Gill, Jo - The Cambridge Companion To Sylvia Plath
Gill, Jo - The Cambridge Companion To Sylvia Plath
Gill, Jo - The Cambridge Companion To Sylvia Plath
The controversies that surround Sylvia Plath’s life and work mean that her
poems are more read and studied now than ever before. This Companion
provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of Sylvia Plath’s
poetry, prose, letters and journals and of their place in twentieth-century
culture. These newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars
represent a spectrum of critical perspectives. They pay particular attention
to key debates and to well-known texts such as Ariel and The Bell Jar,
while offering original and thought-provoking readings to new as well as
more experienced Plath readers. The Companion also discusses three recent
additions to the field: Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, Plath’s complete
Journals and the ‘Restored’ edition of Ariel. With its invaluable guide to
further reading and chronology of Plath’s life and work, this Companion
will help students and scholars understand and enjoy Plath’s work and its
continuing relevance.
THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO
SYLVIA PLATH
EDITED BY
JO GILL
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São
Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press,
New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521844963
© Cambridge University Press 2006
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the
provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of
any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge
University Press.
First published 2006
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN-13 978-0-521-84496-3 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-84496-7 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-60685-1 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-60685-3 paperback
Transferred to digital printing 2007
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites
is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
CONTENTS
Notes on contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations and textual note
Chronology of Plath’s life and work
Part I Contexts and issues
1 The problem of biography
SUSAN R. VAN DYNE
2 Plath, history and politics
DEBORAH NELSON
3 Plath and psychoanalysis: uncertain truths
LYNDA K. BUNDTZEN
4 Plath and contemporary American poetry
LINDA WAGNER-MARTIN
5 Plath and contemporary British poetry
ALICE ENTWISTLE
Part II Works
6 The poetry of Sylvia Plath
STEVEN GOULD AXELROD
7 The Colossus and Crossing the Water
JO GILL
8 Ariel and other poems
CHRISTINA BRITZOLAKIS
9 The Bell Jar and other prose
JANET BADIA
10 Sylvia Plath’s letters and journals
TRACY BRAIN
11 The poetry of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: call and response
DIANE MIDDLEBROOK
Selected Reading
Index
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
STEVEN GOULD AXELROD is Professor of English at the University of
California, Riverside. He is the author of Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the
Cure of Words (1990) and Robert Lowell: Life and Art (1978) and has co-
written or edited many other books including Robert Lowell: Essays on
the Poetry (1986), Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens (1988) and Critical
Essays on William Carlos Williams (1995). He has published more than
forty articles and is now researching a book-length study of Cold War
poetry.
JANET BADIA is Assistant Professor of Twentieth-Century American
Literature at Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia. Her
research interests include confessional poetry, autobiography and book
history, especially the study of readers and reception. She is co-editor of
Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian
Age to the Present (2005). She is currently completing a book manuscript
on Plath, Anne Sexton and women readers.
TRACY BRAIN is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Bath Spa
University, where she runs the PhD in Creative Writing Programme. She
is the author of The Other Sylvia Plath (2001). In addition to the essay in
the present volume, Tracy Brain has recently written on Plath in Jo Gill
(ed.), Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays (2005) and in
Anita Helle (ed.), The Unravelling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath
(2006).
CHRISTINA BRITZOLAKIS is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of
Warwick. She is the author of Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning
(1999) and has published articles on modernist poetry, fiction and drama,
including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. Her current research
is concerned with visuality and technology in international modernist
culture.
LYNDA K. BUNDTZEN is Herbert H. Lehman Professor of English at Williams
College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She is the author of two books
on Sylvia Plath: Plath’s Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process
(1983) and The Other Ariel (2001). Her other writings include several
essays on film and feminist theory and on other women poets.
ALICE ENTWISTLE is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of the West
of England, Bristol. She has published widely on late twentieth-century
Anglo-American poetics, concentrating in recent years on poetry written
by women. She is the author, with Jane Dowson, of A History of
Twentieth Century British Women’s Poetry (Cambridge University Press,
2005).
JO GILL is Lecturer in American Literature at Bath Spa University. She is the
editor of Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays (2005) and
the author of a new study of the work of Anne Sexton. She has published
extensively on modern British and American poetry.
DIANE MIDDLEBROOK is a professional writer and Professor of English
Emerita at Stanford University, California. Among her books are Anne
Sexton – A Biography (finalist for the 1991 National Book Award in the
USA); Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (1998) and Her
Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (2003). Middlebrook is an
Honorary Member of Christ’s College, University of Cambridge.
DEBORAH NELSON is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at
the University of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. Her first
book, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (2001), examines
confessional poetry in relation to Supreme Court privacy doctrine. She is
currently working on a book called Tough Broads on women artists and
intellectuals in the postwar era.
SUSAN R. VAN DYNE is Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies at Smith
College, Massachusetts. She is the author of Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s
Ariel Poems (1993) and co-editor of Women’s Place in the Academy:
Transforming the Liberal Arts (1985). She is currently working on a book
titled Proving Grounds: The Politics of Reading Contemporary Women
Poets.
LINDA WAGNER-MARTIN is Hanes Professor of English at the University of
North Carolina-Chapel Hill and has published fifty books on modern and
mid-century American writers. She has held Guggenheim, Rockefeller,
NEH, and other fellowships. Recent biographies are of Barbara
Kingsolver and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. Her work on Plath includes her
1987 book, Sylvia Plath: A Biography, available in many languages;
Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (1999, 2nd edition 2003); and several
collections of essays on Plath’s work.
PREFACE
The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath offers a critical overview of
Plath’s writing (predominantly the poetry, but also fiction, letters and
journals) and of its place in twentieth-century literature and culture. The
eleven specially commissioned essays in the collection are the work of
leading international scholars in the field and represent a spectrum of
critical perspectives and practices.
The book is divided into two sections. The first section discusses Plath’s
writing in relation to relevant contexts and perspectives (exploring the
temptations and limitations of reading her work biographically, the insights
to be gained by examining its historical and ideological contexts, the
difficulties and rewards of adopting a psychoanalytic perspective and the
influence of her writing on contemporary American and British poetry).
The aim here is to show that Plath’s work is not entire unto itself; that it
emerged in particular historical, ideological, literary and personal contexts,
and, moreover, that the figure of Plath we may think we know is a product
of a complex, mutable and contested tissue of discourses. These essays
combine a critical awareness of key issues and debates in Plath studies with
incisive readings of the poetry and prose; their intention is to inform and to
stimulate the reader’s own engagement with the writing.
The second section discusses a range of Plath texts in turn – from her
earliest collection The Colossus to the poems of the Ariel period to The Bell
Jar and the manuscripts of Letters Home – raising a number of important
and challenging issues, and proposing a variety of reading positions. This
section is interested in both the diversity and the detail of Plath’s work, in
its richness, its craft and its technical complexity, and it focuses on Plath’s
concentrated and ambitious use of poetic form. It draws attention to its
sometimes overlooked variety and it alerts readers to Plath’s sustained
manipulation of a range of genres and voices and her development of a
sophisticated and linguistically self-aware poetics. It reflects on the
publishing history of specific volumes and the construction of a Plath
‘canon’ and highlights recent critical debates about agency and ownership,
about the politics of editing and the ethics of criticism. The essays in both
sections are informed by an awareness of gender as a factor in the
production and reception of Plath’s work.
Like others in the series, the Companion to Plath draws on and –
implicitly or otherwise – assesses previous scholarship in the field. This
critical heritage is examined in detail, where relevant, in the chapters which
follow (and a comprehensive list of sources is provided at the end of the
book). Nevertheless a brief survey of the field of Plath studies is useful at
this point as a way of setting the scene and of demonstrating, first, that
approaches to Plath’s work change over time and second, that there is no
orthodoxy of critical opinion. Some of the earliest studies of Plath’s writing
– for example, C. B. Cox and A. R. Jones’s 1964 article ‘After the
Tranquillized Fifties’ and Al Alvarez’s 1967 ‘Beyond all this Fiddle’ –
considered it in the context of the newly emergent ‘confessional mode’ of
poetry (the name was coined by M. L. Rosenthal in a review of Robert
Lowell’s 1959 Life Studies) with which Plath – rightly or wrongly – was
typically associated. Plath was an acquaintance of Lowell’s, had studied
alongside poet Anne Sexton in his Boston University writing workshops
and seemed, particularly in the poems which culminated in Ariel, to belong
within this frame. Such an association seems now to be rather limiting,
although recent revisions of confessionalism in the light of, say, Michel
Foucault’s work and in the context of Deborah Nelson’s reading of the
mode as a product of Cold War anxieties about privacy and surveillance
suggest the potential value of revisiting Plath’s work in the light of a revised
definition of the term.
Contemporaneous with this (and perhaps an inevitable consequence both
of the turn to the personal and private in this period, and of the particular
circumstances of Plath’s death) were early and persistently influential
biographical accounts. Memoirs by family and friends featured in Charles
Newman’s 1970 collection The Art of Sylvia Plath (which reproduced
articles originally published in a 1966 special issue of the journal Tri-
Quarterly). This was followed by Al Alvarez’s recollections of Plath’s last
days, The Savage God (UK 1971/US 1972), and some years later by Anne
Stevenson’s controversial Bitter Fame – the latter ignited arguments about
authority and ownership of truth which continue to smoulder to this day. A
characteristic of such works – although we should note that this is not a
problem unique to Plath studies – is a worrying conflation of poet and
speaker, of lived experience and poetic text. Of late, more sophisticated
treatments (Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman (1994) and Jacqueline
Rose’s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), which she later supplemented
with an essay entitled ‘This is Not a Biography’) take a step back and
question the status, value and purpose of literary biography.
Another early approach to the study of Plath was through the lens of
mythology. Judith Kroll, author of one of the first book-length studies of
Plath’s work, Chapters in a Mythology (1976), cites the profound influence
on Plath (through Hughes) of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. Steven
Gould Axelrod, however, demurs, arguing that ‘Plath never actually cared
much about The White Goddess except when she was feigning an interest in
topics of interest to her husband’ (Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of
Words (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 46).
A psychoanalytical approach to Plath’s life and writing seems always to
have proved tempting. David Holbrook’s Sylvia Plath: Poetry and
Existence (1976) examines the poetry in the light of what it diagnoses as the
poet’s schizoid personality – a condition which Holbrook wishes to
ameliorate or neutralize in order to protect her vulnerable readers: ‘these
works may be offering falsifications or forms of moral inversion which are
absurd, or even deranged, and may even do harm to the sensitive and
responsive young person’ ((London: Athlone Press, 1976), p. 2). In the
same year, Edward Butscher’s contentious Sylvia Plath: Method and
Madness appeared. More recent psychoanalytical accounts, for example
Jacqueline Rose’s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Elisabeth Bronfen’s Sylvia
Plath (1998) and Christina Britzolakis’s Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of
Mourning (1999), have developed a rather different approach, one inflected
by the insights of poststructuralism and feminism. Here, as in contemporary
literary studies more generally, the shift has been away from analysing and
pathologizing the author to an acknowledgement of the uncertainty of truth,
the slipperiness of language and the indeterminacy of the subject.
Plath’s writing coincided with the emergence of the second wave of
feminism and thus her work has frequently been read in terms of its
recognition and representation of the conditions of life for women of the
1960s onwards. Studies by Alicia Ostriker, Jan Montefiore, Suzanne Juhasz
and many others established Plath’s importance in a newly validated
tradition of women’s writing. More recent feminist approaches have
challenged some of the assumptions of such criticism. Renée Curry’s
thought-provoking account of representations of whiteness in modern
women poets, White Women Writing White: H. D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia
Plath and Whiteness (2000), critiques the essentialism and the colour
blindness of Plath’s poetry.
Plath’s historical context and her engagement with issues of political,
cultural and ideological concern have often been overlooked in the
enthusiasm for reading her work as merely private and introspective – as
‘mirrorlooking’ to use her own scornful term (PS, p. 170). Stan Smith’s
important book Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth-Century Poetry
(1982) redresses this, seeing the poetry as located very much in a particular
place and time, and as engaging in affirmatory or contestatory ways with
large questions of history, society, responsibility. Deborah Nelson’s reading
of Plath and her contemporaries in the context of Cold War cultures of
privacy and surveillance (Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, 2001)
and Robin Peel’s study of Plath’s preoccupation with the political anxieties
of the 1950s and early 1960s (Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War
Politics, 2002) have also proved influential. In each of these cases, Plath is
read as a politically engaged poet. Like T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and others
(Denise Levertov and Thom Gunn of her own generation), Plath shifted
cultures by moving across the Atlantic. Of late, Tracy Brain and Paul Giles
have read Plath’s language and themes in terms of this dislocation (Brain
posits the notion of mid-Atlanticism and draws attention to the equivocal or
liminal voices of Plath’s writing).
To all these must be added the numerous studies of Plath’s work which,
while sometimes drawing on some of the broad approaches outlined above,
develop their own perspectives and areas of interest. These include major
studies by Marjorie Perloff, Helen Hennessy Vendler, Tim Kendall, Linda
Wagner-Martin, Lynda K. Bundtzen, Susan R. Van Dyne and many, many
others. What is striking in summarizing this heritage is its breadth and its
diversity. The Companion treads a confident path through this rich and
heterogeneous material.
Of particular importance to this Companion – and thus of real value to its
readers – has been the recent publication of three key texts. The Cambridge
Companion to Sylvia Plath is the first study of Plath to be able to make use
of all these resources. The first of these is Ted Hughes’s 1998 collection of
poems Birthday Letters. This revisits the life and, more importantly, the
work of Plath, in poems such as ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, which writes back to
her well-known and fiercely contested poem of the same name, and ‘The
Beach’, which offers a different perspective on the scene explored in her
1961 ‘Whitsun’. It is too simplistic to say that this is Hughes’s version of
the story of their marriage, or that this is Hughes in dialogue with Plath (if
we think it important to register the nuances of Plath’s poetic voices and to
flag up the noncoherence of poet and speaker, surely we should adopt a
similar approach in considering Hughes’s work?) Nevertheless, what
Birthday Letters does do, in what I regard as a profoundly self-conscious,
troubled and troubling way, is remind us of the shared difficulties – for
writer and reader alike – of engaging with this material, with these issues.
Analysing the complexity of their creative partnership is the approach
Diane Middlebrook takes in her book Her Husband: Sylvia Plath and Ted
Hughes – A Marriage (2003).
The second key text to emerge of late, in 2000, is the more complete
edition of Plath’s extant journals (known as The Journals of Sylvia Plath:
1950–1962 in the UK and The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath in the
US). Edited by Karen Kukil, the Associate Curator at Smith College, the
new Journals reproduce for the first time Smith College’s extensive
holdings of Plath’s diaries. Running to almost 700 pages, the Journals are
hugely valuable to our understanding of Plath’s writing practices and
sources, although as Bonnie Costello cautions of the work of Marianne
Moore ‘this multiplicity of sources is quite different from the multiplicity of
references’ (Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 6).
Finally, what has been perceived by some as a troubling gap in Plath’s
oeuvre is closed by the publication of Ariel: The Restored Edition – A
Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and
Arrangement (2004) with a ‘Foreword’ by Frieda Hughes. As Ted Hughes
disclosed in his ‘Introduction’ and ‘Notes’ to Plath’s Collected Poems, the
edition of Ariel which had been published posthumously in 1965 (UK/1966
US) did not follow the order, or even include all the poems, which Plath had
planned (CP, pp. 14–15). The significance of Hughes’s alterations to the
trajectory of the volume are considered at length in Marjorie Perloff’s 1990
article ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)making of the Sylvia Plath Canon’ and
Lynda K. Bundtzen’s book The Other Ariel (2001).
In her ‘Foreword’ to the restored edition of Ariel, Frieda Hughes
expresses concern about the repeated ‘dissect[ion]’ by readers of some of its
key poems (her anxiety replicates Ted Hughes’s own point, in defence of
his editing of the 1965/66 version of Ariel, that he would have left more
poems out had he suspected that they would ever be ‘decoded’ (WP, p.
167)). There is an anxiety in both of these cases about reading – about the
power of other people’s reading to yield unexpected, proliferating and
uncontrollable meanings. Interpretation is experienced (or interpreted) as an
attack on the hermetic body of the text, on the singular truth which is
presumed to hide there. What I wish to argue here is that the text – Plath’s
poetry, any writing – cannot exist outside of such interpretative processes; it
does not ‘mean’ alone. To suggest that it does is, arguably, to deny the
complexity and richness of the writing, to reduce it to singularity. On this
point I disagree with Frieda Hughes’s suggestion that the Ariel poems
‘speak for themselves’ (A Rest., p. xvi). What they ‘speak’, I would
contend, depends on who is listening and when, how and why they are read.
As a counter to these arguments against interpretation, I propose a plea
for interpretation. The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath seeks to
stimulate a plethora of ongoing readings – of primary and secondary
sources alike (for biographies and critical studies, like poetry, reward
careful and critical reading). Rather than positing a definitive truth about
Plath’s work, the essays collected below introduce relevant contexts and
issues and offer diverse reading practices – all in the service of a
multiplicity of interpretations. For it is only by interpretation, by reading,
thinking, writing about and discussing these poems, that their richness,
complexity and resonance will adequately be recognized.
Jo Gill
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks, first, to Ray Ryan of Cambridge University Press who
commissioned this Companion, to the anonymous reviewers who approved
the idea and to the School of Humanities at Kingston University, London
whose generous and timely offer of a Research Fellowship ensured that it
could be completed. At Kingston I owe particular gratitude to Avril Horner,
David Rogers, Sarah Sceats and Meg Jensen. Thanks, too, to friends and
colleagues at the Universities of Gloucestershire and Exeter – in particular
to Peter Widdowson, Shelley Saguaro and Mark Whalan. Others who have
offered their interest and support include Stan Smith, Stacy Gillis, Alice
Entwistle, Frances Hollingdale, Jeannette Gill and Sheena and Ray
Hennessy. It has been a pleasure to work with all the contributors to this
companion and I hope that the finished item does their scholarship justice.
Final thanks, as always, to Neil Stevens and to Jacob, Freya and Keziah.
ABBREVIATIONS AND TEXTUAL NOTE
Unless otherwise indicated, poems discussed in this volume are from Sylvia
Plath, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber; New
York: Harper & Row, 1981). Where there is a difference in pagination or
contents between English and American editions (for example, in the case
of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams) the edition used is indicated in an
endnote.
A
Sylvia Plath, Ariel (London: Faber and Faber, 1965; New York: Harper &
Row, 1966).
A Rest.
Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, ed. Frieda Hughes (London:
Faber and Faber, 2004).
BJ
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Heinemann, 1963 (under the
pseudonym Victoria Lucas); London: Faber and Faber 1966; New York:
Harper & Row, 1971 (as Sylvia Plath)).
BL
Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (London: Faber and Faber; New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998).
C
Sylvia Plath, The Colossus and Other Poems (London: Heinemann,
1960; New York: Knopf, 1962).
CP
Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber and
Faber; New York: Harper & Row, 1981).
CW
Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water (London: Faber and Faber; New York:
Harper & Row, 1971).
J
Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath: 1950–1962, ed. Karen V.
Kukil (London: Faber and Faber, 2000); The Unabridged Journals of
Sylvia Plath (New York: Anchor, 2000).
J Abr.
Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes and Frances
McCullough (New York: Dial, 1982) (abridged edition).
JP
Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose
Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1977; New York: Harper & Row,
1979).
LH
Sylvia Plath, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, ed. Aurelia
Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975; London: Faber and Faber, 1976).
PS
Peter Orr (ed), The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).
WP
Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell
(London: Faber and Faber, 1994).
WT
Sylvia Plath, Winter Trees (London: Faber and Faber, 1971; New York:
Harper & Row, 1972).
CHRONOLOGY OF PLATH’S LIFE AND WORK
1932
Sylvia Plath born 27 October in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of
Aurelia Schober and Otto Emil Plath. Aurelia was first-generation
American, Otto had emigrated to the US from the German-speaking
Polish corridor as a young man. Aurelia Plath worked as a teacher and as
a secretary. Otto Plath was Professor of Entomology at Boston University
and an expert on bees.
1935
Birth of Sylvia’s brother, Warren.
1939
Outbreak of World War II.
1940
Death of Otto Plath after complications arising from diabetes.
1941
Pearl Harbor; US enters World War II.
1942
Aurelia, Sylvia and Warren move to Wellesley, Massachusetts.
1945
Atomic bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. End of World War
II.
1950–1
Plath attends Smith College, Northampton (majoring in English) on a
scholarship granted by novelist Olive Higgins Prouty.
1950–3
Korean War.
1950–4
McCarthyism.
1953
Early January: Plath fractures her leg in a skiing accident. June:
Execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for espionage. Summer: Plath
takes up a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine, NewYork. Returns
home exhausted and close to breakdown, ECT administered, suicide
attempt and hospitalization.
1954
Post-World War II food rationing in Britain ends.
1955
Graduates from Smith College summa cum laude and travels to England
on a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge.
1956
25 February: meets Ted Hughes at the launch party for a student
magazine.
16 June: marries Ted Hughes in London. Honeymoon in Benidorm,
Spain.
1957–9
Plath and Hughes in the US.
1957: Plath teaches at Smith College.
1958: Plath attends Robert Lowell’s writing workshop at Boston
University alongside Anne Sexton, takes a secretarial post in a
psychiatric clinic, enters therapy with Dr Ruth Beuscher.
1959: Travel through the US and period at Yaddo, the writers’ colony. In
December 1959 Plath and Hughes return to live in England.
1960
April: Plath’s and Hughes’s daughter, Frieda, born in London. 31
October: Plath’s first collection of poetry, The Colossus, published in the
UK.
1961
February: Miscarriage and appendectomy.
March to May: Writing The Bell Jar.
Late August/early September: Plath, Hughes and Frieda move to North
Tawton, Devon.
Antinuclear demonstrations take place in London.
1962
January: a son, Nicholas, born in Devon.
The Colossus published for the first time in the US (14 May).
19 August: ‘Three Women’ broadcast on BBC radio.
October: Plath and Hughes separate; Hughes leaves North Tawton.
Cuban Missile Crisis.
December: Plath and children move to London.
1963
January: The Bell Jar published in London under the pseudonym Victoria
Lucas.
11 February: Plath dies by suicide.
1965
11 March: Ariel published in the UK.
1966
June: Ariel published in the US.
1 September: The Bell Jar published in the UK under Plath’s own name.
1971
14 April: The Bell Jar published in the US under Plath’s own name.
Crossing the Water published (May UK/September US).
Winter Trees published in the UK (September).
1972
September: Winter Trees published in the US.
1975
December: Letters Home published in the US.
1976
April: Letters Home published in the UK.
The Bed Book (1959?) published.
1977
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams published in the UK.
1979
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams published in the US.
1981
Collected Poems published.
1982
Collected Poems awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
PART I
Contexts and issues
1
SUSAN R. VAN DYNE
The problem of biography
Because the poems and novel that have made Plath’s name came to almost
all her readers as posthumous events, her work has inevitably been read
through the irrevocable, ineradicable and finally enigmatic fact of Plath’s
suicide. The challenge for her biographers has been to puzzle out the
relationship not merely of her life to her art, but of her art to her death.
Biographers promise to expose these relationships for scrutiny, and yet the
genre itself is inexhaustible: there is never an end to what the biographer
cannot know. If Plath’s biographers differ sharply in their readiness to
propose definitive and sometimes reductive explanations of her character,
they also can be judged by their ability to register the quality of her
achievement, to explain what Plath’s work revealed so compellingly to
readers, particularly women, of her own and the next generation, and why it
will remain illuminating and important in the future.
Biographers of Plath demonstrate that the genre is always interested,
although hers have been more noticeably partisan than most. In fact, each of
the major biographies is in part motivated to counteract what is perceived as
egregious bias in the one before. Reading them in sequence, we hear an
edgy conversation that has lasted for three decades. Each biographer also
takes up the story at a different moment in Plath’s publication history and
growing literary reputation, and not unimportantly, in Ted Hughes’s oeuvre
and reputation. In each decade biographers gained access to new published
and archival resources that document in voluminous detail Plath’s historical
context, her professional and personal correspondence, her education and
reading and her creative process in the drafts of her Ariel poems.1
When Edward Butscher published Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness in
1975, neither Plath’s letters nor her journals had been published, nor had
her fiction beyond The Bell Jar been collected.2 By contrast, Linda Wagner-
Martin began researching her 1987 biography when Plath’s Collected
Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982.3 She consulted the unedited letters
from Plath to her mother acquired in 1977 by the Lilly Library at Indiana
University, along with documentation of Plath’s life from infancy through
her year teaching at Smith in 1957–8. Wagner-Martin read Plath’s poetry
drafts and her censored and incomplete journals (a much larger selection of
her journals than those published in 1982), which are among the most
important materials Smith College bought from Hughes in 1981. Anne
Stevenson’s apparent mission in Bitter Fame was to counteract what by
1989 was represented by the Plath Estate as Plath’s mistaken status as a
feminist martyr.4 In ‘The Archive’, a central chapter in The Haunting of
Sylvia Plath, Jacqueline Rose takes the Hugheses (Ted and his sister
Olwyn) to task for what she and others experienced as pressure from the
Estate to adopt their view or lose permission to quote Plath’s work.5
Against these charges of coercion, Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman
(1995) struggled to recuperate Stevenson’s efforts, as well as to forefront
the unavoidable partiality of biography as a genre.6 Diane Middlebrook’s
biography of the Plath–Hughes marriage, Her Husband (2003), attempts to
take the measure of both poets after Hughes’s bombshell publication of
Birthday Letters in 1998, his unanticipated death from cancer months later,
and the showering of England’s most prestigious prizes on its poet laureate
in the last years of the century.7 She was the first to mine the Hughes
archives at Emory University, a dauntingly rich and tangled repository of
Ted Hughes’s correspondence, drafts and workbooks, and of his editorial
curatorship of Plath’s work.
Finally, Ted Hughes is also Plath’s biographer, despite his insistent
refusal to be interviewed by biographers. Through his control of her archive
and his own, through more than fourteen introductions to and annotations of
Plath’s work, and in a series of litigious public and private interventions to
protest against invasions of privacy by biographers and critics, he has laid
claim to irrefutable knowledge of Plath’s inspiration, intentions and writing
practices, and the chronology of her work. His late volume, Birthday
Letters was read by many as an anguished memoir of their marriage and of
her writing. Accompanying the rise in Sylvia Plath’s stature as a major
literary talent of the twentieth century is an apparently inexhaustible market
for stories of her life (which seems emblematic of the gender norms that
governed growing up talented, ambitious and female in the postwar US)
and of this marriage between professional writers.8
Reading the life
In thinking through these biographies, I want to highlight several bad habits
of reading Sylvia Plath as woman and as writer that misunderstand the
relation of biography to art. While some of these reading fallacies are more
prominent in one biography than another, others are shared. First, beginning
immediately after her suicide and continuing through Hughes’s late poems
about Plath, a powerfully influential narrative assumes that her suicide
authenticates the truth of her poems. This reading assumes that the relation
of creative writing to lived suffering is transparent and direct, and is
predetermined rather than chosen by the poet. Further, her death is
understood as a tragic but inevitable byproduct of her poetic method; her
suicide is proof that the violent unresolved materials of her unconscious,
once courted or confronted as subjects for poetry, couldn’t finally be
transmuted, ordered and contained by words. Al Alvarez launched this
demonic teleology in his memoir of Plath, The Savage God, Robert Lowell
promulgated it in his foreword to the American edition of Ariel, and Hughes
reinscribes it in Birthday Letters.
Second, Anne Stevenson’s is only the most egregious example of those
who read the poet as pathological and her writing as symptomatic of her
illness. Stevenson recycles Edward Butscher’s binary logic of true and false
selves, in which an unacknowledged, and essentially destructive true self is
temporarily constrained through verbal technical polish only to break
through in the searing denunciations of the Ariel poems. In this reading
Plath’s character is fixed from childhood by heredity, chemistry, trauma or
family dynamics, and a compliant mask is held tenuously in place by
middle-class propriety and ambition, until the mask breaks at the
dissolution of her marriage.
A third misreading accepts the binary of true–false selves, but reverses
their values. Plath is the product of rigid gender norms imposed by
patriarchy, her mother’s influence and a dominant husband until his
defection causes the true, subversive, protofeminist self to erupt in fury.
This reading oversimplifies the relation between individual subject and
ideology by imagining that Plath’s true self could be immune to repressive
ideology. Rather, the subject is constituted through ideology; gender norms
are not merely given and internalized, but are apprehended, resisted and
negotiated constantly in conscious and unconscious ways.
What none of these reading habits can do justice to is Plath’s agency as
woman and artist. Perhaps because as a culture we subscribe so exclusively
to paradigms in which personality is fixed by good or bad parenting, early
trauma or brain chemistry, biography underestimates Plath’s habits of
conscious reinvention and the lucid artistic control of her poetry, even in her
final days. Rather than assume that Plath is an unusually autobiographical
writer, we need to understand that she experienced her life in unusually
textual ways. In her letters and journals as much as in her fiction and poetry,
Plath’s habits of self-representation suggest that she regarded her life as if it
were a text she could invent and rewrite. At the age of seventeen, her
creation of a persona is self-conscious and potentially omnipotent: ‘I think I
would like to call myself “The girl who wanted to be God”’ (LH, p. 40). At
moments of crisis, throughout her life, she imagines that she can erase the
inscription of lived experience and earlier textual selves and be reborn,
unmarked as an infant, inviolate as a virgin. Each of the narratives she
created, whether letters, journals, prose, poetry or interviews, served her as
enabling fictions; these proliferating personae were self-consciously chosen
and personally explanatory. The dissonance and contradictions among these
self-representations are at once symptomatic, in that they demonstrate
postwar American culture’s powerful shaping influence on her imagination,
and also strategic, in that they represent her efforts to imagine, dismantle
and reconstruct her ongoing self-narrative into a script she could live with.
While Edward Butscher has been uniformly disparaged by the Estate and
other biographers since the publication of Sylvia Plath: Method and
Madness in 1976, this first full-length biography puts in circulation almost
all the formulas that later biographers would adopt and reinforce. Butscher
introduces the term ‘bitch goddess’ as shorthand for Plath’s poetic persona
and sometimes as a descriptor for the woman herself. In combination, his
terms evoke ‘a discontented, tense, frequently brilliant woman goaded into
fury by her repressed or distorted status in male society’ and ‘a more
creative one . . . with fierce ambition and ruthless pursuit of success’ (pp.
xi–xii).9 The bitch goddess is the profoundly angry subconscious force that
Butscher claims underlies her overachieving adolescence, her contemptuous
resentment of family and friends, and her urge to manipulate and control
everything from boyfriends and mother figures to nature itself.
He sees Plath’s character as deformed by mental illness. Although he
claims to eschew a medical diagnosis, Butscher’s account depends on
frequent references to her split personalities, psychosis and narcissism (pp.
26–7 and 125, among others). Like Stevenson later, he faults Plath for the
unjust attack in The Bell Jar on everyone who had supported her (p. 308).
But unlike Stevenson’s extension of the blanket of moral blame from
Plath’s character to her work, Butscher uniformly admires her craft. More
than any later biographer, he praises the accomplishment of The Bell Jar, as
‘a minor masterpiece of sardonic satire and sincere protest’, comparing it to
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Nathanael West’s Miss
Lonelyhearts (p. 310). He recognizes in the Ariel poems not the mistaken
fury of an unreasonable wife, but ‘the fully conscious legend of the bitch
self that she would assert with calculated genius’ (p. 316).
Butscher also proposes the ‘lost little girl’ thesis of the poet arrested in
her development by the childhood trauma of her father’s death – a thesis
most vividly deployed in Hughes’s 1995 Paris Review interview ‘The Art
of Poetry LXXI’ and in Birthday Letters. Butscher imagines in Plath’s ‘The
Moon and the Yew Tree’ an ‘allegory of the lost little girl’ which he
claimed Hughes also recognized (p. 297). While he identifies the poem as a
masterpiece, his reading emphasizes Plath’s helpless passivity, even though
the speaker nowhere identifies herself as little girl.
Butscher believes that their marriage benefited them mutually as poets.
As Diane Middlebrook would argue more comprehensively three decades
later, Butscher recognizes that ‘their marriage vow above all was a mutual
protection pact against the world and for poetry’ (p. 188) and that their
union ‘provided two of the more original minds of their generation with an
unprecedented and productive opportunity to feed and grow upon one
another’s stores of poetic insight’ (p. 189). Most surprisingly, Butscher
offers frequent insights that would coalesce in 1980s and 1990s feminist
readings of Plath. He catalogues her justified resentment of male privilege
in her culture, her domestic double day, even when Hughes shared childcare
(p. 290), the submerged revenge plots of her poetry and magazine fiction
(pp. 215–18, 270), and the appropriation of male powers by the Ariel
heroines (p. 339). He recognizes that she mobilized weapons of self-
defence and tools for survival in her late poetry (p. 342). Yet the latent
misogyny of Butscher’s representation is stronger than his nascent feminist
sympathies. His version attributes to Plath a strong, innate distaste for
sexuality (pp. 63, 77) and an attitude of condescension towards the men she
used (pp. 95, 123). The greatest weakness of Butscher’s argument is the
internal contradiction suggested by his title. Is the repressed self articulated
in the master works of the Ariel period (and foreshadowed in the novel and
the revenge plots of the magazine stories) strategic method or symptom of
madness? Is the bitch goddess manipulated guise, self-conscious persona or
ungovernable eruption of the unconscious?
Among the valuable aspects of Butscher’s biography for later readers is
his persuasive critique of Alvarez’s deterministic model of reading Plath’s
art as a fatal gamble with her own sanity. In his frequent, detailed analysis
of the form of the poems, Butscher demonstrates that he takes all of Plath’s
poetry seriously, even the work that predates Hughes (labelled ‘Juvenilia’ in
Hughes’s edition of her Collected Poems). Butscher has unerring judgement
about the important poems from each period, and reads many carefully.
More than any later biographer, he identifies Plath’s literary influences
beyond Hughes and credits her with significant artistic growth before they
met. He flags the bias in the interviews he draws upon, although he differs
from later biographers in identifying the Comptons and Peter Davison as
hostile and the Merwins as supportive after the separation. Finally, he
unearths Plath’s politics, important to critics three decades later, and
emergent in her undergraduate days when she was part of the crowd who
hissed Joseph McCarthy at Smith College (p. 69).
Although reviewers suggest that Plath has become a blameless martyr in
the accounts of feminists, Linda Wagner-Martin’s Sylvia Plath (1987) is a
responsible, temperate account. Actually the sole biographer who takes an
explicitly feminist stance, Wagner-Martin claims Plath is broadly feminist
in her belief in her own talent, her professional devotion to her calling, the
importance of female friends, mentors and artistic models, and her anger
that her fame would be more difficult to achieve and her work judged by
different standards because she was a woman (pp. 11–12).
Wagner-Martin’s ‘Preface’ is quoted more often than any other part of
her book (for example, in reviews by Alvarez, Helen Vendler and Butscher,
and by Malcolm). This is perhaps because, taking her own experience as
example, she candidly accuses the Estate of coercion and attempted
censorship in withholding permission to quote at length from Plath’s
materials.10 Calculating that together Olwyn’s and Ted’s suggested changes
would have meant deleting 15,000 words from her manuscript, Wagner-
Martin gave up her intended close-readings in favor of her argument – an
argument which, in any case, is not markedly hostile to Hughes.
Wagner-Martin’s revisions of the available narratives laid down by
Butscher and Alvarez resist monocausal explanations. Wagner-Martin
recognizes that even before Otto’s death, staged performances of
precociousness and femininity required by him in her early childhood
would have disastrous developmental consequences for her relationships
with men, and that her inevitable emotional dependency on her mother
Aurelia, while at first sustaining, became deeply resented in adulthood. Her
reprise of Plath’s psychotherapy with Ruth Beuscher in 1958–9 reminds us
that Plath reassessed all her primary relationships; she not only gained
‘“permission to hate”’ her mother (J, p. 429) but also confronted the link
between her suspicion of Hughes and her resentment of her father. Wagner-
Martin also situates Plath’s psychosexual struggles with her family and in
her intimate relationship with Hughes in a larger cultural framework.
Plath’s overclose relationship with her mother emerged in part through the
fragility of the family’s ability to preserve the middle-class façade of their
Wellesley address after Otto’s death. Despite Aurelia’s heroic efforts to
provide, the house was overcrowded with her extended family, forcing the
adolescent Sylvia to share her mother’s room, in what she would describe in
her journals as a ‘stink of women’ and a suffocating ‘smarmy matriarchy of
togetherness’ (J, pp. 431, 429). Wagner-Martin does not privilege biology
or childhood trauma as the exclusive source of her mental illness (though
she documents a history of depression in Otto’s female relatives), but
usefully links these to historical and cultural pressures on Plath’s self-
construction.
Benefiting from the wealth of archival material available to her that
Butscher lacked, Wagner-Martin finds more explicit trace evidence in the
drafts for poems from spring 1962 that Plath was anxiously pondering
violence and death in her relationship well before ‘The Rabbit Catcher’
articulated her anguish (pp. 202–4). She plausibly suggests an ominous yet
unspoken exchange occurring that spring between the antifemale short
stories and plays of Hughes that Plath typed and her own artistic production
in which she anticipates her discovery of his infidelity. She finds in Plath’s
extensive correspondence in the Smith archives a circle of trusted women
friends whom she reached out to in her final months and admiration for
breakthroughs in subject matter and voice by fellow poets Anne Sexton and
Stevie Smith. In retelling her final weeks, Wagner-Martin emphasizes
Plath’s plans with these female confidantes and professional approval for
her work signaled by requests from several editors for submissions. This
contrasts sharply with Hughes’s widely repeated claim that her Ariel poems
were largely rejected. She also departs from Hughes’s contention
(strenuously made to Aurelia in editing Letters Home) that far from
intending to divorce him, Plath and he were on the verge of reconciliation.
Wagner-Martin’s approach is never sensational; nor does she pretend to
be exhaustive. Her account depends on the tremendous outpouring of
feminist literary criticism that occurred in the fifteen years after Butscher’s
biography, some of which she had collected in her 1984 Critical Essays on
Sylvia Plath.11 In paraphrasing the archives that she was forbidden to quote,
she also opens the way for much productive scholarship that followed in the
1990s. She offers an accessible, unargumentative introduction to Plath’s
work, with readings that are suggestive if somewhat embryonic.
Ted Hughes had multiple reasons for wanting an authorized biography of
Plath by the mid-1980s, not least his need for control over what he
emphatically insisted was his story as much as Plath’s. Anne Stevenson
began her research for Bitter Fame in 1985, the year after Hughes was
named Britain’s poet laureate. By 1982, with publication of Plath’s
Collected Poems and of the abridged edition of Plath’s Journals (in the US
only), everything Hughes intended to publish was out, and the Plath
archives had been sold off. His decisions had made possible an avalanche of
critical and popular attention to Plath’s work and had amassed a sizeable
personal fortune for Hughes. That income had been threatened during the
1970s by back taxes he owed on royalties from her books, reported in a
letter to Lucas Myers as an oppressive debt.12 During the 1980s Hughes’s
management of the Plath estate became the object of increasingly critical
scrutiny and the source of financial anxieties that, in his letters, again reach
monumental proportions. A libel suit was filed in 1982 against the film
version of The Bell Jar (the book was by far the most lucrative of the Plath
properties). This was not resolved until 1987. The mounting ironies were
not lost on Hughes: fearing bankruptcy for the same reasons that he was
wealthy beyond his imagination; Britain’s poet laureate, but eclipsed in the
US by Plath’s rising fame, which he had helped to promote, Hughes shrank
from further involvement in Plath affairs and at the same time longed for
vindication in the ceaseless combat that had preoccupied him for the past
decade.13
Stevenson’s biography Bitter Fame, when it finally appeared in 1989,
bore the wounds of another battle, the struggle between Olwyn Hughes’s
version of Ted’s story and Stevenson’s own. The equivocal author’s note by
Stevenson seemed to deny responsibility for the outcome under the guise of
perhaps reluctant collaboration with Olwyn: ‘In writing this biography, I
have received a great deal of help from Olwyn Hughes . . . Ms. Hughes’s
contributions to the text have made it almost a work of dual authorship’ (p.
x). In an interview a year later, Stevenson claims, ‘She insisted on writing
the author’s note herself – on pain of withdrawing permission for the use of
quotations.’14 The equally unprecedented inclusion of three stand-alone
memoirs by several of her sources as appendices prompted more
widespread and sharply critical charges against the Estate’s bias and
editorial control than Wagner-Martin’s direct accusations. Whether
Stevenson was the helpless hostage of Olwyn Hughes or her willing
collaborator, the informants she calls ‘witnesses’ were polarized camps that
she felt forced to choose between, although Stevenson knew that each was
unreliable.15
A quarter of a century separates Stevenson’s interviews and the events
she was researching. During this time memoirs by acquaintances had been
sold and published and had become petrified in frequent rehearsals to other
biographers, accumulating ever more historically distant annotation and
elaboration. The new memoirs that Stevenson reproduces are from several
peripheral witnesses who are uniformly unsympathetic to Plath. Dido
Merwin, who was their London neighbour for a time, is unremitting in the
pettiness, possessiveness and harridan hostilities she attributes to Plath.
Lucas Myers, a Cambridge friend of Hughes, whose marriage, children and
divorce paralleled Sylvia’s and Ted’s, seems to have known the Hugheses
marriage almost exclusively through Ted’s letters. Richard Murphy, an Irish
poet, who was at most a casual acquaintance, accuses Plath of unwelcome
sexual advances during a brief stay as his houseguest in September 1962.16
For Stevenson to include these appendices as first-person accounts seems
an odd choice because their perspectives have already been incorporated in
the body of the biography. It is as if, in the contestatory battle that
biographical accounts of the marriage had already become, Stevenson
wants to buttress her own interpretation of Plath’s bad behaviour with a
final chorus of corroborating witnesses.
In a 1990 interview Stevenson claims that she willingly accepted
Olwyn’s aid, but eventually lost authorial control, as well as 45 per cent of
the British royalties, to her. She ultimately agreed to a rewrite of the last
four chapters as a ‘mixture’ of her and Olwyn’s views (‘Biographer’s
Dilemma’, p. 2). Stevenson admits that Olwyn’s interventions were
shadowed by Hughes, who wrote a lengthy critical letter and reviewed two
complete drafts: ‘he was more responsible for the book than he lets on’
(‘Biographer’s Dilemma’, p. 3). Whatever the Hugheses’ joint involvement,
the biography’s central flaw is its lack of sympathy for the poet, and, more
importantly, for the poetry. Stevenson never presents Plath’s point of view
about the marriage, representing Hughes as saintly husband and generous
tutor, while she is to blame for all their troubles. Her representation of
Plath’s character combines a litany of character flaws (narcissism,
unreasonable jealousy, violent rages, perfectionism) and symptoms of
mental illness (paranoia, violent mood swings of manic-depression, a split
personality, hysteria) which, taken together, suggest a teleology that make
her unsavable in the end and consequently everyone near her blameless.17
Bitter Fame recycles Butscher’s reductive evil twin paradigm: ‘the “real”
Sylvia – violent, subversive, moonstruck, terribly angry – fought for her
existence against a nice, bright, gifted American girl’ (Bitter Fame, p. 163).
But unlike Butscher, Stevenson seems not to fathom the greatness of the
poetry this alleged split produced. The language of moral blame affects her
aesthetic judgements, especially of the late poems: ‘What the poet seems to
want is a remedy for her inability to accept a form of truth most adult
human beings have to learn: that they are not unique or exempt from
partaking in human processes’ (p. 290).
To produce Rough Magic (1991), Paul Alexander claims that he read the
entire archives at Smith and Indiana, as well as conducting 300
interviews.18 Certainly this research enables him to present a much thicker
description of key moments in Plath’s life. We learn the harrowing details
of Otto’s illness and Aurelia’s heroic homecare; we appreciate more fully
the gross mismanagement of Plath’s outpatient electroshock treatments, as
well as Olive Higgins Prouty’s interventions in her treatment after her
suicide attempt. Alexander revisits the 1962 bonfire that apparently
underlies Plath’s poem ‘Burning the Letters’ to report three separate purges,
the first two witnessed by Aurelia, in which Plath burnt her second novel
and later all her mother’s letters. The third, recalled by Clarissa Roche,
includes a witchlike exorcism, with Plath dancing around a fire of Hughes’s
papers, his nail clippings and other ‘scum’ from his desk (Rough Magic, p.
286). Sometimes, though, the details he has amassed are merely numbing in
their profusion.
Many of Plath’s old boyfriends appear, mostly to testify against her. We
are told that Eddie Cohen, her Chicago correspondent, advised Plath early
on that she needed therapy and that Gordon Lameyer was deceived about
Plath’s virginity. To Alexander, Plath’s sexuality has a desperate,
manipulative cast to it, and is linked to a compensatory cycle, overfamiliar
from other biographies: ‘When she felt abandoned by a male romantic
figure, she subconsciously experienced the sense of loss she harbored over
the death of her father’ (p. 183). A more serious flaw is Alexander’s
apparent readiness to present several far-fetched scenarios as fact. He does
not document the source for the sexualized scene of Hughes’s nearly
strangling Plath on their honeymoon (p. 167), nor Assia’s alleged seduction
of Hughes at Court Green by dropping her nightgown over his head at the
breakfast table (p. 277).19 Although he identifies his source for Plath’s
alleged return to the US for an abortion in September 1961, and her return
to England on a ship of Fulbright students, everything about the incident
lacks credibility.
Alexander offers few new insights on the poetry, but he valuably charts
the rhythms of composition and publication in Plath’s and Hughes’s shared
work lives. For example, in August 1960 Hughes’s Lupercal was published
to excellent reviews and Plath’s third manuscript was rejected for the Yale
Younger Poets prize. Their joint BBC interview, ‘Two of a Kind’, a jolly
report on marrying because they were good for each other’s poetry, is
broadcast in 1961 in the same month that Plath’s story of submerged marital
rage, ‘The Fifty-Ninth Bear’, is published. The Knopf acceptance of The
Colossus probably buoyed her writing of The Bell Jar, her secret project in
spring 1961. A densely textured record of Plath’s daily life, Alexander’s
biography demonstrates the depth of the archives he has plumbed, but he
fails too often to shape what he has retrieved into meaningful patterns.
Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman might well serve as the definitive
exposition and enactment of the problems of biography as a genre. Because
each liability – the tingle of voyeurism, her partisan motivation, her self-
doubt as a writer, the final unknowableness of her subject – is disarmingly
revealed as her own, Malcolm gambles that the reader will come to trust her
self-conscious fallibility as the most honest.
Like Middlebrook later, Malcolm seizes on Hughes’s invented persona as
‘her husband’ to convey his split roles as protector of her children,
destroyer of her journals and consummate editor. Malcolm’s twin goals are
to redeem Hughes as Plath’s ‘greatest critic, elucidator and impresario’
(Silent Woman, p. 155), and to vindicate Stevenson’s championing of the
Hugheses’ version. At the heart of Malcolm’s sympathies – and the crux of
her book as well as of earlier biographers’ battles with the Estate – is Ted
Hughes’s struggle with Plath over ownership of his own life and his
attempts to wrest it back from her representation in writing. If Plath’s life
has been dragged into the public domain, he vehemently resists the
simultaneous infringement on his story: ‘“The main problem with S. P.’s
biographers is that they fail . . . to realize that the most interesting and
dramatic part of S. P.’s life is only ½ S. P. – the other ½ is me”’ (quoted p.
201).
Malcolm believes that she, Plath and Stevenson shared a common
predicament as aspiring women writers in the 1950s. She claims that
women’s self-loathing, combined with their envy and resentment of male
success, led them to believe it was ‘“the man’s fault when the writing didn’t
go well”’, a ‘transferential misprision’ that Malcolm identifies as ‘the
central concern of contemporary feminism’ (pp. 87–8). To exonerate both
Hughes and Stevenson, Malcolm discredits Plath’s earlier biographers with
sharp, swift strokes. First and foremost she blames Alvarez’s The Savage
God for originating the narrative of ‘Plath as an abandoned and mistreated
woman and Hughes as a heartless betrayer’ (Silent Woman, p. 23). To
demonstrate the pitfalls of the mediated narratives collected through
interviews, she revisits the pro-Plath witnesses whom Stevenson omitted
and provides vivid portraits of their fallibility. Driven by ego, hostility or a
simple need for cash, each finds the events they almost compulsively
renarrate receding further from accessibility; Clarissa Roche, for example,
is hypnotized to retrieve fresh information.
Malcolm trusts letters, over these discredited interviews, as her most
reliable sources. To her, letters are ‘fossils of feeling’, the biographer’s
‘only conduit to unmediated experience. Everything else the biographer
touches is stale, hashed over, told and retold, dubious, unauthentic, suspect’
(p. 210). Malcolm’s preference for letters powerfully argues for
independent, detailed archival research. She structures her apparently
desultory narrative by revelations from unpublished letters, in many of
which the elusive Hughes comes forward as a passionately definitive
biographer. He chides Stevenson for claiming that he could never forgive
Plath for burning his papers: ‘“I never held that action against [Sylvia] –
then or at any other time . . . She never did anything that I held against her”’
(quoted p. 143). Malcolm sees Hughes’s interventions as motivated by
redemptive affection for Plath that should preempt other accounts: ‘when he
writes about Plath, he renders all other writings crude and trivial. He writes
with brilliant, exasperated intelligence and a kind of Chekhovian
largeheartedness and melancholy’ (p. 123).
Over another letter from Hughes, Malcolm does battle with Jacqueline
Rose, whom she describes as the ‘opposition’s most powerful and plausible
witness’ (p. 177), ‘the libber in whom the Hugheses finally met their match’
(p. 176). Her struggle is in part staged through an unsent letter to Rose.
Through a series of deconstructive moves intended to rival Rose’s own
critical practice, Malcolm exposes contradictions in Rose’s avowed
positions, most importantly that ethics are involved in interpretation and
that Rose’s own fantasy may be to have sole possession of the unavailable
Hughes. Satisfied that she has bested the critic at her own intellectual game,
Malcolm can disavow the jealous triangle she constructed to shame Rose as
perhaps more evidence of the biographer’s unreliability: ‘I no longer have
the conviction I once had that Jacqueline Rose and I were fighting over Ted
Hughes’ (p. 183). Yet her layering of letters, sent and unsent, suggests
otherwise.
Almost a decade later, when Middlebrook resuscitates ‘her husband’ as
the image of Ted Hughes’s lifelong partnership with Plath, Hughes again
comes forward as Plath’s most admiring consort. In her biography of a
marriage, Her Husband, Middlebrook demonstrates that whatever damage
their marriage ultimately produced in their lived experience, it was a
mutually productive literary partnership of the first order. By moving
discussion of their marriage into consideration of what was good for poetry
– their creation of mythic personae – Middlebrook arranges a kind of no-
fault divorce, the pain of which is transcended by a more lasting union
through poetry. To Middlebrook, the couple’s needs were diametrically
opposed. Plath needs middle-class domesticity, with motherhood a core
psychic requirement and Hughes as muse and mentor for her writing.
Hughes’s writing requires solitude and periodic escapes into wildness,
usually through extramarital sex. Her Husband replaces blame for Hughes’s
behavior with sympathy for his artistic requirements. As far as poetry is
concerned, there is no question of Hughes’s infidelity; Plath remains his
lifelong muse and most poignantly reappears to him in ‘The Offers’ to
demand their reunion.20
Middlebrook underscores earlier biographers’ and critics’ judgement that
Plath’s investment in Hughes fostered her artistic growth. She differs most
from her predecessors in the very persuasive evidence she offers of their
stylistic habits of ‘call and response’ in which images, sound patterns and
phrases are exchanged between poems, often to quite different ends.
Middlebrook also advances an alternative understanding of Plath as mother
and poet. Rather than the tension between the demands of poetry and the
rigours of single-motherhood other critics find, she argues for continuity
between Plath’s prechildren idealization of motherhood, as measure of her
domestic and poetic creativity, and the Ariel poems, which she sees as
‘bursting from her motherhood’ (p. 193.) It was the experience of maternity,
Middlebrook claims, that rescued her from apprenticeship to Hughes (p.
153).
Middlebrook draws on new archival material, Hughes’s letters at Emory
University and the British Library, to give a fuller first-person account of
Hughes’s curatorship of the Estate than appears in any of his introductions
to her work. Through these we see, even more vividly than in Malcolm, the
emotional needs that produced the split persona, ‘her husband’, that she
chooses as her title. In place of the familiar image of Hughes as destroyer of
Plath’s journals and despoiler of her finished Ariel volume, Middlebrook
evokes a picture of Hughes as stunned participant in an ongoing
conversation with Plath. Hughes’s discovery of his poetry on her writing
table after her death is evidence, she suggests, of Plath’s ‘continuing
attachment to their creative partnership’ (p. 219). Along with the carefully
ordered and bound Ariel poems, Hughes found his poem ‘Out’, which
contains poppy imagery echoed in her two poppy poems, and a typescript of
his ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’ next to reviews of The Bell Jar (p. 220).
Middlebrook offers a romantic reading of Birthday Letters as their reunion
(other Plath scholars might name it a rematch) in which Hughes rehearses
old disputes on an ‘intimate wavelength’ (p. 279). Whatever the tone of the
exchange, Middlebrook is entirely accurate in insisting on the text-based
dynamics of the book: ‘he has been prompted by her words to enter into
dialogue with that self she made in language’ (p. 279).
Given Middlebrook’s impressively extensive new research, it seems
curiously old-fashioned to appeal to Robert Graves’s ‘white goddess’
paradigm to explain Plath’s function in Hughes’s artistic life. She is the
awesome primal female required by Hughes’s shamanistic journey: ‘her
destiny [is] to inflict devastation on Hughes as well as release his creative
fluency’ (p. 283). Certainly his accounts of Plath’s development resort to
similar formulas, as Middlebrook paraphrases: ‘an old shattered self
reduced by violence to its central core, had been repaired’ (p. 114).
Middlebrook sympathetically attempts to explicate the Gravesian
worldview that she feels underlies his art, yet in granting the explanatory
power for Hughes of this cosmology, she risks losing sight of how Plath’s
might have differed. Middlebrook’s belief in the indissoluble nature of their
union is likewise evident in her retelling of the final weeks of Plath’s life.
She underscores Hughes’s later version of their potential reconciliation
rather than Plath’s letters about the finality of their separation.
Middlebrook makes a lucid and compelling argument from a wealth of
new archival sources that is generous in its admiration of both poets, yet the
portrait of the marriage that emerges is less marked by the contestation of
gender norms that has made their story so emblematic for the end of one era
and the dawn of our current age.
The uncertainty of biography
Who is the Sylvia Plath that these biographies have produced? Taken one
by one, these narrations purport to give us the real Sylvia, to penetrate the
multiple guises and arrive at certain truth, verified by a chorus of
eyewitnesses. Yet my purpose in emphasizing the contradictory stories
these biographies tell is to demonstrate that what they communicate is
uncertainty.
If we hope to piece together the definitive, documented facts that provide
a causal link between Plath’s experience and her art, we are bound to be
disappointed. We need to recognize that biography produces and reproduces
the stories circulating in our culture, particularly those that are used to make
female experience legible. The credibility of the figure of Plath as
psychotic, wounded, devious, narcissistic or death-driven does not lie with
the objectivity of the witnesses the biographer draws upon, but comes from
the multiple sites within culture that give shape and meaning to women’s
experience as story. These explanatory plotlines smooth over the
contradictions, dissonances and unknowable motivations of the life in order
to narrate a coherent identity unfolding developmentally in time that we as
readers recognize as familiar and plausible.
More helpfully, feminist theorists have enriched our understanding of
selfhood, not as an experiential certainty, but as a process. The female
subject, like any other, does not preexist her awareness of culture but
emerges through it, in language and representation. Further, as Joan Scott
explains, ‘it is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are
constituted by experience’.21 Claiming experience as a property of selfhood
is thus an act of interpretation and a process in need of interpretation.
Culture itself is a site of competing solicitations and prohibitions that shape
subjectivity, but unevenly and never completely. Plath’s subjectivity, in her
private and public acts of narration, can be read in Judith Butler’s terms as a
‘daily act of reconstitution’. She apprehends her gender, her sexuality, her
embodiment in an ‘impulsive yet mindful process of interpreting a cultural
reality laden with sanctions, taboos, and prescriptions’. Her agency is not
fully self-determining but is nonetheless present in the improvisations and
reconsiderations through which this subjectivity is appropriated, not merely
given: ‘Not wholly conscious, yet available to consciousness, it is the kind
of choice we make and only later realize we have made.’22 The life-writing
theorists Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explain that the interaction
between experience, subjectivity and story is constant:
Every day, all day long, the material universe affects us, literally as
well as discursively . . . But in making meaning of these events, we
make that meaning, or the ‘experience’ of those events, discursively, in
language, and as narrative. Thus, we retrospectively make experience
and convey a sense of it to others through storytelling; and as we tell
our stories discursive patterns guide, or compel, us to tell stories about
ourselves in particular ways.23
What this reconceptualization of subjectivity as a process disturbs is the
neat binary that an uncritical reading of biography rests upon; that before or
behind the art is a coherent, unified self to be laid bare as the source or
motor of the poetry. We need to resist the unexamined assumption (and
often in biographies of women what amounts to the misogynist practice)
that a woman can only write out of or about what she has actually lived.
Such a premise disallows the transformative power of a woman’s art as
epistemology, as an alternative, equally self-constituting form of knowing
and being.
Can we simply forgo biography? I think not. Every literary critic must
inevitably confront what Jacqueline Rose describes as ‘something
untellable, but which has to be told, [which] enters the frame when the
subject of biography dies by her own hand’.24 We cannot simply dismiss
biography; instead, we need to situate the story of a life differently, as part
of more encompassing narratives. We need to take apart the ways that
Plath’s and Hughes’s lives are forever conjoined in material ways, in the
revenue Plath’s texts generated for Hughes, as well as in texts they
generated about each other. Their intertwined literary history suggests that
Plath and Hughes were each moved to write (and to rewrite each other’s
work) because each believed that to be in possession of a story meant to be
in possession of your life. Each uses poetry as an enabling fiction; having a
story means creating a coherent narrative with an explanatory past and a
plausible future. Telling a story is interpreting your life; it also makes that
life possible. We could also use their cross-referential writing practice as a
test case to examine the limits of genres; biography necessarily
interpenetrates autobiography in the poems, as both poets tell the other’s
story as a way of telling their own. Nancy Miller, Leigh Gilmore and Paul
John Eakin rightly contend that autobiography is always relational. Their
subtle and provocative theories of life-writing scrutinize the malleability
and permeability of established genres such as biography, autobiography,
confessional poetry and literary criticism and identify new hybrid forms.25
Hughes’s public and often litigious conflicts with biographers and literary
critics demonstrate his aggrieved sense that Plath’s autobiographical acts
were in fact biography, imprisoning him in her misrepresentation. Any
critical interpretation of her work, it seemed, also harmfully interfered with
his own and his children’s possession of the woman Sylvia Plath. In her
‘Foreword’ to Ariel: The Restored Edition, Frieda Hughes reveals what she
experiences as the incursion of literary criticism and biography into life:
‘The point of anguish at which my mother killed herself was taken over by
strangers, possessed and reshaped by them. The collection of Ariel poems
became symbolic to me of this possession of my mother . . . and vilification
of my father’ (A Rest., p. xiv). Dramatically, both Hughes and his daughter
testify to the incredible power of texts to produce a figure with tremendous
staying power, here a figure of Plath that they claim not to recognize.
That our sphere of enquiry is steadily expanding outwards from the
hermetically sealed text, I am convinced, is a very good thing for literature.
The critical practices that appear most promising to me are those that reveal
how literary texts are illuminated by an enlarging network of other texts in
which they are embedded; these methods require that we do not set aside
biography, or history, or commercial ‘packaging’ but that we analyse their
interrelation. I have suggested how the methods of feminist criticism,
cultural criticism and life-writing theory enable us to see how artists are
shaped by and reshape ideologies, how they engage cultural anxieties about
gender roles, sexuality, happiness, materialism, politics, the environment
and war – topics that recent critics have explored in Plath. Our questions
now legitimately encompass the composition of literary texts, their
publication and reception, and the cultural uses of poets as icons or
caricatures. The meanings of Plath’s poems, I am proposing, are not fixed
but change depending on our tools and the contexts in which we have
learnt, in the past four decades, to read them.
How will this change our practical reading practices, of Plath as artist and
of her biographies? I recommend four strategies. First, approach
biographies with a hermeneutics of suspicion about what we expect to find
there. We need not only to interrogate the cultural scripts that structure the
biography and produce the figure of Plath, but question as well our search
for a final truth that we mistakenly imagine exists outside of culture or
before mediation by its images and stories. Second, grant the artist her
imaginative freedom to invent, misremember, substitute and play. Emily
Dickinson’s insistence on the difference between her existence and that of
the ‘supposed person’ in her art is essential to reading Plath. Third, we need
reading practices that honour the unconscious as an integral element of
subjectivity and of narration. I offer my students Adrienne Rich’s insight,
‘Poems are like dreams in that you put in them what you didn’t know you
knew.’ Last, we can develop habits of reading more reflexively, of including
the historical moment of our own reception and consumption of these texts
as part of what must be examined.
If, in our widening understanding of multiple sites and forms of
mediation, Sylvia Plath seems to recede further and further from our
comprehension, I am heartened that these strategies will actually make her
more present to us textually – implicated, resisting, investing, improvising,
revising the myriad texts around and about her, because each of these texts
is, in turn, susceptible to interpretation.
Notes
1. See my Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993), and Lynda K. Bundtzen, The
Other Ariel (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
2. Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (New York:
Seabury Press, 1976).
3. Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Biography (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1987).
4. Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1989).
5. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991).
6. Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New
York: Vintage, 1995).
7. Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage
(New York: Viking, 2003).
8. See Dale Salwak, Living with a Writer (New York: Macmillan, 2004),
and Frances Wilson, Literary Seductions (London: Faber and Faber,
1999).
9. See Rose’s discussion of the origins of this term in Haunting, pp. 165–
9.
10. See A. Alvarez, ‘A Poet and Her Myths’, New York Review (28
September 1989), p. 34; Helen Hennessy Vendler, ‘Who Is Sylvia?’,
New Republic (6 November 1989), p. 100; Edward Butscher,
‘Unfinished Lives of Sylvia Plath’, Georgia Review (Spring/Summer
1990), p. 296; and Malcolm, Silent Woman, p. 25.
11. Linda Wagner (ed.), Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath (Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1984).
12. Ted Hughes letter to Lucas Myers, 16 January 1977, Emory.
13. Ibid.
14. Anne Stevenson, ‘A Biographer’s Dilemma’ (interview with Madeline
Strong Diehl), Michigan Today 22.2 (April 1990), p. 2.
15. ‘The animus of the pro-Sylvia side against Olwyn was so very great,
and the misconception of what Sylvia was all about was so terrible, that
I was thrown back in Olwyn’s arms anyway’, ibid.
16. Middlebrook mentions that he met the couple in London (Her
Husband, p. 179). Plath knew him as prizewinner in a contest she
judged; later, at Plath’s initiative, the couple were his houseguests in
Ireland (September 1962).
17. Among many other references, for split selves, see p. 23, 163–4;
egotism, pp. 15, 21, 32, 164–5, 167; mood swings, pp. 15, 36, 59, 93,
298; paranoia, pp. 129–31; and hysteria, pp. 56, 60, 138, 187.
18. Paul Alexander, Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (New
York: Viking, 1991), p. 1.
19. Assia Wevill and her husband David were acquaintances of Plath and
Hughes. When the latter couple left London, the Wevills took over the
lease of their flat. In May 1962 they spent a weekend with Plath and
Hughes at their North Tawton home. Later that summer, Hughes and
Assia Wevill began a relationship, which continued until 1969 when
Assia died by suicide.
20. ‘The Offers’ was published in Hughes’s limited edition Howls &
Whispers (1998) and reprinted in Ted Hughes, Collected Poems
(London: Faber and Faber, 2003).
21. Joan Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry 17 (1991),
p. 27.
22. Judith Butler, ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’,
Yale French Studies 72 (1986), p. 40.
23. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press), p. 26.
24. Jacqueline Rose, ‘Sylvia Plath – Again: This is Not a Biography’,
London Review of Books (22 August 2002), 2; reprinted in Jacqueline
Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern
World (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), pp. 49–71.
25. See Nancy K. Miller’s hybrid genre ‘personal criticism’ in Getting
Personal (London: Routledge, 1991); Leigh Gilmore’s study of the
markers of autobiographical acts in Autobiographics: A Feminist
Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1994) and The Limits of Autobiography (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2001); and Paul John Eakin’s How Our Lives Become
Stories (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
2
DEBORAH NELSON
Plath, history and politics
Sylvia Plath is arguably the best-known and most iconic poet of her
generation. Try to imagine, for instance, a major Hollywood studio
producing a film about any of her contemporaries, much less casting an A-
list actor, Gwyneth Paltrow, in the feature role.1 This reputation rests largely
on one volume of poetry, Ariel, and a novel, The Bell Jar, that, while very
good, would not be nearly as well known, nor so often taught, if not for the
incandescence of the poetry. Ariel had this tremendous impact for three
interlocking reasons. One, it is extraordinary, unmistakably original poetry.
Two, its psychological intensity remains palpable four decades after its
shocking debut. Three, its publication followed the suicide of the poet, who
was young, beautiful and married to another major poet of the era. There is
no way to separate these elements. As brilliant as the poetry is, there has
been a good deal of excellent poetry written in the past forty years that has
not earned international celebrity for its authors. Moreover, it is important
not to separate aesthetic achievement, psychological extremity and
biographical scandal. It is precisely this convergence that struck a nerve
with postwar readers.
But we should also add a fourth element, one that is not part of the Plath
legend, and that, in fact, spoils the myth of the tragic poet whose
exploration of her own madness ultimately killed her. Plath was a
remarkably astute cultural critic. Regarding Plath as a cultural critic obliges
us to think historically about her career and about poetry itself, neither of
which lend themselves easily to historical analysis. For instance, to think
about Plath’s career, we must begin with autobiography, not history. To
think historically about lyric poetry, we have to violate some of our most
cherished assumptions about the transcendence and autonomy of the genre.
Nevertheless, historical analysis enriches Plath’s work substantially,
bringing out elements of critique and insight that are otherwise invisible.
Plath’s poetry, on the other hand, reveals aspects of the period in which she
wrote that have been overlooked and misunderstood.
Let us begin with Plath’s career and the problem of autobiography. Until
the late 1980s, few critics understood Plath to be writing about anything but
her own suffering, though how they interpreted this act varied considerably.
Plath, however, saw her poetic material as representative, not merely
personal. In a journal entry from 1956, Plath compiled a ‘to do’ list that
ended with the following: ‘Be stoic when necessary & write – you have
seen a lot, felt deeply & your problems are universal enough to be made
meaningful’ (J, p. 569). Plath’s severest critics simply did not (or could not)
see her ‘problems’ as universal, in part because she was a woman, and
women’s experience is rarely deemed universal. Without universality,
Plath’s work appeared narcissistic and self-indulgent. Yet even Plath’s
ardent admirers hesitated to universalize her poetry, at least initially. They
wanted to celebrate her exposure of her personal life as an act of rebellion,
both literary and political. This polarized response to Plath’s work attached
to the label ‘confessional poet’ given to her by M. L. Rosenthal after her
death.2 We will return to this troublesome category shortly.
In her journal Plath did not assume that her problems were universally
meaningful. Instead, she understood universality to be an effect of writing,
that is, an aesthetic effect.3 Her life could be ‘made meaningful’ but it was
not a priori significant to her readers. Moreover, Plath linked the act of
writing to ‘stoicism’, not the indulgence in feeling. ‘Be stoic when
necessary & write’ appears as one entry on her list, not two. Evidently,
poetry might be about feeling, but she did not imagine it to be an
outpouring of feeling. These two distinctions are essential to rethinking
Plath’s oeuvre. To regard Plath’s signature directness as a stoical mediation
of feeling is, on the face of it, counterintuitive, and by the time she wrote
the Ariel poems, somewhat misleading. She had learnt to risk greater
candidness from Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, two poets who were also
designated confessional. Nevertheless, the presence of more intense feeling
and more intimate suffering should not lead us to assume that Plath changed
her mind about the craft involved in turning feeling and experience into
poetry. If anything, Plath was a far better craftsperson in her late work. We
might say instead that Plath was strategically intimate and deliberately
intense because she understood the meaning and the effect of these choices
on her readers.
Autobiography is significant for literary history and the history of
American culture more generally. The broader turn towards autobiography
in literature, of which confessional poetry is one part, constituted one of the
most visible ways that post-World War II writing differed from modernist
writing. Personal voice, which materialized not only in every literary form,
but also in the fine arts, mass culture and politics, has been understood as an
effect of new social forces like psychotherapy and mass celebrity as well as
a lingering manifestation of American religious devotion. While these are
certainly crucial factors, the decision to be personal in public was motivated
more variously. It expressed the wish to represent a particular group; the
desire to bring into public view previously hidden or ignored experience;
the aim to see new experiences as universal; and the attempt to unmask
universality as a fiction for a particular subject, white and male, that was
not named as such. Speaking personally was, therefore, enmeshed in the
politics of universality – who had it, who wanted it, and who wished to
deprive it of its cultural power. The result was profound. The image of the
American public would be dramatically pluralized in the latter half of the
twentieth century. Writing autobiographically was, therefore, not simply an
individual aesthetic choice; it was also a political decision.
Writing personally or writing about private life, which are not precisely
the same thing, was also political in another sense. Private family life and
the ability to withdraw from the scrutiny of others, most especially the state,
were considered the bedrocks of American freedom in the Cold War. This
respect for privacy was often used to draw a contrast between the US and
its enemy, the Soviet Union, a totalitarian regime which by definition
claimed all human activity for the state. The autobiographical and
confessional trend in American culture erupted simultaneously with this
ideological inflation of the value of privacy. Moreover, confessional poetry
was not merely the personal in public. It was always the most secret,
violent, damaging and disruptive elements of private life on display. Plath
and her fellow confessional poets provided a counterdiscourse to the official
ideology of privacy in the Cold War.
Reading historically
Understanding Plath in history helps us to recognize how her poetry spoke
of and to her generation and how the poetry she wrote reflected concerns of
a particular historical moment. Nonetheless, thinking of Plath as a historical
poet has been inordinately difficult. The most insightful reader of Plath’s
relationship to history, Jacqueline Rose, identified the problem as follows:
‘history is either dearth or surplus, either something missing from Plath’s
writing or something which shouldn’t be there’.4 Rose’s path-breaking
book, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), initiated a major rethinking of
Plath’s work and ‘the implication of psyche in history, and history in
psyche’ (p. 7). Exploring the Plath archive with a new set of assumptions
taught readers to look at what Plath’s writing and her public image – her
iconicity – revealed about her culture. More specifically, the extent to which
Plath wrote about American Cold War politics in her journals and annotated
major works of political history and theory in her personal library suddenly
appeared relevant to her poetry. After Rose’s powerful revision, an
increasing number of critical works began to read Plath’s prose and poetry
historically, exploring her engagement with mass media like advertising and
women’s magazines or her development of poetic technique in the newly
professionalizing institutions of higher education. Directing analysis
towards history revealed Plath’s art as actively engaged in a critique of
American Cold War culture and its gender ideology.5
The Bell Jar has been somewhat easier to read for its engagement with
history than Ariel, which is attributable in part to the difference in genre –
literary historians have traditionally considered the novel a social genre –
and in part to Plath’s journal-musings on the novel’s composition. Plath
wanted her own experiences growing up in the 1950s to provide the
template for a ‘generational’ story. In her journal she wrote of the novel’s
narrator, Esther Greenwood, ‘Make her a statement of the generation.
Which is you’ (J, p. 289). Like the journal passage quoted earlier, this one
also shows Plath seeking wider significance for her story by positioning
herself as a representative figure. And indeed, the first sentence of this
generational novel locates the heroine in historical time by referring to the
execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Jewish couple from the Bronx
who were tried, convicted and executed for espionage in 1953. The
Rosenberg trial was one of the most spectacular and polarizing events of the
early Cold War, a period marked by ‘witch hunts’ for communists, the most
famous of which gave us the term ‘McCarthyism’. Hysterical
anticommunism was the defining event of her generation.
Nonetheless, the narrator does not allude to the crime for which they
were convicted – passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union – nor describe
the Cold War climate in which their trial took place. She concludes the
opening paragraph of the novel by saying of the execution, ‘It had nothing
to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being
burned alive all along your nerves’ (BJ, p. 1). The event seems noteworthy,
it would appear, only in the gruesome manner of their dying, not in the
larger meaning of their death for Cold War politics. Thus Esther narrates her
story in psychological, not political terms, the event being irrelevant to her
except insofar as it fuelled her attraction to extremity. Esther’s comment
seems to contradict Plath’s stated goal. What does it mean to create a
character representative of a generation who insists that its most significant
events have ‘nothing to do with [her]’?
If we forget that the novel is a comedy and a satire, and if we insist that
Esther is Plath, we are likely to conclude that the author herself had no
interest in politics or history, but simply a morbid fascination with death.
And this is certainly the way many have understood the The Bell Jar and
the poems in Ariel. Plath does more than frame the novel with the
execution, however. ‘Esther Greenwood’, which looks like a derivation of
‘Esther Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg’ – Ethel Rosenberg’s full name –
seems to name the heroine after a woman whom many Americans, Plath
included, believed to have suffered a terrible injustice.6 Plath clearly has
more to suggest about this historical event than her character does. In
naming her heroine after a victim of hysterical anticommunism, she casts
Esther’s rebellion against 1950s codes of femininity in Cold War terms. In
Esther’s response to the Rosenberg trial, Plath depicts her generation’s
inability to grasp the connection between public events and private life.
The framing of the novel with the Rosenberg trial was long overlooked
because Plath was assumed to have little interest in history. In addition to
the fascination with biographical readings, expectations of the genre and
subgenre in which Plath made her reputation (the lyric and the confessional
poem respectively) reinforced the impression of her lack of interest.
Understanding the privacy of the genre helps us to identify why historical
reading is rarer with poetry than the novel. The notion that lyric poetry is a
uniquely private genre has had a tenacious hold in the minds of readers and
poets since the Romantic period.7 From John Stuart Mill to T. S. Eliot to
Northrop Frye, the lyric has been defined as a voice overheard speaking to
itself. Withdrawing from the scrutiny of others to conduct a dialogue with
oneself is one of the most powerful images of autonomy that we have, both
aesthetically and politically. The speaker can express herself freely
precisely because she is not in a social situation and is free from obligation,
scrutiny and consequence. This freedom of expression translates into the
freedom to self-create, which allows the speaker to transcend the constraints
of place and time and the circumstances of social position. Moreover, that
the poem itself was an autonomous form, complete unto itself, was the
aggressive claim of modernist poets and of the New Criticism, the critical
school in which Plath was trained. That is to say, the lyric is the form
believed to imitate and express the human subject’s autonomy from the
social, historical world. To imagine the lyric springing not only from the
mind of a solitary speaker but also from the muddy soil of history – the
body, the economy, politics, family, social life – violated expectations of the
genre.
The public and the private
Labelling Plath a confessional poet intensified her remoteness from the
events and struggles of her day. If lyric poetry was imagined as the private
expression of a private individual, confessional poetry with its taboo
subjects like mental illness, sex, alcoholism, infidelity, rage and domestic
conflict was deemed altogether too private. Exposing the darkest aspects of
private life, confessional poets were not exploring the autonomy that private
space nurtured, but instead submerging themselves in the aspects of
domestic life that curb autonomy and compromise self-expression.
Confessional poetry, therefore, produced a double breach, violating poetic
decorum by refusing to transcend the particulars of family and the body,
and social decorum by flouting the tacit limits of public discourse. Whether
celebrated as a rebellion against the reigning aesthetics of modernist
impersonality or reviled as betrayal of taste and modesty, confessional poets
were by definition interested only in their own domestic and psychic
terrain, not in the public world around them.
In the rarer instances when history appeared in the foreground of her
poetry, Plath’s readers recoiled from it. It became, as Jacqueline Rose
argued, a surplus, something that should not be there. Critics argued that
when Plath did take an interest in history, she collected images of the
gruesome, the violent, the damaged or the traumatic to express her own
personal misery. A history that had ‘nothing to do with [her]’ seemed to
have been used as if it did. Most controversially, Plath’s use of the
Holocaust in Ariel led to claims that she unethically appropriated the
historical experience of others to figure her own pain. For example, in two
of her most famous poems, Plath positions her speaker not only as a Jew,
but also as a victim of the Holocaust. In ‘Lady Lazarus’ the speaker
describes her skin as ‘bright as a Nazi lampshade’ and likens her face to
‘featureless, fine / Jew linen’. In ‘Daddy’ she evokes an image of railway
engines transporting Jews to the concentration camps, to ‘Dachau,
Auschwitz, Belsen’, and explains, ‘I began to talk like a Jew. / I think I may
well be a Jew.’ Determining who has the right to make imaginative use of
the Holocaust has been enormously contentious, not only for Sylvia Plath.
However, what most galled her critics was not just the use of this imagery,
but the perceived incommensurability between Plath’s experience and that
of a Holocaust victim. As one commentator put it in an oftquoted line,
‘whatever her father did to her, it could not have been what the Germans did
to the Jews’.8
The trouble came when Plath was suspected of making private use of
public horror. Jacqueline Rose has argued that Plath’s representation of the
Holocaust brought into view a problem with metaphor and identification.
She was trespassing in peculiarly dangerous historical terrain, a place where
‘metaphor is arrested’ and ‘fixed’, a space where fantasy identification is
disabled (Haunting, p. 207). Susan Gubar suggests that we locate Plath in a
tradition of postwar prosopopoeia, which summons the posthumous voice
in order to give the dead a place in living memory.9 Both Rose and Gubar
want to keep open a space of identification and speaking for others. In other
words, both see Plath making public use of public horror.
This suggestion helps us to interpret Plath’s very self-conscious
consideration of the relation of personal pain and historical violence in the
Ariel poem ‘Cut’. ‘Cut’ not only reverses the direction of analogy between
personal and political, it undermines its very possibility. In the poem the
speaker slices the top of her thumb while chopping an onion, a common
domestic accident. The poem, however, quickly transforms a culinary
mishap into a lesson in American history. The speaker addresses her thumb
as ‘Little pilgrim’ and tells it that an Indian is responsible for its scalping
(stanza three), observing that, from the cut, ‘A million soldiers run, /
Redcoats, every one’. Here we might imagine Plath to be inflating personal
injury with historical analogy. Yet the irony of the poem makes this an
unlikely reading. The opening line – ‘What a thrill’ – suggests that we are
not meant to sympathize with the injured speaker, but to watch the horror
and fascination evoked by the eruption of her own blood. With this irony in
mind, we might more profitably consider how Plath uses self-mutilation to
think through the history of violence in the nation-state.
The dominant rhetorical figure of the poem is apostrophe, an address by a
speaker to an absent person, abstraction or nonhuman entity. The speaker
addresses the thumb repeatedly, calling it not only ‘Little pilgrim’ but ‘my /
homunculus’, ‘Saboteur’, ‘Kamikaze man’ and finally ‘Trepanned veteran, /
Dirty girl, / Thumb stump’. Amassing these apostrophes draws attention to
the rhetorical figure, which accomplishes several important things in the
poem. First, because apostrophe personifies or animates the nonliving, it
displaces both violence and injury on to an other. It, not she, is both victim
(the scalped pilgrim or trepanned veteran) and perpetrator of violence (the
saboteur or kamikaze man). The address to the thumb also condenses a
series of twentieth-century conflicts into one image. For instance, dressing
the saboteur or kamikaze in a ‘Ku Klux Klan / Babushka’, Plath evokes the
enemies of World War II, Germany and Japan; obliquely references the
Cold War antagonism between the US and the Soviet Union; and recalls the
nativist and anti-immigrant ideology of the Ku Klux Klan, best known for
its persecution of African Americans. Scrambling the dichotomy between
victim and perpetrator, insider and outsider, self and other, Plath makes it
impossible to assign guilt to or claim innocence for the nation. Instead, by
collapsing historical conflicts and positions of aggression and violation,
Plath thwarts any comfortable moralizing about violence.
Second, because the apostrophe dissociates the speaker from the injury,
the poem can explore the anaesthetizing effect of spectatorship. If a cut
might be expected to induce pain, the apostrophe allows Plath to reverse the
problem of feeling, creating a new dilemma: not too much pain, but too
little. In stanza seven we find that she has attempted to kill the ‘thin /
Papery feeling’ with a pill. Instead of deadening the pain, the speaker tries
to release herself from the numbness that the spectacle of blood and
violence has induced and which the rhyming ill/pill/kill hypnotically
reinforces. The rhetorical figure of apostrophe creates a position –
dissociation – that permits a distanced, depersonalized reaction to violence
that lacks a moral compass. By reading American history as both a
spectacle of blood and a domestic accident, Plath’s poem explores the way
war and violence become banal and morally ambiguous. In the climate of
Cold War moral self-congratulation, ‘Cut’ offers a confrontation with
American history where moral superiority is untenable. It also interweaves
the personal and the political in a way that refuses the dichotomy between
them.
History-making
One way to read history out of (or into) poetry is to investigate specific
references to events, persons or institutions, understanding that these
references may be explicit or appear in metaphor, analogy or allegory.
Another way looks at how poetry takes part in a wider cultural
phenomenon. Seeing a poem not just through its attention to history but as a
part of history – that is, as history-making – may seem to exaggerate
poetry’s impact in American culture. We ordinarily imagine this genre to
lack a sufficiently large readership to have any widespread influence. While
Plath might represent an exception to this rule, this is not precisely what I
mean by history-making. Instead, poetry, like any other cultural or social
form, absorbs and reflects the anxieties and pleasures of its times, often
critically though not always. The difficulty of pursuing this kind of reading
lies in the necessity to look outside the poetry to its context, which requires
a body of knowledge most readers need to acquire. But how do we know
where to begin? We do not simply import historical knowledge into a poem
but first ask where the poem guides an investigation into history. If Plath’s
poetry is private, what exactly did privacy mean during this historical
moment?
The historian who first discerned the link between Cold War international
relations and patterns of marriage and childbearing in the 1950s, Elaine
Tyler May, illustrated the paradox of Cold War domestic ideology by
examining a photo spread from Life Magazine. In this 1959 issue a smiling
newlywed couple honeymoons in a bomb shelter, in one photo surrounded
by canned goods, in another descending into the steel and concrete bunker
for two weeks of ‘unbroken togetherness’.10 While Life was clearly having
fun with the image, slyly acknowledging the sexual element of the
honeymoon in their ‘togetherness’, neither the photo spread nor the article
accompanying it, was ironic. As May points out, these images inadvertently
portrayed the contradiction of Cold War domestic life. As private, erotically
charged and materially satisfying as it was meant to be, the home was also
extremely isolating and vulnerable to external threats. Privacy and
abundance were to compensate for insecurity, to provide the shelter from
nuclear anxiety. May revisits the ‘kitchen debates’ between the American
vice-president, Richard Nixon, and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khruschev, to
show how important the ideology of privacy was to Cold War international
relations. When Nixon and Khruschev squared off during Nixon’s 1959
visit to Moscow over the relative quality of kitchen appliances, the success
of either system, it was implied, depended not on the cultivation of a vibrant
public sphere, but on the enrichment of private life.
Plath was no stranger to Cold War domestic ideology and, in particular,
to its asymmetrical effects on women’s lives. When she graduated from
Smith College in 1955, the Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai
Stevenson, gave a commencement address that featured the rhetoric of Cold
War domestic ideology. Reprinted at the time in Women’s Home Companion
and cited some years later in The Feminine Mystique by fellow Smith
graduate Betty Friedan, Stevenson’s address championed the ‘humble role
of housewife’:
In short, far from the vocation of marriage and motherhood leading
you away from the great issues of our day, it brings you back to their
very center and places upon you an infinitely deeper and more intimate
responsibility than that borne by the majority of those who hit the
headlines and make the news and live in such a turmoil of great issues
that they end by being totally unable to distinguish which issues are
really great.11
In reassuring these newly minted college graduates that their place was in
the home, Stevenson does not condemn female ambition. On the contrary.
He grounds his appeal for housewifery in their ambition, urging them to
take part in the ‘great issues of our day’ by devoting themselves to private
matters of home, husband and childrearing. The Smith graduate can weigh
in on the ‘great issues’, however, only by cutting off her aspiration for a
role in the public world and for publicity itself. By staying out of the
headlines and out of the news, remaining ‘in the living room with a baby in
your lap’ or ‘in the kitchen with a can opener in your hand’, women could
play a crucial role in navigating ‘our crisis’ (quoted in Friedan, Mystique, p.
60). Cultivating the private space of the home made the greatest possible
contribution to the US’s success in the sphere of Cold War international
politics.
Stevenson’s advice to exercise ambition in domestic duties helps us to
understand the strangely ambivalent role that wives and mothers played in
the Cold War 1950s. On the one hand, mass culture and public servants
alike extolled the virtues of mothers and wives. They were idealized in
magazines, political speeches, television programming and advertising and
lauded by experts in psychology, medicine and child development. On the
other hand, there was a creeping anxiety that wives and mothers enjoyed
too much power in the home and could not be trusted with the care of future
soldiers and statesmen. Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers, one of the
period’s most widely cited screeds against mothers, rebuked women for
exercising excessive power and thereby emasculating their sons. This
drama of the suffocating and domineering mother, straight out of the
Freudian family romance popularized in the 1950s, became a staple of
American self-knowledge.
Plath engaged this ideological contradiction in the private sphere and
women’s place in it when she satirized the aggressive marketing of the
institution of marriage in Ariel’s ‘The Applicant’. The poem begins by
disconnecting marriage from romance and placing it instead in a domain of
work and social advancement. The opening line, which seeks to determine
the applicant’s acceptability, evokes the cosy exclusivity of the country club
rather than the couple. The decision to wed is, therefore, not a fulfilment of
personal desire but a social obligation. Plath then further evacuates personal
intimacy by listing the qualifications of an applicant, accentuating the
vocational aspect of marriage and taking Adlai Stevenson’s admonition
very literally. Drawing at times the language and at times the cadence of her
lines from the realm of advertising, Plath reveals domestic ideology to be a
con act on both women and men.
In ‘The Applicant’ Plath employs to savage effect one of the most
characteristic moves of her late poetry: incorporating into her poems
language drawn from nonpoetic or antipoetic sources, for instance, nursery
rhymes, advertising slogans and bureaucratese. Here her poem stretches the
euphemistic abstraction of bureaucratic or corporate rhetoric with the
visceral specificity of the body. ‘Our sort’ is not blemish-free, but crippled,
broken and wounded. As the list in stanzas one and two shows, the
successful applicant will be someone with a ‘glass eye, false teeth’, with
any one of a number of prostheses or surgical supports, with some obvious
injury or disability, else ‘how can we give you a thing?’. Marriage, it is
implied, depends upon defect. ‘You have a hole, it’s a poultice,’ the final
stanza promises in lines that mock the declarative bombast of outrageous
sales claims. The husband becomes a symbol of lack, a ‘hole’, while the
wife supplements him prosthetically to make him whole.
Plath’s poem speaks back to the ideological inflation of marriage
ordinarily aimed at women by directing its sales pitch to the hapless groom,
uncovering the assumption of male inadequacy that grounds appeals to
women’s ambitious domesticity. ‘The Applicant’ satirizes both Stevenson’s
appeal to female ambition and Wylie’s angry repudiation of wives and
mothers by taking their logic to the extreme. Women are meant to strive for
perfection in menial domestic chores while men are told that they are
inadequate for the tasks of ordinary life. ‘The Applicant’ interprets the
ideological emphasis on marriage and family as a scare tactic disguised as
the promise of fulfilment.
Plath’s inversion of the appeal to marry also contains the Cold War
paradox of domestic security. She derides the idea that the institution of
marriage will protect the couple from nuclear conflict. It is important to
remember that the speaker also encourages the applicant to marry the ‘suit’
as well as the ‘living doll’: ‘Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. / Will you
marry it?’ (stanza five). The suit, which is to say the role of husband, might
not be comfortable, but it promises security. The speaker pledges the suit’s
indestructibility; it is fire-, water-, shatter- and bomb-proof, and comes with
a lifetime warranty that echoes the language of crisis that made marriage a
refuge in a dangerous world. Like Elaine Tyler May’s image of the
newlyweds in the bomb shelter, Plath’s poem sows anxiety into the promise
of security. Stanza five ends with the ominous guarantee ‘Believe me,
they’ll bury you in it.’ Marriage becomes an institution built on fear and
inadequacy, where the couple retreats from the insecurities of public life to
heal the wounds to male ego and supply an outlet for female ambition. ‘The
Applicant’ cannot properly be said to treat a private matter because the very
logic of the poem reminds us how public and political contemporary
marriage was.
The personal is the political
Yet Plath does not always parody the discourses of Cold War ideology as
explicitly as she does in ‘The Applicant’. Confessional poetry takes part in
the much larger debate about privacy that permeated nearly every area of
American life. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the period when Plath was
writing her last and best work, alarms over the loss of privacy were being
raised in relation to the suburbs, television, the computer, psychoanalysis,
the FBI and the police, record keeping in institutions of higher learning,
new technologies of surveillance, city planning, tabloid journalism,
photojournalism and more. While, as I have argued, privacy and private life
were being hailed as the core features of American democracy, American
citizens began to recognize the loss of privacy as an increasingly familiar
experience. We should therefore understand privacy in these debates as
inherently paradoxical, which helps us to grasp why the US’s confessional
culture emerged simultaneously with deep anxiety about the loss of privacy.
The more privacy was extolled, debated and measured, the less self-evident
it became. If privacy was so valued, why was it constantly being violated?
If it was so integral to a free and democratic society, why would artists and
celebrities, politicians and ordinary citizens, choose to surrender it by
offering private information about themselves to the public?
This debate suggests why confessional poetry’s blurring of distinctions
between public and private worlds was freighted with social meaning that
extended beyond matters of aesthetic value. Postwar social transformations
– like the growth of corporations and the expansion of the suburbs – seemed
to corrupt Americans’ desire for autonomy and freedom. Often linked, these
trends created two of the most familiar targets of 1950s social censure: the
‘organization man’, who relinquished his individuality to the corporation,12
and the suburban homeowner, who sought perfect conformity with the
neighbours. In the reception of confessional poetry, Paul Breslin shows that
the inwardness and emotional volatility of the poetry represented to its
readers a revolt against this invasive, overly rational society. Madness and
rage were reactions to the internalization of external social codes, that is,
the colonization of the private self by society and the state. The willingness
to violate these codes liberated the authentic self, which would necessarily
be wounded since the organized society demanded the renunciation of
individuality. Feminist critics, too, regarded Plath’s rage and madness as a
protest against inauthenticity, in this case the masks of femininity that
stifled female creativity and self-expression. With the central insight of
second-wave feminism – the personal is the political – Plath seemed to take
on a more active, critical role, producing a damning critique of patriarchal
institutions. In both these readings we can recognize a pattern of viewing
authentic selfhood as something hidden from and damaged by an intrusive,
oppressive society.13 The authentic and free self remains associated with
privacy, but achieves its liberation only by forsaking that privacy.
This heroic reading of Plath’s confession should be balanced against her
own complication of the familiar notions of privacy and confession. If we
return to the image of the private home in Ariel, we see that Plath works in
various poems to unsettle the idea of the home as a place in which to
withdraw from scrutiny. For instance, ‘Lesbos’ presents us with a
paradoxical image of the home in the image of the kitchen, ‘all Hollywood’
and ‘windowless’ with ‘Stage curtains’ and ‘coy paper strips’ instead of a
door (stanza one). This description gives us a paradoxical theatricality,
something like a closet drama, both performative and yet closed off from
public viewing. Being ‘windowless’, no one can see inside the home, but
neither can any one inside it see out. Moreover, the ‘paper strips for doors’
suggest that once in the home, it is impossible to withdraw from the other
occupants. The home may be private – closed off from the world – but it is
hardly a space of privacy. Moreover, its theatricality indicates that it is not a
place of authentic selfhood either. The home is as much a place for masks
as the theatre of public life.14 The seething rage of the poem derives in part
from the blending of claustrophobia and theatricality. The actors cannot get
off the stage. Both women, rivals for the husband of the speaker, see
through the performance of the other, know they are seen through
themselves, and yet are compelled to act their parts.
As she does in ‘Lesbos’, Plath riffs on states of exposure everywhere in
the poetry. The most famous example is ‘Lady Lazarus’, where we see
multiple images of exposure, but we find it as well in the bee sequence,
where the speaker encounters the danger of the sting with bare, unprotected
skin. A great many of the poems written for Ariel (but not included in the
version edited and published by Ted Hughes) feature surveillance,
eavesdropping, spying and voyeurism. Not only is the space of the home
devoid of privacy, but the body is frequently displayed, like the striptease in
‘Lady Lazarus’, or exposed, as in ‘A Secret’, like the watermark stamped
on the body – ‘wavery, indelible, true’. Messages seem to emerge from
inside the body on to the surface of the skin, never by choice and sometimes
by force. The surgeon in ‘The Courage of Shutting-Up’ forces internal
secrets to light by tattooing ‘blue grievances’ on to the surface of the skin.
One of the most common figures in confessional poetry, and Plath’s in
particular, the surgeon makes a living by breaching the surface of the body.
This provides a figure of the forced transgression of bodily integrity. In so
many of these poems – ‘A Secret’, ‘Purdah’, ‘The Detective’,
‘Eavesdropper’, ‘The Other’, ‘The Jailer’, ‘Words heard, by accident, over
the phone’, ‘The Courage of Shutting-Up’ – there are irresistible pressures
to reveal secrets.
This pressure to reveal and expose oneself casts ‘confession’ in a very
different light from how we have ordinarily imagined it. Confession
becomes an effect of coercion. Plath seems highly aware that the conditions
of self-revelation militate against free and authentic self-expression. The
performance has an audience with its own agenda. Think of the last sections
of ‘Lady Lazarus’, after the peanut-crunching crowds, when the speaker
addresses ‘Herr Doktor’. This figure of the psychoanalyst is waiting for the
intimate details to be proffered by the analysand. While Plath was certainly
a subject of analysis herself, the whole enterprise of psychoanalysis was
very important in 1950s American culture, particularly for white middle-
class women. Adjusting to the ambivalence of the role of woman,
housewife and mother was aided by the (usually) male doctor. Plath need
not be speaking just of her own experience, but more generally of an
institution that demands secrets and hands them back in a new form, one
which the patient has not given them. When the speaker tells ‘Herr Doktor’
that ‘I am your opus, / I am your valuable’, we can now understand the
subsequent sneering line, ‘do not think I underestimate your great concern’.
The doctor has his own prestige and authority tied up in the patient, who
has been turned into his opus, that is, his work of art. The shriek at the end
of the poem resists confession by frustrating his appropriation of her words.
The result is ambiguous. A howl of rage is not a triumph of self-expression,
but neither is it a submission to coerced self-revelation.
Two years after Sylvia Plath’s death, the US Supreme Court announced
its decision in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut to affirm a constitutional
‘right to privacy’. Surprisingly, for all the rhetoric about the value of
privacy in a democracy, such a right did not exist until 1965. Echoing Cold
War fears about the police state and pieties about the sanctity of marriage,
Justice Douglas asked, ‘Would we allow the police to search the sacred
precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of
contraceptives?’ Since the answer could only be ‘no’, the new right to
privacy in the ‘zone of the home’ was immediately welcomed as a major
advance in American civil liberties. While new cases quickly showed that
this zone would have to be expanded and revised, the right to privacy
became one of the hallmarks of a modern democracy. While we can only
wonder what Sylvia Plath would have made of this development, we do
know that her work requires us to look back on this history more
sceptically. Ariel invites us to reread a history we believed we knew, to
question the logic of the court’s affirmation of privacy and to ask whether
the zone of the home is a suitable place for a woman to locate her
autonomy.
Notes
1. Sylvia, directed by Christine Jeffs, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and
Daniel Craig. DVD (Icon, 2003).
2. M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since
World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
3. Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), p. 31.
4. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 206.
5. For a fuller discussion of this period, see my Pursuing Privacy in Cold
War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
6. Marie Ashe, ‘The Bell Jar and the Ghost of Ethel Rosenberg’, in
Marjorie Garber and Rebecca Walkowitz (eds.), Secret Agents: The
Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism, and Fifties America (New York:
Routledge, 1995), p. 216.
7. The most influential account of this modern history of the lyric is
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, in Shierry Weber
Nicholson (trans.), Notes to Literature: Volume One (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991).
8. Leon Wieseltier, ‘In a Universe of Ghosts’, New York Review of Books
(25 November 1976), pp. 20–3 (p. 20).
9. Susan Gubar, ‘Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia
Plath and Her Contemporaries’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1
(2001), p. 192.
10. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold
War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 3.
11. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; New York: Dell, 1983),
p. 60.
12. William Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1956).
13. Paul Breslin, The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the
1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987).
14. See Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) for a brilliant reinterpretation of
Plath’s so-called authenticity.
3
LYNDA K. BUNDTZEN
Plath and psychoanalysis: uncertain truths
Psychoanalysis is both a body of doctrine and a system of psychotherapy
developed principally by Sigmund Freud. Concerned with the study and
interpretation of mental states, the body of doctrine describes conflicts and
processes originating in the unconscious. As a form of therapy,
psychoanalysis seeks to alleviate neuroses and other mental disorders by the
systematic technical analysis of unconscious factors as revealed, for
example, in dreams and fantasies, slips of the tongue and free-association,
neurotic symptoms or lapses in memory, and does so by revealing
unconscious contents and motives in the patient’s psyche and behaviour.
Both as doctrine and therapy, psychoanalysis relies on the concept of the
unconscious – mental processes, ideas and desires of which the conscious
mind is unaware – and interpretively seeks to make what is unconscious,
conscious. In the context of literary studies, psychoanalysis is particularly
interested in the ways in which the language of the text may displace or
conceal its subject. Psychoanalysis in this context should be understood not
so much as a tool with which to diagnose the pathology of the individual
author but as an interpretative and narrative practice which, as for example
in the work of Jacqueline Rose, discussed below, is alert to the place of
fantasy, desire and repression in our personal and collective lives.1
The sexual origin of almost everything Freud found in the unconscious
and the often taboo nature of these ideas, wishes, desires and fantasies
explain why the unconscious was, in Freud’s view, undiscovered country.
These contents are kept out of consciousness, claims Freud, precisely
because of their illicit nature: it is socially and morally unacceptable, for
example, to desire sex with one’s mother and the death of the father as a
sexual competitor for her affections, yet these are common themes in
psychoanalytic doctrine and diagnosis. Freud explained the importance of
repression and denial in keeping these oedipal desires and drives buried in
the unconscious, but also the psychic cost of resistance in neurotic
symptoms such as anxiety, depression, hysteria and paranoia.
By the time Plath came into contact with Freudian thought,
psychoanalytic doctrine and therapy had been absorbed thoroughly into
both popular and high American culture and might be understood, even
when it was attacked, as a hegemonic ideology for defining both individual
and family psychology. On the popular level, for example, Hollywood
director Alfred Hitchcock could rely on the widespread currency of
Freudian thought in his audiences when delineating his troubled,
psychologically damaged characters in movies such as Spellbound, Psycho
and Marnie. We also know that Plath, like many American intellectuals in
the 1950s, was attracted by the noncommercial austerity and beauty of
Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s films (see, for example, the entry in
Plath’s Journals for 1 November 1959 (J, pp. 521–2)). Bergman gained
fame as a confessional artist, giving his own neurotic obsessions free
expression in his films.2 The psychological complexity of his characters,
especially his women, inspired Plath’s dramatic work ‘Three Women: A
Poem for Three Voices’, which borrowed from Bergman’s film Brink of
Life. The ‘marvelous new Ingmar Bergman movie’ that Plath mentions
seeing and enjoying in a 21 December 1962 letter to her mother was
Through a Glass Darkly (LH, p. 491). The film is a harrowing study of the
psychological breakdown of a young woman, Karin, who seduces her
younger brother and then, in her final scene, has a hallucination in which a
spider-god attempts to rape her. As the film unfolds, it becomes
increasingly clear that this spider-god is a projection of Karin’s familial ties
with her husband, father and brother, who all have a predatory relationship
to her. Karin’s suffering may well have resonated with Plath’s own
psychological stress at the time.
If the 1950s was a historically contingent moment for the meeting of
minds between Plath and Freud, she was certainly not alone. Plath’s
benefactor, Olive Higgins Prouty, had been a patient at Austen Riggs, a
prestigious psychiatric hospital, and her popular novel, Now, Voyager, later
a Bette Davis movie, is about the liberation through psychotherapy of its
sexually repressed heroine. In addition to providing Plath with scholarship
money at Smith College, Prouty was Plath’s financial benefactor after her
suicide attempt in 1953 and supported her expensive therapy at McLean
Hospital. Like Plath, fellow poets Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell were
both institutionalized mental patients there, and their experiences as patients
provided inspiration and material for their poetry.3
Plath was encouraged by her therapist, Dr Ruth Beuscher, to explain
herself to herself in Freudian terms and to fashion herself as a patient, an
intellectual and artist by applying Freudian and other psychoanalytic
doctrines and therapies. In her final months, for example, Plath was reading
Erich Fromm’s 1956 book The Art of Loving, apparently at Dr Beuscher’s
recommendation. Fromm is known as an ego psychologist, and this volume
is more concerned with self-help than depth psychoanalysis.4 For the critic
who practises psychoanalysis on literary texts, their authors and their
characters, Plath therefore poses a rather daunting problem: she is
thoroughly conscious, and at times ruthlessly direct, in her appropriation of
psychoanalytic ideas (Diane Middlebrook notes a similar tendency in her
biography of Plath’s contemporary, Anne Sexton). Plath often anticipates
the psychoanalytic critic’s strategies by making them her own, leaving the
critic with little to do but expand upon ideas that are already planted in the
text. The temptation is to read Plath as confessing to her own psychic
conflicts projected into poetic personae and fictional characters that are
transparent versions of Plath herself.
‘Daddy’
Nowhere are the difficulties for the critic of this psychoanalytic
selfinterpretation more obvious than in ‘Daddy’, arguably Plath’s most
famous poem. Before its publication she read ‘Daddy’ for a BBC radio
broadcast in October 1962, and later, in notes for the BBC on her new
poems, described the poem as ‘spoken by a girl with an Electra complex.
Her father died while she thought he was God.’ The girl’s ‘case’, Plath
proceeds to explain, is difficult because the father was a Nazi, and the
mother may have been ‘part Jewish’. These two inheritances meet in the
daughter and ‘paralyze each other – she has to act out the awful little
allegory once over before she is free of it’ (CP, p. 293, n. 183). Plath directs
her reader to interpret the poem through the lens of a popular
psychoanalytic narrative: a daughter with an Electra complex is one who
desires her father sexually, her body incestuously devoted in this instance to
a dead man’s, as Electra’s was to her father Agamemnon’s. In a state of
unfulfilled and impossible desire, the daughter’s story might be one of static
sexual frustration and father-worship; but Plath also insists on a paralysis of
sexual roles historically derived from the Holocaust. Because the father is
not just a dead God, but also a Nazi, and the mother ‘very possibly part
Jewish’, Daddy is also a sadistic villain, and the daughter’s feminine
sexuality is marked by the mother’s role as a victim, possibly in a
masochistic relation to the father. As the speaker of ‘Daddy’ generalizes,
‘Every woman adores a Fascist.’
The poem, Plath tells us, is also an ‘allegory’, suggesting that these
sexual roles have been internalized by the daughter and are part of her
psyche. They are symbolic figures enslaving her until the poem’s utterance,
which will be an acting out of the internal struggle, intended to free her
from paralysis. Here, too, Plath embeds an analogy to psychoanalytic
therapy – the famous ‘talking cure’. In psychoanalysis the patient (the
analysand) is encouraged by the analyst to speak, to free-associate, to
thereby make what has been unconscious, conscious and available to
control. ‘Acting out’ suggests the transference whereby the patient,
unknowingly and unconscious of what she is doing, imposes on the analyst
the role of father-oppressor. The daughter in Plath’s poem has done just
that, but with her husband, ‘I made a model of you’, she says, ‘And I said I
do, I do.’ Catharsis or freedom is supposed to arrive with the conscious
knowledge of what is being acted out, how it has wounded her, and an
ensuing awareness of how to begin healing. Plath seems to be asking her
reader to understand the poem psychoanalytically as both symptomatic of
illness and curative.
Readers seldom feel, however, that ‘Daddy’ achieves resolution or
closure. Passions are not spent or assuaged. Even without the knowledge
that Plath committed suicide four months after the composition of ‘Daddy’,
the rage expressed in the poem and its excessive accusations, that Daddy is
a Nazi devil, a brutish torturer and a vampire, are evidence that the
speaker’s fury is ongoing and self-destructive. She has tried to kill herself
once before, and when in the antepenultimate stanza she says the
‘telephone’s off’ and she is ‘finally through’, it sounds ominously as though
her own death is the only way to end the struggle with Daddy. Because the
poem also stresses repetition, the confident ‘once over’ of acting out
proposed by Plath in her introduction is suspect. The ‘concept of repetition
in Freudian thought’, as critic Jacqueline Rose points out, can be liberating,
but may also signify a deadly compulsion. The speaker might be understood
as ‘going back to the beginning in order to retrieve the mythic narrative of
[her] individual history’, and with retrieval, she achieves both
understanding and release. Or this might be ‘repetition as insistence without
content’ – a compulsion to repeat that is associated by Freud in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle with the death-drive (Haunting, p. 50). One of Freud’s
best examples of this behaviour is Lady Macbeth’s futile efforts to wash
away the crime of regicide by repetitively rubbing her hands while
sleepwalking, ‘acting out’ her tortured conscience even as she tries to
exorcise its burden of guilt. This is, however, repetition for its own sake and
does nothing for Lady Macbeth, who finally kills herself.5
The daughter in ‘Daddy’ may be interpreted in a similar way. After her
first suicide attempt, she did not surrender the wish to ‘get back’ to him, but
married a surrogate figure and significantly, a Daddy substitute who would
punish her, repeating a masochistic relationship to a dominant male figure:
the husband is pictured as ‘A man in black with a Meinkampf look // And a
love of the rack and the screw’. She must kill Daddy, she says, because he
died before she had time, and if she has killed one man, she says, ‘I’ve
killed two’. This is crime for punishment, once again soliciting physical
abuse. The poem’s language is, in itself, highly redundant or repetitive in its
rhymes and rhythms. The insistent ‘you’ in the opening line, as throughout
the poem, is accusatory, as if the daughter is poking a finger in Daddy’s
chest. Finally, all these repetitions may suggest that the daughter’s rage
disguises unconscious guilt for wishing Daddy’s death.6
The question of Plath’s difference from her speaker also remains
unsettled and unsettling for critics. Criticism has long favoured the proverb,
‘Trust the tale, not the teller’, encouraging a heavy demarcation between
author and speaker in a lyric poem. In T. S. Eliot’s famous formulation, ‘the
more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man
who suffers and the mind which creates’, and ‘the difference between art
and the event is always absolute’.7 With ‘confessional’ poetry, though, such
distinctions are hard to honour. We know, for example, from the date
appended to the text in Plath’s Collected Poems, that ‘Daddy’ was
composed on 12 October 1962, the anniversary of her father’s leg
amputation in 1940 (Otto Plath died of a cardiac embolism on 5 November
1940) (LH, p. 24). Is Plath attempting to ‘amputate’ Daddy from her own
psyche? To put him to rest finally? Should we read ‘Daddy’ in Freudian
terms as a symbolic castration of the father, an attempt to rob him of his
sexual power over her? Evidence from the Journals supports just such an
identification of the poem’s speaker with Plath, who describes a typical
moment in therapy with Dr Beuscher this way: ‘If I really think I killed and
castrated my father may all my dreams of deformed and tortured people be
my guilty visions of him or fears of punishment for me? And how to lay
them?’ (J, p. 476). Suicide is, as Plath decided after reading Freud’s
‘Mourning and Melancholia’, a ‘transferred murderous impulse’ from a
loved one ‘onto myself’ (J, p. 447). I will return to this quotation later, but
one explanation Plath seems to be formulating for her first suicide attempt
is internalized guilt for wishing her father dead and having that wish
fulfilled. He died before she had time to resolve and overcome these oedipal
– not Electra – wishes, and the consequence is an overidealized paternal
figure, a Daddy of divine proportions, godlike infallibility and abusive
powers to match his omnipotence in Plath’s psyche.
Before I explore the problematic nature of this Freudian psychoanalysis
by Plath herself, let me recommend its explanatory power both locally, in
several texts and textual moments, and theoretically, since it is an analysis
that evolves in relation to later reconfigurations of Freudian ideas based on
the daughter’s preoedipal relationship to her mother. Other poems
illuminated by the ‘complex’ that Plath discovers in her own psyche include
‘Full Fathom Five’ (1958), ‘Electra on Azalea Path’ (1959), ‘The
Beekeeper’s Daughter’ (1959), ‘The Colossus’ (1959), ‘Little Fugue’
(1962) and ‘Sheep in Fog’ (1962 and 1963). In ‘Full Fathom Five’ the
father’s domain is the sea, and the daughter both remembers and longs for
an incestuous union with him in his ‘shelled bed’, even if she must drown,
or ‘breathe water’, to join him. The ‘dark water’ of ‘Sheep in Fog’ is
equally threatening, though here her immersion is in ‘a heaven / Starless
and fatherless’, suggesting the daughter’s fear of abandonment by a
heavenly father. The identification of the speaker with Electra and the father
with Agamemnon is reiterated in both ‘Electra on Azalea Path’ and ‘The
Colossus’, as is the daughter’s paralysis in an impossible desire, begging for
pardon in ‘Electra’ for the love that ‘did us both to death’ and, in ‘The
Colossus’, struggling as a solitary archaeologist under the ‘blue sky’ of the
Greek Oresteia to mend the shattered statuary of his colossal form. In both
‘The Colossus’ and ‘Little Fugue’, the daughter longs to elicit the dead
father’s words, echoing the complaint in ‘Daddy’: ‘I never could talk to
you.’
The speaker of ‘Little Fugue’ is frustrated by the dead father’s silence in
her memories of him. She can see his voice, but not hear him, and what she
sees is ‘Gothic and barbarous, pure German’, anticipating the Nazi father’s
‘obscene’ ‘gobbledygoo’ in ‘Daddy’. The ‘fugue’ of the poem’s title refers
to the speaker’s amnesia; in stanza eleven she is ‘lame in the memory’ as
her father is lamed by amputation. This version of paralysis, the compulsion
to repeat without making any progress, is symptomatic of all these poems.
In contrast to the daughter’s fury in the later ‘Daddy’, the amnesiac of
‘Little Fugue’ suffers from affectlessness and an inability to piece together
her memories of him into a coherence that might make her life whole.
Otto Plath was an entomologist and expert on bees, giving Plath (and
later, Ted Hughes in Birthday Letters) yet another sexual and symbolic
context for exploring her relationship to him. In ‘The Beekeeper’s
Daughter’ the garden setting is eroticized, ‘a garden of mouthings’, with its
musky flowers, some of them trumpet-throated, ‘open to the beaks of
birds’, or resembling ‘little boudoirs’. The father, the master of the bees
(stanza one), rules over ‘many-breasted hives’. The potential for violence
comes with the daughter’s challenge and assertion of incestuous longing:
‘Here is a queenship no mother can contest – // A fruit that’s death to taste:
dark flesh, dark parings.’ The murderous wish that was to surface later in
‘Daddy’ is here translated into the mating (or pairing) of a daughter-queen
bee with the father, who is also bridegroomdrone, and dies in the sexual
consummation – a ‘dark paring’ (or cutting away).
In The Bell Jar as well, Plath shapes her heroine Esther Greenwood’s fate
in Freudian terms and retrospectively may be explaining the unconscious
motivation for her own suicide attempt in 1953. The crucial moment of
decision in the novel comes after Esther visits her father’s neglected grave.
She remembers that her mother neither took her to her father’s funeral nor
mourned her husband’s death, and she resolves to enact her grief in
recompense for these failures. In the following passage Esther is oblivious
to her unconscious anger at both her parents: ‘I had a great yearning, lately,
to pay my father back for all the years of neglect . . . I had always been my
father’s favorite, and it seemed fitting that I should take on a mourning my
mother had never bothered with’ (BJ, p. 165). With only a slight change in
tone, from obsequious dutifulness to condemnation of both her parents, this
passage can be read as vengeful – this is payback time for her father’s
neglect of her – and disdainful scorn for her mother, who obviously did not
love the father as much as his ‘favorite’ daughter. Esther muses on what
might have been if her father had lived, if he had been her intellectual
mentor, and is appalled by the graveyard’s impoverished appearance. To
make up for her own lack of tears as a child, but also and especially for her
mother’s failure to cry, Esther begins to howl and weep. The episode ends
abruptly here, but leaps forward immediately to the suicide: ‘I knew just
how to go about it’, Esther says, suggesting that what she has learnt in the
graveyard precipitates her action (BJ, p. 167). If we are fully persuaded by
Plath’s insistence on an Electra complex, then Esther, like the daughter in
‘Daddy’, desires ‘to die / And get back, back, back to you’ and
unconsciously to ‘get back at Daddy’.
The mother
While Plath is everywhere confident of the baleful influence of this absent
and overidealized father figure in her psyche and certain of the truth that,
left as a child without the ‘love of a steady blood-related man’, she has been
scarred for life (J, p. 431), she is more inclined to blame her mother both
for his death and for her own self-destructive behaviour. The ‘transferred
murderous impulse’ she describes (in the quotation I now return to about
Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’) is ‘from my mother onto myself: the
“vampire” metaphor Freud uses, “draining the ego”: that is exactly the
feeling I have getting in the way of my writing: mother’s clutch’ (J, p. 447,
my italics). Feminist critics and revisionists of Freudian thought such as
Jessica Benjamin argue that ‘the father and his phallus have the power they
do because of their ability to stand for difference and separation from the
mother . . . As long as the traditional sexual division of labor persists, the
child will turn to the father as the “knight in shining armor” who represents
freedom, the outside world, will, agency, and desire.’8 If we reformulate the
daughter’s, or Plath’s, supposed Electra complex in these terms, what
suddenly takes precedence over incestuous longing is the need for a
dominant male figure to help the daughter to enter the world, become
independent and, most important, loosen the ties to the mother. The
preoedipal relationship between mother and daughter, as it is delineated in
feminist readings of Freud by Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein,
forms an intense bond sustained by bodily likeness and is only reluctantly
given up in the daughter’s recognition that she can never take the father’s
place. The daughter, no less than the son, regards the father as a rival for the
mother’s affections.9
‘Mother’s clutch’, it turns out, is a far more significant problem for Plath
than that posed by the Electra complex. Immediately after her father’s
death, Plath asked her mother to sign a contract agreeing never to marry
again (LH, p. 25). This might be construed as the little girl’s protest against
any man taking her beloved father’s place, but equally important, perhaps,
is gratification in having Otto Plath out of the way at last and Mother all to
herself. Evidence suggests that Otto Plath’s illness affected family life
severely and the young Sylvia was often sent to stay with her grandparents
while her mother tended both to Otto Plath’s failing health and her younger
brother’s asthma attacks (LH, pp. 22–3).
Plath’s notes on her psychotherapy with Dr Ruth Beuscher are
preoccupied with establishing boundaries between herself and her mother,
even if the only way she can do this is by aggressively attacking what she
decides is Aurelia’s ‘defective’ love (J, p. 448) and persistently dramatizing
her mother as smothering, intrusive, disapproving and jealous of her
marriage to Ted Hughes. She often sets up mother and husband as rivals for
her allegiance, which may be interpreted as an ‘acting out’ of the original
love triangle of Sylvia, Otto and Aurelia. This time Ted/Otto will be the
victor. Dr Beuscher apparently gave her patient Plath ‘permission’ to hate
her mother, validating for Plath her dramatization of Aurelia ‘as an enemy:
somebody who “killed” my father . . . a murderess of maleness’ (J, p. 433).
Plath suggests that Aurelia’s life had been reduced to ‘a dry chittering stalk
of fear’ (J, p. 438). Her comments effectively sterilize and desexualize the
mother, representing her as sacrificing her own life for her daughter’s, but
then exacting a debt of gratitude for her martyrdom.
When Plath records her ‘ideas of maleness’, they are associated with
sexual and creative power (J, p. 437). The overvaluation of Otto Plath, and
later Ted Hughes, as authoritative mentoring figures simultaneously
strengthens her own masculine ambitions as a poet and helps her to define
herself as an adventurous, desirable and sexually fecund woman, totally
different from her mother. In one of her letters to Aurelia, written shortly
after she falls in love with Hughes, this validation of her creativity as both a
poet and a woman is recorded in soaring prose. She speaks of her own
strengthening voice, of Ted’s approval of her poems, poems which seem to
him ‘strong and full and rich’, particularly in comparison with the work of
other female poets (Sara Teasdale and Edna St Vincent Millay are
mentioned). Her own poems, Plath says, are ‘working, sweating, heaving
poems born out of the way words should be said’ (LH, p. 244). Giving birth
to poems is intimately linked to the womanly power of giving birth to
children, but Plath insists on her difference from other women poets, who
are stereotypically feminine in their timidity; indeed, Plath embraces
masculine virility and bravado for her creative powers, claiming to outdo
Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. B. Yeats in force and spirit
(LH, p. 243).
Yet ‘mother’s clutch’ continues to compete with Plath’s sense of
autonomy, even after her marriage to Hughes. At one point Plath writes that
she wishes for her mother’s death so that she ‘could be sure of what I am:
so I could know that what feelings I have, even though some resemble hers,
are really my own’ (J, p. 449). From a feminist psychoanalytic perspective,
these fears of losing her independent selfhood to maternal domination
would not be so exaggerated if the original closeness had not been so
profound. The extensive correspondence between Plath as ‘Sivvy’ and her
mother as ‘Dearest Mummy’ in Letters Home has been read by cynical
critics as calculated self-posturing to placate Aurelia and to disguise Plath’s
true self, but may also be read as testimony to what Aurelia describes as the
‘psychic osmosis’ (LH, p. 32) she shared with her daughter. The letters are a
gift to Aurelia of a vicarious ‘golden girl’ life in compensation for the
mother’s sacrifice of her own. Paula Bennett in her study of Emily
Dickinson, Plath and Adrienne Rich, My Life a Loaded Gun, is especially
eloquent on Plath’s ‘compulsion to present herself in the role of the good
daughter’. She reads it as less about love than ‘fear, fear of the loss of her
mother’s approval and, above all, fear of the sense of separation (of being
rejected) that loss of approval would bring’. Bennett also contextualizes the
mother-daughter bond shared by Plath and Aurelia in cultural terms,
arguing from a feminist perspective that Plath was conforming to norms
imposed by society in constructing her femininity. Hence Bennett describes
the letters as written in ‘the glossy, trivializing, “feminine” style that she
[Plath] picked up from her reading in women’s magazines during the 1950s
. . . It is a style appropriate to the girl her mother wanted . . . a girl who
could, like her mother before her, cope gallantly with any setback that came
her way.’10 The promise extorted from Aurelia never to marry again implies
that her daughter would have to take her father’s place, as she does, for
example, in ‘Electra on Azalea Path’. After her father’s death, the speaker
‘wormed’ back with the mother’s body in a bed where the only evidence of
the father is ‘the stain of divinity’: ‘As if you had never existed, as if I came
/ God-fathered into the world from my mother’s belly’. The psychic cost of
having the mother all to oneself is double, as we can see here: the
apotheosis of the father, his elevation into the immutable and divine figure
who will later exact punishment, and the survival into later years of a
preoedipal dependency on the mother.
The companion poem to ‘Daddy’, written four days later on 16 October
1962, is ‘Medusa’. The title ostensibly alludes to the Gorgon of classical
mythology with her famous paralysing gaze, but also refers to the immature
form of the jellyfish Aurelia, Plath’s mother’s name. Many of the poem’s
images suggest a symbiotic union like that of a foetus in a womb. The
speaker is still tied to her mother by an ‘old barnacled umbilicus’; the
mother’s body is ‘fat and red, a placenta’, or else a ‘bottle in which I live’.
The speaker refuses to sustain herself as a foetus in a womb, though,
declaring in stanza seven that she will not ‘bite’ from it. The mother, in
turn, threatens engulfment, ‘touching and sucking’ the speaker, sustaining
her own life by figuratively eating her daughter. Like ‘Daddy’, the poem
ends with what looks like an emphatic dissolution of relationship: ‘There is
nothing between us’, which ambiguously reads as ‘nothing’ existing to
separate them.
Simultaneous with the composition of ‘Medusa’, on 16 October 1962,
Plath writes two letters to Aurelia telling her that she ‘must not go back to
the womb’, that she cannot return home to her mother in the US, but also
expressing the need for help, the need for someone to ‘protect’ her, to nurse
her back from the flu, and to defend her in her plight as a deserted wife to
an unfaithful husband (LH, pp. 469, 470). The impossible position this puts
Aurelia in – who better to satisfy these demands than a loving mother? –
dramatizes the extraordinary defences that Plath erected to separate herself
from her mother. Since Aurelia was present in July of 1962 when Plath’s
marriage began to crumble, there is shame associated with this distancing.
In ‘Medusa’ the speaker claims that she feels ‘overexposed, like an X-ray’;
in a letter dated 9 October 1962, the day Hughes finished packing to leave
the marriage, Plath had written to Aurelia of her reluctance to see her: ‘The
horror of what you saw and what I saw you see last summer is between us
and I cannot face you again until I have a new life’ (LH, p. 465). This
excuse suggests that the mother has seen too much. In my earlier
psychoanalytic account of this poem, I argued that this may have been a
costly choice:
In cutting herself off in this way from Aurelia and what Aurelia
represents, Plath may well have felt herself cut off from all benevolent
outside sources, and also from Sivvy, the ideal fiction created for her
in the image of her culture – the old perfect self, free from blemish. As
a result, only old yellow, the rival ingrate, was left to speak, and Plath
was not yet strong enough to manage all the guilt in giving her voice.
(Bundtzen, Plath’s Incarnations, p. 108)