“If the leader’s lost they break faith, and tear down the honey
they’ve made, themselves, and dissolve the latticed combs.”
(Virgil, Georgics. IV. ll.214-215)
“Here are my bees,
Brazen, blurs on paper.”
(Carol Ann Duffy, The Bees. ll.1-2)
Plath claimed that she knew “nothing of bees. My father knew it all” (Axelrod, 25)[1]. Jessica Luck challenges this self-criticism in arguing that “Plath is revising the highly organized “theoretical world” of her father’s bumblebees in her more “real world” experience with honeybees” (Luck, 296). The ‘real’ world that Plath therefore illustrates is not exclusively her world, but of the moment in which she is writing, revealing perhaps it is not her father who ‘knew it all’, but that Plath merely occupies a different concern. This is evident in three of the poems in Plath’s five-poem ‘bee’ sequence; The Bee Meeting, The Arrival of the Bee Box and The Swarm[2]. The sequence in its entirety was written within five days from 4th – 9th October 1962, approximately four months before her suicide, all occurring at the end of her posthumous collection Ariel, and thus, within the final, most celebrated, and arguably most brutal poems of her life. The sequence was created at indeed a brutal time, during the aftermath of the demise of Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes, (the ‘hawk’ to Plath’s ‘bee’), a “bereavement [that] hurled her first into a creative frenzy and then, when that mania faded, into extinction” (Axelrod, 26). In considering the bee as informing our enquiry of Plath from their significance in both her beginning through her father, and as a product of the ‘mania’ of her end, they qualify as a dominant motif in discussing Plath’s oeuvre. Whilst Plath scholarship conventionally revolves around “those who pathologise [and] diagnose” Plath, or deem her as exclusively feminist (Rose, 3)[3], she remains to be far more political than this; in her micro metaphor of the bee, she confronts the macro language of violence, that not only reveals domestic inequality, but also exposes an invaded post-war Britain. Being a “brutal poet” (McClanhan, 163) herself, Plath participates in this violence literarily, to brazenly attack national domesticity of post-war Britain. Plath is more familiar with the plight of the bee than her father; she defends them and identifies with them through the language of violence and invasion, across the state, to the home.
Sinfield explains how “the institutions of literary culture want Sylvia Plath to be mad to protect themselves and readers from the implications of her life and work. For ‘madness’ seems to be individual” (209). To identify an individual madness rather than a ‘national’ madness confines Plath, and dismisses her from her contextual moment. Rose argues that to read Plath in a purely biographical context is to limit her, and instead positions her as much more political than that; “for the writer, the lived life was the point of departure rather than, as it is for the biographer, the place at which there is a desperate need to arrive” (Rose, 13)[4]. This challenges Plath’s reception as merely ‘mad’ and exposes the perhaps uncomfortable reality that her micro subjects transcend macro issues. In The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath, Gill asserts how “the relics in ‘Lady Lazarus’ (the ‘cake of soap’, the ‘wedding ring’ and ‘gold filling’) are more than the residue of one failed marriage, or even of a despairing femininity, they are among the poignant traces of the massacre of millions of Jews” (Gill, 61), similar to her reference to “a man in black with a Meinkampf look” (Daddy, ll. 65). These ‘Holocaust’ poems identify Plath as a poet intimately concerned with the historical aftermath in which she abides. Boswell explained that “Daddy is not so much about personal experience as about the relationship between the personal experience of those who were not there and the historical experiences of those who were” (Boswell, 42). These overt political examples establish a groundwork of Plath’s poetry as concerned with her historical moment via a personal lens. Her bee sequence however demonstrates a more covert critique on post-war British domesticity, through the metaphor of the bee.
Considering that the climate in which Plath wrote her bee sequence was one in which “a women’s duty [was] to devote herself to the home and a man’s duty to ‘keep’ her” (McCarthy, 55), there is an explicit parallel to the act of ‘keeping’ both a bee and woman. This parallel therefore functions in Plath’s critique as the bee serves as a generally “well-managed and rationally reproducing society” (Rogers, 299), but also as a sort of revolutionary symbol due to how “in a play on the initial of his surname, Napoleon Bonaparte adopted the bee as his personal insignia” (Gordon, 49). Napoleons flag of “Elba”, as mentioned in Plath, (TS, ll. 8), depicted the Golden Bee of Napoleon’s emblem. He intentionally coined the bee as his iconography of choice, thus solidifying the bee as an appropriate symbol for violence, and simultaneously for domesticity and reproduction (Rogers, 299), suitable for the ground Plath is covering. Plath questions the societal expectation of the ‘rationally reproducing’ female in identifying the capabilities and potentials of both the woman and the bee, but how their respective communities attempt to limit them. This oppression demonstrates a certain violence, an inequality, that Plath acknowledges in likening this situation to that of the hive to craft her confrontation on established domesticity. On conceiving the bee sequence, Plath claimed she was “writing like mad … terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me” (Axelrod, 52). These poems were thus a direct outcome of her own turbulent, ‘violent’ life, in which she compares domesticity to choking; the home, the epitome of safety, and an institution that is ultimately stifling. This introduces Plath’s aligning of the home and the state, as she promotes the private to be very much a public issue. Sinfield furthers this angst in describing how “Plath violated the story of adjustment by going on to write violent vengeful poetry and killing herself” (Sinfield, 209). Here, Plath is perceived to be rejecting a progressive betterment, resisting ‘adjustment’ in her restless language. Sinfield therefore announces Plath to be vengeful on the conventions that have choked her, and as administering her vengeance on a ‘violent’ institution with subsequent violent language.
We have established how Plath’s “writing was implicated as the attack on non-domesticity” (Sinfield, 210), a notion confirmed in TBM. The ‘attack’ that Sinfield describes would require a certain force, aligning Plath with active attacker as opposed to passive object, and in that, masculine penetrator. She is penetrating conventional domesticity in the poem, via her critique of a ‘hive’-culture. Whilst Perloff argues that “the virgin white hive […] becomes the source of new life for the poet” (Perloff, 194), it seems Plath views it as destructive, her sequence being a manifesto to do away with hive culture. Here, the bee metaphor functions in exploring how a “virgin” (ll. 34) bee resides and remains in the “hive” (ll. 34), awaiting insemination, facilitated by “the rector, the midwife, the sexton” (ll. 2), exposing post-war Britain as very much a ‘hive’ nation. In Plath’s Three Women, she furthers this critique in stating “I shall be a wall and roof” (ll. 140) in which case the bee or woman not only occupies the hive, but she is conditioned to be the hive. In this way, the hive is a model of ultimate heterosexual domesticity, a model she critiques as “barren (…) etherizing its children” (TBM, ll. 25), and satirically states “how instructive this is!” (TS, ll. 46). She deems this model sterile and therefore redundant, in need of transition, and thus, her exposé being radically penetrative and somewhat violent in its nerve. Sinfield quotes Holbrook; “we use a knowledge of ‘psychology’ (by which Holbrook means normative gender roles) to ‘defend ourselves against her falsifications’ … so the problem appears to be Plath herself and, by so much, it is not political” (209). This shows how the nation defends and protects itself from Plath by its denial of her accusation, but she continues to penetrate this ‘hive’ mentality.
Describing “the rector, the midwife, the sexton” (TBM, ll.2), Plath confronts institutions of birth, marriage and death respectively, and identifies these institutions of British life with the bee-keepers, the invaders. They foreshadow the later “butcher”, “grocer” and “postman” (ll. 30), mundane figures of daily life, figures so commonplace, the speakers subsequent need for “protection” (ll. 3) seems irregular. The ‘meeting’ of the poem acts as ‘wedding’; “the initiation the frightened woman undergoes is tacitly likened to a wedding scene; she wears a veil and is attended by a vicar and a midwife who are witnesses to her defloration” (Gill, 58). Plath uses marital language as she talks of ‘the rector’, describing a domestic act for what is essentially an invasion (by the bee-keepers), and in that, using language of the domestic to describe behaviour of the nation. This marital language maintained throughout the course of the poem is simultaneously accompanied by a preoccupation with the language of violence and death; “blood clots” (ll. 19), a “murderess” (ll. 48) and “killing” (ll. 49). Such vast description alongside the “bride flight” (ll. 46) suggests an inevitable murmur of danger that parallels regular life; indeed, Plath choses a “black veil” (ll. 22) and a “white box” (ll. 54), (or coffin), suggesting a confusion between wedding and funeral – of the domestic and danger.
Plath’s coinciding of marriage as one domestic institution along with the language of violence is overt, but the way she unites these two concepts in the sequence is through the metaphor of domestic materials; objects that she reimagines as metaphors in terms of military and brutality. She equips “The head ‘surgeon’ of the ritual [as] even more impenetrable, for he is dressed like an astronaut in ‘a green helmet’” (Luck, 293), establishing the male characters as active, armoured attackers, leaving the female as passive and vulnerable to penetration. However, Plath is subtle in that she aligns this militant language with commonplace household objects; in Wintering, she refers to the British sugar brand “Tate and Lyle” (ll. 27), and in TS describes “marshalling its brilliant cutlery” (ll. 9), particularly “knives” (ll. 6), likening the English tea-time to an arsenal of weaponry. Much like “throats [are] stepping stones for French boot-soles” (ll. 14) and “hands [are] asbestos receptacles” (ll. 54) throats and hands, man, is reduced to tool. Plath furthers this comparison throughout the poem by reinforcing a preoccupation with ivory; “ivory palace” (ll. 50), “figures of ivory” (ll. 16) and “bone of ivory” (ll. 24), all matter of the same material, both a commodity and a bodily material, indicating that the state or ‘palace’ is founded on violated humans, bones.
Gill acknowledges this consistent juxtaposition of the domestic and the violent in TBM; “the arcane rituals of the bee meeting are all the more alarming for being surreally juxtaposed with the everyday and domestic” (Gill, 58). The importance of clothing and household objects in the poem maintain the image of the conventional home. Particularly, the various headwear described instigates further speculation; the “visors” (ll. 13), “ancient hats” (ll. 5) and “helmet” (ll. 28) each represent different possibilities, symbols of authority, military uniform / armour, or even targets, authorities now outdated or ‘ancient’ according to Plath. This essentially innocent, harmless, indeed household imagery is laden with violent connotations of war. Indeed, it is “knights in visors” (ll. 13) with their “breastplates of cheesecloth” (ll. 14) and “spiky armoury” (ll. 32), armour fabricated out of the home. Similarly, the speaker, who claims, “in my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection” (ll. 3) and is “nude” (ll. 6) uses descriptions of femininity and sexuality to describe the vulnerability, and lack of armour of that of the female. There is an inevitable stress on dress in the poem, and in that, uniform. This idea of the unarmoured female is apparent in the language of the “virgin” (ll. 34) throughout the poem. This does not only parallel marital ideas in the poem but insinuates an anticipated penetration; the “white” “hive [as] snug as a virgin” (ll. 34) awaits insemination and penetration, just as the British home awaited invasion. The bee-keepers are interrupting and penetrating an existing domestic pattern. Plath is also penetrating this pattern, perhaps arguing this archaic pattern is in need of an invasion. She “dreams of a duel” (ll. 46) that is currently a mere dream, an ongoing plight, that Plath’s premature death inhibited her continuation of such a duel.
This established female vulnerability is further evidenced by the first-person speaker that states “I am nude” (ll. 6). Boswell identifies the macro implications of the position of this speaker in explaining that “the “newly conceived poetic ‘I’ was also a cultural seismograph that could register the aftershocks of the destructive events of the modern era” (36); with this particular female “I”, the “the micro ‘I’ examines that isolation, and that the ‘confessional’ poet […] in such a way as to make his psychological vulnerability and shame an embodiment of his civilisation” (Boswell, 36). This suggests that the personal vulnerability expressed by the speaker in the poem embodies the national vulnerability of the female, awaiting either instruction or attack. Whilst the speaker signifies the individual, the ‘bees’ being hunted by the keepers depict that same helplessness in the masses. However, this suspected paranoia questions the speaker’s perspective; are the fellow bee-keepers intimidating invaders, or innocent, as there is evidence in the poem of them “smiling” (ll. 5), “buttoning the cuffs” (ll. 8) of the speaker and giving her a “fashionable white straw hat” (ll. 21), helping her, yet the speaker negatively exclaims “they are making me one of them” (ll. 22), much like in ABB her fear manifests in “small, taken one by one, but my God, together!” (ll. 20) destroying the individual in its entrance into the collective. This perhaps unnecessary threat and fear of violence in potentially innocent situations portrays a post-war distrust. Plath’s technical and formal devices such as the restless questioning include abundant alliteration and personification, where the household “tinfoil [is] winking” (ll. 16) and “dusters fanning” (ll. 17). Here, Plath’s technique makes these inanimate objects threateningly animate. This plays with how the poem functions as deceptive; the reader naturally identifies with the speaker, but in the case of a paranoid speaker the poem requires more work as perspective is questioned. In this instance, the speaker is the distrusting soldier, and the reader is the post-war generation, relying on an essentially distrusting and wounded ancestry. The poem seems to appropriately end, the last line is yet another question, “why I am cold” (ll. 51), different for its absence this time of a question mark, and for its breaking of the otherwise five-line stanza that occupies the sequence in its entirety. Connoting to a certain death, this not only contributes to Plath’s arguments of the ultimate inadequacy of a ‘hive’ system, but as if the landscape of frantic uncertainty on which the poem exists is now naturalised, so much so that it does no longer require technical aids or formal punctuation to confirm its existence.
When Plath asks “Is it some operation that is taking place? / It is the surgeon my neighbours are waiting for” (TBM, ll. 30), Plath complicates her language of violence with the language of medicine. Written against the backdrop of a nation of a wounded generation and a generating National Health Service, the medical domain was both desired and speculated against. Plath acknowledges this angst in introducing surgery as a form of violence, likening the bee search to an operation. This announces the problematic notion of to what extent an operation or surgical procedure is merely a permissible or somewhat acceptable form of violence; a mundane, approved and normalised form of violence that we thus do not question due to its position as a household concept. In these terms, violence is both the cause (in terms of the war that wounded so many), and the solution (surgical and medical advancements) to the national climate Plath abides in, a stately, and yet personal matter. The threat of have the body operated upon serves as a more implicit form of violence, that nonetheless increases the patient’s vulnerability. Oates explains how many of the poems written “during the final, turbulent weeks of [Plath’s] life, read as if they’ve been chiselled, with a fine surgical instrument, out of arctic ice” (Oates, 23). This confirms that Plath not only acknowledges “some operation” (TBM, ll. 26) surrounding her, but as Oates explains, likens herself to surgeon, ‘chiselling’ and extracting her poetry. When she states, “it is the surgeon my neighbours are waiting for” (ll. 31), she introduces herself as a surgical poet, providing a sort of self-announcing and authorisation as she continues to both critique and participate. This language of violence as masked as a sort of procedure is apparent elsewhere in Plath’s canon; In Three Women, she talks of the baby as being “carved in wood” (ll. 211); not ‘made’ or ‘conceived’, but carved. The act of carving a conception indicates a sort of lack of consent; a passive object being brutally chipped at into a desired shape. Plath describes the concept of reproduction in these terms as to emphasise the violence of domestic passivity as subjugated on the woman, how it reduces her to reproductive object, violently carved at.
“The long white box” (ll. 55) that ends TBM is directly answered in ABB, the next poem in Plath’s sequence, with its “clean wood box” (ll. 1), demonstrating how the poems function individually in the sequence, but also engage as a collective. The bee box here is compared to a baby’s coffin, “I would say it was the coffin of a midget/ or a square baby” (ll. 3-4), inarguably a place of confinement, “locked” (ll. 6) with “no windows” (ll. 9) and “no exit” (ll. 10). Again, eliminating Perloff’s earlier claim of the hive as sort of generator of new life, the metaphor of the coffin indicates the sterility of the hive that Plath is reinforcing; that hive culture, consisting of a homebound female and the inseminating male, is essentially redundant, she is ‘dissolving’ the established “latticed combs” (Virgil, ll. 215). The baby coffin marks the demise of this convention, or indeed the ‘square’ baby representing a somewhat malfunctioning product of the established norm. This sense of breeding a certain malformation in a confined and constrained environment describes not only the failings of heteronormativity but demonstrates Plath’s literary process; she “lay ear to furious Latin” (ll. 21), Latin depicting a sort of heightened language by which poetry ultimately descends from, with the box restricting that creative language. In this way, Plath aligns her perceived literary imprisonment among societal captivity, transforming bee hive to bee trap.
From TBM to ABB, the speaker progresses from paranoid hysteric to captor. Boswells “I” transcends from victim to aggressor. The first person “I” establishes an authority that the previous speaker did not. The second speaker authorises herself, “I am the owner” (ll. 25), or perhaps more appropriately, slave trader as the “swarmy feeling of African hands” (ll. 13) would suggest. This reading of such colonial language suggests a critique on Empiric Britain, the anxiety of the dominant party furthering the oppression of whatever subjugated group remains in the box. This is furthered by empiric imagery such as “Caesar” (ll. 22) and the “Roman Mob” (ll. 19), making the poem very much an empirical commentary. The speaker feels more comfortable confining the “unintelligible syllables” (ll. 18) she hears from the box, this other, foreign tongue, than face the outcome of releasing them. The speaker seeks comfort in repressing the unknown, for fear that they might “turn on me” (ll. 34), leading her to the conclusion that she must simply postpone their freedom for a more convenient time; “Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free” (ll. 35). This undoubtedly critiques social authority, the comparison to God satirising the established hierarchy whereby the privileged, or perhaps male, is granted a false superiority. Considering that Plath attempted to master some “paternal source of godhead” (Axelrod, 32), she certainly likened God with paternal authority, an authority to which she was both subjugated, and tried to exhibit herself in her critique.
The last line of ABB, “the box is only temporary” (ll. 36) is both an echo to an earlier point in the poem, and a sort of prolepsis to the future. Initially, Plath’s speaker states that the box has “no exit” (ll. 10), the knowledge that it is temporary therefore meaning that the box is not something to be ‘exited’ or escaped from but needs to be destructed as a whole unit; it is the box that is temporary, not the confinement. Similarly, it is prophetic in that the speaker administers a certain omniscience in this final line, it is not a question but an assertion, “the box is only temporary”. This confirms that the confinement Plath refers to is not eternal. McCarthy asserts that “the debate over married women’s employment reveals important fractures in post-war assumptions about the rise of egalitarian, compassionate marriage” (48); the gradual post-war rise in women’s employment therefore destructs this ‘box’, hence its temporality. The fact that like the last line of TBM, this line breaks the otherwise five-line stanzas in the sequence makes the lines structurally symbolic of what is describes; although the stanzas are regular and structured, boxed, it only requires one additional line to break their otherwise rigid pattern and expose their temporality. The stanzas throughout the sequence portray individual ‘boxes’ or ‘hives’, self-contained homes that Plath recognises and destructs in her additional line in ABB. Plath’s argument is beginning to manifest here, as despite their mutual subjugation, the woman and the bee are separate; women can not eternally by confined to the home as a vessel of insemination as the bee remains to be- whilst this may be adequate for the bee species, it is not appropriate for British women.
The Swarm opens with the more certain invasion that has merely been alluded to in its previous poems “something is shooting at something in our town” (ll. 1), the sibilance creating a lyrical fulfilment to the prophecy of the prior poems. That ‘something’ in the sky seems to be the swarm of bees, “so the swarm balls” (ll. 17) and “the bees have got so far” (ll. 26). The speaker claims that the bees intimidating the sky are “so dumb it thinks bullets are thunder” (ll. 20), that is, natural. Here, the party of the town and the swarm of the bees participate in a sort of ‘shoot-out’ by which the town deems the bees as bullets and the bees expect their counter-bullets to be precipitation. Each party accepts that the ‘shooting’ is caused by nature, not man. This idea of violence as natural is again apparent in Three Women, having “stitched life into me” (ll. 72) implements a violent and yet intrinsically domestic image being stitched, (stitching allocated the female role), the consequent ‘life’ or conception a result and desired outcome of such domesticity. It is apparent however that the concept of ‘stitching life’ indicates a certain violence, whilst the needle remains to be a safe, ‘feminine’ object, it is sharp. Alluding to the ‘rational reproduction’ (Rogers, 299) mentioned prior, this exaggerates the actual violence of such extreme domesticity and ‘rational reproduction’.
In drawing on a historical canon, Plath uses vast and seemingly unrelated political references and introduce them to the domain of the home, qualifying Plath as very much a political poet; “Plath repudiated the idea that she should be confined to an inner circle of ‘home, other womenfolk, and community service, enclosed in the larger circle of my mate.’ She wanted ‘two overlapping circles … both with separate arcs jutting out in the world” (Sinfield, 217). She overlaps the arc of the state alongside the arc of the quintessential British home, allowing her to comment on the current climate of the nation with these tools from her personal arsenal. To intertwine these two arcs Plath uses the acute bee metaphor, which becomes her “brazen, blurs on paper” (Duffy, ll. 2) developing her domestic critique. Plath’s union of the home with state responsibility is violent, personal, and haunted by the bee. She consistently satirises the established ‘hives’ that she declares redundant, by combining the state, home, and the bee; “O Europe! O ton of honey!” (TS, ll. 60).
Bibliography
Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. U.S.A.: The John Hopkins University Press, 1990. Print.
Boswell, Matthew. Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2012. Print.
Duffy, Carol Ann. The Bees. London: Picador, 2012. Print.
Gill, Jo. “Ariel and Later Poetry”. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print. 51-72.
Gordon, John. “Sylvia Plath: Three Bee Notes”. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews. 16.3 (2003): 49-51. Print.
Luck, Jessica Lewis. “Exploring the ‘Mind of the Hive’: Embodied Cognition in Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems”. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. 26.2 (2007): 287-308. Print.
McCarthy, Helen. “Women, Marriage and Paid Work in Post-War Britain”. Women’s History Review. 26.1 (2017): 46-61. Print.
McClanahan, Thomas. “Sylvia Plath”. American Poets Since World War II. Ed. Donald J. Greiner. 5.1 (1980): 163-68. Print.
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Background of the Modern Poetry. London: Oxford University Press, 1989. Print.
Perloff, Marjorie. Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Print.
Plath, Otto. Bumblebees and Their Ways. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934. Print.
Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1981. Print.
Rogers, Janine and Charlotte Sleigh. “‘Here is my Honey-Machine’: Sylvia Plath and the Mereology of the Beehive”. The Review of English Studies. 63.259 (2012): 293-310. Print.
Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London: Virago, 1991. Print.
– “This is not a biography”. London Review of Books. 24.16 (2002): 12-15. Print.
Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Print.
Virgil. The Georgics. London: Penguin Classics, 1982. Print.
[1] Otto Plath was a professor of entomology at Boston University and author of Bumblebees and Their Ways (1934).
[2] Throughout the remainder of this essay I will refer to the poems The Bee Meeting, The Arrival of the Bee Box, and The Swarm in the short form TBM, ABB, and TS respectively.
[3] From Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Full Citations in Bibliography.
[4] From Rose, This is not a Biography.
Literary Essays and Reviews 