ABSTRACT
When her daughter, Sylvia, was still a child at home, Aurelia Plath’s “Bible” was a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems.1 It was not, of course, R.W. Franklin’s authoritative version, but a version more similar to Alfred Leete Hampton’s collection. Aurelia Plath’s ambiguous presentation of Dickinson as at once sacred, her oeuvre a Bible, and wayward, her words a replacement for the Bible, was presumably an attempt to show that she transferred the gift of poetry to her daughter, a lineage through which Dickinson, mediated by Aurelia, reached Sylvia Plath. But if Aurelia Plath’s use of the word “Bible” suggests the way that text functions as a go-between, enacting ties between mother and a child, Plath’s poetry seeks to disrupt the linguistic maternal, to specify instead an opposite gesture in poems whose aesthetic draws on the trope of maternity only to mark an ascetic space dislocated from the quotidian maternal trappings of comfort, care, and material satiety. If Emily Dickinson’s poems were Sylvia Plath’s nursery reading, then it is perhaps no surprise that her poem “The Rabbit Catcher” irresistibly calls to mind the nursery library, specifically the children’s story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice’s philosophical rabbit inaugurates the tricky movement of “The Rabbit Catcher,” but, like Aurelia’s anecdote about Plath’s inheritance from Dickinson, the tradition that the poem’s feminine speaker invokes is elusive. In Plath’s poem, the white rabbit that leads Alice and her readers “down, down, down” navigates the rabbit hole of maternity.2 But “The Rabbit Catcher” also catches the death of its speaker, for the poem’s very dramatic and structural emergence is based on its speaker’s apparent sublimation into death. Like Alice’s white rabbit, Plath’s rabbit talks, commenting on the metaphorics of posthumousness, a troped posthumous voice its fabular hunter cannot trap. While “The Rabbit Catcher” has often been read as a depiction of a marriage gone bad, in this chapter I argue that Plath’s use of the dead, nonhuman voice is a way of
querying abjection, an exploration that supervises the details of her biography.3 Rather than focusing on biographical messages in the poem, I want to argue that the poem’s already dead speaker’s complaint-a look at hunting from the perspective of the prey-goes beyond confessing a wife’s troubles and presents the difficulty of the feminine speaker as such in the place of elegy. It presents, that is, how the pastoral elegy becomes a “place of force” for the feminine speaker.
