Spinster Sylvia Plath\'s Poem \"Spinster\"

Spinster

Sylvia Plath's poem "Spinster" is about a woman's fear of losing control over her sexual feelings. A spinster is a woman who chooses never to marry, and at the time the poem was written (the 1950s), sexual activity was only socially acceptable within the confines of a legal marriage. Thus, a woman who chose not to get married was choosing also not to be sexually active. So the title of the poem is the first clue that Plath is talking about something more than leaves, trees, birds, and the seasons. She uses these images as metaphors for the sexual feelings of an unmarried woman.

For example, in the first stanza "this particular girl" takes a "ceremonious april walk with her latest suitor." A ceremonious walk is one in which the girl is aware of an audience. This girl knows society is watching her and judging her behavior, that she is expected to behave in a certain, socially-accepted manner. April is a springtime month associated with love. A suitor is a man who is sexually attracted to her, who could possibly fall in love with her and want her to get married. All of a sudden she is "intolerably struck by the bird's irregular babel and the leaves' litter." The irregular babel and leaves' litter are metaphors for sexual arousal. Inside, she doesn't feel calm, sedate, and in control, and this is intolerable, since she has been raised at a time when women are expected to control the sexual behavior of men. Women are responsible for what happens, so sexual arousal or excitement must be quashed, not enjoyed.

Furthermore, women were not supposed to have sexual feelings at all. If she allowed a man to express himself sexually with her, she was "dirty." Engaging in sexual activity meant she was no longer "pure," but as Plath puts it in the second stanza, "sloven."

In the third stanza, the girl wishes to return to her state of pre-arrousal when she was not bothered by sexual feelings. Plath speaks of this state as winter, "scrupulously austere in its order" in which the girl is completely in control of her own feelings and not tempted to experience sexual pleasure, her "heart's frosty discipline exactly as a snowflake." A snowflake is an apt metaphor for a spinster, a woman separate and unattached, not moved or controlled by another person (and particularly not by a man), a snowflake drifting.

In the fourth stanza the girl definitely feels tempted by "a burgeoning" of sexual desire that affects her physical senses ("her five queenly wits"). "Vulgar motley" represents allowing sexual feelings to take over uncontrolled. The girl sees this state as "A treason not to be borne" or her body working against her rationality. Society (and her mother, perhaps) has told her only fools allow men to have their way, that women who have sex before marriage become society's pariahs. So the girl says, "let idiots reel giddy in bedlam spring; she withdrew neatly." Bedlam spring is unrestricted love. She doesn't dare participate, and so she withdraws from the man.