Sylvia Plath's transformations of modernist paintings

College Literature, Summer 2002 by Zivley, Sherry Lutz

In the shadow cast by my dismal-headed

Godmothers. (Hughes 1981, 75)

while her mother "cried and cried."The other vengeful godmother, Euterpe, the muse of music, collaborated with the mother who:

Sent me to piano-lessons

And praised my arabesques and trills

Although each teacher found my touch

Oddly wooden in spite of scales

And ... hours of practicing. (Hughes 1981, 75)

But Plath remained "Tone-deaf and, yes, unteachable" (75).

Her transformations continue. The spurned and hence vengeful godmothers who have been transmuted into two muses are again refigured into two of the Erinyes, whom Aeschylus described as "frighteningly hideous" and whose "principal function was to avenge fathers, or more often, mothers, upon their undutifal children" (Tripp 1970, 231). These Erinyes clearly intend to hound the speaker until she dies.

Although the speaker finally breaks free and leaves her mother,14 who is presented as

Floating above me in bluest air

On a green balloon bright with a million

Flowers and bluebirds that never were

Never, never, found anywhere. (Hughes 1981, 75-76)

(an image that itself suggests the paintings of Marc Chagall), the speaker cannot escape her mother's influence or that of her agents, who follow and torment her wherever she goes. As she complains in the poem's last stanza,

Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,

They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,

Faces blank as the day I was born,

Their shadows long in the setting sun

That never brightens or goes down.

And this is the kingdom you bore me to,

Mother, mother. (Hughes 1981, 76)

Plath conflates her personal experiences with de Chirico's painting, identifies the two specific muses that she feels she cannot satisfy, and then transforms them into Erinyes that she believes will persecute her for the rest of her life.

"Perseus"

Plath's "Perseus: The Triumph of Wit Over Suffering" is based on Paul Klee's etching with the same title. Klee's etching is a portrait of two grotesques. Perseus is represented as a giant who looks like an ogre in a fairy tale or the giant at the top of Jack's beanstalk. His ugliness is compounded by both his face's sneer and the startled, almost cross-eyed sidelong glance of his eyes. Nevertheless it is a face that looks clever and devious-almost as if Perseus has just solved some perplexing riddle, which indeed he has. In contrast, nothing alleviates the ugliness of the Medusa. The top of her head is missing and she has no nose, or rather a nose so flattened to her face that in profile she appears to be noseless. Each large, lidless eye contains only a small dot of an iris. She looks less like a cruel Gorgon than like a hideously deformed, not-quite-fully-human creature.

Plath's "Perseus" focuses on the fact that Medusa, whom Plath identified as her mother in the poem "Medusa," wallows in guilt-producing "sorrow," apparently because her daughter has disappointed or neglected her. Consequently she celebrates Perseus's slaying of the Gorgon.

Plath's poem, which she believed to be "the biggest and best poem I've ever written" (Plath 1975, 336),15 begins, not with the victorious Perseus, but with a diatribe of hatred addressed to the Medusa head he holds. She calls it