We know that the conceit of this poem emerged out of the 103° fever that Sylvia Plath suffered the day before she wrote the poem. In other sections of this guide, we explore Biblical and etymological associations between fevers and fire, and the conception of fire as a cleansing or purifying force. Whether consciously or not, there is another pool of cultural references that Plath taps into by making her illness a metaphor for sin, and her fever a purifying fire. That would be the mythos of the disease of consumption.
Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “Illness as Metaphor,” published in 1977 after her own cancer diagnosis, reflects on the history of the use of illness as a metaphor throughout the centuries in a largely Western context. Much of the essay is devoted to investigating 18th- and 19th-century uses of tuberculosis, also known as consumption, as a metaphor. While today Americans often consider tuberculosis a disease of the past, by the early 1900s tuberculosis had killed one in seven of every person that had ever lived. It remained the leading cause of death in America until the early 20th century, and still kills over a million people globally each year. Needless to say, consumption was a huge force in human history, and has had a lasting impact on culture and language. Sontag writes that “for over a hundred years TB remained the preferred way of giving death a meaning—an edifying, refined disease.”
Consumption is a bacterial disease that affects the lungs, and symptoms include fevers, rosy cheeks, emaciation, both lethargy and bouts of passionate activity, and terrible coughs. Because it causes the body to wither away, while mental faculties remain, it began to be seen as a “purifying” disease sometime in the 18th century. Over the course of decades, the symptoms of consumption even became fashionable, sophisticated; Sontag describes that “the dying tubercular is pictured as made more beautiful and more soulful.” Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby describes tuberculosis as a disease which eats away at the body until only the soul is left: “the mortal part wastes and withers away, so that the spirit grows light and sanguine with its lightening load,” and “death takes on the glow and hue of life.” In 1852, suffering from TB, Thoreau wrote that “death and disease are often beautiful, like… the hectic glow of consumption.”
The ways in which the speaker’s body in “Fever 103°” is consumed by her fever, and how that illness transfigures her spiritually, feed off of the metaphoric language with which consumption has long been described. Historically, readers of this poem may be primed to accept illness as a purifying agent because of the baggage of centuries of interpreting tuberculosis as a spiritually edifying disease. It was seen as artistic to waste away from consumption, and sexy; it was a glamorous tragedy. People’s personality traits were even blamed as its cause. People said that those who suffered consumption were “not quite life-loving enough to survive.” Sontag notes that in the cultural mythos of the disease, “TB was represented as the prototypical passive death. Often it was a kind of suicide.” Tracing the threads of self-loathing and suicidal ideation in this poem from “Isadora’s scarves” to “selves dissolving, old whore petticoats,” we see that this poem envisions a spiritual relinquishment of the self, a kind of heavenly suicide. Building up this consumption-like fever as a source of spiritual transformation in “Fever 103°,” Plath mobilizes subconscious associations developed over the tuberculosis-ravaged centuries to further her poem’s sensational ends.
