"Full Fathom Five": the dead father in Sylvia Plath's seascapes.

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-MAR-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

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.

Plath's poetic treatment of seascapes reveals something of the deeper psychological rupture that her art explored and, in part, sought to heal. The loss of her coastal idyll is intrinsically linked with Otto Plath's death. In Erica Wagner's words, "the time before her father's death had become idealized" for Plath (Wagner, 160), and her seascapes are thus imbued with a strong sense of his presence. In her poetry a seascape may serve both to recall past happiness and also to posit a (re)union with the absent father figure which would help Plath come to terms with what she now lacks.

The geographical and emotional significance of Nauset for Plath emerges in a letter of August 1960 where she laments the "depressingly mucky" nature of the English seaside (the family had just visited Whitby in Yorkshire), contrasting it unfavorably with Nauset, for which her heart "aches," and adding that "there is something clean about New England sand, no matter how crowded" (LH, 391). The same topic is addressed in "Ocean 1212-W":

Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood--the calling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon. After all, in England, no place is more than 70 miles from the sea. "There," I'll be told, "there it is." As if the sea were a great oyster on a plate that could be served up, tasting just the same, at any restaurant the world over. I get out of the car, I stretch my legs, I sniff. The sea. But that's not it, that is not it at all. (JP, 118) (3)

This sentiment assumes a darker tone in Ted Hughes's autobiographical poem "The Beach," which recalls his attempt to show Plath an English beach that might alleviate her nostalgic longing:

That "jewel in the head"--your flashing thunderclap miles Of Nauset surf. The slew of horseshoe crabs And sand-dollars. You craved like oxygen American earlier summers, yourself burnt dark-- Some prophecy mislaid, somehow. (14-18)

He takes her to Woolacombe Sands, a place of natural beauty--"where the peregrine went over and the shark under" (53). When the couple reach the beach, however, after driving through "a steamed-up hour of November downpour," (59) it is already dusk and the sea is "unperforming"--its dull waves managing only "to lift and flop" as "a weak hiss / Rolled back oil-balls and pushed at obscure spewage" (73-74). Hughes, confronted by the gloomy spectacle, realizes that he has only succeeded in finding "the reverse of dazzling Nauset." Plath's reaction is loaded with emotional significance:

You refused to get out. You sat behind your mask, inaccessible-- Staring towards the ocean that had failed you. (69-71)

Although this is the same ocean that breaks on the New England shore, Hughes knows it represents "the flip of an ocean fallen / Dream-face down" (75-76). Rather than bridge the emotional and spatial distance between Plath's English present and American past the trip has only brought that distance into greater relief, and she responds by withdrawing still further into herself. The poem, relating in part to the breakdown of the Hugheses' marriage that was by then in motion, ends with a sense of distance and isolation in which Plath's vision of the sea remains unmatched (and unmatchable) by anything that the world around her can offer.

The American seascape holds such importance for Plath, I suggest, because its emotional value is inherently linked to its associations with her dead father, and the loss of the one is inextricable from the loss of the other. Consequently, a return to the seascape of her childhood, in actuality or in verse, enables her to draw closer to the figure whose loss she feels so acutely, and who must be confronted if any psychological growth on her part is to be possible. The coast, then, is a location for happiness that is also permeated with the presence of death. The meeting place of land and sea is a threshold on which Plath envisages an exchange with the dead, attained through an imaginative or physical death on her part. It is a place for suicide attempts as much as childhood games. When she appears to scorn the beach in Hughes's poem, then, her withdrawal into herself may be read as evidence of a deeper psychological engagement with the absence the beach represents.

This study will trace Plath's use of seascape in several poems, from the early "Dream with Clam Diggers" to the later "Berck-Plage," and show that throughout her oeuvre she engages with coastal imagery on a physical and psychological level, both in terms of her past happiness and her deep sense of loss. She comes to regard the coast as a place that holds out the possibility of reunion with her lost father, and in several poems suggests that suicide is the route by which this reunion may be attained. In the midst of her remembered happiness, then, Plath is acutely aware of what has been lost, and how she may regain it. The seascapes of her childhood memories are not simply past idylls in which happiness is preserved, they are psychological points on a route to reunion with Otto.

Plath's poetic use of landscape has received considerable critical attention in recent years, with the crux of the debate resting on whether it developed or remained constant throughout her career. Ted Hughes's seminal essay "Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems" (1970) led some critics to conclude that in viewing her work as "a unity" (in the words of Brita Lindberg-Seversted) it is possible to see that the natural world remains richly symbolic throughout her oeuvre without admitting that Plath's treatment of such imagery undergoes any change in this respect. In her 1990 article, "Sylvia Plath's Psychic Landscapes," Lindberg-Seversted argues for a more developmental approach, in which the later work displays a greater psychological range as Plath "creates 'psychic' landscapes out of concrete places, scenes and objects." (510) (4)

Lindberg-Seversted places her own reading of Plath in the context of previous work by Ingrid Melander, Jon Rosenblatt, and Edward Butscher. (5) All of these studies, though, predate the extra biographical material provided by the publication of Plath's Collected Poems (edited by Hughes) and her Journals (Lindberg-Seversted's article employing the 1982 edition and not the much more comprehensive volume edited by Karen V. Kukil, which appeared in 2000). In her study, Lindberg-Seversted argues cogently that Plath developed an increasingly sophisticated response to natural imagery in which the outer world, whilst retaining recognizable features, became a starting point for psychological exploration. In doing so her article focuses exclusively on landscapes (Plath's response to the countryside of Cambridgeshire, Yorkshire, and Devon providing most of her material). "The seascapes," she notes, "with their crucial relevance for themes like the father-daughter relationship, loss and death, deserve a special and thorough treatment of their own and...

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