The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath

Anita Helle, Amanda Golden, Maeve O'Brien, Anita Helle, Amanda Golden, Maeve O'Brien

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350119239
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Literaturkritik für weibliche Autoren

With chapters written by more than 25 leading and emerging international scholars, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath provides the most comprehensive collection of contemporary scholarship on Plath's work. Including new scholarly perspectives from feminist and gender studies, critical race studies, medical humanities and disability studies, this collection explores: · Plath's literary contexts – from the Classics and the long poem to W.B Yeats, Edith Sitwell, Ruth Sillitoe, Carol Ann Duffy, and Ted Hughes
· New insights from Plath's previously unpublished letters and writings
· Plath's broadcasting work for the BBC Providing new approaches to her life and work, this book is an indispensable volume for scholars of Sylvia Plath.

PART I

New Cultural and Historical Contexts

CHAPTER ONE

Plath as Punch Line

JONATHAN ELLIS

According to Marc Spitz, Sylvia Plath is “both a literary and feminist icon and a too-easy punch line. Her outsize sadness and shakiness sometimes upstage her magnificent writing” (59). Oddly enough, in his own book, Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film (2014), Spitz does more or less the same, co-opting Plath into honorary membership of what he calls a Twee Tribe. “When she took the gas in her London kitchen,” he concludes his pen-portrait of her life and work, “Plath led a kind of march of the war-scarred into oblivion that would both seal her as a Twee heroine (tragic, beautiful, damned) and afford her followers a vacuum to fill” (61). Literary critics are just as guilty of beginning with Plath’s death rather than her artistic achievements. Jeffrey Berman’s chapter on Plath in his study Surviving Literary Suicide (1999) begins with a diary entry from one of his graduate students that foregrounds the following subjects: “suicide, Smith, free thought, poetry” (137). Berman endorses this free association of nouns by immediately declaring Plath “the most haunting twentieth-century literary suicide” (137). I open with Spitz and Berman’s accounts not to endorse them—the image of Plath in both popular culture and literary criticism as a Pied Piper of Suicide is both crass and offensive—but to think about why those who read and write about Plath’s work are frequently characterized, explicitly or implicitly, as “followers” rather than “readers.” This response to Plath is, unfortunately, a familiar one. Cultural critics and literary scholars, usually male, admit to liking Plath’s work but disliking the effect of that work on her, usually female, readers. Thus, a few paragraphs later, while Spitz defends Plath’s poems alluding to the Holocaust as written by “a child of World War II and its horror,” he simultaneously diminishes their seriousness by stating that she “provides war-haunted voices for those who never served” (59).

One can find versions of this “magnificent” author/shame about her terrible readers divide in popular and scholarly writing about Plath. In Tim Kendall’s Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study, he attacks critics for losing sight of why Plath was famous in the first place: “her popularity has not always helped to enhance our understanding of her work. … It should not be controversial to assert that the most interesting thing about Sylvia Plath is her poetry” (xi). For Kendall, discussions of mythology and popularity distract us from reading poems. “I have tried to remain as practical as literary criticism allows, using detailed close readings to explain what is characteristic about Plath’s poetry and how it changes over time” (A Critical Study xi). Kendall’s prose is deceptively flat and sober-sounding. Where is the offense here? Surely this is just a call for extended close reading, the in-vogue return to New Formalism popular in the 1990s and 2000s? Perhaps so, and yet I cannot entirely shake off the idea that Kendall, like Spitz, may actively dislike Plath readers, Plath scholars, and, if I am being honest, the majority of Plath’s writing. Plath’s prose is conspicuous by its absence from his critical study, so too is her visual art. Tracy Brain’s The Other Sylvia Plath, published the same year, is more inclusive and wide-ranging, opening with a consideration of the archives and how they change our view of the published poems. Her desire to see “a new edition of the Collected Poems, where every poem is transcribed freshly, and checked and double-checked, to ensure that readers have versions that they can rely on” (The Other Sylvia Plath 25) is yet to be met. In Kendall’s defense, his book was almost certainly finished before the new edition of the Journals, edited by Karen V. Kukil, went to press. Eye Rhymes did not appear until 2007; Volumes 1 and 2 of the Letters were only published recently. Yet, given the starkness of his statements above, I doubt whether any of these publications would have changed his estimation. For him, it is the individual poem that counts. Everything else is secondary, including drafts, manuscript variations, prose, and unpublished work.

I have written elsewhere about the prevalence of such hierarchies, particularly in relation to letters, an art form rarely considered an art form, let alone a literary genre (13–31). Plath’s letters, to be specific the letters collected by her mother Aurelia Plath in Letters Home, rather than the letters in the new volumes edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Kukil, have often been described as fake or inferior works in relation to the poems, journal entries, and other forms of prose. Kendall hardly mentions them; Spitz doesn’t say anything about them at all. Such a position was flawed a decade ago. A cursory reading of Letters Home reveals Plath to be an expert mimic and innovator of epistolary prose, even a formulaic note home. Now, with the evidence of her full correspondence, it is indefensible.

Janet Badia’s 2011 book, Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers, helpfully explores the long history behind many of these prejudices, a history that predates the reception of Plath’s own work. It is a study not so much of Plath’s writing but of writing about Plath, in particular the ways in which the figure of the Plath reader is recycled and replicated in numerous films, television series, novels, and poems. While critics like Spitz and Kendall want to reclaim Plath from her readers who are nearly always depicted as young, misguided women incapable of reading her work properly, Badia wonders how the figure of the Plath reader came to have such a negative reputation in the first place. In so doing, she questions whether continual appeals to “approaching Plath’s writings as pure works of literature untainted by the discourse surrounding the author” are, in effect, “literary bullying” (15). One can hear the long and still pervasive legacy of New Criticism here, in particular its treatment of the poem as a self-contained unit, the reading of which requires students to be suspicious of knowledge acquired from fields such as biography, history, or psychology. “We need to recognize,” Badia suggests, “that there are many ways of valuing Plath as author, and the first step towards appreciating these different approaches is to understand where our prejudices against certain ways of understanding her originate” (16).

Badia’s answer lies at least as far back as the Romantic period when so-called excessive novel reading by women was linked to both illness and madness. “Reading,” she observes, “was central to the diagnosis and treatment of hysteria: the wrong reading practices, it was argued, could incline one to the disease, while the right reading could contribute to its cure or prevention” (5). Badia shows the extent to which the Plath reader pathologized by contemporary critics as immature and suicidal is related to the similarly stereotyped nineteenth-century reader of sensational fiction. In both cases, gender is considered to mar judgment.

Let me return briefly to Kendall again as he attempts to separate Plath’s poetry from her other writings by appealing to what he calls “Seamus Heaney’s belief that poetry cannot be reduced to merely another form of discourse” and so must be read “primarily as poetry” (“Preface”). To read poems “primarily as poetry” as opposed, say, to read poetry as biography, history, or philosophy sounds harmless enough, but what does it actually mean? It is worth cross-referencing Kendall’s words with Heaney’s own essay on Plath, “The Indefatigable Hoof-taps,” in which he praises “the great appeal” of “Ariel and its constellated lyrics” (218). “These poems,” Heaney writes,

are the vehicles of their own impulses[.] … They move without hesitation and assume the right to be heard; they, the poems, are what we attend to, not the poet. They are, in Lowell’s words, events rather than the records of events, and as such represent the triumph of Sylvia Plath’s romantic ambition to bring expressive power and fully achieved selfhood into congruence.

(219)

Heaney loves listening to poets. But what does he hear in Plath’s work? “The poems … not the poet.”

I am not convinced the line between poem and poet is as clear as Heaney or Kendall would have us believe. The best analogy I can think of for the shifting relationship between author and subject comes from Plath’s own poem, “In Plaster” (1961), in which the speaker’s broken body is copied, molded, and made “unbreakable” via a plaster-cast before that same cast begins to take on a life of its own. For me, this is a poem that interrogates the modes of critical reading Plath was taught at Smith College in the early 1950s and that she practiced herself when she returned to teach there between 1957 and 1958. As Amanda Golden points out: “Plath’s manner in the classroom mirrored the impersonal strategies of the modern writers whom she taught. … Her close readings keep to aesthetic and formal commentary, sizing and dividing up texts into sections and parts, itemizing themes and listing issues” (“Sylvia Plath’s Teaching and the Shaping of Her Work” 258). In “In Plaster” Plath reflects on the close and often shameful relationship between biographical experience and lyric poetry, the attempt, particularly on behalf of male critics, to have one without the other. Gillian White’s book, Lyric Shame (2014), engages with midcentury debates about lyric poetry and subjectivity, what White identifies as an “unspoken but pervasive embarrassment over what poetry is, should be, and fails to be.” Thinking about the reception of Anne Sexton’s work, she wonders whether “a quintessential Confessional poem has ever existed. The critical tendency has been to displace the shame of the Confessional ‘lyric’ onto some lesser, inferior, or ‘bad’ Confessional. But who, what poem, is the quintessential Confessional? Now that some writers affiliated with Language have taken in Sylvia Plath, to whom should one turn as the ‘real’ Confessional?” (147–8). White’s point is not that there is a “good” or “bad” Confessional poem, or “real” and unreal Confessional poets. Such terms say more about the personality of critics than the characters of poems. She is intrigued by why we talk about poems as if we were talking about people. “Poems are ashamed but have no sense of shame,” she argues. “What can we make of poetry if we try to unshame it, engaging (new? un-? something other than anti-) lyric readings of it?” (7). Lucy Tunstall’s recent work on Plath and the lyric covers similar ground, querying critics like Heaney’s focus on poetic “purity” (the word is Heaney’s):

What exactly do we mean by purity? Is it artistic, spiritual or carnal, and how are these aspects connected? How is purity in art bound up with material costliness and the rarefied object? What combinations of register are permissible in a lyric poem, and how are notions of perfection in poetry connected with repression, oppression, neuroticism or tyranny? And not least: what exactly are we looking for when we find transcendence in a poem?

(97–8)

For Tunstall, Plath is not prepared to provide neat answers to these questions. At the same time, her work alerts us through its questions to what Tunstall characterizes as “the potential damage (by intrusion, calcification, domination or commodification) in all lyric poetry, including her own” [103]).

Damage appears an odd word to associate with lyric, even with Plath’s lyrics, but I would like to keep it in mind as one of the effects of reading her work. Plath was certainly aware of Romantic and Victorians discourses of lyric purity, of what a poet could or could not say in a poem, particularly if they were a female poet. In the sonnet, “Female Author,” exiled to the back of her Collected Poems under the heading “Juvenilia,” she brings these stereotypes to life, imagining the eponymous author as a Tennysonian woman at a window, absorbed in her own narcissistic concerns and ignorant or indifferent to others’ suffering. While she “nibbles an occasional bonbon of sin” or “nurses / Chocolate fancies,” actual people are hurting beyond her “rose-papered rooms,” the final line of the poem revealing “gray child faces crying in the streets” (CP 301). Plath parodies this image of the female author as decorous and self-absorbed, “lost in subtle metaphor” (CP 301). One could never say this about her own writing! The poem’s third-person narrator points out the flaws in the female author’s perspective, her narrow focus on what lies inside the room, not outside of it. She hears what the female author pretends not to, widening her frame of reference. Plath could be sharp about other authors, particularly her female contemporaries. Her journals and letters identify such authors as at best mentors to outgrow, at worst rivals to best and outmaneuvre. At the same time, perhaps Plath is also making a more general point about the condition of literary creation of Anglo-American poetry at midcentury. Unlike Heaney (at least in his essays), she does not pretend the poetic space is a pure one. Lyric poetry absorbs impure elements from the author’s biography that cannot be entirely cleaned away by rewriting or revision. The reader arrives at the poem with unclean hands as well.

When reading Plath, it is difficult, if not impossible, to forget the two “facts” nearly everybody knows about her even if they have never read a word of her writing: her marriage to Ted Hughes and the manner of her death. I have lost count of the number of times a critic has “found” the biographical Hughes in a poem, often in unlikely places. The same is true of feelings that “foreshadow” her suicide. The page of a Plath poem, whatever poem, is figuratively marked with her and our backstories. How do we read the poem through so much history? In an early poem like “Female Author,” this is archly presented via the sight and smell of “hothouse roses” and “festering gardenias” that almost prevent us from breathing for ourselves (CP 301). We have to fight to see the woman underneath it all. In her early work, Plath dramatizes the cost to oneself and perhaps to the poem in attempting to purify one’s writing. Whatever else the female author is in the poem, she does not seem especially happy. The thrill of Plath’s later work is not just the abandonment of these unwritten rules about what does and does not belong in a poem, but the bravery of telling us she is doing so. She thus has the confidence to begin “Fever 103°” (1962): “Pure? What does it mean?” (CP 231).

If lyric for Plath is a messy business, one that involves the author and reader in complex and frequently uncomfortable positions of power and submission, one would not necessarily know this from the titles of many of her poems. “Mushrooms” (1959), “Tulips” (1961), “A Birthday Present” (1962), and “Balloons” (1963), to pick a poem from each of the last four years of her life, sound deceptively cheery in the list of contents. Plath has a particular gift for lulling us into a false sense of security. By the time we know what the poem is really about, we have been found out. I say “we” and “us” as if we could generalize about the reader when of course this is impossible. How does Plath create such an intimate relationship with the reader? One of the ways is through her frequent use of the second person pronoun, “you.” As Tracy Brain points out: “[w]hat is crucial about the second person narrative is that it establishes a relatio...