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“My tree stays tree”: Sylvia Plath and Ovid’s Daphne

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  • 21 March 2019

    The original version of this article was revised due to numerous typesetting mistakes.

Notes

  1. The following abbreviations for Plath’s works are used throughout: LH (Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, ed. A. Plath. London, 1976), LVI (Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume 1: 1940–1956, ed. P. Steinberg and K. Kukil, London, 2017), LVII (Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume 2: 1956–1963, ed. P. Steinberg and K. Kukil, London, 2018), CP (Collected Poems, ed. T. Hughes, London, 1981), J (The Journals of Sylvia Plath: 1950–1962, ed. K. Kukil, London, 2000). Sincere thanks are due to the two anonymous reviewers at IJCT for their comments and suggestions, and to Greg Woolf and the Institute of Classical Studies for post-doctoral funding.

  2. For example, A. Bakogianni, ‘Electra in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: A Case of Identification’, in Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English, ed. S. Harrison, Oxford, 2009, pp. 194–217; and I. Hurst, ‘“We’ll all be Penelopes then”: Art and Domesticity in American Women’s Poetry, 1958–1996’, in Living Classics, pp. 275–94 (278). On Plath’s parody and pastiche of psychoanalytic models, see J. Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, London, 1991, and C. Britzolakis Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, Oxford, 1999 (pp. 7, 60–61, 160); on psychoanalytic approaches to Ovid’s work, see E. Spentzou, ‘Theorizing Ovid’, in A Companion to Ovid, ed. P. Knox, Malden, 2009, pp. 381–93.

  3. T. Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. P. Keegan, London, 2005, pp. 1175–7; T. Hughes, ‘Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems’, in The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. C. Newman, Bloomington, 1970, pp. 187–99 (190).

  4. LH 9; E. Butscher, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness: A Biography, Tucson, 2003, p. 4.

  5. E. Butscher, Method and Madness (n. 4 above), pp. 10–11.

  6. Now ‘Wellesley High School’; Latin syllabus available at: https://sites.google.com/a/wellesleyps.org/whs-program-of-studies-2018-19/cml-courses (accessed: 6 September 2018).

  7. LVI 87, 105, 106, 107.

  8. Cf., a local contemporary of Plath, Rachel DuPlessis, recalls reading Apuleius in her school Latin class in her essay ‘Psyche, or Wholeness’, The Massachusetts Review, 20, 1, 1979, pp. 77–96.

  9. LH 37. On Hughes’s biographical use of the Theseus and Ariadne myth, see D. Berry, ‘Ted Hughes and the Minotaur Complex’, Modern Language Review, 97, 3, 2002, pp. 539–52, and G. Liveley, ‘Birthday Letters from Pontus: Ted Hughes and the white noise of classical elegy’, in Ted Hughes and the Classics, ed. R. Rees, Oxford, 2009, pp. 216–32 (220–22).

  10. On Plath’s engagement with the Georgics, see my forthcoming chapter in Sylvia Plath in Context, ed. T. Brain, Cambridge, 2019.

  11. J 26–7.

  12. For a history of the English Tripos Tragedy Paper, and a copy of the exam Plath sat in 1957, see https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cambridgeauthors/the-tragedy-paper-continuity-and-change (accessed: 8 January 2019).

  13. Including Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and Phaedrus, ed. H. Fowler, Cambridge, 1953; Plato: Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, ed. W. Lamb, Cambridge, 1953; and Quintilian (Institutio Oratio Vol. III, ed. H. Butler, Cambridge, 1921. Plath’s library is catalogued online at: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/SylviaPlathLibrary/yourlibrary (accessed: 17 September 2018). G. Jacobsen, in ‘“A holiday in a rest home”: Ted Hughes as vates in Tales from Ovid’, in Rees, Ted Hughes and the Classics, pp. 156–76 (159–60), cites F. J. Miller’s 1916 Loeb edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as Hughes’s source text for his translations in Tales from Ovid. The use of a Loeb edition as a crib is unusual as Hughes’s preferred source texts (for Seneca and Aeschylus, among others) are Penguin Classics. Hughes’s library (Emory University) has not yet been fully catalogued, although the collection includes many volumes previously owned by Plath; it is tempting to speculate that this Loeb Ovid may be an inheritance from Plath. Available here: http://discovere.emory.edu/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do (accessed: 17 September 2018).

  14. Britzolakis, Theatre of Mourning (n. 2 above), pp. 116–17.

  15. J. Gill, The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath, Cambridge, 2008 (pp. 54, 60) notes the mythic presences of Echo, Narcissus and Diana and Actaeon in Plath’s work; and S. Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems, Chapel Hill, 1993 (p. 114) reads the Demeter and Persephone myth in ‘Wintering’ (CP 217); neither scholar links Plath explicitly to Ovid.

  16. The widespread acceptance of the biographical nature of Plath’s poetry may have led T. Ziolkowski to dismiss Plath’s poem ‘Metamorphosis’ as ‘hav[ing] nothing to do with Ovid or his Metamorphoses’, in Ovid and the Moderns, Ithaca, 2005, p. 169.

  17. ‘Marvelous product’ from S. Plath, ‘Script for the BBC broadcast “New Poems by Sylvia Plath”’, in Ariel: The Restored Edition, ed. F. Hughes, London, 2004, p. 193.

  18. All Latin quotations are taken from P. Ovidi Nasonis. Metamorphoses, ed. R. Tarrant, Oxford, 2004; all English translations are my own. Gill notes an ‘implicit reference’ to Ovid in ‘The Courage of Shutting-Up’ in Cambridge Introduction (n. 15 above), p. 68.

  19. Daniel Libatique discussed the ‘eloquence’ (facundum, Met. 6.469) of Ovid’s Tereus as a mechanism of power in his paper ‘Ovid in the #MeToo Era’, Society of Classical Studies 2019 Annual Meeting, San Diego, 6 January 2019.

  20. P. Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion, Cambridge, 2002, p. 86; see also C. Segal, ‘Philomela’s Web and the Pleasures of the Text: reader and violence in the Metamorphoses of Ovid’, in Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature, ed. I. de Jong and J. Sullivan, Leiden, 1994, pp. 257–80; L. Curran, ‘Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses’, Arethusa, 11, 1, 1978, pp. 213–41; P. Joplin, ‘The voice of the shuttle is ours’, Stanford Literary Review, 1, 1984, pp. 25–53; A. Richlin, Arguments with Silence: Writing the History of Roman Women, Ann Arbor, 2014, pp. 140–43.

  21. Gill, Cambridge Introduction (n. 15 above), pp. 67–8.

  22. ‘The surgeon’s role is ambiguous; he is implicit in the mutilation of the speaker yet at the same time it is precisely this mutilation (the tattooing of the body) which gives metaphorical voice to the subject’s trauma’, Gill, Cambridge Introduction (n. 15 above), p. 68.

  23. Initially titled ‘The Courage of Quietness’, Plath’s amended title transforms ‘a feminine virtue [quietness] to the internalization of what is usually a command by another’ (L. Bundtzen, The Other Ariel, Stroud, 2005, p. 245, n. 36).

  24. On the interplay of sexual violence, gender and art in Ovid’s episode, and its programmatic nature for the epic that follows, see Curran, ‘Rape and Rape Victims’ (n. 20 above); see also H. Parry, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Violence in a Pastoral Landscape’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 95, 1964, pp. 268–82; W. Nicoll, ‘Cupid, Apollo, and Daphne (Ovid, Met. 1.452 ff.)’, Classical Quarterly, 30, 1, 1980, pp. 174–82; N. Davis, The Death of Procris: ‘Amor’ and the Hunt in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Rome, 1983, pp. 39 ff.; L. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism, New Haven, 1986, p. 85; B. Nagle, ‘Erotic pursuit and narrative seduction in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, Ramus, 17, 1988, pp. 32–51; P. Knox, ‘In Pursuit of Daphne’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 120, 1990, pp. 183–202; C. Segal, ‘Ovid’s metamorphic bodies: art, gender and violence in the Metamorphoses’, Arion, 5, 1998, pp. 9–41; J. Farrell, ‘The Ovidian Corpus: Poetic Body and Poetic Text’, in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and its Reception, ed. P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi, and S. Hinds, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 127–41 (133); p. 139; P. Salzman-Mitchell, A Web of Fantasies: Gaze, Image, and Gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Columbus, 2005, pp. 29–38 and Richlin, Arguments with Silence (n. 20 above).

  25. The conclusion of the tale of Daphne – a woman whose laurel leaves are worn by the surviving male poet – suggests a model for the afterlife of Plath and her poetry; on Plath’s literary presence in Hughes’s Tales from Ovid, see my ‘Ovid, Plath, Baskin, Hughes’, forthcoming in The Ted Hughes Society Journal, 2019, 8, 1.

  26. On the valorization of female chastity in patriarchal societies, see M. Macciocchi, ‘Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology’, Feminist Review, 1, 1979, pp. 67–82. On the tradition of using Daphne as a moral lesson to preserve female chastity, see M. Barnard, The myth of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid to Quevedo: love, agon, and the grotesque, Durham, 1987. On Ovid’s own poetic political critique of the legislation of the lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis (intended to preserve chastity), see J. Hallett, ‘The Role of Women in Elegy: Counter-cultural Feminism’, Arethusa, 6, 1973, pp. 103–24.

  27. J. Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, 2nd edn, Stroud, 2007, p. 42; Laura (Riding) Jackson was, however, a reluctant muse, and viewed her relationship with Graves ambivalently. For Jackson’s ‘crushingly unsympathetic’ response to Kroll’s use of The White Goddess to read Plath’s poetry, see Bundtzen, The Other Ariel (n. 23 above), p. 39; on Graves and Ovid, see G. Liveley, ‘Ovid in Defeat? On the reception of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris’, in The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, ed. R. Gibson, S. Green and A. Sharrock, Oxford, 2006, pp. 318–37.

  28. R. Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, New York, 1983, p. 446.

  29. Richard Sassoon, Plath’s lover before Hughes. Cf. P. Murray, ‘Reclaiming the Muse’, in Laughing With Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought, ed. V. Zajko and M. Leonard, Oxford, 2006, pp. 327–54. On Ovid’s Muse, see A Sharrock, ‘An A-Musing Tale: Gender, Genre, and Ovid’s Battles with Inspiration in the Metamorphoses’, Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature, ed. E. Spentzou and D. Fowler, Oxford, pp. 207–27. On Daphne in modern women’s writing, see S. Brown, ‘Daphne’, in her Ovid: Myth and Metamorphosis, London, 2005, pp. 45–66; and R. Fowler, ‘“This tart fable”: Daphne and Apollo in Modern Women’s Poetry’, in Zajko and Leonard, Laughing With Medusa, pp. 381–98.

  30. On Woolf’s ‘treatment’, see J. Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, London, 2005, p. 37.

  31. For example, Tereus’s vision of Philomela as ‘one of those naiads or dryads you hear about…’, quales audire solemus | Naidas et Dryadas (Met. 6.452–53); on rape ‘interpellating’ the female subject in Metamorphoses, see L. Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare, Cambridge, 2000, p. 158.

  32. The fraudulent uates is similarly filtered through an Ovidian lens in ‘Snakecharmer’ (CP 79), in which the aspiring Orpheus can pipe ‘no rocks’ (cf. Threicius uates et saxa sequentia ducit, Met. 11.2).

  33. Malin Pereira links ‘On the Difficulty of Conjuring a Dryad’ and ‘Virgin in a Tree’ in her discussion of Plath’s early-career negotiation of hegemonic binary modernist aesthetics. Pereira argues that Plath initially ‘accepts the aesthetic values inherent in her concerns with binarism, perfection, and formalism… [although she] recognizes the position of women within these frames as problematic and confining, and uses irony as a tool of interrogation’, in Embodying Beauty: Twentieth-century American Women Writers’ Aesthetics, London, 2000 (pp. 104–5). Pereira also argues that the conclusion of ‘On the Difficulty of Conjuring a Dryad’ posits natural life and ‘the real’ as the true benchmarks of artistic vision – the narrator’s tree stays tree, and she builds her art from leaf, from grass – thus subtly undercutting the male ‘fantasy’ aesthetic (106). The author does not find the presence of Ovid or Daphne in these poems, however, describing rather their ‘classical Greek subject matter’ and an indebtedness to H.D.’s poem ‘Mid-day’, a poem that allegorizes female anxiety of authorship and represents H.D. ‘at her most “Greek” – and modernist’ (106, 105). I thank the reviewer for bringing Pereira’s work to my attention.

  34. Met. 1.547–50; Farrell (n. 24 above), p. 133; Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body (n. 31 above), p. 39.

  35. Suggesting a further dryad informs this tale: Pomona (Met. 623–97).

  36. V. Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, London, 2003, p. 49; a tapestry hanging in Orlando’s house depicts Daphne in flight. As R. Fowler notes, Orlando’s is a distinctly Ovidian poetic imagination: ‘Moments and Metamorphoses: Virginia Woolf’s Greece’, Comparative Literature, 51, 1999, pp. 217–42 (235); see also S. Brown, The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes, London, 1999, pp. 203–10.

  37. Cf. Am. 1.7; on bruises adding to the beauty of the elegiac puella, see B. Gold, ‘Propertius 3.8: A Self Conscious Narration’, Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, 17, 1985, pp. 155–64 (158); on erotic violence in Ovid, see: L. Cahoon, ‘The Bed as Battlefield; erotic conquest and military metaphor in Ovid’s Amores’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 118, 1988, pp. 293–307 (296–7); D. Fredrick, ‘Reading Broken Skin: Violence in Roman Elegy’, in Roman Sexualities, ed. J. P. Hallett and M. Skinner, Princeton, 1997, pp. 172–93 (185–6); E. Greene, ‘Travesties of Love: Violence and Voyeurism in Ovid Amores 1.7’, The Classical World, 92, 5, 1999, pp. 409–18 (415–17).

  38. It is a ‘poem about the dark forces of lust… It is dedicated to Ted Hughes’, J 214.

  39. Hughes casts himself in the role of the panther is his response poem, ‘Trophies’, in his Birthday Letters, London, 1998, p. 18.

  40. J 432; cf. disdain for ‘conventional morality’ at J 269, 432, 461.

  41. ‘Pursuit, guilt’, J 350.

  42. Racine: Phèdre, ed. E. James and G. Jondorf, Cambridge, 1994, Act 1, Sc. 2.

  43. J 225.

  44. On the relationship between sexual violence and landscape in Ovid, see C. Segal, Landscape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: a study in the transformations of a literary symbol, Wiesbaden, 1969; R. Gentilcore, ‘The Landscape of Desire: The Tale of Pomona and Vertumnus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, Phoenix, 49, 2, 1995, pp. 110–20; M. Bolton, ‘Gendered Spaces in Ovid’s Heroides’, Classical World, 102, 3, 2009, pp. 273–90.

  45. cf. Met. 3.259–315, esp. 309.

  46. P. Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee: 1898–1918, ed. F. Klee, Berkeley, 1964, p. 168.

  47. On the poem’s critique of ‘art-for-art’s-sake’, and its reprisal of the anti-fantasy aesthetics of ‘On the Difficulty of Conjuring a Dryad’, see Pereira (n. 33 above), pp. 106–7.

  48. Contra Fowler, who reads the poem as a ‘now-classic poem of sexual demurral’ in ‘This tart fable’ (n. 29 above), p. 382.

  49. Angélique Thomine suggests that the ‘puritanical’ voice, distinguished by quotation marks throughout the poem, can be read ‘dans ce contexte de références grecques omniprésentes’ as a Greek Chorus, announcing the victory of exemplary virgins over Eves, Cleopatras and Helens, in ‘Le Mythe de Daphné vu par Sylvia Plath’, Les Chantiers de la Création, 6, 2003, para. 13. Thomine similarly reads the poem in the context of 1950s sexual mores, but takes an explicitly biographical approach. I thank the reviewer for bringing Thomine’s article to my attention.

  50. On the representation of women in art and women’s to-be-looked-at-ness, see J. Berger, Ways of Seeing, London, 1972; L. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16, 3, 1975, pp. 6–18; quotation from ‘I Am Vertical’, CP 162.

  51. uagina: (1) the sheath (of a sword or sim.), scabbard; (2) (transf.) a natural structure resembling a sheath; (especially applied to the sheath that encloses an ear of corn before it emerges); P. Glare ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary (2 vols), Oxford, 2012, p. 2208.

  52. Compare both Apollo’s prophecy to Daphne that her leaves will be used as wreaths and victor’s crowns, her evergreen leaves earning eternal glory and praise; and Plath’s anxiety about being transfixed on paper as the Dream Woman Muse, and the need to reject this role to create her own literary fame, J 301.

  53. Thomine argues that the poem’s figuration of virginity as dehumanizing is complicated by a lexical field of protection which is consistently and positively associated with trees (the ‘laurel skin’, ‘pine-needle armor’ and ‘bark habit which deflects’): ‘Le champ lexical de la protection est très présent dans “Virgin in a Tree”… Ces termes évoquant la protection sont tous liés à l’arbre, que ce soit la “peau de laurier”, “l’armure de pin”, ou “l’écorce qui dévie”’, in ‘Le Mythe de Daphné’ (n. 48 above), para. 16–18.

  54. ‘Déshumanisée, elle est assimilée à l’arbre… plutôt qu’à une femme’, Thomine, ‘Le Mythe de Daphné’ (n. 48 above), para. 16.

  55. CP 192. cf. ‘The Bee Meeting’, where the speaker wishes to escape by metamorphosing – not into a beautiful tree but into the weed cow parsley: ‘I could not run without having to run forever’ (CP 211). In Ovid, Daphne blames her beauty for ‘causing’ Apollo’s lust (‘change this treacherous form which has pleased too much’, qua nimium placui, mutando perde figuram, Met. 1.547); her metamorphosis into a tree does not mar her beauty as wished, nor allow her to escape from Apollo’s lust (‘only her bright beauty remained. Apollo still loved her [like this]’, remanet nitor unus in illa. | hanc quoque Phoebus amat, Met. 1.552–3). Plath may comically pre-empt Ovid’s Apollo in ‘The Bee Meeting’ by asking to be turned into an unremarkable plant, unsuitable for decorating the heads of Roman victors. Plath describes the ‘gullible head’ of the cow parsley as ‘not even nodding’; while ‘gullible’ suggests the speaker’s complicity in the passivity and violence of the Daphne episode, the speaker also demonstrates a silent control over her narrative actions. Where Ovid’s Daphne seemed (uisa) to give her resigned assent to Apollo (adnuit, Met. 1.567), Plath’s speaker silently refuses. Jessica Luck reads a demurring Daphne in ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ (CP 212): ‘would [they] forget me | If I… turned into a tree[?]’ in ‘Exploring the “Mind of the Hive”: Embodied Cognition in Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 26, 2, 2007, pp. 287–308 (292). On the ambivalent nature of Ovid’s uisa which may signal Daphne’s refusal, see G. Liveley, Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’: A Reader’s Guide, London, 2011, p. 28.

  56. An older Daphne also appears in ‘Widow’ (CP 164): ‘the compassionate trees bend in, | The trees of loneliness, the trees of mourning’ – recall Daphne’s ‘nodding’ branches (Met. 1.566–7). The tragic loss of personhood these women have suffered in metamorphosis and the denial of sexuality is expressed by Plath’s lines, ‘They stand like shadows about the green landscape— | Or even like black holes cut out of it. | … a shadow-thing’, ‘a bodiless soul’.

  57. Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body (n. 31 above), p. 10.

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Ranger, H. “My tree stays tree”: Sylvia Plath and Ovid’s Daphne. Int class trad 27, 215–237 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00503-9

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