CHAPTER 6

Sylvia Plath: Holocaust and Self

One of the major critiques addressed to Sylvia Plath is that her poetry utilizes Holocaust suffering inappropriately. These critiques argue that her poetry on some level does not have the right to explore Holocaust materials in the ways that it does: that it is a form of immoral cultural appropriation. Furthermore, they contend that she is appropriating a pain that is not hers in order to illustrate her own inner states; that she is somehow misusing the Holocaust in order to discuss her own depression. Critics have countered this in various ways, arguing that this is an overly biographical take on her poetry, and that Plath’s firstperson speeches are dramatic monologues for different characters in Europe. The critique that Plath is somehow misusing Holocaust imagery for her own ends, and that these ends are somehow unacceptable, opens up various avenues for unpacking her poetry, and larger questions about ownership of Holocaust representation: to whom does the right to aesthetic or literary representations of the Holocaust belong? What does it mean to talk of appropriate and inappropriate uses of Holocaust materials in art?

There is anger against Plath’s often deliberately flippant use of the Holocaust in her poetry from various quarters: Jewish critics who see her as unable to capture in her poetry the brutality of an experience she did not live through; Harold Bloom and Seamus Heaney’s contentions that they are aesthetically unsuccessful and harness the Holocaust to self-justifying ends. The idea that Plath misuses the Holocaust for her own personal gain does several things: for one, it relies on the notion that as a gentile, she is not granted access to a specifically Jewish suffering. How could a relatively privileged girl from Wellesley know the pain of the Holocaust victim? How could her suffering possibly be on the same level or comparable to those of Holocaust victims? In the light of her suicide, it is certainly questionable to suggest that her suffering was somehow insufficient. It also hinges on a narrowly autobiographical idea of the literary, and its imaginative and ethical capacities for, as Hannah Arendt puts it, “being and thinking in my own identity where I am not” (241).

The critique presupposes a distinction between Plath’s gentile suffering and the Holocaust victim’s Jewish suffering which her poetry arguably seeks to collapse. Poems such as “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Mary’s Song” identify with Jewishness and with Jewish Holocaust victimhood. “Daddy,” in particular, does this in a patently flippant way: “I think I might be a bit of a Jew,” the speaker announces at one point. It is as though she has plucked the idea off the top of her head, and then gradually falls in love with it throughout the poem, pushing this bad taste thought further and further, defying the reader to call her out on it (which critics then did). The flippancy of this identification is fully aware of the taboo of doing such a thing, and the pleasure of disobedience is built into the childish nature of the rhyme; Plath’s speaker is being naughty, and enjoying it, and pushing limits. Herein lies the impious quality of the poem, which carries within its shock charges deeper meaning: the affiliation is playful and is expressed playfully, but beneath the playfulness there is more serious intent. According to dominant Jewish self-identification processes, one cannot be “a bit of a Jew,” one is or one is not. Being “a bit of a Jew” in Nazi occupied Europe could get you deported to a concentration camp, depending on which side of the line of arcane Nazi racial classifications you fell. Declaring that you might be “a bit of a Jew” in this context makes a willing mockery of a multiplicity of positions: of Jewishness self-defined as racial difference, of Nazi anti-Semitism’s ideological biological spuriousness, of Jewish suffering as unique practice of ethnic self-identification, of cultural, ideological and political ownership of Holocaust representation.

What issues does the question of asking what it might mean for gentiles to identify with Holocaust victimhood open up? Here we also may begin to think with Richey and The Holy Bible: what does it mean for the visitor to a concentration camp, the tourist, to make pronouncements on it? Holocaust tourism is predicated upon a certain type of emotional experience that the visitor will undergo. How might this private catharsis be translated into a response? Claire Brennan’s overview of critical responses to Plath’s poetry discusses the shift away from thinking about the appropriateness of Plath’s use of the Holocaust, and James E. Young’s suggestion that rather than “asking whether a writer coming after the Holocaust should be traumatized by a memory she may have inherited only literarily, we might ask to what extent the writer was traumatized by her literary historical memory of the Holocaust” (Brennan 72). The Holocaust has become, by Plath’s time, public, shared memory. The poet organizes her inner private world by way of this shared historical imagery:

If “The public horrors of Nazi concentration camps and the personal horrors of fragmented identities become interchangeable,” as Arthur Oberg suggests, it is not because they are actually analogous; it is just that the movement between public and personal horrors is at once historical and private. As long as these images of the Holocaust are public, they inevitably enter the private imagination at some level, where they are invariably invoked to order personal experiences.

(Brennan 75)

This gets closer to what I have in mind, but I need to push it even further. Plath constructs her poetic characters, or the poetic self she channels through them, as being in the lineage of the Holocaust, products of it, made by it. There is no self in Plath’s poetry that reaches for and makes appropriate or inappropriate use of the facts of the Holocaust that are external to it: but rather, the poetic self is informed by and formed through its knowledge of and reaction to the Holocaust.

This brings us to understandings of depression that de-politicize it as primarily a private, inner, personal matter: a failing of the individual to adequately respond to the social world. Some critiques of Plath hinge on this assumption of depression as a personal matter. The young woman from Wellesley (and in different ways, the pretty boy rock star from Wales who has made it), is thus seen as depressed because of some defect within them: depression as a private sphere, an intimate disease of failing, which is somehow contained within the individual. Plath’s novel The Bell Jar disputes this view. The book begins with a preoccupation about the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, convicted of spying for the USSR, being executed, and from its first line it is thus haunted by the political aura of 1950s McCarthyism and the global violence and geopolitical tension of the Cold War. Autobiographical protagonist Esther Greenwood’s interaction with a fellow intern, Hilda, who expresses joy that the Rosenbergs are about to be executed, is a pivotal moment — followed by the personal, sexual trauma of the attempted rape by a misogynistic acquaintance, Marco — that comes before her breakdown. The personal, intimate dimension is always shot through, occasioned by the political, the ideological: violent sexually abusive patriarchy is inextricable from American political brutality. “Daddy” weaves these connections even tighter, exposing fatherhood’s fascistic desires.

Plath’s work argues that depression and suicide are not an internal causeless failure to live up to the demands of the world, but in part a justified response to the violence of human society and history. In her poetry, depression is not some purely personal problem (as if such a thing could exist) that has hijacked the Holocaust as a way of expressing and aestheticizing itself, but the depression in the first place is partly caused by the fact of the Holocaust existing; it is not so much a case that the depressed or depressive artist is somehow appropriating the Holocaust to express herself, but more so that the depression to begin with is partly caused by the existence of the Holocaust. In this way, the Holocaust belongs to all of us inasmuch as our identities are forged by an awareness of it, and a coming to terms with its existence; a processing of it, and a reaction to it.

Plath’s work impiously desacralizes the Holocaust by being flippant about it, by turning it into a fancy dress game, a gleefully morbid cabaret show. Her work challenges the notion that, as a gentile, she has no right to put herself in the place of the Holocaust victim. By being “a bit of a Jew” with a Nazi dad, Plath’s work breaks down dichotomies of Nazi and Jew, in favour of a humanistic and universalizing approach that sees the Jew and the Nazi within the human. The Holy Bible rejects Plath’s comedic flippancy, but certainly carries over her personalizing, appropriating framework into its Holocaust material and the way in which the depressive consciousness at the heart of the album is understood through reference to the Holocaust. Plath primarily identifies with victims, The Holy Bible shifts from victim to the interior vision of an external judge and accuser, whose rage and despair boils over into feeling its way into nihilistic positions that may be read as coming to coincide with the Nazi perpetrator. The girl speaker in “Daddy” relishes the thought of being chuffed off to the concentration camp in a train, in a sado-masochistic death fantasy, re-animating the Holocaust as ongoing event, the engine of the train an anticipation of the camp’s ovens. For Plath, the Holocaust is not so much over but ongoing, feverishly living on at the level of inner and interpersonal struggle, winning, in the end, as she submits to its death logic: the choice of suicide by gas oven also cannot help but go noticed.

By the time the speaker of “Mausoleum” and “The Intense Humming of Evil” comes to the same place, it has gone cold and lifeless. In this absence of life, a visitor outside of history, he finds the cold pressure of historical fact, but above all his own all-consuming conscience and guilt.

The Holocaust is a highly touchy subject matter, and the Manics wavered on how to best present this topic, reworking the lyrics of “The Intense Humming of Evil” to make them more judgmental. In interviews they discuss the song as a warning against Holocaust denial historical revisionism, so that it becomes a necessary act of historical memorialization, speaking the truth to the lies of Holocaust denial: “I didn’t think the first draft of ‘Intense Humming of Evil’ was judgmental enough,” James Dean Bradfield told Q in late 1994. “It’s a song about the Holocaust and you can’t be ambivalent about a subject like that. Not even we are stupid enough to be contentious about that” (qtd in Maconie). Yet as ever, the interview summary of the song only contains a fraction of its multiplicity of voices and perspectives that cancel each other out in a nihilistic blur. The Holy Bible battles its own desire to contain and present that truth, the speaker faltering under the weight of his own judgment, almost succumbing to the very violence it seeks to indict.

The cultural and literary afterlives of the Holocaust are and continue to be an extremely contested area. Writing in 1996, Gillian Rose discusses two Holocaust novels and notes:

The books tell the same story: that impotence and suffering arising from unmourned loss do not lead to a passion for objectivity and justice. They lead to resentment, hatred, inability to trust, and then, the doubled burden of fear of those negative emotions. This double burden is either turned inwards or outwards, but both directions involve denial. It is the abused who become the abusers, whether politically as well as psychically may depend on contingencies of social and political history. (51)

This reads very Richey-esque, a pessimistic take on the notion that victims are capable of learning from their trauma: that it is naïve, if not dangerous, to hope that victims will alchemically transform the suffering they have undergone into a more moral world, one elevated and illuminated by the Enlightenment values of reason and truth. The truth may be too much to bear and collapses into anger and resentment and revenge — a process chronicled by Jean Améry in his Auschwitz survivor memoir At the Mind’s Limits (1966). Rose could also here be talking about Israel, and how it has come to be seen as embodying these bitter ironies in repeating as abuser elements of that which its progenitors suffered as victim. In the last two decades, global sentiment on Israel as a colonial, occupying force have continued to grow and polarize. Judgment on Israel doesn’t appear per se in The Holy Bible, though “Of Walking Abortion” can certainly be read as provocatively pairing and blurring two worlds: the safe inhabited world of “shalom shalom” with its love for the children and its limitless horizons, an ideological sublime of the nation state; and the world of violence and death and destruction and fascist dictators and butcher’s hooks that it rests upon and disavows.