Plath, domesticity, and the art of advertising

What's in a Brand Name?

Plath wrote her first mature poems at the same time Roland Barthes assessed advertising as one of French culture's everyday "mythologies." For postmodern American writers, advertising offered a means of reconfiguring the modernist paradigm of history, myth, and self. In the perpetual now of ads, instantaneousness renders obsolete T. S. Eliot's cumulative historical sense. Fungible consumer goods render irrelevant the monumental qualities that modernists valued. Postwar American culture also provided branded mythic figures for domestic adventure; unlike James Joyce's wandering urban Ulysses, the Jolly Green Giant and Elsie the Borden cow came straight to your suburban kitchen. Genies unleashed the magic of Woolite soap and Wishbone salad dressing, and Lees took suburban families on magic carpet rides. Through the magical powers of miracle products, consumers could attain mythical attributes within the confines of domestic space and the nuclear family. For the self-mythologizing Confessionals, advertising offered secular myths as potent as Freud's. Brand names such as Triscuits (Lowell), Bab-O (Sexton), and Ovaltine (Plath) could grant talismanic status to mundane household objects in their poems. As Twitchell puts it, advertising assumes religion's role of"adding meaning to objects" (2000, 13), and Plath goes further than her peers in bringing the resonance of advertising into postwar American poetry.

The title poem of Plath's first volume, The Colossus, shows how advertising mythologies shape Plath's construction of domesticity and complicate the issue of female agency. Like "The Disquieting Muses," this poem inserts a branded product from mass culture into a mythical framework from high culture, but the speaker of "The Colossus" exercises more control over the product she consumes. In the earlier poem, the speaker recalls the "cookies and Ovaltine" her mother offered to calm the children during a hurricane. While the brand name reflects motherly nurture, the product becomes one of her many failures to alleviate her child's growing anxiety. In "The Colossus," the speaker makes her own choice-Lysol-for the task of rehabilitating a giant "historical" figure she addresses as "father." Both a decayed monument and a "littered" landscape, the father figure is the space that Plath's speaker has inhabited "thirty years now." In the poem's initial words I shall never, Plath renders ambiguous the speaker's degree of agency-a feature we find in other poems of domesticity. Defeated and deliberate, the speaker declares that her labor will remain unfinished: "I shall never get you put together entirely, / Pieced, glued, and properly jointed" (1981, 129). Is her labor, then, a choice (like Lysol), or a compulsion (like housewifery)?

Sandra Gilbert articulates critical consensus on this 1959 poem in the Voices and Visions video series, stating that the speaker is "enclosed in the kind of patriarchal history" that the Colossus-father represents (1988). This position establishes clear gender and power boundaries that diminish the speaker's agency.While Gilbert's interpretation certainly clarifies Plath's more academic images such as the "Roman Forum" (a site of patriarchal state and literary power), it doesn't quite fit the cultural meanings that Lysol occupied in the 1950s. As a product for use in the home, Lysol invokes an indoor,feminine space that both reinforces and resists patriarchal power: