibility for the contents of this document.

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Introduction: Breaking the Silence

Silence. Unseen but ever present in the world around us. At night as I type it ensues the taps of my

laptop and wraps rounds every sound of a turning page. It is the suspense before something great and

the pause before something awful. It is the deafening noise that fills the room after a heavy

conversation, it is the last resort when the words can’t be found, it is in the beginning, at the end, in

the space between, it is in every word you hear if you listen hard enough. Silence is everywhere, yet

nowhere at all. Beyond the shape and sound of words it manifests itself as a powerful phenomenon

that tugs at the extra-linguistic meaning that is not captured in expressed consciousness. In its subtle

presence it permeates every waking moment, an infinite stretch of possibility and meaning that goes

beyond the frontiers of language into the ineffable depths of communication. To talk about silence is

a seemingly paradoxical task because in order to understand and interpret its presence in language,

the silence itself must be broken.

In The World of Silence Max Picard states that “the word has supremacy over silence”,

suggesting that consciousness can be understood only through the cultural paradigm of language

(15). Picard’s precedence on the word as the principle instrument of communication threatens a

solipsist existence for all that cannot be expressed in language. To adapt the Wittgenstenian phrase of

“whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, the latter promulgates the struggle to articulate a hidden truth wherein the speaker feels lost or victimised in language (7). This

interpretation subjugates a speaker into silence who cannot assert their supremacy over the word.

Recognising then, that there are speakers in the silence, surely the silence itself must speak?

Pertaining to the ineffable depths of phenomenology, silence concerns that which has not been, or

cannot be spoken, and yet to write about silence is to move towards an emancipation from the veil of

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Cheryl Glenn’s book Unspoken uses the analogy of silence to equal that of the zero in mathematics, as “an absence with a function, and a rhetorical one at that”, suggesting that silence, while commonly conceived as a nothingness state, still remains part of the communicative web that

compromises the scope of lived experience (4). Widely considered an affliction of femininity, a

simulacrum of subjugation, passivity or even death, silence extends to the far reaches of the

periphery to embody the lives and thoughts of those who cannot speak for themselves. According to

Max Picard, “there are periods in human history, periods in which history seems to carry silence –

nothing but silence… periods in which (wom/)men and events are hidden beneath the silence” (83). Resonating on Picard’s statement it becomes clear that language is not the whole story, and that these

hidden figures in history, while silent and hindered by a language that fails to signify, still have a

voice to be heard.

The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate the rhetorical art of silence in poetic language, and

how, in its subversion of linguistic discourse, repressed, silent voices can be identified as a

meaningful presence rather than a modicum of absence relegated to the shadows of human

consciousness. By making the decision to use silence as a rhetorical device, writers can develop a

new discourse of communication that would ordinarily have been dismissed as insignificant and

unremarkable. Susan Sontag’s assertion that “in the greatest art, one is always aware of things that

cannot be said, of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible… the

poet’s most potent element in a work of art are, often, in silences” (36). Sontag’s insight into the unspeakable depths of expression formulate the body of thought that I will attempt to explicate in my

research. The voice? Sylvia Plath.

Writing in a time of intense female repression, Plath stylistically carves a space for the wild

quandary of unspeakable lived experience in the nuances of language that speak beyond the chains of

her oppressor. As a 1950s housewife, Plath’s inherent relationship with silence and oppression is

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her silence becomes less the binary inferior to speech and more its equal. By levelling the playing

field of speech and silence, Plath resists the voice of the oppressor by voicing the unspoken depths of

the weak and the repressed. As a woman, and therefore an invisible presence in 1950s society, Plath

engages with the invisible to assuage a meaningful presence for the marginalised speaker that goes

beyond, and ultimately transcends, language.

To direct my study into the rhetorical presence of silence in Plath’s poetry, I must first answer

the question that perturbs the silence: how can the writer pinpoint its essence through the paradoxical

nature of construing its rhetorical presence in language? By way of illuminating a linguistic

hermeneutic of silence, the first chapter will discuss the psycholinguistic theories of Jacques Derrida

and Julia Kristeva to identify how silence exists in the blank spaces that intercede the text and the

repressed, unconscious drives of being. The textual ambiguity of the written word that deconstructs

the unspoken presence of communication is championed in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, wherein his

attention to the trace and space between words as the “becoming-absent” of the subject exposes the

instability of language (69). As a non-existent requisite of speech, Derrida’s theories legitimate the

subtle permeations of silent signification in the written word to house the interplay of an absent voice

in communication. After analysing Derrida’s linguistic theories that engender a meaningful

hermeneutic of seeing silence in language, in Chapter Two I intend to utilise Derrida’s deconstruction

technique to highlight Plath’s unnerving use of negative space in her poetry and how, in pertaining to

what is absent, Plath “deals with [the] ghosts” of hidden figures in history ("Specters of Marx" 11).

By the same token of Derrida, the potentiality of silence is also given prevalence by Julia

Kristeva, who outlines its discourse as all that has “not been grasped by the linguistic or ideological

system”, citing these “ruptures, blank spaces and holes into language” as a birthing place for new expression and experimentation for writers, particularly those who have themselves experienced

alienation and marginalisation in life and language ("Oscillation" 165). Kristeva promulgates this new

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to liberate the repressed speaker. In Chapter One I will elaborate on Kristeva’s theory of key dialectical

concepts in Revolution in Poetic Language, and how her sublimation of bringing the repressed,

unconscious drives of the semiotic back into the speaking body of language is intrinsic to signifying

the unspeakable, silent depths of being. Giving impetus to what cannot be spoken in symbolic

language, Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic outlines a dynamism through which I will analyse Plath’s

Collected Poems in Chapter Three, and how, by noting the presence of Kristeva’s semiotic in Plath’s

work, the silence of a repressed speaker can be seen to speak volumes through its subversion of

symbolic discourse.

To support my analysis of Plath’s later poems in Chapter Four, after discussing the key dialectical concepts of Kristeva’s psycholinguistic theory, I shall proceed to analyse her doctrine of abjection that disrupts and violates the speaking subject. From the perspective of the maternal speaking

body that is subjugated upon entrance into language, I will examine Kristeva’s theory of the abject in

Powers of Horror to illustrate the muted voice of a female subject in a repressed, patriarchal society.

Emulating the “fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside”, reading abjection in the

poetry of Plath will emancipate the muted voice of a female body dominated by the patriarch ("Powers"

Kristeva 5). In transposing the theoretical framework of Derrida and Kristeva into the lines of Plath, I

hope to expose how the agency of silence is used as a strategic defence against the dominant forces

who sought to silence the weak and the oppressed.

Resonating on the power of silence as an ambiguous force in poetic language, this thesis will

elucidate the repressed and forgotten voices folded into the lines of Plath’s poetic repertoire by

noting their absence as presence in poetic language. In short, just because someone is made invisible

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Chapter One

Seeing the Holes in Language: An exposition of silence in philosophical and psycholinguistic theories

To understand the prevalence of silence in poetic language, we must first understand why silence is a

subjugation of a repressed speaker from within language itself. In this chapter I will explore the root

of silence in language, and how it uncovers the inadequacies of a language system when the words

fail to express the intrinsic experiences of a repressed speaker. Regarded by Adrienne Rich as the

“oppressor’s language” in her poem ‘The Burning Paper Instead of Children’, the oscillating tension between what can be said and what can’t be said languish within the remorseless confines of the patriarchal prerogative (16). The following pages will trace the dominant philosophical and

psycholinguistic theories that detail the emergence of a repressed speaker from the silent depths of

the incommunicable.

1.1 The Silence of the repressed

What is apparent from the very beginning of philosophical theory is that the patriarchal

language system is often found wanting when the words fail to express the phenomenological

experiences of the repressed speaker. This male domination of logical form and systemic order in

language first finds root in Plato’s allegory of the Cave that demarcates the rational clarity of the Sun, harbinger of light and of the Good, as the ultimate form of masculinity. Transcendence is only

possible if one breaks from the confines of the cave and moves towards the light of the Sun. If one

accepts Luce Irigaray’s gendering of Plato’s cave as womb-like and therefore feminine, Plato’s

allegory suppositions the maternal as a presence that needs to be escaped in order to occupy language

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Platonic metaphor in her view that “the woman can never be the sun but is only covered by it,

constrained by it as by an alien and restrictive garment forced on her from above” (664). While

Plato’s original allegory pivots on the escape from the cave, Irigaray and Nye suggest that this escape from the cave is in no way liberating, and that in the blinding dominance of the Sun, the

maternal presence is severed and the female voice is lost in the light. What then does this mean for

the female or the otherwise oppressed voice? If the canon of language belongs to the masculine and

its victors, how can the repressed express themselves within a system that seeks to silence them?

After rejecting the logos of patriarchal diction, what tools remain besides animalistic shrieks and

melodic bursts to express the kaleidoscope of human experience? This is the dilemma of the

repressed speaker.

It is at this point that authenticity of language is brought into disrepute as the marginalised

speaker is faced with the barricades set by a masculine language. In order to break free from Plato’s

Sun, the speaker is required to return to the “incommunicable wilderness” and recover the divided

self from the “undercurrent of language” (Nye 676). In the fractured communication between the

form of language and the inexpressible nature of phenomenological experience, a breakdown of

communication emerges, leaving what cannot be expressed firmly outside of language in the solipsist

prosody of the wilderness. By this account, language becomes problematic and the speaker is

estranged from its discourse when faced with the need to express despair, horror and all the ineffable

shades of experience that culminate, inevitably, in shrieks or silence. Feminist critic Elaine

Showalter interprets this limitation only as an absence of a woman’s choice who, when denied access

to “the full resources of language” is forced into “the hole in discourse, the blanks and gaps and

silences” (255-256). Showalter’s claim discloses the exposition of the dominant psycholinguistic

theories in this thesis that will be interpreted to support the claim of meaningful silence in poetic

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Plath utilises the agency of silence to go beyond the limitations of language to articulate the lived

experience of indescribable trauma and the mute sensibility of 1950’s femininity.

1.2 Silence in the space like the ‘b’ in subtle: Derrida’s trace and différance

As this thesis will discuss, many of Plath’s poems characterise a speaker on the edge of both

language and life, vascillating between speech and silence as they struggle to identify themselves in

language. To further explicate this struggle, it is essential to discuss the post-structuralist theories of

Jacques Derrida who saw the holes in language that enervated the kaleidoscope of phenomenological

existence. Plath’s poetic language epitomises an absent voice in life that is made present through her writing, her deployment of silence in particular creates a potency in the lines that speak beyond what

Derrida would call “the impurity” of language ("Speech and Phenomena" 85). Considered one of the most controversial philosophers of the twentieth century for his resonate attack on the values of

reason and truth, Derrida’s theory of deconstruction that gave rise to his notion of “différance”, allows possible interpretations of seeing the silence that is decentred from, and in parallax with, the

written word ("Différance" 3). Engaging with elements of Derrida’s theory to deconstruct language

and observe the traces of a marginalised voice in Plath’s Holocaust poems is intrinsic to furthering

my research into the study of silence.

Derrida’s concept of Deconstruction was first discussed in his 1967 book, Of Grammatology, in which he argues in contrast to the Platonist, hierarchal ideal of binary opposites wherein one

element is privileged at the expense of the second (presence/absence, speech/writing,

masculine/feminine). Derrida formulated his theory in conjunction with Ferdinand de Saussure,

whose theories identified with the arbitrary nature of meaning and language that is produced by a set

of signs with two sides: the signifier (words, images and sounds) that articulates the signified (the

concept or idea) ("Grammatology" 13). In this web of signification, the structural network of these

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disparity of meaning in signification that no longer referred to the intrinsic experience of man but the

built-up system that points towards meanings other than the signs themselves. To take back control

of textual meaning, Derrida advocated a deconstructive technique that breaks down signification to

observe the trace of what is “in and of itself inaudible” ("Différance" Derrida 4). In Derrida’s theory

of Deconstruction he attempts to reconceive the difference that demarcates individual

self-consciousness by challenging the rigid structure of logocentrism in his advocation that there is no

fixed centre to meaning, and that the arbitrary nature of consciousness should be reflected in the

decentred nature of writing ("Grammatology" 14). In rethinking the structural conditions of thought

and possibility in speech and writing, Derrida’s theory offers a way out of the impasse of the

unspeakable nature of lived experience by defying authoritative definitions of language.

As Derrida observes, “this deconstruction of presence accomplishes itself through the

deconstruction of consciousness” that reveals “the irreducible notion of the trace” ("Grammatology"

70). Derrida refers to this trace not as a presence, “but rather the simulacrum of a presence that

dislocates and refers beyond itself” (26). This is what Derrida calls the “différance” of meaning that

exists in the space between signs in the “systematic play of differences… by means of which

elements are related to each other” (27). Accounting for Derrida’s “effacement” that belongs to “the

very structure of the trace” in signs, we are made aware of the pull and push of speech and silence

("Speech and Phenomena" 156). By noting the traces in the written word, Derrida opens up a

pathway to see the traces of unspoken communication that exists in language and, by extension, the

silence of the repressed speaker that I shall proceed to uncover in my analysis of Plath’s poems.

In Derrida’s 1972 essay Différance, he acknowledges the hidden depths of meaning in the

trace that “can be written but not spoken in the silent “a” of différance” ("Différance" 3). His assertion of the ‘a’ that acts “as if it made no difference” can be understood as a silent presence that

exists in the written word. Derrida correlates the “inaudible difference” of the silent ‘a’ in speech to

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absent. In recognising the play of absence in writing and the breath of silence in speech, Derrida

outlines a methodology of deconstruction to make explicit the traces of the silent tomb from within

the text itself. By this Derrida scrutinises the “silent play” of semantics embedded in the traces

around signification (4). As Petter Dyndahl accounts, “deconstruction may be said to represent a way

of exposing the implicit presence of what is absent in the things we normally accept as natural and

rational” (128). In other words, phenomenological truths that seemingly escape our attention in the representation of the written word can be revealed if one reads into the inaudibility of the writing to

note the extra linguistic meaning that exists in the silence.

In Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena, silence is posited as “a determination and effect within a system which is no longer that of presence but that of différance” ("Speech and Phenomena" 147).

By noting the discreet graphic intervention of the ‘a’ in lieu of the correctly spelt ‘e’, Derrida plays

with the silence of the grapheme to highlight the nuanced variation of the written word “that cannot

be apprehended in speech” and is therefore “offered by a mute mark” ("Différance" 3). Lisa Mazzei calls this subtle presence of meaning a “beckoning trace”, like a “siren” that lures you into “a field play of silence” that can be either ignored or deferred (25). In reading the spaces between the

modulation of the written word, Derrida derives meaning from the silence in the différance that is “as powerful as it is unreal, a hallucination or simulacrum that is virtually more accurate than what it is

so blithely called a living presence” ("Différance" 13). This spectre of silence that haunts the

shadows of the written word is in many cases more powerful and more poignant than the articulation

of the words themselves. I will corroborate this statement through my analysis of ‘The Thin People’

and ‘Berck-Plage’ in the following chapter.

For Derrida, communication, once released from the Rousseadian shackles of the logos (by

way of decentering the focus from logical discourse), offers absolute freedom to the speaker to

subvert and transform language at will. Unlike Plato whose sole premise of communication is the

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advocates expression through deconstruction of the logos, différance of meaning and silent traces in

language. For Derrida, the poverty of language is nowhere more obvious than in its inability to make

present what is absent from linguistic discourse. In Of Grammatology he observes that while “no

phoneme corresponds to the spacing between words”, the deliberate use of “pause, blank,

punctuation, the interval in general” imbibes an invisible presence that “constitute the origin of signification” (87, 99). This assertion draws focus on the dichotomy of speech and silence, of words and blank spaces, of being and non-being all of which do not exist without the intrinsic presence of

the other. By this account Derrida saturates meaning beyond the margins of language, illuminating

within it an authenticity against the backdrop of words that, if consciously positioned, speak a louder

truth than the words themselves.

In poetry most significantly, this shadowy play of silence from within the very structure of

language itself reveals depths of hidden meaning that, according to Mazzei unveils “the unseen, the

unheard” and “the not read” (27).With Plath in particularly, by exposing a discourse of hermeneutics beyond the limitations of language, repressed consciousness can rise up from the caverns of the

unsaid to assume the gaps of the in between and disrupt language with its silence, like the ‘a’ in

différance. There are periods of history that demand Derrida’s différance to make explicit a truthful

lived experience. In this regard Plath’s Holocaust poems poignantly reveal to the reader the ghosts of

the victims that haunt every line with their absence by making implicit their presence hidden in the

trace of the written word.

1.3 Kristeva’s resistance

While in recent years the seminal psycholinguistic theories of Julia Kristeva have somewhat

lost potency in present academic consciousness, her approach to reading language from the

perspective of subjugation echoes round a voice emerging from the depths of silence. With particular

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first part of this chapter will detail certain aspects of Kristeva’s theory in relation to the “process of

the speaking subject” ("The System and the Speaking Subject" 31). By exposing the body of

language as “always too distant, too abstract” to fully represent the lived experience of the traumatised or the subjugated, Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic will further my study into the

meaningful silences in Plath’s poetic language ("Stabat Mater" 162). The second part of this chapter

will offer an interpretation of Kristeva’s abject that I hope will shed light on the limitations of a speaker at odds with the language system and struggling to find a voice from within a suppressed,

objectified body. At the very least Kristeva’s theory will shine a light on the slavishly used,

Nietzschean metaphor of the “prison-house” of language that promulgates the notion of Plath

struggling to find a voice from within the repressive depths of a patriarchal signification1.

The premise of Kristeva’s linguistic theory observes the silence of a muted speaker who is

forced to reside outside linguistic discourse as a result of the exclusivity of the language corpus. By

this Kristeva means that in the process of entering patriarchal language, the speaker is obliged to

severe ties with the maternal (usually by violent or disruptive means), in order for the speaking

subject to be formerly constituted. Elaborating on the Lacanian theory that the evolution of the

subject is intrinsically linked to the evolution of language, Kristeva demarcates the limitations of

language imposed on the marginalised speaker by way of the subject’s entrance into the inherent

language laws of the Father through castration of the Mother. Kristeva’s process of entering

language is mimetic of Jacques Lacan’s account of the ‘mirror stage’ which posits the centrality of a

subject’s formation of identity to follow the essential castration of the Mother. As the take-off point for Kristeva’s theory of writing and speaking in language, Lacan posits the child’s entry into the

1_{Further investigation into the term reveals that the first use of "prison-house" in English was by Frederic}

Jameson in his book "Prison House of Language", wherein Jameson roughly translates an epigram of

Nietzsche to express what is now the crux of his famous language study: "We cease to think if we refuse to do it in the prison-house of language, for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit". See Jameson 101-219; Lovekin 209.

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symbolic order and conscious sentience as the moment it looks in the mirror and sees itself for the

first time ("Revolution" Kristeva 100). In recognising its identity, the child enters into a duality of

the imaginary and the symbolic “figure of law”, a split between the unconscious and the exterior

formation of the ‘I’, the latter of which is organised and understood through language so as to protect against the inconsistencies of the former and connect with other people (Lacan 67). Kristeva viewed

this split as “the first social censorship” and that upon viewing itself for the first time in the mirror, authenticity and reality is lost when the child first understands itself as having an identity set apart

from the Mother ("Revolution" 102). This is now the dilemma of the authentic speaker. Given only

the tools of a bias language the subject’s identity is refracted and phenomenological thought is denied expressive access to the maternal depths. The subject’s divorce from the maternal pulsions

and drives is perceived by Lacan as a requisite of negativity; as a necessary act to enter the inherent

laws of the father-tongue that relegates the subject into a position of loss through their construction

and consequential alienation in language.

In her seminal thesis of 1974, Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva pays homage to

Lacan’s concept of the imaginary and the symbolic but departs slightly from it in her reformulation of the two categories. Unlike Lacan, Kristeva focuses on the pernicious consequences of the psychic

split in the child’s ‘mirror stage’ that represses the maternal drives. In contrast to her predecessor,

Kristeva viewed the difference between the imaginary pre-oedipal and the symbolic order as a

gender opposition in language that silenced and made absent the maternal presence. Claiming

language as the basis of multiple layers of oppression, Kristeva traces the emergence of the speaking

subject to occupy two systemic modalities of being: the semiotic (the Mother) and the symbolic (the

Father). With the former emanating the feminine, subterranean element of meaning that emulates the

pre-oedipal, heterogenous forces of the imaginary and the latter traversing the masculine, unitary

system that pervades language. Like two sides of a coin, the semiotic and the symbolic cannot be

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semiotic the external symbolic would empty of all meaning. Likewise, without the symbolic,

language would exist as incoherent non-sense. Arising from an intermittent dialectic of these

modalities, the speaker emerges somewhere along the spectrum of liberation and repression. Kristeva

posits these two modalities to highlight the opposing forces that work within the “signifying process”

of a subject ("Revolution" Kristeva 92). For Kristeva, the semiotic is a complex web of bodily drives

and sensory shifts that form the composites of the pre-oedipal. By this Kristeva implies that the

boundless energy of the semiotic exists before words, in the rhythmic “abyss” between the child and

the Mother that exists in flux outside of the temporal language discourse ( "Stabat Mater"178). While

Lacan renders the sundering of the Mother as an essential birth of the ego and identity, Kristeva

reshapes his theory to advocate a return to the pre-oedipal wilderness of the maternal body as a

revolutionary force that resists the inherent laws of the Father to liberate the speaking subject from

paternal repression.

Kristeva’s resurgence of the pre-oedipal semiotic reopens the dialogue of the maternal body as she fosters the semiotic as a revolutionary form from within the paradigm of language. In doing

this however, Kristeva recognises a flaw in the dialectic between symbolic discourse and the sensory

cave of the semiotic. In failing to accurately depict the motions of the Mother and the sensory

thoughts and experiences that lie deep within, the speaker is forced to occupy a vacant, or silent

space of dispossession that denies any unified projection of textual meaning. Like the Mother who is

castrated in the ‘mirror stage’, the semiotic, although present in the creation of the subject is

repressed and made absent from signification and therefore erased from representation. To that effect

Kristeva discourses the inherent flaws of language as a structure that cannot effectively convey lived

experience, particularly feminine experience, not just because its very essence is of a masculine

nature, but that it is incapable of reflecting a truthful reality. One is reminded once again of the

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speaker2_{. How then, can the speaker break free from these words that bind and make mute crucial}

lived experience? Is the speaker fated only to feel the Mother, recognise the rupture, but remain

silent in the shadows of a language that has let them down? To the unfulfilled voice that laments its

fate to reside forever in the depths of the semiotic cave, Kristeva answers: poetry.

Privileged by Kristeva for its capacity to subvert grammar and syntax and its willingness to

play with rhythm, metaphor and meaning, the subjugated, Wittgenstenian silence of the semiotic is

given a voice in poetic language. To transpose the Heideggerian statement of language as “the house

of Being”, poetry is the house of the unspeakable, the marginalised and the silenced in its

unremitting subversion of language discourse (Heidegger 217). In Revolution in Poetic Language,

Kristeva demonstrates how the rebellious approach to language by the avant-garde poets is displayed

in their ebullition of rhyme and rhythm of words as bodily drives from the semiotic (122). According

to Kelly Oliver’s expositions of her writings, poetry for Kristeva is “one of the most spectacular

shatterings of discourse” in its explosion of “the subject and its ideological limits” that pushes

beyond the rigid structure of symbolic language (29). Borrowing Lacan’s famous term of the elusive,

unattainable internal drives of the unconscious that eludes the rigidity of the symbolic, Kristeva’s

reference to poetry as an expression of “jouissance” that rises up from the “semiotic chora” to speak

the unspeakable is the springboard into the depths of meaningful expression for the poets

("Revolution" 101, 103). In other words, the rhythmic, pre-verbal pulsions of what cannot be spoken

in discourse pushes back against the symbolic and reveals itself through the refracted, personalised

projections of poetry.

Kristeva analyses this jouissance as it simmers underneath the surface of language in its

release of instinctive, unconscious energies that resist the constraints of the symbolic. Kristeva calls

these traces of the semiotic jouissance in poetic language “a heterogenous energy discharge” that

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produces “ruptures and sudden displacement” in signification, a presence that houses the interplay of a split subject within the “signifying process” ("Revolution" 145, 96). According to A. R Jones, by revealing in poetry this “eruption of instinct” as remedial to the restrictive nature of the symbolic, the

totality of the latter is “broken up, so that a new potential for signifying a return to fusion with the Mother can arise” (Jones, A. R. 60). In poetry, the power of the semiotic holds equal power to that of

the symbolic, its presence is not lost in the transition to language rather it is utilised in the opening up

of the signifying process to forge a new pathway of expression. This energy of Kristeva’s chora

(borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus, meaning ‘womb’ in Greek), lends its energy to the rhetorical

devices in poetry that ruminate the unsaid ("Revolution" 93). Stirring memories of Irigaray’s

interpretation of Plato’s cave as a female womb, Kristeva advocates the presence of the chora as the unspoken presence of the semiotic motions that “ruptures” the symbolic to become the manifestation

of alterity within (145). In these ruptures of jouissance that unsettle symbolic discourse, Kristeva

places a meaningful premise on that which is unspoken in the depths of being. In Chapter Three I

will argue how Plath writes silence into her poetry by engaging with the pre-oedipal rhythms of the

semiotic. Particularly with poems such as ‘Sheep in Fog’, ‘Words’ and ‘Tulips’, where the speaker is positioned at odds with her surroundings, Kristeva’s semiotic becomes present in the lines to acutely

depict the muted experiences of a repressed speaker in patriarchal language.

As Jones claims, “the symbolic is a man’s world” that “dominates the pleasures of the body

and the senses” (58). Jones’ statement is intrinsic to my study of silence as it affirms Kristeva’s gender opposition that afflicts the unspeakable depths of the feminine semiotic. In a world where

women are marginalised to silence, poets can be seen to revolt against these shackles by reworking

the chains of language and deploying the silence of the semiotic to highlight the holes in language

and reveal a nuanced and more truthful breadth of meaning. The repressed depths of these bodily

drives making their way back into language through the medium of poetry is Kristeva’s attempt to

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Mark Cauchi observes in his essay The A/porias of Skin: Secrets and Secretions of the Self and

Other, true communication only arises “when we struggle to articulate ourselves… across the

differentiating, silent chasm between our voices”, and that the limit of our tongues function as “an aporetic border between [my] silent depth and [my] expression, but also between” ourselves “and the

other” (167). Cauchi’s statement correlates to Kristeva’s “heterogeneity” in poetic language, and

how the intrinsic task of the poet is to eek up the dregs of the semiotic from the silent chasm of

ineffable experience to assert vital aspects of phenomenological truth ("Revolution" 103). Indeed it is

Kristeva’s revolutionary force of the semiotic from within the symbolic that oscillates the tension between the inside and the outside, the ego and the unconscious, or the subject and the other that

pushes the speaker from the mute void of the inexpressible to the edge of alphabet and speech. This

movement of the maternal body breaking through the barriers of the semiotic into language is what

Kristeva terms the “thetic break” into abjection (107).

Arising from the ‘mirror stage’, the thetic break concerns a subject at the threshold of the symbolic in the abject of being. “One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it, violently

and painfully” posits the movement of the subject into the abject as a liberating jouissance set apart from patriarchal language ("Powers" Kristeva 9). This seemingly paradoxical statement that

articulates the suffering of a speaker is, according to Thea Harrington, a necessary composite that

surges up in defiance against the symbolic to “hear the speaking, abject mute sister who swarms below” (Harrington 142). In poetic narrative, the “suffering as the place of the subject” that threatens dissolution, emerges as “an incandescent, unbearable limit between inside and outside, ego and other” ("Powers" Kristeva 140). In these divisive lines of communication, the subject walks the tight

rope of speech and silence, of being and non-being, and the ostensibly pervious abject becomes the

pivot of a silent subject emerging from the unspeakable depths.

Out of “the daze that has petrified” the subject from the “absent body of the Mother”, the thetic break catalyses the subject’s new identity in relation to the Father ("Powers" Kristeva 6).

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Constituting a breakdown, Kristeva correlates abjection as the moment the child enters the symbolic

through the thetic break. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva calls abjection a “disturbance of identity”

that “stems from the initial confusion between the body of the Mother and that of the child; abjection is thus bound up with the relation to the unsignifiable body of the Mother from which the subject

never quite manages to detach him/herself completely” (13). It perpetuates the notion of a body

violently separated from its maternal origins that leaves its trace on the speaking subject. Kristeva

permeates the governance of the thetic break from the Mother as an “abject” notion “radically

excluded” from the external Father that “draws [me] towards the place where meaning collapses” in

its resistance from “borders, positions or rules” ("Powers" 2, 4).

Rather than being a composite of the paternal signifier driven by Lacanian desires, the abject

is formed through the drive of fear and jouissance and testifies to the precarious balance of the

subject in relation to its identity. As Kristeva explains, “I experience abjection only if an Other has

settled in place and stead of what will be ‘me’”, shedding light on the displacement of the self that occurs upon repression by “an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession

causes me to be” (10). It is only at this crucial intersection of identification where a subject can be

perceived as heterogenous; subsumed by “discomfort, unease” and “dizziness stemming from an

ambiguity” of identity through which “the violence of a revolt against, demarcates a space out of which signs and objects arise”. In this rupture of being, Kristeva outlines the imaginary boundaries of the self as unstable, and that despite conscious attempts to exist within, and be understood by the

symbolic, we are continually and repetitively drawn towards the ontological slipperiness of the abject

and it’s twisted contusions entailing a visceral, bodily response to all that “disturbs identity, system” and “order” (4). By writing from the perspective of a subject at the threshold of the thetic break between muteness and speech, writers have made present the maternal body and repressed state of

the speaker that “gnaws… at the symbolic’s almightiness” from within ("Stabat Mater" Kristeva 185). Chapter Four will discuss how Plath engages with Kristeva’s abject to play with the boundaries

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of the inner voice and outer body, and how, by positioning the speaker’s identity at the border of

meaning, the silence of the speaker’s repression moves through abjection and emerges as a voice

from the unspeakable depths. This is certainly true in her poems ‘Three Women’, ‘Edge’ and ‘Lady

Lazarus’ wherein the speaker writes her female body into the lines to show a silent subject trapped in the abject, repressed by patriarchal signification.

The image of a corpse singularly emphasises Kristeva’s conceit of death in the abject as “the

utmost of abjection” (4). In its epitomal supposition of “death infecting life”, the abject outlines a space in which the lifeless ideal of a female body can be expressed through the literal breakdown of

barriers between the semiotic and the symbolic. As Kristeva explains, in the mark of death,

defecation and all that is unspeakable from within the symbolic, the boundaries between subject and

object disintegrates and “there I am, at the border of my condition as a living being” ("Powers"

Kristeva 3). This is certainly true for the female speaker who, expelled as ‘the other’ to the

wilderness, presides in “the silent anguish, choking on the rhythms” of the ineffable semiotic

("About Chinese Women" Kristeva 15). This horror of the bodily drives left outside of speech

signals to the incompleteness of the speaking being that, when articulated in poetry, can be a

catharsis to the repressed silence of the maternal drives. On the cusp of muteness, silence and despair

the poetic revelation of Kristeva’s abject in poetry allows the subject to find a voice in suffering,

psychosis or even death. By recognising the subject transgressing the thetic break into language, one

can recognise the undoing of a maternal identity through abjection and the need to express this

fractious experience as a means of resisting semiotic oppression.

While Michelle Boulous Walker notes that the abject “threatens the masculine writer with a suffocating return to the archaic maternal body”, for the female writer it should be perceived as a

liberating force (66). In her description of the abject in writing as unstable and volatile, “somewhere

between the structures of repression, denial and foreclosure”, Walker depicts the presence of the

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equivocation, the abject occupies a space that first and foremost addresses what the paternal

symbolic does not, suggesting that if writers mobilise these structures, a voice can formulate outside

the dominant arch of language. In this sense the abject offers an alternative way of thinking about the

silent place of a woman, or as Walker terms it, “Plato’s mute matrix”. Silence is addressed in aspects

of the abject as it bears the resounding mark of the unspeakable and untold depths of being emerging

into language. Despite being told in the masculine mould, the silence of the maternal body can be

transposed into writing through the abject, something of which is essential for female writers to

embrace the abject as the catalyst in which their voices can be heard. By refracting the violence and

suffering of the muted female body, Kristeva’s abject is presented as a way in which silence can be

spoken in literature, and that, as Minh-Ha observes, in transposing the trauma of separating from the

Mother into writing, the writer can “render noisy and audible all that had been silenced in

phallocentric discourse” (qtd. in Boyer 207). In sum, the female writer must break through the bell

jar, so to speak, of patriarchal oppression to find the voice hidden deep within the matrix of a

repressed unconscious. Nowhere is this abject ideal so intensely absorbed than in ‘Lady Lazarus’,

where Plath literally burns the speaker alive as her jouissance, to rise again from the ashes of abject

destruction and be reborn from the silence of death into liberated language. Like the abject, silence is

not easy to grasp, but by taking Kristeva’s theory and interpreting the silence in Plath as a particular

phenomenon of the abject, Plath’s poetry will offer a whole new perspective of giving a voice to the

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Chapter 2 The ghostly silence of Plath’s Holocaust Poems

The following chapter will outline the voicelessness of the Holocaust victims that are made

present in Plath’s Holocaust poems ‘The Thin People’ and ‘Berck-Plage’. I will use Derrida’s theory of Deconstruction and différance to draw focus on the blank spaces between the lines of these poems

in order to illustrate how Plath’s poetic structure and deployment of silence has pushed the

boundaries of depicting trauma beyond language. It is important in this chapter to draw focus on

what is notably absent from the text, and how, when this silence is observed, the lived experience of

the Holocaust victims is felt more viscerally in the lines than the words that are found wanting.

Following the Second World War, the haunting aftermath of Auschwitz left its stain on

society and coagulated any word used to describe its vulgarity. Writers certainly felt that “language

itself had been damaged, possibly beyond repair” in the wake of such horrors and that speaking the unspeakable often promulgated an inevitable tailing-off into silence ("In Extremis" Steiner 304).

Long disputed by theorists and literary critics as a highly problematic area for writing, with attempts

to do so labelled as “barbaric” by Theodor Adorno; any words used to relay the heinous events of the

Holocaust inevitably fell short of their intentions (qtd. in Murdoch 124). Adorno’s statement

indicates the inappropriate discourse of language to capture the atrocities of the Nazi concentration

camps as an attempt that makes redundant the canonical exports of poetry as the cathartic form of

human expression. Critics such as Leslie Kane denotes “this unspeakable silence” of inhumanity as

“that which cannot be verbalised because the experience it would illuminate exceeds the defining act of human consciousness which is speech” (23). How can language as we know and use it be

deployed as a voice for the ruthless extermination of millions of people? In Language and Silence,

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describing the abject inhumanity of its recent history, the events of the Holocaust rested “outside

speech” beyond “all forms of human reason” that had given rise to the “breaking point of language” ("Language and Silence" 123). In short, the logos of rational, light-bringing language had become

mired in death and human evil. The dilemma here is rendering the Holocaust meaningless in any

failed attempt to aptly record it in language. Plath confronts this ineptitude of language in ‘The Thin

People’ by placing the victims in the backdrop of the blank spaces interceding the lines, present yet

absent like Derrida’s silent tomb. Moreover, by deconstructing language through surreal imagery and deliberate avoidance of explicating the horror in ‘Berck-Plage’, Plath shows the silence of the

Holocaust victims to haunt her poetic language just as their memory haunts the conscience of human

history.

2.1 ‘The Thin People’

As evidenced in her 1957 poem ‘The Thin People’, Plath’s invocation of Derrida’s blank, muted space to permutate the presence of the Holocaust victims haunts the two-lined stanzas in a

reverberating silence. The poem depicts the speaker watching a film reel of a liberated concentration

camp. In her description of the emaciated, death-like prisoners with “stalky limbs”, the speaker

struggles to locate the words to convey the truth of what she is seeing, resorting to the enjambed

declaration of “They / are unreal”, with the third pronoun forming the singular ensuing word that

follows a caesura in the first line of the stanza (Plath 64). This word placing technique is poignant in

that it situates the thin people in opposition to the rest of humanity, just as the first line of the poem

“They are always with us” immediately demarcates the existence of ‘us’ (the rest of humanity) and ‘they’ (the thin people). It is this oppositional discourse that reminds us of the binary opposites that differentiates what is absent from what is present (speech/silence or being/non-being). Plath’s

emphasis of these opposites (with the former perceived as ‘us’ and the latter ‘them’) is made strikingly more apparent in the aesthetic structure of the poem.

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The arrangement of the two-lined stanzas with repeated one-lined breaks of empty space

juxtapose the words on the page with silence. This spatial organisation works to affirm Plath’s assertion that the victims exist within the ‘thin silence’ and not in the incongruous, and by extension

de-stabled presence of the words that surround them. The silent stanza breaks retain a poignant and

eerie sense of foreboding that hold just as much, if not more presence than the words that intercede

them. In allowing the presence of the stanza breaks to effuse meaning from its absence of words, the

poem establishes a balance between speech and silence that gives equal traction to both speech and

silence therein allowing the silence to speak what the words cannot. In doing this Plath has avoided

Adorno’s barbarism of churlishly depicting the horrors of the concentration camps by acknowledging

the unspeakable in the unspoken. She has entered the “unreal” of Derrida’s différance that subverts

the confines of language by speaking beyond its limitations ("Différance" 13). Further, Ernestine

Schlant’s description of absence birthing presence in The Language of Silence as “cut into the wall” with the “outline of human figures” that are themselves “non-existent” against “the surrounding

cement that makes their absence visible” (1). Schlant’s description helps to visualise Plath’s silent

victims of the Holocaust more vividly on the page in their existence against the cemented backdrop

of the words that surround them. Paul Mitchell affirms this view in his comment on the space

between words that engulfs the subjects of the poem into “a heterogenous non-site”, subsumed with

so much unspeakable trauma that it “goes beyond the realm of the signifier and thus into silence”

("Late Poems" 49). To that effect it is these blank spaces in between the lines that outline the

voicelessness of the holocaust victims that “cannot be brought into language (and thus eludes

signification)”.

Like Adorno, critic Anne Marie-Smith recognises the “delicate activity” of bringing “the

silence of the past or the unconscious into language”, retaining the view that humans cannot

holistically exist without bringing every gradient of phenomenological experience to the forefront of

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Wittgenstenian silence that mutes the speaker whereof one cannot articulate. By choosing the word

‘thin’ in attempting to depict these people, Plath further derides the inefficiency of language in relation to this travesty, the words are quite literally thin on the ground. Interestingly, the digraph of

‘th’, a voiceless sound that forms only at the very tip of your tongue, occurs twice in the title and a further forty times throughout the entire poem; as if to iterate the silence of the victims by repeating

the phoneme that does not require a voiced utterance. Smith’s statement is fitting in this instance as it

supports Plath’s repeated use of phonemes, that we use unconsciously, to express the oppressed presence of the Holocaust victims. Furthermore, by nothing the absent voices of the victims in the

breakdown of the ‘th’ digraph, Derrida’s deconstruction comes to light by making present the

“inaudible” trace of the voiceless in the written word ("Différance" 4). In doing this, Plath brings the silence of the past into the utterances of the poem, with every repetition of the digraph ‘th’ reminding

us of the voiceless ‘Thin People’.

2.2 ‘Berck-Plage’

Much like ‘The Thin People’, Plath’s 1962 poem ‘Berck-Plage’ attempts to rewrite the horrors of the Second World War in an elegiac poem of 126 fragmented lines that directs itself

towards the ineffable traumas that unravelled on the beaches in Northern France. In support of

deploying absence as presence in poetry, Jay Winters’ comment on silence as a “space either beyond

words or conventionally delimited as left out of what we talk about” aligns itself to the central theme

of ‘Berck-Plage’ ("About Silence" 4). By this Winter refers to the silence that speaks more volumes than what can be articulated. Drawing aesthetic parallels with ‘The Thin-People’, the two-lined

stanzas saturate the balance of speech with silence that demands equal consideration of the two

entities from the reader. The effect of this, as Maeve O’Brien observes, pulses “the unspeakable

horrors of war through the poem”, wherein the blank spaces between the words “create gaps where

meaning makes leaps through a vacuum” (99). In the first three stanzas, the speaker makes apparent

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This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.

How the sun’s poultice draws on my inflammation.

Electrifying-coloured sherbets, scooped from the freeze By pale girls, travel in the air in scorched hands.

Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding? I have two legs, and I move smilingly (196).

This introductory image projects something surreal, with the blank spaces forming a chasm of the

unsaid. What would have been an archetypal relaying of a summer beach scene (with sunshine

soaked views of people buying ice-cream) becomes an introductory scene to a horror film of

something insidious. The speaker’s question of “what are they hiding?” as she moves automatically

with “two legs… smilingly”, pre-empts the ensuing stanzas detailing “the shrunk voices” of the maimed, “waving and crutchless”. At this point we realise the split narrative of the past and the

present that is woven through the sinister imagery of the stanzas. Here Plath is demonstrating the

distorted nature of memory and the inefficiency of language through the surreal juxtaposition of

images that fluctuate between the past and the present.

The second line of the first stanza stirs memories of Plato’s rational sun, yet the “poultice” of its presence subverts the remedial nature of cure and the clarity of rational language to cause further

“inflammation” for the speaker. Plath’s oxymoron of an irremedial poultice serves to place the speaker outside the realms of language. Poisoned by the unspeakable horrors, the rational light of

language awkwardly imposes the beach scene. What is interesting here is the difference between the

first stanza above and Plath’s “fragmentary rough draft” of ‘Berck-Plage’:

Silent and violent, the sun

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Although the final version of the poem omisses the first line and reshapes the second, it is clear the

message that Plath is attempting to convey; that the unprecedented violence of the war has pushed

language beyond its frontier into the depths of unspeakable trauma. Further, the “great abeyance” of

the sea in the final version of the first stanza invokes a disruption of natural imagery, with the

personification of the sea rippling its presence through the poem as if the sea itself was complicit in

the past horrors whereof it bore witness. The sibilance of the ninth stanza, as the sea crystallises and

wordlessly envelopes the events of the war “with a long hiss of distress” plays to remind the reader

of the innumerable deaths that occurred on French beaches during the Normandy landings (Plath

196). Much like Plath’s depiction of the “Limbs, images, shrieks” swallowed by the “green pool” of

the “sick” sea, the communicative word choice of Plath’s hisses and shrieks are absolved to be less than words, rather animalistic extortions of lost lives and stolen voices (197). Plath’s speechless

signifiers move away from the seemingly rational clarity of Plato’s Sun as the wordless laments of these lines moves towards what Leslie Kane would advocate as the “inexpressible… unintelligible”

acts of inhumanity (23).

The third section of ‘Berck-Plage’ witnesses the speaker become distant as she grapples with the incomprehensibility and inexpressibility of the horrors that took place on the landscape.

Interceding the blank spaces with superficiality the reader is shown a reel of matter:

On balconies of the hotel, things are glittering. Things, things –

Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminium crutches. Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk (197)

Here it becomes apparent that the speaker cannot directly address the repugnant truth of events,

therefore by making explicit the “things”, the speaker makes implicit the unspoken horror, therein

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“silence shapes all speech”, and that by noting what Plath does not say in the written words, the reader can ascertain a sense of what is made implicit in the silence (85-86). In the surface level detail

of Plath’s poetic landscape, the unsaid reveals the Derridean silent trace of what cannot be sufficiently relayed in language. In these stanzas we see how Plath is deconstructing language to

make present the absent voices of the Holocaust by “diverting the attention from the very thing

which is shown” (86). In other words, the “things” which Plath does not speak about becomes more

caustically illuminated on the page. In ‘Berck-Plage’, Plath alludes to the mass suffering and deaths

of the Second World War in her creative act of avoidance, infused within metaphoric copulations of

the sea and the sun and the spaces in between. In The World of Silence, Max Picard dictates that “it is

language and not silence that makes man truly human”, in this respect we can interpret Plath’s

decision to avoid directly making explicit the horrors as reference to the inhumanity of the war (15) .

If the truth is so barbaric that it cannot be spoken, then the truth must be told in the silent, subtle

différance that permeates the written word. Derrida’s deconstructed interpretation of language that

unveils traces of meaning is evident in Plath’s shadowy play of making present what is absent in the spaces between words. Combined with her elusive style of writing as an act of avoidance, Plath

probes the unspeakable depths of the Holocaust horrors and filters them into her poetry through the

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Chapter Three

Falling silent from the struggle, the repressed speaker in symbolic language

This chapter will analyse Kristeva’s semiotic that pushes up and disrupts the signifying practice in Plath’s poems through a cohort of rhythm, repetition, and otherness. In the following pages I hope to discern a more concrete sense that Plath’s liberating jouissance was to subvert the discourse of language with the rhythmic pulsions of the silent semiotic; detailing how Kristeva’s

subterranean, extralinguistic meaning rises up through the lines to paint a lucid picture of a repressed

speaker in the mid twentieth century. The repressed semiotic of the speaking subject in Kristeva’s

theory filters through many of Plath’s poems as a struggle to articulate individual experience from within the symbolic. Ultimately the semiotic drive that is liberated in language culminates in a

lugubrious silence that overshadows the speaker’s attempt to be unencumbered by words. Described by Kristeva as a poet “disillusioned with meanings and words”, Plath’s message of ‘Sheep in Fog’ and ‘Words’ can be read as symptoms of a “language that gives up” ("About Chinese Women" 157; "Horror" 11). Indeed, the tonal resignation of these poems illustrate a repressed subject who has

ceased with the struggle to gain full access to a language that oppresses her. These poems cast a

fervent light on a woman who has “fled to the refuge of lights, rhythms and sounds” to escape the

suffocating confines of the symbolic that pushes her back into silence ("About Chinese Women"

Kristeva 157).

3.1 ‘Sheep in Fog’

The struggle to articulate the repressed semiotic depths holds no better example than in her

1962 poem, ‘Sheep in Fog’, wherein Plath strikingly immerses the reader with a poetic voice that

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Poems of Sylvia Plath, he accounts for Plath’s “movement beyond the symbolic” in the poem’s

“intensified erasure of subjectivity” that exposes the failures of language for being “unable to constrain” the lived experience of the speaker (39). In ‘Sheep in Fog’, the destabilised image of the subject is displayed through the overbearing presence of the personified objects around her. With the

first four stanzas ruminating on objects that serve to repress the presence of the speaker, Plath

positions the speaker’s voice as inferior to the external in her contrastive use of active verbs. The

first line of the first two stanzas “the hills step off into whiteness” and “the train leaves a line of

breath”, demonstrate how Plath is using language to paradoxically show what is unnatural in the external and yet at liberty to move around by “stepping off” or “leaving” (262). In contrast to this,

the projected inertia of the speaker, who is portrayed to “disappoint” the “people or stars” around,

succumbs to the “stillness” of her body as she is overlooked by the active landscape around her. In

this subject/object contrast, Plath draws focus on the imbalance between subject and object and by

extension the disservice of language in its role to effectively give an active voice to the speaker.

The three lined stanzas, each with varying chaotic rhythms and meter serves to further the

speakers discord in the poem, with the only three personal pronouns in the poem being positioned on

an unstressed syllable to further clarify that Plath is deliberately placing the subject as inferior to

everything else. In a landscape poem that submerses the speaker amidst the dissolution of the world

around her, a sense of calm and stasis is deployed through the blank spaces between the stanzas to

create a slow-paced, sparse-ness to the tone of the poem. With recommendations by Mitchell to “be

appreciated as an aural experience”, this heightened awareness of space with the aided repetition of the ‘o’ sounds that preside in the second and third stanzas reasserts the feeling of dissolution within

the poem ("Late Poems" 42). In reference to Mallarmé’s poems, Robert Greer Cohen associates the

/o/ phoneme with “stasis and circularity” that is evidently “of the feminine principle” and is argued

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primordial Mother” (qtd. in "Late Poems" Mitchell 44). This is certainly true in the following lines

of Plath’s ‘Sheep in Fog’:

Hooves, dolorous bells – All morning the

Morning has been blackening (262).

The final ‘ack’ sound of the last line in this stanza disrupts the calm flow of the ‘o’ and the melodic lull of “morning” that reasserts the oppressiveness of the landscape over the speaker. In parallel with

Cohen, Mitchell states that it is these “circular, non-developmental sounds” absorbed within the

poem that “create the effect of stasis within them”, emerging as a necessary composite of Plath’s resistance against Kristeva’s symbolic (42). As such Plath’s jouissance in her textual gaps and slow-moving sounds shows the subject at the borderline of language, beyond the capabilities of the

signifier “where meaning collapses” ("Power" Kristeva 2). The landscape dominates the poem,

leaving the speaker as a secondary presence outside the signifying practice of the symbolic gesturing

towards a melancholic experience of the silence.

The final stanza (added five weeks after the composition of ‘Ariel’ on January 28th 1963), is the poem’s most frictious comment on the subject’s position outside of the symbolic and an ominous foreboding of the lasting silence of death:

They threaten

To let me through to a heaven

Starless and Fatherless, a dark water (262).

The tight knit of vowel sounds and repeated ‘th’ phoneme in the first line act as a barrier to the

speaker trying to ascend the threshold of her language. Further, the near rhyme of “threaten” and

“heaven” intensifies the rhythmic crescendo to the internal rhyme of the last line. “Starless” and “Fatherless” stand as a final conclusive statement of the speaker, situated in a ‘no man’s land’ of language, with no fixed position in the landscape and no fixed hold on the ‘father’ language. The

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sombre tone of “Fatherless” can be interpreted as a failure of the Lacanian signifier to move the

poem towards a feminine jouissance beyond the phallus, within which the speaker has returned to a

repressed silence. This loss is explicated further by Steven Gould Axelrod, who outlined this tight

repetition of phonemes and rhymes to accost “the sound of silence” that registers “not as language at

all, but as a noise” like “radio static” (21). By this Axelrod means the repetition of the sounds in the poem become less about the word signifiers and more about a unified text that unravels to reveal an

inevitable silence that accompanies the failure of the paternal signifier. Furthermore, the iamb and

dactyl of these words form a blundering pace towards the speaker’s inexorable fate with the repeated

suffix of ‘less’ intensifying the movement of the speaker into silence. More poignantly, as if in a final surge of despair, the caesura preceding the final utterance of “a dark water” adds emphasis to

the last lament of the speaker unable to transcend the pre-oedipal cave of the semiotic. The final

stanza bears witness only to the yielded silence of the speaker confined to dwell in the unspeakable

caverns of the maternal cave that prevents her from transitioning freely into the paternal light of

language.

This profound ambivalence towards death and defeatism feats in revealing Lacanian fractures

of the subject’s identity within language; in the sense of the subject surging up from the pre-oedipal

depths to emerge, yet succumbs, inevitably, to its repression in a swathe of darkness and silence.

Plath illustrates this with the slow rhythmic tensions of the ‘o’ sounds, ambiguous gaps and ebullitions of the ‘dark’ depths of the unconscious. As Nye observes, “the onorous distinctiveness

that does not signify” is left floundering when it is “repressed and brought to light by articulated

language” (673). This is certainly true in the speaker’s conjecture of ‘Sheep in Fog’, whose loneliness is further ostracised by her inability to emerge within the symbolic and exist in

equilibrium with the objects around her. She is, so to speak, nothing more than a visage of a sheep in

a fog. As a result, the speaker returns to the repressed chora of Kristeva’s semiotic, to the internal

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theory attempts to view the semiotic as an essential play of opposites in which life consists, this is

evident in the stanzas of Plath’s poem but ultimately it presides as a Lacanian play of negativity and

not, in fact, a positive oscillation of the Kristevean subject in process. ‘Sheep in Fog’ testifies to this

dilemma in language by presenting itself as a poem of defeat and lethargy, as the speaker eventually

submits to being trapped in an unconquerable, patriarchal language.

3.2 ‘Words’

The unerring sensation of being trapped in language is also refracted in her slightly later

poem ‘Words’. Written in the final month before her suicide in February 1963, ‘Words’ ruminates Plath’s conflicting relationship with patriarchal language that, like ‘Sheep in Fog’, culminates in a speaker unable to liberate herself from within the symbolic. In this intricate web of rich metaphors

and surrealist imagery, Plath mediates on the effect of words and the “echoes” that reverberate

around them, as the speaker in the poem reveals how the “fixed stars” of the symbolic order surpress

the unspeakable depths of the semiotic (270). The prominent spondee of the first line “Axes” strikes

an invasive tone to the poem, the imagery of which pictures the powerful impact of words that cut

through the identity of the speaker in a merciless fashion:

Axes,

After whose stroke the wood rings, And the echoes!

Echoes travelling

Off from the centre like horses.

Like axes, words are cutting, effective and particularly deadly. Just as the rings of a tree show their

resilience and age, Plath’s nod to the lineage of language in seeing “the wood rings” after the cutting

of the axe draws attention to the entrenched history of patriarchal discourse that have developed over