“Whose side are they on?”: The Intentional Betrayal in Sylvia Plath’s “Cut” (1962)

My background:
I’m not crazy about poetry, as a general rule. As a more specific rule, I’m not crazy about free verse poetry. I have a wholehearted appreciation for formal poems, and anyone who knows me knows I am quite literally in love with Shakespeare’s sonnets. I could, and have, spend a whole evening sitting and reading those.

But when it comes to reading basically any other poems, I’m significantly less excited. That said, poetry is one of the most interesting types of literature to analyze–and, I might argue, the best, in the sense that poems are so compact that it’s feasible to do a real close reading, right down to every word and punctuation mark.

The analytic advantage to free verse poetry over metrical or rhymed is that there’s more to analyze. Without having to conform to certain rules, the poet is free to make intentional line breaks and word choices, which then enable us to see even more clearly the poem’s argument. It’s not like word choice isn’t deliberate in formal poetry–it’s just that the form tends to guide the diction and syntax, rather than the other way around.

So, that might be more of a side note than my real “background” to this text, but I feel like it’s worth mentioning. When it comes to “Cut,” specifically, it’s probably more relevant to note that I’ve done two analytical readings of this poem–once in my sophomore year, in a class on contemporary American poetry, and once this January, while I was sitting in on a class on critical theory. When I read it back as a sophomore, I did really take to it, although I’m not sure why. Maybe because it’s so blatant, but so ambiguous. Maybe because the four-line stanzas push it an inch closer to formal poetry. Maybe because I actually understood what I was reading first time around. My analysis of it, however, was (at best) a list of observations about how it was interesting that the speaker uses celebratory imagery after cutting herself. The analysis of “Cut” that I did this January, though, took that a little further, and it’s the piece I’m including in this entry. It’s definitely not the best thing I’ve ever written, as it was primarily a very simple and short exercise in Formalist analysis. But it was fun, and hey, at least it makes something of an argument.

The poem:

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.

The commentary:
The first thing readers of Sylvia Plath’s “Cut” will notice is the ironic language used to describe what seems to be an accidental slip of the protagonist’s knife while she is cutting onions—she characterizes the event as “a thrill” (line 1) and a “celebration” (line 17), likening her damaged thumb to a champagne bottle and the trail of blood to a red carpet. Her thumb, it seems, is his own little person—a “Homunculus” (line 23), dressed for the occasion in “red plush” (line 8) and “[a] flap like a hat” (line 6). Though her physical response to the action of cutting herself seems straightforward—clutching her thumb and wrapping it in a bandage—her delighted emotional response does not suit the situation. This irony, however, alludes to a larger ambiguity within the poem. The speaker celebrates the cut, but was this simply a happy accident? No; to a large extent, the paradoxical language of the poem suggests that this cut is intentional on the part of the speaker.

“Cut” is a poem that is overwhelmingly characterized by the language of paradox—it alternates the motif of celebration with one of war, moving from the third stanza, which personifies her thumb as a scalped pilgrim, to the fourth stanza, which describes the thumb as a “bottle/of pink fizz” (lines 15-16), to the fifth, in which drops of blood become “a million soldiers” (line 19). This back-and-forth leads dramatically to the only direct question the poem asks: “Whose side are they [the soldiers (or, rather, the drops of blood)] on?” (line 21).

This line opens up a paradox within the poem, as it asks whether the blood is on her thumb’s side, since it betrays her by spilling all over the floor and staining the gauze that she uses to staunch the bleeding, or on her side—which implies that the cut was intentional, and her thumb is bleeding out as she had hoped. Aside from the initial “thrill” the speaker experiences at the cutting of her thumb, this line is the first suggestion of deliberateness that the poem offers. From this question, we begin to understand the true nature of the war within the poem: there is a tension between the speaker and her thumb, and it is ambiguous as to whether the cut is the fault of the thumb (a “Saboteur” and a “Kamikaze man” [lines 27-8]) or of the speaker herself, who is the “Indian” responsible for “ax[ing its] scalp” (line 10).

The key element in determining the culprit of the action is the personification of the thumb. Though the thumb takes on several roles throughout the poem, most of them are human—a “little pilgrim” (line 9), a “Homunculus” (line 23), a “saboteur” (line 27), a “kamikaze man” (line 28), a member of the “Ku Klux Klan” (line 30), and a “trepanned veteran” (line 38). These references are still ambiguous as to whether or not the thumb is responsible (as a “saboteur” or a “kamikaze man” may do damage to themselves as well as others), but the word “Homunculus” hints at a deeper meaning behind the speaker’s personification. Her thumb, to her, is a “little or diminutive man” (OED), and not simply that—he is the affectionately named “little pilgrim” she has scalped, which implies that her action was an intentional attack. With this in mind, it becomes clearer that the speaker is the antagonist. She rebels against her thumb, and thus, the “Redcoats” (line 20) run out. We are now certain of whose side they are on—her thumb’s.

Since the speaker views the thumb as a person of its own, and has essentially attempted to murder that person, we can see how her action may be a deliberate attack on a part of herself. However, with this matter resolved, we are then left to wonder what has caused the speaker to react this way against her thumb and herself. We find the answer in several other ambiguous lines in the poem that suggest a deeper underlying problem. She admits, “I am ill./I have taken a pill to kill/The thin/Papery feeling” (lines 23-6). With the stanza break right after “pill to kill,” it seems for a moment as if the speaker were about to commit suicide, and the following two lines do not do much to eliminate that possibility. They instead suggest that a pill might eliminate the “thin/Papery feeling”—emotional emptiness in the speaker’s life, which would be resolved by her death. One of the final images in the poem confirms the idea that the cut was an emotional release for the speaker: the “trepanned veteran” (38). Trepanning is a medical drilling procedure used on the skull to alleviate pressure, and a veteran is someone who has survived a war. This description is the perfect characterization of the speaker’s thumb; he has survived the war with the speaker, but is damaged—and the particular form of damage he suffers is the effect of a release. This need for release is the root of the speaker’s action: as the Indian scalps to free himself from the pilgrims, and as the kamikaze man sacrifices himself to inflict damage, the poem suggests that the speaker has cut herself to escape the “thin/Papery feeling” of her hollow life.