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| Two Views of a Cadaver Room |
| 作者Author / Sylvia Plath 西爾維亞．柏拉絲 |
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Two
Views of a Cadaver Room
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 Summary |
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In Part 1, the speaker describes a girl's
experience of watching cadavers dissected in the dissecting
room. The four human corpses are compared with dehumanized
objects—burnt turkey, rubble, and old leather. As the
“white-smocked boys” (the medical students) started to gouge the head
of a cadaver, the girl discovered the skull was too messy that it
needed "A sallow piece of string" to hold it together. Later,
while the girl was discerning the pale snail-like foetuses preserved in
the jars, the boy, with macabre humor, offered her a cut-out heart for
a love token of his affection, “like a cracked heirloom.”
Part 2 is based on Bruegel's stupendous painting, The
Triumph of Death. Instead of portraying the
horrifying scenes of massacre that fill ninety-nine percent of the
picture, the speaker particularly illustrates the pastoral scene of the
music-playing lovers at lower right corner. They are “blind
to the carrion army” and “deaf to the fiddle in the hands / Of the
death's-head shadowing their song,” though death may fall upon them
soon. Yet the speaker, with a witty and admiring tone,
intimates that the timeless stasis of the artwork would make the
lovers' desolation be “stalled in paint.” |
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| Biographical
Background |
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The event in Part 1 is based on Plath's
experience with her Harvard medical student boyfriend, Dick
Norton. When she visited Harvard for the first time, in
October 1951, she went with Dick on his tour of duty at Boston's
Lying-In Hospital and spent a whole night watching dissections of
cadavers, observing foetuses in jars arranged chronologically to show
development, visiting seriously ill patients, and seeing a live birth,
complete with the mother's episiotomy. Plath later recounts
this event in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar.
The protagonist expresses her response to the experiences: “I was quite
proud of the calm way I stared at all these gruesome things.” |
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| Pictorial
Background |
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The Triumph of Death presents a fantastic, apocalyptic landscape
where Pieter Bruegel (or Peter Brueghel) illustrates the end of the
world in a new and horrifying way. Conventionally, the final
scene of human history was depicted as the Last Judgement. In
the company of saints, Christ decides the everlasting destiny of each
human soul, while Heaven and Hell wait to receive them. Yet
Bruegel's painting reveals skeletons using scythes to mow everyone
down. They attack the living in overwhelming numbers, and
conduct themselves in an orderly, military fashion. God does
not appear anywhere. And there is no indication of
resurrection and redemption. The artist presents death not as
the punishment for specific human sins and follies, but as the
universal destiny of all people; and it is indifferent to piety,
religion, social classes, or wealth. The military imagery of
the skeletons indicates Bruegel's accusation of war, for no matter who
wins, death is always the eventual victor.
Actually, Bruegel's picture combines many images that people of the
later Middle Ages used to express their fear of death and the
afterlife. One of them is the notion of the Dance of Death,
in which the dead lead away many living representatives of human
society. As we can observe at lower left of the painting,
where the dead carry away a pilgrim, a king, and a cardinal.
The notion also reflects in the musical instruments played by several
of the dead. While the skeleton riding the bone cart plays on
a hurdy-gurdy (detail 1), the skeleton on top of the death van beats on
a pair of kettledrums (detail 2). The motif of playing music
juxtaposes the lovers at the lower right (detail 3) and the
dead. These two lovers are portrayed with physical and
psychological realism. The lady seems unaware of the skeleton
playing a fiddle behind her. Yet the slight frown on the face
of the man gazing at his lover reveals that he is gradually aware of
the gruesome music that joins their song. Although the man
has a sword, he is not ready to use it. And their love song
suggests a great contrast among the grim music played by the
dead. The artist not only portrays a land of horrifying
death, but also preserves a little corner for a couple of indifferent
lovers.
Pieter Bruegel, The Triumph of Death,
c. 1562
The
Triumph of Death,
detail 1
The
Triumph of Death,
detail 2
The
Triumph of Death,
detail 3
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 Form |
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The two parts of the poem are balanced by
nine-line and two-line stanza forms in each part to reflect
structurally two views of death. The regular rhyme in Part 2
(abccdedff ba) presents the perfection of the world of art, while the
off rhyme at the end of Part 1 (abaacdcee fa) reflects the disorder in
the world of time. Also, in Part 1, the sounds are staccato
and harsh, such as "b," "c," "d," "k," and "t" (dissecting, laid,
black, burnt, turkey, death vats, white-smocked, cadaver, caved,
rubble, skull plates, old leather, snail-nosed babies, cut-out heart,
cracked). These sounds convey the hard reality in daily
life. In Part 2, the sounds are light and gentle, such as
"f," "1" and "n" (afloat, blue, satin, sings, fingering, leaflet,
fiddle, song, Flemish lovers, flourish). These sounds
indicate the lovers' delicate, frail, Arcadian corner. |
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| Commentary |
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Sylvia Plath's ekphrastic poem broadens the
theme of Bruegel's painting. The Triumph of Death presents
a landscape of death, which is an inescapable destiny of all human
beings. But Plath reconstructs the vision in her poem into a
juxtaposition of death in two worlds to manifest the eternity of
artistic creativity. Plath uses death in the physical world,
symbolized by the dissecting room, to indicate ephemeral human
life. Yet she also specifically focuses on the music-playing
lovers in Bruegel's painting to suggest how art can stall death at a
certain moment in the world of art. The permanence of art
outlives transient human life. Death becomes only a symbol in
the artwork. Also, the couple in Part 1 suggests an abnormal,
ill-matched male-female relationship. The medical student's
indifferent attitude toward the dissected bodies is echoed with his
offering a disconcerting valentine to the girl. Part 2
presents an Arcadian, amorous male-female relationship. The
happiness of love enables the lovers to be neglectful of the
approaching death. Though they are surrounded by the army of
the dead, they still preserve a little corner where death does not
invade. Thus Plath utilizes two views of death to reflect two
views of love. |
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