SYLVIA PLATH THE BEE MEETING

In the Bee meeting, the speaker expresses her sense of insecurity firstly through the structure as she asks rhetorical questions regularly, indicating her lack of confidence and uncertainty. Some of the questions are found in the first line of the first, second and third stanzas. The speaker also doubt about the villagers' response, attitute and feelings towards her- " why did nobody tell me?" and " does nobody loves me?". We can sense her fears, loneliness and insecurity in these questions. Her use of dictions also adds on to her indication of being alienated. The speaker refers the rest of the villagers as a group- "they are all gloved", "they are smiling" and" everybody is nodding a", where this group of people are always doing things together in exception of her. She also uses absolutes like "all" here; signifying sense of being left out. The speaker also states her vulnerability thought straightforward phrases like " i have no protection" and "nude as a chicken neck". The use of anaphora enhances her declare of fear- "will not smell me fear, me fear, my fear". In this poem, persona personifies the animal [the bee], with capabilities of a human; able to notice, hide, know and smell. Personifying indicates giving an animal/object the ability to think and plan like a human; in this case suggest that the persona felt that the bees have a motive to hurt her. The paranoidical response of the persona further portrays her insecurity and guard against every single thing around her. Even the body hawthorn [etherizes] its children" and" mind of the hive,,, everything". This train of thought in fact lasted throughout the poem. She felt herself being hunted like a bee queen and being "the magician's girl who [did] not flinch" due to exhaustion. The diction "hunted" and "flinch" she used in the poem suggest that she felt is unwanted and prayed for. The Bee Meetings questions are really ontological ones, reaffirmed through link verbs such as They are, I am, it is, and is it? For Plath being and female being are virtually the same, and for the persona, to be female is to be manipulated by nature, history, and inevitably by contemporary politics and either openly or more obliquely to be threatened with death. To succumb to the terror of extinction means self-annihilation. To resist it makes for the dramatic tension that permeates the poems. The persona constantly resists the impulse to flee or to retreat into psychic stasis. Given the state of extremity in the poems, she resists in three basic ways: through flight, through counter-aggression that is both sexual and political, and through a stoic endurance of horror. The exhaustion she feels at the end of the poem makes her unable to answer the last battery of questions. This is appropriate since the voice of the poem is expert at heightening rather than allaying fears and uncertainties. She will, however, approach the last enigma from another angle in the second poem. "The Arrival of the Bee Box" (212-13) must be understood as responding to her demand in this first poem to know "Whose is that long white box in the grove."

To sum up, throughout the bee sequence, Plath entertains thoughts of her own death and explores contributing factors, such as an increasingly unsupportive community and her unfulfilling role as a domestic housewife and mother. While she seems disturbingly attracted to the utter emotional detachment which death represents, Plath ends her bee sequence, and Ariel overall, with an emphasis on endurance through a winter of pain and violent struggle. Thus, the bee sequence represents, in microcosm, Plath's development as a poet. She turns away from the vulnerability expressed in "The Bee Meeting," shapes her emotions into her own poetic form in "The Arrival of the Bee Box" forges a new trajectory for a "lion-red" queen bee at the end of "Stings," and discovers a hope for which to endure in her newly defined strain of poetry in "Wintering."