STAMFORD UNIVERSITY

BANGLADESH

Assignment on:
Ambivalent personality of Sylvia Plath that noticed in her work

Ambivalence, mixed good and bad feelings about particular entity, individual or
circumstance, became a ruling passion in Sylvia Plath's life. Ambivalence
encompasses all Plaths identity i.e. her works, love towards people and friends
surrounding her etc. If we analyze her work, those are also guided by ambivalence.
As an obsessive-compulsive neurotic, she finds relief only in her self-expression
through writing. But often this ambivalence is much prominent in her poetry.
Many of her poems bear the evidence of narcissism, self-hatred, deep attachment
and simultaneously deep hatred towards her dear and near and full of
disappointment towards marriage and married life, pain and domestic life. This
ambivalent personality of SP made her and her works obscure and bizarre to the
readers.
 In the poem Morning Song she reveals her ambivalent feeling towards
her newborn baby. As a mother, her relationship with the children seems
ambivalent. Her reflection and attachment towards the children seem too puzzling
to understand. At the beginning of the poem, her fondness for the newborn baby
declares her deep fascination and intimation but as she proceeds, she feels the baby
as a stranger in her life.
At the very beginning of the poem, Love set you going like a fat gold watch,
establishes Plaths deep heartfelt love towards the newborn baby. This simple line
openly exposes that a mother considers her baby as a part of her life to be
treasured as people esteem old watches passed down from generation to
generation. The same caring and loving mother in the second stanza contrasts her
baby metaphorically to a new statue. Here the poet expresses her ambivalence
through these words. A new statue is not meant to be placed at an intimate place
like home, but it is preserved in a restricted museum. Thus comparing her loved
baby with a new statue the poet seems to create a great distance between their
relationships. The third stanza seems to rudely express the baby as a stranger to the
mother and therefore, she says Im no more your mother Though the mother
gives birth to the baby as a cloud produces rain which takes the shape of a lake that
reflects the cloud, she is in fear of the babys subsistence. The baby no doubt will
resemble the mother, but its uniqueness ultimately will drive it from the mother, as
the wind drives the cloud far from the lake. At times she seems to be mad for her
child. Again, the same mother wants relieve from the punishment of the children.
In short, Plaths attitudes towards children were always in ups and down- an
extreme complex ambivalence.

In poem Metaphors, Sylvia Plath describes her pregnancy in metaphorical

language; exploring ambivalence about it. At the time of the poem's composition
Plath was pregnant with her first child, Frieda. The poem suggests a deep
ambivalence about motherhood. The basic conflict is the poem is that of duty vs.
individuality. The narrator feels that by subsuming herself to the duty of
motherhood, her own individuality is being stifled. While she loved her children
deeply, she felt trapped as she wanted to develop her professional writing career,
and therefore annoyed at her confinement during her pregnancy.
This poem suggests her disenchantment with pregnancy; she does not feel
attractive in her situation. She is aware of herself and discouraged by her physical
appearance. She feels large and unwieldy, comparing herself to an elephant, a "cow
in calf," and a "ponderous house." She expresses no joy with her increasing size.
Instead, she is too well-aware of how she has lost control of her body. There is a
sense of resignation in her use of the term "means" and "stage," for they suggest
that she has lost all autonomy and identity while the child within her grows. She
considers herself just as a "means" and a "stage" for another. Everything happening
to her is for someone else, not for herself. To her, the overall depiction of
pregnancy is not very heartening and this is evident in the last line of the poem
"Boarded the train there's no getting off." Here, she suggests that she lacks any
agency, and is instead at the mercy of another. She implies that her feelings about
the child mean nothing; she must carry the pregnancy to term. She has no choice in
the matter.
Therefore, the poem is a powerfully realistic depiction of how pregnancy can be
stifling to a creative and ambitious woman. Sylvia Plath was profoundly
ambivalent about this prescribed role for women. She lamented how grotesque she
looked, and expressed her resignation over a perceived lack of options. So it is
clear that, though she loved her children, but was not completely content in either
pregnancy or motherhood.

In the poem Daddy, Sylvia Plath showed her contradiction in the

relationship with her father. The poem Daddy clearly depicts Plaths ambivalent
mind. It reflects that Plath suffers from Electra complex. She herself admitted that
the Electra complex is a condition where she has an unresolved passion for her
father. It is an extremely complex emotion and hard to express. It is quite peculiar
that how a person can love and hate one person at the same time. If we love
someone, we aspire after our love. However, it can also turn to hatred if the person
doesnt love us back, and we feel the ambivalence conflict on our mind. The
feeling is like erosive poison, and it will get into whole body, brain, heart and so
on. It tortures every second every day, only to kill the person then we can be
released. This poem shows a sense the emotional ambivalence between Sylvias
affection and hatred toward her dad.
In the very beginning of the poem the speaker, Plath addresses her father, Otto
Plath as god. But the god like father due to his early death deprived her of all kind
of love and affection turns into a devil. When she grew up, she compares him to a
devil, a vampire, and, most controversially, a Nazi. The multiple uses of this
imagery in these lines -"Luftwaffe", "swastika", "Fascist", "Meinkampf look"
shows her hatred to her father. She expresses a lot of hatred feelings and cursing
words toward her father. Such as Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. In
some ways, she hated her father so bad that she even wanted to kill him. She also
says "Daddy, I have had kill you. You died before I had time''. She actually wanted
to kill her father in order to get rid of her consciousness of his influence and
disruption.
Although her father is just like a tyranny and made her felt under big pressure, she
still loves her father very much. Her father's influence on her is countless. Her
complicated feelings for her father could be found in line At twenty I tried to die
and get back, back, back to you where she expresses her strong emotion towards
her father. She even tried hard to learn German in order to talk to her father.
Though she hated him, even wanted to kill him, she wanted to communicate with
him because she is still in love with her father and longs for a father's love. Both
hate and love are intense in her.
Actually the poem shows that she still love her father deeply. But he hates her
father because he died when she was only ten, and could not provide protection
and care for her. "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through" this line suggests that
she still can't forget her daddy. The reason why she called her daddy a bastard is
because he didn't give her the love and concern she needs. She hates her father,
because she felt that she was abandoned by him, and this kind of thought kept
haunting her. Therefore, she forced to use her aversion toward her father in the
cause of concealing her mighty heartbroken feelings. Lastly it is can be said that
the author really loved her father but she couldnt express it as he died so early and
thats why the authors love became half love and half hate.

The poem Mirror is also evident of Sylvia Plaths ambivalent mind which deals
with a woman's struggle with her inner self, which is showing true reflection and
outer self that is showing a sense of fluctuation. The entire poem is dedicated to a
woman's reflection and her perception of herself in a mirror. The hardest truth for a
woman to absorb while looking at the mirror is her growing age. The growing age
is the biggest truth of life. Mirror clearly tells the woman about her growing age.
The woman keeps looking into the mirror and gets depressed knowing that her
death is getting closer and closer. The woman struggles with the loss of her beauty,
admitting each day that she is growing older. Though the woman occasionally
deludes herself with the flattering "liars" candlelight and moonlight, she
continually returns to the mirror for the truth. The values are embedded in the truth
the woman finds in her mirror. The mirror and reflection are metaphors
representing the absolute truth of present realities.
In the first Stanza the mirror is admiring itself, praising itself, and reflecting itself.
We see the mirror explaining how it is "important to her," implying that what this
woman thinks herself to be lies merely in her appearance. The mirror maintains
that it is "not cruel, only truthful," yet the mirror itself is ignorant of reality. The
mirror knows only of what little it can see. The mirror's ignorance is apparent in
that it fails to understand that it is meaningless to her. The mirror is wrong when it
explains how it is so very "important to her." The mirror is not important to the
woman, she is important to herself. All that matters is her own self-image, her
beauty, her narcissism. The mirror is only "truthful" to the level that the woman
deems it to be, it is just a tool through which she can perceive her ugliness. It could
be argued that her own image is all she cares for.
The second stanza shows a change in the mirror. The differences between a lake
and a mirror are important here. The lake is not "silver and exact" like a mirror but
it has more depth. A woman bends over the lake and looks in and "searching her
reaches for what she really is." The mirror now becomes a symbol for the private,
hidden self. The lake calls the candles and moon liars as they do not give enough
light to give a true reflection. Here the lake presents the image of that woman
getting older and yet still searching for her real identity even though is being lied
and has been a victim of some lies.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises towards her day after day, like a terrible fish

This final image suggests much insecurity. Here the terrible fish could represent
both the inexorable approach of old age, and the death of what she feels is her
socially accepted self. This is the outer self of a woman which yearns to please and
be loved, but might be destroyed by the emergence of her true self or by the
realization of her true inner potential that she sees in the depths of the lake.
In the conclusion, it can be said that her poems are full with her ambivalent
thinking and it is her ambivalent personality which gives a unique trait in her work
and makes her work different from the others.

The end