Stella Vine, "Sylvia Plath" (2004)
Sylvia Plath as Film
Noir Femme Fatale
__________________
“the lithic impulse—
the desire, the need
to reduce the demands
of life to the unquestioning
acceptance of a stone”
— Richard Howard,
"Sylvia Plath," Alone With
America: Essays on the
Art of Poetry in the United
States Since 1950
______________________
Noir, my dears—
Taciturn and separate
In a quarry of silences
And impulses to die for
Accommodating wrecks—
Of existence so that "the vase,
reconstructed, houses / the
elusive rose" still exists
Such was the dilemma—
Sylvia proposed back then
As her marriage ended and
"Ariel" began her noir life
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Yet even now we don’t—
Have the whole thing together
The book of poems and the
Poem known as "Ariel"
Can we see Sylvia Plath's life—
As she kept meaning it to be
While its been stoned to death
By mobs of poets and critics?
From the vantage point—
Of her death, still just a stone’s
Throw away from film noir
"Conceptual" to "immanent"?
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The bridged and the engulfed—
The unfinished chapters in her
Noir modernist mythology
Which was always her quest
Sylvia Plath says imperfectly—
That is, with abiding awareness
Of her imperfection an she began
Her Arielesque push to fame:
… With luck I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call these spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles.
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Her entire body of work can be—
Understood best as spasmodic
Tricks of silence, into the dark with
Her readers as her victims
Call her “Bitch Goddess”—
As she came to know it in "Ariel"
"Stasis in darkness" as well as
The "great Stasis" in "Years"
Sylvia’s femme noir guise—
Takes the form of an ongoing dialogue
("your voices lay siege … promising
sure harborage") which is deceptive
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Film noir takes a form which—
In the later poems is Sylvia speaking
From a point of identification with stasis
Complete, resolved, irreversible
"The cold dead center / where spilt—
Lives congeal and stiffen to history”
Is Sylvia on the other side, within the
Deathly Paradise, where Noir lives
The triumph of Sylvia’s final style—
Is to make expression and extinction
Indivisible ("I like black statements")
Like a true film noir femme fatale
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Which is why A. L. Alvarez says—
That her poems read as if they were
Written posthumously from the very
Source of Sylvia Plath's creative energy
Which was her femme fatale—
Self-destructiveness best realized
As the goal and the gain of Sylvia Plath's
Joy as Nietzsche accounts for it:
"All that suffers wants to live,
longing for what is farther, higher, brighter.
"I want heirs"—thus speaks all that suffers; "
I want children, I do not want myself."
Joy it is that wants itself—
the ring's will strives in it …
Joy, however, does not want heirs,
or children—joy wants itself, wants
eternity, wants everything
eternally the same.
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Recognizing the femme fatale power—
Of other modern women writers such as
Pauline Réage and Doris Lessing raises the
Possibility of a film noir joy such as:
“Histoire d'O” and “To Room Nineteen”—
Surveying the entire sweep of film noir
Spiritual evolution, an ascesis whose
Inevitable conclusion is death
After everything else has been endured—
Sylvia Plath leaves her apprenticeship to
Otherness moving on and mourning to
More ceremonious things like ecstasy
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Prepared to obey a tragic ontogeny—
("I am ready for enormity"), Sylvia—
Sloughs off—divesting herself of—mere
Personality like a cloud of unknowing
In order to achieve the noir identity—
Conferred by Joy though she submits herself
To the ordeal, the process refuses to take,
And the would-be victim is left alone
The impenetrable surface of—
Film noir existence cannot be willed
It can only be surrendered to, gaining
When it has been given over
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All of Sylvia’s poems are—
Confessions of failure, records of
Estrangement, even boasting of betrayal
The exhaustion of the noir impulse
The impoverishment of her poetry—
To escape ("the stars are no nearer…
And all things sink / into a soft caul of
Forgetfulness") is what worries us
