"Full Fathom Five": The Dead Father in Sylvia Plath's Seascapes
2007; University of Texas Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tsl.2007.0007
ISSN1534-7303
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Poetry
Resumo“Full Fathom Five”:The Dead Father in Sylvia Plath’s Seascapes Peter J. Lowe 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 19531 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 [End Page 21] 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...
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