Sylvia Plath's transformations of modernist paintings

As the poem progresses, the snakecharmer's power becomes more insidious.The reference to "Eden's navel" suggests that the snakecharmer has produced a garden of evil. In this phrase, the word "navel" implies that the inhabitants of the garden will produce an unending line of evil descendents, and with the allusion to the creation story in Genesis-"let there be snakes! / And snakes there were, all, will be"-it is clear that Plath sees the snakecharmer as an inversion of God and as the creator of evil. But, apparently, so did Rousseau, because the snake in the painting, which slithers out the tree limb as it listens to the snakecharmer becomes Satan in the form of a serpent (a visual image that suggests that Rousseau was alluding to Michaelangelo's serpent tempting Adam and Eve in one panel of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). Also, the fact that the snake is coiled around the snakecharmer suggests how comfortable this snakecharmer/creator is with the evil he has summoned forth.

Then, in a surprising twist, Plath diverges from the implications of the painting and imagines that unlike God, who saw that his creation "was good" and was satisfied with it, the snakecharmer soon "tires of music," gets bored with his creation and undoes it. He

Pipes the cloth of snakes

To a melting of green waters, till no snake

Shows its head, and those green waters back to

Water, to green, to nothing like a snake. (Hughes 1981, 79)

With this reversal, Plath deflates the evil she has imagined, explaining that the snakecharmer "pipes the world back to the simple fabric of snake-- warp, snake-weft. Pipes the cloth of snakes." She thus suggests that the snakecharmer's creation was never a real world of evil but merely an imagined world within Rousseau's work of art (a work that never manages to be as insidious as Plath's description of it implies).

To accentuate the poem's aura of evil, Plath utilizes much consonance in the first part of the poem, with phrases like "snakecharmer begins snaky sphere," "waters waver, "Pipes a place," "snake-scales," and "Rules the writhings;" assonance (with phrases like "waters waver," the long "e" in the repitition of the word "green," long "a's" in "snake," "place," "wave," and sways," and Hopkins-like consonantal repetitions and reversals like"

He pipes. Pipes green. Pipes water.

Pipes water green until green waters waver

With reedy lengths. (Hughes 1981, 79)

Thus Plath's language, with its sounds of hissing and undulation, emphasizes the degree of evil with which she overlays the painting.

Transformations: Roles for Women

Like many women of the 1950s, Plath believed women have only three options-three roles in which they can live their lives. They could remain barren spinsters, become seductresses or prostitutes, or become wives and mothers. Many of Plath's poems criticize not only the limitations of these roles but the women who settled for them. In "Three Women" she shows the unhappiness that each of these roles produces, and she criticizes the role of virgin in "Maudlin," "Spinster," "Two Sisters of Persephone," "Childless Woman," of aging spinsters who meddle in other people's lives in "Eavesdropper," "Tour," and "Kindness,"7 of the sexually active single woman or whore in "Strumpet," "Two Sisters of Persephone," and of the wife and mother in "Lesbos," "Jailer," "Purdah," "Tulips," "A Life," and "The Arrival of the Bee Box."