Recently in English class, we have each been asked to lead a discussion on a poem of Syliva Plath's. I was given the poem 'The Jailor' - a poem in which Plath depicts a male/female relationship, with the man as a dominating 'jailor' figure, and the woman his abused prisoner. Despite his constant physical and emotional violence towards her, the persona of the poem realises they are dependent on one another, and that she cannot escape.
So, with this poem, I have based my discussion points around patriarchal domination/rebellion, the formulation of identity/mental instability, and ambivalence/victimisation.
Here, the most interesting theme for me is that of the persona's ambivalence: why, despite suffering so much, does she feel drawn to the abusive jailor figure? She has been 'drugged and raped', burnt with cigarettes, and reduced by forced starvation to a feeble, feverish state by this man - whom the reader assumes to be her partner. Plath spends the entire poem setting up the character of this persona as 'the victim': that is her identity. She is literally crushed, killed over and over by her relationship: 'hung, starved, burned, hooked.'
So why does she remain with the jailor, allowing herself to be his 'indeterminate criminal'?
There are two possible answers for this.
Firstly, she is a character entirely defined by her victimisation: part of which even she admits is, if not self-inflicted, self-cast - hence the movie-set like setting of the poem ('the same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position / with the same trees and headstones) and the fact that it is her 'red and blue zeppelin' that drops her 'from a terrible altitude'. She is defined solely by her relationship with the jailor. And in turn, he is defined by her. He can only be the jailor with a prisoner; thus he relies on her equally for his identity. 'What would he do, do, do without me.' is the final line of the poem, phrased not as a question, but as a statement, through which she directly reasserts her importance to him (and thus her power over him).
Secondly, there is the fact that, as far as the persona of 'The Jailor' is concerned, the codependence on which her relationship is founded equates with love.
So where does this link in with Rihanna? Well, when my Lit. group were discussing 'The Rabbit Catcher' (a poem with a very similar message to 'The Jailor'), several people were annoyed at Plath. They claimed she was self-obsessed, self-indulgent and pathetic: if her relationship was really as bad as she claimed, she should have just ended it. "She should just get over herself." someone said.
I think this point of view totally underestimates the ambivalence that people in a position such as the persona of 'The Jailor' are subjected to. They are genuinely torn.
And this is something that Rihanna discusses in her latest interview on her relationship with Chris Brown. She expresses the suffering of her ambivalence with painful honesty, which just goes to show the courage it has taken her to get out of that relationship and to now talk about it in front of millions.
So I think it is important to look at Plath's 'domestic' poetry in context: whether or not it is exactly based on her own relationship with Hughes is largely irrelevant. 'The Jailor' is a poem with a message about a woman who is in an abusive relationship. And the emotions she expresses are true to life, and are incredibly painful and difficult to overcome. It is not something that you can just 'get over'. As Rihanna said:
I am strong. This happened to me. I didn't cause this. I didn't do it. But it's happened to me, and it can happen to anybody.
Not everyone in the same position is as strong as Rihanna, who was able to face up to the situation and get herself out of it. The feeling of entrapment is not something we can underestimate. 1 in 4 women will be subjected to domestic abuse in their lifetime. This is a problem that we should be united to end, not something to ignore or underestimate.
No one is able to speak for all womankind, or for all abuse victims, or for all of any 'group' of people: everyone is individual. But every voice is relevant. And this is why we cannot ignore the words of someone like Plath, however self-obsessed and 'pathetic' she may appear, whether her poems are based on fact or are simply fiction. Her voice has a relevancy today, and her poems make a point that we shouldn't ignore.
