“The Shrike”: Relentless Ambition

Pictured:  A scene with “Mrs. Shrike” from “Shopping for Death” by Ray Bradbury, an episode on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
The Shrike bird might have metaphorically flown to the height of its popularity in 1956. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Air Force One was a Shrike U4-B (“The singular air”). That same year, the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents aired a show called, “Shopping for Death,” written by Ray Bradbury. It featured two salesman trying to console an aggressive, hostile woman named Mrs. Shrike. Plath at least occasionally watched Hitchcock, as she alluded to him in some 1955 letters.
In her poem, “The Shrike,” written on July 3, 1956, Plath seems to compare herself to this aggressive predatory bird of Africa and Eurasia. There were other influences at work in the layers of meaning for this poem, however. In the news, the Imperialist British and French troops (“Such royal dreams”) had withdrawn their troops from the Suez (“her flown mate / Escaped”). Plath addresses the hunger in Africa “With her blank brown eyes starved wide” and the emaciated bodies “With taloned fingers, / Shaking in her skull’s cage” and “so hungered.”
There was also a popular play running at that time called “The Shrike,” by Joseph Kramm. It was set in a mental ward and featured a man who had unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide in the same way that Plath had attempted to when she was twenty, by swallowing a bottle of pills. His bitter and manipulative wife drove him insane with her relentless ambition for him, and Plath may have seen a connection between his attitude and the British over Northern Africa and the Suez especially. Because the fictional Mrs. Shrike had won over the doctors, the man comes to be under his wife’s control completely. Did Plath contemplate that her ambition for her husband (“Such royal dreams beckon this man”) and jealousies (“While she, envious bride”) may have been too great?
AFRICA, ALFRED HITCHCOCK, ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, BRITISH IMPERIALISM, EARLY POEM, FRENCH IMPERIALISM, JOSEPH KRAMM, PLATH POEM, SHOPPING FOR DEATH, SUEZ, SUEZ CANAL, SUEZ CRISIS, SYLVIA PLATH, THE SHRIKE, THE SHRIKE PLAY