Sylvia Plath’s Struggle with Becoming a Tree: The Intimate Identification with the Flourishing Death

Sylvia Plath’s Struggle with Becoming a Tree: The Intimate Identification with the Flourishing Death

The struggle with becoming a tree in Sylvia Plath’s poems reveals her struggle to create a subjectivity for herself as a female poet in a patriarchal world. Becoming a tree epitomizes the tradition in which Plath strives to create her poetic subjectivity: the opposition between the male Romantic poet and the feminine nature that inspires him, the prototype of which is Ovid’s myth of Daphne becoming the tree muse for Apollo. Plath internalizes the death of the body imposed on the woman in the formula and creates out of the negativity within her. Instead of treating nature as an object in order to become a poet, she accepts that she is both the articulate poet and the nature that can never be fully expressed. Torn between the one who expresses and the one who is expressed, the bodies of trees in her poems painfully shine with layers of darkness. The trees represent a female subjectivity that closely communicates with the darkness, which is fairly dangerous for a formed subjectivity. This paper analyzes the complex layers of the question of becoming a tree imposed on the female body. It then discusses how Plath responds to this burden by creating a subjectivity expressed by black trees that intimately identify with the flourishing death and articulate the darkness within themselves as a landscape.