Death in 19th and 20th C Feminist Poetry

Presented by: Doaa Alaa Hashem

Under supervision of: Dr. Hoda Elakad

English Department

Ain Shams University

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Contents

Death in 19th and 20th C Feminist Poetry 2

Notes 21

Works cited 22

Appendix I: Emily Dickinson's poems 23

Because I Could not Stop for Death 23

Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers 24

A Death blow is a Life blow to Some 25

Appendix II: Sylvia Plath Poems 26

The Colossus 26

Daddy 28

Tulips 32

Appendix III: المالئكة نازك قصائد 35

للعار � غسال 35

لها قيمة ال امرأة مرثية 37

المذبوحة الراقصة 38

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Death in 19th and 20th C Feminist Poetry

Feminist poetesses used the imagery of death to express their frustration with their

patriarchal world and their wish to escape its oppression in some cases or as double

oppression of females in other cases. American poetesses Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath

as well as Arab poetess Nazik Al-Malaika, significantly expressed this feminist fascination

with death in their poetry. Plath wrote between the 1950s and 1960s, at the same age as Al-

Malaika, who wrote from the late 1940s till mid 1970s while Emily Dickinson wrote in the

1850s till late 1880s. Al-Malaika and Dickinson were considered pioneers of modern poetry

and though Plath's could not be considered a pioneer of modern poetry, yet her was so

uniquely and intimately her own. Despite the different styles, ages and cultures, all three

poetesses expressed death and feminism as tightly interwoven together, especially in

Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death", "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" and " A

Death blow is a Life blow to Some", Plath's "The Colossus", "Daddy" and "Tulips", as well as

Al-Malaika's "Ghaslan Lel'ar" or "Washing Away Shame", "Martheyat Emraa La Keemata

Laha" or "Lamentation of a Worthless Woman" and "Arakessa Almathboha" or "The

Slaughtered Dancer".

Before analyzing these poems, a short introduction to the lives and distinctive poetic

styles of each writer would show where each of them came from. Emily Dickinson led a life

of seclusion and most of her poetry was published posthumously. Her poems are intense

expression of her feelings and thoughts, but not affected with her age or the events of her

time. Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Mass., the eldest daughter of Edward

Dickinson and of Emily Norcross Dickinson. She remained at home unmarried, all her life.

At the age of 17 she returned from school and settled into the Dickinson home turning herself

into a competent housekeeper and a more than ordinary observer of Amherst life which was

dominated by the Church and Amherst College.

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During Dickinson's life, death was always close at hand. Living in a rural setting a

century and a half ago, she was aware of the cycle of existence, from birth to death and birth

again. Most of the people also would have been aware of that cycle, living on farms, tending

to animals, watching the seasons change. Moreover, this was a time before advances in health

care when people would die from a simple infection or injury; women routinely died in

childbirth, along with the child; life expectancy was only about 40 or 50 years; few people

would survive to old. Dickinson simply reflected in her writing what she saw in life which

was constantly shadowed by death. From the age of fifteen, she witnessed the funeral

processions of Amherst passing by to the adjacent cemetery, the "forest of the Death", with

its trees of white tombstones. Thus almost a quarter of her poems; around 700 out 1775

poems, dealt with death in different plots and themes. In May 15, 1886, she died of nephritis.

Most of her work was published posthumously, only around 7-10 poems were

published during her life and even those were heavily edited out of all her stylistic features.

She received no critical acclaim during her lifetime. The few editors who actually appraised

Dickinson's verse faulted her language as too unsentimental and plain to suit contemporary

tastes. Further, the structure of her poems was not as polished as the conventional romantic

verse that was published in the leading periodicals of the day. Even after her death, her poetry

was heavily edited before publication. It was not till Thomas H. Johnson published her

complete body of 1,775 poems in 1955 that the public read her poems as she wrote them and

she received her deserved acclaim as one of the most important and original poets to emerge

from the American literary tradition. (1)

While Dickinson's poetry was a reflection of her inner thoughts, Plath's poetic persona

was born from the ashes of her personal life. Indeed, the glamour brought about by her

suicide overshadowed much of her work. It made her a feminist heroine for her fans and a

poetess damned by a murderous art for her critics.

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She was born in Boston in 1932. Her father, a German immigrant, was a professor of

entomology at Boston College who maintained a special interest in the study of bees. His

sudden death from diabetes mellitus in 1940 devastated the eight-year-old Plath, and many

critics note the significance of this traumatic experience to her poetry, which frequently

contains both brutal and reverential characterizations of her father, as well as imagery of the

sea and allusions to bees. She was greatly affected with his loss. He was a German ex-patriot

and his treatment of his daughter was based on the belief that children should be seen and not

heard. He repressed her feelings towards him causing emotional confusion at a young age

between hatred and guilt.

However, she grew up comfortably in middle-class style and attended Smith College.

Though Plath appeared to be a carefree student who was the envy of many young women, she

silently struggled with the monsters of mental illness. In her senior year, she experienced her

first breakdown. She was subsequently hospitalized and treated with shock therapy. Plath

described hospitalization as "[a] time of darkness, despair, and disillusion--so black only as

the inferno of the human mind can be--symbolic death, and numb shock--then the painful

agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration." This was followed by a suicide attempt in

1953 and six months of intensive therapy.

After that, Plath was able to return to college and she graduated only a couple of

months behind her class. She wrote her honors senior thesis on the double personality in

Dostoyevski's novels and graduated summa cum laude. She received a Fulbright scholarship

and began two years at Cambridge University. There she met and married, in 1956, the

British poet Ted Hughes, a man who resembled her father in his repression of her feelings

and expectation of her following his rules. They lived first in Massachusetts at first, and then

in 1959 they returned to England, where their first child, a daughter, was born. The same

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year, 1960, saw the publication of her first book of poems, The Colossus. She suffered a

miscarriage in 1961, and bore a son in 1962.

In 1961 the Hughes family moved to Devon. She had won a Saxton Grant $2,000 that

enabled her to work on The Bell Jar. She spent her days trying to manage doing housework,

caring for her two babies, and writing. Personal jealousies, differences in American and

British views of gender roles, and a return of Sylvia's depression complicated the Plath-

Hughes marriage. Despite their happiness when Sylvia became pregnant once more, after an

earlier miscarriage, the marriage of two aspiring writers living in an isolated village with their

infant on little money was difficult. During the summer of 1962 her marriage to Hughes

began to fail; she was devastated when she learned that he had been unfaithful to her.

Although she and Hughes travelled to Ireland together in September, the marriage was by

then in ruins, and in October she asked her husband to leave for good.

Before Christmas, Plath moved herself and the children to London where she signed a

five-year lease on a flat once occupied by the poet William Butler Yeats. She took the finding

of the Yeats house to be some kind of a sign. However, it was the coldest winter in London.

She did not have a phone, and the pipes froze.

At that time, Plath was at work on the Ariel poems. The poems continued to rush out

of her even though she was full of despair. Her friends said she seemed cheerful at times and

still full of hope despite her problems. On February 11, 1963, after carefully sealing the

kitchen so her children would not be harmed, Sylvia Plath took a bottle of sleeping pills and

stuck her head in a gas oven. (2)

Unlike Plath, Al-Malaika's life had little or no influence on her poetic persona. She

was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1923, oldest among her four sisters and two brothers. Her

mother was a poetess and so was her father. In her early teens she showed great love for the

Arabic language, history and music, and modern Arabic poetry.

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She earned a BA degree in Arabic literature from Baghdad Education College at

1944. She also earned a scholarship to study literary criticism at Princeton University, New

Jersey, which was then a predominantly male institution in which she was one of the very

few female students. In 1954 she also earned her masters degree in comparative literature

from the US.

In 1961 she married her colleague in the Arabic department at the Education College

in Baghdad, Abdel-Hadi Mahbouba. With her husband, she helped found the University of

Basra in the southern part of Iraq. She left Iraq in 1970; two years after Saddam Hussein's

Baath Party came to power. She lived in Kuwait until Saddam's 1990 invasion, when she left

Kuwait City for Cairo and lived there till she died in 2007. (3)

All three poetesses had distinctive poetic styles. While Dickinson and Al-Malaika

were modern poetry pioneers, Plath's style was so deeply intimate to be imitated by others.

Dickinson's compact, forceful language, characterized formally by long disruptive dashes,

heavy iambic meters, and angular, imprecise rhymes, was one of the singular literary

achievements of the nineteenth century. Her aphoristic style, whereby substantial meanings

are compressed into very few words, could be daunting, but many of her best and most

famous poems were comprehensible even on the first reading.

Dickinson was not a “philosophical poetess”; … she made no effort to organize her

thoughts and feelings into a coherent, unified worldview. Rather, her poems simply recorded

thoughts and feelings experienced naturally over the course of a lifetime devoted to reflection

and creativity: the powerful mind represented in these records was by turns astonishing,

compelling, moving, and thought-provoking. It emerged much more vividly than if Dickinson

had orchestrated her work according to a preconceived philosophical system. (4)

As for Nazik Al-Malaika, in 1947 she published her first collection of poetry, A'shiqat

Al-Layl (Lover of the Night). Its poems were written in classical form. A few months later

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news of the cholera epidemic that was then sweeping Egypt arrived in Iraq. One thousand

deaths of cholera per day made the poetess write her well-known poem "The Cholera."

It was with this poem that Al-Malaika first freed her poetry from the rigid strictures of

traditional rhythmic forms and rhyme schemes. Only the tafila, a looser, more flexible metric

division, was retained. Nazik Al-Malaika with Badr Shakir al-Sayyab must take much of the

credit as pioneers of modern Arabic poetry, for they both played an important role in

developing and popularizing Arabic “free verse” (al-shi‘r al-hurr).

It would be erroneous to equate modern Arabic poetry with the English and French

versions of “free verse” and “vers libre”. A more descriptive term for "al-shi‘r al-hurr" would

be “taf‘ila poetry”, named for the feet or metrical units that make up the lines. In fact there

was very little that was “free” about taf‘ila poetry. Al-Mala’ika sought to modernize Arabic

poetry without completely unmooring it from its metrical roots. Among the modern poets of

the 1950s and 60s, she seemed like one of the few who recognized that these metrical roots

were precisely what had cemented poetry’s popular appeal in the Arab world, as well as its

traditional reputation as the “register of the Arabs” (diwan al-‘arab).(5)

Finally, Sylvia Plath's unique literary style had her poetry  described as being "at once

confessional, lyrical, and symbolic" (Hinkle 920). Intensity, imagination, and attention to the

evolving self characterized Sylvia Plath's poetry. She handled very painful and intense

subjects such as suicide, self-loathing, shock treatment and dysfunctional relationships. The

flow of images combined with the structure of her poetry successfully drew the reader into

that suffering.

The styling that led to the continuity of her art and its relevance to society could be

attributed to many factors and techniques common among her poetry and prose; namely her

unique uses of rhythm and meter, her prevailing themes of feminist criticism, her use of the

technique of "doubling," and her unique approach to characterization.(6)

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This short introduction to the three poets and their poetic style should help us

understand their poems. We could now easily read their poetry as feminist works challenging

the patriarchal society oppressing women. To this end, they expressed either refusal to be part

of this society and escaped their oppression through death or they described death as an

added element of oppressing women.

Both Dickinson and Plath treated death as an escape from oppression in their poems.

The theme of Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death" was immortality. The speaker

described death as a gentleman suitor carrying her in his chariot to eternal immortality:

BECAUSE I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

In their essay "Emily Dickinson’s Perspectives on Death: An Interpretation of

Dickinson’s Poems on Death", Omana Antony & Suchi Dewan observed that Dickinson

presented death not as something to cringe away from in terror, but rather as a gentle and

persuasive suitor escorting his love on a joy ride. Pickard also commented: "Throughout,

death is seen … as a welcome relief from life‘s tensions … as a lover gently conveying one

to hidden pleasures … and finally as a solemn guide leading one to the threshold of

immortality." (Pickard, p-55).

According to William Galperin, in this poem "labor" was equivalent to "leisure." And

the speaker gave them both up as she recognized that her suitor was death:

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,

And I had put away

My labor, and my leisure too,

For his civility.

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She also understood that in marrying him, as she presumably intended, her house would have

been a grave: "We paused before a house that seemed / A swelling of the ground;" Thus, by

redefining death so that it meant a woman's suitor of choice, the poem similarly redefined

immortality as a woman's victory by preventing the patriarchal society from controlling her

life.

Like Dickinson, Sylvia Plath presented death as an escape from oppression. However,

unlike the victory depicted in Dickinson's "BECAUSE I could not stop for Death", "The

Colossus" was Plath's admission of defeat against her society and her surrender was

confirmed by her choice of death. In "The Colussus", she depicted her father as a great but

broken statue, a ruin from some former time: "O father, all by yourself / You are pithy and

historical as the Roman Forum." The speaker was laboring, as she had been for thirty years,

to get him "put together entirely / Pieced, glued, and properly jointed"—to bring him back to

life or to put him into perspective, either way meant freeing herself from his power so that

she could create a free existence for herself. The poetess described a very private, personal

experience; her relationship with her dead father whom she both adored and hated because he

died, because he was dead and still influenced her life.

The last three lines of the poem, presented a particularly striking image: "My hours

are married to shadow. / No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel / On the blank stones of

the landing." The marriage to shadow was a marriage to the memory of the father, and

therefore to death itself. It was a statement of the submission of the speaker to the broken

statue of her father and her acceptance, indicated in the word 'married', that there could be no

escape from this memory into a more vital life, thus, she accepted her death almost with

fervor as an escape from her oppressive life. "The scene, being a symbolic construction, is

meant to be translated into a psychological and emotional vocabulary: I am yoked, dedicated

to death, observes the protagonist. The giant statue is mythic and larger than life, but in being

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so it is also the past—it is irrevocably dead and cannot be reconstructed. But it has become

her only home. She lives in its shadow and views the living world from its perspective. Her

own life, as she sees it, is therefore a living death." (Juhasz)

Unlike Plath, who viewed death as defeat, Dickinson viewed death as a safety from a

painful life. In "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers", Dickinson described graves as a safe

sanctuary where the dead would be:

Untouched by Morning -

and untouched by noon -

Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, 

Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone - 

The dead were described as "meek", a fit description of women in Dickinson's age, as

enduring oppression with patience and without resentment; they really have no choice to be

anything but meek, because they were not in control of their lives. In their death they were

"untouched" by the motion of the sun throughout the day. "One can say that, at deeper levels,

her typical experience [of] motion involve[d] pain or terror, [while] cessation [of motion

denoted a] state of rest" (Antony, Dewan, p 5). Thus, again, death was used as an escape from

a patriarchal society where women only experience painful oppression to a safe restful

existence.

This same patriarchal society was symbolized as a father in Plath's poem "Daddy".

Plath's only way to free herself from the father figure was to kill her father’s memory, which

she did by metaphorically murdering him. It was a bleak poem, where she confessed her

desperation and conflicting feelings towards her father, and later her husband, quite frankly.

Plath confessed that, after failing to escape her father's influence on her life even though he

was long dead through attempted suicide, "At twenty I tried to die", she married a man who

resembled father, "a man in black with a Meinkampf look / And a love of the rack and the

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screw. / And I said I do, I do." a man who played the role of a vampire of her spirit, one who

"drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know." (Sylvia Plath was married to

Ted Hughes for seven years.) When she drove the stake through her father’s heart, she was

not only exorcising the demon of her father’s memory, but also killing her husband and all

men.

Earlier in the poem Plath confirmed the resemblance she saw between her father and

her husband; “Every woman adores a Fascist,/The boot in the face, the brute/Brute heart of a

brute like you”. She was describing the brutality of both men; her father’s disregard for his

health causing his death when she was only eight, thus abandoning her when she most needed

him as well as his general personality which she feared when he was alive: “In which I have

lived like a foot/For thirty years, poor and white,/Barely daring to breathe or Achoo”, and her

husband's cruelty at the end of their marriage when he abandoned her and their family. 

"Daddy" was a total rejection of patriarchal society which dictated that fathers then

husbands had total control of women's lives. Such rejection of family and society led to that

final rejection of life itself as she herself declared: "At twenty I tried to die". The poem was

written a few months before Plath committed suicide, so it is possible that she was thinking

of her father and how he left her at such a young age. Her suicide is everywhere predicted in

the poem. "Her earlier terror at death, thus, becomes a romance with it, and her poems

themselves are … yearnings toward that condition. Freud believed the aim of all life is death,

and for Plath life was poetry. So by extension, poetry for her now becomes death, both

conditions inseparable." (Phillips)

The poem opened with a reference to the father's black shoe, in which the daughter

has "lived like a foot," suggesting her submissiveness and entrapment. "Daddy" was

obviously an attempt to escape the idealized father's influence on her life; but it clearly failed

at this task. He kept returning in the poem in different guises: statue, shoe, Nazi, teacher,

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devil, and vampire. Thus, the father was reviewed in terms of his dominance, cruelty, and

authoritarianism. Furthermore, the story is no longer the daughter's attempt to reunite with

and to marry the dead father; it is now the daughter's wish to overthrow his dominance over

her imagination and to "kill" him and the man who takes his place—the vampire husband.

The rhythm in "Daddy" resembled a "nursery-rhyme jingle [and at the same time an]

incantat[ion] - a deadly spell being cast. A ferocious rejection of "daddy" is taking place; the

most damning charges imaginable are being hurled at him. Yet the wizardry of this amazing

poem is that its jubilant fury has a sobbing and impassioned undersong. The voice is finally

that of a revengeful, bitterly hurt child storming against a beloved parent. She is declaring

herself free, both of ghostly father and of husband. The implication is that after this exorcism

her life can begin again, that she will be reborn" (Stevenson). However, it was clear that to

Plath this rebirth would occur in death, where she can finally escape the influence both her

father and her husband had on her life. Plath actually fulfilled this escape from her life

through suicide a few months after this poem was written.

Somewhat like Plath's "Daddy" foretold her actual suicide, Dickinson's "A Death

Blow is a Life Blow to Some" gave the impression of her existence as so meaningless that her

death actually seemed to be a new beginning. In fact, this poem could so clearly be applied

Dickinson's life and death. During her life, she was expected by her society to live demurely

in her parents' house and apply herself to domestic chores either till she got married or till she

died. No one paid much attention to her brilliant poetic talent and male literary critics and

friends advised her not to publish her poetry. It was only after her death that her poetry came

to be published. Even then, it was not till the 1950s that modern critics had come to recognize

that Dickinson's poetic style was in fact decades ahead of its time. Thus, it was after her death

that Dickinson found life and immortality, just as her poem suggested.

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The poem itself was very short:

A Death blow is a Life blow to Some

Who till they died, did not alive become—

Who had they lived, had died but when

They died, Vitality begun.

However, Dickinson succeeded in only four lines to confirm that physical death is the

beginning, not the end. The second and third line depicted women's way of life at her time so

faithfully one could not escape the conclusion that she was again referring to death as

women's only escape from a meaningless fruitless life of oppression in a patriarchal society.

In "Tulips", Plath presented death as an escape expressing Dickinson's view rather

than her own of death as defeat as presented in "Daddy" and "The Colossus". Death seemed a

welcome escape from her life not surrender to her defeat as in the other two poems. She used

a personal experience as a setting to express this idea of death."Ted Hughes says she wrote

"Tulips" after being hospitalized for an appendectomy in March of 1961." (Dobbs)

The narrator had received tulips from her family but she wanted to reject them as she

wanted to reject the her life and the family that restrained her freedom:

Now I have lost myself, I am sick of baggage—

My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;

Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

She did not want tulips. The gift she wished for was death to free her from her family which,

she believed, was a "baggage" stopping her progress. Ironically, the gift she received was the

"too excitable" tulips symbolizing life. She felt disappointed because she had already given

her name and day-clothes away, relinquished herself to the nurses that "pass and pass," and

believed herself on her way to achieve freedom through death as expressed in the sensation

that her possessions "Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head"

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What she found in her rejection of the gift here was freedom, a kind of perfection:

I didn't want any flowers. I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free—

. . . .

it is what the dead close on, finally. . . .

Yet, the poem ended by the patient waking up from death or rather anesthesia. Plath

portrayed how the narrator reluctantly came out of her death-like anesthesia reversing the

imagery of the first four stanzas in the imagery of the last four intimating that she failed to

achieve her freedom.

Arab poetess Al-Malaika presented a totally different view of the correlation between

death and feminism: death as a weapon to force women to submit to the patriarchal society.

In her poem "Washing Away Shame", Al-Malaika depicted a girl slain by one of her relatives

to wash away shame; Al-Malaika lamented this crime which was so easily accepted:

وسواد … ودموع وحشرجة أم)اه

المطعون الجسم واختلج الدم أنبجس

الطين فيه عشَش6 المتموج والشعر

الجالد .. ( أال يسمعها ولم أم)اه

األوراد وتصحو الفجر سيجيء � وغدا

المفتون واألمل تنادي والعشرون

واألزهار المرجة فتجيب

للعار � غسال )ا عن رحلت

We did not hear anything the slain girl might have said, only her last whimpers, so we

could never be sure whether she was really killed because of the reason her murderer gave or

if she was murdered for whatever reason he considered she deserved to die for. She might

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have refused to marry this relative who murdered her, or if they were in a rural area, she

might have inherited land and refused to give it up to male relatives. Motives for the murder

were left vague on purpose and we only knew what he murderer said.

Moreover, Al-Malaika observed the bitter irony of the patriarchal society which

allowed men what it would not allow a women. The murderer did not hesitate to kill for the

purpose of "Washing Away Shame"

الناس ويلقى الوحشي )د الجال ويعود

العار" " " " مزقنا مديته ويمسح العار؟

" أحرار" السمعة بيض فضالء ورجعنا

Then he returned to pursue the sins he used to pursue undeterred by the same values

or moralities he used to murder the girls.

األنفاس العاطرة الكسلى الغانيه ناد

وباألقدار " بالقرآن عينيها أفدي

جزار يا كأسك إمالء

العار غسل المقتولة وعلى

He called the owner of the tavern; drank wine, and requested the presence of a prostitute

whom he was ready to redeem at the expense of his sacred beliefs. Al-Malaika tried to embed

the picture with symbols of social oppression of women not for the sake of morality, but as an

oppression of women and a denial of their right to life, just because her murderer considered

it his right to wash away shame.

The murder spread fear throughout the neighborhood:

الجارات السوداء قصتها وستحكي

تنساها لن )ة الخشبي األبواب حتى)

األشجار حتى) وستهمسها

للعار … � غسال للعار � غسال

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Fear spread its authority over all the girls, to the extent that they suffered misgivings over

every act they did. They found themselves in a position of perpetual mourning, for fear of

being murdered like the slain girl. Al-Malaika cynically deplored this weapon used to usurp

all women's rights:

القرية فتيات يا الحارة، جارات يا

مآقينا بدموع سنعجنه الخبز

أيدينا وسنسلخ سنقصجدائلنا

)ه نقي اللون بيض ثيابهم لتظل)

Death was used as a weapon to force women to give up whatever rights they had and

to obey not only the rules set by the patriarchal society but also the orders of their male

relatives or else it would be so easy to kill them to wash away shame.

In "Lamentation of a Worthless Woman" Al-Malaika conveyed a different form of

death as double oppression of women: the indifference shown by people towards the death of

a woman. Just because she was a worthless woman, her funeral deserved neither attendance

nor even sadness. No one even a bothered to follow her coffin through a window overlooking

the road with sad eyes:

ترجفشفاه ولم خد) لها يشحب ولم ذهبت

وتروى تروى موتها قص)ة األبواب تسمع لم

وشجوا أسى� تسيل cنافذة أستار dترفع لم

تراه ال حتى بالتحديق التابوت لتتابع

الذكر ترعشه الدرب في هيكل )ة بقي ( أال

صداه مأوى� يجد فلم الدروب في تعثر h نبأ

الحفر بعض في النسيان إلى فأوى

القمر كآتبه يرثي

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The poem described the funeral of an unknown woman. Her burial was as obscure

and forgotten as her death which raised not a tear in any eye. This was the first scene in the

poem, clipping out the funeral procession and the burial ritual: a procession going in haste

and in secret on a moonlit night with the moon as the only the eye-witness. Nobody was even

there to witness it till it disappeared up the street from behind a window curtain. Then she

was buried deep and completely forgotten.

The second scene described the next morning after the funeral:

أسلم6 iوالليل  iه للصkباْحd  دون6  نفس6 ، c اهتمـام

mبصوت iالضياء وبالصيامd الحليبm  بائعةm  وأتى

mواءiمm لم  ب cجائع nٍّطmق6  قd 6ب عظـامd سوى  منه  ت

mشاجراتiمm وبالمـرارةm  ب ، والكفاْحd  البائعين

في mباألحجار الصبيان mق iبتراش  mِض dرiع dالطريق

mالماء mم6ساربm 6وkِثm  ب ،  المiل mة kقـmاألز بالرياْحd في

dرفيق بال السطوْح mبأبواب تلهو

dعميق cنسيان mشبه في

This scene revealed the reason of the total indifference to her death. The woman died in a

place of total indifference caused by poverty, hunger, bitterness and dirtiness. The poem

exposed the oppression and humiliation against women in the patriarchal society, an

oppression which would be doubled in poor areas to the extent that injustice against females

did not stop at the threshold of death, but extended beyond it. No one cared to attend her

funeral for she was a "Worthless Woman".

As long as the one who was dying was a woman, no one would care; not only that,

they would still expect her to dance to their tunes despite the fact that she was slaughtered

and about to die. "The Slaughtered Dancer" expressed the injustice and cruelty a woman

17

could be exposed to even after she was slaughtered. The poem conveyed image after image of

the injustice, humiliation and oppression a woman is exposed to.  

وغن)ي القلب مذبوحة إرقصي

وابتسا رقص فالجرْح مواضحكي

She was expected to conceal her tears of pain and continue smiling and dancing. She

was not even allowed to die in peace. The wound had stopped bleeding for the time being so

she was put back on leach like an animal to continue her dance because her convulsions are

meaningless.

السخينا , الدمع أسكتي أدموع

ابتساما الجرْح صرخة من واعصري

وناما الجرْح هدأ ؟ اانفجار

المهينا القيد واعيدي فاتركيه

؟ الضحايا الختالجات معنى أي)

She was ordered to turn her sadness and tears into a lovely music full of life without

showing a trace of her misery

لحنا المحرق جرحك من إقبسي

حياة من بقايا فيها تزل لم

وحزنا يفضبؤسا لم لنشيد

Her screams of pained conveyed ingratitude and madness to her owner and she was

ordered to forget about her dead and leave them unburied.

وجنون ! جحود أي) ؟ صرخة

دفن دون صرعى قتالك أتركي

The last order, to leave her dead unburied implied that when she died, she would not be

buried herself, for if her owner would not allow his slave to stop her duties as a dancer

entertaining him then he would not exert himself to bury her either.

18

She was then ordered to laugh in gratitude at the knife that slaughtered her, frankly

called a victimized slave and told that trying to revolt is madness. She had better dance

happily and smile in exultation

)ا حب الحمراء للمدية إضحكي

اختالج دون الثرى فوق واسقطي

النعاج ذبح تذبحي أن )ة من

وقلبا روحا تطعني أن )ة من

تثوري أن ضحايا يا وجنون

العبيد األسرى غضبة وجنون

سعيد ممتن) رقصة أرقصي

األجير العبد غبطة في وابسمي

Finally, she was ordered to smile entranced at her murderer giving him her humiliated

free heart, as she was a slave and not allowed to have anything free, even her heart. This was

the final humiliation; she would surrender her heart and allow her murderer to become elated

stabbing her at will

افتتانا الجاني للقاتل وابسمي

المهانا الحر) قلبك إمنحيه

وطعنا ا حز) ينتشي ودعيه

Theses last three lines were repeated three lines later as to stress the inevitability of

the woman's fate. The poem then ended with the repetition of the first four lines of the poem

as if coming full circle.

Thus, to Al-Malaika, death was the final humiliation of the victimized slave the

woman was told she was, not the escape it represented to Dickinson and Plath. The three

poetesses agree that throughout life women had felt oppressed, enslaved, or abused.

Patriarchal society had prevented them from pursuing their own interests and living freely

19

throughout history. However, would death be a better alternative to a life one is not permitted

to fully live for themselves? It would be interesting to note that western female poetesses

referred to death as an escape from oppression while eastern female poetess referred to it as

double oppression.

Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath often invoked death within their poetry. For them

leaving this world was the only way they could finally achieve autonomy from men, and

men's overwhelming controlling presence in their lives. According to them death should be

embraced rather than feared.

Nazik Al-Malaika, on the other hand, presented death as double oppression not as an

escape to freedom. It was depicted as an end to any hope a woman might have had for a free

fulfilled life, a mark of indifference to women and also as a sign of disregarding women's

feelings and pain. It seemed that Al-Malaika believed that as long as life continued, there was

hope for improvement while death was the end of that hope.

Could these opposing views of death indicate that though eastern women are usually

depicted as less free than western women, yet eastern women who had more belief in

achieving their freedom than western women? This question would need more researching

than this paper allowed but it would be worth the effort to explore it.

20

Notes

I was indebted to all the information I used in this paper about the poetesses' lives and

poetic styles to the following sources:

1. Emily Dickinson Museum - The Homestead and the Evergreens

http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/childhood_youth

2. Griffin, Marie, "Sylvia Plath - Poet, Author: Great talent in great darkness", Oct

10, 2011

3. Stevens, Simone, "Nazik al-Malaika (1923-2007) Iraqi Woman’s Journey Changes

Map of Arabic Poetry", Al Jadid, Vols. 13/14, nos. 58/59 (2007/2008)

4. Marcus, Mordecai CliffsNotes on Emily Dickinson's Poems. 28 Nov 2013

</literature/e/emily-dickinsons-poems/about-emily-dickinsons-poems>.

5. Mlynxqualey, "On Nazik al-Mala’ika’s Revolutionary Romantic Poetry" September

5, 2013 - Arabic Literature (in English)

6. ST, "Analyzing Sylvia Plath's Writing Style through Her Poem, Mirror", Apr 2,

2008

21

Works Cited

Antony, Omana and Dewan, Suchi, "Emily Dickinson’s Perspectives on Death: An

Interpretation of Dickinson’s Poems on Death", Lapis Lazuli -An International Literary

Journal (LLILJ) ISSN 2249-4529, Vol.2/ NO.2/Autumn 2012

Dobbs, Jeannine, "Viciousness in the Kitchen: Sylvia Plath’s Domestic

Poetry." Modern Language Studies 7.2 (1977).

Galperin, William, D. Campbell, "Critical Perspectives on Selected Poems by Emily

Dickinson: Overall Approaches to Dickinson"

https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/dickinsoncriticism.pdf

Juhasz , Suzanne, "Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, a

New Tradition", New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. Copyright © 1976.

Phillips, Robert, "The Dark Tunnel: A Reading of Sylvia Plath." Modern Poetry

Studies 3.2 (1972).

Pickard, John B., "Emily Dickinson: An Introduction and Interpretation" Holt,

Rinehart and Winston, 1967

Stevenson, Anne, "Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath." Copyright © 1989 by Anne

Stevenson.

22

Appendix I: Emily Dickinson's poems

BECAUSE I could not stop for Death

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste, 5

And I had put away

My labor, and my leisure too,

For his civility.

We passed the school where children played

At wrestling in a ring; 10

We passed the fields of gazing grain,

We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed

A swelling of the ground;

The roof was scarcely visible, 15

The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’t is centuries; but each

Feels shorter than the day

I first surmised the horses’ heads

Were toward eternity. 20

23

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers

Untouched by Morning - 

and untouched by noon -

Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, 

Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone - 

Grand go the Years, 

In the Crescent above them -

Worlds scoop their Arcs - 

and Firmaments - row -

Diadems - drop -

And Doges surrender -

Soundless as Dots, 

On a Disk of Snow.

24

A Death blow is a Life blow to Some

A Death blow is a Life blow to Some

Who till they died, did not alive become—

Who had they lived, had died but when

They died, Vitality begun.

25

Appendix II: Sylvia Plath Poems

The Colossus

I shall never get you put together entirely,

Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.

Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles

Proceed from your great lips.

It's worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,

Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.

Thirty years now I have labored

To dredge the silt from your throat.

I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of Lysol

I crawl like an ant in mourning

Over the weedy acres of your brow

To mend the immense skull-plates and clear

The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia

Arches above us. O father, all by yourself

You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.

Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

26

It would take more than a lightning-stroke

To create such a ruin.

Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.

The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel

On the blank stones of the landing.

27

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do   

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot   

For thirty years, poor and white,   

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.   

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,   

Ghastly statue with one gray toe   

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic   

Where it pours bean green over blue   

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.   

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town   

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.   

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.   

So I never could tell where you   

28

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.   

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.   

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna   

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck   

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.   

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

29

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.   

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,   

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot   

But no less a devil for that, no not   

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.   

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,   

And they stuck me together with glue.   

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.   

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

30

The black telephone’s off at the root,   

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

The vampire who said he was you   

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.   

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

31

Tulips

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.   

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.   

I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.   

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses   

And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff   

Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,

They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,

Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,   

So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.   

Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——

My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,   

My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;   

Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat   

stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

32

They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.   

Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley   

I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books   

Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.   

I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free——

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them   

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.   

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe   

Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.   

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,   

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,   

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.   

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,   

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow   

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,   

33

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.   

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,

Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.   

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river   

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.   

They concentrate my attention, that was happy   

Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;   

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,   

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health.

34

Appendix III: المالئكة نازك قصائد

للعار غسال�

...وسواد ودموع وحشرجةٌ أماه

المطعون الجسم واختلج الدم وانبجث

الطين فيه عشَش المتموxج والشعر

الجزار إال يسمعها ولم اماه

األوراد وتصحو الفجر سيجيء � وغدا

المفتون واألمل تنادي والعشرون

واألزهار المرجة فتجيب

... للعار � غسال عنا رحلت

الناس ويلقى الوحشي الجالد ويعود

العار " " "" مزقنا مديته ويمسح العار؟

أحرار" السمعة بيض فضالء "ورجعنا

" الكاس" وأين الخمر أين الحانة kرب يا

" األنفاس" العاطرة الكسلى الغانيةَ mناد

" وباألقدار" بالقرآن عينيها افدي

" جزار" يا كاساتك6 امأل

العار غسل المقتولة وعلى

الفتيات عنها وتسأل الفجر وسيأتي

" " " قتلناها" الوحَش فيرد} تراها أين

" وغسلناها" جبهتنا في عار وصمةُ

الجارات السوداء قصتها وستحكي

النخالت حتى الحارة في وسترويها

تنساها لن الخشبية األبواب حتى

األحجار حتى وستهمسها

35

... للعار � غسال للعار غسال

القرية فتيات يا الحارة جارات يا

مآقينا بدموع سنعجنه الخبز

أيدينا وسنسلخ سنقصجدائلنا

نقية اللون بيض ثيابهم لتظل

فالمدية لفتة ال فرصة ال بسمة ال

وأخينا والدنا قبضة في تراقبنا

قفار اي يدري من � وغدا

للعار � غسال ستوارينا

36

لها قيمـة ال امرأة مرثية

بغدادي)" " زقاق من صور

dترجف ولم خ6د{ لها dح6ب d6ش ي ولم dذهبت iشفاه

mها موت قصkة6 iاألبواب mمعdتس و6ى  لم dرi و6ى ت dرi وت

dترتفع جdو6ا أسى�  تسيلi  نافذةc  أستارi  لم وش6

تـراه ال  حتى  بالتحديـقm  التابوت6  لتتابع6

cهيكل ة6 kـ بقي ه  الدربm  في  إال iشmع dرi 6رd ت الذxك

مأوى� 6جد ي فلم mالدروب في kر6 تعثh صـداهi نبأ

رd بعضm  في  النسيانm  إلى  فأوى فـ6 iالح

. dالق6م6ر i6ه 6ت كآب 6رثي ي

* * *أسلم6 iوالليل  iه للصkباْحd  دون6  نفس6 ، c اهتمـام

mبصوت iالضياء وبالصيامd الحليبm  بائعةm  وأتى

mواءiمm لم  ب cجائع nٍّطmق6  قd 6ب عظـامd سوى  منه  ت

mشاجراتiمm وبالمـرارةm  ب ، والكفاْحd  البائعين

في mباألحجار الصبيان mق iبتراش  mِض dرiع dالطريق

mالماء mم6ساربm 6وkِثm  ب ،  المiل mة kقـmاألز بالرياْحd في

dرفيق بال السطوْح mبأبواب تلهو

dعميق cنسيان mشبه في

* * *

37

المذبوحة الراقصة

وغن)ي القلب مذبوحة إرقصي

وابتسام رقص فالجرْح واضحكي

يناموا أن الضحايا الموتى إسألي

واطمئني )ي وغن أنت وارقصي

السخينا , الدمع أسكتي أدموع

ابتساما الجرْح صرخة من واعصري

وناما الجرْح هدأ ؟ اانفجار

المهينا القيد واعيدي فاتركيه

***؟ الضحايا الختالجات معنى أي)

ورزايا , ستنسى أحزان بعض

وجرحى , قتيالن أو وقتيل

***لحنا المحرق جرحك من إقبسي

حياة من بقايا فيها تزل لم

وحزنا يفضبؤسا لم لنشيد

***وجنون ! جحود أي) ؟ صرخة

دفن دون صرعى قتالك أتركي

؟ السجين النتفاضات معنى أي)

***بقايا الشعب وفي ؟ إنتفاضات

؟ دماء نبع تسل لم عروق من

األبرياء وبعض ؟ إنجارات

؟ ضحايا بعد يسقطوا لم بعضهم

***الجروْح في بدعا جرحك يكن لم

38

المميت الحزن سكرة في فارقصي

للسكوت الحيارى األرق)اء

***)ا حب الحمراء للمدية إضحكي

اختالج دون الثرى فوق واسقطي

النعاج ذبح تذبحي أن )ة من

وقلبا روحا تطعني أن )ة من

تثوري أن ضحايا يا وجنون

العبيد األسرى غضبة وجنون

سعيد ممتن) رقصة أرقصي

األجير العبد غبطة في وابسمي

***افتتانا الجاني للقاتل وابسمي

المهانا الحر) قلبك إمنحيه

وطعنا ا حز) ينتشي ودعيه

***وغن)ي القلب مذبوحة وارقصي

يناموا أن الضحايا الموتى إسألي

واطمئني )ي وغن أنت وارقصي

افتتانا الجاني للقاتل وابسمي

المهانا الحر) قلبك إمنحيه

وطعنا ا حز) ينتشي ودعيه

***وغن)ي القلب مذبوحة وارقصي

وابتسام رقص فالجرْح واضحكي

يناموا أن الضحايا الموتى إسألي

واطمئني )ي وغن أنت وارقصي

39