A Generation Apart: Jorie Graham vs. Sylvia Plath and the Change of Woman's Identity

Rebecca Teachey

Sylvia Plath and Jorie Graham are two dramatically different women, from opposite classes as well as two separate generations, yet both reveal within their poetry that a woman’s identity is indeed shaped by the identities and expectations of her parents (Post). How does their poetry address these parental expectations, and what are the underlying implications to woman’s identity?

Plath’s poem “Daddy” begins with a matter-of-fact tone laced with an edge of bitterness, “you do not do, you do not do/Any more, black shoe,” where the speaker identifies herself as the foot that is so restricted it cannot breathe or even sneeze inside the shoe. This identification implies that she feels inferior and repressed.  The shoe is representative of the confining image of her father and his expectations of her.  This is an interesting twist on an article of clothing that is normally considered a sign of prosperity or protection.  A shoe sometimes suggests following a particular path in life, so perhaps the speaker is also suggesting that she can no longer follow her father’s path and must pursue her own.  The fact that the shoe is black indicates further oppression.

The narrator directly confronts the image she has held of her father and declares to him, “Daddy, I have had to kill you/You died before I had time”.  These lines reveal the speaker’s frustration that she has not been able to “kill” the image of her father before now.  The father is compared to a swastika, “so black no sky could squeak through,” representing the Nazi oppression of the Jews.  The speaker actually refers to herself as being “like a Jew” several times, which reinforces the idea of being a victim to the father’s image.  Continuing with the black theme of the poem, the father stands in front of a blackboard in a picture, representing authority and the expectations of education.  This sense of authority is reinforced when the speaker tells her father “I made a model of you,” indicating how deeply her identity was entrenched in this self-created image of her father. 

The line “And the villagers never liked you” suggests that some of her anger and suffering comes from realizing too late what everyone else already knew: the image was a facade.  As the poem progresses, its tone seeps into disdain directed at herself and this image, before erupting into triumphant fury with the line “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”  The narrator shows a sense of empowerment by this last line; having worked through her childhood adulation, she refuses to be a victim of it any longer. Whether the point of the poem is tearing down a gilded image of this father or merely rejecting his expectations, the speaker’s identity has changed from conformity to the father’s image to that of an embittered woman free to move on with her life. 

Rather than being a confrontation with the father, Jorie Graham’s poem "Picnic” is relayed as a memory, giving it a dream-like quality associated with an afternoon at a country picnic.  Similar to “Daddy”, however, this piece also identifies the father as a source of deceit: “Then someone...laugh[s], although they are lying/and X...will sleep with father.”  The reader understands that X is not the mother, because the mother is introduced later in the poem. Identifying the woman as “X” and not describing her any further strips X of all identity. This suggests that the speaker does not wish to acknowledge this woman as important in her or her father’s life, especially since she is taking her mother’s place in her father’s bed. She also does not describe X as sleeping with ‘my father’ but simply “father,” which indicates that the speaker does not wish to claim him, probably in retaliation for his betrayal.  This indicates that the daughter’s identity is closely joined to her mother’s, that she is just as betrayed by his actions.

The speaker, not wanting to leave her father and X alone and “(wanting to be seen)” by them, follows them as they retreat “down by the pond.” The speaker wants to be seen to remind her father that his actions are a betrayal and that she will remember them.  She looks into still water and sees “how each side wants the other to rip it open,” seeming to allude to the hidden current beneath the stillness waiting to be released in a flood.  This hidden stillness reflects the undercurrent of emotion that the reader was introduced to in the beginning, the sorrow “kept under” and the laughter that comes in “quick-jagged laughs.”  These emotions contrast with the ideal family picnic setting and the father's betrayal, revealing the deep level of pretense.  The urge to “rip it open” indicates how deeply this tension is affecting the atmosphere and suggests the desire to release it by exposing and ending the pretense.

The speaker describes herself as “the girl who/was me,” indicating that she has changed since the beginning of the poem.  After the scene with the father, the reader is introduced to the speaker’s mother, who sits with the girl in her bedroom, “both of us facing into the mirror.../me in front of her.”  This scene strengthens the notion of the mother and daughter’s intertwined identities.  However, as the narrator looks in the mirror, she is drawn into it the way she was drawn to the water, attracted to the undercurrent of hidden emotions and shadows.  Here the speaker has found herself buried behind the image in the mirror, a self beyond the expectations of her parents, “no pressure from some shore, no/shore.”  The two shores indicate the struggle she is experiencing, torn between her parents and wanting to experience herself fully: “ 'I should go in' I thought 'I want the fate/ to come up now; make it come quick'.”  But the mother begins changing her daughter’s face:“She shadowed the cheek, held the lips open/ fixed the edge red.”  The mother is painting the daughter's face, changing her identity by “forcing the expression on,” while inside the stillness is shrieking: “Open up open open."  This suggests that the daughter is torn between what she has seen inside the mirror and what her mother is forcing upon her; it is the sense of “waiting” that they “painted” alive.  Waiting is a study in repressed emotion, the expectation and anticipation that can become so strong that the only way to alleviate it is by pacing.  It is interesting that “candor coming awake, there/ one face behind the other peering in” becomes “the only thing in the end of the day that seemed/ believable.”  By changing her daughter’s identity, the mother has also altered her sense of reality, and therefore inflicted her own version of the truth.

In these two poems the poets agree that a father plays an important role in shaping his daughter’s identity.  Plath’s poem suggests that only by breaking down the father’s image and his corresponding expectations can a woman move on and take her life back for her own.  Graham indicates that the daughter’s identity is intertwined with both parents, which suggests that when the father betrays the mother, he also betrays their daughter.  Graham also is warning that being trapped between these two parents in a state of dishonesty results in turmoil that distorts a child’s identity as well as her perception of reality. Plath’s dark poetry is something less than polite, suggesting that it is okay to give vent to strong emotions, yet at the same time she seems to be asking the reader to delve more deeply into the poem.   By addressing the undercurrents of emotion directly in front of the reader, Graham is creating a complete image of this picnic, encouraging the reader to experience each aspect fully.
 
In Plath’s poem, “Medusa”, the speaker is once again confronting her parent.  This time she is addressing her mother, “Did I escape, I wonder?”  Most daughters tend to think of their mother’s presence as comforting, yet Plath is conveying a sense of imprisonment.  This mother is also still influencing the daughter’s identity:“In any case, you are always there/Tremulous breath as the end of my line.”  These lines offer the reader the image of a mother finishing her daughter’s thoughts, invading her space, shaping her ideas and repressing her identity with the mother’s very presence.  In the next lines, “touching and sucking,” Plath creates the image of a whirlpool, sucking the speaker down into it, suggesting that she is in a perpetual struggle to escape. “I didn’t call you/I didn’t call you at all,” the narrator insists; “nevertheless, nevertheless/You steamed to me over the sea.” These lines clearly depict how unwanted the mother is, and how frustrated the speaker feels with her mother intruding in her life. 

Along with the image of intrusion and forced identity, “Medusa” also follows the theme of life giver and taker with the image of the mother as “Fat and red, a placenta,” while her presence paralyzes “the kicking lovers” and “I could draw no breath”.  The speaker indicates that this relationship of life-giver is meaningless to her now: “I shall take no bite of your body.” She no longer has use for her mother’s body because this body is attached to the spirit and mind that are being inflicted upon her.  The speaker cries, “Off, off eely tentacle!” as she attempts to extricate herself from her mother’s grasp.  The tentacles represent the hold the mother has over the daughter, while the eely-ness suggests that there is a sense of evil about the mother, as if she knows what she is doing to her daughter, yet she won’t stop inflicting herself upon her child.  The last line of “Medusa” insists “There is nothing between us,” ending the poem with a tone of ringing finality, but the image of the tentacles seems to remain, suggesting that as long as the mother is alive, the speaker can never truly escape.

Graham’s poem “Imperialism” is presented as a memory where the mother introduces her daughter to death at the age of nine, “because she wished for me /to know the world”.  This implies that the mother equates the world with death, and wants her daughter to have the same association, which results in parental expectations and identity being forced upon the child. This concept is reinforced when the mother has her daughter “walk on in” to the “Strange water,” the river where the ashes of the burned bodies are being disposed of. The ashy muck of the river clings to her skin: “the more it slipped off you the more it clung to you/and caked/so that the only sense of cleanliness you got/was in the decision/to stop/and let the sun reclaim you, and let it seal the film of silt.”  This image conveys how dirty the daughter feels under the influence of this forced identity, and how tightly it has sealed around her, creating a sense of repression.  The daughter recalls “a white umbrella a man in the river near me was washing/and how the dark brown ash-thick riverwater rode/in the delicate tines as he raised it rinsing./-first near the surface then underwater." She is conveying to the reader that not only is the surface of her body caked with silt, but her very soul has been tainted. 

The veiled image in this poem is of the mother as life giver and life taker.  When they watch bodies being burned and “then watched the pulleys lift/the fine-meshed grille covered with ash and cartilage,” which is then shaken into the Ganges, the daughter sees a woman’s shape in the grille.  This image represents the mother’s power of life and death and conveys that the daughter understands her mother’s power.  Yet the speaker becomes hysterical: “I cried so much…they had to call whatever doctor was on hand.”  A stranger is the only person who can calm her because her mother’s body was “no longer relevant.”  “She/tried to hold me to her, I’m sure/making it worse.”  The speaker’s mother has succeeded all too well in teaching her daughter how fragile the body is, and therefore has killed her daughter’s childish trust and innocence.  By inflicting her expectations (an understanding of death) on her child, this mother has taken her daughter’s life as a child and given birth to her premature understanding of the world and her frail place within it.    At the end of “Imperialism” Graham reveals that because of the traumatic repression of her identity by her being forced to conform to her mother’s expectations, the child no longer recognizes her mother: “no face at all dear god, all arms.”  The mother has become only arms, limbs that have the power to give and take life based on a whim, but without a face to give them individuality.  This seems to be the definition of both imperialism and mother.
 
These two poems reveal the way mothers force identities upon their daughters without fully considering the ramifications.  In “Medusa” and “Imperialism” the two poets seem to agree that mothers tend to be oppressive, inflicting expectations that cause their children to suffer.  Although the ending of “Medusa” sounds final, the reader is left with the sensation of still being entangled in the mother’s tentacles, just as the river’s dirt could not be washed away in “Imperialism.”  This conveys the idea that escaping these identities and expectations isß almost impossible.
 
The poetry of Sylvia Plath and Jorie Graham explores the shift in identity from a generation of women subject to parental and social repression to women wanting to break away from the mould, hoping for a freedom of self both external as well as internal. Sylvia Plath is described as having “a troubled soul oppressed by sexist times” (Randall).  Because of this, most critics file Plath’s poems neatly into the genre of confessional poetry where “Plath’s search for identity in life always morphs into an exploration of identity through suicide or death” (Quart).  And certainly, according to Plath’s biographies, she did seem to conform to the “notion of the model child” (Wagner-Martin), which could justify the “driving, seething hatred and fury that always lurked within her and which she tried to suppress” (Bitter Fame).  And while this fury does appear in “Daddy”, looking more deeply the reader might find that Plath is suggesting poetry should not always be calm or restrained, that emotion is what drives its creation and should not be couched in polite phrasing.  Perhaps she is comparing a poem to her father or an oppressive government, or perhaps she is talking to the reader telling them that their restrictive expectations of her and her poetry must end.  She wants to be accepted exactly how she is, as an artist who views “poetry as an aesthetic rather than a therapeutic pursuit” (Kirsch).

Graham seems to agree with this argument, locating her own work within the “gaps” or "eternal delay” of language and its meaning, suspending the reader in “the long sleep of resemblance” (Gardner 1).  She seems to write with the intention that the poem be experienced, through sound, taste, touch, all of the senses, frustrating critics with obscure line breaks, numbering patterns and stanzas that dart all over the pages like ants at a picnic.  Yet in doing so, she “makes us aware of the very processes of thinking, of the act of consciousness” (Spiegelman 8), freeing the reader to abandon forced expectations and linger in the moment.  Take time to breathe in the scent of grass in the spring time, to pause and watch the geese v-ing overhead in a gun barrel grey sky and suddenly the poet vanishes and the poem becomes your own, “a link in a universe that is a 'dream'” (Zinnes 1).

That seems to be what these women are trying to achieve.  These poets are releasing themselves and their readers from the restraint of polite society, allowing us all to “struggle with, succumb to, and experience” (Henry 3) the riveting emotion of creation.  Plath releases women from social expectations of restraint and modesty to fully experience a complete range of emotions, despair, rage, frustration, and isolation, while Graham invites the reader to leave behind deep analysis in favor of exploring the senses to their fullest.  Between the two of them they have altered the identity of woman, allowing her to “relinquish unrealistic expectations” (Post) by exposing the different faces of identity imposed on her by social and paternal expectations, freeing her to revel in everything that is woman.

Works Cited

“Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath.” Economist Newspaper Ltd, Vol. 312. 1989. Expanded Academic ASAP. Online. Thomson Gale. Sweet Briar College. 18 Oct 2006.

Gardner, Thomas. “Accurate Failures: The Work of Jorie Graham.” The Hollins Critic Vol. 24. Oct 1987. p1(10). Expanded Academic ASAP. Online. Thomson Gale. Sweet Briar College. 20 Nov 2006.

Graham, Jorie. “Picnic”, “Imperialism.” The Dream of the Unified Field. Hopewell, New Jersey: Ecco Press. 1995. P122, 90, 176.

Henry, Brian. “Exquisite Disjunctions, Exquisite Arrangements: Jorie Graham's "Strangeness of Strategy." Antioch Review Vol. 56. Summer 1998. Expanded Academic ASAP. Online. Thomson Gale. Sweet Briar College. 20 Nov 2006.

Hoffert, Barbara. “Plath as She Was: Behind the Book: Sylvia Plath's Ariel: The Restored Edition”. Reed Business Information Vol. 129. 2004. Library Journal. Expanded Academic ASAP. Online. Thomson Gale. Sweet Briar College. 20 Nov 2006.

Lewis, Alison M. “Kirsch, Adam. The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets.” (Book Review). Reed Business Information, Inc. (US). Vol. 130. 2005. Library Journal. Expanded Academic ASAP. Online. Thomson Gale. Sweet Briar College. 20 Nov 2006.

Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy”, “Medusa.” Ariel. Ed. Ted Hughes. NY: Harper & Row, 1966. 49, 39.

Post, Robin Dee. “Issues in Psychotherapy with High Achieving Women: Separation and Self-Esteem.” (1979). ERIC. Ebscohost. Online. Sweet Briar College. 30 November 2006. http://search.ebscohost.com.

Quart, Alissa. “Dying for Melodrama: Why does Sylvia Plath Still Seduce the Adolescent Psyche?” Vol. 36. Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers, Inc, 2003. Expanded Academic ASAP. Online. Thomson Gale. Sweet Briar College. 20 Nov. 2006.

Randall, Jessy. “Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963).” Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. Detroit: St. James Press. Vol. 0004. 2000. 68-69. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Online. Thomson Gale. Sweet Briar College. 20 Nov. 2006.

Spiegelman, Willard. “Repetition and Singularity.” (Book Review). Kenyon Review. Vol. 25. Spring 2003. 149 (20). Expanded Academic ASAP. Online. Thomson Gale. Sweet Briar College. 20 Nov 2006.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963).” Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature. Harper Collins Publishers Vol. 1. 1991. Infotrac Onefile. Online. Thomson Gale. Sweet Briar College. 20 Nov. 2006.

Zinnes, Harriet. “The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994.” (Book Review). The Hollins Critic. Vol. 34. Jun 1997. Expanded Academic ASAP. Online. Thomson Gale. Sweet Briar College. 20 Nov. 2006.

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