 Political cartoon illustrating France’s imperial lust
Most assume that Plath wrote the predatory poem “Pursuit” for Ted Hughes. In her journals, Plath privately acknowledged that this poem is about “the dark forces of lust.” She hardly consoled her mother in a letter too, writing that it represented “the terrible beauty of death,” and the paradox that the more intensely one lives, the more one burns and consumes the self (LH, 225). The poem was written on February 27 and 28, 1956 according to her calendars. According to her journals, Plath was still conflicted over Richard Sassoon, who had left her alone in Paris. “Pursuit” juxtaposes Plath’s feelings about her own dark, conquering, French imperialist lover with France’s politics at the time (CP, 22). She loved France, and Sassoon, and yet she shut her “doors on that dark guilt.” The poem’s reader can easily note that “Pursuit” is full of African details: the panther, jungles, black marauders, and the greed and ransacked lands well-fit the then-current events of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco’s liberation from French and Spanish protectorates which dominated the news at that time. Indeed, “Pursuit” begins with the epigraph by French dramatist Racine: Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit (“In the heart of the forest, your image follows me”), a nod toward Sassoon. Plath had been reading Racine on the same day that she met Ted Hughes, and she read the French poet Ronsard the next day when she finished her poem. Additionally, she was reading the Greek classics Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, and found herself “struck by cold dark fate & ruin”[1] She compared herself with Oedipus, destroyed by lust.[2] The day after meeting Hughes, Plath noted in her calendar that she was “Exhausted & chastened after orgy”—this time presumably with a young man named Hamish Stewart, with whom she left the St. Botolph’s party. The day after the party, Plath acknowledged she was “obsessed” with Ted Hughes, yet she also romantically entertained Chris Levenson, Mallory Wober, and her former boyfriend Mike Lotz when he came to visit, all in the span of a few days. Plath stated in her journal at that time that she was “suddenly seeing a lot of” a young man interested in scientific mysticism named Gary Haupt too. Plath’s calendar entry on the day she began “Pursuit” is “self-lived with radiant panther.” Eleven days later, she writes “panther-tormented day with fever & fury” when Ted Hughes comes to town, and on March 11 she referred to her affair in her calendar as a “Continuation of the Ted Travesty.” From her letters home and the number of men she juggled at the time, we can deduce that the panther is not one specific man, but rather lust itself. In Greek, the name panther means all-animal and was the most fearsome of beasts. Plath would have known this as it is explained in Tom a Bedlam, the text of a 17th-century incantation held at the British Museum which she referred to in her calendar a month later.[3] Plath had been feeding the erotic fires, reading D.H. Lawrence’s racy The Man Who Died, as well as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). As D.H. Lawrence used the panther as an analogy for sexual power (Lawrence, 59), Plath eventually began referring to Hughes specifically as a panther and “black marauder” in her journals on March 10, 1956, stealing her own words and images from this poem that came two weeks before, then directed at a less-definite target of emotion. Where the poem’s “gutted forest falls to ash,” Plath had written in her journal of herself doing the same. Plath also wrote of this same “fury” and of wearing the “violent, fierce colors” of black, white and red (UJ, 233). These are all colors seen in “Pursuit.” Plath’s journals reveal that the “him” of “Pursuit” is a dark and dangerous dream-man who did not yet exist, although Hughes would soon come to embody him: “Let me someday confront him, only confront him, to make him human, and not that black panther which struts on the forest fringes of hearsay. Such hell. They refuse to face me in daylight. I am not worth that. I must be, when if they ever come. They will not come. I don’t want to eat, to go to tea today. I want to rave out in the streets and confront that big panther, to make the daylight whittle him to lifesize” (UJ, 235). [1] Per Plath’s pocket calendar, dated February 28, 1956. The calendar is available in the Plath archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington. [2] From unpublished entries in Sylvia Plath’s 1956 pocket calendar, dated February 25 & 26, 1956. This calendar may be found at the Sylvia Plath Archives in the Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington. [3] Plath quoted, “From the hag and the hungry goblin,” from Tom A Bedlam, in her pocket calendar on April 14, 1956. This calendar may be found in the Sylvia Plath archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington. BLACK MARAUDER, IMPERIALISM, IMPERIALIST FRANCE, LUST, PANTHER, PARIS, PLATH POEM, PURSUIT, RACINE, RICHARD SASSOON, SYLVIA PLATH, TED HUGHES, TRAGEDY
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