Aegis 2010
10
“My Body is a Pebble”: Death Drive, Repression, and Freeing the Self in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel >>> Stephanie Freas “Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen — physical or psychological — wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweettweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.” -Sylvia Plath in a Letter to Aurelia Plath, 1962 In “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” a poem in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, the speaker finds herself questioning a box of bees she receives. The box, a foreign object, is filled with bees, working, fighting, and communicating in ways she cannot understand. Her attempts to comprehend the language are fruitless. The speaker is a foreigner herself to the community of bees, although inevitably, as a human, she has control over their lives. The speaker struggles between the fact that in their busy lives within the box, the bees might forget her, and that she has unswerving control of their lives in the same manner. Such a dichotomy of powerlessness and control begs the reader to question what the speaker is truly struggling with in this moment aside from the bee box. In finality, she ends the poem, and the issue, with “the box is only temporary” (line 36). Individually, this poem invites readers to ponder if there is a sense of alienation, of powerlessness, and fear even in a community, as Plath so artfully separates the speaker from the bee box. Incorporated into Ariel as a whole, we find that the speaker in Plath’s collection of poems grapples with individuality, a desire for death, and finding her place in a world she does not identify with. As readers delve into the plethora of lyrical yet blatantly honest confessions of rage, alienation, and self-awareness, they will eventually question the speaker herself: can we even begin to separate the speaker from Plath? Plath’s life and own thoughts arise in these final poems of her life in such a way that the speaker and Plath merge as one singular voice1. Theorists like Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and Lee Edelman can address this voice, within the context of the poems, in a psychoanalytic manner. The study of psychoanalysis is generally attributed to the study of human behavior in relation to that person’s emotional or psychological issues. Throughout Ariel, specifically in poems such as “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Edge,” and “Tulips,” the speaker battles with the death drive on numerous occasions; she also brings to surface issues that seem to have been repressed during her life. Finally, we see how the signifiers given to her by a dead father and husband may have been attributed to the speaker throughout her life, and how Plath’s poetry reacts to such barriers.
