definition of confessional poetry, Waters (2015) remarks mental illness as social taboo, something that Plath already identified in the 1950s society. In both Cut and Elm, mental illness stigmatizes the persona, who fears future, the social medium around, and death.
In Cut and Elm, Sylvia Plath experiments making use of the resource of dialogue to develop the poems in two different instances. For example, in Cut, the persona starts with the excitement of something that is about to happen, but the focus is suddenly changed to the damage on her thumb. Also, many times inside the poem, the persona addresses directly to the thumb, her “Little pilgrim”, “Homunculus”, “Dirty girl”, just to point out a few of what could indicate a close intimate connection between persona and personified thumb. Meanwhile, Elm is also constructed in a dialogical way, but in this case, the Elm tree progresses ideas, feelings, fears, and mental tortures, both for it and the persona, who listens the entire time. Besides suffering from mental illness, the persona and the Elm tree have a distant relation, very different from what happens in Cut, in which the mighty Elm is more experienced and tries to guide (though to suicide) the persona who appears to be looking for a solution.
Additionally, both poems experiment extensively with the effects of Pound’s phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia. In Cut, phanopoeia draws and establishes a connection between images of socio-historical violence to the close mutilation of the thumb. Melopoeia makes use of words that rhyme, but are not placed exactly at the end of the verses, or near rhymes. For instance, the clearest and very important sound for the poem is using words that end in ill, such as “thrill”, “ill”, “kill”, “pill”. And for logopoeia, like was presented in the analysis “wattle” and “bottle”, that creates the context inside the reader’s mind picturing the image of a party through the sounds of the words, even though “wattle” does not carry the meaning, the mind of the reader can connect to new meanings. Likewise, Elm explores the same devices. For example, phanopoeia sets imagery of suffering and a dark mood in the poem, while melopoeia gives the sense of reoccurrence through sound, like in the end repeating “that kill” three times. Finally, logopoeia mixes both musicality, by using /i/, /ai/, and /s/ sounds that cause anguish, and images in a chaotic order to demonstrate how unstable the mind is.
4 CONCLUSIONS
The investigation around mental illness in two confessional poems by Sylvia Plath, named Cut and Elm, from the Feminist Disability Theory perspective offered a new possibility of interpretation of her works. The analysis demonstrated how these poems are intrinsically linked with mental illness due to the use of rhetorical figures to represent mental traumas. Also, in association with Pound’s phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia created effects on readers, which were extracted and explored in the analysis section. The use of linguistic devices with literary techniques made possible to trace marks in both poems to connect with the main topic of the investigation, mental illness. They establish images and create sounds that make readers understand what is presented is inside the persona’s mind, as well as how it is socially oppressed inward. In Cut, starts creating characteristics for the finger, maybe in an attempt to personify the almost cut-off thumb, and when the image is well-established a dialogue develops exploring the head, the mind. In Elm, the dialogue is ongoing, but the Elm tree speaks freely of the mental breakdown inflicted on both the entity tree and the persona who passively listens.
The Feminist Disability Theory provided a groundwork that made possible to dig up the presented interpretations of Sylvia Plath’s works. First, the theory applied to the poems made use of the knowledge already gathered by the Feminist Theory, contributing with disability studies in the sense of observing social dynamics that difficult the integration of people with disabilities. As consequence, society create obstacles that many times deprive a life of access, isolate individuals, and haunt the minds of us all. Another important aspect of the Feminist Disability Theory explored is criticizing those practices, trying to find a way around them to provide a universalizing view that both include and take care of people.
Through Cut and Elm, Plath portrays the 1960s society, a world that traditionally isolated those who did not followed cultural established standards, but unfortunately today this same social dynamic still persist. We need more social inclusion and care, because just like Garland-Thomson (2002) always stresses in her articles, disability will certainly touch us all to some degree, if we live long enough. Finally, the Feminist Disability Theory demonstrated how multiple and unstable the human mind can be in Cut and Elm, it is part of who we are, what the human being is. The multiplicity and instability of the human mind happens due to
social interactions that together build an entangled system. When disability is considered in the equation, turns out to expose how our culture judge and mystify disability, creating the concept of impairment, even though most of us have some kind of disability.
To conclude, Sylvia Plath’s works are still relevant to this day due to how she deals with social topics in an intimate way. Note, this study only analyzed two of her poems, but there are hundreds to research yet. What if this same investigation could be done in other poems of the Ariel collection? Is it possible to establish parallels, connections, comparisons with other authors or works which also deals with mental illness? In this sense, what other ideas from the Feminist Disability Theory could be taken into consideration? How did authors after Plath deal with mental illness? How did confessional poetry develop after Sylvia Plath?
This study can be only a beginning to others to come, the possibilities are infinite. Plath’s magnificent use of confessional style plus the way social themes are approached, like taboos and suicide, can inspire new attitudes and think. Because of that, Plath’s Cut and Elm might be the way out of a standardized society in direction to one that shelters and supports all.
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ANNEXURE
Annexure 1 – “Cut”, by Sylvia Plath
Cut
for Susan O’Neill Roe What a thrill –My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge Of skin,
A flap like a hat, Dead white.
Then that red plush.
Little pilgrim,
The Indian’s axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle Carpet rolls
Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle Of pink fizz.
A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run, Redcoats, every one.
Whose side are they on?
O myHomunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man – The stain on your Gauze Ku Klux Klan Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when
The balled
Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silence How you jump – Trepanned veteran, Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.
Annexure 2 – “Elm”, by Sylvia Plath
Elm
(For Ruth Fainlight)I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, Echoing, echoing.
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.