By Anna Shepherd
The great novelist and poet Sylvia Plath’s work proves that, done well, metaphors are the tastiest ingredient in your writing. They can accurately show what you are thinking in unique ways.
They can be funny, surprising, disarming and…incredibly insightful.
But before we take a look at Plath’s salacious affair with metaphor, let us consult some linguistic experts to find the value of using metaphor.
Linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have written a now famous book called ‘Metaphors we Live By’ which states that metaphors are hugely important in how we, individually, take a look at the world and relate it to our own understanding.
Lakoff and Johnson state that this understanding, our ‘conceptual system’, uses metaphor to express itself. A key metaphorical example they use is ‘time is money’. The concept of ‘money’ is apparent in how we talk about time. Time must be saved, used thoughtfully and therefore certainly not wasted, akin to how we think about money. For these reasons, Lakoff and Johnson say ‘human thought processes are largely metaphorical’. The comparison of ‘time’ to ‘money’ is a far snappier, concise and creative description. So, whatever metaphor your speaker uses in your writing, you are showing the thought processes of the speaker.
Take a look at Plath’s poem ‘Metaphors’, which explores how she felt during her pregnancy:
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this far purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
Plath’s metaphors here are a bit more complex than Lakoff and Johnson’s examples but they make her writing so interesting and peculiar, as we are given an insight into Plath’s thought processes about pregnancy. By using the metaphor of a ‘loaf’ and ‘yeasty rising’, she prizes pregnancy as something fresh and homely but when she calls herself a ‘means’ she shows how she thinks of her pregnancy as an impersonal process. Together, these two metaphors demonstrate the complexity of Plath’s feelings and allow us to get inside her head just a little bit more.
Test out the might of the metaphor when you next find yourself writing! ☺
Want to read a little more?
Books: Metaphors we Live By, By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson- take a look at the introductory chapters to learn more about metaphors.
The Bell Jar, By Sylvia Plath, a novel Plath wrote that is not too difficult to read but has great examples of metaphors throughout the book that show the characters thought processes in lots of depth!
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