Nelya Trofimuk

“Sleeveless Summery Dress”: Sylvia Plath’s Bind to Society’s Norms.

Sylvia Plath uses imagery to demonstrate her main themes and ideas. By using these subtle hints, she enables the reader to make connections between her numerous poems. In one of Plath’s most famous poems, “The Bee Meeting”, the main theme is that of of fear, the fear of life and death. In “Lady Lazarus”, the main theme is Plath’s suicide attempts and how people are holding her back and are forcing her to live. In “The Bee Meeting” and “Lady Lazarus”, images of clothing demonstrate society’s bind on individuals by comparing clothes and conformity with nakedness and individuality.

In “The Bee Meeting,” the images of clothing show the poem’s progression. It begins with the speaker, who it is safe to assume is Sylvia Plath herself, is not appropriately dressed for this encounter with the bees. However, she is later forced to conform, she is obliged to assimilate with the villagers. In “Lady Lazarus.” Instead of being undressed to begin with, she is somewhat clothed, but later undressed. The clothes in both of these poems symbolize a bind to society’s standards and a bind to life.

In “The Bee Meeting,” the secretary buttons “the cuffs at [her] wrists” (8), and later, they give her a “fashionable white straw Italian hat / And a black veil…”, they are “making [her] on of them” (21). The villagers are attempting to rid her of her fears by helping her become one of them, emotionally. The image of these clothes maker her become one of them physically. Instead of clothing her, in “Lady Lazarus”, she is instead stripped from her “Jew linen” (9). Instead of the clothes binding her to society’s norms, the clothes she wears in “Lady Lazarus” bind her to her suicide attempts, death, and depression. These were the effects of the pressure of fitting in with society’s norms.

In “The Bee Meeting,” she meets the villagers. She feels left out and unloved because she is not appropriately dressed, she feels naked. She stated that “they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me” (4). This symbolizes not only that she feels like an outsider, but also that she was not warned. She was not warned about all the events that occurred in her life. Plath feels like an outsider in her “sleeveless summery dress [she has] no protection” (3). Nakedness usually represents innocence and individuality in Plath’s poems. However, without the protective beekeepers clothing, instead of being herself and unique, she feels betrayed and unloved. In “Lady Lazarus” her removal of clothing symbolizes her coming back to life, when she states that they “unwrap [her] hand and foot” (23). She is forced to “peel off the napkin” to get rid of her bind, or tie to the want to self-destruct. When she is clothed in “The Bee Meeting”, she admits to being in pain. This pain does not allow her to run, and she further proves society’s strong grasp by stating “I am rooted” (31). The clothes are binding her to the villagers; they are preventing her from running and being herself. She is forced to live in the cruel world, and she could only run if she ran forever, which alludes to her suicide attempts in “Lady Lazarus”.

In conclusion, Sylvia Plath uses these images of clothes to demonstrate her personal bind to life and the people in the society who are forcing her to live, those that want “a piece of [her] hair or [her] clothes” (Lazarus 64). When she is different and a unique individual, she is not accepted because she is not properly dressed. They, the villagers, judge her, feel sorry for her, and try to help her by pressuring her to look like one of them. However, this plan takes an opposite effect, because she is in pain, and she wants to run even more. She is rooted, she is stuck living. The clothes symbolize the bind to life and in effect – the bind to death. They reinforce the theme that both of these events are inevitable.