Literary Criticism

"The Bee Meeting"

Sylvia Plath

Katie Kalivoda, October 7, 2008

Biographical and Psychological Appraoch

Sylvia Plath's "The Bee Meeting", along with most of her poetry, is seriously influenced by her life at the time it was written. This poem was written very soon after she discovered the affair between her husband, Ted Hughes, and Assia Wevill. She had then moved to London with her children, separating with Hughes. However, Plath had also accomplished many things she had wished to, such as having her two children and publishing her first collection of poems. Therefore, her new anthology, Ariel, which includes her bee series, is obviously filled with mixed feelings. She has many of the same qualities as the speaker does. For example, this was one of the most vulnerable times of Plath's life after the separation, and it is proved in that she was successful in committing suicide a year later. Also, for her entire life she was able to fit in with society on the surface because of her incredible talent for literature and intellect. However, like the speaker, she was not a part of society like the rector, midwife, and sexton are. And as change is a major theme in "The Bee Meeting", it was in her life as well as she transitioned to a life as a single mother.

Psychologically, Plath presents many ideas because of her past and her mental illness. In many of her works her father is portrayed as Hitler because of her abundance of repressed feelings for him. During her childhood he was a distant and mean father, creating an unhappy enviornment despite the loving relationship she had with her mother. In "The Bee Meeting", her father is not depicted as Hitler, but as the queen bee. In the piece, Plath, being the speaker, was created by the queen, ignored by the queen, and then expected to do everything for the queen.

In her bee sequence, Plath encompasses the ideas of finding one's and specifically her identity and how that relates to the female body and one's consciousness. On this topic, critic Jessica Lewis Luck insightfully said, "Plath's status as both beekeeper and poet creates a fruitful nexus of science and poetry that allows her to examine the structures and mechanisms of her own consciousness, her hive-mind, and a new foundation for her sense of self that runs deeper than the surface model with which she begins the sequence." (F)

Feminist Approach

Being a female writer that was also in such close proximity to famous male poet, Ted Hughes, feminism was a major point by Plath. In "The Bee Meeting", the speaker is like a worker bee subject to the drones, who do nothing for hive, and one important female, the queen. As a typical woman, the speaker is forced to mindlessly work for the good of the hive, as women were expected to do for the home during most of Plath's lifetime - women were just gaining equal rights before Plath's death in 1963. Additionally, when Plath is the speaker and her father is the queen, he expects her to do everything for him. She must sustain the hive, care for the queen's brood, and be expected to die for the queen. All of this must be done in service to the hive and queen rather than each worker bee for herself.

In Plath's poetry, there is a common theme of wrongly treated female bodies. Other critics have said that Plath's poetry as a whole is "an attempt to transcend the burden of female embodiment". Her work that focuses on the wronged female body is her "means of empowering the female body in a masculinist culture". (F) As a modern woman, being a note worthy poet, in the 1950s and 60s she understands the capabilities of women, and wishes no woman to be tied down the way she was by her own father.