#particularly in relation to levels of nakedness

[jessieren]

Dear Mr Evans

Please find within a formal letter of complaint regarding your non compliance with specific terms in your recently signed contract.

Specifically, the women of tumblr would like to express their concern that they are running extremely low on HNW content and are even having to resort to duplicating previously used content.

They are also suffering from a near complete drought of new work, new photo content and well, frankly, new you.

We hereby demand that you engage in some new projects really fucking soon, preferably with the aforementioned contractually agreed levels of nakedness.

And yes we mean any project..

Thx babe

Love tumblr

[hellomynameisbisexual]

Here's a shortlist of those who realized that I — a cis woman who'd identified as heterosexual for decades of life — was in fact actually bi, long before I realized it myself recently: my sister, all my friends, my boyfriend, and the TikTok algorithm.

On TikTok, the relationship between user and algorithm is uniquely (even sometimes uncannily) intimate. An app which seemingly contains as many multitudes of life experiences and niche communities as there are people in the world, we all start in the lowest common denominator of TikTok. Straight TikTok (as it's popularly dubbed) initially bombards your For You Page with the silly pet videos and viral teen dances that folks who don't use TikTok like to condescendingly reduce it to.

Quickly, though, TikTok begins reading your soul like some sort of divine digital oracle, prying open layers of your being never before known to your own conscious mind. The more you use it, the more tailored its content becomes to your deepest specificities, to the point where you get stuff that's so relatable that it can feel like a personal attack (in the best way) or (more dangerously) even a harmful trigger from lifelong traumas.

For example: I don't know what dark magic (read: privacy violations) immediately clued TikTok into the fact that I was half-Brazilian, but within days of first using it, Straight TikTok gave way to at first Portuguese-speaking then broader Latin TikTok. Feeling oddly seen (being white-passing and mostly American-raised, my Brazilian identity isn't often validated), I was liberal with the likes, knowing that engagement was the surefire way to go deeper down this identity-affirming corner of the social app.

TikTok made lots of assumptions from there, throwing me right down the boundless, beautiful, and oddest multiplicities of Alt TikTok, a counter to Straight TikTok's milquetoast mainstreamness.

Home to a wide spectrum of marginalized groups, I was giving out likes on my FYP like Oprah, smashing that heart button on every type of video: from TikTokers with disabilities, Black and Indigenous creators, political activists, body-stigma-busting fat women, and every glittering shade of the LGBTQ cornucopia. The faves were genuine, but also a way to support and help offset what I knew about the discriminatory biases in TikTok's algorithm.

My diverse range of likes started to get more specific by the minute, though. I wasn't just on general Black TikTok anymore, but Alt Cottagecore Middle-Class Black Girl TikTok (an actual label one creator gave her page's vibes). Then it was Queer Latina Roller Skating Girl TikTok, Women With Non-Hyperactive ADHD TikTok, and then a double whammy of Women Loving Women (WLW) TikTok alternating between beautiful lesbian couples and baby bisexuals.

Looking back at my history of likes, the transition from queer “ally” to “salivating simp” is almost imperceptible.

There was no one precise "aha" moment. I started getting "put a finger down" challenges that wouldn't reveal what you were putting a finger down for until the end. Then, 9-fingers deep (winkwink), I'd be congratulated for being 100% bisexual. Somewhere along the path of getting served multiple WLW Disney cosplays in a single day and even dom lesbian KinkTok roleplay — or whatever the fuck Bisexual Pirate TikTok is — deductive reasoning kind of spoke for itself.

But I will never forget the one video that was such a heat-seeking missile of a targeted attack that I was moved to finally text it to my group chat of WLW friends with a, "Wait, am I bi?" To which the overwhelming consensus was, "Magic 8 Ball says, 'Highly Likely.'"

Serendipitously posted during Pride Month, the video shows a girl shaking her head at the caption above her head, calling out confused and/or closeted queers who say shit like, "I think everyone is a LITTLE bisexual," to the tune of "Closer" by The Chainsmokers. When the lyrics land on the word "you," she points straight at the screen — at me — her finger and inquisitive look piercing my hopelessly bisexual soul like Cupid's goddamn arrow.

Oh no, the voice inside my head said, I have just been mercilessly perceived.

As someone who had, in fact, done feminist studies at a tiny liberal arts college with a gender gap of about 70 percent women, I'd of course dabbled. I've always been quick to bring up the Kinsey scale, to champion a true spectrum of sexuality, and to even declare (on multiple occasions) that I was, "straight, but would totally fuck that girl!"

Oh no, the voice inside my head returned, I've literally just been using extra words to say I was bi.

After consulting the expertise of my WLW friend group (whose mere existence, in retrospect, also should've clued me in on the flashing neon pink, purple, and blue flag of my raging bisexuality), I ran to my boyfriend to inform him of the "news."

"Yeah, baby, I know. We all know," he said kindly.

"How?!" I demanded.

Well for one, he pointed out, every time we came across a video of a hot girl while scrolling TikTok together, I'd without fail watch the whole way through, often more than once, regardless of content. (Apparently, straight girls do not tend to do this?) For another, I always breathlessly pointed out when we'd pass by a woman I found beautiful, often finding a way to send a compliment her way. ("I'm just a flirt!" I used to rationalize with a hand wave, "Obvs, I'm not actually sexually attracted to them!") Then, I guess, there were the TED Talk-like rants I'd subject him to about the thinly veiled queer relationship in Adventure Time between Princess Bubblegum and Marcelyne the Vampire Queen — which the cowards at Cartoon Network forced creators to keep as subtext!

And, well, when you lay it all out like that...

But my TikTok-fueled bisexual awakening might actually speak less to the omnipotence of the app's algorithm, and more to how heteronormativity is truly one helluva drug.

Sure, TikTok bombarded me with the thirst traps of my exact type of domineering masc lady queers, who reduced me to a puddle of drool I could no longer deny. But I also recalled a pivotal moment in college when I briefly questioned my heterosexuality, only to have a lesbian friend roll her eyes and chastise me for being one of those straight girls who leads Actual Queer Women on. I figured she must know better. So I never pursued any of my lady crushes in college, which meant I never experimented much sexually, which made me conclude that I couldn't call myself bisexual if I'd never had actual sex with a woman. I also didn't really enjoy lesbian porn much, though the fact that I'd often find myself fixating on the woman during heterosexual porn should've clued me into that probably coming more from how mainstream lesbian porn is designed for straight men.

The ubiquity of heterormativity, even when unwittingly perpetrated by members of the queer community, is such an effective self-sustaining cycle. Aside from being met with queer-gating (something I've since learned bi folks often experience), I had a hard time identifying my attraction to women as genuine attraction, simply because it felt different to how I was attracted to men.

Heteronormativity is truly one helluva drug.

So much of women's sexuality — of my sexuality — can feel defined by that carnivorous kind of validation you get from men. I met no societal resistance in fully embodying and exploring my desire for men, either (which, to be clear, was and is insatiable slut levels of wanting that peen.) But in retrospect, I wonder how many men I slept with not because I was truly attracted to them, but because I got off on how much they wanted me.

My attraction to women comes with a different texture of eroticism. With women (and bare with a baby bi, here), the attraction feels more shared, more mutual, more tender rather than possessive. It's no less raw or hot or all-consuming, don't get me wrong. But for me at least, it comes more from a place of equality rather than just power play. I love the way women seem to see right through me, to know me, without us really needing to say a word.

I am still, as it turns out, a sexual submissive through-and-through, regardless of what gender my would-be partner is. But, ignorantly and unknowingly, I'd been limiting my concept of who could embody dominant sexual personas to cis men. But when TikTok sent me down that glorious rabbit hole of masc women (who know exactly what they're doing, btw), I realized my attraction was not to men, but a certain type of masculinity. It didn't matter which body or genitalia that presentation came with.

There is something about TikTok that feels particularly suited to these journeys of sexual self-discovery and, in the case of women loving women, I don't think it's just the prescient algorithm. The short-form video format lends itself to lightning bolt-like jolts of soul-bearing nakedness, with the POV camera angles bucking conventions of the male gaze, which entrenches the language of film and TV in heterosexual male desire.

In fairness to me, I'm far from the only one who missed their inner gay for a long time — only to have her pop out like a queer jack-in-the-box throughout a near year-long quarantine that led many of us to join TikTok. There was the baby bi mom, and scores of others who no longer had to publicly perform their heterosexuality during lockdown — only to realize that, hey, maybe I'm not heterosexual at all?

Flooded with video after video affirming my suspicions, reflecting my exact experiences as they happened to others, the change in my sexual identity was so normalized on TikTok that I didn't even feel like I needed to formally "come out." I thought this safe home I'd found to foster my baby bisexuality online would extend into the real world.

But I was in for a rude awakening.

Testing out my bisexuality on other platforms, casually referring to it on Twitter, posting pictures of myself decked out in a rainbow skate outfit (which I bought before realizing I was queer), I received nothing but unquestioning support and validation. Eventually, I realized I should probably let some members of my family know before they learned through one of these posts, though.

Daunted by the idea of trying to tell my Latina Catholic mother and Swiss Army veteran father (who's had a crass running joke about me being a "lesbian" ever since I first declared myself a feminist at age 12), I chose the sibling closest to me. Seeing as how gender studies was one of her majors in college too, I thought it was a shoo-in. I sent an off-handed, joke-y but serious, "btw I'm bi now!" text, believing that's all that would be needed to receive the same nonchalant acceptance I found online.

It was not.

I didn't receive a response for two days. Hurt and panicked by what was potentially my first mild experience of homophobia, I called them out. They responded by insisting we need to have a phone call for such "serious" conversations. As I calmly tried to express my hurt on said call, I was told my text had been enough to make this sibling worry about my mental wellbeing. They said I should be more understanding of why it'd be hard for them to (and I'm paraphrasing) "think you were one way for twenty-eight years" before having to contend with me deciding I was now "something else."

But I wasn't "something else," I tried to explain, voice shaking. I hadn't knowingly been deceiving or hiding this part of me. I'd simply discovered a more appropriate label. But it was like we were speaking different languages. Other family members were more accepting, thankfully. There are many ways I'm exceptionally lucky, my IRL environment as supportive as Baby Bi TikTok. Namely, I'm in a loving relationship with a man who never once mistook any of it as a threat, instead giving me all the space in the world to understand this new facet of my sexuality.

I don't have it all figured out yet. But at least when someone asks if I listen to Girl in Red on social media, I know to answer with a resounding, "Yes," even though I've never listened to a single one of her songs. And for now, that's enough.

[mostballinestplaya29]

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

6/24

This film really surprised me in many ways. For one, I am truly not a fan of this particular time period when it comes to films. Secondly, the film starts off slow and a bit dreary. Even with these couple of details that don’t fit my taste, I truly enjoyed the realness and the intimacy of the film.

There were a few scenes that involved nudity; however, there was a lack of the male gaze in those scenes. The first nude scene with Marianne didn’t appear to focus on her naked body and she appeared as more of a silhouette in the shot. Heloise appeared partially naked in a shot, while Marianne was painting her portrait, yet I got the feeling that her nakedness was the innocent vulnerability that she shared with Marianne. Her naked breast did not even phase me as a sexual part of the scene.  

Someone mentioned in class that the removal of Heloise’s and Marianne’s scarves before sharing a kiss was a significant scene for them and showed an important example of consent. I feel as though this is an important aspect in the film because it displays the best example of respect. Both characters truly respect and care for each other. Another example of this care is when Marianne comes clean to Heloise and tells her that she was hired to paint her portrait—against her will. Typically, in this type of situation involving deceit, there’s an over-dramatic blow up that occurs. Instead, the ‘coming clean’ seemed to bring the two women closer together.  

The Jenny Kitzinger and Celia Kitzinger reading was relatable to this film because of the realness of the two main characters—Marianne and Heloise. It also helps that this film was directed by a female director. In the reading, lesbians are particularly dangerous and highly sexualized in films; however, in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, this is not the case. There is a complete lack of the male gaze, there is more vulnerability and there is a higher level of respect between the women.  

[lsmithart]

**Research: Robert Gober / The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry

Anti mentioned Robert Gober to me in relation to my wax cast ideas due to his explorations of the body and objects as fragment. Gober’s practice relates greatly to multiple areas of my research, particularly the abject, the uncanny and object/material theory. Gober’s practice explores objects as personified beings, his sculptures encouraging us to view them as subjects rather than objects. This notion relates to an area of research divulged within my dissertation, indeed a key underpinning to my area of practice. In the book ‘The Object’ by Antony Hudek (2014), the author explains that “objects define us because they come first, by commanding our attention, even our respect; they exist before us, possibly without us” (p.15). 

Untitled (wax leg), 1989-90.

Untitled, 1984.

Similarly to Duchamp, Gober utilises domestic, everyday objects, however choosing to cast them rather than exhibiting the original objects. Hudek explains that “transforming the Duchampian readymade into something dubious and obsolete was a widespread preoccupation in the 1960s and 70s, as the post-war euphoria at the potentially infinite multiplication of consumable objects turned into doubt” (p.20). Although Gober mainly created work during the 1980s, it would suggest that his practice evolved as a result of the increasing popularity in utilising domestic objects similarly to that of Duchamp throughout the 20th century. ‘While thumbing his nose at the art world was great fun, the Bicycle Wheel was also a catalyst for new ideas and for re-thinking entrenched positions. In this one work he not only re-defined the activity of the artist and re-imagined the nature of a work of art in the 20th century, but he also re-interpreted the role of the spectator’ (Snell, 2018). Gober’s concepts span sexuality, religion, and politics; these concepts touched upon incredibly minimally through his use of fragmentation and disparate, simple object sculptures.

For me, Gober’s work spoke of something more deeply set in the experience of the body in pain. I particularly drew this conclusion from his wax casts of fragmented body parts, prompting me to reconsider my readings into ‘the body as fragment’ by Linda Nochlin. I thought about how viewing the body in a fragmented and abject sense created feelings of uneasiness and how this relates to the experience of pain and trauma; particularly when trying to gauge an understanding of another person’s experience of trauma. It is a process of attempting to share and embody trauma through the means of materialism and externalising what exists within that often instils a sense of uncomfortableness in others. I have often found this to be the case in my own practice due to the sheer vulnerability and embodiment of the internal that characterises it. 

I had heard of the book ‘The Body in Pain’ by Elaine Scarry in a lecture by Doris Salcedo whilst researching last year and had been meaning to read it since then as the ideas and concepts resonated with me. Whilst on this train of thought, I decided that now would be a good time to make some headway with this book. It turned out to be a fascinating read and I am only part of the way through. Not only did it help to contextualise my own ideas about the body as fragment in relation to Gober’s work and beyond, but it also brought new ideas about breaking down the process of trauma to light. My key notes from the text are below:

The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry

Chapter 3: Pain and Imagining

Page 161-162:

The object is an extension of, an expression of, the state. E.g. rain = longing, berries = hunger, night = fear. However nothing expresses the physical pain. Therefore, pain becomes something that must be materialised by the individual. In art terms therefore, subconscious processing of trauma through material output becomes the object associated with pain.

Page 163:

“As an embodied imaginer capable of picturing, making present an absent friend, that same imaginer is also capable of inventing both the idea and the materialised form. This demonstrates a mechanism for transforming the condition of absence into presence.”

Page 164:

Physical pain is an intentional state without an intentional object; imagining is an intentional object without an experienceable intentional state. Thus is may be that in some peculiar way it is appropriate to think of pain as the imagination’s intentional state, and to identity the imagination as pain’s intentional object. In isolation, pain ‘intends’ nothing’ it is wholly passive; it is ‘suffered’ rather than willed or directed. To be more precise, one can say that pain only becomes an intentional state once it is brought into relation with the objectifying power of the imagination: through that relation, pain will be transformed from a wholly passive and helpless occurrence into a self-modifying and self-eliminating one.

Physical pain and imagining could belong to one another as each other’s missing intentional counterpart.

Non-object transferred into object through a process of imagining, feeling and actioning.

Chapter 5: The Interior Structure of the Artefact

Page 282:

The womb is materialised as dwelling-places and shelters.

The printing press, the institutionalised convention of written history, photographs, libraries, films, tape recordings and Xerox machines are all materialisations of the embodied capacity for memory. They together make a relatively ahistorical creature into an individual one, one whose memory extends far back beyond the opening of its own individual lived experience, one who anticipates being remembered beyond the close of its own individual lived experience, and one who accomplishes all this without elevating each day its awakened brain to rehearsals and recitations of all information it needs to keep available to itself.

Page 284:

The human being has an outside surface and an inside surface, and creating may be expressed as a reversing of these two bodily linings. There exists both verbal artefacts (e.g. the scriptures) and material artefacts (e.g. the altar) that objectify the act of believing, imaging, or creating as a sometimes graphically represented turning of the body inside-out. But what is expressed in terms of body part it, as those cited contexts themselves make clear, more accurately formulated as the endowing of interior sensory events with a metaphysical referent. The interchange of inside and outside surfaces requires not the literal reversal of bodily linings but the making of what is originally interior and private into something exterior and shareable, and conversely, the reabsorption of what is now exterior and shareable into the intimate recesses of individual consciousness.

Page 285:

The reversal of inside and outside surfaces ultimately suggests that by transporting the external object world into the sentient interior, that interior gains some small share of the blissful immunity of intert inanimate object hood; and conversely, by transporting pain out onto the external world, that external environment is deprived of its immunity to, unmindfulness of, and indifference toward the problems of sentience.

Page 286:

The habit of poets and ancient dreamers to project their own aliveness onto non alive things itself suffuses that it is the basic work of creation to bring about this very projection of aliveness; in other words, while the poet pretends or wishes that the inert external external world had his or her own capacity for sentient awareness, civilisation works to make this so.

Page 288:

A chair, as though it were itself put in pain, as though it knew from the inside the problem of body weight, will only then accommodate and eliminate the problem. A woven blanket or solid wall internalise within their design the recognition of the instability of body temperature and the precariousness of nakedness, and only by absorbing the knowledge of these conditions into themselves (by, as it were, being themselves subject to these forms of distress), absorb them out of the human body.

Page 289-290 - A material or verbal artefact is not an alive, sentient, percipient creature, and thus can neither itself experience discomfort nor recognise discomfort in others. But though it cannot be sentiently aware of pain, it is in the essential fact of itself the objectification of that awareness; itself incapable of the act of perceiving, its design, its structure, is the structure of a perception. So, for example, the chair can - if projection is being formulated in terms of body part - be recognised as mimetic of the spine; it can instead be recognised as mimetic of body weight; and it can finally, and most accurately, be recognised as mimetic of sentient awareness. If one human acknowledges another human in pain and wishes it gone, this is an invisible, complex percipient event happening somewhere between the eyes and the brain and engaging the entire psyche. If this could process of imaging unreality and acknowledging the reality of pain could be made visible and lifted out of the body, endowed with an external shape - that shape would be the shape of a chair (or, depending on the circumstance, a lightbulb, a coat, an ingestible form of willow bark). The shape of a chair is a shape of perceived-pain-wished-gone. The chair is therefore the materialised structure of a perception; it is sentient awareness materialised into a freestanding design.

Page 290-291 - Two levels of projection are transformations: first from an invisible aspect of consciousness to a visible but disappearing action ; second, from a disappearing action to an enduring material form. Thus in work, a perception is danced; in the chair, a danced-perception is sculpted. Each stage of transformation sustains and amplifies the artifice that was present at the beginning. Even in the interior of consciousness, pain is ‘remade’ by being wished away; in the external action, the private wish is made sharable; finally in the artefact, the shared wish comes true. For it the chair is a ‘successful’ object, it will relieve her of the distress of her weight far better than did the dance.

References:

Hudek, A., (2014). Documents of Contemporary Art: The Object. London: Whitechapel Gallery, The MIT Press. pp. 14, 15, 20, 22, 23, 24, 30, 32, 40, 42, 43, 94, 97.

Matthew Marks, (no date). Robert Gober. [Online]. Available at https://matthewmarks.com/artists/robert-gober. [Accessed on 28/11/2020].

Scarry, E., (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. New York.

Snell, T., (2018). Here’s looking at: Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel 1913. The Conversation. [Online]. Available at http://theconversation.com/heres-looking-at-marcel-duchamps-bicycle-wheel-1913-98846. [Accessed on 26/11/2020].

Vischer, T., and (Basel), S., (2007). Robert Gober: Sculptures and Installations 1979-2007. Steidl. Available at http://www.schaulager.org/en/file/195/cb6849b2/rg_CatalogueIntroduction_E.pdf.

[wumbleberry-fc]

All of them :P

1:Full name

Alexander David Walter, but please call me Pete

2:Age

18

3:3 Fears

I’ll die early and break my promise to my best fried to not die for “many, many years to come,” getting anything- even water- in my eyes or close to my eyes, my parents finding out about my beliefs and kicking me out

4:3 things I love

My best friend, my best friend, and, um, my best friend

My best friend, cuddling/hugging, and being cold

5:4 turns on

Uhh, I only get “turned on” if I haven’t ‘done the deed’ in a while, but I don’t really have any stimuli that can sexually “turn me on” consistently.

6:4 turns off

Honestly? Nakedness. And also…… gosh, I don’t know. My lack of sexual attraction is not helping me come up with an answer…

7:My best friend

My best friend is Rachel and she is a first violin in the top orchestra at my former high school and we met through a school club and we had lunch every day almost all of my senior year and she is the best and I love her

8:Sexual orientation

Sexual orientation? Asexual, or on the Ace spectrum at least.

9:My best first date

Uh, what in my life classifies as a date? I’m so ??? on everything, but….. I’m going to claim that I haven’t had a true first date with anybody. However, I did go to dinner with someone (who was forced to go with me by her parents 1/10 would not recommend at all) before the homecoming dance in my freshman year and the pasta wasn’t terrible and we did have some moments of sustained conversation…

10:How tall am I

6′ 1″ (186 cm)

11:What do I miss

My best friend, getting to eat lunch with my best friend and another of my closest friends every day at school, the high school clubs and band, marching band, my AP Gov class, playing games with people

12:What time were I born

11:55 am on a Monday

13:Favourite color

Onyx, cerulean/cobalt

14:Do I have a crush

I wouldn’t classify anything I have as a crush right now, neither romantically nor platonically

15:Favourite quote

“You’ve got opinions, manWe’re all entitled to ‘emBut I never asked

So let me thank you for your timeAnd try to not waste any more of mineGet out of here fast”

from the song “King of Anything” by Sara Bareilles

16:Favourite place

Next to my best friend. Otherwise, the city where I grew up.

17:Favourite food

A cheeseburger with an egg on it. A bun, a burger patty, american cheese (or cheddar), bacon, an over-easy egg, and lettuce. Plus, I love biting into the burger and then letting the runny yolk drip onto the fries and if I’m lucky, some cheese will also drip onto the fries over time and so I can have cheesy, egg-y fries and they just taste so good

18:Do I use sarcasm

Yeah, I would say so.

19:What am I listening to right now

The ringing in my ears from my hearing damage

20:First thing I notice in new person

Their faces (more specifically, their lips)

21:Shoe size

Men’s 11-12 Wide

22:Eye color

Blue most of the time

23:Hair color

Dirty Blond

24:Favourite style of clothing

Whatever is clean, or if not, whatever I can slip on in a few seconds. Often a T-shirt and basketball shorts

25:Kiss someone that starts with the letter “R”?

Yeah

27:Meaning behind my URL

I play the tuba and wanted to join the Jesus SquadTM

28:Kiss someone that starts with the letter “M”?

No

29:Favourite song

“She Used To Be Mine” by Sara Bareilles

30:Favourite band

Panic! at the Disco

31:How I feel right now

Unstimulated

32:Someone I love

My best friend

33:My current relationship status

Content

34:My relationship with my parents

I’m not all that open with them and don’t feel that it’s worth it at this point to let them into my personal life

35:Favourite holiday

Christmas, honestly. It’s one of the two times I get to see all of my mom’s family, guaranteed, and it’s much better than Thanksgiving

36:Tattoos and piercing i have

None, and I don’t want any either

37:Tattoos and piercing i want

Oh. Well, what I typed five seconds ago still stands, I don’t want any.

38:The reason I joined Tumblr

Uhh, I’m not going to say… Let’s say the puns, yeah, the puns…

39:Do I and my last ex hate each other?

She should hate me, but I don’t hate her. I just feel incredibly guilty…

40:Do I ever get “good morning” or “good night ” texts?

My best friend and I try to say good night every night.

41:Have I ever kissed the last person you texted?

No

42:When did I last hold hands?

Sunday

43:How long does it take me to get ready in the morning?

However long it takes to find clothes and get up

44:Have You shaved your legs in the past three days?

It’s been a good two years or so I think, but I want to do it again

45:Where am I right now?

My living room

46:If I were drunk & can’t stand, who’s taking care of me?

I wouldn’t be drunk, alcohol in no way tastes anywhere close to as good as root beer does

47:Do I like my music loud or at a reasonable level?

However loud it needs to be for me to clearly hear it, and loud if I’m trying to drown out noises I don’t want to hear (the television about once a week average)

48:Do I live with my Mom and Dad?

For 11 more days and then whenever I’m not at college, and we’ll see after I graduate

49:Am I excited for anything?

I’m going to my best friend’s first cross country meet of the season today and so I get to see my best friend today!!!!!

50:Do I have someone of the opposite sex I can tell everything to?

My best friend

51:How often do I wear a fake smile?

Talking about my life or the future or anything around my parents and church friends

52:When was the last time I hugged someone?

Sunday

53:What if the last person I kissed was kissing someone else right in front of me?

I’d be really confused but I’d support and accept it

54:Is there anyone I trust even though I should not?

I only fully 100% trust one person, and I’m fairly sure the people I’ve talked to on here aren’t bad

55:What is something I disliked about today?

I once again didn’t do anything productive towards getting ready for college

56:If I could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be?

Barack Obama would be pretty neat to meet

57:What do I think about most?

My best friend

58:What’s my strangest talent?

My buddy, I have no clue. Probably making alright sounding composition things with no knowledge of theory or anything.

59:Do I have any strange phobias?

emailing people, talking on the phone with people

60:Do I prefer to be behind the camera or in front of it?

I don’t like filming, but I also am not the most comfortable in front of a camera at all times

61:What was the last lie I told?

Probably something related to emailing my professor about renting a tuba for band

62:Do I prefer talking on the phone or video chatting online?

Video chatting online is better than talking on the phone, but both are fifth out of five methods of communicating that I detailed up yesterday for my best friend.

63:Do I believe in ghosts? How about aliens?

No, and probably not. I do think aliens exist, but I don’t believe in aliens? Like, it’s rational to think that given the entire space, aliens have to exist, but also any thoughts we have about aliens don’t strike me as believable??

64:Do I believe in magic?

No

65:Do I believe in luck?

Yes and no, it depends, it switches back and forth. Kinda like if I believe in a monotheist God.

66:What’s the weather like right now?

Recovering from the ash from the wildfires. Also we’re transitioning from summer drought to our rest of the year “This is why Seattle has the reputation it does” weather, slowly but surely over the course of the next month before it truly kicks in mid-October.

67:What was the last book I’ve read?

The last book that I read start to finish every word was probably Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner”

68:Do I like the smell of gasoline?

Not particularly, no

69:Do I have any nicknames?

(Hot) Pete, and my last name

70:What was the worst injury I’ve ever had?

Split open my head and needed a couple stitches when I was 8

71:Do I spend money or save it?

If I had any self-control or discipline, I’d be that rich teenage white boy you hear a lot in the media

72:Can I touch my nose with a tounge?

No.

73:Is there anything pink in 10 feet from me?

Same as yesterday, the stuffed animal, pillow, and folder are all still here and my hot pink tie is still in my room about 40 feet away

74:Favourite animal?

I feel uneasy around pretty much any non-human sentient being, and then most human sentient beings as well. I just… don’t know how to answer this question honestly

75:What was I doing last night at 12 AM?

I was finishing up answering the rest of the asks last night at around midnight

76:What do I think is Satan’s last name is?

Satan is just a myth to scare people into being “better” people, where “better” is just a specific lifestyle dictated by whoever managed to gain influence in the doctrine and teachings of the religion.

His origins also come from a time where surnames and ‘last names’ were not a thing, so Satan is most likely a stand-alone name, much like Plato and Zeus.

77:What’s a song that always makes me happy when I hear it?

“She Used To Be Mine” by Sara Bareilles

78:How can you win my heart?

I’ll be the judge of that. It just… happens. Rachel, Kyle, Grae, Haley, Katie, Hot Luke, and others just……. existed, and then pretty much somehow they just became a big part of my life and I…. I just love them

79:What would I want to be written on my tombstone?

That I was a beloved friend who made a positive difference in their lives

80:What is my favorite word?

Aaaaahhhh! I know so many words, like, more than 5, and there are so many good ones!!!!!! Right now, I’m feeling music as the best word of the moment.

81:My top 5 blogs on tumblr

No. This is so rude. Why? Why must I single out a few blogs and tell the world that the interaction we’ve had isn’t enough for me and that you’re just not special enough to me? I refuse to do this.

82:If the whole world were listening to me right now, what would I say?

“I love my best friend, gay people are amazing, fund the arts, respect the arts, respect people who work the “undesired” jobs, work to protect the environment, and try to do things that make you happy while not harming other people or sentient beings.”

83:Do I have any relatives in jail?

Not that I know of

84:I accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow me with the super-power of my choice! What is that power?

I’m firmly in the teleportation camp. I hate being late and I’m not a fan of travelling.

85:What would be a question I’d be afraid to tell the truth on?

Hygiene-related questions… please…. I’m working on it…. let me be…..

86:What is my current desktop picture?

The default background

87:Had sex?

No, ew.

88:Bought condoms?

Never actually seen them accept in memes and once during health class in freshman year

89:Gotten pregnant?

No

90:Failed a class?

Yeah….. and it was the second semester of APUSH too…

91:Kissed a boy?

On his hand, which I’ll count

92:Kissed a girl?

Yeah

93:Have I ever kissed somebody in the rain?

No

94:Had job?

I became a CYO volleyball referee and reffed two seasons so far.

95:Left the house without my wallet?

Often, and since I’ve been driving, only twice (although one was driving up for a the campus tour at the college I ended up choosing, which was about 5 total hours of driving that day, a week after I got my license). I try to remember it when I go out because I saw a few months ago a post on here saying how valuable it is in case of an accident or something and the person has an ID, and I’ve been watching crime dramas for years and having an ID is always good.

96:Bullied someone on the internet?

Good heavens, no!

97:Had sex in public?

No! Ewwww, God that’s even worse

98:Played on a sports team?

I sooo miss volleyball, and soccer was fun too

99:Smoked weed?

I hope to be able to say no until I die

100:Did drugs?

I occasionally took my prescriptions… for like 2 months… whoops

But no, not for the intention of getting high or anything, I hate drugs, even advil and tylenol

101:Smoked cigarettes?

Fuck cigarettes (and no, I haven’t)

102:Drank alcohol?

A drop of an IPA when I was 13 and a sip of a red wine when I was 16 (with parental supervision that time), and nah, it isn’t my thing.

103:Am I a vegetarian/vegan?

Show me a well-prepared vegetable that has a decent flavor and I might be open to eating them more often

104:Been overweight?

Ever since I was like 2

105:Been underweight?

Never

106:Been to a wedding?

I think I’ve been to 5?

107:Been on the computer for 5 hours straight?

what do you think I do every day?

108:Watched TV for 5 hours straight?

So many wasted hours...

109:Been outside my home country?

Not yet

110:Gotten my heart broken?

Actually? Seriously? Like, more than just butt hurt over an infatuation? No, not really

111:Been to a professional sports game?

A couple baseball games

112:Broken a bone?

My ulna and radius, just above the wrist, on my dad’s 48th birthday back in fifth grade when I tripped over my two feet in the middle of our street and landed poorly. We didn’t go to the hospital for like 3 days

113:Cut myself?

Like, as in self-harming? No.

114:Been to prom?

No, freshman homecoming was off-putting enough for me after the aftermath…

115:Been in airplane?

Yeah! Flying is great!

116:Fly by helicopter?

No

117:What concerts have I been to?

I apparently went to two The Wiggles concerts when I was a baby, and since then it’s only been school concerts

118:Had a crush on someone of the same sex?

I think the desire was enough to elevate it past a mere infatuation, but it wasn’t like a full-on crush if you know what I’m saying.

119:Learned another language?

Not fully… I’m that kind of white person (minus the complete snobbish elitist attitude)

120:Wore make up?

It isn’t bad, but it’s too close to my eyes for me to be comfortable, and it’s wayyy too much work to do like every day just to look better than my meagerness. I’m already bad enough with basic hygiene, this would be too much (although I guess if I cared that much about it it might help this problem…). I’ll gladly wear it for a show, though.

121:Lost my virginity before I was 18?

The concept of virginity is complete bs to oppress women and “weak” men and is only fun in the ‘sacrificing a virgin into a volcano’ trope but even then I don’t like it (again, sex is gross for me, so no)

122:Had oral sex?

I have kissed and been kissed on my lips, various spots on my face, and my hands, and that’s it.

123:Dyed my hair?

No

124:Voted in a presidential election?

No, but I registered to vote on my eighteenth birthday this year and I voted in the primary elections back in August and I can’t wait to vote in the November elections because VOTING IS IMPORTANT ESPECIALLY IN NON-PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS WHEN ONLY A VERY LOW PERCENTAGE OF THE POPULATION VOTES!!!!! LIKE, IT’S DISAPPOINTING THAT ONLY ABOUT 50% OF THE POPULATION VOTES IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS, BUT THAT NUMBER DROPS TO 30-40% IN MIDTERM ELECTIONS AND ONLY 10-20% IN LOCAL-ONLY ELECTIONS (READ: ELECTIONS IN ODD-NUMBERED YEARS) AND THOSE NUMBERS BREAK MY HEART AND WE NEED TO VOTE MORE BECAUSE VOTING IS THE EASIEST WAY TO HAVE SOME LEVEL OF PARTICIPATION IN GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS AND IT IS IMPORTANT FOR THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE TO BE HEARD AND IF YOU ONLY VOTE IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS OR NEVER AT ALL, THEN THE PEOPLE WHO FAITHFULLY VOTE EVERY YEAR, AKA RICH OLD WHITE CONSERVATIVE MEN, ESSENTIALLY HAVE ALL OF THE VOICE IN THE ELECTIONS AND WE DO NOT NEED TO HAVE EVERYTHING ABOUT OUR GOVERNMENT DECIDED BY RICH OLD WHITE CONSERVATIVE MEN IF YOU’VE EVER READ ANY HISTORY TEXTBOOK OR REALLY ANYTHING, YOU SHOULD EASILY BE ABLE TO SEE WHY! PLEASE VOTE IN EVERY ELECTION!!!!!!!!!

125:Rode in an ambulance?

No

126:Had a surgery?

Do stitches count? Otherwise, no.

127:Met someone famous?

No

128:Stalked someone on a social network?

Too many times, sadly, and sorry

129:Peed outside?

Yeah

130:Been fishing?

No

131:Helped with charity?

I’ve volunteered with some non-profits, but I don’t think I’ve done so with a quote “charity” unquote.

132:Been rejected by a crush?

Probably? Most things were minor infatuations that I used to think were crushes, so I’m not sure. You could say that the most recent potential qualifier rejected me, but I would beg to differ given things now

133:Broken a mirror?

I was a reckless child

134:What do I want for birthday?

More time to spend alone with my best friend, more time to be with my best friend, a sudden influx of cash (and/or guaranteed financial stability), root beer and food and people to play games with

135:How many kids do I want and what will be their names?

Zero (0). However, if I do have kids, I’d probably adopt them, and I’d probably let them choose their names. Otherwise, I really like the names Luke, Pete®, James, Haley, Sara, Nicole, Alex (particularly for non-binary or female identifying persons), Rachel (though I probably wouldn’t name my kid that bc it’s too special for me), Hannah, and Emily.

136:Was I named after anyone?

My parents don’t say so.

137:Do I like my handwriting?

I’ve spent a long time crafting this efficient style, so yes. Also I have like three style to choose, my Most EfficientTM style, my All Caps (with the first letter taller than the others) style, and my fancy style with all of the tails at the end of the letters, the a like this font has it, the curls, anything I find to be   fancy   *jazz hands*

138:What was my favourite toy as a child?

Probably my little cars that I would move around on my city roads carpet along with a motorcycle that made had a brief jingle and then a simple noise that was super cool for 6-8 year old me

139:Favourite Tv Show?

Phineas and Ferb, or How I Met Your Mother

140:Where do I want to live when older?

Ideally, somewhere here in my hometown, I just love it here.

141:Play any musical instrument?

I can make a sound, but is it really playing? *suspenseful music crescendos*

142:One of my scars, how did I get it?

My Aunt re-married when I was 8 and the guy had a son a few months older than me, and we babysat him for a month during their honeymoon. Well, this boy wasn’t a good influence on me at all, but that’s beside the point. I thought he was… you know what, that actually is the point, but…. I though he was cool, and he could do things and did things that I wanted to try.

Well, one day, we laid out flat a futon and covered it with all the cushions and pillows from the couch that was also downstairs. Then, he grabbed an exercise ball, put it on the futon, got on it, rolled across the futon over the pillows, and stood up on the other side of the futon when he was done and I was so impressed, it blew my mind that he laid his midsection on the ball and rolled the ball like 6 feet and didn’t move or fall off of the exercise ball as it rolled.

So I tried it. And at the end, I slid off the ball, but not to land. I didn’t know how he stayed horizontal, and it showed, as I fell forward and slammed the side of me head into the corner of a cabinet right next to the far side of the cabinet. It hurt, and so I didn’t try a second time… until he successfully did it again a few minutes later. So I, desperately wanting to do it right and be “cool” like him, tried to do it again.

And I hit the exact same part of the side of my head on the corner of the cabinet again, almost exactly how my run went the first time. After the second hit, my head really hurt, and so I put my hands to my head, ran halfway up the stairs, and began to cry.

Also know that I was going through a phase where I loved to fake cry. I thought imitating the sounds of crying without the tears was one of the funniest things. And my mom hated it. She was a stay-at-home mom at that point, had been from a few months before I was born until my youngest sister entered elementary school with us. And so she was at home all day, every day (hence the babysitting). So, for the two months of summer by that point, my fake crying obsession was driving her up the wall.

Back to the story. Now, I’m sitting on the staircase, hands on my head because it hurts, tears forming in my eyes and my voice beginning to make all the crying sounds that I made when I was fake crying all summer so I guess my imitations were spot on. But after about a minute, I decided remove my arms from my head, and I looked at them, and there were lines of blood all the way from my fingers to my elbows and drops had fallen from my elbows onto my sock, and I shrieked.

I immediately went back down the stairs to the office where mom was on the computer, and the tears were coming almost as steady as the blood, and I was full-out crying. My mom, who was looking at the screen and thus only heard me crying, lashed out angrily, telling me to stop bothering her with that freaking fake crying. That is, until I got her to look at my arms. She took me upstairs and cleaned me up a little, but, while my bleeding slowed significantly, it didn’t stop.

After about 3 hours, my dad came home from work, and the bleeding still hadn’t stopped, and so we went to the hospital. I ended up getting 5 or 6 stitches, and when my hair is cut short enough, you can see the small white line.

That’s the only scar that I definitely know that I have. I haven’t really done anything physically risky since. That’s also pretty much when I stopped crying all that much…

143:Favourite pizza toping?

Extra cheese. Otherwise, sausage.

144:Am I afraid of the dark?

Only if I’m trying to sneak through somewhere and I can’t see where exactly I’m going

145:Am I afraid of heights?

Yeah, I would say I have a mild fear of heights. Specifically if I have to go down somewhere (like downhill slightly and there is a sharp decline on one side), or if I have to jump more than like 3 feet

146:Have I ever got caught sneaking out or doing anything bad?

I’ve been reprimanded for going out for most of the day and not saying anything, just disappearing for like 6 hours on a Sunday morning

147:Have I ever tried my hardest and then gotten disappointed in the end?

I never try my hardest

148:What I’m really bad at

Emailing people I need to, cleaning, hygiene, contacting people, calling people on the phone/talking to people on the phone, doing what I need to do

149:What my greatest achievements are

I graduated from high school, I won an CYO volleyball championship in sixth grade, I won a math competition in 7th grade (by guessing better than 19 other 7th and 8th graders from two different schools), and I…….. I haven’t really done much yet, nothing truly worthwhile (except maybe hs graduation)

150:The meanest thing somebody has ever said to me

I can’t think of anything, really. Although some acquaintances of mine made anti-Semitic “jokes” in front of me during summer camp this year and it bothered me a lot

151:What I’d do if I won in a lottery

I’d buy a large enough apartment to have space to wander around (picture Castle’s apartment from the show Castle, and pretty much like that but a little less opulent and I don’t need all the ornate luxuries around. Just the space of like 5-7 medium/large open rooms with a comfortable bed and a non-cramped bathroom or two, and a nice big kitchen for all the food I’m going to have.

I’d always have root beer in stock, along with some snacks that I like, and I’d have whatever foods my friends like because my closest friends would have invitations to come at literally any time (like, this is for max 6 people), and I’d like to regularly meet up with my closest friends and I’ll treat them to nice filling dinners at the local diners, Denny’s, wherever they want, even McDonald’s or whatever, and I’ll tip really well, like at least $50 dollars because those people are always so nice, and I’ll splurge so much on my friends.

I’d also donate a bunch to all of those people who really need it that I see come across my dash, and I’ll donate a crapload to my high school band because they meant the world to me, and I’d FUND THE ARTS BECAUSE THE ARTS ARE IMPORTANT.

152:What do I like about myself

I like that I love the arts and that I play the tuba and that I am getting into writing music and that I write poetry and that I love my friends especially my best friend and I like that I try to be positive and supportive of the LGBTQ+ community and that I actively try to make the world a slightly happier place most of the time

153:My closest Tumblr friend

Katie

154:Something I fantasize about

Getting to spend long periods of time with my best friend, having a bunch of money to spend on my best friend, being happy

155:Any question you’d like?

What is your favorite video game that you own that you’ve never seen elsewhere and is likely not well-known at all?

I love the game Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords for the Wii, and I can play it for hours upon hours for days and not get bored. It’s a really fun game with a long storyline that is entertaining and original, and I just love playing it and have literally only ever seen it at our house since my mom somehow found it and bought it like 7 years ago.

(yes, I made that question up myself)

Thank you for asking all of these!!!!!

(when I copied and pasted it to a google doc in case the computer shuts down and I lose the whole answer, it said that I had 4825 words and it took up 17 pages. So, yeah, this is 4867 words long!)

(And I was right, the everything disappeared and so I had to post it early so I could go back and edit it, so now it’s 4900 words long in total, after editing.)

[bluewatsons]

Candice L. Wuehle, “And I a smiling woman:” Sylvia Plath’s Unheimlich Domesticity, 11 Plath Profiles 1 (2019)

Doppelgängers, living dolls, monstered speakers, and alien landscapes populate the corpus of Sylvia Plath’s writing from her juvenilia to her posthumously published Ariel poems.1 It is apparent from the poet’s undergraduate thesis, “The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky’s Novels,” that Plath was absorbed by the psychoanalytic underpinnings from which the concept of the uncanny was birthed.2 In her thesis, Plath argues that Dostoyevsky’s characters have “attempted to exclude some vital part of their personalities in hopes of recovering their integrity. This simple solution, however, is a false one, for the repressed characteristics return to haunt them in the form of their Doubles” (Coyne). Plath’s articulation of “repressed characteristics” is certainly informed by Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” in which Freud analyzes E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story “The Sandman” in order, ultimately, to argue that a “return of the repressed” is at the root of uncanny affects.’

Significantly, the Germanic origin of the adjective “uncanny” (“unheimlich”) springs forth from the space of the domestic, ergo, the domain of the feminine. Likewise, Plath’s use of uncanny affects functions as a tool the poet frequently employs to interrogate cultural constructs regarding “femininity,” particularly in relation to the domestic sphere, motherhood, and objectification of the female body. While Plath was already a well-known figure throughout the English literary scene due to appearances on the BBC and in various publications, Frances McCullough argues that the poet reached cross-continental renown in the years between the posthumous publication of Ariel in 1964 and American publication of The Bell Jar in 1971 due to the influence of the Woman’s Movement, which politicized the contents of Plath’s work written in an era that was “pre-drugs, pre-Pill, pre- Women’s studies” (9). Plath biographers Anne Stevenson and Linda Wagner- Martin agree with McCullough’s reading; Stevenson claims Plath as “a heroine and martyr of the Woman’s Movement” (Two Views of Plath 1994) while Wagner-Martin states, “Like Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique” Plath’s Ariel and The Bell Jar were “both a harbinger and an early voice of the Woman’s Movement” (Two Views of Plath 1995). However, in spite of Plath’s unique significance to first wave feminists, little attention to the manner in which the poet persistently frames issues central to the Women’s Movement as uncanny have been considered.3 Several scholars, such as Kelly Marie Coyne, in her recent article, “The Magic Mirror”: Uncanny Suicides, from Sylvia Plath to Chantal Ackerman and Judith Kroll in her 1978 biography, have examined Plath’s work through the lens of the uncanny. Indeed, these critics also take their point of departure from Plath’s undergraduate thesis, however, they do not expand their analysis of her work beyond the concept of the “double” or “döppelganger” to consider the many other aspects of the Freudian uncanny present in her poetry. Coyne offers an interesting analysis of the double from a queer studies perspective, ultimately arguing that, “Plath—in doubling on both the extradiegetic and intradiegetic levels of [her] work—propose[s] a queer liminal space that siphons and ultimately expels repressed uncanny desire, allowing for both self-sustainability and personal integrity” (1). My own reading of the Plathian uncanny (specifically in relation to the döppelganger) orients itself first from Luce Irigarary’s conceptualization of the döppelganger: “Within herself,” Irigaray argues, “she is already two—but not divisible into ones” because female desire “does not speak the same” singular “language as male desire.” Rather, it is “diversified” and “multiple” (100). Like Irigarary, my reading insists that to express female desire is always to speak the language of the uncanny, therefore, not even a “queer liminal space” possesses the ability to “expel uncanny desire”; rather, to speak of female desire and the female experience is to always be speaking in Plath’s depictions of motherhood, domestic labor, and media representations of femininity as uncanny, monstrous, alien, and otherwise “creepy,” therefore, provides crucial insight into both the poetics of Sylvia Plath as well as the manner in which Plath’s use of the uncanny comes to serve as a synecdoche of a much larger cultural discourse.

Via an etymological investigation regarding that which constitutes the homelike (“Heimlich”) as “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, comfortable, homely, etc.” (2), Freud locates the home at the center of the unfamiliar, stating, “The word Heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich. What is Heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich” (3). The Freudian uncanny is thus the familiar, which has been estranged through repeated repression. What I have termed “the Plathian uncanny” manifests itself as a return to the (quite actual) home, whose constraints Plath’s speakers wish to outright reject, but are compelled by cultural forces, legal restraints, and/or historic precedent, to repress. In “The Applicant,” for example, Plath presents a furious satire of a job interview:

First, are you our type of person?

Do you wear

A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,

A brace or a hook,

Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something’s missing?... (1-6)

In these lines, Plath presents the gaze of the (male) interviewer as one which views the “ideal” woman (“our type of person”) as incomplete and inherently repressed. This repression generates an uncanny mode (as displayed quite literally by Plath as a body outfitted with artificial parts) that presents the domesticated female body as a site of contested cultural and psychological memory. In “The Big Strip Tease: Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath,” Kathleen Margaret Lant emphasizes the extreme power the female body poses in Plath’s poetry, arguing that the poet’s frequent recourse to bodily imagery “... reveal[s] Plath's conviction that undressing has become for her a powerful poetic gesture, and in these poems it is the female speaker who finally disrobes— and here she attempts to appropriate the power of nakedness for herself” (630). Lant further elucidates the connection between power and subjectivity, adding, “Plath does not simply contemplate from the spectator's point of view the horrors and the vigor of the act of undressing; now her female subject dares to make herself naked, and she does so in an attempt to make herself mighty” (630). It is significant, then, that the “mighty” power of uncanny representations in Plath’s late poetry are often generated by transformations and conflations of the speaker’s body with cultural or historical artifacts; in “The Other,” the speaker’s own blood becomes “an effect, a cosmetic” (line 30) while the speaker’s body in “Fever 103o” boldly transitions into “a pure acetylene/ Virgin” (46-47).4 In this way, the body itself becomes an unheimlich vessel which functions to question, contest, and, ultimately, protest normative ideals regarding female subjectivity.

This essay will begin by considering the poetry and prose of Sylvia Plath from a Kristevian perspective in order to illuminate the manner in which Plath confronts and destabilizes the “borders” which confine the domestic space and domesticized body. A close reading of “Lady Lazarus” will examine the way in which Plath constructs a speaker who performs this destabilization by weaponizing the abject via a repetition compulsion which emerges and replays a repressed past. Through further consideration of Lady Lazarus as an uncanny actor who replays a past appropriated from other tragedies (i.e., the Holocaust and the Lazarus Myth), I argue that Plath emphasizes gender differences in the act of remembering in order to perform the uncanny and give voice to the silenced, or, abjected.

Plath’s Unhomelike Home

The Heimlich/unheimlich distinction applies even more pointedly to the “home” of the female body itself. Plath’s female “I”/eye is much like Hoffman’s monstrous “Sandman” who is “without eyes” and instead is possessed of “ghastly, deep, black cavities instead” (90).5 Plath’s speaker both experiences the world as uncanny and is herself an uncanny actor within it. This generates a doubled sense of dis- ease in Plath’s work; because the speaker is often a “living doll” (“The Applicant”); a “little toy wife” (“Amnesiac”); or a collection of assembled, inanimate parts, “My head a moon/ Of Japanese paper” (“Fever 103o”) who witnesses the world as a series of events rife with uncanny atmosphere, the rhetorical situation in which these poems exist is itself disembodied.

Even more troubling, however, is the implication that the female body is never “whole” in terms of consciousness or corporeality. Rather, it functions as a liminal site at which the real and the unreal not only meet, but merge. This merger situates the Plathian body as neither a subject nor an object, but rather as a Kristevian abject who/which "preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be" (Kristeva 10). A resistance to a patriarchal symbolic order that attempts to position the speaker as only a mother, wife, or sexual object generates much of Plath’s uncanny tension. Liz Yorke also analyzes Plath’s work from the lens of French feminist thought in Impertinent Voices: Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Women’s Poetry to argue that what is shocking in Plath’s work is her readiness to “enter into the fields of semantic danger of her own rage, anguish, and desire” (37). In other words, Plath’s speakers demonstrate symbolic and semantic risk via utterances that serve to 1.) Position the reader as the audience of an uncanny experience in which the concept of “femininity” is made uncanny due to a sense of “intellectual uncertainty” (The Uncanny 7) and disease. This gesture forces the reader to consider female experience as inherently othered. The speaker is thus situated in a liminal space in which she recognizes that which is her own (her Heimlich body in its sexual and maternal capacity) yet is simultaneously made unrecognizable via the utterance that makes the body unrecognizable to itself (a toy, a corpse, a living doll). This gesture resonates with Kristeva’s assertion that the abject marks the moment of individual psychosexual development when the self is separated from the mother in order to distinguish a boundary between "me" and "(m)other" (Felluga 3). Plath’s uncanny representation of motherhood and the domestic space emphasize the “me” and “(m)other“ in order to suggest her speaker exists in the liminal space which “does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4).

The stage of the unhomelike home in which much of Plath’s Ariel era poetry takes place thus becomes the zone through which borders are stretched and interrogated. In one of the poet’s final poems, “Balloons,” a mother surveys her children as they play with party balloons that have “Since Christmas...lived with us.” This traditionally cheerful scene takes on an alien, if not horrific, quality. The balloons have, from the poem’s first stanza, been described as an animate “they” who “live” as “oval soul- animals,” yet they quickly become the “queer moons we live with/ instead of dead furniture!” The balloons are, unlike the furniture, not “dead” (they seem to move of their own volition and respond to sensation by “shrieking” and “delighting”), and yet despite the act that they “live,” the balloons are not quite alive. A balloon becomes, rather, a portal to “a funny pink world” that the children “may eat on the other side of it” and the iconic scene of small children playing with red and green balloons in the days following a holiday becomes a space in which even a child can contemplate a world beyond the world they currently inhabit. Importantly, it is the very act of “living” alongside the uncanny balloons that illuminates their liminal quality and pressurizes the idea that the border space between worlds actually becomes more available the closer it exists to the known. In other words, it is because the balloons have become Heimlich that they must now also be unheimlich, and it is because of the conflation of their familiar status as (dead) objects of domestic celebration with their aura of humanness that they come to represent the repressed.

Plath’s work repeatedly demonstrates the transformation of the familiar to the terrifying as a response (or resistance) to the discovery of an institutionally, politically, spiritually, or culturally imposed boundary. In Plath’s semi- autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood (Plath’s fictional manifestation of herself) famously states:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. (77)

This passage enacts a double-death; first, of Esther, whose indecision prevents her from eating and second, of the fruit itself, which must be eaten before they “wrinkle and go black.” For many readers, this passage simply evokes the uncertainty of youth.

However, it also serves as an excellent example of the psychic entrapment exposure to “borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4) produces in Plath’s speakers. The very familiar ideas of “a husband and a happy home and children,” becoming “a famous poet” or “brilliant professor” or “editor” or traveling the world each become terrifying because to choose one means to repress the rest and to choose none means the death not just of the self, but of the opportunity to have a self. 

Plath’s later poetry, especially “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” accepts the impossibility of attempting to balance the unstable psychic economy displayed in Esther Greenwood’s lament. In each of these poems, Plath presents her speaker as a woman who has “made the choice” to be a wife, a daughter, or a sexual object and thus repressed her desire for other choices. This repression reemerges as a dangerous (and dangerously uncanny) protest against the very conditions that manufactured it. That which has been repressed returns as a monstered woman who has the power to destroy the borders that have abjected her; through conflations of time, bodies, identity, and the border between death and life, Plath’s speaker weaponizes her own abjection. Consider, for instance, the speaker’s address to her dead father in “Daddy”:

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would

do.

But they pulled me out of the

sack,

And they stuck me together with

glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf

look

And a love of the rack and the

screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the

root,

The voices just can’t worm

through. (58-70)

Once the speaker herself is disassembled and “stuck” back “together with glue” she enters the liminal/abjected space that reveals to her that she has the power to reconstruct her dead father in a shocking conflation of a Nazi/husband in lines, such as the flatly end-stopped “And then I knew what to do.” (sec. 13, line 3) The repressed father reemerges, then, in this uncanny figure, which Plath’s speaker can confront via her own uncanniness. It is the marriage (“And I said I do, I do.”) of monster (“me together with glue”) to monster (“I made a model of you”) that grants her access to the origin (“the root”). In essence, Plath’s speakers are monstered, alien, or uncanny because they are a chimera of remnants (the husband, the wife, the Nazi, the bones, and the glue) housed within a (physically and temporally) present body.

The terrifying quality of Plath’s speaker is not merely that she is a zombie-like figure who eternally reemerges and replays a repressed past in order to destabilize limits, but that she replays a past which was never known to begin with. As in “Daddy,” images, symbols and even languages that are outside Plath’s own realm of psychic identity frequently emerge in order to evoke the uncanny. Critics, such as Irving Howe, Arthur Olberg, and Susan Gubar, have noted Plath’s frequent recourse to Holocaust imagery and identification with Judiasm is, to say the least, an odd point of identification for a white, middle-class, Unitarian-raised woman from Massachusetts. In order to further analyze how the schism between the appropriated collective memory of other races and religions and the individual and highly confessional memory of Plath’s speaker functions, this essay will consider how “gender differences in the act of remembering” (Hirsch and Smith 4) that which was repressed generate a version of the uncanny that is unique to Plath. This distinctively Plathian uncanny merges the poet’s own psychic sense of that “which is familiar and old—established in the mind and which has become alienated from the self only through the process of repression” (217) with a larger cultural psyche of whom the speaker identifies with in defiance of cultural, historical, or social borders, positions, or rules.

(Lady) Lazarus: Cultural Memory and Gender

Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith’s “Feminism and Cultural Memory” provides a valuable lens through which to consider Plath’s poetry in regard to the role “the female witness or agent of transmission” plays in memory construction. Hirsch and Smith expand Paul Connerton’s concept of the “act of transfer” to examine the way in which “dynamics of gender and power” are manifested in cultural memories mediated through a female speaker.6 Plath’s persistent presentation of the female speaker as a site of objectification and abjection suggests, then, that to be a woman engaged in the act of remembering is always to mediate the past through the lens of abjection that proposes a permanent slippage between the self and the other. As Arthur Oberg points out, Plath’s late poems, “Daddy,” and its companion piece, “Lady Lazarus,” both incorporate a “movement” which “is at once historical and private; the confusion in these two spheres suggest the extent to which this century has often made it impossible to separate them” (146). Interestingly, Oberg’s analysis of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” omits a consideration of the “historical and private” dichotomy present in these poems as one that is distinctly mediated via the gendered perspective of a suburban white woman. However, his observation that Plath presents these “two spheres” as inextricable suggests that Plath’s speaker’s consciousness of her own status as a housewife is actually quite mimetic of the blurred boundary between the real and the unreal which constitute uncanniness.

Indeed, Plath’s anxiety regarding her domestic status was not unique to the poet; a mere seven days after Plath committed suicide in Primrose Hill, Betty Friedan articulated many of Plath’s central frustrations in The Feminine Mystique. In A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the  1960’s, historian Stephanie Coontz details the powerful reaction American middle-class women had in response to Freidan’s opus. Within the first months of publication, Friedan received hundreds of letters from women who believed The Feminine Mystique had saved their lives (xx). Friedan recognized the private disappointment of the housewife as well as the deep shame generated by “the silent question—is this All?” (Friedan 1). Presciently, Plath’s work strives to create a grammar with which to address “the problem that has no name” (Friedan 63).

While Freidan clarifies the separation between the public and private spheres in order to argue that the public sphere generated social and political injustice, which served to silence the private sphere, Plath revels in the blurring of the spheres in an attempt to disrupt both. A consideration of the extreme emphasis on gender (specifically in regard to domesticity, motherhood, and the body), which Plath uses to stress “historical and private spheres” further illuminates the manner in which these poems invest themselves in uncanny remembrance. As Hirsch and Smith note, “cultural memory is always about the distribution of and contested claims to power. What a culture remembers and what it chooses to forget are intricately bound up with issues of power and hegemony, and thus with gender” (6). As scholars such as Christina Britzolakis and Susan Gubar have highlighted, “Lady Lazarus” is a complex and fascinating consideration of the relationship between gender and the manner in which secondary memory frames power relations.

“Lady Lazarus” perceives itself retroactively from its first line, “I have done it again.” This declarative, abruptly end-stopped statement emphasizes the performative quality of this dramatic monologue while simultaneously insisting that the moment of performativity is past—it is already “done.” Immediately, a temporal dislocation is established that distances the poem itself from the speaker and the speaker’s recollections. The title of the poem, of course, compounds this sense of dislocation through its allusion to Lazarus of Bethany, the saint whom Christ restored to life four days after his death. While the raising of Lazarus is typically associated with rebirth and the power of Christian belief to triumph over death itself, Plath subverts the traditional reading of this story by assigning Lazarus not just a different gender, but also the title of “Lady.” In this way, Plath forces a reconsideration of the idea of resurrection through the lens of gender and class in order to present this miracle not so much as “re/birth” or “re/surrection,” but rather as a re/inscription or re/impression that is itself a form of repetition compulsion. In Freud and the Scene of Trauma, John

Fletcher provides a useful analysis of the relationship between the uncanny and repetition compulsion:

Freud shifts the emphasis away from the content that is being repeated, with its combination of alien and the déjà vu, to the sheer fact of repetition itself. The uncanny feeling proceeds not from the return of the once familiar but no longer recognized in itself but from what that retention testifies to: the activity of autonomous—daemonic— inner compulsion-to-repeat independent of the content of what is repeated. (320)

In light of Fletcher’s analysis, it is especially significant that Lady Lazarus characterizes her resurrection, ironically, in the diction of commercial media because this particular medium heightens a sense of automated repetition. Like a “jingle,” which makes noise by clattering against itself repeatedly, Lady Lazarus’ resurrection testifies to the compulsion to repeat for the sake of repetition. She sarcastically disregards her “theatrical comeback in broad day” as a context-rich event and is decidedly scornful of the idea that her second birth is “A miracle!”

On the contrary, she claims that her new living body is only a “sort of walking miracle,” which, upon further examination appears to be more akin to an anti-miracle; a monstrous amalgam of the possessions of Holocaust victims. Indeed, it is this very conflation of life and death that generates the intellectual slippage that signifies the uncanny and positions Lady Lazarus as the personification of uncanniness (and, in the same vein, positions the uncanny as the anti-miraculous). We read that Lady Lazarus is resurrected not as a human, but as human form composed of inanimate objects:

...my skin bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot

A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. (4-9)

While the repetition (and, as many critics have argued, appropriation) of the tragedy of the Holocaust assigns Lady Lazarus’s monologue a distinctly traumatic texture, I would argue that this is not actually a traumatic remembrance, but an uncanny one. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud asserts that trauma manifests itself indirectly through intrusive “remembrances” which have not yet been incorporated into the psyche of the sufferer (7). Trauma scholar Cathy Caruth adapts Freud’s initial theory to a study of literature in order to suggest that intrusive phenomena or unabsorbed affects (and their subsequent effects) cause a trauma survivor’s life narrative to exist in a non- linear narrative that, until recovery from the traumatic event, is contextually “dehistoricized” from the survivor’s own life. It is not until the “unclaimed experience” of the trauma itself can be recalled that a trauma survivor can create a context for the previously unexplained text she has survived, but not yet incorporated into her recollection of personal history (Caruth 2-5). The structure of uncanny remembrance does, in many ways, act as a “double” of the structure of traumatic remembrance; both undergo a period of latency prior to the reincorporation of a memory. However, while the traumatic structure is the incorporation of memory that has been repressed as the result of an external event which could not be understood by the survivor in its moment of impact (i.e., “shellshock”), the uncanny structure is the reincorporation of an internal repression which has always been a component of the psyche and therefore understood on some level, but which has been, critically, repressed or erased. Caruth’s notion of dehistoricization is therefore rendered somewhat inapplicable if Lady Lazarus is considered an uncanny actor instead of a trauma survivor. Subsequently, the implications of this poem in regard to the manner in which traumatic history itself relates to gender and power dynamics becomes significant.

“Lady Lazarus’” disturbing gesture of prosopopoeia (in which victims speak, impossibly, from inside the gas chamber) is conflated with an erotic burlesque performance in order to suggest that Plath’s speaker has a distinctly gendered sense of incorporeality. Lady Lazarus’ tone shifts from boastful to horrific to triumphant as her strip tease reveals not flesh, bone, or even corpse, but the space from which her decomposition took place. She begins her de-materialization with the curious pronouncement, “soon, soon the flesh/ the grave cave ate will be/ at home on me.” The flesh, which has already decomposed (or been “eaten” by the cave), impossibly returns—significantly, it returns to “home,” or the Heimlich. Via the dissolution of the female flesh, Plath has ingeniously constructed a scene in which the process of objectifying the body of Lady Lazarus becomes indistinguishable from the process of abjectifying the body of Lady Lazarus. Lady Lazarus manifests her rage at “the peanut-crunching crowd” who shove “in to see/ them unwrap me hand and foot” in the unveiling of her new form (referred to as “The big strip tease.”) by historically situating (first via the Lazarus Myth and then via the Holocaust) the performance of being a “Lady.”

Significantly, this particular historicization of performance is what assigns this poem its uncanny structure; the speaker is not incorporating the Holocaust or the Lazarus Myth as a part of her own individual memory, rather, she is conflating it directly with her repressed psyche in an act that generates the chimeric Lady Lazarus. Paul Breslin questions Plath’s conflation of myth and reality, asking “...did she fear that the experiential grounds of her emotions were too personal for art unless mounted on the stilts of myth or psycho-historical analogy” (110)? Breslin’s reading of “Lady Lazarus” as a confessional poem in which the poet fears that “the experiential grounds of...emotions” are inherently artless seems to miss the point insofar as Lady Lazarus’ (not Plath’s) “experiential grounds” are presented not so much as “too personal” for the speaker, but for the speaker’s audience. Lady Lazarus’s audience, composed first of “Gentlemen, ladies,” then “Herr Doktor, Herr Enemy” and finally “Herr God, Herr Lucifer” is possessed of an increasingly patriarchal gaze that Lady Lazarus counters with a body which is weaponized by the uncanny conflation of her “psycho-historical” composition. The final five stanzas of “Lady Lazarus” perform a dynamic movement in which the speaker rapidly shifts her presentation of her cultural importance from inanimate yet cherished object to an enraged and murderous reincarnation of her own objectification.

Lady Lazarus begins her transformation with the statement:

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,

The pure gold baby (66-68)

thereby asserting her belief that her body is the grand scale creation (“opus”) of the patriarchal figures she is addressing. Furthermore, she recognizes her worth as a creation is entwined with a certain lack of personal history or identity; the nature of the opus is its triply asserted “purity.” Plath’s use of the word “pure” is, in this context, itself a psycho-historical conflation of the idealization of the virginal female body and the racial policy of the Third Reich. Plath complicates her speaker’s objectified status with the dramatically enjambed line break between this stanza and the next,

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate

your great concern.(69-71)

The final image of an inanimate “pure gold baby” is gruesomely brought to life in the moment of its murder. This stunning turn is mimetic of the poem’s controlling Lazarus motif; in both instances, the repressed can only emerge from its uncanny status (as living dead or golden baby) through an act of great violence.

In the next two stanzas, we read that this emergence first manifests itself as a palpable nothing, which then transforms into pure symbol:

Ash, ash—

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing

there—

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling. (72-77)

While Lady Lazarus was once a compilation of body parts arranged in the shape of a strip tease performer or a construct of beliefs about feminine virtue (an “opus”), the violence of being “poked and stirred” has transformed her from a resurrected body/ideology to nothing at all. The “cake of soap, “wedding ring,” and “gold filling” emerge from the fire as doubly uncanny objects. In one respect, they are uncanny simply because they conceal their horrific origins in the trappings of the familiar. But, more directly to my point concerning gender difference in the act of remembering, these objects symbolize domesticity, marriage, and beauty (respectively).

It is, of course, imperative to observe that Plath has selected these specific objects because they merge the idealized markers of femininity with the repurposed bodies of Holocaust victims. This merger insists that, for Plath, to be female is to be objectified, but more importantly, to be objectified is always to also be abjectified. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva explains, “refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being (3).” To some degree, we can read that Plath’s speaker has “permanently thrust aside” her own subjectivity in order to “theatrically” project that which only “feels real.” The severe juxtaposition between these object’s double connotations has been deemed appropriative by many critics, question “the poet’s ‘right’ to Holocaust imagery” (Young 133). While some scholars have questioned Plath’s ethics, others have questioned her sense of poetic scale, such as Irving Howe, who argues that, “it is decidedly unlikely” that the conditions of Jews living in the camps “was duplicated in a middle-class family living in Wellesley, Massachusetts, even if it had a very bad daddy indeed” (12-13). It is at the juncture of these two critiques (one which suggests Plath’s identification is unethical and the other which suggests it is overwrought) that complex issues of gendered memory begin to emerge and a consideration of the manner in which the uncanny presents itself as the mode by which the repressed makes itself apparent becomes salient to our understanding of Plath’s controversial use of prosopopoeia and allusion.

“Dying is an art”: Performing the Uncanny

For Plath, the uncanny took on a political potential precisely because it is an aesthetic divorced from ethical matters; it inherently privileges being present—or, bringing to the surface that which has been repressed—over all other considerations. The political potential of the uncanny (to disturb an idealized version of the female body; to make monstrous the object of the gaze; to question norms regarding motherhood and domesticity) is founded in its ability to articulate a history of which its speaker has not participated, but rather articulated as emblems of her own circumstances. In this way, Plath’s uncanny aesthetic has a radical capacity to disturb, or even rupture, the continuous, cohesive, and widely accepted historical narrative that instances of the uncanny necessarily place in doubt because its very essence is to resist comprehension. The political potential of the uncanny therefore rests in an ability to bring what is incomprehensible, unacceptable, or taboo to the center of conscious; quite actually, the uncanny gives voice to the dead.7

The Lazarus myth, on one hand, is a seemingly clear analogy for the repressed in the sense that Lazarus represents that which is repressed and dead to us, ergo, his resurrection signals a clear return to the repressed. Lazarus, as one risen from the dead, is both dead and alive in an exemplification of the slippage which is the fundamental hallmark of the uncanny. However, I argue that, although he is arisen from the dead, Lazarus of Bethany would not be classified by Freud as an uncanny actor at all. On the contrary, Lazarus would be considered quite canny according to Freud’s definition, which stresses “intellectual uncertainty”8 as the hallmark of an uncanny experience. Within its Biblical (and canonical) context, the Lazarus narrative is given prominence because it is emblematic of Christ’s power “over the last and most irresistible enemy of humanity—death” (Tenney). Rhetorically, the Lazarus Miracle is an act of witnessing intended to deny the ambiguity of death, therefore refusing the concept of the living dead. In other words, although Lazarus is arisen from the dead, he is defined by the miraculous certainty of his life. The Lazarus Myth, then, is decidedly canny because there is no question or uncertainty whatsoever regarding the narrator’s reliability. Rather, to witness the Rising of Lazarus is to experience the total certainty of faith itself.

Plath’s own version of the Lazarus myth, on the contrary, ruptures the continuous, highly canonical narrative presented in the Gospel of John via a reframing of the myth told from the voices of those who have been historically silenced and, subsequently, reincorporated into archival memory. Plath’s Lady Lazarus is, rather, an apocryphal speaker who asserts her own version of history told from the unstable zone of repressed memory. To return to Hirsch and Smith’s “Feminism and Cultural Memory,” Lady Lazarus serves as “the female witness or agent of transmission” who actually comes to perform the archive in which “dynamics of gender and power” are made manifest. Vast components of this archive are, however, unavailable to  Lady Lazarus because they have not been incorporated into the collective memory and, therefore, lack the social, historical, and cultural structures that could contextualize those memories and, indeed, provide the vocabulary necessary to articulate them. As mentioned earlier, Plath utilizes an uncanny poetic technique in order to express that “which is familiar and old— established in the mind and which has become alienated from the self only through the process of repression” (The Uncanny 217). Plath’s uncanny poetics stress the particularly gendered nature of this self-alienation in several ways: 1.) Her use of prospopoeia conflates the objectified female body (grotesquely separated into pieces by the audience’s gaze) with pieces of Holocaust victim’s repurposed bodies in order to suggest that gaze itself transforms the body into a material, inanimate object whose crisis can be articulated only via the voices of the victims of genocide, who have themselves been made objects. 2.) While Plath’s use of prospopoeia frames the always gendered experience of being the object of the gaze through the historically canonical (and accepted) experience of survivors, her use of allusion frames her private experience as a suicide survivor through allusions to commercial culture, the Bible, and the atrocity of the Holocaust. These allusions combine to create an impossible amalgamation which suggests that the repressed elements of Lady Lazarus’ psyche can only resurface as a monstrous collage which borrows pieces from the history of others in order to write the history of her own alienation. It is important to note that in her biographical references to her three suicide attempts, Plath is acutely self- aware that she is suffering from repetition compulsion. I have already discussed the first line of the poem (“I have done it once again.”), in which Plath establishes the poem’s temporal dislocation; this line also immediately establishes the speaker’s awareness that she is to be denatured and yet, are regarded as triumphs to the speaker, who victoriously states:

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well. (42-22)

Freud originally developed his theory of the phenomenon of repetition compulsion in his 1914 essay, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” as a pattern wherein an individual interminably repeats patterns of behavior that were established during a period of trauma in earlier life. It is clear that Plath’s speaker is repeating the trauma of a suicide attempt and, in fact, she goes so far as to provide a timeline (we learn that “One year in every ten” an attempt is made; that the first attempt occurred at the age of ten years old; the second at twenty; that the speaker is “only thirty”; and, finally, that Lady Lazarus is monologizing the third of “nine times to die”) which further articulates the sense that the speaker is highly aware of her compulsion to repeat.

This compulsion is, in fact, an orchestrated performance. It is this quality of orchestration and performativity that transitions Lady Lazarus’ compulsion to repeatedly reenact her suicide attempt from a traumatic memory structure to an uncanny one. Freud again revisits the concept of repetition compulsion in The Uncanny (five years after its original inception) in order to suggest that the uncanny is also the result of an event that has been superseded in one’s psychic life and therefore serves as a reminder not of a suppressed external event, but a repressed internal event. The repressed internal event of “Lady Lazarus” does not, in fact, seem to be the speaker’s suicide attempts; we read, via the total recall and articulation with which the attempts are conveyed, that these suicide attempts are fully incorporated into the speaker’s psyche. Rather, the speaker seems to have repressed the very constructs (of history, commerce, and religion) that have combined to assign her a gendered identity.

Lady Lazarus’ sense that nothing is every truly erased, forgotten, or lost via repression becomes uncanny precisely because the events that she has repressed emerge as the memories and experiences of others via her use of allusion and prosopopoiea. As Maurice Halbwachs, who developed the concept of collective memory, has suggested, memory is one of the elements of our social architecture that binds us to one another (22-49). Halbwachs’ foundational principles of memory theory, combined with Caruth’s previously mentioned trauma theory, suggests that the traumatic memory is that which both binds and refuses to be past. To position this within its psychoanalytic context, a collective is bound by the event that contains so much force its trace refuses to fade or be erased from the collective’s historical or narrative understanding of history. In this way, then, “Lady Lazarus’” speaker’s inability to convey her trauma without borrowing from events such as the Holocaust or the Lazarus Myth in order to articulate her rage at constructs of gender indicates a larger cultural amnesia and repression. Trauma historian Judith Herman points out that a traumatic event can only come into consciousness once a political event (such as a war, election, etc.) has occurred which provides culture with the language to articulate the conditions of the trauma. The trauma that “Lady Lazarus” seeks to articulate, however, predates the language provided by the Women’s Movement and therefore must co-opt the language of other tragedies in a gesture which bears the uncanny marker of a psychic economy which has gone bankrupt; which must use currency which is not its own.

“Like air”: The Monstrous Nothing

In the last two stanzas of “Lady Lazarus,” the reader once again witnesses a violent rebirth of the speaker. Unlike the resurrections that have played out in the poem’s previous twenty-six stanzas, this final act of transmogrification appears to have produced a new result. Lady Lazarus emerges as a sort of monstrous feminine figure to deliver a message of warning to yet another conflation of history, myth, and religion in the address:

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware. (78-80)

One is reminded, here, of Plath’s similar gesture in the poem “Daddy,” in which the speaker addresses her father: “  used to pray to recover you/ Ach, du // In the German tongue, in the Polish town...” It seems that in the moment of direct articulation or confrontation with the systems that have repressed the speaker, she must borrow the language (“tongue”; “Herr”) of the oppressor themselves to make herself understood. However, Plath begins to signal towards an inversion of this incorporation of oppressor to oppressed in the above stanza’s rhyme scheme. Just as the hard rhyme of “Herr” with the repeated “Beware” sonically9 indicates to the reader that the oppressive forces have, quite actually, become a part of Lady Lazarus’ language, the poem’s final stanza suggests that the uncanny archive from which Lady Lazarus has expressed herself throughout the poem has now been weaponized and is capable of not just incorporating, but devouring, the oppressor: 

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air. (81-83)

Enraged, Lady Lazarus rises from nothing (the “ash” of the crematoria) with the ability to, in turn, regard the constructs that have degraded her as nothing (“air”).

By the end of the “Lady Lazarus,” Plath has transitioned genres: what was once horrifically uncanny is now only horrific. A differentiation of the uncanny from the horrific is necessary here. While the uncanny often displays elements of the horrific (such as feelings of fear, dread, repulsion, and terror) the horrific is founded in a “fear of the unknown” (Lovecraft). The uncanny, conversely, is founded in a fear of the reemergence of that which was once known, but has been forgotten. Lady Lazarus is horrific when she emerges to “eat men like air,” but, importantly, the texture of intellectual uncertainty which was prominent in her previous manifestations is now gone. She “rise[s]” with her “red hair” as a fully recognizable woman; this last line is the poem’s first presentation of Lady Lazarus as analogous to an incarnation of Plath herself that is not conflated with death. The autobiographical detail, “red hair,” directs the reader towards a corporeal, intellectually certain rendering of Plath as woman (not a woman/corpse or woman/myth).

This moment is also significant in the larger context of Ariel’s highly symbolic color scheme. As Eileen M. Aird points out, “The world of Ariel is a black and white one into which red, which represents blood, the heart and living is always an intrusion” (85). The color red’s significance to Ariel’s symbolic order is perhaps best articulated in “Tulips,” a poem in which the speaker emerges from the white, sterile world of the hospital to the vivid, living world represented by the tulips by her bedside. In the following passage, we read red as both the marker of life and the marker of that which cannot be attained: 

And I am aware of my heart: it

Opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of

sheer love of me.

The water I taste is warm and

salt, like the sea

And comes from a country far

away as health. (60-64)

The reemergence of red in “Lady Lazarus,” signals that the speaker is no longer only an observer of “a country far away as health,” but a citizen of it. In accordance with the larger world of Ariel, Lady Lazarus’ red hair indicates that she is no longer speaking in an uncanny voice via a return to the repressed as symbolized by personification of the dead, but that she is now speaking in the horrific voice of a woman who has returned to her own body to “eat men like air.”

Interestingly, a consideration of Plath as an artist consciously evoking elements of horror positions her much more directly as a precursor to movements of political art during the 1970’s which were directly in dialogue with the Women’s Movement. In The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice, Alexandra M. Kokoli considers the work of the visual artists in order to define and explore the political power of uncanny representations of femininity.10 Kokoli argues:

Feminine writing takes place when the culturally repressed return with a vengeance, when the long censored and (presumed) impossible erupts into language and the world, throwing it into ‘chaosmos.’ [...] in which witches and female monsters are not merely reclaimed but reimagined as symbols of resistance and even revolutionary agents. (1-2)

A consideration of Plath’s own “Lady Lazarus” as a “female monster” birthed from an uncanny archive positions Plath’s speaker as an agent of destruction who can speak the culturally and politically “impossible.” This consideration also removes Plath from her long-held position as a “confessional” poet primarily invested in the speaker’s interiority. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the Plathian uncanny, however, is the promise that the monstered speaker is “the same, identical woman” as the confessional speaker who began the poem. Perhaps it is the insistence that for Plath, female interiority is itself alien, eerie, and by nature, repressed, which is the most horrific element of her poetry.

Footnotes

Jo Gill offers a comprehensive overview of the manner in which Plath’s treatment of themes regarding “the process of transformation, translocation and even dislocation” (43) develop throughout the poet’s career. Gill considers representations of both natural and artificial environments, ranging from physical transformation to alien dislocation beginning in Plath’s juvenilia and ending with her posthumous Ariel poems. Likewise, Mary Lynn Broe provides a psychoanalytic interpretation of subjectivity in Plath’s early and mid-career poetry that considers the fragmentary nature Plath’s speaker’s psyche.

“The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky’s Novels” was submitted as a component of Plath’s Special Honors in English at Smith College in 1955.

Plath biographer Frances McCullough argues that the poet reached cross-continental renown in the years between the publication of Ariel in 1964 and The Bell Jar in 1971 due to the influence of the Woman’s Movement, which politicized the contents of Plath’s work written in an era that was “pre-drugs, pre-Pill, pre- Women’s studies” (9). Anne Stevenson and Linda Wagner-Martin concur with McCullough’s reading; Stevenson claims Plath as “a heroine and martyr of the Woman’s Movement” (Two Views of Plath 1994) while Wagner-Martin states, “Like Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique,” Plath’s Ariel and The Bell Jar were “both a harbinger and an early voice of the Woman’s Movement” (Two Views of Plath 1995).

Notably, Marilyn Boyer considers the body in “The Disabled Female Body as a Metaphor for Language in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar” by utilizing a mixture of feminist and disability studies (with an emphasis on theories provided by Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan) in order to examine “The mind/body connection, or more pointedly, its dis-connection” (199) in The Bell Jar.

...

Hirsch and Smith define an “act of transfer” as “ an act in the present by which individuals and groups constitute their identities by recalling a shared past on the basis of common, and therefore often contested, norms, conventions, and practices. These transactions emerge out of a complex dynamic between past and present individual and collective, public and private, recall and forgetting, power and powerlessness, history and myth, trauma and nostalgia, conscious and unconscious fears or desires. Always mediated, cultural memory is the product of fragmentary personal and collective experiences articulated through technologies and media that shape even as they transmit memory” (5).

It is notable that Plath chooses to “give voice to the dead” not via a spectered medium, but via the risen dead (or, the zombie). In this way, Plath again stresses the idea of the body as an object separate from its own subjectivity; she is also able to further emphasize the abject nature of the rotting corpse.

Freud builds his definition of the uncanny upon Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 essay, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” in which Jentsch argues the uncanny occurs when there is intellectual uncertainty as to whether or not a being is animate or inanimate. Jentsch considers the “The Sandman’s” uncanny doll, Olympia, to be the signifier of the uncanny. Freud extends this consideration of the animate/inanimate binary, arguing that in uncanny literature, the uncanny becomes apparent when the reader themselves experiences intellectual uncertainty regarding whether or not the events related by the narrator are real or imagined.

Christina Britzolakis considers the sonic elements of the Ariel poems for their departure from Plath’s earlier narrative strategies of subject-based dislocation in favor of poetic strategies reliant on sound sense and “oral/aural, incantatory element[s] at the level of language” (170).

In particular, Kokoli examines the work of Judy Chicago, Faith Wilding, and Robin Weltsch.

Works Cited

Breslin, Paul. “Sylvia Plath: The Mythically Fated Self.” The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry Since the Fifties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Broe, Mary Lynn. The Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, narrative and history. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Coontz, Stephanie. A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

Coyne, Kelly Marie. “The Magic Mirror”: Uncanny Suicides, from Sylvia Plath to Chantal Ackerman. Georgetown University, PhD Dissertation. 2017.

----“The Many Faces of Sylvia Plath.” Literary Hub. 27 Oct. 2017, http://lithub.com/the-many-faces-of-sylvia-plath/ Accessed: 23 February 18.

Curry, Renée R. White Women Writing White: H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Whiteness. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000.

Aird, Eileen M. From Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1973.

Annas, Pamela J. A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Britzolakis, Christina. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.

Boyer, Marilyn. “The Disabled Female Body as a Metaphor for Language in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.” Women's Studies, 33.2, 2004, 199-223. Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chiacgo: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. W. W. Norton & Company; The Standard Edition, 1990.

----The Uncanny. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

----“On the Sexual Theories of Children.” London: Read Books Limited, 2014.

----Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.

Betty Friedan. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997 The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, edited by Jo Gill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Felluga, Dino Franco. Critical Theory: the Key Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Fletcher, John. Freud and the Scene of Trauma. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

Gubar, Susan. “Prosopopœia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1, 2001, 191-215. Halbwachs, Maurice and Lewis A. Coser. On Collective Memory. University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Hirsch, Marianne and Valerie Smith. “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.1, 2002, 1-19.

Howe, Irving. “Letter to the Editor.” Commentary. 1974.

Irigaray, Luce. The Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper Colophon Edition, 1978.

Kokoli, Alexandra M. The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice. Camden: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.

Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Big Strip Tease: Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Contemporary Literature, 34.4, 1993, 620–669.

Lovecraft, H.P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. The Palingenesis Project (Wermod and Wermod Publishing Group), 2013.

McCollough, Frances. “Introduction.” The Bell Jar. New York: Harper, 1971.

Miller, Ellen. “Philosophizing with Sylvia Plath: An Embodied Hermeneutic of Color in ‘Ariel’". Philosophy Today, 46.1, 2002, 91-101 

Tenney, Merril C., Kenneth L. Barker & John Kohlenberger III, ed. Zondervan NIV Bible Commentary. Nashville: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994.

Oberg, Arthur. Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creely, and Plath. New Brunskwick: Rutgers University Press, 1978.

Plath, Sylvia. Ariel: The Restored Edition. New York: Faber & Faber, 2010.

Stevenson, Anne. Two Views of Plath’s Life and Career—By Linda Wagner-Martin and Anne Stevenson. Modern American Poetry, 1994. Web. 26 February 2018.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Two Views of Plath’s Life and Career—By Linda Wagner-Martin and Anne Stevenson. Modern American Poetry, 1995. Web. 26 February 2018.

Yorke, Liz. Impertinent Voices: Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Women’s Poetry. Abingdon: Routledge, 1991

Young, James. “’I may be a of a Jew’: The Holocaust Confessions of Sylvia Plath.” Philological Quarterly, 66.1, 1987, 127-147.

[afrikanza]

Best Places to See Elephants in Africa

The largest land mammal on earth has its comfortable home in Africa. Although there are some unique species of elephants in South East Asia, they are dwarfed compared to the African giants.

The spectacular scenery of these majestic animals makes them a must-see encounter in a lifetime.

The following are the 10 Best Places to See Elephants in Africa:

10. Skeleton Coast, Namibia

Famed for its unforgiving harshness to both sailors and most other beings, Skeleton Coast still has mercy for land’s biggest land mammal. Skeleton Coast is the only place on earth where you can find ‘desert elephants’.

The ‘desert elephants’ on this land that ‘God made in anger’ (as popularly known in local dialects) have uniquely adapted and eat quite a different type of vegetation than that eaten by their counterparts in the rich grasslands of Amboseli National Park. They are also smaller in weight, with much longer and slender legs characterized by more dynamic movements.

Due to scanty vegetation that barely covers the giant elephants’ nakedness, you can easily spot desert elephants[1] as they majestically straddle this barren land. You can either strategically position yourself near the drought-resistant bushes of mopane tree and camelthorn where they browse for a meal or position yourself near the riverbanks of Hoanib River where they go to quench their thirst and irrigate their drought-scorched hides. Whichever the case, you will have an experience unmatched elsewhere in the world – only in Africa, and particularly in Namibia.

Desert elephants in Namibia

  9. Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is home to some of the largest herds of elephants – thanks to its fertile lands and rich vegetation.

Mana Pools National Park[2] is relatively a small park with just a few dozens of elephants. However, these elephants have some unique habits that attract curious visitors. The elephants here are not just big in size but have a unique acrobatic habit on standing on their two hind legs as they stretch their proboscis to pick the juiciest fruits and tastiest leaves hanging over the tall canopies. This acrobatic is not an easy endeavor bearing in mind that some of the elephants can reach 5 tons in  weight.

This Park is located along the banks of River Zambezi, one of the mightiest rivers in Southern Africa. The river originates in Zambia, stretches eastwards through Eastern Angola – as if to fetch more water and then turns south-westwards to establish a border between Botswana and Zambia and then stretches further eastwards to demarcate the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe before pouring its precious collection into the Indian Ocean after trespassing Mozambique.

standing-on-two elephants of Zimbabwe

  8. Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve, Malawi

Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve[3] is located in northern Malawi.  It is a world-famous site due to its conservation efforts, championed by none other than Prince Harry of the British monarch.

Being a conservationists’ wildlife reserve, most of its elephants have been relocated from other Parks where they faced threats of poaching, drought, overpopulation, and diseases. Among the major sources of this relocation are the Liwonde and Machete National Parks.

So far, 500 elephants have been relocated into this Park. The park is optimized for tourist visits as a means of creating awareness of the conservation effort and also making the park more economically sustainable as the proceeds from tourism helps to plow back into the conservation efforts.

Elephants in Malawi

  7.  Kruger National Park, South Africa

Kruger National Park[4] is the most famous game park in South Africa and arguably the third most famous after Masai Mara and Serengeti National Parks. Like the other two Parks, Kruger National Park is home to the Big 5 land mammals and the Big 3 grey ones.

Elephants stomp their unmistakable authority as they traverse this Park. With plenty of well-kept driving tracks plus strategically positioned lodges, you can have an up-close view of these elephants as you enjoy the great hospitality of the African people and the soothing breeze of the African warm climate – only brewed in Africa – for you.

Elephants in Kruger National Park

Related Read: Best places to see Hippos

  6. Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe

When it comes to the elephants narrative world-over, Hwange National Park [5]is a paradox. It is a paradox in the sense that, while elephant populations are dwindling at an alarming rate in other natural habitats across Africa, the opposite is the reality at Hwange. The elephant population has been rising sharply in this Park to the extent that it has raised alarm due to the risk of overpopulation.  The current elephant population is 46,000 and is threatening to explode past the 50,000 mark in the near future.

There has even been protracted battle between the government of Zimbabwe and conservationists due to this encouragingly unique phenomenon. While the government wants to curl the excess population and sell its ivory so as to plow back the proceeds into conservation effort, conservationists are against this as they consider a bad precedent and an excuse for other parts of the world to formalize poaching.

The best time to view elephants is during the dry season that sets in between July and October. At such a time the dense vegetation becomes porous and also the elephants stay close to water sources. This way, it is easier to find them in specific locality than when they are spread out in the hugely expansive Park.

Elephants in Hwange National Park

  5. Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa

This is probably the southern-most elephants natural habitat in Africa (and probably the world). Addo Elephant National Park[6] is just about 70 kilometers from the famous Port Elizabeth city. This is South Africa’s third largest national park that claims a whopping acreage of 1,800 km square.

Addo Elephant National Park is an encouraging story for conservationists. With a near extinct population of just 11 elephants in 1931, the population has grown naturally to reach a sizeable level of about 450 elephants.

The Park boasts of a great tracking infrastructure with plenty of Jeep safaris and horseback safaris available for one to traverse the lengths and widths of this massive park.

Elephants in Addo National Park

  4. Chobe National Park, Botswana

Chobe National Park[7] is home to one of the world’s largest populations of elephants. There are about 50,000 to 60,000 elephants in this Park. Found in the semi-arid lands of Botswana, this Park is not so far from the world’s famous Victoria Falls – another of Africa’s great tourist attractions, found in neighboring Zimbabwe.

June-November is the best time to sight these giant land species. This is because that is the driest season and as such, most elephants lines the Chobe river to drink water and also to keep their large skins cool.

Taking a boat ride along the Chobe River is the assured way to watch and capture this enlivening moment.

Elephants in Chobe National Park

3. Okavango Delta, Botswana

Okavango Delta is a UNESCO World Heritage site[8] that is located in North-Western Botswana. Fondly referred to by locals as “plenty of plenty” and internationally billed as the ‘Eden of Africa’, Okavango Delta is home to boastful elephants – the largest land mammal on earth in a habitat natively occupied by some of the shortest people on earth – the pygmies. What a contrast? Well, not so strange in Africa.

Elephants in Okavango Delta

Must Read: Best Places to see Monkeys

2. Tarangire National Park, Tanzania

Tarangire National Park[9] is located in Northern Tanzania in the Manyara region. The Tarangire ecosystem is one of the richest in Africa in terms of hosting a variety of big wildlife.

Elephants in this Park are uniquely reddish in color – not natural but due to the red oxide dust that collects on their skin. Other than this unique ‘skin’ color, this is the place with the oldest known elephant twins. There have also been more twins born in this park. This is a rare occurrence.

This makes Tarangire National Park, not only a place with the highest population of elephants on earth but the only place on earth where you can witness reddish twin elephants – only in Africa, uniquely Tanzania.

Elephants in Tarangire National Park

  1. Amboseli National Park, Kenya

Established in the Southern parts of Kenya and bordering Mount Kilimanjaro, Amboseli National Park[10] is home to the world’s longest-running elephant conservation program.

Amboseli has one of the most unique and panoramic sceneries of any Park in Africa. This is due to the fact that it is largely a plain land with short Savannah grassland. This makes it easy to make a photographic shot that captures a very wide area without obstructions. Established at the foot of Africa’s tallest mountain – Mount Kilimanjaro, makes it even more spectacular. You can easily capture a large Savannah grassland, the world’s largest land mammal, and Africa’s tallest mountain – all in one photograph. What more? All these while being caressed by the freshest breeze that nature brews atop Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Elephants in Amboseli National Park

Conclusion

The World’s biggest mammal has its indelible footprints on the land of its nativity – Africa. A visit to Africa without sight of elephants is no visit at all. Herein are the 10 best places to see elephants in Africa. Be glad that you now have a precise itinerary list of your next African elephant safari excursion.

  Resource Links:

[1] Desert elephants of Namibia

[2] Mana Pools National Park

[3] Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve

[4] Kruger National Park

[5] Hwange National Park

[6] Addo Elephant National Park

[7] Chobe National Park

[8] Okavango Delta UNESCO

[9] Tarangire National Park

[10] Amboseli National Park

The post Best Places to See Elephants in Africa appeared first on Afrikanza.

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