She is able, in "Wintering," to accept also the activities of women who "have got rid of the men,/ The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors." Knitting, tending the cradle, harboring life in her body-bulb, she will survive. The bee sequence tells of the search for a female identity in a world without men, without stings, without knives. It is "the room I have never been in," where the "black" is bunched "like a bat." The speaker now enters with her "torch," lighting "appalling objects," "Black asininity. Decay./ Possession." This open confrontation with the blackness at the center of her own existence, and not associated with some outside threat, is the source of her tentative recognition that she will survive. For once she is totally on her own -- a painful recognition which reflects Plath's own situation.