115

An “I” Elated: The Ecstatic Self as Creative Process and Product

in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Anna Dillon, Queen’s University Belfast1

Ekstasis in illumination as the transformation from “Stasis in darkness” (Plath

Collected Poems 239)2 is a fundamental movement in several of Plath’s poems, her
later work in particular. An exploration of the ecstatic self, the key figure in this
progression, demonstrates the centrality of the concepts of creativity and change to
Plath’s poetic process and product. My analysis of the ecstatic self in three of Plath’s
most acclaimed, works, “Fever 103º,” “Lady Lazarus” and “Ariel,” draws on the
original meaning of the Greek word ekstasis,3 meaning “the self standing outside the
self,” or “displacement.” It also draws on the concept of depersonalisation as
understood in the fields of psychiatry and psychology, namely, the experience of a
profound sense of detachment from one’s everyday, “personalised” self, replete with
full individual personality and character traits. This detachment generally takes the
form of the perception of oneself as being at a distance from oneself, of existing
outside of one’s own body, and observing the former self. Its strength is such that
one’s typical or normal self is often felt to be “the false, showpiece self” (Simeon and
Abugel 59). My use of depersonalisation differs from any idea of a Cartesian mind-
body dualism, a Freudian split between the conscious and the unconscious, or a
schizoid division, mirroring or doubling of the self, such as that discussed by R.D.
Laing, David Holbrook and Carmen Birkle. I interpret it, rather, as the detachment
and transplantation of the ontological core of the individual from his or her
personalised aspects to a new locus of identity. As such, it constitutes the abstraction
and transformation or evolution of the self into a new form. It is not to be regarded as

1
This paper was delivered at the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at the University of Oxford on 29
October 2007.
2
All future quotations from Plath’s poems in this paper are taken from this edition.
3
The etymological route which led to the present-day word “ecstasy” is, to be precise, and working
retroactively, the Old French term extasie, from the fourteenth century, which itself stems from the
medieval Latin extasis and the Greek έκστασις (ekstasis), which is derived from έκ (ek, meaning “out”)
+ ίστάναι (istanai, meaning “to place”) (“ecstasy,” Oxford English Dictionary Online). The OED
Online states, furthermore, that
The classical senses of έκστασις are ‘insanity’ and ‘bewilderment’; but in late Gr. the
etymological meaning received another application, viz., ‘withdrawal of the soul from the
body, mystic or prophetic trance’; hence in later medical writers the word is used for trance,
etc., generally. Both the classical and post-classical senses came into the mod. langs., and in
the present fig. uses they seem to be blended. (“ecstasy,” Oxford English Dictionary Online).
Plath Profiles 116

the individual’s loss of personality, but rather personality’s loss of the power to be the
sole defining aspect of the individual. This loss is caused by acute self-observation,
and the depersonalised, distanced, extremely self-aware mind comprises the essential
aspect of the individual’s new identity.
Plath’s poetry is rich with manifestations of the ecstatic self in the form of the
disembodied, elevated, self-observing speaker. The emergence of this figure
commences with a process of abstraction of self from self; a struggle subsequently
arises between forces of discord in the old, personalised ontological state and the
experience of harmony potentially inherent in the depersonalised self. This tension
frequently takes the form of a conflict between dullness and incandescence, death and
sexual fever, corporeality and spirituality, stasis and motion. The depersonalised,
metamorphosed self which emerges victorious in this conflict is characterised by the
speaker’s rapturous pleasure at her attainment of a new, extreme locus of power and
possibility and the emotional, spiritual and cognitive benefits that this affords her.
Foremost in these are the evocation of an ecstatic love of self and the emphatic self-
assertion of a resoundingly vocal individual. Plath’s ecstatic speakers’ new
ontological states, while ostensibly involving death, namely the death of the self,
subvert this self-destruction by rendering it the metamorphic origin of an apocalyptic,
apotheosis-like experience which is inherently creative and life-affirming. Central to
this portrayal is the constant displacement of genesis onto metamorphosis. In this
way, Plath deconstructs the concept of creation by mapping it onto the idea of change;
the point of creation of the self is repeatedly revealed as the threshold of the evolution
of one identity into another. Plath thus highlights the latent fecundity of the ecstatic
movement of displacement. Her evocation of the transformative energy and activity
of the ecstatic self reveals a distinctly Nietzschean Übermensch-like figure of self-
overcoming, one which, as Schopenhauer also posits, gains pleasure from the will to
power, the thrust forward and upward into a higher self. Heideggerian inflections of
transcendence are also rife in this figure, the ecstatic self being akin to Heidegger’s
Dasein. These combined philosophical inflections are merged, finally, with Derridean
concepts of the dissolution and transfiguration of the self through a creativity-
enabling death. Plath diverges from Derrida, however, in that the human subject does
not disappear entirely from her scheme, since the emergence of the ecstatic self is
contingent upon the prior existence of the personalised self; its creation can only stem
from the change of this figure through the event of death.
 117

My work on Plath is allied to Judith Kroll’s mythological reading of Plath in

the similarities between our conceptions of “false self,” “essential self” and the
process of “transcendence” in Plath’s later poetry. My interpretative scheme differs,
however, in that its philosophical focus posits an ecstatic union of the self with the
self, rather than with the universe, as Kroll suggests. It also infers less a ritualistic,
controlled willing of death than the ecstatic reception of a state of ekstasis which
reflects and embodies the process and product of literary creativity. More a pure
motion than a Krollian ritual, it is not “the dissolution of the ego into a larger Self”
(Kroll 173), but the evolution of the ego into a higher self.
In “Fever 103°,” the process of displacement of the speaker’s identity
becomes explicit in the final section of the poem, starting with the fifteenth stanza:

I think I am going up,

I think I may rise –
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean
Not you, nor him

Not him, nor him

(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) -
To Paradise. (232)

The speaker looms large in the remaining half of the poem, “I” appearing ten times
more frequently here than in the former half, as she describes the effect of her fever in
terms corporeal and spiritual:

Three days. Three nights.

Lemon water, chicken
Plath Profiles 118

Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern –

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive. (232)

The “flickering” of the tenth stanza signifies the start of the process of
depersonalisation, constituting an abstraction of the speaker’s essential self from her
“old,” personalised self, with its “aguey tendon, the sin, the sin” and its fraught state
of malaise as symbolized by the “tinder cries,” the weighty, stultifying “yellow sullen
smokes” and the “ghastly orchid” (231). Rather than the water of the eleventh stanza
bringing any cleansing experience of purity, it is the “heat” and “light” inherent in the
symbols “moon / Of Japanese paper” and the sexually suggestive camellia (232)
which signify the purification of the speaker’s identity in an experience of ekstasis
which is akin to that experienced by religious mystics such as Teresa of Avila, whose
autobiographical work The Interior Castle4 Plath had read. The theme of
displacement of identity is compounded by Plath’s use of Christian (specifically,
Catholic) imagery of the Virgin Mary in her portrayal of the ascension of the speaker
to an elevated plane. The speaker’s defiant assertion of her new identity, culminating
in her attainment of an elysian existential state, clearly represents the supremacy of
harmony in this depersonalized state.
The inherently creative nature of this experience is enhanced by the reference
to the “beads of hot metal” and “acetylene” (232), substances not symbolic of
“modern and mechanical flame,” as Anthony Libby maintains (128), but rather
materials emphasising transfiguration and transformation. The final four stanzas
feature, arguably, the metamorphosis of the elements found earlier in the poem. The
4
In her journal entry on December 15 1959, she writes: “Am reading St. Therese’s autobiography: a
terror of the contradiction of “relic and pomp admiration” and the pure soul” (Journals 454). She notes
later that St. Teresa “is calle [sic] the Doctor of Mystical Theology because of her writings on the
relations of the soul with God” (Journals 591). Plath cites several sections of St. Teresa’s
autobiography and makes her own notes on the saint’s life, the material varying from incidents from
her early life to aphorisms from her work to descriptions of supernatural cures attributed to her.
 119

“beads of hot metal” (232) represent the transmuted moisture in the “lecher’s kiss”
(231), while the final ascension is the transfiguration of “the low smokes” and the
“yellow sullen smokes” which “will not rise” (232). This ascension also represents
the transformation of the leaden drooping of “[t]he ghastly orchid / Hanging its
hanging garden in the air” (231). The purifying fever of sexual fervour, whereby the
speaker bears “gold-beaten skin” and astounding “heat” and “light” and is heralded to
a higher plane of existence by “The beads of hot metal” (232), represents the
transfiguration of the Christian and Greek mythical imagery of hell found in the first
four stanzas (“The tongues of hell,” “The tinder cries,” “The indelible smell / Of a
snuffed candle!” [231]). Plath thus manipulates transcendental mysticism and
orthodox Catholicism by using them not simply to “describe a sickness,” as Libby
avows (128), but rather to create the emergence of the ecstatic self against a backdrop
of conflict between sexual decadence and purity, self-destruction and self-assertion.
The explicit use of the trope of performance in “Lady Lazarus” is, arguably,
Plath’s chief tool in portraying the abstraction of that poem’s speaker from her
typical, “personalised” self. The images of the “Nazi lampshade,” “paperweight,”
“fine / Jew linen” and the skeletal head (244), in their evocation of a being reduced to
inanimate objects, all serve to emphasise this abstraction of self. The suggestion of
trauma and death in the simile of “rocked shut / As a seashell” and the “sticky pearl”-
like worms (245), in conjunction with the ensuing images of imprisonment and hell,
convey the discord in the speaker’s typical, performed self. These find their
culmination in the images of bodily injury and torture in Stanzas 20 to 24, the “scars,”
the “bit of blood,” the turning and burning of the “pure gold baby / That melts to a
shriek,” concluding in the imagery of the literally reduced body in the “ash,” “cake of
soap,” “wedding ring” and “gold filling” (246). As in “Fever 103°,” this ecstasy
features clear religious overtones of ascension and resurrection, which are then
rendered problematic by being compounded with the suggestion of sexuality and
associated issues of illness, masochism, sadism and vengeance. The final stanza, with
its evocation of the phoenix ascending, bodily and spiritually, out of the ashes of its
former self to an incipient state of euphoric existence, embodies the ecstatic self as
creative process and product; sadistic and masochistic self-exposure transmutes into
pleasurable self-revelation. From the performance of the everyday self the speaker
has moved to the even more emphatic performance of an escalating drama of self-
Plath Profiles 120

realisation which has at its core the spectacular and rich generative potential of
metamorphosis.
While the appearance of the speaker in “Ariel” is initially in the context of
wholesome unity with the horse which she is riding (“God’s lioness, / How one we
grow, / Pivot of heels and knees!” [239]), the fracturing of this unity is implied in the
very same line, in the phrase “— The furrow / Splits and passes” (239). This furrow,
with its counterpart image of “The brown arc / Of the neck” which the speaker
“cannot catch” (239), heralds the abstraction of the speaker from her foregoing state
of unity and marks the point from which the movement of displacement of her
identity proceeds. The discord within the speaker surfaces in the evocation of
darkness and pain in the “Nigger-eye berries which “cast dark / Hooks —— / Black
sweet blood mouthfuls, / Shadows” (239); her movement away from her previous self
is rendered yet more explicit in the subsequent reference to that vague, menacing
“other,” the “Something else” which propels her from her previous position (239).
The evocation of her unpeeling of excuviae of self, “Dead hands, dead stringencies”
(239), makes it clear that the process of depersonalisation is now well underway. The
following stanza, with its suggestion of transmutation in “Foam to wheat” (239),
presages the explicit change in her existential state which is presented in the ninth
stanza. In this burgeoning existence as an “arrow, / The dew that flies / Suicidal”
(239-40), the speaker has clearly moved from an earthly, corporeal physicality, as
evidenced by the “Pivot of heels and knees! — The furrow […] Nigger-eye berries
[…] Thighs, hair; / Flakes from my heels” (239), to a more abstract, spiritual mode of
existence. This intensely metaphorical imagery in the final two stanzas, concluding
with her “drive / Into the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning” (240), reveals her
achievement of an ecstatic state of being “beside” or “beyond” herself. The imagery
and metaphors of suicidal self-immolation render her old identity most definitively
annihilated. Simultaneously, the repeated phoneme “I” in “flies,” “Suicidal,” “drive”
and “eye” underlies her pulsatingly self-assertive new existence (240), one which is
inherently life-affirming in its quality of insistent vocal self-presentation and its
evocation of the optimism of the dawn of a new existence. The depiction of this new
state of being as a fiery, liquid repository of creative and generative possibilities can
be interpreted as the metamorphosis of the “substanceless blue / Pour of tor and
distances” (239).
 121

From the “stasis” of the opening line, therefore, the poem moves irrevocably
to a mode of motion, of constant flux which, to use Dave Smith’s words, “is all fluid
feeling” (45). The speaker occupies once again an existential locus characterised by
harmony; her being “at one with the drive” (240) constitutes the transformation of
“How one we grow” (239), the crucial difference being that she is now entirely self-
defined. The ecstasy inherent in her climactic unity with her own existence, her own
purpose and action in her “drive / into the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning” (240)
is, as in “Fever 103º” and “Lady Lazarus,” imbued with multi-layered sexual and
quasi-religious inflections. Foremost among the latter are the alternative name for
Jerusalem in the Old Testament book of Isaiah, “Ariel,” meaning, as Kroll points out,
“lion (lioness) of God” or “altar […] of God” (181). It bears, furthermore, as
Margaret Dickie Uroff observes, the imprint of Egyptian mythology in the figures of
the warrior-, lioness- and sun-goddess Sekhmet, called variously “Scarlet Lady” and
“Lady of Flame,” associated with blood and arrows of fire, and Bast, goddess with the
same roles as well as goddess of pleasure, named “Eye of Ra” and “Lady of Flame”
(Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes 164-65). This culmination of the speaker’s experience
of displacement is, therefore, emphatically apotheosized and apocalyptic, aligning her
with the awesomely creative and verbally self-actualising divine being of Coleridge’s
“infinite I AM” (304) whose being is suffused with “the eternal act of creation”
(Seigel 444).
While Plath’s poetry of the ecstatic self is imbued with elements of the divine,
the mystical, the mythical and the fantastic, it is, nevertheless, grounded in the realm
of the mundane, in that it endorses the continued effort at the basic human endeavours
of human survival and human speech. Her ecstatic speaker’s capability for speech is,
paradoxically, innately human; her ecstatic flights of self-displacement are not merely
dramas of self-aggrandizement, of an egotistical power-trip into the realm of self-
exalted, pseudo-divine creative ability, but an emphasis of the human ability for self-
creation and change. In her repeated conjunction of human physicality (e.g. “kisses”
[232], “red hair” [247], “eat men” [247] and “red / Eye” [240]) with speech-enabling
ecstasy, Plath simultaneously highlights the pleasure of otherworldly ecstasy and the
pleasure in the achievement of ordinary, yet paradoxically extraordinary, human
existence. She echoes the “poor potsherd, patch, matchwood” yet “immortal
diamond” (66) which is the flawed, but gloriously redeemed, mortal of Gerard
Manley Hopkins’s “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the
Plath Profiles 122

Resurrection.” I reject, consequently, Anthony Libby’s claim that Plath’s poetry, in

its similarities with the religio-mystical writings of the via negativa, features “few
avowals of love for humanity” which “balance the desire for immersion in otherness”
(144). I maintain that Plath celebrates the condition of humanity for its very ability to
provide experiences of otherness which, paradoxically, involve self-assertion; she
promulgates ordinary humanity as a potential source of enlightening mystical vision.
Plath’s ecstatic speaker contrasts, therefore, with the “omnipotent self” of the
artist as described by Kristeva (50), a figure of “[a]esthetic exultance” which is
“plunged into mourning” by “ordinary social and linguistic usage” (50-51). More
applicable in this context is Kristeva’s description of ekstasis as a process whereby
“[i]n the place of death and so as not to die of the other’s death, I bring forth – or at
least I rate highly – […] a “beyond” that my psyche produces in order to take up a
position outside itself” (98-99). Ekstasis represents for Plath not a “cauldron of
mourning” as Christina Britzolakis suggests (101), but rather the fiery furnace of the
forging of fresh creative possibilities of life and speech; death functions as a platform
for the speaker’s launch to new heights of existence, rather than the plunge to depths
of damnation or existential despair. Plath displaces and replaces death with the
ecstatic self, but, crucially, not to escape death, but rather to defeat it; hence, death
becomes the genesis of new life. The ecstatic self is an “I” elated because it is an “I”
which has been annihilated, and yet survives; arguably, in a purer form than before.
Marjorie Perloff, among others, has shown that Plath’s structuring of Ariel is
testament to a pervasive desire to emphasise “rebirth and continuity” (16). Her poems
are, as Dave Smith avers, “ectoplasmic with the will to live” (46). “Tulips,” for
instance, also deeply infused with the concept of depersonalisation, concludes with
the speaker’s persistent heartbeat, indicative of survival and self-love, and her
recuperative tasting of health. “Poppies in October” also closes its drama of
contrasting self-abnegation and self-elevation with the prominent image of a “red
heart” blooming and the dawning of a new day (240). “Mystic,” meanwhile,
concludes its depiction of a mystical self-immolation with the intertwining of these
three images of the sun, flowers and the heart, defiantly asserting the continuation of
life: “the heart has not stopped” (269). These portrayals give the lie to Daphne
Simeon and Jeffrey Abugel’s claim that the “tendency to self-observation” which is
inherent in depersonalisation “continuously rejects the tendency to live” (59). In
Plath’s scheme of ekstasis, self-observation is the vision which enables self-
 123

transformation and the resultant ability to live life to the full. This ekstasis is what
Maurice Blanchot describes in The Space of Literature as “an experience of death”
which is, essentially, “[t]o see properly,” to find that “things then offer themselves in
the inexhaustible fecundity of their meaning which our vision ordinarily misses – our
vision which is only capable of one point of view” (151). In occupying a position of
detached elevation, an aerial/“Ariel” view, the ecstatic self is afforded a much greater
plenitude of perspectives than the personalised self; the change in the “I” creates a
change in the eye.
This advantage of perspective, when allied with Plath’s interest in the
generative power of displacement and metamorphosis, suggests that she is more
fundamentally concerned with the role of the ecstatic self in the eradication of
distance between concepts, the conflation of opposing ideas such as life and death,
self and other, speech and silence, than in the connotation of negative valencies of
alienation, isolation and detachment. The displacement inherent in the ecstatic self is,
after all, not merely a matter of distancing, but also the enactment of rapprochement
to a new locus, a remapping, and one which does not implicitly preclude a return to
the original points of departure. To invert Robert Duncan’s phrase and say “to
transform is to form” (Ellmann and O’Clair 992), we approach the poetic act being
carried out by Plath in her poetry of the ecstatic self; every time she depicts the move
from the so-called “normal” self to the ecstatic self, she effects, essentially, the
generation of a new mode of being. Change becomes creation; metamorphosis and
genesis become indelibly intertwined. Her ecstatic female personae are not engaged
in Margaret Dickie Uroff’s conception of “subversions of the creative act,” since they
are “anxious to make a breakthrough back into life” (“Sylvia Plath” 115). Their
“performances” are less “stagey” (“Sylvia Plath” 115) than fervently, self-glorifyingly
theatrical, and comprise those very acts of self-revelation which Uroff claims they are
attempting to prevent (“Sylvia Plath” 115). Their subversion is, more accurately,
their revelation of creation based on change rather than on the sui generis genesic.
Similarly, Plath conflates personality and impersonality; the figure of the
ecstatic self in her poetry is, arguably, both the “the expression of personality” and the
“escape from personality” (48-49) to which Eliot refers in “Tradition and the
Individual Talent.” This effulgent new ontological state constitutes another version of
Eliot’s poetic doctrine as advocated by Steven K. Hoffmann; a personality which is
“properly objectified and thereby transformed” (691). In privileging this transformed
Plath Profiles 124

subjectivity’s life-affirming self-expression, Plath reaffirms her belief in the value of

creative poetic endeavour; she postulates a connection between the ecstatic self, the
supremacy of the human will to live and the supremacy of the poetic voice. It is to
such a connection between poet and reader that Diane Middlebrook refers when she
asserts that Ariel’s excellence consists “in having found a poetic mode that […]
conveys an instantly recognizable subjectivity, one that matters to readers” (227); the
significance of the ecstatic self to readers lies, arguably, in its familiar otherness.
Plath immerses her readers in a Stevensian “tune beyond us, yet ourselves” (165); the
ecstatic self is her muse and her music.
 125

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