A ‘Beautiful Fusion’: On Death and Becoming Nature in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel

In her autobiographical short story, 'Ocean 1212-W,' Sylvia Plath describes a feeling of total unity with the ocean—a sense of 'fusion' with her 'childhood landscape,' that salty 'end of the land' (Johnny Panic, 123). Yet Plath writes that when her brother was born she felt the edge of herself—'the wall of my skin'—and, as a result, her self-described 'beautiful fusion with the things of the world was over'. Perhaps unknown to Plath, this theory of an 'oceanic feeling' was coined by Romain Rolland, who describes it as a 'sensation of the "contact" between ourselves and other beings' which 'manifests in the human psyche through a sense of limitlessness' (Silverman 30-31). It is a sense of borderless subjectivity, of 'being one with the external world' (Silverman 31). Resisting the fantasy of an 'indissoluble bond' with nature, critical theorist Kaja Silverman extends this concept, arguing that, since our bodies remain after death, 'the oceanic feeling must...be something we access through our finitude,' perhaps only possible via death of the self.

With an eye for death as that which manifests Plath’s desired fusion with nature, this paper traces the way speakers in Ariel blur the border between self/nature in order to re-imagine the 'oceanic feeling' Plath once felt. Mapping the porosity of borders between speaker/nature, this paper analyzes five poems in Ariel—'Berck-Plage,' 'Ariel,' 'Stings,' 'Lady Lazarus,' and 'Wintering'—to show that each provide a counter-narrative to the fracture in Plath’s kinship with nature by re-imagining a self united with the elements. Through repetitions of self-erasure, the fraying of the speaker’s self, and the transcendence of embodiment in natural spaces, these poems elucidate a theme repeated throughout Ariel, in which death is represented as its inverse:
life-giving, restorative, and most critically, the only conduit for 'a sense of limitlessness' with the natural world. This (re)union is framed as only attainable via death, an end in which the body finally bleeds into its surroundings. This paper demonstrates that Ariel articulates a desire for the 'oceanic feeling,' while reinforcing Silverman’s claim that this sensation is only ever accessed 'through our finitude'.