Analysis

          Bareness, or the state of having stripped away both physical barriers and culturally constructed selves, becomes a nearly impossible feat. A life of unconsciously accumulating layers and layers of expectations like noisy dust, or perhaps even marble and dust and kisses and shadows, results in this seemingly perfect human being. However, inevitably, the long-suppressed self must hover above the body eventually, taking note of all of the ways in which, to painful extents, a culture obsessed with “perfecting” the woman manifested itself through a seeming corpse’s skin, hair, clothing, feet:

The woman is perfected.
Her dead 

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare (Plath).

By applying deconstructive queer theory, one can detect the irony and hollowness in such words as “perfected” and “accomplishment” and thus the complexity of the very “woman” at the heart of the scene. In truth, this person, perhaps not literally lifeless but rather inwardly so as a result of the false bodily shell, has inherited a particular sort of womanhood, a particular gender identity and sexual identity. She/he/they bear it. Despite being clothed in a toga, metaphorically speaking, and having bare feet, there is this hesitation to the language, this animated suspension. The hanging words “her bare” conjure up a moment of near exposure of the true self beneath a seemingly liberating disguise. “Bare,” a word of seeming liberation, represents that continued need to conceal, for atop the skin is still that limiting, stifling toga. A toga is not so light and flowing, after all, for it, at least this particular one, hides a human being.

          This human being recognizes that for ages, since before even the construction of statues in ancient Greece---one might even begin to think back to Adam and Eve before their need to conceal different parts of themselves and thus blossom into their respective gender and sexual identities---the woman has been called on to exist, behave, dress, love, and even die, according to the norms established by the heteropatriarchy, established by an entire cultural system. According to Tyson, “Our sexual orientation may be inborn, but definitions of appropriate gender behavior are socially constructed” (Tyson 321). Thus, Plath’s poem challenges inherited constructs with the usage of binary oppositions: bareness and concealment. Once the binary of bareness and concealment collapses, the speaker and the reader alike can perceive the body as a vessel for much more than the seemingly female spirit; the unexplored possibilities of whatever identity truly lies beneath the surface begin to emerge (too late). 

           Children represent much more than the next generation. They represent the tangled history which brought them there in the first place, the circumstances under which their birth occurred. In “Edge,” the offspring, by virtue of their hunger/thirst for provisions that (seemingly) only mothers can produce, deliver the “dead” person a sense of emptiness, depletion: 

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals (Plath).

Again, “dead” immediately calls to mind lifelessness, but, since there is an entire chain of signifiers with any given word, one can begin to wonder if the children were ever born in the first place, if perhaps they are mere ideas that the person associates with his/her/their own body’s characteristics and body’s capabilities. The “white serpent,” symbols combining the innocence of the color with the deadliness of the creature, could not choose its path and has thus perished. Plath’s consciousness of the paradoxical nature of such paired words makes deconstructive queer theory a natural perspective from which to read the poem. The weight of many centuries’ worth of gender-based ideologies rests between and among mere letters: “Language is wholly ideological: it consists entirely of the numerous conflicting, dynamic ideologies … operating at any given point in time in any given culture” (Tyson 239). Consequently, one might assume that linkage that the speaker establishes between children and innocence turned evil is an act of confrontation, a way to corral the burdensome ideologies and emphasize her/his/their own state of depletion. 

          Fertility is so often a condition from which duty and motherhood spring. Moreover, according to compulsory heterosexuality, only one woman and one man are needed to begin a family, so long as fertility is present on both ends. This poem appears to be collapsing the binary of fertility and infertility, for, even if the “dead” person is still technically fertile, she/he/they feels an emptiness that extends beyond physical incapacity. Perhaps to be “infertile” is to be aware of other familial structures and thus other sexual possibilities. The notion of the fluid self, which contrasts with this person’s present state of dryness, is perhaps what this person seeks or might have sought (considering that an entire family may have already been created at this point). 

          In the sky looms what may perhaps be the ultimate reminder of humans’ sadness as a result of all of the limits imposed by language and standards for gender and sexuality: the moon. Although the speaker deems the moon female in this poem, one recognizes the moon’s remove from the female body all of its baggage: 

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone. 

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag (Plath).

The gender of this moon feels almost arbitrarily assigned, given the line, “The moon has nothing to be sad about”; however, it is juxtaposed with the dead “woman” of the earlier lines of the poem and is thus significant because it continually lives, stares, impacts the earth. The speaker, who, at this point, lingers in this realm between the body and the moon (some sort of heavenly realm, perhaps, or at least what is over the edge of life), seems to be lamenting about her/his/their own condition after a lifetime of pretending, playing a role. This suppression of self would cause sadness, indeed. It would make sense that the moon, as opposed to a male god, has an eye for “women” who, beneath the surface, have an unarticulated queer identity. Consequently, being “used to this sort of thing,” the moon, who seems to embody the speaker’s alter ego, has witnessed other deaths or near-deaths. The binary oppositions, moon and (wo)man, are collapsed, thus allowing precipices/edges to spring up in daily life. The moon, somehow a startling window into one’s own unarticulated interiority, offers an edge over which might lie relief. The title itself reveals Plath’s quiet fixation on whatever is on the other side of the edge, if anything at all---an underbelly.