SYLVIA PLATH

¡§Two Views of a Cadaver Room¡¨

Study Guide

Summary ¡U Biographical Background ¡U Pictorial Background

Form ¡U Commentary

n Summary:

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¡Xburnt 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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n Biographical Background:

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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n Pictorial Background:

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.

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n Form:

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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n Commentary:

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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