{"id":53,"date":"2023-05-03T08:14:33","date_gmt":"2023-05-03T12:14:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/?p=53"},"modified":"2023-09-05T10:02:47","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T14:02:47","slug":"lilies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/lilies\/","title":{"rendered":"Lilies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Plath, Paintings, and Plants<\/strong><\/h1>\n

By Gabi Dondes (’26)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sylvia Plath\u2019s poem \u201cYadwigha, On a Red Couch, Among Lilies\u201d responds to Henri Rousseau\u2019s famous painting \u201cThe Dream.\u201d Plath sometimes visited museums when lacking inspiration, and may have been attracted to this painting because of its botanical content. During her time at Smith College, Plath took a year-long General Botany course with Kenneth Wright that fascinated her and inspired her to use botanical imagery throughout her work. Similarly, Henri Rousseau himself visited the popular botanical gardens in Paris frequently and used them as a reference to create his post-impressionist paintings, including \u201cThe Dream.\u201d Artists and writers such as Plath and Rousseau gravitate towards botany in order to utilize it not only for mere inspiration but also, more importantly, to communicate a sense of empathy and other humanistic ideals.<\/p>\n

Sylvia Plath\u2019s poem on Rousseau\u2019s painting reveals more about the painting itself and the underlying motivations behind her writing about this specific work. Furthermore, Plath was drawn to the botanical imagery in Rousseau\u2019s painting and related to the lore behind it. She writes in the last stanzas (Plath 2018: 86):<\/p>\n

And that, Rousseau told the critics, was why the couch
\nAccompanied you. So they nodded at the couch with the moon
\nAnd the snakecharmer\u2019s song and the gigantic lilies,
\nMarvelingly numbered the many shades of green.
\nBut to a friend, in private, Rousseau confessed his eye
\nSo possessed by the glowing red of the couch which you,
\nYadwigha, pose on, that he put you on the couch
\nTo feed his eye with red: such red! under the moon,
\nIn the midst of all that green and those great lilies!<\/p>\n

Rousseau\u2019s painting was initially confusing to viewers as it featured a woman on a lush, velvet couch in a wild jungle with \u201cmonstrous\u201d lilies (Line 7). In order to appeal to this larger audience\u2019s understanding of his painting, Rousseau labelled this juxtaposition a dream, as Plath suggests; Yadwigha, on the couch, was dreaming of a jungle with a snakecharmer\u2019s music. He even went so far as to write this into an accompanying comment to his painting: \u201cThe woman asleep on the couch is dreaming she has been transported into the forest, listening to the sounds from the instrument of the enchanter\u201d (Rousseau n.d.). However, Plath highlights the true motivation behind his painting in her poem: that Rousseau, to a friend \u201cconfessed his eye [s]o possessed by the flowing red of the couch\u201d (Line 35) that his supposed lover Yadwigha sat on, that he had to paint it. In exposing this detail and by taking aim at the \u201cliteralists\u201d (Line 1) in the beginning of her poem, Plath pushes back against the \u201cconsistent critics\u201d (Line 8) that she felt Rousseau needed to contend with, likely because she felt this pressure herself. Plath faced many rejections when she sent her work to magazines and publishers, and her work only found real fame after her death. Plath attempts to redeem Rousseau\u2019s painting by sharing\u2014what she views as\u2014the full story.<\/p>\n

In their use of botanical imagery, Plath and Rousseau declare their wish for freedom of expression and ask those who view it to accept this wish. In simply appealing to their viewers\u2019 pre-existing desires, as Plath puts it in her poem, these artists risk losing the original meaning behind their creations. In order for an artist to freely communicate their message, viewers themselves must be willing to encounter something new and strange. That is to say, these messages are only communicated effectively if the viewer approaches a work with openness. Therefore, Plath utilizes Rousseau to highlight the complex relationships between artist and viewer and attempts to rebuild these relationships so that they include the perspectives of both the artist and their viewer, allowing artists like Plath to continue making their art as they see fit.<\/p>\n

\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Plath, Sylvia.\u00a02018.\u00a0The Collected Poems<\/em>. Reprint edition. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.<\/p>\n

\n
Rousseau, Henri. n.d. \u201cHenri Rousseau. The Dream. 1910 | MoMA.\u201d The Museum of Modern Art. Accessed August 26, 2023. https:\/\/www.moma.org\/collection\/works\/79277<\/a>.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Plath, Paintings, and Plants By Gabi Dondes (’26) Sylvia Plath\u2019s poem \u201cYadwigha, On a Red Couch, Among Lilies\u201d responds to Henri Rousseau\u2019s famous painting \u201cThe Dream.\u201d Plath sometimes visited museums when lacking inspiration, and may have been attracted to this painting because of its botanical content. During her time at Smith College, Plath took a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1188,"featured_media":36,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1188"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/318"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}