Midweek Magic: The Moon

This post was originally here at the Hearthfire two years ago, in January 2011. I've dusted it off and brought it back out in honour of this week's lovely Full Moon.

Symbol, deity, influence: people believe the moon to be many things.  This flexibility as a literary or filmic metaphor or motif allows it to be used and re-used again and again.  For me, the moon is mysterious but beautiful.  She (there's no possibility, for me, of a masculine moon) has subtle power, less direct than the sun, but all the more interesting for it.  Contemporary representations tend to be 'spooky' however: a full moon on screen practically always indicates danger to come.

In the Tarot, the Moon card is the Unconscious, the unknown and the unpredictable.  For some, it represents falsehood (since we see more clearly by sunlight, the moon is thought to be deceptive), but I cannot square that view, personally - it feels like a relic of more openly misogynistic times when women's wisdom was inherently mistrusted.

Women are related to the moon perhaps because of her liminal nature, waxing and waning, which seems to be mirrored in the lives of human women, most clearly through our menstrual cycle, but also through the longer cycle of girlhood, fertility and post-menopause.   Lunar deities, however, are often virginal - e.g. Diana, Artemis - although the moon's phases are also associated with aspects of the wiccan Triple Goddess (maid/waxing moon, mother/full moon, crone/waning and dark moon).  Perhaps it is the relative 'coldness' of the moon's light which leads to its association with virginity, especially in the case of the Roman Diana and the Greek Artemis, both of whom are depicted as strongly protective of their single status.

Plath and The Moon
In teaching Sylvia Plath's Ariel collection, I often find myself having interesting discussions with students about the 'meaning' of the moon.  For me, "The Moon and the Yew Tree" is a beautiful poem about the failure of the church to satisfy Plath's desire for truth, while the moon, although (or perhaps because?) she is "bald and wild", is ultimately more appealing to her as a symbol.  In that poem and elsewhere she associates the moon with her mother, which complicates her use of the symbol, ascribing it negative qualities as well as the 'wildness' which I suspect she admires.  It is largely because of this negative association with her mother that some find "The Moon and the Yew Tree"'s moon difficult to read positively.  Personally, I think this is symptomatic of the complications of the mother-daughter relationship.

image by Graur Codrin from freedigitalphotos.net

Sylvia Plath and me: negotiating and teaching Ariel

Today marks fifty years since Plath's death. I've seen lots of pieces in newspapers: interviews with people who knew her, extracts from books exploring her life and works, links to interpretations of her poems and plenty of discussion of the new cover image for The Bell Jar. Personally, I think there's a strong possibility the new cover will attract new readers to the novel; hard to see how that could be a bad thing, even though at first glance the cover looks like it trivialises Plath's themes. This Telegraph piece explains rather nicely how the cover fits the book.

But anyway, I came here today to write about my own experiences of working with Plath's poems, having taught Ariel as an A Level text many times.

More than any other writer whose work I've had the pleasure of teaching, Plath herself gets in the way. It's nigh on impossible to get students past their fascination with her life. There are no absolute answers, and therefore we want to know, damnit! But then, isn't that a large part of what A Level English is about: the lack of immediately reachable answers?

What fascinates me is that my opinion of her life and her problems has changed, and not just once. Don't forget also that this is in the middle of my attempts to get students past her biography and into the poems for their own sake. I can't have students continuing to claim, as some will at the start of the course, that Lady Lazarus "proves" that Plath didn't intend to kill herself fifty years ago (believing herself able to rise again), or that Daddy tells us that she was a Jew and her father was a Nazi. It's very difficult to teach Ariel as a collection without any reference to biography (she says, never actually having tried it). And even her most clearly fantasised poems - like Lady Lazarus which she told us was about "a woman who has a great and terrible gift of being reborn" - intertwine with her own life so much that it's difficult to discourage students from looking for bits about Hughes or her father.

And yet. For all the frustration, I'd still choose Ariel any chance I had. Yes it explores dark emotions that some suggest it's immoral to 'expose' teenagers to, but I'd argue that many teens are exposed to those emotions anyway, and a safe distance to discuss and explore them might be just what they need. And yes, some teens will almost worship Plath and practically make a cult out of her perceived suffering, but again, those who react so strongly to her would have found something else to ritualise (and again, discussing those feelings in class at a safe third party distance may be helpful). When there's time to go there, it's also interesting to discuss the phenomenon of this fascination with her and what she's come to represent. Frieda Hughes' poem, My Mother, published when the Gwyneth Paltrow/Daniel Craig film Sylvia came out is great for stimulating this.

In many ways, for all its extremity of emotion, Plath's work offers us something that everyone can relate to on some level. Who hasn't had frustrating relationships with their parents, been jealous or had thoughts which they know are destructive?

Lastly but absolutely not least, the poems have such a savage beauty. I love her use of sound - she clearly enjoyed the performance aspect of poetry - and some of her imagery is strikingly original and just gorgeous.