THE BEE MEETING BY SYLVIA PLATH

SYLVIA PLATH’S POEM "THE BEE-MEETING"

Introduction

Giving us the prevalent atmosphere of the poem, Robert Phillips says, “The Bee Meeting opens with vivid imaging of the poet’s vulnerability before the hive. within the poem, all the villagers but her are shielded from the bees, and she or he equates this partial nudity along with her condition of being unloved. within the symbolic wedding ceremony which follows, a rector, a midwife, and she or he herself—a bride clad in black—appear. She seems to recollect that even the arrows that Eros wont to shoot into the bottom to make new life were poisoned darts.

And even as her rummage around for a Divine Father was tempered by her fear there was none—that God would be nothing quite, say, the Wizard of Oz, a bit man with a giant wind machine—so, too, her look for consolation from her earthly father creates an intensity of consciousness within which she now not has any guarantee of security. Eros for her is ever among the imminence of death. Certainly, every mythology relates sex to death, perhaps most clearly within the tale of Tristan and Iseult. In nature, the connection is even more explicit: Always the male bee dies after inseminating the Queen. Plath’s personal mythology anticipates this.

If the central figure of authority, the Queen, is her father, then the daughter/worker must die after the incestuous act, as she does at the conclusion of “The Bee Meeting” and as Plath did at the conclusion of her suicide attempts. The long white enclose the grove is after all her own coffin, only during this light can the poem’s protagonist answer her own questions. “What have they accomplished, why am I cold.”

CRITICAL APPROACHES

I

Plath increasingly finds ways of connecting what I've got called the ‘oracular’ or ‘transferential’ drama of her poems with a bigger historical process. The 1962 sequence which has become referred to as the ‘Bee Poems ‘attempts to excavate the traces of this process within the familiar scenario of the daughter’s initiation into the mysteries of writing by a father whose power she both desires and repudiates. Beekeeping is related to the childhood image of the all-powerful father in ‘Among the Bumblebees’, ‘Lament’, and ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’. it's also related to female fertility and reproductive power. In ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’, for instance, the daddy is that the ‘maestro of the bees’ who ‘move[s] hieratical . . . amongst the many-breasted hives’, in a very garden of overwhelming lushness. within the Bee Poems, the relationship between artistic creativity and power is inscribed as directly personal and political, drawing not only on the association of bees with Otto Plath but also on Plath’s own experience of beekeeping in Devon. Beekeeping becomes an analogy for the writing of poetry, which, while playing on the Platonic figure of the bee-poet possessed by divine insanity, as described within the Ion, implies a craft, a specialized practical skill, or expertize.

The Bee Poems are often read as a parable of female self-assertion or narrative rite of rebirth, affirming the integrity of the creative self, and thus furnishing an alternate, more hopeful ending for Plath’s career. Yet if on one level the poems are often seen as forging private mythology of survival, on another their dreamlike logic of displacement and condensation resists narratives of self-realization anchored in an exceedingly stable notion of the topic. This alternative narrative logic manifests itself through the mobility of identification, which generates various uncanny effects. particularly, the scapegoating or sacrificial trope undergoes a variety of psychic and narrative permutations. Although the speaker is initially seen as a direct pupil and sacrificial victim of a surgeon-priest performing an operation (‘The’ Bee Meeting’), she subsequently receives a box of bees with which to start her own hive (‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’). In ‘Stings’ it's the father-beekeeper who is stung by the bees; in ‘The Swarm’, he becomes a dictator who uses the bees as instruments of imperialist self-aggrandizement. within the final poem of the sequence, he disappears, leaving the speaker alone, ‘wintering in an exceedingly dark without a window’, with the ambivalent harvest of her beekeeping.

In the Bee Poems, the governing metaphor of beekeeping inserts the dynamics of the father-daughter transference into a social and historical continuum. The beehive could be a classical figure of the polis as hierarchically ordered, industrious collectivity, during which the common and personal good are together. Bees were, of course, the educational specialism of Otto Plath, author of Bumblebees and Their Ways, and of a treatise on ‘Insect Societies’ for A Handbook of psychology. With its highly structured division of labor, the hive seems to meet all the wants of the ideally ‘adjusted’ or technocratic society, a smoothly functioning social organism void of conflict. Yet it's also an upscale source of paradox and contradiction. as an example, it's a matriarchal society of female producers, a detail that is crucial to Plath’s reflection on power. It is, also, of course, an authoritarian society. The hive allows the poet to assume multiple and constantly changing points of identification—including those of beekeeper, queen, and worker-drudge—in a psychic theatre, signaled by pervasive imagery of clothing. for instance, the villagers’ protective beekeeping gear turns them into participants during a sinister scapegoating rite:

Who are these people at the bridge to fulfill me? they're

the villagers—

The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.

In my sleeveless summery dress, I've got no protection,

And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell

me?

They are smiling and disposing of veils tacked to ancient

hats.

The speaker’s lack of ‘protection’ casts her within the role of sacrificial initiate-victim or patient in an exceedingly surgical ‘operation’. She identifies herself with the scapegoat, the queen who is within the process of being moved to a different hive by the villagers to stop the virgins from killing her. Yet at the identical time she becomes a performer, ‘the magician’s girl who doesn't flinch’. The rhetoric of innocence, naivety, and vulnerable nakedness may be a masquerade that allows her to assume the central role within the drama. Poetic authority is inscribed as a function of the speaker’s highly subjective and willed reinvention of herself, which renders the boundary between inner and outer worlds radically fluid and permeable. In ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, the speaker may be a Pandora figure, who hovers on the brink of assuming her ownership of the potential hive, torn between the terror of its ‘dangerous’ powers and fantasies of absolute control. The box of bees becomes a metaphor of the unconscious itself, whose dark, ‘primitive’ forces are linked with the threat of racial and sophistication otherness (‘the swarmy feeling of African hands

Minute and shrunk for export,

Black on black, angrily clambering’, the ‘Roman mob’). Moreover, this trope of the ‘primitive’ unconscious is acted go in linguistic terms. The ‘unintelligible syllables’ of the bees threaten the speaker with a loss of sovereign control over meaning. She oscillates between the positions of master and slave, oppressor and victim; between fantasies of despotic power which mimic and caricature the authority of a ‘Caesar’ (‘They can die, I want to feed them nothing, I'm the owner’) and of break loose vengeful forces through metamorphosis and disguise, assuming the ‘petticoats of the cherry’ or a ‘moon suit and funeral veil’.

Throughout these poems, the speaker is alternately attracted and repelled by the implications of being ‘in control’ (‘Stings’). In ‘Stings’ she is again cast because the beekeeper’s apprentice, learning the way to operate the ‘honey machine’ which is able to ‘work doltishly

Opening in spring, like an industrious virgin’. Here, however, the threat emanates less from the emblematic male figure than from the feminine, domestic collectivity of the worker bees or ‘winged, unmiraculous women’, who would turn the speaker into a ‘drudge’. The dreamlike logic of ‘Stings’ produces a splitting of the father-beekeeper figure; it pits beekeeper and feminine apprentice as equivocal allies against an intrusive ‘third person’, a false beekeeper and ‘scapegoat’ who provokes the fury of the bees. This surrealist triangulation is inscribed within a logic of wish fulfillment or fantasized revenge. The punitive stinging of the interloper is followed by the climactic revelation of the Queen Bee:

They thought death was worthwhile, but I

Have a self to recover, a queen.

Is she dead, is she sleeping?

Where has she been,

With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?

Now she is flying

More terrible than she ever was, red

Scar within the sky, red comet—

Over the engine that killed her—

The mausoleum, the wax house.

These lines have often been read as announcing a flash of mythic rebirth, and therefore the triumphant flight of the queen, escaping from her enclosure in ‘the mausoleum, the wax house’ , does indeed recall the apocalyptic-destructive power of other iconic female apparitions in Plath’s work: the Clytemnestra figure in ‘Purdah’, the red-haired avenging demon of ‘Lady Lazarus’, and ‘God’s lioness’ in ‘Ariel’. Yet the ‘terrible’ power of the queen is deceptive; in spite of her ‘lion-red body’, her flight relies on the delicate mechanism of ‘wings of glass’, and therefore the image of the ‘red / Scar within the sky’ suggests the vulnerability of a wounded, stigmatic ‘I’ instead of a triumphant affirmation of selfhood. The queen is in any case a highly equivocal totem of female power; she could be a mere instrument of the hive’s survival, and to it extent reinforces a mythic view of femininity as grounded in unchanging laws of nature. it's a masculine figure, the beekeeper, who exploits and regulates the labor and raw materials of the hive, and also the fertility of the queen, for the assembly of a commodity. In ‘The Swarm’, the beekeeper who maneuvers the bees into a replacement hive is likened to Napoleon, the prototypical dictator; the bees become armies that undergo self-immolation at his command:

How instructive this is!

The dumb, banded bodies

Walking the plank draped with Mother France’s

upholstery

Into a replacement mausoleum,

An ivory palace, a crotch pine.

The myth of maternity, like that of charismatic leadership, is enlisted within the service of nationalist and imperial ideology; Through such myths, the poem implies, the totalitarian state entwines itself with the effective life of its subjects and becomes ‘the honeycomb of their dream’. Napoleon, whose imperial motif was the bee, and who kept bees during his exile at St Helena, could be a figure who holds an ambiguous fascination for the speaker; in an exceedingly draft of the poem, he's addressed as ‘My Napoleon’. Although she ridicules the totalitarian dream which sees the globe as mere plunder (‘O Europe! O ton of honey!’), her schadenfreude implicates her in Napoleon’s will for power.

In the Bee Poems, equivocal attempts to imagine a female collectivity are intercut with fantasies of individual martyrdom, usurpation, and revenge. The last poem of the sequence, ‘Wintering’, celebrates the feminine hive’s powers of survival and its expulsion of ‘the blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors’ after they have performed their limited function. But the dimension of protofeminist allegory announced by the trope of the matriarchal community remains essentially tentative and undeveloped, less a conclusion than a matter. Rather, Plath’s use of beekeeping because the unifying metaphor of the sequence insists on the materiality of writing as a social practice. The text appears because of the product of social likewise as individual energies. In an ironic rewriting of her New Critical apprenticeship (which saw the poem as a self-referring verbal microcosm or autotelic object), what emerges from the Bee Poems could be a view of the poetic text without delay psychically and historically overdetermined. Plath’s earlier rewriting of de Chirico’s ‘metaphysical’ style represented a key moment in her theatre of mourning.

While the Bee Poems also draw on the resources of surrealism, they resist the psychological determinism of the sooner de Chiricoesque landscapes for a more dynamic vision of the relation between the psychic and therefore the figurative. Their emphasis is a smaller amount on the fatalistic daughter-in-mourning scenario of ‘The Colossus’, ‘Electra’, and ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’, than on the rhetorical manipulation and reinvention of such transferential scenarios as a method of imagining the probabilities of change and metamorphosis.

At the identical time, all myths of power, whether individual or collective, are seen as fissured by internal contradictions and thus as ultimately self-defeating.

The Bee Poems represent the foremost complex and sustained instance of the oracular metaphor through which, as we've got seen, Plath explores the technical resources of her craft and therefore the range of possibilities available to her as a poetic initiate. The encounter with the ‘oracle’, in its various guises, combines a mythic return to the origins of poetic voice with the seductions of a pre-existent law or tradition, as within the fantasy of power gained through sacrificial victimhood. Yet Plath’s struggle for poetic authority, and her revision of her modernist precursors, can't be seen as a teleological movement culminating in a very mythic moment of self-realization. Although the oracle is often linked with scenes of instruction and discipleship, its burden, from the outset, is that the return of the repressed.

The social, psychic, and especially linguistic energies which sustain the pedagogical transmission of authority also are capable of overwhelming or interrupting it. For Plath, the very terms of selfhood remain, as I shall argue within the next chapter, entangled with a figurative ‘other’

The bees react hysterically and become the “outriders” of such poems as “Stings” and “The Swarm,” while the speaker disguises herself as a passive vegetable—” herbaceous plant.” Plath reinforces this resistance to the exposure within the depiction of the old queen for whom the villagers are searching:
Although she identifies with the queen, the persona differs during fundamental respect. Despite the actual fact that she must inevitably be supplanted by a replacement queen, the old bee remains secure within the pattern of the hive; her role within the natural hierarchy defines her being. The persona’s terror, on the opposite hand, can't be assuaged within the ritual of nature and her surreal ceremonial interplay with the villagers only whittles away at a nebulous sense of identity. Her sole recourse lies in one more disguise, ultimately that of the “magician’s girl who doesn't flinch” from the shower of knives that threatens her with extinction
“The Bee Meeting”‘s questions are really ontological ones, reaffirmed through link verbs like “They are,” “I am,” “it is,” and “is it?” For Plath “being” and “female being” are virtually identical, and for the persona, to be female is to be manipulated naturally, history, and inevitably by contemporary politics—and either openly or more obliquely to be threatened with death. To succumb to the fear of extinction means self-annihilation. To resist it makes for the dramatic tension that permeates the poems. The persona constantly resists the impulse to escape or to retreat into psychic stasis. Given the state of extremity within the poems, she resists in three basic ways: through flight, through counter-aggression that's both sexual and political, and thru a stoic endurance of horror.