Sylvia Plath’s Cut

Cut
by Sylvia Plath

For Susan O’Neill Roe

What a thrill–
My thumb instead of an onion,
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian’s axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man —

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump —
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s “Cut”

Pain. This potent emotion has reverberated throughout history in wars, sickness, and relationships. But, similar to other emotions, it can be manipulated into other components of life. Sylvia Plath has done this successfully
in one of her controversial works, “Cut”. But does “Cut” truly establish her supposed “masochistic counterpart” that is so pushed upon her by society? While she was clinically proven depressed, her poems showed “the intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experiences” that were taboo to express verbally. “Cut” not only seems to play a popular role in her widely-public suicidal character, but it also provides personal, accurate insight into the eternal opinion of her supposed “dark” and “death-like” nature. That nature is echoed throughout “Cut” beginning with the image of the onion. Before the reader reaches the first stanza, directly under the title there is a dedication by Sylvia Plath to Susan O’Neill Roe. “Plath dedicates ‘Cut’ to her brand new au pair, Susan O’Neill Roe, in what seems a sort of ‘welcome to the family gesture’. Susan O’Neill Roe was the babysitter who came and took care of Sylvia Plath’s children while she wrote during the last few months of her life. One can only imagine Roe’s reaction to this bloody love gift, and marvel at Plath’s complexity.”

The opening stanza begins with the line, “What a thrill-“which “suggests that it was unexpected, not premeditative” automatically removing the self-mutilation theory (Wisker, 15). “However, Plath did cut herself deliberately at least once. Her mother remembers coming across her sunbathing outside and seeing gashes on her leg. When she asked her about it, Plath’s reply was that she wanted to see if she had the guts.” (Wisker 17) “My thumb instead of an onion/ The top quite gone/ Except for a sort of hinge” immediately provides the reader with the image of Plath in her kitchen attempting to slice an onion. She misses and cuts part of her thumb, creating a hinge that fascinates her. According to Claire Brennan, “There are certain places to cut. And the precise location determines the color and the pain of the cut. At the very tip, under the thumbnail, is a very thin layer of skin.

There’s not much discoloration or pain. But farther down on the thumb, the bluish color will appear and the pain will be more intense. It would be about the size of a thumbnail on the back of the thumb. That gives it enough length and width for a flap.” (Brennan 31)

This flap serves as a door into Plaths mind, providing the reader with her thoughts on pain which aren’t provided directly, but through allusions. As Plath continues with the next stanza, it’s interesting to note how she interrupts the same thought to separate the other corresponding half in a new stanza. Regardless, Plath continues with the thought of the hinge of skin. She compares it to a white hat that’s soon followed by a “red plush”, or the emergence of blood. She continues this same image of blood in the next stanza. “Little pilgrim/ The Indian’s axed your scalp. /Your turkey wattle/ Carpet rolls” bring in the first historical image. Indians and Pilgrims were natural enemies, bound to war against each other. Plath personifies her thumb as the Pilgrim and the knife as the Indian, but then provides an image of a turkey, the animal the Pilgrims and Indians feasted upon at Thanksgiving. The turkey symbolizes a peace offering, but she inserts the interesting term, wattle. This wattle is the “ugly thing hanging from the turkeys neck; it was freely moving, wrinkly, long, shriveled, hanging; barely attached.” (Wisker, 17) The carpet Plath refers to is her skin. If the skin is long enough, it will curl up, much like a carpet roll. She continues that thought with the next few lines. “Straight from the heart, I step on it/ Clutching my bottle/ Of pink fizz. A celebration this is. / Out of a gap/ A million soldiers run, / Redcoats, every one.” The blood, coming “straight from the heart”, where blood is pumped from, has leaked on the floor. Plath steps in it while holding a bottle of “pink fizz”. According to Bloom,
when there, she pours an effervescent antibiotic agent on the wound, resulting in the pink fizz (the diluted red blood).” (Bloom 56) Her sarcasm seeps through the imagery silently with the line “A celebration this is” as the reader realizes Plaths ability to remove the present reality to the back of the mind. As the blood continues to trickle from her cut, she makes an awesome allusion by giving her blood cells the title of “soldiers. These soldiers, conveniently called Redcoats, not only for the historical value but also because of the red color of blood, are escaping from the gap, her body, the cut. ” ‘A million…/Redcoats, everyone’ simply means that the blood is not a simple liquid but is composed of a million tiny parts, each with an individual and collective purpose-hence the military analogy” (Brennan 32).

“Whose side are they on? / O my/ Homunculus, I am ill.” Plath seems to question whether the Redcoats are on her side or not “simply because they are on the run. Deserters.”(Kendall 29). This “Homunculus” that Plath speaks
of is an out of the ordinary personification of the universal conscious. There are many definitions for homunculus, but all seem to direct the inquisitive in a distinct direction. This “seems to be a name given to the ‘man inside my
head, the little voice that tells me what to do’. He is the executive of the mind, the person who controls the behavior, but that it does nothing in explaining the origin of our actions.” (Wisker 18) He is “…sometimes represented
by 2 figures: an angel and a demon…” showing the innate ability and power the homunculus holds in persuading our every subconscious thought and provoking our every conscious action.

“I have taken a pill/ To kill/ The thin, / Papery feeling.” Plath decides that the pain is too much, and chooses to take a pill such as modern day Tylenol or Advil, nothing that would kill the pain of her life, just “The thin,/Papery feeling.” This feeling, oddly expressed by Plath, is seen by some as referring “to how useless she feels” (Kendall 30).

To say the least, the next few lines of Plaths poem seem to hold the most powerful diction used. “Saboteur, Kamikaze Man—/ The stain on your/ Gauze Ku Klux Klan/ Babushka/ Darkens and tarnishes when/ The balled/ Pulp of your heart/ Confronts its small/ Mill of silence”. Saboteur and Kamikaze Man are both words that seem to have the same theme behind them: Death. “The reference to ‘Saboteur’ represents the sabotage of one’s own well being and one’s physical body…” (Bloom 57) whereas “The Kamikaze references simply point to the idea that for a moment she is her own killer.” (Brennan 32) While both point to death, something that isn’t attempted at deliberately in the poem, both subjects can surface by accident, hence the sarcasm in the poem. In any case, Plath has applied not only “pink fizz”to her wound, but has now placed a piece of gauze over which the wound has bled onto, hence “The stain on your Gauze…” The “… Ku Klux Klan reference representing the outward act of anger, hatred, and loathing against self…” theory seems to produce the perpetual suicidal attempt that is always pushed upon Plath. Yet, since gauze is white, and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) did involve much bloodshed, it wouldn’t be uncommon for this insinuation to be used by those of Plath’s poetic ability.

Plath continues the poem with the allusions to more bloodshed, such as “Babushka”, which “is symbolic of the cold war.” (Wagner 67). While Plath uses this along with the KKK allusion, she continues with the next line of more blood shed, “Darkens and tarnishes when/ The balled/Pulp of your heart”. The blood has darkened and tarnished the KKK uniform, or the gauze. “Say this line aloud.’Balled’ sounds the same as ‘bald’. The ‘bald’ in this sense
means that it is lacking skin. When I think of pulp, I think of flakes.” (Wagner 68) According to Wagner, her heart has been attacked and is bald with no protective coverings. This would result in flakes being formed from dried blood and/or dead skin. Next, the blood is personified as it “Confronts its small/ Mill of silence”. As the blood dries on the wound, the blood and body realize that there is complete silence at the site of the minute gash, symbolizing that the process is complete: the cut is not only over, but is final and etched in stone.

Lastly, the final stanza of the poem is one of the most confusing. “How you jump—/ Trepanned veteran, /Dirty girl/Thumb stump.” Plath continues the beginning of “Cut” with the first line in the last stanza, “How you jump—“.
This refers to the initial reaction without the sarcasm. Similar to any normal person, Plath jumped when she injured her thumb. Yet it seems that she is condemning herself, saying “You shouldn’t have jumped”, as if it should
have been expected by the saboteur, by the kamikaze man, by herself. Nevertheless, Plath ends the poem by using three lines of descriptive and criticizing phrases. “Like the trepanned veteran, who is trapped/ensnared, one feels caught and trapped in a battle with oneself” much like Plath is (Hayman 102). This is not only shown blatantly before by the sarcasm, but also by the following two lines, “Dirty girl/ Thumb stump.” “The last 2 lines are self-criticism.
Psychologists think that people with low self-esteem cut. She is belittling herself, possibly sarcastically. Although
“thumb stump” sounds painful, short, and real.” (Wisker 20).

Its amazing how Sylvia Plath is able to take something so simple, something so common, and convert it into a interesting and complex literary work of art. “Her joy was in exploring the fullness of an apparently simple moment and reporting back to us.” (Brennan 34) But, Plath is not only a great writer with an interesting ability, but she is also a poet. Just as Brennan says, “Poets play with words because words are their toys.” (3) It is very obvious that Sylvia
Plath has her very own mental Toys ‘R’ Us.