Sylvia Plath’s poetic voice is one of the most distinctive within the literary canon. Her collection Ariel is a feminist protest bursting with psychological intensity. She wrote in her journals that being born a woman is an awful tragedy’, that women are infinitely ‘doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries’. She desired to be ‘active and doing’ not ‘passive and listening’. The collection turns the notion of femininity on its head. She writes about women in a way never achieved before. Women are presented as choked by domestic politics and cultural forces; as triumphant victims and the doomed innocent. The world of which she writes is intrusive, oppressive and poisonous, full of rage and fear. Throughout Ariel, she uses language to resist the mounting pressure surrounding her. Her language does not inscribe to the objectification of women but rebels against it, rewriting sexual politics. The collection was written when she moved from Devon to London away from her husband Ted Hughes.

Plath sits at the forefront of a revolutionary movement of writing: confessional poetry.

Confessionalism marked a turn towards autobiography in literature, where everything is personal, everything is felt. This genre emerged at a time when America was reaching superpower status in the Cold War and certainly absorbed the historical turmoil surrounding it.

And so Confessionalism was born – a movement that erupted simultaneously with the ever increasing infringement on privacy and autonomy in a time of conflict between the capitalist America and the totalitarian Soviet Union. Sylvia was part of the generation that spent their early years in the shadow of the Second World War and their later life under the fearful realities of the Cold War, and the widespread fears of an imminent apocalypse.

Stylistically, this collection marked a shift from poetic form towards psychodrama as the reader goes on the painful journey into the darkest corners the female consciousness emotionally, erotically and vitriolically declaring war on subservience to men. She rebels against poetic styles and conventions. The poems are raw, colloquial and repetitive; unafraid of formal constraints. The collection is an outpouring, an outcry of anguish in its entirety. It is muscular in style and hugely moving; an extraordinary collection resonant of a monologue.

Let’s look at the poems. Her poem ‘The Applicant’, satirises the expectations of the humble housewife of Cold War culture. Marriage is far removed from romance but is a suffocating convention that leads to the disempowerment of women. The woman is transfixed in a mechanised state as a ‘living doll’. Some of this collection is seen by many of critique of the Cold War conservatism and ideology. It reveals a nightmarish underside to the expectations put on women. She violently exposes the most secret and violent aspects of her private life and satirises the institution of marriage.

In her poem ‘The Jailer’, the speaker is enslaved by a male double. The poem could be read autobiographically, drawing an affinity between the jailer and Hughes, who deprived Plath of ‘my own inner life, my own inner thoughts’. She saw Hughes as God, onto which she projected and invested her inner self. The poem ‘Daddy’ (which was written on the day that Plath agreed to divorce Hughes) is a violent rebellion against domesticity that muted her artistic voice.

Through the multitude of darkness in the collection rises a voice of revolt. In 2004, Frieda Hughes published Ariel: The Restored Edition, giving voice to the original ordering of Ariel that Plath had intended. The re-ordering allowed for the collection to begin on the word ‘Love’ in ‘Morning Song’ and end with the word ‘spring’ in ‘Wintering’. Plath’s creative outpour when writing Ariel, allowed her to be reborn through her writing as an autonomous author, separate from Hughes. The poem ‘Wintering’ explores female progress and survival. In Lady Lazarus, she exclaims:

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

All of Plath’s manuscripts for the Ariel poems are written on the back of old typescripts and manuscripts of the poems and plays by Hughes. Her poems are literally talking – and taking -back.

Plath wrote in her journals: ‘I felt if I didn’t write, nobody would accept me as a human being. Writing was a substitute for myself.’

Her work is often entangled in a feminist fantasy, feeding on gossip about the intimate details of Plath’s personal life. It is true, that Sylvia Plath is a controversial icon, to some an almost cult figure.

Yet, it is the raw honesty in her poetry mixed with the phantasmic landscape that makes her poetry so extraordinary. Perhaps the title Ariel is a nod to Shakespeare’s The Tempest; that like a woman spirit she is looking down on the domesticated, female body. Listen to her poems and see for yourself. You won’t be disappointed.

-Georgina Armfield