The Divine Feminine Fractured: The Poetic Martyrdom of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's life and works have been the center of controversy and academic debate for decades. While Plath was both a lifelong feminist and a remarkably brilliant writer with a keen insight into the double, her prose and poetry in Ariel and The Bell Jar forewent the development of the double as a means of advancing woman and female identities in literary discourse to decry the existing structural bias against women in Western culture. Plath's nihilism can be understood most readily in The Bell Jar, where Esther's dialectic with her various doubles defines the position of women at the start of the second wave feminist movement as perceived by Plath: women were left to choose between a literal death of self or a figurative death in the form of a placid acceptance of their subjugation.

The Doppelganger

One of the most essential concepts for understanding Plath's oeuvre is the literary device of the doppelganger or double. Having studied the device and its use and development by Dosteyevsky while attending Smith University, Plath used the double in her poetry and prose to explore her relationship to femininity and to relate it to the alienation she experienced in her personal and professional life (Stevenson 54). The literary double, as it is characterized by Slauthag in his academic paper, “Doubles and Doubling in the Arts,” acts as a vehicle for introspection. The double allows writers to consider opposing forces that exist within the self: poetry and reason, soul and body, moral and immoral, or creation and destruction. The double or doppelganger has long been used to contest the rationalism and realism dominating Western thought with the fantastic and the otherworldly.

While Slethaug characterizes postmodernists like Nabakov, Pynchon and Barth as having shifted focus away from a “stable and unified self” to explore unresolvable contradictions of the human psyche, Plath is a noted pioneer in this endeavor through her choice to portray her protagonist's self as fractured, allowing her to act as her own dark double. This choice on Plath's part shows a deep and ready insight into the nuances of doppelganger stories, which differed greatly through the mid-twentieth century when focusing on men compared to when focusing on women.

The double played a significant role in the German Romanticism of the 1800s with an impact that extended into twentieth-century German expressionism. In the mid-twentieth century, realism dominated Western thought, and patriarchy sequestered the feminine. It should then come as no surprise that in the literary and cinematic works that deal with the double, when the subject of the work was a woman, the purpose of the doppelganger was often co-opted. Even in works written by women of the nineteenth century, the double was primarily used in literature and cinema with women protagonists to explore the contradictions in the perceptions of women held by men. In an examination of three prominent films released during Plath's teenage years, Lucy Fischer determined distinct differences between the plots and tones of doppelganger films centering men compared to those centering women. When a woman protagonist met her double, the conflict between the two would serve to examine the contradictory expectations placed on women by men and how women ought to act in accordance with men's conflicting desires.

The three films examined by Fischer were released at the wake of Plath's teenage years, one in 1944 and two in 1946. Each film portrayed one twin as a “good woman” and the other as an “evil woman.” The “evil” twin was consistently portrayed as an uncomplicated evil, who acted with jealousy and violence towards her kin-- contrasting greatly with representations of the double in popular cinema when the protagonists were men. When men were cast as doubles, the tone of the film was comedic rather than dramatic, and both the protagonist and his double were often met with a happy ending. Any woman cast as a double to a “good” protagonist died before the end of the film. Fischer's analysis suggests popular representations of the double in Western cinema defined a “good woman” as passive, self-sacrificing, masochistic, loyal, incapable of dishonesty and “safely asexual.” By contrast, the evil woman was portrayed as aggressively sexual, dishonest, intelligent, highly competitive, and “strong and commanding” (Fischer).

Unlike these stories, the protagonist of The Bell Jar is complicated. Esther, the protagonist and speaker of the novel, is presented to the reader as having more in common with the “evil” double archetype at the outset of the novel than with the typical “good protagonist.” Esther is immediately established as both intelligent and competitive. The reader is told by the narrator that she had won a merit-based contest and had desired to steer New York around like “her own private car” (Plath 2). These double characteristics are immediately contrasted with the reality of our expectations for a female protagonist. Esther is passive in New York, against her desires, where she is placed securely in a hotel exclusively for women, “where men couldn't get at them and deceive them” (Plath 4). The reader is then introduced to Doreen, who is immediately described as intelligent, competitive, strong, and commanding. Within the first chapter, she is also established as readily able both to lie and to pursue sexual conquests, giving her the full array of the characteristics associated with the traditional woman double. The introduction of Betsy, a relatively honest woman, creates a paired double to Doreen's “evil” doppelganger within the same chapter. This is notable both in that it creates a foil to Doreen distinct from Esther and that it provides an opportunity for Esther to pledge fealty to Betsy and the “good woman” construct posited by the patriarchal society through which Eshter must navigate.

As the novel progresses, Doreen and Betsy exeunt the narrative as the conflict between the “good protagonist” and the “evil double” is internalized in Esther. Esther brings this internal conflict to the forefront in her reflections on the double standard between men and women with regards to purity and dating: “I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not” (81). Esther wishes to have all elements of her dark double available to her, in spite of the fact that these elements are paired along the lines of a false dichotomy. Esther is not simply choosing to enjoy sexual freedom, but she is affirming all negative qualities that a person, man or woman, might rightly ascribe to a dark double.

She internalized a desire to harm herself as part of her double, the imagined entity through which she develops a sense of self perceived as true or real. When skiing with a boy she had dated for some time, she found herself at the top of a ski slope. An inexperienced skier, she was at first paralyzed with fear until she reflected on the possibility of her death as a result of a collision on the slopes. This possibility encouraged her to step forward and race to the bottom of the slope. As she rushed past “the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise,” she thought to herself that this rush was “what it [was] to be happy” (97). This desire for death is brought forth as the boolean option opposite to a passive retreat, an act in accordance with the “good woman” archetype. Esther only found herself in this situation after being pressured into holding onto the rope tow at the behest of her male companion in spite of her initial protests. Even over such a simple choice, Esther reflected how, “It never occurred to [her] to say no.” A similar passivity is observed when Esther is assaulted in the next chapter of the novel.

Esther wrestles with her desires to stray from the “good woman” archetype throughout the novel, driven to the brink of madness and death for her subversive desires. The reader may interpret Esther's decision to join Doreen after internally pledging her loyalty to Betsy as another instantiation of an “evil” trait: dishonesty. Reading through the lens of Western media, the reader may perceive the assault Esther experiences at the hands of Marco as the only possible consequence to her desire for freedom, having elected to affirm the traits of a double. But the assault of Marco plays out as another dialectic. Marco, the manifestation of the patriarchal system in which Plath and Esther live, threatened to rape Esther and projected his sexual hostility onto her as an object: “Sluts, all sluts.’ Marco seemed to be talking to himself. ‘Yes or no, it is all the same,’” (109). While a reader may follow a narrative line suggesting Esther experienced the assault because she acted as the “evil” double would, the same reader must also be confronted with the reality of Esther's actions in the scene. Had Esther remained passive in the instant, true to the spirit of the “good woman,” she would have been raped. It was only her decision to resist Marco that preserved her “purity” and her sense of self. In this sense, Plath plays the concept of the “good woman” against itself. A “good woman” can only remain a “good woman” in a patriarchal world if she can occasionally act with the traits of an “evil woman,” by exercising her strength and will.

Plath does not assert that the double is evil but rather that society deems her to be evil, and so she suffers. Her deviance is always brutally punished, not as a matter of poetic justice, but as a fact of life in Western culture. This interpretation is also supported by the detail introduced by the speaker at the opening of the novel, in which Esther reflects on the electrocution of the Rosenbergs. This reflection not only establishes the motif of electric shock that will recur in Esther's therapy, but it also alludes to Plath's own mythos of the subjugation of the Jew, a motif that was made especially prominent after The Bell Jar was published and after Plath's death in “Lady Lazarus.” In this poem, Plath compares the speaker to a Jew, skinned and burned by the Nazis. “The big strip tease,” as Plath calls it, occurs in front of a crowd. Even as her skin is stripped apart in front of them, Plath proclaims that the dehumanization of the speaker cannot overcome the immutability of the self: “Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.” While Plath has been harshly criticized for comparing her personal struggles to the atrocities of the Holocaust, the poem is not simply an autobiographical lament of her relationships with her father or with Ted Hughes. Rather, Plath's poem can be read as comparing the systemic oppression and the rape and death of women at the hands of patriarchal systems to some of the singular, most-horrifying violations of Jewish persons in the Holocaust.

The electrocution of the Rosenbergs is something which immediately repulses Esther, but she does not pause to reflect on the system that sentenced the Rosenbergs to their fate and that will later administer electric shocks to Esther over the course of the novel. The reader is then left to recognize electricity as a normalizing and negating force that denies Esther a sense of self for her “espionage” and subversion of cultural norms. This also sets the stage for Esther to struggle with these systems and to resist them with the tools that would later be used by the women writers of the former German Democratic Republic, communist women resisting patriarchal powers. In this sense, Plath's allusion to the Rosenbergs and their alleged association with East Germany, where “rebellious, free-spirited female protagonists [would] also increasingly [appear] … as women writers began to focus more and more on inequality and contradictions in their patriarchal societies” reads as prophetic (Mabee).

Both the interpretation of the double as an object of the male fantasy rather than an introspection into the self and the comparison made between the subjugation of women and the persecution of the Jews can be credited in part to Simone de Beauvior's The Second Sex. The Second Sex was published in 1949, just a year before Plath arrived at Smith college. While there is no direct connection between Plath's attempts to utilize the double as an exploration of the feminine and The Second Sex, Beauvior's analysis gives ready insight into the conflict of The Bell Jar as seen in Esther's struggle to resist the “evil” self that hides under her “good” facade.

Beauvior dedicates a large section of The Second Sex to discussing the conception of the Other. The Other as a philosophical and psychoanalytic concept differs from the double in that the Other is a generalized category to which the double belongs. Freidrich Hegel, a philosopher Beauvior references in her work, discusses a process by which we come to understand the self as part of a dialectic. This process will be discussed here only insofar as it contextualizes Beauvior's argument.

In philosophy, a dialectic is a process of determination through which opposing definitions or conceptions are explored to determine a new understanding or meaning. The process of Hegelian dialectics is construed to be a type of logic that determines meaning by necessity as new considerations arise from the necessity of previous considerations (Maybee). Western culture, Beauvior argued, had developed the conception of “man” in tandem with the conception of “person” while neglecting to develop the conception of “woman” in a comparable manner.

“What Is A Woman?”

This is the question Beauvior poses and attempts to answer in her work. Beauvior observes the subjugation and objectification of women as a part of the self-realization of men. Hegel asserted that a thinking being is only able to understand itself by identifying an opposing concept as Other (Maybee). Men have been treated as the default thinker in Western thought, and so have subjugated women as Other as a natural consequence of this self-determination. While the idea of “man” has been modified through the man's attempt to understand itself in relation to the idea of “woman,” the latter has not undergone a comparable process. Instead, women in Western culture, Beauvior argues, have passively accepted the role of Other and the alienation that comes with it (82).

Reflecting on the “woman doppelganger” as a trope distinct from that of the “man doppelganger” (which may otherwise be called “the doppelganger” due to man's status as the default, or so Beauvior would certainly have asserted), the “woman doppelganger” could have acted as an instantiation of Hegel's dialectic with the purpose of determining the conception of “woman” by contrasting it to the conception of “man”; however, as Fischer's analysis suggests, women are neither the One nor the Other in this purported dialectic. Rather than providing a space of self-determination for women, men have written the dialectic providing two conceptions of women as Other perceived by some male or man subject. This dialectic then conflates a genre of self-determination and exploration of the self with a sort of propaganda that discusses what women ought to be through the lens of the male gaze.

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek describes the fantastical gaze as the Other looking back at the subject. The fantastical gaze is a dialectic in which the One, or the perspective from which a narrative or dialectic is held, sees and experiences only the abyss and a contradiction rather than experiencing sublation, the process of growth that is part of the dialectic Hegel describes. Sublation is the term used to describe the way a subject preserves its identity while the same identity is simultaneously negated so as to allow the subject to identify a unique negation that is particular to the examination of some particular Other. In other words, it is the process of comparing oneself to something different and noticing the particular ways in which they are different, so as to further understand the definition and character of the self (Maybee). Plath's exploration of the conception of women comes from the place of the Other, assigned to this role by men, the perennial One. In this sense, Plath gazes in the inbetween space-- the abyss-- of negation. It is in this space that Plath ends her oeuvre: a denial of herself as the One or a subject of independent will in favor of a pure negation of her perspective as a woman, defining women as the perennial Other. This is a violent act that ought to be perceived as an act of political rebellion.

Suicide as Political Action

Plath examines suicide as a political objection to the indignities levied against Esther and women like her in The Bell Jar through the doubles of Esther and Joan. Joan is strikingly similar to Esther with regards to her character and her background, having grown up in the same town and attended the same college as Esther. Similar to the doubles of Dosteyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Joan acts as a reflection of the protagonist who reveals truths about Esther to herself. Both excel academically, resist the norms pushed upon them by society and wind up hospitalized. Both also share lovers, but, defying the trope of the “woman doppelganger,” they do not serve as competing love interests. In this manner, Joan presents another significant aspect to the doppelganger narrative in setting it further apart from other women-centered doppelganger tales.

At the end of the novel, after Esther experiences vaginal hemorrhaging upon losing her virginity, Joan takes her own life. Joan, acting as Esther's double then seems to have acted out the fate of the “good woman” as Esther accepts her role as the “evil woman.” This is an inversion of the woman doppelganger archetype in that the “good woman” has died while the “evil woman” appears to live on-- not just with regards to the double relationship of Joan and Esther, but with respect to the internal conflict going on in Esther. Esteher's final acts in the novel include her seduction and deception of the mathematics professor, an assertive act of strength and intelligence, that puts on full display Esther's capacity to act as the “evil woman.”

Joan's presence in the novel seems to represent a branch of the fig tree for Esther: a possible outcome of her confrontation of self and the more harrowing conflict with society that this dialectic produces. Esther instead opts to walk into a room guided by “eyes and faces all [turning themself toward her].” The implication is that the gaze of her peers and the facades they don for social purposes strip her of her free will, guiding her as though “by a magical thread” (Plath 244). Our dialectic then leaves Esther with a choice between two discouraging outcomes: Joan's literal death or a death of ego and free will that comes with the acceptance of the role of Other. Those who reject Joan's act, Plath suggests, are left doomed to a life without freedom in which one must play out a fantastic narrative written and prescribed by the gaze of others.

Below is an original elegy written for Sylvia Plath: