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"Full Fathom Five": the dead father in Sylvia Plath's seascapes.
Well, I tried drowning, but that didn't work; somehow the urge to life, mere physical life, is damn strong, and I felt that I could swim forever straight out into the sea and sun and never be able to swallow more than a gulp or two of water and swim on. The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind. --Sylvia Plath, unsent letter, 28 December 1953 (1)
In a song from his 2001 album Gold, Ryan Adams expresses the wish that "I had me a Sylvia Plath" and lists swimming amongst the activities that he imagines sharing with her:
With rain falling fast on the sea While she was swimming away she'd be winking at me Telling me it would all be okay Out on the horizon and fading away.
There is ample evidence in Plath's writings that swimming and sunbathing on America's North Atlantic coast were among her favorite activities, and although she traveled far from the beaches of Nauset, Massachusetts, they retained a strong hold on her emotions. In later years, however, such memories were both a source of comfort and, more darkly, a measure of something Plath felt she had lost, something she attempted, through her poetry and also through an increasingly strong suicidal desire, to regain. Adams's image of Plath "out on the horizon and fading away" reminds us that although she was undoubtedly happy in such a situation, we should not overlook the desire for personal extinction that is also inherently present.
Plath's account of her childhood by the sea, "Ocean 1212-W" will be examined in more detail below, but it is important here to cite its closing lines:
And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle--beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth. (JP, 124) (2)
Childhood happiness ends with the death of the father, prompting a move, both physical and emotional, away from the location in which such happiness was found. These early summers remain happy memories for Plath, but the self that figures in them is crucially distinct from the person she becomes. Return to Nauset may prompt imaginative engagement with the past, but, as in other areas of Plath's life and art, her dead father's presence remains an integral and psychologically disruptive element, reminding her that although the happiness located by the coast has been enjoyed, it is also irretrievably lost.
- Works of Sylvia Plath: Annotated Bibliography
- Reference information from: Monarch Notes Plath, Sylvia January 1, 1963 700+ words
...Annotated Bibliography The Works Of Sylvia Plath Poetry: Ariel. New York: Harper...fiction can be found in The Art of Sylvia Plath, edited by Charles Newman.) Works About Sylvia Plath Articles and Essays: Aird, Eileen...
- Ted Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath.
- Magazine article from: Criticism Churchwell, Sarah January 1, 1998 700+ words
...weapon. --Janet Malcolm 1 When Sylvia Plath killed herself, soon after composing...of fact has, in the case of Sylvia Plath, also resulted in heated debates...life, work, and biography: "in Sylvia Plath's work and in her life the elements...
- Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning.(Review) (book review)
- ANQ WAGNER-MARTIN, LINDA March 22, 2001 700+ words
BRITZOLAKIS, Christina. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning. Oxford...the interest in the lives of both Sylvia Plath and her recently deceased husband...reader to approach the writing of Sylvia Plath from a more theoretical perspective...
- Sylvia Plath: three bee notes. (Essays).(the influence of bees on Sylvia...
- ANQ Gordon, John June 22, 2003 700+ words
...information was in circulation during Sylvia Plath's lifetime, before she wrote...Encyclopedia Britannica current in Sylvia Plath's teens and twenties, "Some...Previous critical discussion of Sylvia Plath's representation of her father...
- Sylvia Plath.
- Magazine article from: The New Leader Pettingell, Phoebe November 2, 1987 700+ words
Sylvia Plath SYLVIA PLATH wanted badly to embody the spirit of her times, however contradictory...sensational drama of her brief life. Linda W. Wagner-Martin's Sylvia Plath (Simon and Schuster, 282 pp., $18.95) stands as something...
- Works of Sylvia Plath: Guide For Further Study
- Reference information from: Monarch Notes Plath, Sylvia January 1, 1963 700+ words
...ars poetica in a poem. Discuss Sylvia Plath's attitude toward poetry, as...in three of her poems. Many of Sylvia Plath's poems contain references to...well wrought poem. 2) Because Sylvia Plath derived many of her symbols and...
- Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning.(Review)
- Magazine article from: Criticism Axelrod, Steven Gould September 22, 2000 700+ words
Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning by Christina...1999. Pp. 250. $60.00, cloth. Sylvia Plath wrote intensely and died immensely Her...personalizations of biography" (8). Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning continues...
- Sylvia Plath: dynamic concepts, a storm-tossed life.(BOOK WORLD)
- Magazine article from: World and I Stern, Fred October 1, 2006 700+ words
...circles as the New England writer Sylvia Plath (1933-1963). Plath reached...rate of four or five per year. Sylvia Plath spent her brief life on both sides...years of her all too brief life. Sylvia Plath was born in Boston on October 27...
