Bees and Brutality: Plath’s violent writing across the state and home.

“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).