“The silver airplanes and the blue capes all dissolved and vanished, wiped away like the crude drawings of a child in colored chalk from the colossal blackboard of the dark.” The closing line of ‘Superman and Paula Brown’s Snowsuit’ packs a serious punch, delivered by a powerful image of the narrator’s naivety wiped away in a flash. She, like Sandra in ‘The Darkness Out There’, goes through a painful rite of passage as she realizes that in a world which flowers sparkle and birds sing, everything is not as it seems. In the midst of the nightmares, hallucinations and neurosis our protagonist’s Mecca, her Jerusalem, all give way to the harsh reality of the cold and nightmarish world.
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Plath starts ‘Superman and Paula Brown’s Snowsuit’ with a historical reference (“The year the war began”) that immediately sets the scene for the reader and is then followed up with the nightmarish image of children drawing civil defense signs, this forces us to consider the neurosis war brings to an innocent childhood. Throughout the story, references to the nightmarish images caused by the war are constantly mentioned; some are described in more detail than others to create a powerful image. “At recess, Sheldon became a Nazi”; this shows that the threat of war is seeping everywhere, into the minds of adults and children alike.
In the ‘Darkness Out There’, there is a constant contrast of darkness and light. The darkness is represented by Packer’s End and all the witches and wolves in it, creating a form of neurosis lurking in the innocence of a child. An alternative explanation for the darkness is the neurosis and hallucinations the characters suffer in, this explanation is strengthened by “… and there was a darkness that was not the darkness of tree shadows and murky undergrowth and you could not draw the curtains and keep it out because it was in your head, once know, in your head forever like lines from a song”, a contrast between darkness and light is also present in this quote, the light represented by lines from a song.
Further examples of sharp contrast and neurosis can also be found in ‘Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit’ in the form of fantasy versus reality. An example of this in ‘Superman and Paula Brown’s Snowsuit’ would be the war image that was played along the children’s fantasy ‘Snow White’, this sequence of films clashes the harsh reality of war with children’s fantasy. Another form of contrast is superman versus man. Superman is a fantastic product of vivid imagination, an imaginary person that saves people from the nightmares and neurosis of the world, where a man is any normal person who could be poor or rich, evil or good. The narrator wants to believe that Uncle Frank is superman; she lists Uncle Frank’s special abilities at the start of the story to justify her belief. After the narrator watches the war image, she hallucinates the prison camp before her eyes every time she tries to sleep, the groaning and moaning haunts her constantly and no matter how hard she tries “no crusading blue figure came roaring down in heavenly anger”, the narrator realizes that she was unable to call on superman to save her from her nightmares and hallucinations.
By the end of the story, the narrator is made aware that superman is nothing but a hallucination; a product of her vivid imagination, consequently causing her to lose faith in superman. “I could see his strong shoulders bulk against the moonlight, but in the shadows his face was featureless.” Taking extra note of the words “shadows” and “featureless”, we notice that the narrator no longer believes that Uncle Frank is superman as his face is “featureless”; the “shadows” represents the nightmares of the world and the neurosis of human nature. She realizes that the world has betrayed her, “OK, but we’ll pay for another snowsuit just to make everybody happy, and ten years from now no one will ever know the difference.” Uncle Frank said this in reply to the narrator’s denial; this shows the corruption and neurosis that Uncle Frank has as he chooses to pay for a mistake that the narrator did not make instead of standing up for the narrator and setting the record straight, this shows that his personal pride is getting in the way of protecting an innocent family member.
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Just as the world betrays the narrator in ‘Superman and Paula Brown’s Snowsuit’, Mrs. Rutter also betrays Sandra and Kerry in ‘The Darkness Out There’. When we first see Mrs. Rutter, we think she would be a nice stereotypical grandma, however as time passed we begin to see what lies underneath the cover of a nice granny. Lively explores the nightmarish thoughts of a person that lived through WWII, and then describes the impact it causes on the present generation. Although the story is short, a clear character development can be seen “He had grown; he had got older and larger.” This shows the character development of Kerry. “You could get people all wrong, she realized with alarm. You could get people all wrong…”This sentence both serves the purpose of showing the development in character for Sandra and forcing us to think about stereotypes and the way first impressions are made. It also nicely concludes all the stereotypical elements in the story by linking them all together.
Both authors weave an inescapable web around their characters, trapping them within. Throughout the story, neurosis, nightmares and hallucinations of the characters are all explored in depth, in a way that entangles the readers within the story, savoring every single great sentence of the story, leaving us to contemplate in our seats. “Through a world grown unreliable, in which flowers sparkle and birds sing but everything is not as it appears, oh no.”
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