Sylvia Plath as an Scorpion Poet

1. Sylvia Plath’s Reflections as The Female Scorpion in
Blue Jar and Lady Lazarus
By
Haleh Esmailian
Contemporary Poetry
Dr. Firouzeh Ameri, PH.D
July 02, 2016
Abstract
This is an attempt to mark the close and fairly inevitable effects of the astrological
specifications of Sylvia Plath who was born on October 27, and therefore is considered to be an
Scorpion (October 24-November 21), on her character and her famous poem, Lady Lazarus, that
was composed during the year before her tragic suicide commitment.
Keywords: Scorpio Women, Zodiac Sign, Lady Lazarus, Suicidal revenge, Bipolar Disorder.

2. Introduction
Being born on October 27, 1932, the American poet Sylvia Plath is astrologically marked
to belong to the eighth zodiac sign, called the Scorpio. As far as the science of Astrology is
concerned, every human being is controlled by one of the twelve zodiac signs relevant to their
date of birth, unconsciously, and therefore, is attributed series of characteristics based on the one
she/he is born under. The changing position of the planets in accordance to each other, the moon
and the sun, is the defining element of every zodiac sign’s unique features. Depending on the
date of birth, each individuals’ personality traits and moods are partly predictable, and as shown
by many research results, these predictions have mostly proved to be correctly assigned. In other
words each of us are controlled directly by the Sign we have been born under, and who we are, is
partly determined by what our Signs require us to be. Of course, this doesn’t mean that our
destiny is totally pre-determined. It is never claimed or implied by the science of Astrology that
the free will may have no effect on our lives. The science does not contradict the free will, and
deals only with the calculations resulting in some interestingly fixed features of each sign, in
general. Along-side these specific traits, the environment in which we are born and grown up, the
genetic factors, the family treatments, and for sure, the free will of every individual, are all
vitally and equally important and effective in our lives and our destiny.
As mentioned above, being born in October, fits Sylvia Plath into a category called the
Scorpio (October 24- November 21), ruled by the kingdom of a planet known as Pluto. Being a
very talented and well-known poet, leading to some inevitable challenge, both mentally and
emotionally, in choosing between being a good woman and a good poet, during the most
productive period in her poetic life, the conflicts with her parents, being betrayed by her
husband, and the mental, physical and emotional problems due to the painful medical treatments
in a mental hospital, are the proved effective factors among many other probably unknown
reasons, that have had the main impact on the her works and lead to her tragic end.
This paper is an attempt to briefly analyze Plath as a Scorpion female poet, and find the
reflections of her astrological self in her poems. Prior to that, some of the very fundamental
features of a typical female Scorpion would be introduced. Other specifications of the zodiac
sign would be discussed in relation to the poet through a concrete examples of the relevant parts
of her poems that could have said to be produced by her, inspired as a Scorpion poet, and not just
a female one.
A Female Scorpion
An encyclopedia describes a scorpion as a nocturnal arachnid that attacks and paralyzes
its prey with a poison injected by the long, curved tail, used for both defense and destruction. Its

3. sting is sometimes fatal. People often draw back visibly when someone says he or she was born
in November, murmuring, "Oh, you're a Scorpio!" either in frank fear, or in awe and respect. But
does this mean that a Scorpion is fatal and dangerous? It depends on how well a Scorpion is
known by the others, because she/he is doubtlessly a superior kind of human being. There's a
crackling, electric vitality about the very presence of a Scorpio that gives her away. As quiet as
she tries to be, such a vital force can't be hidden completely. Frosty on the outside, that is. The
poised surface calm of the Pluto character is carefully designed to hide the boiling inner nature.
Sun position can give a Scorpion mainly three paths to follow. She can imitate the
nocturnal scorpion, who will sting others and even gong herself to death for the pure pleasure of
stinging. Or, she can imitate the glorious, soaring path of her symbolic eagle, who rises above
earthly limitations, and uses her strength wisely and justly. And the third path falls somewhere
between that of a nocturnal stinging Scorpion and the one featured by symbolic eagle’s traits.
Being known as carrying a Gray Lizard’s features. With them, supreme self-sacrifice becomes
neurotic concern about the self, and psychic abilities become fearful apprehensions of the lurking
evils which may strike at any moment. They bitterly withdraw in tangled hatreds at each minor
injury, hoping fate will punish their enemies, almost unconsciously willing destruction without
direct action. They seek the dark shadows and lie dormant, a pathetic waste of the brilliant
potential of their birthright. This one reminds clearly of the books of poems that Plath’s
followers could have had, along-side with the existing ones, if she hadn’t made the choice to take
her own life wasting her brilliant talent as a poet.
A Female Scorpion is with no reason suspicious most of the times. So it is not hard to
guess what the result would be, if she finds a clue that takes her to the point of discovering an
affair between her partner and a third person. She remembers an injury or an injustice, but there
are different ways of reacting. The eagle will crush the enemy so that he will never be able to
hurt her again, win the fight, and leave the defeated to go his own way. The deadly nocturnal
scorpion will first sting, then plan destruction, then sting again. She's not content with merely
evening the score. She must totally destroy the enemy, or at least top him. The typical scorpion
stinger will lie awake nights figuring how to destroy him. However, with the gray lizards, Pluto’s
revenge takes the form of bitterness held inside for years, which inevitably causes deep
melancholy or actual, lingering physical illness. Seething Scorpio resentment, turned inward and
never expressed, poisons with deadly certainty. Turned outward, it can create guilt, because the
stinger scorpion is ashamed to harm the defense-less, when all is said and done. Therefore, it
should be turned neither way-inward nor outward. It should be conquered by looking up and
forgetting, like the eagle- never by looking back in anger and retaliation. But this last choice
can’t easily be made by the Scorpio who fall into the gray lizard path due to the position of Sun
at the time of their birth. This last fact seems confined enough to take us to the main priority of
the papers intention, pinpointing the reflections of Sylva Plath as a Female Scorpion.
The Scorpion Sylvia in Her Works

4. As described in the last part of the previous paragraph, injustice can turn to a form of
bitterness kept inside. This will usually result in severe mental illness, depression, melancholy
and as it did in Sylvia’s life, inevitable self-destruction. The hardship she was dealing with, was
not easy to be tolerated for a sensitive person like her. Hardship that arose from the depth of
bitter experiences caused by losing her father, a tiring trip to New York and the job she didn’t
really find as exciting as she had predicted to be, not being successfully adopted to the city’s
condition, not being admired by her employee while her other co-workers actually succeeded to
maintain it easily, the suicide attempt in her twenties that took place down under her house
taking her mother’s sleeping pills and not being found for two whole days and being declared
dead, the savage treatment by electroshocks in a mental hospital are some examples of the
injustice she received by her nearest one’s but the revenge couldn’t be lead outward, but pouring
inward and kept the same way for years turned it into the hatred that took her to the
self-destructive moment, at last.
These poisonous factors can be detected in her only Novel, The Bell Jar that had been
written during the year before she committed suicide, 1963. It was later on published in the UK
under a pseudonym, to middling reviews, in 1963, after Sylvia’s death, when her husband Ted
Hughes, found himself interested in a seaside house in Devonshire and wanted to buy it despite
his lack of financial supply, but had come up with a tricky solution of having her deceased wife’s
novel published for the needed financial support.
On the World Socialist Web site, Margaret Rees observed, “Whether Plath wrote about
nature, or about the social restrictions on individuals, she stripped away the polite veneer. She let
her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears. In doing so, she laid bare the
contradictions that tore apart appearance and hinted at some of the tensions hovering just beneath
the surface of the American way of life in the post war period.” Oates put it more simply when
she wrote that Plath’s best-known poems, “many of them written during the final, turbulent
weeks of her life, read as if they’ve been chiseled, with a fine surgical instrument, out of arctic
ice.” In the New York Times Book Review, former American Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky
declared, “Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, the poems of Sylvia Plath catch the
feeling of a profligate, hurt imagination, throwing off images and phrases with the energy of a
runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open. All the violence in her work
returns to that violence of imagination, a frenzied brilliance and conviction.” Pinsky further
stated that Plath “suffered the airless egocentrism of one in love with an ideal self.” Denis
Donoghue made a similar observation, also in the New York Times Book Review: “Plath’s early
poems, many of them, offered themselves for sacrifice, transmuting agony, ‘heart’s waste,’ into
gestures and styles.” Donoghue added that “she showed what self-absorption makes possible in
art, and the price that must be paid for it, in the art as clearly as in the death.” Dictionary of
Literary Biography essayist Thomas McClanahan wrote, “At her most articulate, meditating on
the nature of poetic inspiration, [Plath] is a controlled voice for cynicism, plainly delineating the
boundaries of hope and reality. At her brutal best—and Plath is a brutal poet—she taps a source

5. of power that transforms her poetic voice into a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence.”
All the quotations above containing words like self-absorption, agony, raving avenger, violence,
frenzy and the words alike, are clearly illustrating the way a Female Scorpion would typically
react while facing injustice but holding the hatred and anger inside and the upcoming destructive
results. Besides, the word “transforming”, used by Thomas McClanahan also refers to one of the
very fundamental personality traits of both the male and female Scorpion, being Transformative.
According to the astrologists, the typical Scorpion has an intense power in transforming every
situation in whatever other form they wish, and whomever they’d like to. This can be seen as
what a poet and in general an artist does, transforming her inner thoughts and in Sylvia’s case
most of her personal experiences into works of Literature. Her personal experiences mentioned
above, are very well reflected in this “Intensely autobiographical” Novel, and many readers, have
seen in the narrator, Esther Greenwood, the exact reflection of Sylvia Plath. Timothy Materer
wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “The critical reactions to both The Bell Jar and
Ariel were inevitably influenced by the manner of Plath’s death at 30.” The true shade of a
Female Scorpion nature is dark maroon, or deep wine-red and destructive black which are not
female colors at all, unless something goes wrong inside, something dark like the black
poisonous feeling of resentment caused by losing all her hope, that a Scorpion woman gives
them up, by having a close and sudden relationship with the color black, visible in her way of
dressing, decoration, even the sarcastic language she starts to use, if there remains any interest in
communicating, of course, and if she is a Scorpion poet, who has filled herself up with the black
poisonous feelings she had not successfully poured out, the dominance of suddenly favored color
will surely show up in her choice of words, in her writings, affecting the theme, tone and other
imagery and so on. This can be seen in Bell Jar, when in losing her virginity Esther describes it
like— the blood soaking a towel, turning the towel black! Could that really happen? Or, in the
section where Esther is imagining all her potential futures like ripe figs hanging from the
branches of a tree. Figs that are now wrinkled, going black, and implying the author’s darkened
inner moods, filling with the black poison being kept inside due to her being a Scorpion:
One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and
another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor. . . . I
wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat
there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to
the ground at my feet.
A typical Scorpion woman can hate with bitter venom and love with fierce abandon. She
can shriek like a furious banshee or whisper like an affectionate turtle dove. In one of her journal
entries, dated June 20, 1958, she wrote: “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric
currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment
dominates my life, floods it.” As she has admitted herself, the Scorpion woman is strongly ruled

6. by a bipolar characteristic force, due to her astrological qualifications. This can also be tracked in
this Novel when Plath hospitalizes Esther and lets her out again, but she never resolves the
central problem that Esther confronts most palpably in New York: how to be a woman and how
to be a writer, and how to be those two things at once. The closest to a solution she gets is her
description of the gleeful freedom that becomes available only when Esther totally lets go of her
goals and her self-image. This either all or none, tendency is proved to show its effects both in
Esther’s and also in Sylvia’s life, as an Scorpion who chooses to totally lose everything including
her own life, if she is not going to have all what she wants at the same time, the same way and
the same ideally desired amount.
It's true that the Scorpio girl sometimes wanders into dangerous waters in her efforts to
penetrate life, and since there's not the slightest trace of fear in her (unless she has an affliction to
her Moon, and is full of nameless terrors), her search may indeed take her into some weird
byways. But the typical Scorpio will emerge from any discovery still strong and pure. If she
allows the journey to soil her inner spirit, Pluto will punish her with anguished remorse and guilt;
yet she can still call on her great strength of character to rise again, like the phoenix, from the
ashes of her experiments. In Kahlil Gibran's writings, the Prophet replies, in answer to a question
about Evil, "Of the Good in you I can speak, but not of the Evil. For what is the Evil but
Good-tortured by its own hunger and thirst? When Good is hungry, it seeks food, even in dark
caves, and when it thirsts, it drinks even of dead waters." A perfect description of Scorpio. The
metaphor of the phoenix, can be directly related to one of the Scorpion poet’s other works in
which she has clearly reflected this unique feature of her personality, titled Lady Lazarus. Being
written during the year prior to her death, the poem contains within itself the very clear evidence
about this final dominating feature possessed probably only by a Female Scorpion and the
legendary bird, phoenix. Therefore, it would not be wrong to claim that it was the Scorpion
Sylvia’s phoenix-like nature that might have caused her to poetically relate her foreseen death
and promised rebirth to story of a man named Lazarus, from the Bible, who was brought back to
life by Christ, and her transforming abilities that are seen as a gift given to the their ruling planet,
the Pluto. The last lines of her Lady Lazarus mirrors these reflections of Plath’s Scorpion self:
Ash, ash--
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash

7. I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Conclusion
Just like all other critical methods, inscribed by every approach of Criticism, analyzing a
work of literature, by focusing on the Astrological Zodiac features that are attributed to the poet
or the writer, according to the Signs under which she/he is born, can result in relevant and
interesting facts that may lie hidden between the lines of her/his works, waiting to be discovered
or seen from another perspective, where some Biographical or Psychoanalytical methods are the
ones used to study the works. Like this very brief analysis, in which it is tried to look for and
trace the Scorpion Sylvia Plath’s footsteps in two of her last works, including her only Novel,
called the Bell Jar, and her fantastic poem named Lady Lazarus.

8. Works Cited
Christina, Patterson. Ted on Sylvia, for the Record. p. R3.
Donna, Seaman. Review of The Unabridged Diaries of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, p. 313.
Goodman, Linda. Sun Signs.
Sarah, Churchwell. Secrets and Lies. p. 102.