The Feminine in On the Plethora of Dryads by Sylvia Plath and Mayday on Holderness by Ted Hughes
After committing suicide in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become an icon of the feminist movement (Hromatko). Feminists have seen in her a symbol of a woman “que luchó contra los valores patriarcales” (Pâtea, p.41) and a victim of Ted Hughes’s ‘infidelity and abandonment’ (McCue). The purpose of this paper is to determine if it is possible to know if a poem was written by a woman or a man, and to analyse how the feminine is reflected or represented in two poems: On the Plethora of Dryads (1957) and Mayday on Holderness (1960), written by Plath and Hughes, respectively.
As Jacqueline Rose explains (Rose, p. 114), On the Plethora of Dryads is about poetic inspiration. The poem starts with the speaker telling that she (supposing that the speaker is a woman) is ‘hearing a white saint’ who is able to see the ‘quintessential beauty’ of an apple tree (Broe, p. 29), and who also affirms that the tree can only be perceived by a ‘paragon heart’ (L.1-2). Then, she confesses she loves the tree because of its form (L. 5-6). So, she decides to sit under the tree without food. Doing this, she thinks she will be able to see the ‘metaphysical Tree’ (L. 9). Nevertheless, she finds it difficult: ‘No visionary lightings/ Pierced my dense lid’ (L. 23-24). Instead, she receives a ‘wanton fit’ which, as Rose argues, indulges to satiety all her senses and traps her to its ‘miraculous art’. With respect to the last stanza, Rose interprets that ‘to be inspired here is to be playful, lascivious or lewd (‘wanton’), a sexual state which takes its cue, is transferred, from what it is that provokes the inspiration itself’ (L.31-36).
After this analysis I would like to comment on what Mary Lynn Broe says in The Poetry of Sylvia Plath about Plath’s poem. Broe takes it for granted that the speaker is a woman and that the ‘white saint’ is a man. Now, I wonder: could it not be the other way round, the speaker a man and the ‘white saint’ a woman’? Rose in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath states that the poetess underlined some passages in John Langdon-Davies’s A Short History of Women, where Langdon-Davies argues that ‘men and women are purely relative terms, and long before the tendencies of our times work to their logical conclusions, men and women, as we know them, will have ceased to exists; and human nature will have forgotten the ¨he and she¨’ (qtd in Rose, p. 116). This could be the reason why we cannot infer the sex of the speaker and the ‘white saint’, as if her intention was to neutralise the genders. Also it is true that the ‘dryads’ are a stereotyped representation of femininity.
In ‘Mayday on Holderness’, Ted Hughes analyses the relation between man and nature (OCR). The speaker considers the summer as a ‘motherly’ creation or organism (L. 1), representing in this way the idea of life and birth; but, in the next line, he (if we imagine that the speaker is a man) also suggests that this season forms part of death when he sees ‘the decomposition of leaves’, symbolising the ‘cycle of life’ (OCR). In the second paragraph, the speaker compares the river to a ‘vein’ (L. 10). With this metaphor, in my opinion, the river is not only a symbol of life but also of death. We can see that he river has in its waters human remains (L. 10-14). In line 30, with an inversion, the speaker says that the wars ‘smoulder’. Next, he tells that a wounded soldier is calling desperately his mother (L. 31). This suggests that violence is a distinguishing quality of man but also of animals, as we can see, for instance, in line 25 (OCR).
From my point of view, describing the summer as a ‘motherly’ being, the poet might suggest that the feminine is a violent quality. Rose also states that ‘Hughes seems to represent this realm from a place that is located above: ‘I looked down into the decomposition of leaves’’ (Rose, p, 157). This could be seen as a kind of masculine superiority but, in my opinion, this is also neutralised by the fact that when Hughes refers to humans as violent beings, he includes both women and men. This idea is represented in men by the figure of the soldiers, and in women by the image of nature as a cycle of birth and death, and the ‘frenzy of shrews’ (L.36).
In conclusion, we have seen that in both poems the feminine is represented in different ways. In Plath’s poem, neither the speaker nor the ‘white saint’ have a specific gender but we have also seen that the nymphs are stereotyped beings of inspiration. On the other hand, I have shown that Hughes associates violence with both sexes because it is part of nature, of the cycle of life. Therefore, at least in these poems it is difficult to determine if they were written by a poetess or a poet.
Erika Giselle Wilson Cantariño
Bibliography
http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/sylviaplath.html
· Pâtea, Viorica. Entre el mito y la realidad: aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1989.
http: //www.arlindo-correia.com/sylvia_plath_reads.html
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