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Plath may be indulging in self-harm here. There is nothing in the text to suggest the cut was truly accidental and she opens the poem not by announcing the injury but the thrill of it.
That seems unlikely. Although Plath had fixated on self-harm when younger, she wouldn’t have needed an ‘onion’ as an excuse to do it. Sounds like a cooking accident – but which retrospectively she may come to *think of as self-harm.
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Also, a similar description is used in her novel, ‘The Bell Jar’, to describe the character’s thoughts on self-harming. Esther calls her experience a “small, deep thrill”