Claiming Sylvia Plath : The Poet as Exemplary Figure [1 ed.] 9781443846295, 9781443841733

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Claiming Sylvia Plath

Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure

By

Marianne Egeland

Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure, by Marianne Egeland This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Marianne Egeland Parts of the book have been researched and written with a Government Grant for Artists and a grant from The Norwegian Non-fiction Writers and Translators Association. It has been copy edited with a grant from The Norwegian Research Council. All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4173-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4173-3

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ix

INTRODUCTION

1

CHAPTER ONE THE CONSTITUTION OF A POET Life after Death Conflicting Interests Trapped Into Her Past Whose Facts and Whose Rights? Biographers on the Move Exemplary Figures The Idealized Poet From Socrates to Sylvia

9

CHAPTER TWO CRITICS Before – and After Confessional Extremist A Major Literary Event Assorted Objections Rupture or Continuity? Cult – Icon – Legend – Myth Of her Time, Before or Beyond it? Business as Usual Re-evaluation

10 14 17 23 27 31 36 40 47 48 52 57 60 66 70 76 80 84

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Contents

CHAPTER THREE FEMINISTS For the Prosecution Feminist Normalization Theft of a Positive Identity Woman among Women A Profoundly Political Poet, or a White Woman Writing White? ‘To Sylvia’ – Lesbian Saviour of All Children Androgynous Flux Intertext and Leaking Palimpsest CHAPTER FOUR BIOGRAPHERS Edward Butscher and Method and Madness Linda Wagner-Martin and Sylvia Plath Anne Stevenson and Bitter Fame Biographical Dialectic Paul Alexander and Rough Magic Ronald Hayman and Death and Life Publish or …? CHAPTER FIVE PSYCHOLOGISTS Freud in America Sylvia and Dr B A Freudian Showcase Further Death Studies Creativity and Madness – or the Aristotle Effect The Divided Self Reclamation Doxa An Alternative Explanation? CHAPTER SIX FRIENDS Prelude Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing Soulmates and Old Lovers The Role Model and the Rival The Fire Brigade Revisions New Accusations The Never-Ending Friends Me and Sylvia

89 90 93 98 101 108 117 120 125 133 134 141 145 152 155 163 170 175 176 180 184 188 194 201 207 213 219 221 225 229 235 239 243 247 252 256

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CHAPTER SEVEN THE USE AND ABUSE OF A POET Why Won’t She Lie Down? Converging Fields of Production Multiple Canonizing Mythologizing The Sylvia Plath Formula

261 262 269 276 282 289

NOTES

297

BIBLIOGRAPHY

327

INDEX

361

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure has been long in the making, with new books and essays appearing all the time that affect the dynamics in the field. It can to some extent be defined as the synthesis of my books in Norwegian on Sylvia Plath, on the role of the writer, and on biography as a literary and historical genre. Everybody who helped me realize those earlier projects – initiated in Oxford in 1993, when my interest was triggered by a commentator on BBC radio claiming that Sylvia Plath was suffering from a biography overload syndrome – has more or less directly contributed to this one. Grateful thanks to all and one of you, to anonymous readers during the publishing process, and to engaging participants at international conferences. My greatest debt now as always is to my husband, Jon Haarberg. Without his encouragement and lucid comments there would have been no Claiming Sylvia Plath. I am furthermore indebted to the University Library of Oslo and librarian Annette Møller Madsen, to the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College and its curator Karen V. Kukil. Grants from the Norwegian Government, The Norwegian Non-fiction Writers and Translators Association, and The Norwegian Research Council have contributed to financing parts of the work. Since 2005 my department at the University of Oslo has provided me with excellent working facilities, research time, helpful colleagues, and inspiring students. Sons like Daniel, David, and Kjølv, who have grown to become young men during the work, make sure that literature and criticism are put into a wider perspective, reminding me that we all have many identities, and that reading and writing has an ethical side. Oslo, October 2012 Marianne Egeland

INTRODUCTION

Few modern authors have been the object of such intense worship and myth making as Sylvia Plath. The interest seems incessant. It can be measured in shelves full of academic studies, in reviews, articles, and popular accounts of her life and work, in tributary poems, web sites, novels, films, plays, dramatic adaptations, and musical scores to poems. A recurrent topic discussed in newspapers is precisely this ‘obsession’, a phenomenon remarked on by commentators, who notably contribute to it as they write. In 1976, an old pen pal of Sylvia Plath’s argued for the necessity of ‘Seeking the One True Plath’, in his case, uncovering an image of Plath as he had known her, underneath the extensive cult focus and misconceptions advanced by the literary industry (Cohen 1976). And that is exactly what so many have set out to do, to unearth a pure image of the real Sylvia Plath. Battles in her name have been fought in biographies and in newspapers, among scholars, relatives, critics, and feminist activists. Whether they are family members, professors of literature, psychoanalysts, or simply passionate readers, the advocates claim to speak for the real or true Sylvia, thereby aiming to neutralize adversaries who represent seemingly false versions of their idol. Alternatively, some critics claim to have discovered ‘The Other Sylvia Plath’ or ‘The Other Ariel’, which has been otherwise obscured or hidden behind the popular images.1 While still alive, Plath was recognized as a special poetic talent only by a limited group of insiders. The two books she herself witnessed being published in print – The Colossus in 1960 and The Bell Jar in 1963 – were received sympathetically but not viewed as anything extraordinary. In fact, most of the poems she submitted to newspapers and periodicals during her last months of life were rejected. The fame she yearned for came only posthumously. Living in London, depressed and separated from her husband, Sylvia Plath committed suicide in February of 1963 at the age of thirty. She left behind two small children and a collection of poems ready for print. Published two years later, Ariel secured her an international name. Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, was met with accusations of desertion, censorship, abuse, and even murder. Spotlighted by feminists, biographers, and

2

Introduction

journalists, he appeared to have lost control not only of his wife’s story but also of his own. Different communities of readers turned Sylvia Plath into an icon or an exemplary figure and used her to prove their assertions in order to fill personal or professional needs. Plath’s name added authority to cries for attention from numerous causes. In this book, I delineate the mass of writers and followers who have based their work on Sylvia Plath, and I intend to investigate how and why her image and name have been employed. Given that each reader is conditioned both individually and collectively to the understanding of a literary text, I theorize that specific readings convey the personal traits of the author, as well as superindividual attitudes – attitudes which were typical for the relevant period. In other words, using writing grounded on Plath’s work, I intend to demonstrate that what is good, right, and interesting within literary thought is defined by the era and social group we belong to, much more so than most of us like to admit. Academic circles cultivating a critical attitude form no exception. Seen from a distance, this influence of time and setting is clearly evident in the existing 50 years of Plath’s reception. Inspired by theories on the divided self, critics during the 1960s highlighted confessional and extreme elements in her work, while readers in the 1970s interpreted Plath’s life and writing in light of two dominating models of explanation at the time: psychoanalysis and feminism. When poststructuralist theories caught on at the universities, Sylvia Plath’s most crucial poems came to demonstrate the indefiniteness of language and of sexual identity. The idea of the text as an open entity did not preclude a cultural materialist approach. Her work was treated as social commentary, and the poet herself came to be seen as culturally determined. Her use of the Holocaust and of Jewish imagery which in the beginning was mainly discussed as an ethical question – or problem – later also became a sexual topic linked to fascist fantasies. In subsequent Plath studies, the return of history to the humanities and a preoccupation with context, politics, and popular culture are notable in literary analyses of her work. At about the same time, Ted Hughes gained more sympathy among critics and followers, as feminist criticism began to lose ground. Finally, as self-creation, performativity, interactive art, and a renewed interest in spatial form grew within criticism at large, Plath’s life and work once more offered exemplary material to demonstrate current principles and timely perspectives. This everexpanding area of discussion only further swelled when manuscripts, papers, books, and personal belongings were made available in archives. With the publication of studies dedicated to rethinking the confessional

Claiming Sylvia Plath

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label, Plath’s reception seems to have come full circle. Since new perspectives are added to old ones, perhaps the best metaphor for the trajectory of Plath criticism during the period of 1960 to 2010, which is my focus in this book, is that of a widening gyre. The central issue from the very beginning has been the construction of identity and the involvement of the poet’s work in canon discussions. In many ways, Plath criticism demonstrates the dilemma which the biographical, or the relations of text and author, poses for modern theory and practice. The pendulum has had a tendency to swing. Literary works are either easily treated as self-reflexive and autonomous pieces of art or they are seen as diagnostic reflections of society and/or of the author’s life and death. Yet in the case of Sylvia Plath, her work illustrates a blurring of boundaries between public and private spaces, as well as the converging of fields of cultural production, resulting from complex economic and social factors that largely fall outside the parameters of this study. Furthermore, Plath’s writing has continually spoken to the hunger of critics and devoted readers, who crave to consume the most intimate processes of her life – processes which in current times have become ‘the virtual feeding ground of the media’ (Baudrillard 1985, 130). Just as Sigmund Freud and R.D. Laing appear to have been floating in the air inhaled by early Plath scholars, Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, and Jacques Derrida loom high among the many who, towards the end of the twentieth century, started reading Plath’s poetry as modern elegies of mourning. The latter works can be interpreted as period products just as much as the former. We usually think of our own analyses as better or more sophisticated than those made by previous generations. But literary criticism does not follow evolutionary laws, and subsequent generations will undoubtedly look at us in the same way. Before we know it, the last decades’ promotion of ambiguity, diversity, and multiple meanings may be seen as masking totalizing simplifications on par with derided modernistic or mythic readings. As such, a sociological perspective on art, aesthetics, and culture in line with Jan MukaĜovský and Pierre Bourdieu is relevant to this analysis. One could argue, in fact, that Plath’s case confirms Bourdieu’s idea of the cultural field as a universe of belief where writers and critics struggle for recognition foremost by trying to distinguish themselves from their colleagues and competitors (Bourdieu 1993). To achieve a coveted position in the literary world, it is as imperative to make a name for oneself as it is within modern celebrity culture. ‘Sylvia Plath’, as figure, icon, and person, has clearly succeeded in achieving markers of both elite and popular literary status. Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure is a study of five

4

Introduction

decades of Plath reception, of shifting hegemonic positions and issues addressed by the communities that have tried to make sense of her life and work. My primary goal is neither to offer new interpretations of her texts nor to promote a specific key that can unlock the closed door of the past. Rather, I propose to demonstrate what may predictably happen when critics swear by a particular theory and end up with answers that support their chosen approach. No new book on Sylvia Plath can escape travelling along some of the paths that have already been trodden. When Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker essay was published as a book in 1994, critic James Wood, interviewing Malcolm for The Guardian, declared The Silent Woman as so ‘subtle’, ‘true’, and ‘patiently analytical’ that for him, it was ‘difficult to envisage anyone writing again about Plath and Hughes. She is the cat who has licked the plate clean’ (Wood 1994, 42). How many cats of different sizes and colours have since then found their special treat to savour for the first or umpteenth time? Numerous studies discuss the controversy surrounding Sylvia Plath, her legacy, and Ted Hughes’s role as her editor. Others have accounted for parts of the critical heritage, the archive, the literary estate, and the Plath biographies. But a systematic and comprehensive study of the kind I am presenting here has not been undertaken before. By organizing the reception into reading communities composed of critics, feminists, biographers, psychologists, and friends, I hope to disclose interpretive patterns that might otherwise remain obscure. Functioning as a guide through the massive amounts of literature, the intention here is to establish persistent themes and questions in the writings about Plath during the period from 1960 to 2010. The enclosed bibliography bears witness to the comprehensiveness of my study and the wealth of material that I base it on. Although I have sought to cover as much as possible, Claiming Sylvia Plath does not pretend to be an exhaustive reception study. Even after limiting myself mainly to written and published material in English, the quantity of books, essays, and dissertations is still overwhelming, and readers may look in vain for a discussion of specific works. I have chosen to concentrate on what I regard as the most representative works. As a result, my findings reveal a pervasive religious tone in much of the reception, as well as a considerable amount of activity by ‘agents’ like Al Alvarez. The diversity of my material requires both widespread and complementary approaches to complete the analysis. The questions I ask are influenced by methodologies such as Prague structuralism and German reception aesthetics, as well as those from sociology of literature and cultural studies. I hope to suggest alternative entries to an often-told story

Claiming Sylvia Plath

5

by demonstrating that the same fundamental rhetoric applied to writers and their roles preserves its validity even as the social setting and print culture change. How the poet is perceived and presented is heavily influenced by a tradition originating in Antiquity. Thus, I seek to clarify the classical sources constituting the rhetorical paste in which Sylvia Plath and so many of her mediators seem to be stuck. Through my analysis of rhetoric, which encompasses several discourses, including biography, writer worship, and celebrity cult, I arrive at an examination of an ancient and almost omnipresent rhetorical figure: the exemplum or example, which Aristotle defines as a basic means of persuasion (Lyons 2006). Its main function is to produce belief and to lend authority to the speaker’s or writer’s argument. Intrinsic to literary criticism, the example also shares many points of resemblance with the quotation. In the form of a person, the exemplary figure constitutes a subgroup of the rhetorical figure. That Sylvia Plath is an object of fascination is quite obvious. Yet why does she continue to fascinate? Focusing on Plath as an exemplary figure clarifies why she has been serviceable to so many and how open she has been to colonization. Because the interpretive Plath communities address the same subject and because all of us have more than one identity, many Plath commentators figure within several communities. Visualized on paper, the interpretive communities I study can be drawn as partly overlapping circles. Each circle more or less corresponds with specialized genres or discourses, each possessing its own particular convention and horizon of expectations. A thorough investigation of all these literary paradigms lies beyond the scope of my work. However, for the sake of clarity, the correspondence between genres or discourses and the people who practice them may be summarized like this: Biographers write biographies, friends mostly write memoirs that emphasize an insider perspective, and critics exercise criticism in a number of genres ranging from reviews to scholarly monographs. Members of the communities that I have labelled as ‘Feminists’ and ‘Psychologists’ likewise employ several rhetorical genres, and while these are often the same as the ones I discuss in the ‘Critics’ chapter, feminists and psychologists nevertheless have their own discursive practices which not only affect the way they express themselves but also determine the questions they ask and the answers they offer. Since feminists strive for social and cultural change, much of their writing is political and tends rhetorically towards the political pamphlet. Psychologists have an affinity for case studies and for inferring general knowledge from specific examples. Sylvia Plath, as a particular case, is turned into a didactic model and used as an exemplary figure by psychologists, feminists, and others to

6

Introduction

draw far-reaching conclusions. A rhetoric of accountability and guiltfinding and of accusations and condemnations is widespread. The overlapping of communities and genres means that some issues, persons, and discussions necessarily resurface throughout this book like themes and variations. If I note inconsistencies or questionable elements, personal indignation on my part is not the cause. Ethics are, however, clearly involved. I have found it necessary to explicate this rather obvious point because, like other critics, Plath commentators compete for the authority to determine legitimate interpretations of their subject. At stake in the struggle is ultimately the power to define proper discourse. A strong sense of ownership characterizes insiders. They react to scrutiny of the ‘wrong’ kind, and they react if undue attention is paid to contributors they dismiss as extreme or regard as unimportant. I disagree. Caricatures belong to the picture and help create more distinctive patterns. Furthermore, it is not as if I have vacuumed the media for freakish opinions; on the contrary, with few exceptions, I rely on material from established newspapers and publishing houses. With its strong sympathies and antipathies, there are obvious advantages to operating outside the Plath institution. This ‘outsider’ position that I proclaim for myself does not of course imply that I believe I have escaped ordinary hermeneutical dilemmas or limitations. Although I take a metaperspective on textual exemplification, I still have to lean on a procedure that is fundamental not only to the Plath reception that I investigate, but also to literary criticism in general. My interest in ethical questions, which follows as an inevitable consequence of journalism and a biographical approach to authors, should not exclude a hermeneutical argument for the ethics involved in literary scholarship. The use of examples, exemplary figures, and textual exemplification has ideological implications that are easily overlooked because the procedure comes so naturally to us. According to Montaigne, ‘tout exemple cloche’, or ‘every example limps’ (Montaigne 1991, 1213). And he should know. Like his fellow humanists, Montaigne uses a quotation, a saying, or an example both as a springboard for his essays and as the strings of his arguments from beginning to end. The rhetoric of example involves appeal to and enactment of authority that readers ought to question. How do critics pass from instance to principle? On what grounds are arguments and conclusions founded? As readers, we have to make judgments on the interpretations of probabilities that may actually be presented as truths. Since my point of departure is the opposite of what Michel Foucault argued for in his seminal work, ‘What is an Author’ (1969), i.e. it should not matter who is talking, I have tried to supply bits of information about

Claiming Sylvia Plath

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some of the people I comment on at the time they did their talking. Rhetorically, what is said is always said in a specific situation and for a specific purpose in dialogue with others. This is where my interest lies. As patterns and lasting effects are increasingly difficult to establish the closer we get to our own time, the earlier reception of Plath’s work will have to be emphasized more than later contributions. Recent works praised for epoch-making insights may, with time, be judged quite differently by the same people or at least by others. Gloating hindsight is always a danger for those who address subjects from a historical perspective. When we know how things have turned out, yesteryear’s verdicts easily look dated, and failed prophecies bode even worse. How mistaken were the critics who considered Sylvia Plath as a mere shooting star and predicted that her legend would quickly die out. And how perceptive other commentators seem in retrospect. Writing about ‘The Cult of Plath’ in 1972, Webster Schott claimed that the mass audience was mainly grasping at her troubled personality. Accordingly, a ‘novel right now about Sylvia Plath by one of the fact manipulators would be worth a villa in southern France’ (Schott 1972). Of course, as it turns out, the biographies came first, followed thirty years later by fictional accounts on paper and screen. The public image – or images – of Sylvia Plath, as well as the criticism devoted to her, is my object of study. It is certainly evident that Plath demonstrates the relevance of Boris Tomaševskij’s 1923 essay on ‘Literature and Biography’, in which the Russian formalist argues that it is essential to consider how the biography of a poet operates in the reader’s consciousness. The important thing is not the individual’s factual life and whether the perception of it is correct, but how the image of an author affects the reception of his or her work. Thus, Tomaševskij distinguishes between ‘writers with biographies and writers without biographies’, between those who are the subject of anecdotes and biographical stories and those who are unknown to the public or appear as neutral (Tomaševskij 1995, 89). Poets moving from one category to the other, like Plath did after her suicide, make for interesting study. Irrespective of context, there is, no doubt, a theoretical point to all of this. The reception of Sylvia Plath’s life and work, my case in point, should be considered a general reminder of how important the reader’s contribution is in his or her attempt to make sense of texts. Reading in vacuo is hardly reading at all; instead, making sense of texts involves making use of them. As we have seen, students of the Plath reception have shelves upon shelves of texts, which they actively use to make sense of the author and the world.

CHAPTER ONE THE CONSTITUTION OF A POET

Sylvia Plath’s remarkable position today is only partly due to the brilliance of her writing. How and when she died has been just as decisive for her reputation. Irving Howe in 1972 identified the formula behind Sylvia Plath’s public acclaim as a ‘Glamour of Fatality’ (1972, 88). A cultural fascination with suicide and the young dead converged with a popular fascination of literary celebrity and the need of an emerging political movement to make a special case out of Plath. Killing herself in the same year that The Feminine Mystique (1963) was published by Betty Friedan, and leaving behind two small children and a manuscript of outstanding poems, Plath seemed to confirm romantic notions about the poet and to demonstrate the difficulties women artists had of surviving in a man’s world. Her reputation grew with the women’s movement. She was canonized as a genius and a martyr, and those closest to her were made accountable for her tragic end. The pervasive image of Sylvia Plath as an exceptional person and a unique poet is usually accounted for by her individual qualities. To expand upon the understanding of her public position, I would like to stress the tradition of author worship and the use of exemplary figures in literature. Detouring by Plath’s grave and posthumous reputation, I intend to give a short account of this tradition and to evaluate other reasons for placing her within it than the connection established by Katha Pollitt, who nominated Ted Hughes as ‘the most notorious literary spouse in history’ but for ‘the possible exception of Xantippe’ (1998, 4). As Plath’s husband, widower, editor, copyright holder, and manager of her literary estate, Hughes has played an important part in the reception. A presentation of his views and actions, along with Aurelia Plath’s, is therefore included in the pages that follow. I return to a discussion of how Sylvia Plath functions as a literary celebrity in the final chapter of the book.

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Chapter One

Life after Death The extraordinary afterlife of Sylvia Plath commences with a piece entitled ‘A Poet’s Epitaph’, which showed up in The Observer six days after she committed suicide. This ‘obituary’ consisted of four poems, a photograph of Sylvia Plath holding her baby daughter, and a short text by the paper’s poetry editor, Alfred – ‘Al’ – Alvarez. Alvarez supplies his readers with a few personal details about the deceased but does not mention the cause of her sudden death. Rather, he focuses on her literary mastery and presents her as ‘the most gifted woman poet of our time’, an artist who in the previous months had written ‘almost as though possessed’. In her last poems, she had been systematically experimenting with ‘that narrow, violent area between the viable and the impossible, between experience which can be transmuted into poetry and that which is overwhelming’ (Alvarez 1963a). Together with the printed poems, ‘Edge’, ‘The Fearful’, ‘Kindness’, and ‘Contusion’, all composed shortly before her death, Alvarez transmits a spooky atmosphere with his message: ‘She leaves two small children. The loss to literature is inestimable’. It was as if the poems spoke from the grave, accentuating how weak the mooring to everyday life is. When ‘[t]he blood jet is poetry, / There is no stopping it’ (‘Kindness’). Seemingly notified in advance, death appears as inevitable. The epitaph resulted in an immediate interest in Sylvia Plath, an interest maintained by obituaries, prestigious journals, and a memorial broadcast made by Alvarez for BBC radio. In the course of 1963, poems and essays were printed in The Critical Quarterly, London Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Punch, New Statesman, Poetry, The New Yorker, The Listener, The Review, Encounter, and The Observer (Tabor 1987).1 Introducing ten Plath poems in Encounter, Ted Hughes emphasizes the intensity of her spirits, an uncompromising thoroughness evident in everything she did, and – despite the poems’ prevailing sense of doom – a genuine love of life. During her final months, Sylvia Plath developed a new, quicker manner of composition. Acknowledged by Hughes (1963), the death of Otto Plath had been a defining moment for her. Some years later, George Steiner – a critic and, at the time, a fellow of Churchill College in Cambridge – recalls the ‘shock’ caused by Encounter, and he imagines it then, in 1969, still to be reverberating. As they stood there side by side, her ten poems represented ‘an act of extremity, personal and formal, obliging one to try and re-think the whole question of the poet’s condition and of the condition of language after modernism and war’. For Steiner, Plath addressed nothing less than

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Theodor Adorno’s dictum, ‘no poetry after Auschwitz’ (1969, 247–48). When Ariel was published in 1965, reviewers treated it as a literary sensation. They called attention to the poet’s original way of expressing herself and the nightmarish atmosphere in her universe. The Colossus was seen as a piece of poetical apprenticeship leading up to Ariel, the manifestation of her true voice. Some critics reacted to an indiscriminate use of rhetorical devices and to the juxtaposition of rather trivial personal experiences with the fate of the Jews. Word got around that Sylvia Plath was an obsessed and suffering poet, both terrified and fascinated by death – an incarnation of the brilliant artist victimized by personal problems and cruel circumstances. As the cause of her death became more widely known, the discussion intensified. The high price she seemed to have paid for her art added an electrifying dimension to her poems. Over a period of twenty years, Ariel sold more than half a million copies. The Bell Jar, for which Sylvia Plath could find no publisher in the United States during her lifetime, sold three million paperback copies from 1972 to 1996, after its initial publication in the US in 1971 (McCullough 1996, xiv). Winter Trees and Crossing the Water, which consist of remaining poems, came out that same year. Special and limited editions flourished; British and American editions differed. Aurelia Plath edited Letters Home in 1975, and a collection of prose texts, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, appeared in 1977 (extended edition 1979). Collected Poems was awarded the American Pulitzer prize for 1981. The Journals of Sylvia Plath followed in 1982, with Ted Hughes as its co-editor. While the large number of titles gave the impression of a writer who was still alive, the books conveyed different and contradictory sides of Plath as a person and as a writer. She was associated with confessional poets, such as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, who used themselves and their own experiences as subjects, ostensibly without reservation. ‘Alas, I can only tell my own story’, Lowell observes in the last book he wrote, Day by Day (1977; in ‘Unwanted’), letting the readers in on his own life crises, divorces, and infidelities. He even included bits of letters from frustrated wives, without asking for their permission. Treated in this confessional vein, Plath’s work was interpreted literally and biographically, an inclination still endorsed by the publishing houses. Blurbs, quotations from reviews, and photos on book covers encourage readers to conflate art with life and fictional characters with biographical persons.2 Critics explained their biographical and confessional readings by claiming direct access to the poet’s intentions. According to Richard Howard, ‘she kept meaning us [to see her life], from the vantage of her

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Chapter One

death’ (1969, 416). He then duly adapts his interpretation to this understanding of what Plath was all about. Alan Brownjohn holds the poet herself accountable for the massive preoccupation that others attach to her life and death: ‘More than any other poet of our time she dictated – altogether unconsciously – the terms on which her work would be approached by most of her critics after she died’ (1982, 165). Repeated targeting of those who apparently had deserted the lyrical ‘I’ resulted in Ted Hughes being turned into a synonym for ‘oppressive male’ and ‘deceitful husband’. Otto Plath came to personify the worst of patriarcy. Aurelia Plath, as the wicked mother, was made responsible for an exalted manner and conventional views which readers of Letters Home found discomforting. They could not get the ‘Sivvy’ of the letters to correspond with Ariel’s original and merciless persona. What did not fit into the idealized image was explained away, defined as false, and attributed to unfortunate influences. In the first years after Sylvia Plath died, Ted Hughes was able to keep his privacy. But at the end of the 1960s, criticism against him increased proportionally with her standing as a cult figure. An insatiable appetite for biographical information grew. At readings, Hughes risked being received with hissing and disgust-ridden resolutions. Some wished him dead, and violently so. Conclusive in the case against him was that in 1969, Assia Wevill, ‘the other woman’ for whom he left his wife, actually killed herself and their four-year-old daughter. Everything Sylvia Plath had said and written, whether her words were originally meant for private eyes only or for a larger audience, was attributed with crucial importance. When the public learned that Ted Hughes had changed the poet’s own ordering and content choices in Ariel, destroyed her last diary, and made cuts to both her letters and journals, a big commotion ensued. Hughes was portrayed as a censor who treated his wife’s work just as badly as he had treated her. It didn’t exactly help Hughes’s case that he had asked his own sister, Olwyn, to manage the estate and act as the agent for her dead sister-in-law. The relationship between Sylvia and Olwyn was known to have been on the strained side. However, Olwyn Hughes needed a way to make a living after she resigned from her job in Paris to help care for Plath’s children. And in her role as family advocate, she did not favour diplomatic euphemisms. She met accusations of censorship and oppression with allegations of lies and mythmaking. Within a decade of her death, a multi-layered image existed of Sylvia Plath, rendering her as a death-driven, extremely gifted, and disturbed poet on the one hand, and as a competent and fiercely ambitious woman on the

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other. Depending on the informers, the biographical angle, or what texts were being highlighted and how, she was seen as both an implacable avenger and a woman who was wronged and victimized by husband and parents. Published chronicles tended to imitate popular story structures and conform to the narrators’ own fancies. The readiness of critics to bang the big drum and to pronounce Plath as remarkable in one way or another is visible in George Steiner’s quotation above. Perhaps to give his judgment added authority, he actually imagined having met her personally. In his essay, fittingly called ‘In Extremis’, Steiner writes that Sylvia Plath – then a nineteen-year-old college student – came to interview him in London for Mademoiselle during the summer of 1952. Describing her as a ‘poised and conventionally inquisitive’ young lady, which was typical for the kind of guest-editors these American glossies ‘picked up’, he declares himself haunted by the lack of any distinct recollections. Only the ‘weedy photographer’ had managed to impart an impression (Steiner 1969, 247). Yet the reason why Steiner remembers so little is probably not because Plath’s personality matched her ‘all-too-predictable-article on “Poets on Campus”’, but because they actually never met. Sylvia Plath worked as a guest editor on Mademoiselle’s special college issue in June of 1953 and conducted her interviews with five young poets by mail (Love 1979, N7; Wagner-Martin 1987, 98).3 She did not visit England until 1955. As if they had shaken off some kind of spell, critics would later distance themselves from how they had reacted to Ariel when the book first was published, in March 1965. Using his review of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems (1981) as an opportunity to look back, Denis Donoghue depicts the doxa he subscribed to then as so pervasive and forceful that we get the impression of brainwashing. At the time Ariel came out, risk was imbued with a heroic nimbus, and madness was believed to constitute ‘divinest sense’. In his review for The New York Times Book Review, Donoghue contradicts the traditional concept of rhetoric as a discipline opposed to authenticity. Instead, he regards rhetoric as an instrument applied to suffuse hegemonic ideas with a ‘jargon of authenticity’ so as to appear all the more convincing. Sylvia Plath’s death was widely used to serve such a rhetorical purpose, supporting the belief that ‘the only valid experience was an experience of the abyss’ (1981, 1). Donoghue does not think of the early reception as ‘wrong’; he merely thinks that the Ariel readers were in some respects ‘naïve’ because things escaped them which later became self-evident to him (1981, 30). But is this actually a question of naïveté? Hasn’t the critic here described a rather common phenomenon? Only with the passage of time, when and if our

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Chapter One

perspective has changed sufficiently, are we able to discover the limiting and lacking elements in earlier beliefs, at which point we think of ourselves as having reached some higher horizon of understanding. Mustering objections to a hegemonic discourse from within and question the seemingly normal order of things, or to realize that one’s own prejudgments might be just as conventional as those conditioned by other codes, is virtually impossible. Of course, the likelihood that authority will be challenged increases with the diversification of culture and the existence of rivalling schools.

Conflicting Interests Ted Hughes inherited the delicate job of managing and publishing texts which many saw as devastating attacks on himself and other members of the family. As executor of the estate, he not only had to consider questions of privacy but also how to acquire the greatest benefit for Sylvia Plath’s literary interests. These contradictory obligations proved unsolvable. He was accused of publishing either too little or too much or accused of both at the same time. Although scholars and Plath aficionados seemed omnivorous and demanded full access to her complete writings, critics judged several of the published titles – Winter Trees, Crossing the Water, Johnny Panic, and Letters Home – as a disservice to her reputation. The publishing history of Sylvia Plath’s work may be read as a reluctant jerk-and-pull disclosure and, at the same time, the outcome of a dialectic interaction between parties who wanted to mediate different images of the poet and of their relationships with her. A persistent urge among readers to allocate blame and interpret Plath’s work literally, put Ted Hughes and Aurelia Plath on the defensive. Both of them tried to prevent a biographical reading, while at the same time connecting at least some of her work to a life they knew from the inside and claimed to understand better than others. Their reactions may be seen as protective strategies proceeding from close ties with a poet whose eloquence – in Diane Middlebrook’s words – was stirred by negative emotions, and whose reputation rests on work written after she had dismantled ‘the structure of parent/child, teacher/student, mentor/apprentice’ that prevailed within her principal relationships (2003, 128). In an effort to divert public scrutiny from himself, Hughes emphasized the importance of his wife’s relations with her dead father and her own children. An awareness of abstraction was, according to him, necessary when reading her poems, since she did not write about specific persons but about archetypes.

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One month before Ariel was launched, Hughes published a short outline in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin (1965) of Sylvia Plath’s background and her way of composing. In this piece, Hughes expands on views he had presented in Encounter: Sylvia Plath grew up in an atmosphere of intellectual competition and Germanic discipline; she worshipped her father and was always the perfect student bent on excelling. Her love of life was as possessive as it was uncritical: ‘It fastened her to cups, plants, creatures, vistas, people, in a steady ecstasy’. Ariel hardly resembled any other poetry, but the book is her: ‘Everything she did was just like this, and this is just like her – but permanent’. Hughes considers his wife’s poetic development amazing both because of its suddenness and its completeness. Contrary to how she used to work, Ariel had been composed at high speed. The birth of their two children had apparently triggered the heightening of her creative process. Yet Hughes also describes the poems as fruits from many years of labouring to find the right words and to invent intricate rhymes and metrical schemes. The resulting verses are ‘odd-looking’, the vocabulary ‘one of the widest and most subtly discriminating … in the modern poetry of our language’, marked by a musicality of an almost mathematical kind. Behind the poems resides a ‘fierce and uncompr[om]ising nature’ and ‘a child desperately infatuated with the world’ (Hughes 1965). Around the same time, Hughes gave a rare interview in The Guardian about his own background, work, and life with Sylvia Plath. He calls their marriage an all-absorbing working partnership, free from rivalry. They had mutually influenced and inspired each other ‘like two feet, each one using everything the other did’, writing ‘out of one brain’. While she had a great desire to succeed with novels and short stories, he values only her poems as works of genius (in Horder 1965). Hughes in the interview does not mention her death or the cause of it. For more than thirty years, he consistently sought to limit the attention given to personal details, and he mostly stuck to his early interpretations. Accounting for the chronological order of Plath’s poems, Hughes in 1966 labelled her way of writing as mythological and – unlike Anne Sexton’s and Robert Lowell’s – as neither confessional nor personal. In Sylvia Plath’s poetry, autobiographical details are set out as masks for ‘dramatis personae of nearly supernatural qualities’; family and everything else spoke the fundamental language of disintegration and renewal. Hughes uses words such as ‘clairvoyance’, ‘mediumship’, and ‘psychic gifts’ to characterize his wife’s special talents. Perhaps conveniently for him, poetry like Plath’s, which is filled with ‘emblematic visionary events’, escapes ordinary analysis (1966, 81–82).4 Still, he believes the poetry

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reflects her inner process of cognition because within her, artistic and personal development were the same. And they were the same in nature too, he maintains, thus imbuing the events of Plath’s life with a sense of inevitability. In a 1982 article, where he discusses her journals, Hughes claims that the root system of her talent consisted of ‘a deep and inclusive inner crisis’ that probably traced back to the death of her father and settled into its chief symbols at the time of her first suicide attempt. Hughes does not doubt that the shock treatment and ‘death’ she went through in 1953 ‘fused her dangerous inheritance into a matrix from which everything later seemed to develop’. Conforming to his account, Sylvia Plath went so far as to describe that suicide attempt as a bid to get back at her father (1982a, 88). If she had been able to free herself from ‘that one wound that wracked her, she might have changed, led a normal life, even perhaps have felt healthy enough to stop writing’, he later speculates. Hughes goes on to claim that all her creative work tells the same story of ‘Oedipal love for her father, her complex relationship with her mother, the attempt at suicide, the shock therapy’ (in Negev 1998a). In this – that is his – version, neither Plath’s story nor her root system had anything to do with her husband. Whether the psychological process taking place within Sylvia Plath is seen as a technique of crisis management or as the uncovering of roots, it largely happened outside her ordinary consciousness and, according to Hughes, seemingly went on undisturbed by outer upheavals in her life. However, the inner workings of the process reveal themselves in her poems (1982a, 88–89). To study the chronology of the texts is consequently helpful for understanding them, Hughes states. Very little of her poetry was ‘occasional’. Rather, the texts form one long poem where the individual poems constitute ‘chapters in a mythology’. At stake for her was the mending of a shattered self or the finding of a new one (1966, 81). Seen in this light, the poems are by-products of her central quest. Hughes defines Plath’s real creation as ‘that inner gestation and eventual birth of a new self-conquering self, to which her journal bears witness, and which proved itself so overwhelmingly in the Ariel poems of 1962’. The fact that her new self could ultimately not save her confirms what is known about this kind of ‘conflict’, he claims. There is no guarantee that victories will last, and those who turn their back on a defeated enemy are in the greatest danger (1982a, 98–99). In his foreword to the first edition of Sylvia Plath’s journals, Hughes compares the changes going on within her to ‘a process of alchemy’. Once more, he terms the apprentice writings as thrown off ‘impurities’ and ‘by-

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products of the internal work’, whereas Ariel and the associated later poems are proof that she finally achieved the birth of a new real self in the death of an old one. Except for the journals, all the other writing constitutes, in his words, ‘the waste products of its gestation’ and ‘the visible faces of her lesser selves, her false or provisional selves’. The journals – which he calls ‘her autobiography’ – show how she struggled with these warring selves (Hughes 1987, xiii–xv; my italics). However, there are good reasons for arguing that the journals actually contain many set pieces and writing exercises. In what way does this affect his theory? Hughes was far from alone in expanding on Sylvia Plath’s real and false selves. But commentators disagree on what they see as one or the other. In a later essay, Hughes does not differentiate as sharply as he used to between the various parts of her production and notes that Ariel and The Bell Jar are ‘closely related’. Having been ‘gestated’ in parallel and in the same imagination, they both utilize ‘a genetic code of symbolic signs that has few equals for consistency and precision’ and operate on the same upper and lower level (Hughes 1994a, 8). Yet they differ as to how the ritual of rebirth functions: more positively in the novel than the poems, where the possibility for an authentic rebirth is defied more openly. The conflicting interests between his roles become evident when Hughes, as her editor, writes about the widower of Sylvia Plath – i.e. himself – in the third person singular, explaining how ‘her husband destroyed [one of her last journals], because he did not want her children to have to read it (in those days he regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)’ (1982a, 86). Analysing the evolution of ‘Sheep in Fog’, Hughes argues that ‘the Ariel poems document Plath’s struggle to deal with a double situation – when her sudden separation from her husband coincided with a crisis in her traumatic feelings about her father’s death’ (1994d, 191). Clearly, Hughes also struggled with a double situation. In subsequent chapters, I return to reactions caused by statements like these – Diane Middlebrook has for instance appropriated the expression ‘her husband’ as the title for a book published in 2003 – and evaluations of Hughes’s work as Plath’s literary executor.

Trapped Into Her Past For years, Aurelia Plath succeeded in stalling The Bell Jar’s release in America because she felt herself and her close friends to be unjustly treated in the book. She did not surrender until plans of a pirated version became known and the estate, as a consequence of US law at the time, risked losing its copyright (McCullough 1996, xiii–iv). But she did not

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give in gladly. Her distress is apparent in a letter she sent to Harper & Row, which was quoted in a biographical postscript to the American edition (1971). Mrs Plath realized that no matter how much pain The Bell Jar caused, it would still be published. All the same, she needed to impart what Sylvia had told her about the book in early July of 1962: ‘What I've done,’ I remember her saying, ‘is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color – it’s a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown. … I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.’ Then she went on to say, ‘My second book will show that same world as seen through the eyes of health.’ (in Ames 1972, 214)

According to Aurelia Plath, the book’s very title endorses the point she wanted to make, and that ought to guide the reading of it. As for the poetic licence her daughter had taken, she was quite explicit: Practically every character in The Bell Jar represents someone – often in caricature – whom Sylvia loved; each person had given freely of time, thought, affection, and, in one case, financial help during those agonizing six months of breakdown in 1953 … [A]s this book stands by itself, it represents the basest ingratitude. (214–15)5

Here and elsewhere, Mrs Plath expresses hurt at the way she finds herself portrayed in her daughter’s work. In spite of this, she continued to insist that at home, they had known another Sylvia. Ingratitude was not at the core of her personality, and for that very reason, Sylvia became frightened when The Bell Jar showed signs of becoming a success, Aurelia Plath maintained. To her brother Warren, Sylvia had written, ‘this must never be published in the United States’ (215). It is doubtful whether Sylvia Plath noticed any acclaim for her novel before she died. After all, she failed to acquire an American publisher for the book. Ted Hughes in 1982 commented that if she felt qualms about publishing ‘this supercharged piece of her autobiography, she made no mention of it at the time, either in conversation or in her diary’ (1982a, 98). Prompted by her publisher in London, she had considered ‘the libel issue’ and made a list of minor corrections that were necessary for changing specific factual references. According to Sylvia Plath’s own account, most of the characters in The Bell Jar are either fictitious or made indistinguishable, except for Esther’s mother, who is based on Aurelia. However, she detected nothing defamatory in Mrs Greenwood – ‘a dutiful, hard-working woman whose beastly daughter is ungrateful to her’.6 Could

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she really have been that unaware of how destructive the portrait is? On the other hand, in a letter to ‘Dear James’ at Heinemann, she assumed correctly that her mother was not of the suing kind. As best as she could, Aurelia Plath did insist that she was not Mrs Greenwood, whose character was, she claimed, a composite of five different people they had both known (in Toomey 1978).7 As it turned out, all objections were in vain. Upon its publication in the US, The Bell Jar became a tremendous success. The reception confirmed Aurelia Plath’s worst fears, and as a result, she suffered a heart attack. She needed to modify the public’s image of her, of Sylvia, and of their relationship. Just before Letters Home was published, she explained to a local Wellesley paper that this new book ‘more than anything else’ projects her daughter as she saw her (in Ouellet 1975, 1). She was also confident that the letters revealed the Sylvia they ‘all’ knew (in Robinson 1976, 515). ‘I had to have Sylvia speak in her truest voice, which I know comes through in these letters’, she reasons in another interview, where she rationalizes her efforts to publish their correspondence (in Robertson 1979; my italics). After Mrs Plath capitulated with The Bell Jar, Ted Hughes could hardly veto an edition of letters home from ‘Sivvy’, but he did exercise his copyright to safeguard his own and their children’s privacy. He warned his mother-in-law against including too much of Sylvia’s abundant enthusiasm and advised her to fashion the narration carefully, like a novel. To avoid a false impression of completeness, he underscored the imperativeness of keeping the book short. In the absence of a biography, the letters would be interpreted as authentic background material, yet they had the potential to elicit attacks because they gave such a one-sided portrait of Plath (Hughes 2007, 351–53). Letters Home did garner a sufficient amount of interest. Compared to other Plath titles listed in Stephen Tabor’s 1987 bibliography, only The Bell Jar received more reviews, while the poems attracted notably less attention.8 But the letters did not have the neutralizing effect that Aurelia Plath had planned. Rather, Hughes’s warnings of what could happen if she did not make drastic cuts proved to be correct. The reception is interesting for what it reveals about the likes and dislikes within the literary field, as well as among readers who on the one hand think the letters are too much and who on the other hand criticize the book for its omissions. According to Jill Neville (1976) in The Sydney Morning Herald, the inverted mirror held up to the romantic poet at the heart of a booming Plath industry was not much appreciated. While Neville describes the letters as ‘touching’ and ‘quite dazzling in their ordinariness’, other critics deemed them to be indicative of a pathological mother–daughter relationship. Harriet Rosenstein,

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who for her PhD dissertation at Brandeis University in 1973 had written a critical biography of Plath,9 claims that the editor’s introduction smacks of ‘maternal self-sacrifice’ and describes the letters as ‘embarrassing to read, painful to contemplate’ (1975, 45). They form an interminable report card of achievements aiming to satisfy an unappeasable maternal demand. ‘Everything Sivvy “shared” was payment to the bank that held rightful title to her life’ (46). Peter Ackroyd’s review was even entitled ‘Dear Mummy, I hate you’ (1976). Erica Jong by contrast sees Letters Home as an ‘immensely valuable work’, and she expresses her gratitude to Mrs Plath and Ted Hughes for letting it be published. Yet, like numerous colleagues, she deplores the ‘many ellipses’ and the ‘appalling’ secrecy surrounding the poet’s last months of life (1975, 10). Responding to an accusation of whitewashing, Harper’s Frances McCullough states that Aurelia Plath had not been concerned with sparing either herself or her daughter. Apart from private material that was really nobody’s business and hurtful comments that Ted Hughes had asked them to remove, most of the deletions could be explained by an obvious need to edit and downsize a voluminous manuscript. Asking readers to remember their own letters home, McCullough (1976) insists that if a complex person like Sylvia Plath came through as one-sided, the censor at work was the daughter herself and not her mother.10 Reviewers reacted with irony, disconcertion, and denunciation to Sylvia Plath’s capacity for uninterrupted gushing. In her monthly column of brief reviews for The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams finds the girlish glee ‘unbelievable and even revolting’ (1976). Harriet Rosenstein associates the language and sentiments with ‘Mademoiselle at midcentury’ (1975, 45). To critic and scholar Hugh Kenner, the letter writer sounds ‘like the heroine of a Seventeen story’, resembling a million other unremarkable adolescent diarists (1976, 459). Most unusual, however, was how Plath still poured out the Seventeen idioms as a Fulbright scholar and kept up her ‘usual unmodulated burble’ right to the end. ‘Did [Ted Hughes] suddenly tire of being trapped in a Seventeen story?’, Kenner wonders (460). Peter Ackroyd, at the time twenty-six-years-old and with one book of poetry to show for himself, claims Letters Home proves Sylvia Plath to be ‘a minor poet’ and that ‘her work had no staying power’ (1976). Larry McMurtry likewise regards the letters as a disservice to Sylvia Plath. The best of her work had been published years ago, he points out, ‘but it will be a long time before we have finished having the worst’ (1975). For reviewers, Letters Home poses what seems to be an unyielding contradiction. How could ‘fierce Sylvia’ – the persona that readers already

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knew – be reconciled with ‘sunny Sivvy’ – the daughter they were offered (Rosenstein 1975, 45)? In writer Rosemary Dinnage’s words, the dilemma was how to envisage the two voices ‘as one and the same person, capable of using language in such totally opposite ways’ (1976). One effect of Sivvy’s language was that the syrupy coating obviously produced some kind of blindness for readers. Those who say that Letters Home lacks in woes and complaints and only presents the bright side of life cannot have read the book closely. Many of the letters are desperate and depressive laments that were difficult for her mother to stomach no matter how much Aurelia Plath was used to her daughter’s ups and downs. On 16 October 1962, Sylvia Plath sent her mother two letters, begging that somebody from home, her aunt or perhaps her sister-in-law whom she had never met, could come to England and help out for six weeks. Two days later she wrote a new letter, telling her mother to ignore the previous pleading, but Aurelia Plath had already cabled the local midwife to hire assistance for Sylvia (Letters Home, 468–71). Throughout their life together, Mrs Plath supported her daughter as best she could, commenting on the reception of Letters Home this way: ‘They say she wrote the letters to keep me happy, to hide the darker side. Sylvia? Putting herself out day after day? The reason she wrote those letters was to get a reply, and she always did’ (in Robertson 1979). What else was a mother who received so many declarations of daughterly love and admiration to believe? The mentioned letter from Sylvia Plath dated 18 October 1962 ends in a typical way: ‘I love and live for letters’. According to Aurelia Plath, both Sylvia and Ted urged her to come and visit them during the summer of 1962. The whole purpose of her stay was to take over the domestic chores and tend to the children, she writes in a letter to Judith Kroll, author of Chapters in a Mythology (1976), one of the first full-scale studies of Plath’s poetry. Sylvia moreover suggested that she buy a house near to them in Devon, a request that troubled Aurelia because she had no intention of fulfilling it. Mrs Plath tried explaining to Kroll the conflicting bequest her daughter had left them when she died. While negative feelings for most people usually dissipate with time, with Sylvia they were written at the moment of intensity to become as ineradicable as an epitaph engraved on a tombstone. … [S]he has posthumous fame – at what price to her children, to those of us who loved her so dearly and whom she has trapped into her past. The love remains – and the hurt. There is no escape for us.11

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Interviewed in The New York Times in connection with the staging of a play built on Letters Home, Mrs Plath expands on the difficulties The Bell Jar caused for her family. Given that the book was generally accepted as an autobiography, whenever Aurelia Plath spoke her own name, people would react and talk to her as if she were ‘Mrs. Greenwood, the uncaring mother’ who ‘didn’t go to see her daughter’. She had to relive the suicide over and over again, and the same experience plagued her son, his wife, and their children (in Robertson 1979). ‘I have only to look at people to know if they’ve read The Bell Jar’, she said to another interviewer, voicing despair at what had been written about her by people who did not know them at all (in Toomey 1978). Contrary to Ted Hughes, Aurelia Plath describes her daughter’s creative process as a kind of alchemy in reverse. Making use of everything, she ‘often transmuted gold into lead’.12 Persons were caricatured, characters fused, and experiences manipulated for artistic purposes. In a note for one of her Mademoiselle stories, Sylvia Plath writes that those she met through summer jobs tended ‘to turn up dismembered, or otherwise, in stories’. Mrs Plath believed this point ought to be remembered in connection with much of her daughter’s work (A. Plath 1975, 37). Letters Home provides an example of how a young Sylvia Plath transformed activities with her grandfather into cherished memories of ‘daddy’, which she then put into a story where fusions of father and grandfather occur several times (22). Aurelia Plath held on to the portrait she had painted in Letters Home of her daughter and their life together, insisting ten years later in her contribution to Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath (1985) that this was [t]he only Sylvia we – my son and I, for example – knew. … We were a close, affectionate family, supportive of each other, and Sylvia required the most consideration. We all adored her and catered to our ‘prima donna,’ as we teasingly called her. She was merry and witty, refreshingly original. (1985, 214)

Yet according to her mother, Sylvia went through a ‘tragic transformation’ (214). After the shock treatment in 1953, it seemed to them that ‘Sylvia became her “own double”’ (216). When troubled, she sought release by writing out her fury and frustration. Returning once more to her daughter’s habit of blending persons and manipulating events, Aurelia Plath borrows an expression from Richard Wilbur and calls her daughter’s writing process a ‘violation of actual circumstances’ (214). Nowhere was this ‘violation’ more evident than in The Bell Jar, where ‘she transformed personalities into cruel and false

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caricatures’ (216). Mrs Plath describes it as a virtual need for her daughter to violate actual circumstances, rearranging truth for the sake of art. Since she herself recognized ‘the real-life character or event’, Aurelia Plath claims that this phenomenon also dominates autobiographical essays like ‘Ocean 1212-W’. In ‘The Disquieting Muses’, a poem which addresses an ambitious mother whom Aurelia Plath assumed to be modelled on herself, Sylvia Plath not only distorts her own experience to make the mother appear in a negative light, she also appropriates and defaces scenes from Aurelia’s own childhood. Letters Home remains Aurelia Plath’s most important contribution to the Plath literature. She pronounced ‘Letter Written in the Actuality of Spring’, printed in Ariel Ascending, to be her final public statement on the loss and constant pain that ‘no critic of [Sylvia’s] writing has ever seemed to sense fully’ (1985, 214). This feeling of being trapped, and the futility of efforts to set things straight, was an experience that Mrs Plath shared with Ted Hughes. Although she did not participate in public debates, her reactions to certain topics are preserved in annotations on letters and clippings now kept in the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College. ‘Absolutely false: We all loved her dearly + demonstrated our love constantly!’, she wrote in response to a critic who knowingly claimed that narcissism ‘kept Sylvia from achieving a satisfactory relationship with any other person, apparently due to a lack of love or response from her parents’.13

Whose Facts and Whose Rights? ‘I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life’, Ted Hughes states in a newspaper article in the spring of 1989, and continues: [o]therwise you, reader, might suddenly find yourself reinvented by a Mr Hayman who had decided that he owns your facts and can do what he likes with them, and you could then, I assure you, spend years struggling in court with some stranger for not having restrained the new ‘owner’. (1989c)

Hughes had become involved in a heated debate initiated by a letter to The Guardian from two literary pilgrims visiting Heptonstall. Discovering that the route to Sylvia Plath’s grave was unmarked and the tombstone missing, Julia Parnaby and Rachel Wingfield interpreted this as an indication of disrespect for the deceased. Other readers extended the criticism and demanded the facts be set on the table. It was Hughes’s burden to prove that he had not tried to prevent people from visiting the

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grave (Alvarez et al. 1989).14 Seen in retrospect and from afar, it is strange that the primary reaction was not one of consternation at the repeated vandalizing of the grave. On four occasions, the raised letters in her legal surname – Hughes – had been chiselled off the headstone. It was unlikely that groups normally associated with churchyard vandalisms stood behind these incidences. Still, questions were not asked about whom they were and whether their means could be justified if they intended to act on behalf of Sylvia Plath’s interests.15 On the contrary, Parnaby and Wingfield, in a second letter (1989b), anxiously declared themselves to be terribly sorry if anybody had the impression that they were criticizing sisters in feminism or the people of Heptonstall for the neglect of Plath’s memory. They clearly meant to blame Hughes. The women and their followers imply that the desecration was something Hughes had more or less asked for by putting his name on the tombstone and burying Plath in the same graveyard as other members of his family. He was consequently reprimanded for delaying repairs. Hughes replied to these critics by explaining that everything the family had put on the grave for decoration over the years was stolen. Signposting the grave as another tourist attraction would just make it easier for the vandals to target and would also rob the family of one of their last remaining private places. Hughes was answering charges made by, among others, the same Mr Hayman mentioned in the quotation above. Ronald Hayman demanded full access to the poet, asserting an urgent need for biographical knowledge about Sylvia Plath that he accused Hughes of withholding. He likewise charged Hughes with putting undue pressure on biographers who ventured to write her life story. ‘Nobody owns fact’, Hayman reasoned (1989a). However, if we are to believe Ted Hughes, Hayman demonstrates a rather careless attitude in his reporting of the kind of information he asked for. Hughes claims to have found fifteen factual errors or distortions in Hayman’s article on Sylvia Plath, ‘The poet and the unquiet grave’. According to Hughes, the participants in this debate served to verify what he had realized early on. Regardless of declarations to the contrary, it was hardly the truth they cared about. Among all those who said they climbed the barricade for the sake of facts, no one had taken up arms to correct what Hughes himself regarded as one of the worst standing lies: that he and his wife were de facto divorced at the time of her death. In the case of a divorce, both his life and the children’s lives would have been very different. Whatever Sylvia Plath had said to various people at different times, she never touched any divorce papers and had no plans of doing so, Hughes writes. Although they lived separately at the time of her

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suicide, they had continued to discuss the future quite freely, and he maintains that their discussions had moved away from talk of divorce, in contrast to what others presumed (1989b). Hughes regarded the assumptions made by outsiders as just more proof of the deeply-rooted ‘Plath Fantasia’. In the way he depicts his situation in two long letters dated 20 and 22 of April 1989, appearing in The Guardian and The Independent respectively, his relationship with Plath’s audience emerges as a never-ending Quixotic struggle. When Hughes tried to correct mistakes, he was accused of censorship. If he did not want to engage in such fantasizing, this too was interpreted as ‘an attempt to suppress Free Speech’. And if his corrections were accepted, they rarely displaced any presumed or sullied ‘truths’. The tombstone debate followed an established pattern in an ongoing battle over Sylvia Plath’s posthumous name, thereby exposing people’s intense identification with the poet and her work. Perhaps the strong emotions involved can in part explain the lack of conventional reactions to the desecration of a grave.16 As Hayman observes, her readers did feel personally involved, ‘almost as if she were a member of the family’, caring passionately about how she is commemorated (1989a). To this, Hughes retorts that by making her a part of their families, her own family became ‘a bit of a nuisance’ (1989c). A study of this debate over Plath’s grave naturally leads to fundamental questions about literary genres and rhetoric. It raises questions about the relationship between fact and fiction and directs our attention to how differently both concepts may be interpreted, depending on the motivation of the writer and the historical context. Questions are also raised about how other peoples’ lives are used for personal ends, what consequences research and scholarly speculations may have for relatives, and what consideration is owed to the ones left behind. Where should we draw the line between free speech and the right to information on the one hand and the right to privacy on the other? Or, as biographer Ian Hamilton summarizes his pursuit of J.D. Salinger, who took Hamilton to court as a way to avoid unwanted invasion, ‘at what point does decent curiosity become indecent?’ (1988a, 202). How can objects of interest, their family, and their friends protect themselves, be it against the truth or a distorted version of it? The treatment of and public reaction to Ted Hughes furthermore invites us to ask about the relevance of gender and/or sexual identity with regard to the involved parties. Poet and critic Alan Williamson has for his part pointed out that

26

Chapter One [t]wo of the most revered women poets of our time also had partners kill themselves during periods of estrangement. Neither was ever treated with anything other than the tactful silence such tragedies deserve. (1998, 11)

One of the women Williamson alludes to here could be Adrienne Rich. When leaving her husband, she became an outspoken lesbian. Applying the logic of this situation raises the question of whether the public would have been more forgiving of Hughes if he had left Sylvia Plath for another man. Yet a critical difference between these cases is that Rich did not have to deal with both a complicated literary legacy and a dead spouse. Without a doubt, the quality and stature of their respective work is one reason for the massive public interest in the Plath–Hughes saga. Similarly, fascination is added by the confessional element in Plath’s work, which her survivors could do little to affect. The problem, as Ian Hamilton put it, is that Plath may have been ‘an eloquent distortionist’ who was good at making others look bad, inventing narratives, playing roles, and wearing many masks (1992, 299). But, he asks, how do you reply to accusations made in a good poem – ‘by pointing out that it exaggerates, tells lies?’ (295). Most critics, biographers, and journalists writing about Sylvia Plath appear unconcerned with the kind of questions raised above. From the other side of the fence, Ted Hughes insisted that whoever discussed Plath’s life during their years of marriage necessarily had to write about him as well. His views met with little compassion from writers like the Plath biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. To her, his claim of constituting half of Plath’s story demonstrated an ‘immense, and obdurate, ego’ (1996, 55). In Birthday Letters, the poems Hughes published some months before dying of cancer in October 1998, he gives a poetic account of their marriage and what it was like to live on after his wife killed herself. Their tragedy became public, and everybody wanted a piece. One of the poems is entitled ‘Freedom of Speech’. Addressed to their children, ‘The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother’ tells the story of Plath’s grave. With a few exceptions, Birthday Letters speaks to a wife long dead. Hughes presents their meeting and its outcome as fated. Several poems comment on and take her texts as their point of departure. Even though the book is full of mythical allusions, and Hughes must have completed large parts of it during the same period he worked on Tales from Ovid (1997), Birthday Letters has mainly been read literally as an (auto)biographical account which, similar to so much of Plath’s own work, has been used to explain the writer’s life. As a rule, Ted Hughes refused to give interviews about his marriage to Sylvia Plath, and he did not contribute to any of the published biographies

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beyond correcting facts.17 No wonder then, perhaps, that Birthday Letters was received as his version of their story. In spite of a growing disillusionment with regard to never receiving validation for his points of view, Hughes kept sending letters to rectify allegations he could not leave unchallenged. The controversy over the headstone was in this sense quite typical.

Biographers on the Move Charges of censorship against the estate by far outweigh appreciations of assistance and cooperation. In particular, biographers were active in disputing the use of and access to facts. Their account of the situation differed radically from that given by Ted Hughes. He did not recognize at all ‘the firm grip’ that Ronald Hayman claimed he had kept on them. For Hughes, the only, but still quite limited, means of control available to the estate was the right to grant or deny requests to use quotations beyond the ‘fair dealing’/‘fair use’ principle that was applicable to all writers. Edward Butscher, the first biographer to write at length on Plath’s life, assumed great liberties in Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (1976) and included material for which he never obtained permission to quote. Earlier unpublished poems by Plath thus became registered under his personal copyright in the Library of Congress, despite his illegal use of them. Because Plath’s American publisher did not want to go to court, the estate also dismissed a transatlantic lawsuit. Hughes rather regretted that later, when he in 1982 was sued for not having restrained what Butscher wrote about a certain person. This is the case alluded to in the paragraph quoted earlier. Biographical information supplied by Butscher had been made more explicit in a film version of The Bell Jar, and an acquaintance of Plath’s who thought a specific character was based on her, reacted to the portrayal. The resulting lawsuit lasted five years, costing several people – but not Butscher – many hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to Hughes. The next biographer, Linda Wagner-Martin, then went ahead and printed what she wanted, ‘confident that nobody in their right mind would carry a lawsuit across the Atlantic into the US’. Her mistaken facts were repeated when Hayman reviewed her work, Sylvia Plath: A Biography (1987). Hughes had at the time ‘patiently’ corrected Wagner-Martin’s ‘stubborn absurdities’, although ‘for some reason’ this information was not passed on to the readers of Hayman’s new article, Hughes declares (1989c). The numerous biographies and the abundance of sensational newspaper items that targeted Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes illustrate how marketable

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a topic they had become. In the 1 February 1987 edition of The Mail on Sunday, big headlines and revelling journalists depicted the aforementioned lawsuit as basically a feminist plot to claim revenge for Plath’s death. Feminists had been waiting for almost twenty-four years to call Hughes to account, and now the plaintiff, Dr Jane Anderson, accused him of being a sadist. The newspaper story went on to spill details from ‘closely guarded secrets’: Sylvia Plath had not been the only one to kill herself in this reallife saga. The Mail on Sunday continues by proudly announcing that it will ‘disclose her identity today’. When asked about Assia Wevill, Hughes ‘looked stunned’, the journalists report. Their questions directed at his ‘current wife Carol’ remained unanswered. The reporters insinuate that plain dislike of her predecessor was Carol Hughes’s reason for asking the parish council in Heptonstall not to signpost Sylvia Plath’s grave (Walker et al. 1987). Shortly after the Sunday Mail reportage, Hughes writes to a friend about his five-year adventure ‘in the wilder parts of U.S. Law’ and shares his reactions to ‘Sylvia’s legend [being] now so out of hand’. It all made him feel paranoid about the consequences of his own casual remarks, as they became ‘magnified, amplified, spectrally analysed & crazily polemicised in the auditoriums & laboratories & court-houses of the U.S. National Plath Investigations Committee & Patriotic Publications Inc’ (Hughes 2007, 535). The American court case that Hughes unwittingly found himself involved in naturally influenced his later actions. He hoped that people would stick to facts not only because he considered the discussion about his private life to be mere gossip, but also to avoid legal actions caused by what others might say (1989d). In April 1989, Ronald Hayman had not yet started writing his biography of Sylvia Plath. However, he took part later that same year in the evolving polemics regarding Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989) and her attempts to present a more nuanced portrait of the story’s main characters by including sources who sympathized with Ted Hughes. Her book was severely condemned by Al Alvarez. It is typical of the whole controversy that some participants keep reappearing. One of them is Alvarez, who became acquainted with Plath both professionally and personally through his work as poetry editor for The Observer. In The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (1971), he tells the story of their friendship and her suicide, and in his prologue to the book, he makes details of her final weeks publicly known for the first time. As the critic-cum-friend who had practically discovered Sylvia Plath, and as the survivor of ‘a failed suicide’ himself (1973, 257), Alvarez could speak with authority about everything that concerned her. His name figured as

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the first of eight signatories on the letter Hayman initiated in the wake of the Parnaby and Wingfield debacle, criticizing the neglect of Plath’s grave. Two years after Stevenson’s biography was published, both The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (1991) by Ronald Hayman and Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (1991) by Paul Alexander followed. Hayman’s book may, on the one hand, be read as a contribution to the ongoing discussion of Sylvia Plath, and on the other hand, as an episode in a more personal feud between himself and Hughes. In Alexander’s book, Aurelia Plath, who died in 1994, turns out to be an important source. She had gone unmentioned in the first edition because she wanted quiet and an absence of discord for the remainder of her life. Yet Alexander reveals in the second edition that Aurelia Plath had broken down weeping when talking about topics such as ‘the emotional abuse she felt Sylvia suffered during her marriage’, the neglect she believed Hughes displayed towards their children, how Sylvia had given up her country, friends, and family for him, and the fact that he did not even have the courage to call his motherin-law when Sylvia died (1999, xiii, xv). Alexander felt certain that Mrs Plath would have been disturbed by the publication of Birthday Letters. He describes this collection as ‘in essence a disingenuous work’ because Hughes minimizes his responsibility for Sylvia Plath’s death. He obviously finds the ‘palpable’ sense of guilt reverberating in a letter Hughes wrote one month after the suicide to be a more candid expression of Hughes’s state of mind (xvi).18 Dissecting the correspondence between Mrs Plath and her son-in-law, Diane Middlebrook offers another interpretation of this relationship. In Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (2003), she claims that Hughes snatches ‘from melodrama’ a phrase Aurelia Plath had quoted from one of Sylvia’s letters – about how she had sacrificed everything for him, and then he ‘revives it with ice water’ (2003, 241). According to Hughes, neither of them had sacrificed more than the other. Instead, both had found a way to sacrifice everything to writing, and when their marriage broke down, they had mishandled the situation in an equally disastrous fashion.19 The process of interpretation and re-evaluation, then, continues onward, unaffected by the principal characters all being dead. However, there are still living members of the family who can give their version of the story. Plath’s brother, Warren, may have kept his silence, but her daughter Frieda has been decidedly more active since Hughes died, appearing in interviews and at events, managing the estate, and writing for The Times. She has chosen to uphold her father’s insistence that Sylvia Plath’s death is private territory and to restrict the ability of others to quote

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from Plath’s work. Furthermore, Frieda Hughes refused to collaborate with the producers of the film Sylvia. ‘Why would I want to be involved in moments of my childhood I never want to return to?’, she asked after declaring she would never go to see the film (in Elliott and Brooks 2003). With this decision, she avoided involvement in a project that ultimately depicted her own father as the cause of her mother’s suicide. Like her father, Frieda Hughes released a poem about how the public devours Sylvia Plath for entertainment, thereby turning her into their own ‘Sylvia Suicide Doll’ (2003). In the foreword to a restored facsimile edition of Ariel, Frieda Hughes opposes what she sees as the persistent reinvention of her mother and vilification of her father. The many cruel things written about him ‘bore no resemblance to the man who quietly and lovingly (if a little strictly and being sometimes fallible) brought [her] up’ (2004, xiv). She explains that her mother had ‘a ferocious temper and a jealous streak, in contrast to [her] father’s more temperate and optimistic nature’ (xv), and that Aurelia – ‘whose efforts [she] witnessed as a small child’ – encouraged Sylvia to order Ted out of the house (xi).20 After their break-up, she notes, he did not abandon them but instead left Plath money along with their joint belongings, to the effect that Hughes’s own father had to pay for Plath’s funeral. According to Frieda Hughes, when her mother wrote Ariel and then killed herself, she was ‘caught in the act of revenge’. Despite her father being the victim of ‘a voice that had been honed and practised for years’, he ultimately ‘did not shy away from its mastery’ (xvii). Yet, for a person who so strongly advocates the privacy of her family, Frieda Hughes does draw attention to curiously personal matters in her own poetry. In FortyFive (2006), a collection containing one entry for each year of her life, she writes of numerous people who ostensibly have failed and exploited her, stepmother and former husbands included. The first biography of Ted Hughes was Elaine Feinstein’s The Life of a Poet, published in 2001. It portrays a man far more involved in love affairs of various kinds than one would have imagined of the shy, guilt-ridden recluse he so often was made out to be. Rather, he seems to have acted in accordance with the familiar and persistent expectations of a poet: that ordinary social obligations, for instance to a wife waiting at home, do not apply to a genius questing for his muse. Additionally, Hughes’s dedication to astrology and occultism might surprise non-believers. To some extent, biographies of a poet’s life can be seen as products of time and place. However, the tradition to which these texts belong is also as old as literature itself. Exultation of exceptional individuals and exemplary figures, a literal reading of fictional texts, author cults, and the

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identification of the literary persona with the biographical object may all be defined as part of this heritage. In order to prove that a study of the Plath reception can profit from an awareness of such ancient traditions, I will now return to their origins.

Exemplary Figures The rhetoric we use when writing about an author’s work, life, and significance is heavily influenced by ideas and presumptions which evolved out of ancient Greece, not least because of the role that biographies play in the public sphere. Biography as a genre can be traced back to epideictic rhetoric, one of the three main rhetorical genres. Other terms used in Greek together with epideictic were panegyrikón and enkómion, both signifying a eulogy or a laudatory speech. In his seminal work on epideictic literature from 1902, Theodore Burgess points to a close connection between biography and encomium as well as between epideictic literature on the one hand and philosophy, poetry, and the writing of history on the other. Ancient writers active in all these genres believed that a person’s exterior corresponds with his interior, which for them made it possible to deduce virtues and personalities from actions. People not only equalled what they did, but also what they wrote. Works of all kinds were interpreted quite literally to obtain biographical details about their authors. In epideictic rhetoric, representatives of a culture are presented either as praiseworthy paragons or as contemptible specimens. Such examples were believed to have an instructive effect. Thus, heroes have to be larger than life and, according to classical scholar Bryan Hainsworth, ‘exemplary to the extent that they embody what the audiences of heroic poems regarded with awe’. Their moral justification rests precisely in this: It is their greatness which gives heroes the right to exert their power as they please (Hainsworth 1993, 45). Poets of Antiquity were read for edification and because they offered examples of human excellence and weakness. Moreover, by writing on these subjects, authors too became admired heroes. Prose encomia dedicated to mythical characters, such as Achilles, may have been part of an extensive hero worship. They were meant to entertain as well as educate. When the more nuanced forms of forensic (judicial) and deliberative (political) oratory declined in late Antiquity, the black and white representation of epideictic rhetoric became dominant. This trend continued on, and hagiographic vitae – with its focus on saints’ and martyrs’ lives – became the typical genre in the Middle Ages. Rhetorical theory alternately stresses the significance of the content as

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opposed to the form, and the functional as opposed to the ornamental character of epideictic rhetoric. There is a dual, ambiguous identity arising out of the term itself. Epideictic derives from the Greek verb epideiknymi, signifying ‘I exhibit/parade/put on display/demonstrate/prove/show myself’. Who, in fact, is eulogized and put on display is not, however, quite clear: the orator, his object, the speech, or all three? Epideictic speeches may thus be seen as both bragging numbers and show pieces, with the orator demonstrating how clever he is at handling his material and the genre of praising someone else. Aristotle relates the epideictic to ethical questions. Virtue should be praised and vice censured, hence offering both the orator/writer and his audience ideals to reach for. Plato, Cicero, and Quintilian dwell more explicitly on what could be termed as the political relevance of epideictic rhetoric beyond the personal lessons emphasized by Aristotle.21 Sanctioning public mores, eulogies were of service to the state and contributed to nation-building. Panegyrical vitae confirmed the significance of the emperor, thereby securing the power structure. Polybius, the Greek historian, commends the Roman custom of systematically commemorating leaders at their funerals. A ceaseless repetition of glorious deeds turned the past into a heritage for future generations to emulate (Polybius 1923, 6.54– 55). The invitation to imitate set examples contains an element of competition to surpass them. It also justifies the ruling system, class, and gender arrangements; when writers or speakers use examples of deeds, qualities, or persons, they presuppose a cultural agreement regarding their significance. An interchange occurs between power and ideology. In hagiography, exemplarity takes precedence over facts and historicity. Eulogies feature outstanding – exemplary – representatives of a family, group, culture, or society. Religious and philosophical schools involved in hegemonic rivalry painted their masters as holy men and lampooned adversaries in an effort to increase their following. According to classicist Duane Reed Stuart, the business of an ancient encomiast was to magnify and idealize, not to achieve authentic historicity. Shaping events and characters to this end, praiseworthy acts were exaggerated while failures and defects were suppressed. Emphasis was placed on incidents that most ‘redounded to the credit of the man’ (Stuart 1928, 62). Encomiasts described their subject concurring with established patterns. The four cardinal virtues – valour, wisdom, temperance, and justice – functioned as receptacles into which appropriate material could be gathered (65). Epideictic portraits were drawn by exaggerating the exemplary virtues a person had, by adding qualities he lacked, and by presenting coincidences as conscious and characteristic deeds (Aristotle, Rhet. 1.9.28–29, 1.9.32–

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34). If the main objective was to evoke repulsion and not emulation, negative traits were magnified. Because exaltation and perfection were an aim, many eulogists claimed themselves inadequate for the task of portraying praiseworthy heroes. Still, their modesty was often merely rhetorical. The tradition of using examples in literature predates the encomium. Homer employed mythological examples as a kind of argument in specific situations, referring to glorious models which ought to be mimicked. In the Iliad, Meleager is invoked in order to persuade Achilles that he should make peace with Agamemnon and get back to the fighting (9.529–99). Achilles himself refers to the example of Niobe when persuading the grieving Priamos that, notwithstanding their losses, they must eat (24.602– 17). The past is made relevant for the present, and an eternal pattern, or paradeigma – the Greek equivalent of the Latin exemplum – is instituted. Exemplum, meaning ‘an interpolated anecdote serving as an example’, is a common technical term in rhetoric from Aristotle onwards. The exemplary figure functioning as a rhetorical exemplum soon became a favourite device. The term ‘exemplary figure’ (Gr. eikon, Lat. imago) signifies ‘the incarnation of a quality’ (Curtius 1973, 59–60). Exemplary heroes represent a higher, normative reality in the epic, promoting a certain behaviour and self-knowledge. Within Christianity, the Imitatio Christi motif has maintained a similar function. As in Greek literature, the Biblical examples are either positive, admonishing others to act like Christ, or they are negative, warning the readers against repeating deplorable behaviour. An exemplum involves a comparison. Homer’s epic characters find themselves in the midst of a contest with mythological models. They aspire to become examples in their own right by contributing their best on society’s behalf, and enhancing their own personal renown as a result. The use of and attitudes towards example have changed throughout history. Defined as a didactic-illustrative anecdote with a moral point, an exemplum or example is looked on with scepticism by modern readers and often associated with religious preaching. Nevertheless, as a rhetorical figure, example is virtually ubiquitous in all kinds of writing, and its function seems to have been fundamentally the same since the beginning.22 For Aristotle, paradeigma was an inductive means of persuasion linking a particular case to a general rule (Rhet. 1.2.8–20). In his proof-centred understanding of rhetoric as the ability to discern what is most persuasive in every given case, both historical and invented examples constitute a basic type of argument. Whether examples were used to prove a point, clarify something, and/or help the audience remember accepted knowledge,

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the speaker/writer presumes that the examples are understood in the intended way. Depending on time, place, and context, the same example can be supplied to argue different points. The neutral and pragmatic rhetoric of example that Aristotle represented was, in Greek thinking, complemented by Plato’s understanding of paradeigma as a ‘model’, ‘standard’, or ‘archetype’. It is from Plato’s version of the concept that the Latin exemplar derives. We see all the common meanings of example, exemplar, and exemplary within the Plath reception: ‘model, pattern, typical, or representative; worthy of imitation, serving as illustration and/or warning; a copy’. In the Latin tradition, exemplum was linked as often to the Greek eikon (icon) and Latin imago (image) as to paradeigma. Thus, a linguistic category came to include non-linguistic forms, as John D. Lyons notes in his introduction to Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (1989). Lyons interprets the implications of this shift as a further blow to the respectability of example, which was somewhat dubious already from Aristotle’s repeated categorization of it within rhetoric. The visual form of example has the quality of seeming rather than being. When examples are associated with things that appear to be, the consequences are complex and often ironic, Lyons observes. Because of its wide meaning, Lyons hesitates to equate example with narration, as this would represent a more confined exemplary function, which he defines as ‘a concrete instance of a general statement’. Example is a dependent expression inserted into and qualifying a more general and independent statement. Denoting both the model to be copied and its representation, this idea implies reproducibility as well as a dimension of time. Exemplum/example is not a static, isolatable unit, Lyons insists, ‘but the relationship created or assumed between things’ (1989, 10–11). Although it is easy to sympathize with Lyons’s objections against limiting example to narration the way Larry Scanlon does in Narrative, Authority, and Power: The medieval exemplum and the Chaucerian tradition (1994), I do find the rest of Scanlon’s definition useful: ‘[A]n exemplum is a narrative enactment of cultural authority’ (1994, 34). This formulation points at both the function of example and the context in which it occurs – and thereby to the ideological nature of this relationship. Scanlon too maintains that the point of exemplum is to give a specific historical source to an ideological representation of authority. For an example to function effectively, a process of identification must occur on the part of the audience. The enactment of authority implies that the readers or listeners are expected to put themselves in the position of the protagonists. Example persuades ‘by conveying a sense of communal

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identity with its moral lesson’ (35). Equally useful for my purpose is Scanlon’s reminder of the power of stories – narrated examples – that convince by engaging the feelings of the audience, unlike doctrine, which primarily appeals to the intellect. Despite its widespread use, example is almost invisible as an object of study when compared to other rhetorical figures, John D. Lyons indicates (1989, 2006). One reason for this oblivion, he suggests, may be that example poses a threat to literary criticism. Textual exemplification constitutes the fundament upon which criticism rests. To escape mere paraphrasing, literary criticism generates – or fabricates – examples in support of propositions, premises, and conclusions, culminating in the subsumption of the literary text by the critical text. Yet all examples can be deconstructed. Any induction from part to whole is open to question (1989, 4). Another reason for the invisibility of example in theoretical deliberations may be the conspicuousness of the rhetorical figure itself when it appears in texts. Similar to quotations, examples are signalled or announced directly, not with quotation marks or indentation but with words such as ‘for example’, ‘e.g.’ (exempli gratia), ‘to illustrate’, ‘as an illustration of …’, and similar expressions. This openness, compared to metaphor and metonomy, can give the impression of straightforward argumentation. If we delude ourselves into thinking that examples provide direct manifestations of reality, then the complicated relationship between the involved texts – the dependent and independent statements – is concealed. Since didactic stories and other types of examples are so central to systems of belief, Lyons claims that example may qualify as ‘the most ideological of figures, in the sense of being the figure that is most intimately bound to a representation of the world and that most serves as a veil for the mechanics of that representation’. His comments on the example-based nature of literary criticism, especially where he argues that ‘example is a way of taking our beliefs about reality and reframing them into something that suits the direction of a text’ (1989, ix), confirm the relevance of questions I raise in this book. It is material to ask how the poet is used and to halt when commentators say they are only – meaning innocently – dealing with texts, as if that action did not involve ethical and epistemological problems. This is especially true in connection with an object of study so example- and belief-conditioned as Sylvia Plath. Echoing John D. Lyons and Larry Scanlon, Alexander Gelley in Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (1995) likewise accentuates the amount of judgment involved in a rhetoric of example: judgments of ethics as well as judgments of

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interpretation (1995, 13–14). The more diverse a society or culture is, the more liable judgments are to being questioned and the less one can rely on communal identification with the example’s intended lesson. Examples and exemplary figures are basic to epideictic rhetoric. According to Aristotle, examples were, moreover, appropriate in deliberative speeches since judgments and predictions about the future are based on knowledge of the past (Rhet. 1.9.40). Forensic orators introduced examples as arguments in their embellishment of facts in order to persuade the audience of the guilt or innocence of a person with regard to past actions. All these main types of rhetoric, and many combinations of them, may be found in the Plath reception.

The Idealized Poet Of all figures from Antiquity, the examples of Socrates and Christ have perhaps had the greatest historical impact on Western culture. Socrates was the first historical person to be the object of a desire to conserve the individual, comparable to how the Greeks for centuries had treated their mythical heroes by commemorating them in epic poems. Writers like Plato and Xenophon contributed to this end and constructed ways to immortalize Socrates’s memory after he was sentenced to death. Their respective works, Apology and Memoirs of Socrates, contain elements that may be recognized in biographies and continue to shape our perception of authors, although Socrates was not an author himself. Socrates is credited with a different personality in each of these two works, probably because Plato and Xenophon had seen and understood varying sides of him; their motives for writing about him are signalled in the titles of their works, ‘apologia’ and ‘memorabilia’. Experiencing his death sentence as an unexpected and difficult blow, Socrates’s adherents may have produced their defences of him as a method for coming to terms with the trauma. In the Apology, as in Crito and Phaedo, Plato transforms public disgrace into lasting triumph when he allows Socrates to die for his beliefs. The philosopher opts for a martyr’s death rather than escaping and hence demonstrates total dedication to his convictions. The words ascribed to Socrates leave no doubt that his selfappointed vocation – philosophy – is a certified route to the highest good, and death therefore is worth its price. Among his disciples, feelings of awe and admiration can replace the initial shame and sorrow. For heroes, the ability to inspire awe is, of course, a requirement. Important to the Socratics, however, was what could have happened and not what actually took place; thus, his followers’ concern was for the

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‘potential Socrates’ more than ‘the real’. The conflict between a superior and an inferior kind of truth, which we find in the Gospels and in saints’ lives, is evident according to Arnaldo Momigliano for the first time in the Socratics’ experiments with biography. To a professional historian like Momigliano, the biographical genre and its ambiguous position between fact and imagination is rather bewildering (1971, 46–47). The ‘Socratic model’ became not only the formative model for an ideal martyr in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, it also influenced Jewish martyrology (Rajak 1997, 58–59). The expelled social critic is still highly relevant as an idealized or exemplary figure in Western culture. He may be construed as an instance of significance within an available repertory accredited by memory and tradition. It is the availability of such examples that makes them rhetorically effective, Alexander Gelley points out (1995, 12). Among Christians, Socrates was valued as a prefiguration of Christ. Erasmus lets a character in one of his colloquies exclaim: ‘St Socrates, pray for us’ (1997, 194). In ‘The Poet as Hero: Fifth-Century Autobiography and Subsequent Biographical Fiction’ (1978), classical scholar Mary R. Lefkowitz relates Plato’s Socrates character to the new kind of hero which in fifth century B.C. comes to replace the angry and combative heroes of the epic tradition. This alternative heroic image was based on contemporary sentimental mythology and, according to Lefkowitz, just as remote from ordinary men as the old heroic image. The new kind of hero materialized when writers presented themselves as isolated and misunderstood teachers, distinguished by their moral integrity and sense of responsibility towards others. Exile represents an extreme form of what Lefkowitz terms ‘professional remoteness’ (1978, 466). Both Aeschylus and Euripides left Athens, died in exile, and were in the end better appreciated abroad than at home. Heraclitus, Xenophanes, and Pindar exemplify writers who draw attention to their isolation. Later, the idealized concept finds its way into the written lives of the poets. Lefkowitz claims that virtually all the biographical information given in the lives of important poets is fictitious. Texts were culled for biographical information and interpreted literally, regardless of the genre. The poetic ‘I’ was assumed to represent the poet himself. We should, as reported by Lefkowitz, be critical of how much Plato shaped his Socrates to concur with the myth of an isolated professional who works for the common good and in return asks for nothing more than recognition of his moral goals. Plato also portrays himself as an isolated figure who is honest although misunderstood and unjustly treated, rejected at home and abroad in spite of his competent advice. His statement in the so-called

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seventh letter – i.e. ‘I was the innocent and injured party’ – may be seen as a key sentence in an attempt to explain his own role in political dealings on Sicily (Plato 1973, 143). Aristotle believed both Plato and Socrates to be melancholics and exceptional persons as a consequence. Lefkowitz explains the myth of the isolated writer within a tradition originating in the fifth century B.C., when poets started representing themselves as unique persons. This idea corresponds with how writers were seen generally at the time. As a group, they descended from the clergy and were said to have ecstatic powers and close connections with the gods. Poets promoted fame from war, sang about aristocratic deeds, and were themselves treated as heroes. In other words, they belonged to the higher social classes. Janet Fairweather has described the most common ways to stereotype literary history in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Traditions were instituted by accentuating more or less real likeness between great writers, creating family ties where none existed, and portraying the lives of younger authors as patterned on famous predecessors. The same kinds of anecdotes and statements were attributed to several writers, and many similar tales circulated about their ascetic living habits, humble backgrounds, strange deaths, and years of travelling. Fairweather accordingly concludes that rather than mediate historical facts, such stories were the result of transmitting and imitating conventional topoi (1974, 266–69). In the portraits of poets, philosophers, and other writers, such exemplary qualities and incidents form patterns as equally persistent as the belief that authors were isolated and misunderstood. Xenophanes was among those who both endured years of walkabout and possibly a forced exile. For Leftkowitz, the ‘lingering appeal’ of the isolated writer may be ascribed to the tendency to see oneself as a dishonoured prophet: ‘[E]ven Hitler claimed early in his career that his true excellence would be appreciated only by succeeding generations’ (1981, viii). According to biographical tradition, the Roman satirist, Juvenal, had been an expatriate. But the lives disagree on when and where the exilement was supposed to have taken place – early or late in life, in Egypt, somewhere else in northern Africa, or even in Britain. Juvenal did not leave behind any evidence that supports this exile tradition. J. Wight Duff (1960, 477ff) and Janet Fairweather (1974, 239–42) question the factuality of his supposed exile altogether, along with all the remaining biographical information about him. Still, Juvenal’s twentieth-century biographer, Gilbert Highet, claims the opposite, that we ‘know’ Juvenal was exiled, probably to Egypt (1962, 37). He imagines Juvenal’s banishment like this: ‘But wherever he went, it was certainly to an endless

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term of loneliness, surveillance, silence, hardship, and poverty’. Highet then compares Juvenal with Ovid, Seneca, and Dostoyevsky, another expatriate who received a last-minute pardon: So must Juvenal have felt when, three or four years after his banishment, the emperor was assassinated, and from barren rocks and lonely villages the exiles began to return – still dazed and incredulous, and, like the prisoners released from concentration camps, unable for years to speak directly of their sufferings. (31)

As a critic, Highet has no privileged information about Juvenal. Yet so compelling is this tradition – the exemplary poet incarnating such seductive qualities – that he reads it into and out of the work, maintaining that Juvenal’s personal fear and the disappointment caused by his exile are reflected in a deep sense of social injustice which characterizes his satires. No less compelling has been the perception, attributable to Aristotle, that authors are exceptional melancholics. In the Hippocratic humoral teaching on the four bodily fluids, melancholy was believed to be a dual physiological and mental condition caused by an excess of black bile. The word melancholy means exactly that: black bile. Melancholics were represented as vulnerable and unique individuals, possessing imaginative and visionary abilities. The condition comprises two contradictory states of mind – dejection and elation. Persons with this temperament suffer, but they are also highly creative individuals. Having noticed that singular persons who were admired for their brilliance within philosophy, politics, art, and poetry were oftentimes melancholics, Aristotle in Problemata 30.1 tries to explain the qualities of black bile. The melancholy heroes he refers to include mythical figures like Hercules and Ajax. Empedocles exemplifies the category of philosophers, together with Plato and Socrates. The poets are mentioned collectively. Aristotle was not the first to point out the genius of such characters. In epideictic rhetoric, the exemplary figures were praised for this very reason. However, as far as we know, he was the first to connect extraordinary gifts with melancholy. Later, countless scholastics in the Middle Ages subscribed to the conviction that all great men are melancholics. Their special planet, Saturn, was connected with a number of bipolar qualities, which the Renaissance doctor and humanist Marsilio Ficino presents in his De vita libri tres (1489). Ficino’s belief that only people with a melancholic temperament could access true creative powers received enthusiastic support. Since then, the assumption has prevailed that genius and artistic talent

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depend on a specific kind of personality, according to art historians Rudolf and Margot Wittkower in their study of artists’ conduct and character, Born under Saturn (1963). These expectations influence how persons aspiring to greatness within the arts see themselves, how they are seen by others, and how they imagine incarnating specific qualities. Melancholy thus became a fashion and an addiction, and as a result, a tradition of conduct befitting for melancholics spread throughout Europe. Lawrence Babb explains the persistent popularity with the idea that melancholy is inseparable from genius and a superior brain: ‘The Aristotelian concept had invested the melancholy character with something of somber philosophic dignity, something of Byronic grandeur’ (Babb 1965, 184). And what condition could more effectively foster this state of being than exile? Conventions of melancholy – sadness, loneliness, darkness, suffering, creativity, inspiration, desperation – survived the humoral doctrine and ultimately froze into a stereotype, both in linguistic and nonlinguistic forms, visible in painted and written portraits of authors, artists, and intellectuals. In more recent times, manic depression and bipolarity have taken over the function of melancholy as a combined physical and mental disorder that particularly afflicts artists and (wo)men of genius.

From Socrates to Sylvia What, then, do exemplary figures of classical epic and epideictic literature have in common with Sylvia Plath? First, she is used as an argument by biographers, critics, feminists, and others not necessarily to admonish people to act in certain ways, but as a demonstration case to prove or clarify points, theories, and assumptions in order to persuade an audience. Second, to appear cogent, Plathian encomiasts shape the story they recount. Sylvia Plath is made exemplary and applauded for her exceptional talents through means of addition, exaggeration, and suppression, in accordance with Aristotle’s advising. Third, the same technique is used on persons connected with her. Being blackened rather than gilded, they are also shaped into arguments and painted as one-dimensional characters to serve narrative or pedagogical motives within the larger structure of the arguments. Classical topoi of guilt and innocence are widespread throughout the Plath literature. Furthermore, epideictic rhetoric is combined with judicial – forensic – rhetoric, and more than one commentator takes a j’accuse stance. Fourth, the historical subjects are treated as rhetorical personae complying with existing patterns and preconceived notions as to how an idealized poet – or object – should be. Similar to the practice described by Janet Fairweather, Plath’s works are

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sifted for biographical information irrespective of category and genre conventions, afforded the status of documentary sources, and used to explain, defend, and criticize. Fifth, there is a cult-like, religious dimension to much of what is written about Plath, similar to what exists in epideictic hagiography, hero worship, and other textual traditions that use a rhetoric of exemplarity to further systems of belief. Commentators play on an existing repertory of examples that engage the heart and encourage identification. Sixth, other motives – political, feminist, personal, economic, and didactic – may also explain the use of Sylvia Plath as an exemplary figure to champion a number of causes. Critics have summoned her case to advance theories and, in Pierre Bourdieu’s words, to consecrate their own position. Finally, she seems to function as an outlet for writers’ needs to showcase themselves. By aligning with Plath, they epideictically draw attention not only to her, but to themselves and their own rhetorical abilities. The more genius she is presented as possessing, the more reflected glory shines on her spokesmen. Like the heroes in classical heroic poetry, the poet’s greatness justifies her actions as well as the actions of her defenders. Contrary to Socrates, Sylvia Plath speaks to us through her own literary works. Similar to him, she also exists in the writings of others, bits and pieces of her poetry and prose being inserted like lemmata – dependent statements – within their texts. Whether these new texts take the form of apologia, memorabilia, or dissertatio she is constantly interpreted and re-evaluated, an object of heated debates about which appreciation is better. If there is a Plathian model, it is remarkable for its flexibility and its capacity to support contradictory views. When compared to historical and biographical facts, the role of the author, as handed down through centuries of imitation and expectation, is more decisive in determining how a writer is portrayed. A poet is by longstanding definition a uniquely gifted and extraordinary person, a lonely and misunderstood genius, a suffering rebel and melancholic outsider, depressive and often reckless, but also a just and righteous figure: a hero willing to die for that which he believes. This idealized, exemplary author of classical times constitutes the foundation on which Sylvia Plath is imagined and upon which the story of who she was and what she stood for is crafted. Other components have later been added to this ancient prototype. The image of the dying poet – the gifted talent, driven to death by poverty and misfortune without receiving his or her rightful recognition – was developed further during the Romantic period, alongside the hero worship of authors. In Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffes (1926), Edgar Zilsel

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convincingly connects our concepts of genius and the worship of artists to the rise of the bourgeoisie, a large reading audience, the printing press, and the diffusion of newspapers (Zilsel 1972, 104). The religious, cultic element which Thomas Carlyle defined as a principal force behind hero worship, Zilsel likewise thinks pertinent for the hero cult and the exaltation of chosen individuals in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Bourdieu, too, underscores belief as a key issue in his theories on the function of symbolic capital within the field of cultural production. Carlyle held hero worship to be the basis of all religion and great men to be representatives of God. Lecturing in 1840 on ‘heroes, hero worship, and the heroic in history’, he argued for seeing poets and men of letters as particularly competent and all-comprising heroes, being – in addition to creative individuals – vates, prophets, thinkers, politicians, philosophers, and born leaders of men. At the same time, he found their social standing and treatment to be deplorable: ‘Considering what Book-writers do in the world, and what the world does with Book-writers, I should say, It is the most anomalous thing the world at present has to shew’ (Carlyle 1993, 137). The abilities attributed to Sylvia Plath, and the fervour with which she is venerated by others, echo not only Carlyle but the whole tradition of epideictic rhetoric. However, the Plath literature also imitates how forensic rhetoric fashions facts and/or statements into patterns of guilt and innocence. The result is a forceful mixture: a rhetoric of accountability combined with religious longing and hero worship. In these secular times, art has for many taken the place of religion. Artists are still worshipped as visionary prophets, and Sylvia Plath is ranked among the high priests of our times. Al Alvarez, in his Observer epitaph, immediately sets this tone, stating that it was not until shortly before she died suddenly, at the age of 30, ‘that the peculiar intensity of her genius found its perfected expression’. She had been writing continually for the last few months, ‘almost as though possessed’. Her work represents ‘a totally new breakthrough in modern verse’, he claimed, and concludes that ‘[t]he loss to literature is inestimable’ (Alvarez 1963a). Stressing her extraordinary visionary qualities, Ted Hughes for his part compared his wife to primitive ecstatic priests, shamans, and holy men (1966, 82). According to Frieda Hughes, the sanctification of her mother’s suicide meant that the poet herself was treated like some kind of deity, and everything associated with her became enshrined and preserved as miraculous (2004, xiv–xv). But Sylvia Plath is also related to the kind of commodified celebrity writers discussed by Joe Moran in Star Authors (2000); she functions as a repository for the complex needs and longings of her readers. Plath scores

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high on demands for authenticity and personality, for what is ‘real’ and ‘true’ – qualities made so important in a mediatized world characterized by the reification of individuals – precisely because she satisfies the traditional expectations we have of writers. Modern celebrities and star authors are stereotyped just as much as ancient writers were in Antiquity and by seventeenth-century classicists. The assumption of a close relationship between the writer and his work is as crucial now as ever before. Contrary to what Loren Glass seems to argue in Authors Inc. (2004), celebrity authors of the modern type are far from unique in generating biographical interest because readers assume the author’s personality offers a master key to their texts. Even before the Christian era, Sappho’s poems were read as coded messages from the poet’s own life. And critics have continued to interpret Sappho’s life and work in light of each other. The writings on her surviving productions may be summarized like this: [S]ome commentators read the fragments as if they were Sappho’s true story, others as if the poems were the commentator’s own story. The critical error of reducing a narrative voice to an author’s presence has alternated with the psychological and cultural error of projection. … [S]cholars and writers have read the Sappho they had and produced the Sappho they wanted. (Stimpson 1989, xiii)

Thus, as an alternative title for this subchapter, I could have chosen ‘From Sappho to Sylvia’. By and large, I limit my study to texts published in Great Britain and the United States from 1960 to 2010. My aim is to present the history of the Plath reception throughout this period. Since I examine the various interpretive communities in separate chapters, descriptively entitled ‘Critics’, ‘Feminists’, ‘Biographers’, ‘Psychologists’, and ‘Friends’, chronology has been combined with a thematic approach. In ‘Critics’, I focus primarily on the early reception, which was dominated by male scholars and reviewers. Feminist criticism flourished from 1970 onwards and is discussed in the subsequent chapter. Works influenced by psychoanalysis and psychological theories are addressed in the corresponding chapter. The term ‘interpretive communities’ is taken from Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980). Contrary to Fish, however, and more in line with German scholars like Hans Robert Jauss, I am interested in the historical and social dimensions of readers’ literary expectations and their reception of texts. I

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therefore ruminate on how Plath’s name is employed in specific contexts. My main concern is with ‘professional’ readers – critics, scholars, journalists, reviewers, biographers – who have published their interpretations for others to discuss. The division of these types of readers into communities is by necessity a conscious construction, as their actual writing in many cases blends together and might be treated within several contexts. Ted Hughes, undoubtedly an important Plath critic in his own right, is here principally treated as a family member along with Aurelia Plath. The term reception can, at the same time, be taken as an allinclusive concept for the writing I address. The mind-set or intersubjective system of assumptions that we bring to a given text, by hermeneutics denoted as the readers’ ‘horizon of expectations’ (Jauss 1967), may explain some of the turns and changes in the Plath literature. By asking how her work has been received, and by historicizing the ‘concretizations’ of literary works which criticism represents (Vodiþka 1976), it is possible to differentiate readings according to gender and social background, and to detect variations in focus over time. The hermeneutics of reception aspire to combine a formalist perspective with a historical-sociological position. Being equally interested in the use of Plath’s writing, in other words how her life and work are adapted to the strategies of agents set on persuading others of the validity of their projects, it is constructive to supplement the perspective of traditional reception studies with cultural studies and to keep in mind the social functions of art, the complex relationship between cultural and economic capital, and the game play that surrounds literary works. Building on Bourdieu’s theories, it appears that the early phase of Plath criticism took place in what he terms as ‘the field of restricted cultural production’ between representatives of competing schools and generations (Bourdieu 1993). Almost all of these early critics were men who produced cultural goods for the same public. As her position waned among the select few, the interest in Sylvia Plath increased within a more popular field, among students, feminists, and biographers writing for a larger public audience. Whether this happened because of far-reaching socio-economic transformations, changing norms, and loss of symbolic capital in a specific field of production, or resulted from a perpetual struggle for hegemony as new participants entered the scene, Plath has come to inhabit a contested area of cultural production with other ambiguous authors between the highbrow, the middlebrow, and the popular. The compound and manifold writing on her work and life resembles to some extent the characteristics of celebrity coverage that P. David Marshall discusses in his introduction

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to The Celebrity Culture Reader. Accordingly, Plath’s initial claim to fame – the writing she left behind – has on several occasions receded into a ‘pivotal back-story narrative’ (2006, 2) containing scandals presented as a morality tale about guilt and innocence. If identity, self, and individuality are the core issues of celebrity culture, then they are certainly pivotal both in Plath’s work and in her reception. In short, all primary, secondary, and tertiary writings constitute a multilayered textuality that critics and readers try to make sense of and influence as best they can. Regardless of what changes have taken place within the Plath reception, since the poet killed herself, a notion of irresistible force and emotion has constantly been linked with her name. It may be that Sylvia Plath herself is no longer thought of as a possessed being, but her readers and even the public at large are still seen as obsessed with her. What this so-called obsession consists of, and the reasons for its constancy, is a matter for discussion in the final chapter.

CHAPTER TWO CRITICS

The quantity of studies on Sylvia Plath listed in databases and bibliographies far outnumbers titles about writers with whom she is regularly compared.1 All kinds of theories and methods are represented – New Criticism, Structuralism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, New Biography, Postmodernism, Ecocriticism, and numerous perspectives deriving from Cultural Studies in combination with other approaches that aim to make literature relevant to the bigger issues of our time. The multitude of coexisting disciplines makes a chronological account of their rise and fall virtually impossible. Shifting concerns in the Plath reception reflect changing modes within literary criticism and society at large. Worth noticing is that when most practitioners of New Criticism and other formalist schools concentrated on the text, arguing that biographical information and the author himself were irrelevant to interpretation, Plath studies went in the opposite direction: Extra-literary aspects invaded the scholarly examinations after ‘Sylvia Plath took her life, or rather left us her death, in 1963’, as Richard Howard put it (1969, 415). Interpreters of her work turned historical persons into rhetorical personae and exemplary figures. Plath criticism is full of contrasts, reflecting disagreement within a heterogeneous community of critics on what qualities she incarnates and what ideological implications might follow from these incarnations. Literary judgments cover the whole range, from degradation to ‘minor poet’ – uttered mainly by male critics like Irving Howe, Peter Ackroyd, and Harold Bloom2 – to declarations of unrivalled greatness. According to Linda Wagner-Martin when introducing a collection of critical essays on Sylvia Plath in 1984, Plath no less than ‘changed the direction of contemporary poetry – all poetry, not just poems written by women’ (Wagner-Martin 1984b, 1).3 Forty-three years after Plath’s death, WagnerMartin marvels in The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath (2006) at ‘the endurance of her poems’ and their ‘power to transform the direction of American – and to some extent, British – poetics’. Apparently no longer crediting Plath with an influence on all poetry, she still thinks of her

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impact as equal to Ernest Hemingway’s in the area of prose (2006, 52). The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath as well as The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath (2008) might in themselves be taken as manifestations of recognition since the two prestigious series contain so few women and especially female poets from the twentieth century. New monographs and collections of Plath criticism continue to be published, confirming her position and ongoing relevance. While some critics stress her originality, claiming that ‘there was no other voice like hers on earth’ (Pollitt 1982, 53), others place her within widespread tendencies of the time and refer to a shared world of references between the poet and her readers (Vendler 1982, 124). She is admired for her compassion and political awareness as well as criticized for lacking the same. The label ‘relentless honesty’ is freely used to describe Plath’s writing (Lask 1966) regardless of its applicability to fiction. On the other hand, critics have objected to a speculative rhetoric in her work, designed – as they see it – to create sympathy for personal ends. Thus, Plath’s life and work can be adapted to serve almost any type of cause. Or, she may be turned into a heroic cause herself. Linda WagnerMartin, for example, introduces Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath by claiming that ‘[w]ith the awarding of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry to Sylvia Plath’s The Collected Poems, the proof of the power of Plath’s art finally won out – over all the detractors, the enviers, the death-mongers’ (1984b, 1). Considering that hardly any other poet of her generation had at that time received more acclaim, not only the art but also the image of the misunderstood poet undoubtedly holds a compelling attraction.

Before – and After Assessing Plath’s critical heritage four years later, Linda Wagner-Martin in 1988 describes it as ‘generally positive’ and divides the criticism into two stages: before and after the suicide. Knowledge of her tragic death meant that biography entered into the arena of Plath criticism and would never again be separated from it (1988b, 1). When constructing the same periodization as early as 1970, Mary Kinzie notes that during the first period, reviews of The Colossus and The Bell Jar had been ‘brief, reserved, entirely conventional’. She speculates whether the meaning which a critic like M.L. Rosenthal ‘subsequently found “to call out from nearly every poem” [in The Colossus] would even have been divined, had people not been motivated by her death to go back and re-read’ (Kinzie 1970, 283).4 Richard Howard likewise professes to have ‘missed a lot’ the first time around (1969, 413), that is, when Sylvia Plath in the public mind

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still belonged to Boris Tomaševskij’s category of ‘writers without biographies’ (see ‘Introduction’, 7). Perhaps influenced by Irving Howe’s phrase – ‘A Glamour of Fatality hangs over the name of Sylvia Plath’ (1972, 88) – scholar Sarah Churchwell, some thirty years on, argues that Plath’s feminine ‘glamour’, meaning her suicide, her looks, and her biography, has been such a persistent part of the evaluation that readers are uncertain whether her poetic authority is merited or derives illegitimately from personal details. Many accounts therefore seek to undermine the poet’s iconic status by locating it in trivial aspects, Churchwell maintains (2001, 108). One of the critics she refers to is Paul West, observing in 1972 that ‘[h]ad Sylvia Plath been ugly, and not died in so deliberate a manner, I wonder if she would have the standing she has’. Giving us the impression that such statements are illicit, Churchwell leaves out West’s follow up: ‘Maybe so; she seems an unusually good poet, at her best pithy and stark, with a passion for minute accuracy in recording the physical, and not afraid to be caustic or discordant’. But he definitely dislikes ‘the cult which finds her a seraphic cosmic victim, a self-elected St. Joan of the post-natal clinic, whose every word is loaded with unimpeachable witness’ (West 1972). Before her cult-status developed, how and to what did critics react? In his review of The Colossus for The Observer, Al Alvarez (1960) states that the young American Sylvia Plath was not to be dismissed as a mere first volume ‘poetess’. Steering clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, and supersensitivity, she simply wrote good poetry with a seriousness that demanded an equally serious judgment. This made her a real poet, although ‘not, of course, unwaveringly good’, Alvarez writes. For him, the work gets its distinction from a ‘sense of threat, as though she were continually menaced by something she could see only out of the corners of her eyes’. The editor of The Critical Quarterly, Anthony Edward Dyson, in a like manner detects ‘apprehensions of lurking menace’ in the poems. He classifies Sylvia Plath as ‘among the best of the poets now claiming our attention’ and declares her as ‘the most compelling feminine voice, certainly, that we have heard for many a day’ (Dyson 1961, 181–82). An anonymous reviewer in The Times (1961) is impressed with the creatures and objects she ‘most forcefully’ conjures up ‘in brilliantly apt words, often with a lot of humour as well’. Several critics emphasize her complex syntax, excellent control, and technical accomplishment, which, according to Bernard Bergonzi’s 1960 piece in The Guardian, set her apart from most women poets. Others similarly remark on Sylvia Plath’s deviation from what was seen as a standard female style and repertoire.

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In the discourse of literary criticism a generation or so later, the early reception had ‘detected the unstable complexity through which Plath speaks about gender in her writing, the difficulty of pinning down her speakers and tones as purely masculine or feminine’, creating ‘voices that might be described as hermaphrodite’ (Brain 2001, 3–4). But Sylvia Plath’s first reviewers were probably less concerned with unstable postmodernist subjects than baffled by her impressive learning and craftsmanship. With few exceptions, these reviewers were all men, many of whom thought it relevant to comment on the poet’s gender and to mention whose wife she was. Technical skills, intellect, and wry humour were considered to be masculine prerogatives. Sylvia Plath defied such expectations and emerged as a new and different voice. To some, her cleverness tended towards the contrived. Almost excusing his reservations because there was so much to admire, poet Roy Fuller wishes that Miss Plath could ‘let things slip a bit without gushing’ (1961), and Lucas Myers – a Cambridge friend of Ted Hughes – hopes the emotional distance in her next volume could be reduced (1962). Later, critics rather longed for the opposite. More than twenty reviews of the first British and American editions of The Colossus, which were published before Sylvia Plath died, are listed in Stephen Tabor’s 1987 bibliography.5 Although most of the reviews are short and appear in round-ups, the number still seems impressive compared to what first bookers may expect nowadays. On the whole, the reception was more positive in her new country. American reviews tended to find the poems derivative, possibly because the critics were more familiar with her models. But they too thought The Colossus was a promising book. Upon its launch under the name of Victoria Lucas in January 1963, The Bell Jar received close to twenty reviews in newspapers and journals all around Britain. Two Glasgow dailies, the Glasgow Herald and Evening Times, presented the novel in round-up reviews on two subsequent days, on 17 and 18 January respectively. The reception has been summarized in quite different ways. As if she were describing an extraordinary situation rather than the normal state of affairs faced by numerous writers, Linda Wagner-Martin declares that the book ‘stood on its own completely unknown feet – yet it was favorably reviewed’ (1988b, 1). However, going by Frances McCullough, editor of The Bell Jar in the United States, ‘everyone in literary London knew Plath was the author’, and she was ‘deeply stung’ by the ‘lukewarm’ evaluation (1996, x). Reviewing The Bell Jar as one of five new novels with an anti-hero, Robert Taubman praises it in New Statesman for being ‘a clever first

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novel’ and the first feminine novel he had read ‘in the Salinger mood’ (1963, 128). Laurence Lerner, in The Listener, ‘strongly’ recommends The Bell Jar as ‘a brilliant and moving book’ and as ‘tremendously readable’ (1963). An anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement (1963) was equally convinced by an author who could certainly write. The book read so much like the truth that it was hard to dissociate Victoria Lucas from Esther Greenwood, the first person narrator of the story. In the reviewer’s words, ‘[f]ew writers are able to create a different world for you to live in; yet Miss Lucas in The Bell Jar has done just this’. Several observe that a number of other contemporary novels also treat the subject of mental illness and breakdown. Anthony Burgess, in a round-up for The Observer, depicts The Bell Jar as ‘a very competent first novel which deals freshly with what is fast becoming a stock theme of women writers’ (1963). The Times (1963) stresses the dream-like quality of Esther’s worst experiences. Consequently, ‘her condition never seems painfully serious’. According to Taubman (1963), she goes mad in a rather ‘undisturbing way’. American publishers did not warm to the story. Plath’s editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, felt unprepared as a reader to accept the extent of Esther’s illness, since her actions looked quite normal up to the point of her breakdown. Referring to the many books already dealing with the same area of experience, Elizabeth Lawrence at Harper & Row questioned The Bell Jar’s chances in the current fiction market. She thought the novel turned into a case story which conveyed a private experience.6 When The Bell Jar was reissued in Great Britain in 1966 under Sylvia Plath’s own name, Robert Taubman once again reads the novel as an ingeniously written but unconvincing account of a mental breakdown. Its lack of perspective disturbed him. In Taubman’s opinion, the fashionably wry and clever style, which many writers regarded as the only one available to them, diminished the subject (1966, 402). In a Critical Quarterly editorial, C.B. Cox admits to having problems with how to evaluate ‘this semi-autobiographical story’, as it by then was termed. Finding it an ‘extremely disturbing narrative’, the book offered compulsive reading. But he suspects that aesthetic detachment is not really possible because ‘the heartbreaking intensity of the last poems in Ariel became so involved with the scenes in the novel’ (Cox 1966). Peter Dale, the twenty-eight-year-old co-editor of Agenda, voiced similar observations concerning the poems. The circumstances of their composition and the intensity of feeling involved made criticism difficult and forced the question of how life and art interrelated. To cast a cold critical eye on the poems ‘would be to mistake their ultimate meaning’, Dale states in a

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special issue on US Poetry. A natural sympathy for artists who die young tends to add a powerful, extra-poetic effect to the writings. At the same time, ‘[a] critic is almost driven to find them successful so that the immortality of the work may compensate for the tragedy of the death’ (1966, 49). Dale’s comment matches those from several of the critics discussed below. Obviously familiar with Sylvia Plath’s personal life, or trusting others who claimed such knowledge, Dale defines many of the Ariel poems as autobiographical to the extent of being impenetrable without the type of information Al Alvarez offered. But what if readers tried to make sense of the poetry without knowing that there was a biography which ought to be consulted?

Confessional Extremist Questions about Sylvia Plath’s life and death, as set off by Alvarez’s ‘epitaph’ in The Observer on 17 February 1963, were not answered until after Faber and Faber published Ariel in March 1965. Grounding his opinions in personal knowledge, Alvarez promoted Plath’s work within various quarters, while at the same time gaining the reputation as an authority on the subject. Shortly after she died, Alvarez made a memorial talk for BBC’s Third Programme, designed ‘partly as a tribute and partly as an attempt to show how those strange last poems might be read’. In October 1963, the broadcast was published in a special Plath issue of The Review together with nine of her poems. Alvarez’s essay was subsequently reprinted several times with an explanatory introduction and a postscript.7 It contains in condensed form his thoughts on Plath, which he over the years also repeated elsewhere, in anthologies of modern poetry and in The Savage God. In his memorial talk and essay, Alvarez addresses Plath’s ruthless efficiency and competence, stressing how she remorselessly won all kinds of prizes at school, leaving no room for mistakes in what she did. He argues that The Bell Jar was published under pseudonym because she did not consider it a serious work and believed too many people would be hurt, ‘which was probably true’ (1963b, 20). For him, The Colossus remains a competent collection of beautiful poems, but too arranged for his taste. She had apparently not quite found ‘the disturbance, out of which she made her verse’. Instead, Sylvia Plath’s real poems came into being only after the birth of her daughter in 1960, and this creativity increased with the arrival of her son in 1962 – as if the children liberated her poetic identity. Estrangement from their father is not mentioned as a possible

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source for her final ‘extraordinary outburst’ (21). The new poems were simpler, both more direct and more subjective than those of The Colossus, ‘at once deeply autobiographical and detached, generally relevant’ (25). Discussing ‘Daddy’, Alvarez points at ‘the terrible unforgiveness of her verse’ and the ‘violent resentment’ caused by injustice done to her (26). In his view, most of Sylvia Plath’s later poems are ‘about the unleashing of power, about tapping the roots of her own inner violence’, thereby following the direction of the best contemporary poetry (23). But she went much further than either Robert Lowell or Anne Sexton – two of the poets she admired – in analyzing ‘the taboo’ and ‘the intolerable’. Alvarez is not free from romanticizing a connection between creativity and childbirth, as well as the way in which she seems to make poetry and death inseparable and interdependent. And handling such material required not only great intelligence and insight, ‘it also took a kind of bravery’. His celebration of Silvia Plath’s work culminates dramatically: ‘Poetry of this order is a murderous art’ (26). The statement implies that she died because of her art. Like a true hero or martyr, the poet died for what she believed in. Neither Alvarez’s ideas nor his tendency to epideictic hyperbole went unchallenged, however. The reservations made by others may be read as protests against his use of Plath in several of the ways that I describe in the preceding chapter, ways that link our poet to classical exemplary figures – not least how he employs her as an argument to prove his theories. In The London Magazine, Ian Hamilton – editor of The Review – hesitates before Alvarez’s unflinching enthusiasm. Although the poems he had seen were better than The Colossus, Hamilton is ‘not at all sure that in them “the peculiar intensity of her genius found its perfect expression”, nor that they represent a “totally new breakthrough for modern verse”’ (1963, 55), which is what Alvarez had claimed in his Observer tribute. Hamilton points to the danger that poetry committed to the recreation of nightmarish experience risks being no less arbitrary than the instigating experience. When Alvarez hails Sylvia Plath for bordering on the impossible and overwhelming, he thinks the critic has indicated another danger rather than a legitimate mode. In effect, Hamilton questions Alvarez’s rhetoric of exemplarity, its authority, and its ideology. The following year, Edward Lucie-Smith, in The Critical Quarterly, extends the critique against Alvarez and his followers, declaring the concluding remark of his broadcast – ‘Poetry like this is a murderous art’ – to be embarrassingly significant for what it said about the contemporary literary situation. He sees Alvarez as an exponent of the dominant trend at the time, and the demand for personal poetry as an inheritance from the

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Romantic Movement. After religion ceased to be a real force, the poet had been transformed into a ‘quasi-religious figure’, and the romantic urge towards self-destruction was made mandatory (1964, 356). According to Lucie-Smith, ‘we demand firm evidence of the poet’s death-wish before we will give the seal of approval’ (357). Such reactions forced Alvarez to try and clarify his position in a note added to his broadcast. He had not meant to suggest that Plath’s breakdown or suicide validates the writing he admired. But he did believe that writing involves ‘an element of risk’, because a poet exploring the roots of his emotions could end up living out the dredged-up material (Alvarez 1966a, 73). In other words, Alvarez had not changed his mind, and Sylvia Plath continued to be his favourite exemplary figure, incarnating admirable qualities and demonstrating better than anybody else his own poetics. As a critic, he maintained the standard defence for modernism: that a chaotic world requires a chaotic content and a corresponding chaotic form. The poets ought to take in the horrors of the twentieth century and reflect the general disintegration of norms by plunging downwards into their own psychic darkness. Notwithstanding his declaration of high regard for Plath after she died, the Penguin anthology entitled The New Poetry that Alvarez edited in 1962 failed to contain a single poem by her or by any other woman for that matter. It was mainly a British collection in which, counting the number of poems and pages dedicated to his work, Ted Hughes figures as Alvarez’s main example. Two Americans – Robert Lowell and John Berryman – were also found to be worthy of inclusion. However, the revised edition from 1966 parades both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton as representatives of the depth poetry Alvarez asked for in his introduction, ‘The New Poetry, or Beyond the Gentility Principle’ (1966). Their reputation had in the meantime increased considerably. Still, only the marital status of the two token women was commented upon, not any of the twenty-six male poets. Extremist poetry was another term coined by Alvarez. It designates the kind of poems that results from the internalizing movement of modern literature, when writers dive ever deeper into the subterranean world of psychic isolation ‘to live out in the arts the personal extremism of breakdown, paranoia and depression’ (1965a, 185). Poets familiar with psychoanalysis, who coolly and analytically dissect their own motives and obsessions, who visit their dark or violent sides for the benefit of similarly unshockable readers, are invariably pushed into extremism. For such writers, all the diverse facets of schizophrenia become as urgent and commonplace as beauty, truth, nature, and the soul were to the Romantics,

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Alvarez argues. He applauds Robert Lowell for being the most brilliant technician and ‘the poet from whom the whole movement towards Extremism derives’ (1968, 13). Sylvia Plath was his star successor. In her writings, breakdown and suicide become almost neutral subjects. She went beyond the edge of the bearable, and, ‘in the end, slipped over’. At this point in his argument, Alvarez delivers a modified version of his original warning: ‘That is a risk in handling such touchy, violent material’. Yet the consequences are not wholly negative: ‘[T]he courage it took to gamble in this way is reflected in the curious sense of creative optimism, of possibilities in the teeth of the impossible, that stirs in her poems like a moving bass’ (17). Alvarez thus seems to praise some kind of mental daring akin to Ernest Hemingway’s flirtation with death while running with the bulls in Pamplona. When fate is defied, the meaning of life is enhanced, and the creative process is nourished through the suspense. Entitled ‘Poetry in Extremis’, Alvarez’s review of Ariel in The Observer, on 14 March 1965, can be taken as the writer’s attempt to confirm his own position within the Plath reception. On the one hand, Alvarez refers to and quotes from what he had written himself at the time of her death, and on the other hand, he rejects the competing term ‘confessional’ as suitable for describing her poetry. Although intensely personal, Plath’s work is too concentrated and detached and ironic for ‘confessional’ verse, with all that implies of self-indulgent cashing-in on misfortunes; and it is violent without any deliberate exploitation of horrors and petty nastiness.

Since nearly all her last poems had been about dying, death when it finally came was, ‘in a way, inevitable, even justified, like some final unwritten poem’. Alvarez closes his argument by stating that ‘Sylvia Plath learned a great deal from the extremist art’ – defined here as ‘the perceptions pushed to the edge of breakdown’ – first handled by Robert Lowell in Life Studies (1959). In spite of everything Plath had learned from Lowell, Alvarez nevertheless champions Ariel as something extraordinary. Her leap into originality from The Colossus had been ‘unforeseeable’ (1965b).8 A few days later, his older American counterpart, M.L. Rosenthal, reviewed Ariel in The Spectator, together with Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead, under the heading ‘Poets of the Dangerous Way’ (1965) – meaning the dangerous confessional way of Lowell. By killing herself, Sylvia Plath had taken the one advance position left open to her, Rosenthal claims. Poems such as ‘Daddy’ and ‘Fever 103’ signify to him that ‘if a poet is sensitive enough to the age and brave enough to face it directly it

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will kill him through the exacerbation of his awareness alone’, and he correctly predicted that this was material for legends. Ideas advocated by Rosenthal, Alvarez, and like-minded critics contributed decisively to the cult that grew up around Sylvia Plath, portraying her as a sensitive poet who gave everything for her art, and who succumbed only in the face of psychic horrors and unbearable circumstances. The two critics may have labelled the new poetry differently, but they agreed on the basic characteristics, on the great personal hazard involved, and its ultimate worth regardless of the costs. Alvarez and Rosenthal were both active as critics, poets, editors, anthologizers, and authors of books on modern poetry. In a letter, Sylvia Plath commented on the opinion-making power of Alvarez (Letters Home, 476), and Rosenthal figures in her diaries because of his editorial position at The Nation and at Macmillan (Journals 2000, 270, 497). A university professor at New York University, Rosenthal was the first to coin confessional poetry, in order to describe Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. This term proved to be more lasting over the years than Alvarez’s extremism. Contrary to T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative, which dominated poetry and criticism at the time, Lowell had been experimenting with a form closer to prose, revealing autobiographical material about his family and his own mental illness. His speaker was, in Rosenthal’s words, ‘unequivocally himself’ (1959, 154), and ‘his main target, himself as the damned speaking-sensibility of his world’ (155). Life Studies reads as a series of personal and rather shameful confidences about private humiliations, suffering, and psychological problems. Reviewing the book, Rosenthal thought it appropriate to point at forerunners like Augustine and Rousseau. Since Lowell had not published anything in eight years, Rosenthal also used the term ‘confessional’ to separate the new work from his earlier productions (1967a, 26–27). In a collection of essays discussing The Modern Poets (1960), Rosenthal elaborates on his understanding of the term. The Modern Poets came out before the careers of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton had taken off. But they were impossible to ignore in its sequel seven years later, called The New Poets (1967) – a title almost identical to Alvarez’s. A true confessional poem, Rosenthal argues, puts the poetic ‘I’ at its centre in such a way as to make the speaker’s shame and psychological vulnerability an embodiment of his civilization. To achieve this fusion of the private and the culturally symbolic, a ‘genuine’ confessional poem had to be ‘superbly successful artistically’ (1967a, 79–80).9 Several Ariel poems, like ‘Lady Lazarus’, satisfy his requirements whereas others do not rise above the autobiographical. According to Rosenthal, the underlying

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motif which sums up her writing is an ambivalent attitude towards death. He deems Plath’s range of technical resources and capacity for intellectual objectivity to be narrower than Lowell’s. Rosenthal was preoccupied with how the poetic landscape reflects dramatic changes in our perceptions of personality and the courage poets have to look steadily into the abyss in order to deal with what Eliot calls the ‘inexpressibly horrible’. This notion of poetry’s object and reason was quite common at the time. Robert Lowell wonders if Sylvia Plath’s death was somehow part of ‘the imaginative risk’ and whether the fact that she carried out the death she predicted could be seen as ‘an irrelevant accident’ (in Rosenthal 1967a, 68). Contrary to his apprentice, Lowell survived because he stuck to the impersonal motivation of his art even as the private memory threatened to sweep him away from it. Plath had gone one step further down ‘the dangerous confessional way’ and acted out the old romantic fallacy, Rosenthal claims (83). She literally committed her own predicaments in the interest of her art, thereby confusing motive and art, the real with the ideal. Echoing Alvarez and his use of Plath as an exemplary argument, Rosenthal himself was perhaps no less fallacious when stating that her pitifully brief life makes it ‘hard not to ask whether the fine cultivation of poetic sensibility is after all worth the candle’ and answers this question with an unequivocal ‘yes’. He avoids explaining his statement by adding ‘for reasons that I hope we all know’ (89). But, is it really self-evident that art is more important than life?

A Major Literary Event ‘After her death, Sylvia Plath was increasingly treated as a commodity, packaged in Ariel and sealed off by her birth and death dates. She did not become a “confessional poet” until she committed suicide’, Mary Kinzie observes in 1970 (289) after having studied the reception up until then. Ariel was met with a phenomenal interest, helped along by influential critics and scholars who were delivering their decrees within a week of the British publication on 11 March 1965. Alvarez saluted Ariel as ‘a major literary event’; Rosenthal highlighted Plath’s ‘absolute, almost demonically intense commitment by the end to the confessional mode’; P.N. Furbank termed Ariel as ‘sick verse’. Compared to Robert Lowell’s new volume, For the Union Dead, which in Furbank’s opinion could not be healthier, Plath’s work told him that ‘she obviously felt ... like someone brought back from death to disturb and terrify us’. Her myth-creating power, though, he thought was ‘extraordinary’ (Furbank 1965). From day one, Ariel incited varied, contradictory, and strongly worded

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reactions well suited for attracting attention. Reviewers seemed almost at pains to match the vocabulary of her poems. But a more sober tone may be found in an unsigned review in The Times (1965) later that year. Among a whole series of poetry collections, Plath’s gets the verdict ‘noble’. Another anonymous reviewer, in The Times Literary Supplement (1965), pronounces Ariel as ‘one of the most marvellous volumes of poetry published for a very long time’. Biographical comments are limited, the focus being on Plath’s poetic world: an intense, claustrophobic present filled with terrible forces of fear, obsessive images of death, and ‘nightmarish impulses towards brutality or suicide’. In some poems, there is a dry, mocking voice; in others, the sinister trappings are mounted to the extent of appearing like parodies of a Sylvia Plath poem. Her power to write about personal suffering is ‘mysterious’, according to The Times Literary Supplement. One of the first to explain the public impact of Ariel by evoking the poet’s suicide and personality – and not just the poems themselves – was George Steiner. For those who knew Plath personally as well as for the many who ‘were electrified by her last poems and sudden death, she had come to signify the specific honesties and risks of the poet’s condition’. Because the knowledge of her personal suffering had taken on a dramatic authority of its own, this, Steiner believes, made it difficult to judge the poems (1965, 51). In ‘Dying Is an Art’, a title taken from ‘Lady Lazarus’, Steiner presents Sylvia Plath as representative of a contemporary tone of emotional life and as unique in creating poems of implacable, harsh brilliance. The American edition of Ariel, published by Harper & Row in June 1966, contained a preface by Robert Lowell.10 Four lines of quotation were printed as an appetizer on the front dust cover, with the text continuing onto the inside flap. Lowell had at the time attained stardom even outside literary circles and belonged to a group of artists and intellectuals cultivated by Jackie and John F. Kennedy. Loudly protesting against Lyndon B. Johnson’s bombing of Vietnam, Lowell also became a front figure of the peace movement. The cover of Ariel quotes Alvarez pronouncing that the poems read as if they were written posthumously. The risks that Alvarez, Rosenthal, and Steiner had mentioned in connection with Plath’s poetry, Lowell explicates in his own way, escalating the agitation that followed in Ariel’s wake: ‘These poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder’. Lowell evidently saw the deadly outcome as inevitable, and Newsweek (1966) followed suit by choosing ‘Russian Roulette’ as title for its review.

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Time magazine (1966) picked a line from ‘Kindness’ – ‘The Blood Jet Is Poetry’ – to introduce the author of Ariel and a full rendering of ‘Daddy’. A ‘strange and terrible poem’ about ‘her morbid love-hatred of her father’, it is seen as exemplary for the ‘literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale [sic] across the literary landscape’. Intellectual London had supposedly hunched over copies of this particular poem a few days after she killed herself, although ‘Daddy’ in fact was not published until October 1963, in The Review and Encounter. The anonymous Time reviewer delivers ironic, sweeping comments on how ‘Sylvia’s psychosis has standard Freudian trimmings’ and evades neither close relatives nor suicide, shock treatments or marital breakdown. ‘The Blood Jet Is Poetry’ opens with an image of ‘a pretty young mother of two children’ found with her head in the gas oven. The Bell Jar is mentioned only for its autobiographical elements, and Plath’s poetry is dismissed as confessional abreactions. Time treats the publication of Ariel as an opportunity to sell a story rather than to discuss literature. Amateur photos of the main character confuse the line between private and public, which is likewise signalled by the use of a familiar ‘Sylvia’ to report on her life, work, and personality. The poet’s family must have been deeply upset by this kind of journalism,11 particularly because of Time’s position as a nationwide magazine with a circulation of four to five million and some twentymillion readers. In Star Authors, Joe Moran emphasizes the role played by mass-market magazines like Time and Life in converting authors into public personalities. Their emblematic journalism relies on pictures and entertaining stereotypes and on establishing close connections between writers’ art and their lives (Moran 2000, 24–25). The mediated personalities conform to traditional gender stereotypes and idealized suffering artists – male artists that is. The profiles of Robert Lowell and John Berryman that were published the following summer, in Time and Life respectively, present a much more positive and romanticized portrait of two outstanding confessional poets.12 In the cover story on Lowell, ‘the best American poet of his generation’, only two women, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, are mentioned among the two-dozen poets listed from the twentieth century (Time 1967, 35). And only male poets figure among Lowell’s followers, described as ‘excellent poets, some of them brilliant’ (42). There is no room for dragon Sylvia in Time’s version of ‘Poetry in an Age of Prose’.13 The bile she breathes is ostensibly not of the kind that creates a melancholy aura around the poet. Before the publication of Ariel in the US, Ted Hughes told Aurelia and Warren Plath about reports that American students already revered

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Sylvia’s work as ‘a holy text’ (2007, 253), and he doubts that it would be possible to avoid her turning into a literary legend (257). Responding to a letter from Mrs Plath after the book’s release, he then declares that Ariel never should have been published in the States. Despite his misgivings, he never expected it to be such ‘a big-scale sensation’ (259), calling the reaction in England ‘so sane, by comparison’ (260). For the publishers, the reaction in the US meant good marketing (McCullough 1996, xiii). Evaluating the reception two years later, scholar Alicia Ostriker rather prematurely claims that Ariel ‘provoked a violent and brief literary cultism’. According to her, commentators generally failed to distinguish between Plath’s poetry and her biography because so many of her poems deal directly with illness, suicide, and death. The author remembers her own compound reaction to Plath’s work as something like Good God it’s real and Damn, she did it – as if having ‘done it’ were somehow a triumph – and a physical sensation like that of being slapped hard. (1968, 201)

Once the novelty of the suicide wore off, Ostriker believed it would be easier to appreciate the poetic strengths of Ariel. Discussing ‘“Fact” as Style: The Americanization of Sylvia’, she regards Plath as typically American in her affirmation of factual realities, how she takes poetic risks, and how she uses a kind of journalistic technique to explore life. If the work proves lasting, Ostriker argues, ‘it will not be because the poet killed herself but because her personal voice became a national voice also’ (211). Admonishing a straying public back to the literary base has been a regular feature in writings on Sylvia Plath, and its mere constancy demonstrates the futility of the task. Insisting titles like ‘Her Poetry, Not Her Death, Is Her Triumph’ (Drexler 1974) may well have had a counterproductive effect. The invitation to read Plath’s poems ‘as if written anonymously’ instead of reading the complete oeuvre ‘as if it were a protracted suicide note’ fell to the ground (Howes 1972). All the media attention made it impossible to disregard the poet’s biography, even if one wanted to. And most people did not.

Assorted Objections Robert Lowell’s praise of Sylvia Plath was mixed. In his foreword to Ariel, he on the one hand corroborates the image of Plath as an obsessed poetic talent who got rid of her old, neat self and became ‘something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created – hardly a person at all’. On the other hand, he expresses a detached and even condescending attitude,

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drawing a parallel between the late Sylvia Plath and classic literary characters like Dido, Phaedra, and Medea – although Medea killed her children, not herself. Everything in Plath’s poems is apparently ‘personal, confessional, felt’, the manner of feeling comparable to ‘controlled hallucination, the autobiography of a fever’. Her great control and mobility, which made it possible for her to write about anything she wanted with a macabre gaiety, Lowell values as the qualities ‘most heroic in her’. But what she in the end has to offer her readers is death, he asserts; ‘her art’s immortality is life’s disintegration’. In Sylvia Plath’s poetry, ‘life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it’. The poems, then, could be a shocking experience. Lowell believed many readers would ‘recoil’ and ‘painfully wonder why so much of it leaves them feeling empty, evasive and inarticulate’. The foreword ends with his impressions of Sylvia Plath when she attended his writing seminar in Boston. The poems she had worked on then, and which later went into The Colossus, did not evoke much of a resonance in him, nor did they make him guess ‘her later appalling and triumphant fulfillment’ (Lowell 1966b, ix–xi). When women readers, instead of shying away from Plath came flocking and claimed her as their own, Lowell put his apprentice emphatically in her place. In a poem entitled ‘Sylvia Plath’, he tags her as ‘A miniature mad talent’ and follows this with a rhetorical question mark. She is made responsible for sixty thousand American ‘U.I.D., Unexplained Infant Deaths’ a year, because of ‘Each English major saying, “I am Sylvia, / I hate marriage, I must hate babies”’ (1973, 135). The exemplary quality that Lowell’s ‘Sylvia’ incarnates appears to be quite the opposite of what Alvarez ascribes to her. Once again, the reception of Ariel was generally more positive in Great Britain than in the US. Summing up his impressions in 1972, writer Paul West maintains that after years of rebuking poets for not being crisp enough, critics, especially English male reviewers, had gone to the other, gushing extreme over Ariel, ‘so much so that a new form of verbal solecism – the Plathitude – came into being’. They had reacted very differently to the self-chosen deaths of Sylvia Plath versus Yukio Mishima, finding the latter’s suicide a manifestation of tasteless oriental exhibitionism, according to West. The chain reaction Plath set off had ‘more to do with atavistic, sacrificial rituals – Venus romanticized – than with the excellence or unevenness of her writing’. One reason he gives for the veneration is that ‘the poet, so-called, will always seem a visionary, with one foot in myth and one eye on Orpheus’. Here, West (1972) first points at the function poets may have in our culture and then at the very long tradition of ascribing to them a special status, with suicide adding an

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extra credibility to their work. Actually, the reception of Plath was not wholly affirmative on either side of the Atlantic. A major objection in both countries concerns her Holocaust references and the comparison she made between her own suffering and that of the Jews. Some critics took this as evidence of poetic courage. Alvarez and Rosenthal did not voice any misgivings. George Steiner occupied a middle position. He calls ‘Daddy’ the ‘“Guernica” of modern poetry’, claiming that ‘Sylvia Plath became a woman being transported to Auschwitz on the death trains’. The next minute, though, it looks as if he undermines his own reasoning, as well as Plath’s poems, by asking whether they are entirely legitimate, whether the invocation of Auschwitz and the enormity of ready emotion by an outsider for private ends, could be seen as some kind of larceny (1965, 54). Returning to the subject in 1969, Steiner expresses uneasiness with her ‘grim fiction’. The essay entitled ‘In Extremis’, written for the Cambridge Review, refers at least in its title to Alvarez. Does any writer or human being for that matter, other than the actual survivors, have the right to fabricate the kind of ‘death-rig’ that Sylvia Plath constructed, Steiner asks. What right did she – ‘a child, plump and golden in America, when the trains actually went’ – have to locate her personal disasters in Auschwitz (1969, 248)? The American critic Irving Howe was in no doubt about the illegitimacy of how she used the Holocaust: Those who ignored the poet’s need for enlarging the suicide pattern in ‘Lady Lazarus’ had to be ‘infatuated with the Plath legend’ (1972, 90). To compare a set of tangled emotions about one’s father with the fate of the European Jews is ‘monstrous’ when done deliberately, Howe declares, and ‘sad’ if the comparison is made spontaneously (91).14 Sylvia Plath’s Holocaust references proved to be a persistent topic of discussion in the years to come, and they continue to provoke opposing reactions. It may well be taken as an instance of the tenuous ideological and changing relationship between exemplary figures and the (con)text into which they are inserted. The authority that Plath may be trying to enact when comparing herself with Jews and the suffering they incarnate – ‘I think I may well be a Jew’, ‘I may be a bit of a Jew’ (‘Daddy’) – is not granted automatically within her reading communities; on the contrary, it is questioned. Although the audience may identify with the exemplary figure she invokes, the process of identification is not collectively transferred to her. Plath can thus be said to have misjudged the rhetorical figure she applied, its effectiveness, and its ability to persuade (see Chapter One, 33–36).

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At the age of twenty four, seven years before he became literary editor of The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier finds Plath responsible for initiating a trend of ‘death camp chic’, stating that she had not earned any familiarity with the hellish subject and obviously did not realize its incommensurability to her own experience. The Jews with whom she identifies in ‘Daddy’ were victims of something decidedly worse than ‘weird luck’ (1976, 20). Wieseltier is equally critical of George Steiner for mediating a patronizing view of camp survivors as a pitiable, inarticulate lot who needed artists and writers to speak on their behalf (22). A decade later, Professor of English and Judaic Studies, James E. Young, is not interested in Plath’s ‘right’ to the Holocaust but rather in how the Holocaust functions and creates meaning in her poetry (1987, 128). He thinks she exemplifies the ongoing reciprocal exchange that takes place between private and historical realms. Sylvia Plath worked on externalizing her internal world just as the Holocaust entered the public memory with the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. A language of atrocities was thereby made available to her. Young mainly addresses questions of function and aesthetics, suggesting that Plath searched ‘for the right sound’ in the Holocaust and Hiroshima figures of suffering (131). Biographer Anne Stevenson deems the suffering of Sylvia Plath’s inner hell as ‘indeed on a scale to compare with the Holocaust’ and even ‘all the more terrible because it was self-inflicted and lacked a physical dimension’ (1988/89, 14). Conversely, Harold Bloom repeats old objections to a ‘gratuitous and humanly offensive appropriation of the imagery of Jewish martyrs in Nazi death camps’, declaring it ‘incessant in Plath’. He calls both Plath and Adrienne Rich ‘seers of the School of Resentment’, and protests at the feminist defence of Plath’s final mode (Bloom 1989, 3). Seemingly sidestepping the issue, Pamela J. Annas in a 1980 article quotes Betty Friedan’s rather surprising comparison of the situation faced by American women during the late 1950s and early 1960s with ‘a “comfortable concentration camp” – physically luxurious, mentally oppressive and impoverished’. Annas argues that the recurring metaphors of fragmentation and reification in Plath’s later poems are socially and historically based: ‘They are images of Nazi concentration camps, … of kitchens, iceboxes, adding machines, typewriters, and the depersonalization of hospitals’ (Annas 1980, 172).15 Women’s studies advocate Susan Van Dyne lumps the horror of the Holocaust with other narratives that Sylvia Plath turned to when the old fictions failed her and she needed to rebuild a triumphant identity (1983, 397). Van Dyne accuses Irving Howe of being sexist and of rehearsing familiar charges against women artists. According

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to her, Howe thought it was particularly offensive that a non-Jewish woman used the Holocaust (396). Problems which feminists may have had with the issue, morally or otherwise, are perhaps the reason behind a striking redirection in Plath studies, or maybe the shift is just a reflection of modern trends generally. In any case, as the passing of time pushed the gas chambers further into history and more people were increasingly hooked on ‘Fascinating Fascism’,16 Sylvia Plath and her use of the Holocaust stopped being primarily an ethical question and – via Young’s discussion of function and aesthetics – started becoming an erotical issue. Instead of talking about her use or abuse of Jews, several critics focused on the connections between Plath and fascism, including fantasies of violence, sex, and power (see Rose 1991; J.S. Murphy 1995). Feminist readings turned Nazi images into a critique of patriarchy. Yet looking back, Laura Frost asserts that Sylvia Plath’s images of eroticized fascism are part of a literary tradition spanning the entire twentieth century and singles out ‘Daddy’ as probably the most infamous literary example of the genealogy she sets out to trace in Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (2002). The saying now is that the poet’s distance from Nazism ‘allows her’ to write the way she does, to see Nazism in relation to abstract theories, and to use Nazi genocide as a way to imagine the most provocative libidinal dramas. For Frost, ‘every woman loves a fascist’ is not as ironic a line as most progressive feminist readings imply. Rather, Plath’s poems ‘parade stereotypes of innate female masochism’ (Frost 2002, 144–45).17 Gender identity, how it affects the literary work and whether the poet complies with or defies prejudice, constitutes an integral part of Plath criticism from the beginning. As we have already seen from comments on her style, technical skills, and marital status, readers approach her texts with their preconditioned horizons of expectations. George Steiner resorts to the psychiatric term hysteria to characterize Sylvia Plath’s ‘sharply feminine and contemporary’ writing. He detects ‘an intensely womanly and aggravated note’ and locates her within a new movement of women who speak out as they never have before (Steiner 1965, 51–52). Stephen Spender, in ‘Warnings from the Grave’, uses the same term, or derivations of it, several times without properly defining hysteria. He describes the landscape invoked in Ariel as an entirely interior one, ‘in which external objects have become converted into symbols of hysterical vision’. The poems materialize as fragments ‘of an outpouring which could not stop with the lapsing of the poet’s hysteria’ and as if they were ‘written by some priestess cultivating her hysteria’. Such a prophetic character is not new in itself, and Spender points to Wilfred Owen for a corrective: ‘But

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being a woman, her warning is more shrill, penetrating, visionary than Owen’s’. Plath’s femininity is explicitly given as a reason for ‘her hysteria [coming] completely out of herself’ (Spender 1966, 25–26; my italics). Ted Hughes likewise reveals his stereotypical understanding of the female gender as more immediate, emotional, and closer to nature than men. In ‘Notes on the chronological order of Sylvia Plath’s poems’, he indicates that his wife’s lack of protection against her own reality is ‘one of the privileges, or prices, of being a woman and at the same time an initiate into the poetic order of events’ (1966, 82). And in his foreword to The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982), he defines her readiness to sacrifice everything to the birth of a new self as ‘something very primitive, perhaps very female’ (Hughes 1987, xiv). Similar to several male colleagues, Alicia Ostriker finds ‘hysteria unveiled’ in Ariel. Ostriker’s matter of fact description of the ‘I’ at the centre of the poems – ‘commonly childish, hysterical, and radically incomplete, ... forcing the reader into disequilibrium’ and sometimes ‘to identify with Plath’s antagonists’ – may count as another objection to Sylvia Plath’s work. But together with the following observation, this description might also be filed as a partial explanation of why she has remained so popular with readers and critics alike – a subject to which I shall return in the final chapter. According to Alicia Ostriker, Plath’s combination of a refusal of traditional literary locus, dramatic and arrogant assertion of a self which is totally unstable but is the only self one has, and furious attack on an outside world seen as stupidly and brutally stable, produces a poetry which is continually threatening to slide into absurdity. (1968, 205)

A few years after Ostriker, Joyce Carol Oates addresses Plath’s preoccupation with the self, its moods and doubts, but rules out the idea that Plath will have a long posthumous life. Quite the contrary, Oates believes that ‘Miss Plath’s era is concluded’ (1973, 501). Pointing to the poet’s distanced relations with her surroundings, she argues in ‘The Death Throes of Romanticism’ (1973) that Plath’s work may be used to diagnose pathological aspects in contemporary culture. Sylvia Plath neither liked nor empathized with other people. ‘Even her own children were objects of her perception, there for the restless scrutiny of her image-making mind and not there as human beings with a potentiality’ (505). If she writes about herself as a Jew of sorts, ‘it is only to define herself, her sorrows, and not to involve our sympathies for the Jews of recent European history’, Oates claims (504). Plath’s blend of narcissism and self-contempt gave rise to contempt for women and victims generally and to an

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identification with the persecutors. To Oates, it is evident that Plath lacked the necessary ability to distinguish between real and illusory enemies and to estimate the likelihood of actual danger. This helps explain why she could so easily fuse her father with Nazi atrocities and ‘unashamedly declare herself a “Jew” because the memory of her father persecuted her’ (521). As a critic, Joyce Carol Oates departs from probing Sylvia Plath’s own poetic vision, to reflecting more principally on poetry and the kind of poetic family to which Plath belonged: Why does it never occur to Romantic poets that they exist as much by right in the universe as any other creature, and that their function as poets is a natural function – that the human imagination is, to put it bluntly, superior to the imagination of birds and infants? In art this can lead to silence; in life, to suicide. (514)

Trapped in a romantic misunderstanding, it was ‘tragically unknown to Miss Plath’ that a unique personality does not necessitate isolation, Oates comments (1973, 522). A number of other critics have likewise discussed what they see as the romantic aspects of Sylvia Plath’s poetry.

Rupture or Continuity? In the autumn of 1966, the American journal Tri-Quarterly dedicated two thirds of an issue to eighteen Sylvia Plath poems and six essays about her. Edited by Charles Newman, this collection represents the first effort at extensively presenting Plath’s work and life.18 These essays later comprised the core of The Art of Sylvia Plath, published in 1970. Several of the pieces I have referred to so far – by Alvarez, Rosenthal, Spender, and Steiner – were reprinted in The Art of Sylvia Plath along with other works of criticism, a bibliography, and memoirs by friends. Similar mixtures of new and old essays, literary criticism, thematic studies, and personal contributions were repeated in subsequent collections like The Woman and the Work (1979), edited by Edward Butscher, and Ariel Ascending (1985), edited by Paul Alexander. A reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement (1970) greets The Art of Sylvia Plath as ‘not the best imaginable book that could be compiled about her at this time, but it is all we’ve got. And it will be widely read’. Curiously, the review – entitled ‘Sylvia Plath: cult and backlash’ – treats The Art of Sylvia Plath as an inevitable reaction to the cult resulting from her suicide and the publication of Ariel. So heated had the reception been that the reviewer actually regards a calm tone and emphasis on

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craftsmanship to be a ‘backlash’, even though the essays certainly contain their share of ‘myth’ and ‘cult’. Many of them were, after all, written during the first Plath fad. If it is true that the book appeared during a lull in the public interest in Plath, it was definitely only a temporary one. Judged in retrospect, the beginning of the 1970s comprised a peak in Plath’s reception. Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, the American edition of The Bell Jar, and Alvarez’s The Savage God were all published in 1971.19 Several of the earliest academic studies or doctoral dissertations, submitted to a variety of institutions like the University of Essex, University of Gothenburg, and Southern Illinois University, also came out in 1971.20 In fact, Harriet Rosenstein dubbed 1971 as ‘the first Plath annus mirabilis’, with media attention reflecting the extent to which she had become ‘a cult figure’ and ‘an eminently marketable commodity as well’. A particular Plath iconography had spawned mini-industries that were everywhere, Rosenstein claims (1971). Within a few years, examples of nearly every possible type of Plath literature had been published – in addition to reviews, articles in periodicals, collections of essays, and dissertations. Eileen Aird’s Sylvia Plath was the first short, general introduction to the poet’s life and work in an endless succession of presentations,21 and Nancy Hunter Steiner’s A Closer Look at Ariel was the first book of memoirs. Both surfaced in 1973. Edward Butscher’s biography, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness, was published in 1976, the same year as the release of two monographs on her poetry, namely David Holbrook’s Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence and Judith Kroll’s Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Recurring traits in the Plath reception, such as the emphasis on the extreme and the confessional, are also present in The Art of Sylvia Plath. The discussion of Plath’s Holocaust references was subsequently extended to her use of and attitude towards history in general. Another persistent phenomenon has been the contributors’ lack of distance to their subject. It is as if the poet invited personal and stylistic identification, encouraging both philosophical musings and literary ambitions in the critic. To explain the existence of what he terms ‘so much intellectual garbage ... harvested in celebration of Sylvia Plath’, Webster Schott suggests the existence of ‘a communicable disease’ (1972). Harold Bloom insists that Plath herself ‘contaminates’ the criticism, because her readers are ‘harangued’ by a ‘coercive rhetoric’ (1989, 3–4). In The Art of Sylvia Plath, a tendency to pretentiousness is evident in the essay submitted by its editor. The publisher’s note credits Charles Newman with a novel but not with any other kind of publication to his name. He operates with a complicated system of titles, epigraphs, and

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quotations set in different types, thereby adding what seems to be more confusion and less insight to his comparison between Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. The two women poets, whom Newman calls by their first names, belong to the transcendental tradition. They both portray women as heroes, and each writes about love – although from opposite positions: Dickinson was preoccupied with giving love in a Christian context, whereas Plath ‘dramatizes the difficulty of knowing or accepting love’ (1970, 27). Yet the essential difference in their approaches evidently just ‘binds them all the closer’. Putting Sylvia Plath’s ‘entire body of work’ onto one single formula, Newman claims it ‘can be seen as dialogue with an “Other”’ (25). Existential statements likewise flourish in Richard Howard’s assessment. ‘Her entire body of work’ is to him best understood as ‘a transaction – out of silence, into the dark – with otherness’. Howard aims to demonstrate that ‘it was not herself she became, but totally Other, so that she (or the poems – it is all one now) looked back on “herself” as not yet having become anything at all’.22 The Art of Sylvia Plath includes representatives of those who saw Ariel as a break with her early writing and those critics who argued for what they saw as continuity throughout her work. Al Alvarez belongs to the first group, as does John Frederick Nims, who conducts a ‘technical analysis’ of her poetry. Nims describes the rhyme work of The Colossus as ‘extremely devious and intricate’ and that of Ariel as ‘almost excessively simple’ (1970, 144). By then, Plath had been struck – in his words – by ‘a lightning from the spirit’. But without the ‘drudgery’ of the early poems, the ‘triumph’ of her later work would have been unthinkable (136). As a translator of Plath, Annette Lavers on the other hand was convinced that her final poems derive their meaning ‘from an underlying code’ that was developed over years, ‘in which objects and their qualities are endowed with stable significations and hierarchized’ (1970, 101). Only because such a preordained scheme existed was Plath able to write so many poems of high quality in such a short time, Lavers states in ‘The World as Icon’, an essay pursuing several Plathian themes. Studying her sea imagery and her idea of death by water, Edward Lucie-Smith too finds that Sylvia Plath is ‘really a writer of exceptional and persistent unity’. For him, the reason why so many critics stress the differences between The Colossus and Ariel is simply due to ‘accidents of publication’, which meant that for several years her ‘middle-period poems’ had been left out of the critics’ analyses. Although Sylvia Plath herself largely rejected them for later works, Lucie-Smith declares these middle-period poems to ‘provide the key to her development as a writer’ (1970, 91). Objecting to Alvarez’s romantic notions of poetry, he believes the development to have

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been more gradual than previously realized. Ted Hughes argued equally for the idea of exceptional development and for seeing the separate poems as constituting ‘one long poem’ or – alternatively – ‘chapters in a mythology’ (1966, 81; 1970, 187). When Crossing the Water came out, the American edition was subtitled ‘Transitional Poems’. Similar to the British edition, it contained a note explaining that, with a few exceptions, the content had been written in the interim between Sylvia Plath’s two major collections. In The New York Times Book Review, Helen Vendler (1971) read Crossing the Water as an instalment in Plath’s struggles to shed the inherited skins of predecessors like Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell, before transcending into the purer selfhood of Ariel. Other reviewers talked more specifically of Plath’s transitional style, understood both as something different from the rest of her work and as an expression of continuity within the same, preparing the leap from The Colossus to Ariel.23 At the same time, several critics started questioning what to them emerged more and more as a haphazard manner of publishing Plath’s work. Ted Hughes’s old friend, Al Alvarez, suspected commercial reasons for bringing out two volumes in 1971 ‘where one would do’. With the enormous growth of the Plath cult, Alvarez sees the ‘overwhelming’ temptation to milk the market by publishing a new collection every few years instead of going for a proper complete works. He then addresses the question of why some poems were omitted from existing titles. Pointing to the intensely personal nature of Sylvia Plath’s later poetry, some of which was ‘savagely vengeful’, it is understandable that the publication of such poems would be painful for her survivors. Yet the poems being what they are, real art and not vulgar confessional verse, Alvarez maintains that ‘no one, outside her most intimate circle, could possibly pick up the personal references’ (1971a). By now, however, the (auto)biographical reception of Plath was well established. Bearing in mind that quite a few of the poems were contemporary either with late Colossus or early Ariel texts, Professor of English Marjorie Perloff questions the validity in calling the 1971 collections transitional. The confusion was compounded, she claims in ‘On the Road to Ariel’ (1973), by Hughes’s prefatory note to Winter Trees, where he writes that the poems were ‘all out of the batch’ from which Ariel had been chosen ‘more or less arbitrarily’ and ‘composed in the last nine months of Sylvia Plath’s life’.24 But some of the new poems, as Perloff points out, had already been included in the American edition of Ariel. Why, then, were some poems such as ‘Lesbos’ reprinted, while others which had previously

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appeared in periodicals were omitted? What Perloff resented were the discrepancies and lacking explanations behind publishing choices, and not that too little of Plath’s work existed in print. Reviewing Crossing the Water, she finds weaknesses so evident – ‘gratuitous description, overingenious metaphor, mannered sound patterning often unrelated to meaning, and occasional tonal and structural irresolution’ – that she cannot help but wonder if the whole book might be considered ‘a disservice to her best work’. Winter Trees evokes the same reaction. Although many of the poems are striking when read separately, they ‘begin to take on an air of déjà vu when one is familiar with Ariel’ (1973, 107), and Perloff infers that ‘Sylvia Plath’s imaginative world is, despite its power and coherence, essentially a limited one’ (110). Consequently, in this case perhaps ‘less is more’ (109). In an earlier version of her article, she questions ‘whether Sylvia Plath is really the major writer Alvarez describes, or whether she is not perhaps an extraordinarily gifted minor poet’ (1972a, 588). Later, when Sylvia Plath had for years been a favourite in women’s literature courses and a must in the revised literary canon, Perloff would deliver less reserved assessments. If male critics dominated the reception during the first decade, the women were soon to take over.

Cult – Icon – Legend – Myth Perloff opens her essay on Sylvia Plath’s ‘transitional poetry’ by noting that the poet had become a true cult figure. To demonstrate her point, she provides an example of a huge window display in a bookshop, featuring a large photograph of Plath, along with copies of her books and of Alvarez’s The Savage God. In the 1960s, the attention paid to Plath was sporadically characterized as a cult or a myth – for instance in Melvin Maddocks’s 1966 review of Ariel, ‘Sylvia Plath: the cult and the poems’. This sort of attention became increasingly common in the early 1970s. A piece by Ann Birstein in the October 1971 edition of Vogue was published under a typical title for the time: ‘The Sylvia Plath Cult’. And a review by Carl Rakosi in November 1971 was printed with a similarly typical title: ‘Sylvia Plath: the poetess and the myth’.25 Doubtful as to whether the best label was ‘cult’, ‘legend’, or a ‘mysterious incidence of mass identification’, Martha Duffy in Life calls Sylvia Plath ‘easily the year’s hottest literary property’ (1971, 38a). Harriet Rosenstein, whose 1971 review of Crossing the Water draws attention to Plath as a cult figure and a commodity, observes in the following year that ‘Sylvia Plath has become an icon and supposedly a model to us all’ (1972, 44). Nineteen years after the poet died, another

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critic states the obvious: ‘[I]t is difficult to remember that Sylvia Plath was once not a legend’ (Brownjohn 1982, 165). But what do the different commentators put into such terms as cult, myth, icon, and legend? Paul West, as we have seen, reacted to the indiscriminate reverence of Sylvia Plath as a victim and a witness – two points which, on closer inspection, turn out to be central in the many definitions used to label Plath, although the users also include their own preoccupations when labelling her. Marjorie Perloff dislikes publicity that makes the poems seem almost an irrelevancy in the search for the real Sylvia Plath, the Laingian heroine behind the mask of beautiful, brilliant, super-efficient Smith girl, who married the most admired British poet of our time. (1973, 94)

On a previous occasion, Perloff had described the ‘high priestess’ of the growing Plath cult as ‘a courageous free spirit who sacrificed her life for her art, a brave gambler who lost the gamble’. Not surprisingly, Perloff sums up the Plath myth in a way that makes Alvarez responsible for championing the myth rather than the poetry – regardless of how much he distanced himself and lamented the myth’s existence (Perloff 1972a, 581– 82). Because he believed Plath’s suicide to be ‘a cry for help’ (1973, 36), Alvarez, in The Savage God, argues that the ‘myth of the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her art’, is based on a mistake which turns the suicide into the main issue. According to him, the pity lies not in the fact that a myth exists, ‘but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake and too soon’ (1973, 38). However, in analyzing the way Alvarez uses Plath, Marjorie Perloff deems him guilty of the same sort of unfortunate mythologizing. Presenting her as an emblematic modern poet by virtue of her suicide, he claims in The Savage God that while gifted suicidal artists were rare exceptions before the twentieth century, the casualty rate then increased sharply and suddenly. In view of his assumption that ‘the better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be’, the choice of Sylvia Plath as showcase speaks for itself. Seeing Alvarez’s axiom as highly questionable, Perloff produces a list of major authors who did not kill themselves, suggesting that ‘[t]he best twentieth-century poets, perhaps, have been those who could transcend their own death wish, moving beyond death to a larger vision encompassing both life and death’. His insistence that the contemporary artists are particularly vulnerable because they are committed to the truths about their inner life, strikes her as ‘essentially a Romantic and specifically a fin-de-siècle myth’ (Perloff 1972a, 584–85).

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Commentators who elaborate on the myth and cult of Sylvia Plath emphasize, often unconsciously so, romantic qualities which belong to a tradition going all the way back to the lives of the ancient poets. What evolves, despite contemporary references to a ‘fan-club atmosphere’ among her worshippers (Dudar 1971, 38), is a seemingly eternal pattern. For his part, Alvarez criticizes not only the veneration of Plath as a suffering poet, but also as ‘an early martyr for Women’s Lib’, ‘a cult figure and patron saint of the feminists’ (1971a, 1976). In a review of Letters Home, he lashes out at both – at Plath’s name and example having become ‘a cult for every young would-be writer with the blues’, as well as ‘her cause taken up by precisely those dissatisfied, family-hating shrews she herself satirised in her poem “Lesbos”’. He evidently did not see himself as belonging to either of these groups, nor to ‘the “grotesque” scholars she so detested poring over every line she wrote and every shred of evidence’ (1976). Only two years after Sylvia Plath died, when the number of devotees and scholars was a small fraction of what it would become, and when Alvarez stood out all the more prominently, he declares while reviewing Ariel that ‘a myth has been gathering around her work’ (1965b), as if his own words had nothing to do with the production of Plath myths. Others disagreed. Writer Gene Baro, one of the first to muse on the cult of Sylvia Plath, mentions especially ‘grand pronouncements’ made by Al Alvarez, George Steiner, and Robert Lowell as instrumental in the expansion of cult-like attention and as a ‘disservice’ to the poet’s memory. Not since Dylan Thomas had there been ‘such widespread conviction by hindsight of tragic inevitability and doomed young genius’. Consequently, her poems were seen as mythic and prophetic and granted importance as symbols and symptoms. Reviewing Ariel upon its release in the United States in June 1966, Baro reasons that Plath’s literary reputation must rest on the writing as linguistic acts that deepen our perception. As such, he finds the poems ‘a mixed lot’ (1966, 10). Four days after Baro’s review was published, Melvin Maddocks in The Christian Science Monitor likewise compares the cult of Sylvia Plath to that of Dylan Thomas. Although granting her the status only of a minor cult, he thinks she deserved better than ‘being reduced to a beautiful china doll of doom’. According to Maddocks, the Ariel poems were written under remarkable technical control, ‘but not quite so remarkable as the Plath-cultists would have us believe’. He accuses them of doing her a ‘serious injustice’ by treating her poems ‘as her fulfilled statement – to imply that she was capable of no other art but “the art of dying”’ (1966). Reviewing The Bell Jar in 1971, Maddocks returns to his critique of the

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Plath adulation and now declares the legend as ‘minor’, a result of unhappy, self-destructive poets capturing the popular imagination in a way that happy poets never can. Ironically, Sylvia Plath herself wanted to get out from the bell jar whereas modern readers ‘tend to feed ghoulishly on other people’s madness’ and treat mental illness as ‘the ultimate badge of artistic sensitivity’ (Maddocks 1971). What is the common denominator among the concepts icon, cult, myth, and legend that are used to convey the veneration and idolization of Sylvia Plath? First, they all have a religious origin, signalled by accompanying words like ‘priestess’, ‘sacrificial victim’, ‘patron saint’, ‘mystery’, ‘worshippers’, and ‘witchcraft’ that confirm the classical notion of poets as descendants of priests, and their writing as the result of ecstatic – i.e. religious – experience. ‘Icon’, deriving from Greek eikon, means ‘image’ or ‘picture’. In the Eastern Christian tradition, an icon is a pictorial representation of sacred personages. ‘Cult’, derived from Latin cultus and related to ‘cultivation’ and ‘worship’, denotes the external rites and ceremonies of a particular form of religious worship as well as the devotion to a particular person or thing. ‘Legend’, from Latin legenda, meaning ‘what ought to be read’, signifies a story, history, or account of a particular person or place, but legend formerly meant story of the life of a saint. ‘Myth’, from Greek mythos, originally implied a story developed to illustrate the religious spirit of a cult. Second, persons rendered in icons, worshipped in cults, and portrayed in legends and myths are more often than not pictured as exemplary figures and superhumans. Sylvia Plath is drawn variously as priestess, prophet, martyr, or saint – words which likewise have religious origins and connotations – of the supposed cult centred on her. Discussing the use of examples and exemplary figures in his influential book on European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), Ernst Robert Curtius reminds us of the close connection between theology and literature (1973, 59). It developed in the Middle Ages, when God was believed to have given the poeta theologus his commission to write, and then became the backbone of learned Protestant Germany. It is still visible in the language of today. Third, the words are used more or less negatively by someone manifesting detachment from what he or she sees as an untruthful image or uncritical devotion of Sylvia Plath. Perhaps that is why the cult to some extent is described with terms from the economic realm, such as ‘commodity’, ‘property’, ‘industry’, and ‘business’. Critics like Alvarez clearly want to distance themselves from this type of literary congregation,

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regarding themselves as representing a more realistic and truthful view, and not contributing to the phenomenon for which others are made responsible. Deriding ‘the squalid mixture of hero worship, hypocrisy and big business which now surrounds her name’, Alvarez depicts himself as a lone insider of the right kind, with authority to argue that, had she known what was happening, ‘it would break her heart all over again’. Dedicated to understanding the real Plath, he champions her case – and his own as well – on the basis of privileged information (1976). In Vogue, Ann Birstein in the same way authorizes her own mythdefying opinions of ‘The Sylvia Plath Cult’ (1971). The two women had known each other at Smith during a time when the poet was ‘a lovely outgoing young blond girl’, so gifted that others reacted with jealousy. Birstein, who was a faculty wife not much older than Plath, ‘took her side completely’, detecting no blackness or aroma of death about her. She equally sympathized with Plath when the former star student returned to Smith as a teacher and was relegated to the bottom of college teaching hierarchy. ‘The Sylvia Plath Cult’ is marked by a sense of let down because of what Birstein inferred from The Bell Jar, namely ‘the sweetness, the modesty, the golden prettiness, the amiable charm’ that Plath conveyed had all been a façade. For Birstein, the novel was glib and not very good. According to her, Plath is no heroine. ‘Sylvia, the real Sylvia’ resides in the poems celebrating death. Plath had been madly in love with death from the beginning and did not put her head in the oven because of a bleak domestic situation (Birstein 1971). Critics did not require access to personal knowledge to tell their readers what Sylvia Plath was really like or how she would have reacted to the so-called cult. Rosalyn Drexler, who identifies with Plath as a woman and a mother, first universalizes ‘a need in most of us to think of the poet as sacrificial victim’. Then she asserts that even though Plath satisfies a need to surround her work with an ambience of religiosity, ‘[the poet] herself would have been distressed by an audience drawn to her by morbidity’ (1974). Linda Wagner-Martin, who qualified for Alvarez’s labels both as a hero-worshipper and an exponent of the feminist cult, was mainly concerned with the development of another Plath legend. She traces the perception of Sylvia Plath as a death-driven artist back to Alvarez himself and his review of Ariel, in which he compares her work to Lowell’s and classifies their poetry as extremist art (1988b, 10). The legend, as WagnerMartin renders it, was enhanced by the repeated pairing of Plath and Lowell with other American poets into a confessional school. For her, the term ‘confessional’ became a pejorative because such poets were said to

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write about the extremes of human behaviour, and several of them were women. Confessional ‘signalled the end of control, the opposite of craft’ (12). Wagner-Martin also considered Alvarez a catalyst in another sense: The Savage God had increased public interest in the personal and private side of Plath’s work. Alvarez, as we have seen, places the blame elsewhere and defines the Plath cult somewhat differently, while Hugh Kenner offered a variation on the theme when writing on Ariel in 1966. He describes ‘a tasteless Plath Legend’ pandering to voyeuristic tendencies and promises of intimacy through participation. The gist of this legend regarded her poems as ‘unmediated shrieks from the heart of the fire’ and not the carefully shaped constructions he had detected. To some extent, then, Kenner claims the opposite of Wagner-Martin, that Plath’s poems were appreciated as inspired art rather than crafted products. As with most legends, however, the details of these various claims did not concur. Had Sylvia Plath spent six or three months on Ariel? Were the poems written throughout most or parts of every night? And how many did she pull off in each session? It was obvious to Kenner that no one was supposed to wonder how much revision had actually gone into her work. He believes that Plath had laboured quite a bit on her texts. Some of the poems read rather more ‘like expert contrivances than like dictations from the black angel’ (1966, 33– 34). The degree of work and rewriting put into the poems constitutes a recurrent topic – perhaps because the offered answers depend on how the figure of the poet is perceived. Less crafted and rehearsed poetry was viewed as purer, more immediate, and seemingly authentic art, and consequently complied better with romantic notions of the poet as an inspired seer. In the case of Sylvia Plath, ‘myth’ and ‘legend’ are used not only to depict the story about the poet herself, but also to depict the work she left behind. Legend-makers reacted to the formalism of The Colossus and disqualified it as frigid, contrived, academic, and definitely inferior compared to the new and final sincerity that Ariel was said to offer. Still, the old writing habits, which according to Ted Hughes had ‘worked mainly against her’ (1966, 86), were in Kenner’s view the ones that had kept her productive and alive. At the same time, if we take into account the importance invested in Plath’s suicide, Kenner should perhaps have added a question mark to the following statement: ‘One prefers one’s poets kept alive’ (1979, 41). Even before the publication of Ariel, A.E. Dyson states in a Critical Quarterly editorial that Plath’s last poems had ‘impressed themselves on many readers with the force of myth’ deriving from a distinctly modern

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sensibility in a world without faith (1964, 99). The myth is discussed more thoroughly by C.B. Cox and A.R. Jones in ‘After the Tranquillized Fifties: Notes on Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin’, an article published in the same quarterly issue. The two critics argue along lines similar to Alvarez, claiming that the imagery in ‘Daddy’ depends on a ‘rawly personal, even esoteric’ area of experience, ‘yet she manages to elevate private facts into public myth’ (1964, 111). Freudian theories, violence, suffering, humiliation, and a schizophrenic love–hate relationship with the persecutors causing her pain appear to be central ingredients in this myth, as Cox and Jones explain it. They subscribe to the belief that ‘only a maladjusted, psychotic personality can faithfully interpret the maladjusted, psychotic personality of the age in which we live’. Sylvia Plath appropriately reflects and redeems the chaos of modern times. Cox and Jones attribute the compulsive intensity of her last poems largely based on their ability to disclose that ‘in a deranged world, a deranged response is the only possible reaction of the sensitive mind’ (108).26 The importance vested here in the sensitive mind is related to the traditional elevation of the melancholic temperament. Once again, the ancient image of the poet as a visionary prophet – or medium – is advocated. No distinction is made between life and work, between biographical person, poet, and poetry. Perhaps the double function of Sylvia Plath and her poetry as myth can explain the strength of readers’ identification with her. Or is it the other way around? Does a strong reaction to literature and the literary persona itself bring about mythgenerating explanations?

Of her Time, Before or Beyond it? Either way, critics have tried to explain the unique reception by seeing Sylvia Plath and her work as symptomatic of the time, the age, the modern world, the Zeitgeist, or whatever they chose to call it. Thus, she has been invoked as an argument in intergenerational conflicts around extremist, confessional, or feminist literature versus a number of ostensibly outdated schools. Guising controversies as a battle of ‘moderns’ against ‘ancients’ are, according to Pierre Bourdieu, typical for how the cultural field as such functions. To acquire a powerful position, newcomers must dethrone the sitting rulers of taste and advance their own generation as a rupture with the past, whether they represent a renewal or not. Advocating the extremist and the confessional concepts, respectively, Alvarez and Rosenthal both underscore Plath’s relevance, as do Cox and Jones. Their preoccupation with violence, neurotic breakdown, and new

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areas of experience separates the work of authors such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and James Baldwin from much of the literature of the 1950s. Cox and Jones see the formality and decorum of The Movement of Philip Larkin, D.J. Enright, and others as a relapse into Edwardian modes that are totally inadequate for the needs of a violent time, and they elected Sylvia Plath as their prime example of the present and for the future. Their views were challenged in a subsequent issue of The Critical Quarterly. Richard Kell, for one, claims that Cox and Jones exaggerate the violence of modern times as something new and special, questioning their implication that only those who submit to the irrationality within can find truth, and that the more orderly are ruled by convention, smugness, and apathy (Kell 1964). In another letter to the editors, Bernard Bergonzi observes that the argument in ‘After the Tranquillized Fifties’ rests on the desperate romantic assumption that extreme experiences are more real than ordinary ones. To present the work of Plath and Sexton as models meant that an extreme had been turned into a norm. According to Bergonzi, there are more constructive responses to mass cruelty than to erect a cult of literary violence, and he insists that we should examine the ‘rather glib notion’ – so ‘very dear to the literary mind’ – that we live in a sick society (1964). For Bergonzi, Sylvia Plath might be a symptom of the times, but she certainly did not represent the answer. In a variation on this theme, Hugh Kenner in his 1966 review of Ariel suggests that Sylvia Plath’s poems as well as the reception of them reflect prevalent social and cultural currents. Robert Lowell had put his finger on the appeal that was to propel Ariel straight to bestsellerdom, accepting as sincerity ‘nothing less than repudiation’. Kenner calls such spirituality ‘bogus’ and the pathology of the modern secular world ‘a religious pathology’. The despair which brought Sylvia Plath to kill herself passes for unarguable virtue in a time of beats and psychedelics, her readers seemingly half envying the agony she suffered. People quest for spiritual virtues by looking for spiritual shortcuts tried out by someone else (Kenner 1966, 33). Six years later, Irving Howe explains Sylvia Plath’s position as the ‘darling of our culture’ with her glamorous fatality. As fitting material for the ensuing legend, he lists her brilliance, fierce ambition, suffering, history of suicide, and poems ‘in which pathology and clairvoyance triumphantly fuse’. The Plath legend as described by Howe resembles Kenner’s version. ‘It is a legend that solicits our desires for a heroism of sickness that can serve as emblem of the age, and many young readers take in Sylvia Plath’s vibrations of despair as if they were the soul’s own

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oxygen.’ Spokesmen for the sensibility of extreme gesture see in her ‘an authentic priestess’. Most likely, Howe had Alvarez in mind. However, as an exponent of the kind of adoring criticism which whips itself into a frenzy equivalent of its subject, he singles out Charles Newman and counters him in the same way that Marjorie Perloff did with Alvarez: In [The Art of Sylvia Plath], the editor writes – almost as if he too were tempted by an oven – ‘The courting of experience that kills is characteristic of major poets.’ Is it? Virgil, Petrarch, Goethe, Pope, Hugo, Wordsworth, Bialik, Yeats, Stevens, Auden, Frost? (Howe 1972, 88)

Similar to numerous other critics, Elizabeth Hardwick characterizes Sylvia Plath’s work as filled with unrelenting anger, hatred, revenge, violence, self-destruction, and related horrors which equally repel and fascinate readers. Unlike others, Hardwick does not think that Plath’s writing came out of the Cold War, the extermination camps, or the anxious Eisenhower years. Rather, she believes the poet jumped ahead of her time, having more in common with the late 1960s’ rootless rage, contempt for family, and drug of death: ‘[N]o one went as far as she did in this’ (Hardwick 1971, 6). In a posthumously published book on Modern American Lyric (1978), Arthur Oberg likewise writes about Sylvia Plath as ‘perhaps a poet who lived and wrote almost before what might have been her time’ (1978, 177; my italics). He claims to have initiated his study of Plath’s work in a reaction to what the legend and all the talk about ‘our Age and Angst’ had done to the understanding of her verse (xii). The legend-making effects of Sylvia Plath’s suicide also had been an issue in an earlier article by Oberg. But at that point, he was more concerned with elements linking her work to modern poetry past and present. Stating that her use of imagery reaches back to the French Decadents (1968, 72), he relates Plath’s style to a new decadence (67). Crucial for the cult of a modern icon is the feeling of relevance and usefulness. Strong language and a repetitious employment of words like ‘violence’, ‘anguish’, ‘rage’, and ‘contempt’ are common when critics discuss Plath’s work and the poet herself as phenomena. In ‘Reconsidering Sylvia Plath’, Harriet Rosenstein ascribes Plath’s unique position to the seemingly inevitable expression of violent outrage and equally violent despair that had become so widespread responses to our time. She finds it ‘easy to locate in Sylvia Plath denunciations more eloquent, hopelessness more overpowering, than we could ever utter’. This feeling of being spoken for illuminates the fervour with which Plath was adopted as an icon by feminists, Rosenstein implies (1972, 44).

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How this was done is a matter for consideration in Chapter Three. Generally, feminist critics were less concerned with Sylvia Plath’s anger and violence as adequate embodiments of an angst-ridden time than with analyzing her reactions in light of the condition of women, and women writers in particular. In that sense, she was seen not only as typical, but as exemplary. Usually, such an understanding of the poet as exemplum imbues the person and the work in question with an aura of eternity and transcendence. J.D. McClatchy somewhat contrastingly designates the paradigmatic quality of Plath’s career to her being above all a period poet whose sensibility uniquely captures the tone, values, and issues of the culture he or she belongs to. In fact, McClatchy assumes that Plath will emerge in retrospect as ‘the most distinctly “period” poet of her generation’ and ‘an especially representative figure of the directions and dynamics of poetry in the early 1960s’ (1979, 20). He sees her ambitions and anxieties as ‘redolent of the ruthless vanities and sad defenses of Eisenhower’s America’ and even takes Judith Kroll’s Chapters in a Mythology, grounded on ‘the then fashionable murk of Robert Graves’s White Goddess mythologies’, as a confirmation of the period sense for which he argues (19). Far from granting Plath a representative immortality, McClatchy’s definition contains an inherent awareness of datedness – once the particular period is over. He declares the establishment of a cult, with accompanying distortions and inflated claims, to be typical for the appearance and aftermath of any period poet. Thus, the existence of an extensive cult seems to prove her as the period poet par excellence. But what if the cult continues? While Joyce Carol Oates in 1973 believed that Miss Plath’s era already was over, Seamus Heaney fifteen years later thinks that her best poetry creates a poetic language beyond the historic and the autobiographical. With a line from ‘Words’, Heaney in ‘The indefatigable hoof-taps’ (1988) discusses poets’ thoughts on how to overcome subjectivity. He divides Sylvia Plath’s poetic journey into three stages according to their corresponding degree of poetic achievement. The first task for the poet, Heaney states, is to master the craft or artistic genre she has chosen for herself. Heaney finds beautiful and technically impressive poems in The Colossus. The reader’s pleasure comes from a sense of participating in a linguistic tour, the main point being to savour the vocabulary just as much as to analyze the content. Poets who move beyond scale-practicing to create poetry of relation, express their distinctly personal subjects and emotions in such a way as to be recognized and ‘made a common possession of the reader’s’. The

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middle stretch of Sylvia Plath’s poetic journey comprises everything she wrote from ‘The Stones’, the last poem in The Colossus, to her final, intensely creative period. To Heaney, this second level in her development displays a happy equilibrium between a mythic method and the poet’s personal distress, resulting in poems ‘serenely of their age’ (Heaney 1988, 143). Referring to Ted Hughes’s ‘Notes on the chronological order of Sylvia Plath’s poems’, Heaney, too, lets ‘Elm’ from April 1962 set off the third and final phase that contains poems which ‘seem to have sprung into being at the behest of some unforeseen but completely irresistible command’. The way Heaney describes her, it is as if the advanced poet functions like some kind of a medium for powers and insights beyond the individual, or as if she commands access to a collective dream bank where universal truths are hidden. Plath’s last poems convey an absoluteness of tone, and the words have ‘a sudden in-placeness’ about them. But the additional meaning that derives from her suicide poses problems. A poem like ‘Daddy’, Heaney considers as so entangled in biographical circumstances and so insensitive to other people’s pain that ‘it overdraws its rights to our sympathy’. The most valuable part of Plath’s work occurs when she has subjected her personal bitterness and embrace of oblivion to the lyric impulse itself, attaining a certain self-forgetfulness. Because of her inclination to exaggerate self-discovery and self-definition – exactly what for other critics had made her such an important mediator of and for the time – Heaney suggests that her writing may finally appear to be limited (144).

Business as Usual The peculiar spiritual need which Sylvia Plath has satisfied can explain not only why she to some readers emerges as a Christ-like figure, but also why her books became tremendous bestsellers. Perhaps it may also account for the negative reactions which the inevitable financial reward provoked. Whether done by relatives, bookstores, or publishing houses, cashing in on art, especially art that functions as religion, may be seen as suspect and even immoral – almost sacrilegious. In particular, Ted Hughes was treated as part Judas, betraying Sylvia Plath for money, and part parson commercializing her cult. The poet’s devotees resemble church defenders or reformers who present themselves as unselfish advocates of the true spirit and warn others to ‘beware of false prophets’. Their reactions confirm Bourdieu’s notion of the cultural field as a universe of belief governed by a capital of consecration and a systematic inversion of

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ordinary economic principles. In the most autonomous sector of the field, commercial success has negative implications for the status of an artist and, consequently, her interpreters as well. Did Hughes provoke such strong backlash because his editorial dispositions seemed to refute the belief that Plath’s writings were sacred? And did he – in addition to failing his wife – betray the primary commandment that art must be autonomous? Assuming that financial motives were behind the publication of Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, Al Alvarez strikes out against the whole ‘Plath industry’. Entitled ‘Publish and be damned’ (1971), his review suitably reflects the religious mindset I have been indicating as integral to the Plath reception. A few weeks later, on 14 November 1971, The Observer printed the first of two extracts from Alvarez’s forthcoming book on suicide. As an appetizer for the readers – of the paper as well as of The Savage God – they released the book’s ‘prelude’, which happened to be the author’s personal memoir of Sylvia Plath. Announced on the front page, the extract entitled ‘Sylvia Plath: The road to suicide’ covers almost a whole page of The Observer’s review section, the author himself figuring as ‘a failed suicide’. To critically-minded hindsighters, such a use of Plath might easily be seen as nothing other than a part of the industry Alvarez attacked, and both the author and the paper could be suspected of ulterior, pecuniary motives. Ted Hughes was upset at what he felt to be a betrayal of trust by a person who had acquired his information through friendship. In a letter to Alvarez, he characterizes Plath’s followers as a ‘congregation’, and a sensation-watching and half-hysterical one at that. By providing a detailed description of her death and final days, including how she looked in her coffin at the undertaker’s, Alvarez had offered these followers the body they needed for public sacrifice. According to Hughes, Alvarez’s memoir provides the ultimate event which the public wants and needs in order to save them from mere play-acting; he delivers ‘the absolutely convincing finalised official visible gruelling death’. And since Alvarez presents the body separated from all concerns of what it meant for the family, ‘everybody gets the full religious catharsis’. Competing with such strong needs, Hughes might have pronounced as many times as he liked that ‘there are quite a few things more important than literature – more important even than great poetry, let alone memoirs’.27 In front of increasingly deaf ears, Hughes would advocate for the rights of his children, himself, and Aurelia Plath to keep some of their Sylvia to themselves. The public would persistently demand that other rights and priorities came first, that she belonged most of all to them and to literary history. This demand by necessity included everyone connected

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to the poet, whether living or dead. The Savage God was published in concordance with plans. But when Ted Hughes asked The Observer to cut short the second instalment about Sylvia Plath and make it be known that the memoir had been written without his involvement in any way, the paper obligingly referred their readers to the book and printed another abstract from it instead. In the same issue, on 21 November 1971, Alvarez received a favourable review for The Savage God. His use of Plath’s case was barely mentioned and not at all negatively (Richardson 1971). Apparently, Alvarez’s self-appointed position as Plath’s chief warden was widely accepted. No questions were asked about how and why he played the part, or about any personal benefits he might gain from it. When Eric Homberger in New Statesman a year later extended the castigation of Plath profiteers, he did not include Alvarez. Homberger, who was the literary editor of a Cambridge Review issue that contained five essays dedicated to Plath, one authored by Alvarez and one by himself,28 exclaims as a matter of fact that ‘Sylvia Plath means big business’. The American edition of The Bell Jar had by then sold ninetythousand copies in hardback, and between April and July 1972, one million more in paperback copies were sold. In ‘The Uncollected Plath’ (1972), Homberger notes how her name likewise sells copies of The Observer and of expensive collector’s editions, a kind of publishing which he terms ‘bibliographic striptease’ for the wealthy. But Homberger fails to mention that she probably also contributed to the commercial success of The Savage God by featuring as Alvarez’s ‘Exhibit A’ (McCullough 1996, xv). The immense interest which followed in Plath’s wake, Homberger mainly attributes to her suicide and to ‘the haunting fact of her death’. It had done wonders towards mollifying negative editors who had turned down the same poems when she was still alive (Homberger 1972, 404). Upon Alvarez’s request in ‘Publish and be damned’ for a complete compilation of Plath’s poems, Faber and Faber announced an edition ‘in the fairly near future – probably sometime in 1973’.29 Yet ten years passed before the promise could be fulfilled. As to allegations of profit making, Ted Hughes claimed he had just followed Sylvia Plath’s own principle in his attempts to manage her writing in ways which earned as much income as possible for her family (1994c, 163).30 Redirecting the accusations, he complained that many people just saw an opportunity in her to boost their own careers and make money. Indeed, rumours circulated of huge advances given to Plath biographers (Malcolm 1993, 133). In Chapter Six, entitled ‘Friends’, I will return to Hughes’s line of arguments and Alvarez’s memoir. For now, I conclude this section with

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the scenario Alvarez outlined during the autumn of 1971: Brilliant suicidal poet is abandoned by husband, who then fails her again by mismanaging the estate. His narrative dominates the public debate from then onwards and was readily adopted by feminists. When questioning Hughes’s publishing policy, Jacqueline Rose, in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, proposes that ‘money and its significance ... could be seen as the repressed content of the entire drama played out in relation to Plath’s work’ as well as ‘the sub-text of the archive itself’ (1991, 86). According to both Paul Alexander (1991, 348) and Janet Malcolm (1993, 100), it was mainly for economic reasons that Ted Hughes persuaded Aurelia Plath to allow The Bell Jar to be published in the United States. On the other hand, Frances McCullough states that she – as Sylvia Plath’s American editor – set the process in motion by contacting the Hugheses in 1970 on the basis of information received from a colleague. Due to a ‘copyright snag’, another publisher was planning to launch the book without asking for anybody’s consent. This called for immediate action, and in unison ‘[they] undertook the delicate business of telling Mrs. Plath’ (1996, xiii–xiv). Accusations made in ‘Plathologies: The “Blood Jet” Is Bucks, Not Poetry’ (1994), by Professor of Women’s Studies Mary Lynn Broe, leave the impression that it is uncommon, or at least suspicious, for literary estates to make money from a famous writer’s work. Disgusted at the executors’ ‘piecemeal publication history’ (1994, 50–51) and their efforts ‘to Svengali’ (52) critics and biographers, Broe resorts to the same metaphor used by Homberger when accentuating how the ‘literary striptease’ (50) had fragmented Plath’s imaginative force. To focus on the sexuality of her writing and the marketability of Plath’s body – meaning, of course, both the poet’s physical body and her literary work – had become quite common in circles influenced by French feminist theory and by the idea of écriture feminine. Broe wanted to know what the estate had earned on world anthology rights, sales of manuscripts, rare editions, film rights, and so forth, and at the same time, she throws doubt on whether Sylvia Plath really died intestate. However, when seen from the perspective of Frieda Hughes, who together with her brother was a direct beneficiary of the estate’s economic dispositions, Broe’s indignation was not easy to understand. ‘Through the legacy of her poetry my mother still cared for us, and it was strange to me that anyone would wish it otherwise’, she writes in a foreword to the restored facsimile edition of Ariel (2004, xiv).

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Re-evaluation Confronted with the massive public interest in Sylvia Plath, the main strategies chosen by Ted Hughes and Aurelia Plath – to argue that the poet engaged in mythologizing and manipulating experience, respectively – did not lessen the inclination to interpret her work in biographical terms. Reviewing Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams for The Washington Post, Joseph McLellan (1979) describes what may be defined as a common approach to all of Plath’s writing: ‘[M]ost of the people who read these fictions will be looking in them for disguised autobiography. They will not be disappointed’. Judith Kroll was rather alone in systematically pursuing Hughes’s thesis, signalling her allegiance in the title of her book: Chapters in a Mythology (1976).31 Despite applying a structuralist and anti-biographical approach to Plath’s work, Kroll nevertheless argues that because the poet fused father with husband, first the idolization and then the condemnation of them had been without limits. Focusing on the thematic meaning of Plath’s late poetry, Chapters in a Mythology draws our attention to discernible textual sources like Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and above all Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. Kroll seeks to clarify the mythological system, which she believes integrates all sides of Plath’s work, the confessional surfaces included. When the poet alters biographical elements, it is done deliberately to make details more significant – as in ‘Daddy’, where the narrator is ten years old when her father dies while Sylvia Plath herself was eight. The mythic drama enacted in the poetry is summarized by Kroll with the following chapter heading: ‘Death, Rebirth, and Transcendence’, an interpretation condoned by Hughes. According to Judith Kroll, Plath felt The White Goddess provided her with a complete model for mythologizing her own life. In a new edition of her book, Kroll (2007) maintains that Plath was transformed from a poet with a strong Apollonian tendency to a poet with trancelike and instinctual Muse qualities partly through Graves’s work and partly through her marriage to Ted Hughes.32 The gratitude Judith Kroll expresses towards Hughes is exceptional among Plath scholars. She mentions their occasional discussions on an early version of her study and the access she was granted to the poet’s library (Kroll 1976, ix–x).33 Furthermore, she supports literary findings with information supplied by Hughes, such as Plath evidently experiencing a religious crisis or conversion during her last weeks (177).34 For his part, Hughes acknowledges Kroll’s help with establishing many of the final

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texts in Collected Poems (1989a, 17).35 Reviewing Chapters in a Mythology along with Letters Home and Edward Butscher’s biography of Plath, Karl Miller observes in The New York Review of Books that Kroll’s ‘flight from biography’ into ‘a bid for transcendence’ results in explanations just as debatable as the opposite method of interpretation (Miller 1976a, 3). She pushes her point too far, resorting to mysticism and superstition (6). In that sense, Kroll is typical within Plath criticism. The multitude of writers who exhibit Sylvia Plath as exemplary of a particular theory or political belief have a tendency to portray her as extreme in one way or the other – either political or personal, confessional or mythical, and less often as a mixture of each. Because her writing is complex, it may be stretched in numerous directions. Although critic Jon Rosenblatt adopts a thematic approach to Plath’s work and finds mythological cohesiveness within it, he nevertheless claims that Chapters in a Mythology imposes ‘an extremely misleading system on the poetry’. According to him, Kroll’s decoding of the poems in light of the Great Mother myth falsifies Plath in two ways: First, the poet’s development of key images predates her reading of The White Goddess. Her views of death and rebirth were in addition more complex and contradictory than Graves’s mythological system suggests. Second, the obvious despair and sense of failure that informs Plath’s later poems defy an understanding of them as ‘mystical’ or ‘transcendental’ poetry (1979, xi). In his study, Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation (1979), Rosenblatt argues that an initiatory structure of polarities characterizes her work. Before expanding on his findings of a death–rebirth pattern, Rosenblatt criticizes the tendency among cultural critics to see Plath as ‘an “exemplary” figure of the time’ (1979, x) and confronts three widespread ‘misconceptions’ about Plath’s life and work, misconceptions that have more to do with our own obsessions than with hers (3). First, he objects to advocacy that promotes Plath as a dedicated feminist and a demonstration case of patriarchal oppression. She was not culturally victimized, he states. To invoke a masculine conspiracy against her ‘is simply inaccurate’ (7). Next, Rosenblatt disagrees with the romantic idea that she killed herself heroically, pursuing the sources of her inner torment. Plath’s suicide did not ensue from her writing, he maintains. She had been suicidal long before working on her extremist poems and spoke of poetry as a fertile activity rather than a destructive one. Finally, he expostulates the interpretation of her work as autobiographical revelations. Contrary to what critics with a preference for confessional-biographical reading have implied, Plath’s life and work are not inseparably joined. Personal

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experience constitutes raw material for imagistic and thematic elaborations that she transforms into a coherent and dramatic plot, Rosenblatt notes. His rather basic reminder that poems are not to be confused with referential documents echoes in feminists’ repeated efforts at reclaiming Plath from a reductive autobiographical approach. It also echoes in later studies of confessional poetry.36 But Rosenblatt’s kind of totalizing, mythical project soon lost ground to cultural studies and to a preoccupation with the dissolution of identity, with diversity and multiplicity, and with the relationship between the self and society. Exploring such issues, Pamela Annas in A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath thinks that Rosenblatt downplays ‘the significance both of Plath’s gender and of her social and historical context’ (1988, 10).37 Annas combines feminist and cultural approaches with a poststructuralist understanding of language to explore Plath’s expressions of a female self in a phallocentric society. The publication of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems in 1981 gave critics an opportunity to reconsider her work and their own earlier reactions to it. Reviews once more covered the whole range, as some critics professed to being more impressed by the complete oeuvre and some less, while others had their original high opinions confirmed.38 The chronological arrangement of Plath’s 224 adult poems invited assessments of the continuity and change involved in the creative process, her use of imagery, and thematic concerns. Several reviewers were surprised by the variety of her subjects, a variety that so easily disappeared among the more notorious and frequently anthologized poems. To Helen Vendler, on the other hand, Collected Poems reveals narrowness of tone and subject matter. In ‘An Intractable Metal’ (1982), her review for The New Yorker, she comments on factors contributing to Plath’s reputation. Most of the reception had been psychologically or politically motivated, according to Vendler: The time of her fame coincided with a widespread acceptance of the Freudian myths of selfhood (which she also embraced) and with the rise of women’s liberation. Plath’s life seemed a textbook illustration of the ‘Electra complex’ (as she herself called it, schooled by her therapists and her college reading in psychology), and she also seemed an instance of the damage done to gifted women by social convention. ... An electric current jumped between ‘Ariel’ and a large (mostly female) set of readers, and from then on the poetry of Plath became a part of the feminist canon. (1982, 124)

Thus, the poet and her audience shared the same world of reference. In addition to the breakthroughs of Freud and Feminism, Plath’s fame

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coincided with – and to a large extent rests on – the enormous growth of students within higher education. This new audience secured a large readership for her books and destabilized the boundaries between the elitist and more popular fields of literary production. A leading scholar and critic in her generation, Helen Vendler thinks the poet of Collected Poems seems very young to any older reader. She regrets that Plath did not live long enough to reconsider her views of the past and of herself. Plath’s mythic scenarios and corresponding styles had already changed several times, and would most likely have been revised again. Perhaps middle age would have brought her some equilibrium, Vendler speculates. She also regrets that Plath’s sense of herself as exceptional prevented her from seeing herself as one of the many. Laments among reviewers at ‘the wrong kind of fame’ (Pollitt 1982, 52), directed at a critical industry ‘magnetically and unhelpfully drawn to the circumstances of her life and death’ (Brownjohn 1982, 165), rarely led to considerations of where Sylvia Plath would have been with the ‘right’ kind of fame. Would there have been any fame to speak of? How ‘big’ would she have become, and how widely read would she be? Efforts at fresh perspectives and open-minded, temperate evaluations of Sylvia Plath’s poetic achievements did not have significant effects for years to come. With a few exceptions, according to American scholar Nancy Hargrove, neither Collected Poems nor the 1982 edition of her journals touched off a reassessment of the pre-Ariel poems and their relations to later works. The preference for the latter as being immensely superior remained largely the same, as did the words used to describe Plath’s early production – a drudging apprenticeship leading up to her final triumph. In The Journey Toward Ariel (1994), Hargrove proposes a reordered chronology for the years 1956 to 1959 so as to trace more efficiently Plath’s poetic development, in contrast to the ‘approximations’ provided by Ted Hughes in Collected Poems. Acknowledging the complexity of Plath’s work, Hargrove aims to upgrade the poems from her early period – ‘the best of them are equal to the best of the late poems’ (1994, 25) – and to demonstrate that the pre- and post-1960 productions do not constitute ‘two separate and distinctly different types of poetry but rather a single continuous development’ (17).39 Although Nancy Hargrove may, more than most people, appreciate Plath’s early production, it should be evident from the differing positions accounted for earlier in this chapter that she was not alone in arguing for continuity in Plath’s work. Just as it is common to exaggerate certain aspects of the poet to make her appear suitably exemplary, it is no less common for critics and scholars to present their own work as more

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groundbreaking than what is actually the case. Performing in concordance with Bourdieu’s theory of a field, in which ‘the only way to be is to be different, to “make one’s name”, either personally or as a group’ (1993, 106), scholars introduce their studies in an almost ritualistic way by claiming that until they arrived on the scene the reception as such, or at least certain areas of it, has been flawed. This rhetorical figure is so universal that we may define it as a topos of criticism. The rise of the research university after World War II and increasing competition for individual recognition among faculty members, junior lecturers, and aspiring graduates made it imperative to distinguish oneself in this way. Collected Poems was released at a time when extremist or confessional poetry was no longer the big issue. But Sylvia Plath was still – in the words of poet Alan Brownjohn – treated ‘as material for the advancement of doctrines and causes’ (1982, 165). Depicting her as exemplary in one way or another, critics both before and after have had problems distinguishing between life and literature, between biography and fiction. What changes is the cultural context into which she is inserted – into communities swearing by Freud, Graves, Feminism, or confessional literature – and whether the enactment of cultural authority holds in diversified societies like ours. What is constant is the rhetorical function she is put to as an argument in strategies of persuasion. A religious, cultlike tone and an intense personal engagement are noteworthy throughout in what appears as an ongoing competition to reveal the real Sylvia. The next chapter further explores how the story is shaped, how elements are magnified or reduced to fit the argument, and how persons are turned into models of praise and blame. During the heyday of feminist criticism, the management of Plath’s archive became a focal point of attention. Conspiracy and censorship were said to constitute the main editorial principles practiced by the estate.

CHAPTER THREE FEMINISTS

In Literary Women, Ellen Moers’s now classic study from 1976, the author states that no writer has had a greater impact on the women’s movement than Sylvia Plath, although she was ‘hardly a “movement” person, and she died at age thirty before it began’ (1978, xiii). However, if the feminists had been around at the time of her death, Sylvia Plath would not have needed to commit suicide, or so Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch (1971), opines.1 To further illustrate Plath’s significance for a wide range of feminists, we may consider yet another primary figure of the Anglo-American women’s liberation in the 1960s and 70s: Robin Morgan, who voiced a strong personal identification with Sylvia Plath’s life and work (1977, 44). Morgan defined her own writing as a weapon or concrete tool with which she could change the female condition (1972b, 5), and she used Plath as a means to reach this end. Plath’s poem ‘The Jailer’ appears in the groundbreaking feminist anthology Sisterhood is Powerful, edited by Morgan in 1970. And in Monster, her first collection of poetry published two years later, Morgan accuses Ted Hughes of murdering his wife (1972a, 76). According to Janet Malcolm, writing in The New Yorker, Sylvia Plath’s status as a feminist heroine derives in large part from her courage to be unpleasant. She claims that ‘women have adored Plath for the Fascist in her’ and declares her ‘not-niceness’ as the outstanding characteristic of Ariel (1993, 95). Malcolm also singles out the ‘awful mixture of selfloathing and loathing and envy’ expressed in one of Plath’s short stories as ‘perhaps the central concern, of contemporary feminism’ (115). The chapter here demonstrates that the case is rather more complex. As a poet and a person, Sylvia Plath has been portrayed in ways that suit a variety of requirements among both feminist activists and scholars. During the first years of women’s studies, there was in many respects little difference between the two categories. But regardless of their theoretical or ideological leaning, critics and other readers keep on returning to Plath because of her work’s richness and potential for ever new interpretations.

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For the Prosecution Sylvia Plath was adopted by the women’s movement as a poetic genius and a feminist martyr. International Socialist Review recognized her as one of their ‘sisters in struggle’ (Joslin 1971, 30). At the same time, to have a victim, one must also have a perpetrator. Plath’s parents and husband were cast as the main villains, and Ariel read as though the poems were the poet’s own confrontations with them. When Ted Hughes performed publically, feminists loudly declared their contempt for him.2 Robin Morgan set the tone in ‘Arraignment’, her poetic prosecution of Ted Hughes on behalf of all women. She includes accusations of rape and murder as well as a literary assessment of Hughes’s work. She describes his writing as ‘incidentally, / puerile, pretentious dribbles of verse’ and makes publicly known – probably for the first time – the name of Hughes’s other woman, Assia Gutmann Wevill, who also killed herself together with their four-year-old daughter.3 In ‘Arraignment’, Morgan does not portray Wevill as the typical evil temptress but as Hughes’s victim number two in his ‘one-man gynocidal movement’. A ‘Jewish mother in the most heroic sense’, she killed her daughter ‘rather than letting Hughes raise the child’. Morgan moves on to condemn the whole literary establishment, mentioning in particular Al Alvarez, George Steiner, and Robert Lowell, for conspiring in support of Hughes to render Plath harmless. She hints at the possibility of coming to free the poet’s children, to castrate their father, and to ‘blow out his brains’ – not just because of what he has done to the women in his life, but also because he supposedly has tortured a collective ‘us’ with his ‘weapon’. The poem ends with a warning tone: ‘Meanwhile / Hughes / has married again’ (Morgan 1972a, 76–78). Most likely, Sylvia Plath’s children would rather have avoided this kind of attention. Moreover, the misspelling of names and the assertion that ‘Assia Guttman Wevil’ is the woman mentioned in ‘Lesbos’ actually suggest that Robin Morgan was not as well oriented as one might think, based on her accusations. Although she does not express herself quite as explicitly as my summary might give the impression of, since I have left out rhetorical question marks, it is impossible to misunderstand the general drift of her argument: She plainly accuses Ted Hughes of ‘the murder of Sylvia Plath’. Before Monster went to press in November 1972, Morgan was nevertheless worried that her message would not get through. A shorter, more direct version – ending with ‘In the meantime, Hughes, / sue me’ – had, for legal reasons, been stopped by the publisher. To Morgan, this

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spelt censorship. ‘[A] poem, after all, is a poem, for chrissake.’ She considered allegations that her writing was libellous to be just another example of ‘grim male supremacy’ undermining her whole ‘arsenal of logic’. The poem had been intensely researched and Plath scholars would verify the accuracy of it all. Well-known American poets of both sexes would testify in court to a poet’s right to free imagery and free speech. Furthermore, the poem descended from a long and honourable polemical tradition including Dante, Dryden, Byron, Robert Bly, and LeRoi Jones (1972b, 4). But her arguments did not hit home, and the female editor failed her ‘in the presence of the Man’ and of persistent lawyers (5). With the book already in galleys and the poet, in accordance with her own telling, desperately wanting it to be published for purely political reasons, Morgan became practical. Literally crying with rage and humiliation, she began revising the poem. She decided to let the original be known anyway, at poetry readings and through an article about the whole outrageous plot to silence her – almost equal to what Sylvia Plath had suffered. Containing both ‘Arraignment I’ and ‘II’, ‘Conspiracy of Silence Against a Feminist Poem’ was at first offered to Ms. Magazine. Normally considered too reformist for Robin Morgan, she at any rate wanted to reach as big an audience as possible and at the same time to give Ms. a chance to show some courage. Alas, the magazine did not rise to the opportunity, and Morgan describes her initiative as naïve and liberal (21).4 Fortunately, The Feminist Art Journal, another new periodical launched in 1972, saw eye to eye with her, stating in its editorial that in order to fight abuse and exploitation of women in the arts, it was necessary to out the culprits and cite their deeds. So they printed Morgan’s story and both versions of her poem, giving readers an opportunity to compare the two. Whether ‘Arraignment’ may be categorized among the type of prophetic denunciations paradigmatically derived from Zola’s J’accuse is a matter for discussion. Since Sartre in particular, it has become so intrinsic to the personage of the intellectual that anyone aspiring to a position in the cultural field has to perform this kind of exemplary discursive act, according to Bourdieu (1993, 63). Accusations as such flourish in the Plath reception, especially against Hughes. With her title ‘Arraignment’ (‘accusation, charge, indictment’), Morgan signals allegiance to forensic rhetoric and then goes on to pronounce her verdicts on guilt and innocence. ‘Arraignment’ moreover tells us quite a lot about what could pass as poetry at the time while appearing to its creator as impeccable research. It also informs understandings of what there was a market for in publishing and what status Sylvia Plath had attained within

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certain groups. Or, to put it a bit differently, the community Plath appealed to both confirmed and identified with the cultural authority enacted by Morgan. This community was held together by political concerns and extra-literary beliefs that influenced how writers were used and interpreted. And Morgan’s own appeal went far beyond some small sect of believers: Her book was published by the large trade publisher Random House and not by an obscure alternative press.5 Among documents which were certain to prove her right in the event of a lawsuit, Morgan in her conspiracy article mentions Plath’s last letters. In these, Plath expands on how Ted Hughes tortured her, repeatedly raped and beat her up, terrorized their children, denied them money, and – as Morgan puts it – ‘flaunt[ed] his mistress and his child by her in Plath’s face’ (1972b, 21). Yet the mentioned child was born two years after Sylvia Plath died. This goes to show that Morgan did not question the legitimacy of the allegations she renders or what they may say about Plath and her state of mind. She ends her exposure thus: Sylvia Plath paid for her poetry and her consciousness with her life, at a time when there was no Feminist Movement to support her. The least I can do, ten years later, is to say that, with as much detail as I can document and as much power, passion, and rage at those who destroyed her as my art can communicate. (21)

Plath’s case provided Robin Morgan with an opportunity to portray herself as a heroic feminist knight taking on the whole patriarchal establishment and apparently fighting for such a good cause that all means were justified. Others followed Morgan’s lyrical example: ‘Hughes has one more gassed out life on his mind’ is a line from a poem entitled ‘Ten Years Cold’, written – the poet explains – ‘to honor the tenth anniversary of Plath’s suicide’.6 For Harriet Rosenstein, who at the time was working on a biography of Plath that resulted in a PhD, these statements most likely proved some of the points she put forth in ‘Reconsidering Sylvia Plath’, in the third issue of Ms. Magazine,7 where Rosenstein remarks on the problem of language for those writing about Sylvia Plath. Due to a kind of ‘critical overkill’, the poet emerges as the centre of a holy war, and the abundance of strong words effects a numbing of feelings. She rejects ‘the sectarian fervor’ of feminists, who unfurl her name like a battle banner, read her writings and biography as a joint manifesto, and interpret her suicide as a function of sexual oppression. Without disputing her poetic greatness, Rosenstein still thinks it a mistake to exaggerate Plath’s vision. To turn her into an icon and a model, she calls ‘an error as self-indulgent as it is self-defeating’

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(1972, 44). Here, Rosenstein might be seen as exercising the kind of critical judgment that I argued for in Chapter One: judgment of the more or less covert ideology involved in a rhetoric of exemplarity and a judgment of the tenuous relationship between examples/exemplary figures and the context they are meant to illustrate. Studying Plath’s women, Rosenstein finds no proud assertion of womanhood. For the most part, they are mocked and portrayed derisively. In fact, all of the women associated with literature in The Bell Jar end up attracting Esther Greenwood’s scorn. Plath’s role as a feminist heroine, then, is false: ‘[T]o designate her the doomed oracle of liberation, the woman who saw it all and died thereby, is to ignore everything isolating, immobilizing, and life-denying in her work’ (99). In Rosenstein’s view, death is the only redemptive vision Sylvia Plath achieved as a poet. Given that the ongoing self cannot really change, creativity becomes no more than a partial solution.

Feminist Normalization The 1970s, however, was not the decade for revisions of the kind Harriet Rosenstein advocated. Triggered by Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1969), feminist literary criticism grew out of the women’s movement. It aimed to produce fundamental changes by showcasing different kinds of oppression. Suitable examples, past and present, were in demand. Sylvia Plath supplied new and exciting material for promoters of women’s rights and calls for revision of the literary canon. The thousands of students entering higher education and seeking a career within the university system needed new authors and issues to discuss. The time had come for reassessing male extremist readings of Plath. Taste, literary norms, and male-dominated traditions were coming into question. Women scholars were set on normalizing Plath as a rebellious voice in an oppressive society, emphasizing what was typical in her work. Numerous studies ensued with titles such as ‘Sylvia Plath: A New Feminist Approach’, ‘Reading Women’s Poetry: The Meaning and Our Lives’, ‘Sexual Politics in Sylvia Plath’s Short Stories’, ‘Beyond The Bell Jar: Women Students of the 1970s’, and ‘Female – or Feminist: The Tension of Duality in Sylvia Plath’.8 In Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women (1976), Suzanne Juhasz, of the University of Colorado, focused on the woman poet’s straining double bind, which was constituted by her opposing roles as woman and poet. Because men traditionally made books while women made babies, Western literature has overwhelmingly been a

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masculine project and therefore no body of poetry by women existed in the English language until the twentieth century (1976, 1). Tracing the development of a new movement in literature, Juhasz documents Sylvia Plath’s life and art as ‘wholly connected to the fact that she was a woman poet’. For Juhasz, Plath comes across as both the most extreme instance of this double-bind situation (86) and as the one who saw the problem with ‘the coldest and most unredeeming clarity’. To Plath, the only solution was death (114). In order to demonstrate the difficulties women poets faced, Juhasz points to how even some of the more positive male critics emerge as sexist in their judgments, explaining that they too had been programmed within the old tradition. Juhasz thinks it is obvious that M.L. Rosenthal, who downgrades Plath’s range of intellect and experience compared to Robert Lowell, considered Lowell’s mental breakdown, marriage, and relationship with his father to be somehow more relevant than Plath’s. Published the same year as Naked and Fiery Forms, Ellen Moers’s Literary Women argues for Plath’s place within a particular kind of female tradition. Whereas George Steiner in his review of Ariel points at Plath’s ‘Gothicism’ and ‘Gothic effect’ as part of a widespread ‘Gothic strain’ in English lyric poetry (1965, 51), Ellen Moers outlines a female gothic tradition. Contrary to prominent forerunners such as Mary Shelley, the Brontë sisters, Christina Rossetti, and Carson McCullers, the terror in Sylvia Plath’s work was neither a monster nor a goblin or a freak, but the living corpse itself. Likewise, Plath differed from many women colleagues in not writing love poetry. Her more characteristic form was ‘hate poems’ (1978, 167), and Plath’s ‘superb eye for the imagery of self-hatred’ renewed the genre for Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Erica Jong, according to Moers (109–10). Sandra M. Gilbert prefers the terms ‘mythological’ and ‘herstory’ to describe Plath’s vein of work. Perhaps best known for her co-authorship with colleague Susan Gubar of The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Gilbert claims in ‘A Fine, White Flying Myth’ (1979) that, together with Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, and many other women writers, Sylvia Plath tells the same old story ‘of being trapped, by society or by the self as an agent of society, and then somehow escaping or trying to escape’. The readers recognize the story as their own, and consequently, it has a ‘compelling interest’ for them. Actually, ‘it created Plath addicts’. Having gone through some of the same experiences, Gilbert – who was four years younger than Plath, and like her served as a guest editor on Mademoiselle’s college issue – finds The Bell Jar oddly familiar. She believes all who read Sylvia Plath will invariably link their own journey

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with hers. At the very heart of the myth, which Gilbert pieces together from Plath’s poetry, fiction, and life, is a sense of being enclosed within a bell jar, a cellar, or a waxhouse, and then experiencing liberation from that enclosure by ‘a maddened or suicidal or “hairy and ugly” avatar of the self’ (1979, 245–51). An influential feminist critic and Professor of English, Gilbert returns to Sylvia Plath in No Man’s Land, her three-volume effort with Susan Gubar at mapping the position of twentieth-century women authors who claimed their place in the literary world. The War of the Words (1988), the first volume, treats Plath and Hughes as prototypical participants in ‘an ongoing battle of the sexes that was set in motion by the late nineteenthcentury rise of feminism and the fall of Victorian concepts of “femininity”’ (Gilbert and Gubar 1988, xii). Not only did the woman writer have society at large to fight against, she also struggled with ambivalence towards her new power and with male contemporaries who felt threatened by the weakening of patrilineage structures within literature. Both parties handled language as a sexually charged weapon. Gilbert and Gubar argue that Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were equally active in this endeavour, manipulating words in a fight over territory and authority. A handful of Plath texts are examined in a somewhat lopsided comparison with only one single poem by Hughes. The authors state that ‘Hughes’s murderous “Lovesong”’ (1970) is first ‘countered’ by Plath’s short story ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’ (started in 1957) and then ‘countered in advance’ by her poem ‘Words’ (from 1963) (1988, 66). Considering that ‘Lovesong’ was published seven years after Sylvia Plath’s death, it is perhaps more relevant to see his poem as a reaction to existing texts by her than as an ‘attack’ which she, like a psychic, foresaw. How certain is it moreover that ‘Lovesong’ comments specifically on their relationship? In the mean time, Hughes had been living with Assia Wevill, and he married Carol Orchard the same year as Crow was published, a book dedicated to the memory of Assia Wevill and the daughter he fathered with her. While Hughes refrains from presenting one party as worse than the other, Plath’s women are mostly victims of male brutality or a lack of understanding, ‘trapped inside a classic story of female vulnerability in the battle of the sexes’, as explained by Gilbert and Gubar (1988, 68). They inspect her sexual and linguistic warfare further in Letters from the Front, the third volume of No Man’s Land, maintaining that for Plath personally ‘the real world’ was one of war (1994, 267). And for Plath as a poet, World War II offered her a trope of sexual battles about gender and identity (319). ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’ reflect, they believe, her

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thoughts about how the savage war between men and women functioned very much like a war between sovereign states (297). No Man’s Land presents Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes as two examples among many, whereas Margaret Dickie Uroff’s Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1979) exclusively explores how these two poets of comparable stature influenced each other. A Professor of English of about the same age as Sandra Gilbert, Uroff during the 1970s wrote several essays on Plath’s work. When reading her book, we get the impression that Hughes was an emotionally underdeveloped man who partly helped his wife fight her writer’s block and who partially caused it, a poet obsessed with themes of physical cruelty and whose development was ‘very slow’ (Uroff 1979, ix). One of his early poems is characterized as ‘remarkably faithful to the psychology of little boys – and, it must be admitted, to the psychology Hughes maintained into adulthood’ (41). Uroff gives Plath credit for putting an end to his misogynist poems, for being the cause of his general elevation of women in later poems, and for stifling what Uroff calls his ‘exultation in gratuitous vulgarity’ (9). Although Hughes expressed a passion for myths and folklore from his early boyhood on and studied anthropology at the university, Plath is also revered as the source of his more active use of mythological material and the growing psychological insight of his work. The strategies he employs in Crow – ‘sardonic humor, caricature, hyperbole, parody’ – are likewise traced back to Plath, echoing the nursery-rhyme quality of her poems and her ‘more sophisticated surrealistic techniques’ (223). She in addition hints at the possibility that Plath’s involvement in Hughes’s texts consisted of more than merely typing them up for her husband. Yet Uroff does not hold Sylvia Plath responsible for the ‘regressive fantasies’ that the critic detects in some of his poems (224). Psychologically, as well as technically, she remains for Uroff the more interesting and advanced of the two. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes concludes that Hughes had an immediate and wide-ranging impact on Plath. This influence was tempered later in her life once she had captured her own, successful voice. ‘Alone, at the end, she was able to hear only her own voice, to write of the topic that interested her most – her self – and to use everything she had learned’ (218). Uroff’s readers cannot avoid deducing that his influence was ambiguous, even destructive, since Plath’s standing as a poet is based mainly on her final creative period. Conversely, her effect on him ‘was delayed, but in some ways more profound’ (214). Much of the imagery in Wodwo is described as ‘straight out of Plath’ (222). Thus, while he influenced her when she was young and impressionable, her effect on him took hold when he was older and more mature. Their relationship, then,

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testifies to her greater talent and final triumph. In her introduction, Margaret Dickie Uroff notes that ‘much of this book is speculative’ (8). Recognition of the monograph’s wobbly foundation is, however, pushed to the background for much of the discussion. Seemingly insignificant words reveal a campaigning attitude. For instance, she writes that in the period immediately after Lupercal (1960), ‘Hughes emerged as a figure of some prominence in literary London’, and he ‘put together’ the children’s book Meet My Folks! (171). Insofar as Hughes encouraged his wife’s attempts at improvization in ‘Poem for a Birthday’, a piece which Uroff thinks little of, ‘he forced her to work against the grain of her genius’ (216; my italics). A feminist impulse may be defined as the common directive behind Uroff’s book and the other titles commented on so far in this chapter. Noteworthy is their critique of men – in particular Ted Hughes – and efforts at coming to terms with the double-bind situation that women face. It is to this ‘impulse’ that Lynda K. Bundtzen of Williams College in Massachusetts pledges her allegiance in Plath’s Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process (1983). The findings she presents are shaped and conditioned by two things: a ‘feminist awareness of the difficulties peculiar to being a woman and an artist’ and a concern with ‘what knowledge is most worth having about a woman artist’. To sceptical readers, this perspective could indicate that discoveries which do not fit neatly into the scheme are easily neglected. Although feminism was already well established by the early 1980s, Bundtzen terms the critical spirit characterizing her study as ‘re-visionary’ (1983, ix). Plath’s Incarnations rejects outright the assessment of Sylvia Plath as a suicidal or confessional artist based on rubrics which often resulted in pathologizing the writer. Instead, Bundtzen aligns herself with a feminist approach represented by, among others, Suzanne Juhasz, who – in Bundtzen’s words – sought Plath’s ‘exemplary qualities as a woman poet’ (13). Exemplary in this context is to be understood, I gather, as typical and not as an ideal worth emulating, since Juhasz underscores the inevitability of Plath’s death. Central to Bundtzen’s analysis is Plath’s ‘paradigmatic nature as a woman artist’ and her exemplary use of history and myth (46), ‘exemplary’ that is ‘of woman as emerging artificer’ (41). The term ‘exemplary’ is also ambiguous here with regard to Plath’s Holocaust rhetoric, which was hardly considered a generally accepted standard that one should aspire to. In much of Plath’s work, Bundtzen senses a distinctly feminine voice (ix) offering ‘an enriched understanding of what it feels like to live in a woman’s body’ (x).

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Theft of a Positive Identity When Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems was released in 1981, Ted Hughes as the book’s editor made it clear that neither the order nor the selection of the Ariel poems which he had sent to the printer for publication in 1965, corresponded fully with what his wife had arranged in a black binder around Christmas of 1962. In his account, she had at the time pointed out that the poems began with the word ‘Love’ and ended with ‘Spring’. He decided to remove some of the more personally aggressive texts and would probably have taken out others as well if she had not already published them in journals herself. To compensate for the omissions, Hughes included most of the poems she had written in 1963 (1989, 14–15). His notes in Collected Poems mentions that Sylvia Plath had planned to open her volume with ‘Morning Song’ and an ambivalent declaration of love to a baby, in line with the rearranged, first edition of Ariel, and to close the compilation with the bee sequence. Contrary to the disillusioned poems she wrote shortly before killing herself, ‘Wintering’ promises a new spring. Thus, in her review of Collected Poems, writer Katha Pollitt (1982) wonders whether it would have made a difference to Plath’s reputation if the original order, which ended on a note of triumph, had been preserved instead of closing off in absolute despair. Marjorie Perloff seems to be certain of the answer to Pollitt’s question. Comparing ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)making of the Sylvia Plath Canon’, she professes to being shocked because the collections end up telling such different stories (1984, 10). While Plath’s narrative concludes on a hopeful tone and, in Perloff’s reading, unfolds between two poles – between the love ‘for a man that produces babies’ and the rebirth of an isolated self ‘that produces the honey of poetry’ (12) – the published version of Ariel implies that her suicide was inevitable, brought on not by actual circumstances ‘but by her essential and seemingly incurable schizophrenia’ (11). According to Perloff, the poems became more diffuse than would have been the case if they had been published as originally envisaged. In her writing, Plath wanted to settle scores with a deceitful husband and their dishonest life together. But Hughes softens her complaints and silences her anger. Perloff defines his intervention as censorship, pure and simple, arguing that any poems which explicitly linked the cause and effect between his desertion and her depression were expunged. She reads ‘Daddy’ and ‘Purdah’ as ‘a cry of outrage against the deceiving husband’ (15). To support her biographical interpretation, Perloff states that Hughes was having an affair as early as April 1962, that he left his wife for good on a

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trip to Ireland and began divorce proceedings.9 Deploring Hughes’s meddling with the pole of (re)birth into selfhood, Marjorie Perloff believes the reader would easily have identified with the struggling poet and her situation had the proposed order been retained, claiming that ‘the “Cut thumb” is not only Plath’s but ours’ (1984, 16). Jaqueline Rose interprets Perloff’s reading of Plath and her criticism of Hughes like this: Not only did he silence his wife’s legitimate anger. By making Ariel darker than she had devised, Hughes ‘deprived feminism of a positive identity and selfhood’ (1991, 71). Yet how evident would the poet’s carefully contrived structure really have appeared to the majority of readers? And what would it have meant to the readers’ identity, since so many of the poems were unquestionably dark and death-driven? Once again, and repeatedly throughout the following analysis, we may note that this use of Sylvia Plath as an exemplary figure on the one hand proceeds from political convictions that have wide-reaching consequences. On the other hand, shaping the poet into an argument requires an adjustment of the qualities she is made to represent. In earlier studies, such as ‘On the Road to Ariel: The “Transitional” Poetry of Sylvia Plath’ (1973), Perloff herself describes Plath as a Laingian heroine with a schizoid personality and an imaginative world essentially limited to her own anguish and longing for death. In ‘Sylvia Plath’s “Sivvy” poems’, Perloff maintains that the bee poems, both literally and figuratively, mark a dead end, where there is no future other than death (1979, 175). A change in orientation might explain why Perloff later, in ‘The Two Ariels’, sees the bee sequence as a ‘parable of hibernation, a hibernation that makes way for rebirth and continuity’. This new understanding meshed nicely with feminist thinking at the time, and in her conclusion, Perloff goes on to suggest that by incorporating into Ariel the last poems Plath wrote, Hughes took advantage of ‘a particularly acute spell of depression and despair, when death seemed the only solution’, to make ‘the motif of inevitability larger than it really was’ (1984, 16). Here, Perloff leaves out that the mentioned period was not a passing spell, but for Sylvia Plath her final one – the end in that sense inevitable. Would Perloff have argued differently if an article that Hughes wrote in 1971 also had been printed at the time? As it happened, ‘Publishing Sylvia Plath’ did not materialize until 1994, collected in Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose. Originally, Hughes wrote ‘Publishing Sylvia Plath’ in response to implications made by Al Alvarez (1971a) that profit motives were behind the piecemeal publication of her work. It is quite possible that the article was held back because of the controversy resulting from Alvarez’s The Savage God and its serialization in The Observer. Although

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Winter Pollen cites The Observer and 21 November 1971 as the original source and date for the publication of ‘Publishing Sylvia Plath’, the article is not to be found there, and I have not been able to locate it anywhere else.10 In ‘Publishing Sylvia Plath’, Hughes points at conflicting deliberations regarding Ariel and the difficult balance of interests he had to consider before releasing the collection in 1965: scholars who wanted access to everything she had written regardless of its literary quality or character of privacy; the larger audience who longed for ‘a front seat in the kitchen where she died’ (1994, 164); Plath’s own high standards and uncertainty of what to do with the poems; publishers who wanted to cut the manuscript for fear of an outraged backlash; his own need to protect others and his deeply felt belief that ‘there are quite a few things more important than giving the world great poems’ (167). Hughes confesses forgetfulness regarding many things, for instance, why the American edition differed from the British one. All the same, he claims to have acted out of concern for certain people and did not think he had overestimated the possible injuries that would come from publishing the full manuscript. ‘Everything she and her family feared at that time has since come to pass, and more’ (165–66).11 Perhaps what Hughes in Collected Poems refers to as his ‘compromise’ bears witness to the predicament in which he found himself, just as much as it proves him to be an oppressor with ulterior motives. Rather laconically, he remarks that the apprehension felt by several of his advisors – about how readers would react to the violent, contradictory feelings expressed in Plath’s poems – ‘showed some insight’ (Hughes 1989a, 15). But deliberations like these won little sympathy among scholars and activists who dominated the reception in the 1970s and 80s. Discussion of the differences between the two Ariels became yet another recurrent topic in the criticism levelled against Hughes. Linda WagnerMartin was convinced that if the collection had been published as Plath intended, and her planned progression kept intact, ‘praise for it would have been even louder’ (1988b, 8).12 Answering to accusations of deliberately distorting Plath’s vision, and even suppressing parts of her work, Hughes in 1995 brushed aside such charges as ‘based on simple ignorance of how it all happened’. After her death, few magazine editors were willing to print her poems, and the US publishers he approached would not accept the collection as she had left it. In fact, one publisher asked that the number of poems be reduced to twenty, and Hughes declined. However, thanks to her growing fame, all of Plath’s late poems were included in printed collections within six years of

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Ariel’s release. Rather than suppressing anything, Hughes had actually drawn attention to Plath’s original typescript and her full content. Interviewed by Drue Heinz for The Paris Review, Hughes questions the finality of order that her suicide had made definite. ‘She was forever shuffling the poems in her typescripts – looking for different connections, better sequences. She knew there were always new possibilities, all fluid’ (in Heinz 1995, 79). Regardless of his explanations, Hughes’s editing became a major issue for feminists and non-feminists alike. The negative reactions decidedly increased when he in the first edition of The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982) confessed to destroying her last notebook, which contained entries up until three days before she died, ‘because [he] did not want her children to have to read it’. On top of it all, Hughes admitted that the second-to-last diary had ‘disappeared’. No day-to-day records therefore exist after November 1959, except descriptions of specific incidents, literary projects, and neighbours in Devon. Readers who are warmly disposed to Ted Hughes may deduce a lot from his half-apologetic explanation that in those days he ‘regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival’ (1987, xv). But for the most part, critics were not mollified and considered these losses as a form of sacrilege. In this case too, his interference could be seen as an effort to protect himself. Editorial cuts in the published journals were interpreted in the same vein, the reception thus echoing the reactions to Letters Home. The disappearance of Sylvia Plath’s original manuscript for a second novel, a loss which Hughes disclosed in the introduction to Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977), only further confirmed his critics’ impressions of gross editorial carelessness, in addition to censorship.

Woman among Women The women’s movement blamed Sylvia Plath’s tragic destiny on men – especially Ted Hughes – and on a confining patriarchal society. Feminist critics and lecturers also subscribed to this line of reasoning. In an essay entitled ‘The beekeeper’s apprentice’, Carole Ferrier of Queensland University portrays Plath as a victim of the fifties and its corresponding family-centred ideology (1979, 215). Opposing reductive biographical readings, she takes Robin Morgan’s ‘Arraignment’ as her point of departure for an argument that is ‘essentially about patriarchy’, thus focusing on male hegemony and sexual politics in relation to Plath’s work (204).

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Whether the advocates were militant writers or university professors, were called Robin Morgan or Marjorie Perloff, Sylvia Plath’s writing was commonly treated as ‘concrete tools’ or cries of outrage. At the University of Colorado, Suzanne Juhasz claimed that Plath’s death made it possible for readers and critics to handle her poems in an anesthetized way, although the poems ‘ought to hurt and are meant to hurt’. Yet because the poet is dead, ‘no one need feel the blame or the responsibility that these poems engender’ (1976, 87). This kind of poetics implies that literary texts have explicit addressees and are supposed to communicate exact messages – with the apparent inclusion of an accountability index. Ironically, Juhasz seems to think that by leaving out a personal context and thus aestheticizing the poems as art, they will not be studied in accordance with what a serious artist like Sylvia Plath would have preferred. For the women’s movement to idolize her, Sylvia Plath herself had to be portrayed as an exemplary feminist. The importance the movement bestowed on female solidarity made it necessary to emphasize Plath’s close ties with other women. How fundamental this has been to feminist theory and practice is demonstrated by a Women’s Press book on Plath’s poetry. Janice Markey states in A Journey into the Red Eye that the ‘strong affinity with women, so prevalent in her work, remains largely unrecorded, owing to the lack of biographical material covering the last part of Plath’s life’ (1993, 161). Markey’s claim of being a pioneer in criticism appears all the more strange when considering that Linda Wagner-Martin for one championed Plath’s alleged affinity with women in her biography published six years earlier. To underline her general assertion, that Plath started to cultivate friendships with women, Janice Markey quotes the following statement from her journals: ‘How odd, men don’t interest me at all now, only women and womentalk’ (in Markey 1993, 158). Plath writes this note to herself, on 28 January 1959, while in Boston after teaching for a year at Smith College. She had just met up with old school friends who were now young mothers. After visiting with one of them, Plath felt connected to a part of young womanhood – as if ‘Ted were [her] representative in the world of men’. At that time, Sylvia Plath was seeking therapy. She suffered from depression, had problems writing, and wanted children. A happy afternoon spent rug-braiding, chatting about babies, and getting hugs from her friend’s little boy was all the more welcome. Her comment about womanhood is made in between references to the many people she and Hughes were seeing in Boston. Notably, the comment is not followed up by similar statements showing any indication that she had abandoned her

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usual hostility towards women. Instead, her condescending attitude is detectable both before and after, in categorizing expressions like ‘chic Latin’ (in Stevenson 1989a, 214), ‘a capable little Indian woman’ (Letters Home, 373), ‘the little Australian hairdresser’ (418), and ‘spoiled bitches’ (330), a characterization of her Smith College students. During her time at Cambridge University, Plath showed no interest in getting to know any of the English girls, describing them in letters home as ‘fair-skinned, rather hysterical and breathless’ (188) and portraying the dons as ‘bluestocking grotesques’(219). For the benefit of a friend, the ‘ghastly’ Cambridge women are divided into two types: the fair-skinned twittering bird who adores beagling and darjeeling tea and the large, intellectual cowish type with monastically bobbed hair, impossible elephantine ankles and a horrified moo when within 10 feet of a man.

The idea that the women might be clever or perceptive, or even worth talking to, was evidently not a mentionable consideration. One of her costudents was A.S. Byatt, who received her BA from Newnham College in 1957. While promising to herself that she would meet ‘as many people’ as possible during the first term, Plath still felt the need to specify: ‘meaning men’ (in Klein 1966, 182). More than writing, finding a husband and founding a family emerge often enough to be central to her sense of self. Sylvia Plath easily experienced other women as threatening and filled her journals with cutting commentaries and portraits, be it of close friends or women she met in passing. Even Marcia Brown, whom she adored at college and to whose twins she later planned to dedicate The Bed Book, is at one point – after Cambridge – depicted as ‘set in her dogmatic complacency’. And when Sylvia Plath believed to have discovered a touch of resentment or jealousy in her friend, she promised herself that ‘[g]iven time & a Mikeless Marcia I’ll attack her next year & get at her good innards. Innocence my mask’ (Journals, 316).13 People and situations were diagnosed on the basis of how they compared with her own circumstances. Fearing at one point that she might be infertile, Plath laments about the unfairness of it all: ‘It is worse than a horrible disease. Esther has multiple sclerosis, but she has children. Jan is crazy, raped, but she has children. Carol is unmarried, sick, but she has a child’ (Journals, 501). Only a few short weeks after writing these words, Sylvia Plath did in fact become pregnant. This lack of compassion and sympathy for other women’s predicaments is not a rarity in Plath’s journals. A certain Miss Mill, ‘a fat dowdy fixed lady’ whom the Hugheses met at a party, is summed up as

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During the same dinner, she noted how they were served by an ‘ugly fattish yellow dolt-faced girl with purplish acne’ (353). At some friend’s house, Plath met physicist Dorothy Wrinch, ‘who acted like a gray-haired idiot, goggling, going through her little-grey-haired-misunderstoodgenius-scientist-act’ (356). Mrs Van der Poel, an art history professor at Smith and a guest she had herself invited over, she labels as ‘sterile, absolutely barren’ (384). Many of her journal entries can be read as literary exercises in caricature, exact observation, and quick characterization. As such, they are no more to be taken as reliable evidence of the writer’s personality than entries with the opposite kind of content. At the same time, the large number of them may also be seen as an indication of Plath’s views and relations to people in general. The journals are full of similar character assassinations. That her attitude was not just ‘literary’ is obvious from the many episodes her friends and acquaintances have reported. Ted Hughes, as co-editor, was criticized for all the cuts which had been made to the first edition of Sylvia Plath’s journals, supposedly because he wanted to expunge the critical passages about himself. Yet the main editor, Frances McCullough (1990), claimed that a lot of the trimmings were simply due to the mass of ‘Plath’s nasty comments about other people’. These factual persons were, however, not spared when the complete transcription of the journals was published in 2000. Omissions made in the text about Marcia Brown, as quoted above, contain expressions like ‘loyal to weak Mike, jealous as a female fawn-colored bulldog’, ‘Childless, but evidently unwillingly’, ‘I wish she hadn’t married Mike. Then she wouldn’t have to shrink so small’ (Journals, 316). Those who before figured under aliases had their names revealed. Men were also victims of her scalpel, but women in particular are targeted in poems like ‘Face Lift’ (1961), ‘Medusa’ (1962), ‘Lesbos’ (1962), ‘The Tour’ (1962), and ‘Eavesdropper’ (1962). In ‘All the Dead Dears’ (1957), mother, grandmother, and great grandmother reach out their ‘hag hands’ to haul her in. Plath’s diary resounds with strong statements about her own mother and all the reasons she had for hating her, as well as all the mother figures among relatives, teachers, and benefactors who filled her with guilt. There were ostensibly so many women in the family that ‘the house stank of them’ (430). After sessions with her therapist Ruth Beuscher in 1958, Sylvia Plath goes on for pages

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about how much she resents her mother, and how best to express her hatred. She pins all of her miseries on Aurelia Plath, including Otto Plath’s death and her own suicide attempt. As Plath explains it, because she lacked the guts to kill Aurelia – who had never loved her, but only mimed the idea of love – she tried to kill herself instead. Some of the more hateful comments were left out of the first journal edition. Readers had all the same no problems grasping the antagonism. The licence to hate mother, which Beuscher gave to her patient (429), seems to have been copied by many a critic. From the reception of Letters Home, we may safely infer that feelings of female solidarity obviously did not include appreciation for Aurelia Plath. Still, the samples referred to so far from Sylvia Plath’s writing clearly complicate any efforts to present the poet as an exemplary feminist and compassionate sister. On the contrary, she appears to have been sceptical towards what she called ‘a smarmy matriarchy of togetherness’ (429). Explaining, as Janice Markey does, Plath’s negative views as the result of how women are socialized within a patriarchal society, suggests that she should not be held responsible for the consequences of her own opinions. Anyway, what is the principal difference between suppressing Plath’s misogynist tendencies and suppressing her anger – the very crime of which Ted Hughes is accused? In her argument, Markey takes statements at face value, regardless of whether they are corroborated or not. She claims that allegations made by Sylvia Plath of jealous bitchiness on Marcia Brown’s part, should be interpreted as a sign of female rivalry, which was ‘very much Plath’s own experience, even with her closest friends’ (1993, 171). But if it undermines her own politicized interpretation, Markey rejects a biographicalconfessional frame of reference. Unlike the critics she opposes, Markey finds no evidence in Plath’s writings that death was a condition to which she aspired. Thus, to equate the ‘“suicidal” performance of Lady Lazarus’ with the poet’s own suicide obscures what Markey thinks is ‘the most important objective of the poem: to protest against the subjection of women by a consumer-oriented society run by men used to abusing their power’ (38). Although Janice Markey believes otherwise, in my view, it is doubtful whether Sylvia Plath’s ambition to be ‘a woman famous among women’ may be taken as a proof of her strong empathy towards women (5). Furthermore, it is questionable to maintain that she was increasingly drawn to the work of women authors and saw herself as part of their great tradition (158). At that time, women poets were mainly regarded as ‘poetesses’ and compared only to female colleagues. Sylvia Plath represents no exception:

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Chapter Three Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be the Poet of England and her dominions). Who rivals? Well, in history – Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay – all dead. Now: Edith Sitwell & Marianne Moore, the ageing giantesses & poetic godmothers. Phyllis McGinley is out – light verse: she’s sold herself. Rather: May Swenson, Isabella Gardner, & most close, Adrienne Cecile Rich – who will soon be eclipsed by these eight poems. (Journals, 360, 29 March 1958)

Preoccupied with her own standing among contemporary female writers, Plath considered the three-year-older Adrienne Rich to be her most serious competitor, and she was ambivalent towards Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin. When none of her poems were included in an anthology of New Poets of England and America, she felt ‘green-eyed, spite-seething’ jealousy: ‘Except for May Swenson & Adrienne Rich, not one better or more-published than me’, she writes about the six chosen women (315). Anxious that she might be seen as typical of her sex and at the same time might be viewed as not feminine enough, Sylvia Plath evaluates other women writers as negatively as male critics did. Her comments tend to be superficial and competitive. She sides with common masculine objections, branding poems by Sara Teasdale as ‘quailing and whining’ and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s as ‘simple lyrics’ (Letters Home, 244). Isabella Gardner was ‘facile’, Elizabeth Bishop ‘lesbian & fanciful & jeweled’ (Journals, 322). Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood is dismissed as ‘sensationalist trash ... all perverts, all ranting, melodramatic: “The Sex God forgot” – selfpity’ (350). The examples of ‘a bitter, sarcastic Dorothy Parker or Teasdale’ were ‘destructive’. As a twenty-four-year-old woman, Plath herself aimed to sing of fertility: ‘My poems and stories I want to be the strongest female paean yet for the creative forces of nature, the joy of being a loved and loving woman; that is my song’ (Letters Home, 277). Her letters and journals demonstrate that from an early age she was well aware of the literary field as a system of relational positions garnered through games of distinction. She struggled for recognition by challenging competitors but not the fundamental laws of the system. Virginia Woolf was for a long time an ideal before she fell from the Plathian pedestal. Over the years, more male models than female ones made it into the top ranks on her list – D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, W.S. Merwin, Wallace Stevens, Philip Roth, Frank O’Connor, J.D. Salinger, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and W.H. Auden. Mixed with light musings about

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clothes, this is how she responded to two of them: I shall wear my white pleated wool skirt and deep lovely median blue jersey with the square neck to hear Robert Lowell this afternoon: read some of his poems last night & had oddly a similar reaction (excitement, joy, admiration, curiosity to meet & praise) as when I first read Ted’s poems in St. Botolph’s. (Journals, 379, 6 May 1958)

Plath’s attitude towards traditional role expectations was decidedly ambivalent. Especially in the first part of her published diary, she expresses bitterness at the repression of girls, at pacifying bonds, and sexual hypocrisy. But many voices speak in the journals, depending on the genre she is trying out – paralleling in this sense how her tone and phrasing change according to the recipient of her letters. Advocates of a pro-feminist Plath will have no trouble finding good paragraphs to quote. The same, however, goes for the opposite, and anti-feminist conclusions may be just as quickly drawn. Interestingly, the unabridged journals published in 2000, with their many added entries on boys and dating, looks and appearances, and clothes and cooking, promote the traditional woman more than the first edition did. Quite different verdicts may thus be reached about Sylvia Plath’s sentiments, depending on what we choose to accentuate. In his afterword to Nancy Hunter Steiner’s memoir, A Closer Look at Ariel (1974), George Stade claims that Plath in no way thought of the demons haunting her as ‘vengeful spirits conjured up by the social status of women’. In his telling, she attributes Esther Greenwood’s feelings about men and marriage ‘to the bad air inside the bell jar of neurosis’. A Professor of English at Columbia University, Stade believes that poems such as ‘Lesbos’ suggest that ‘she would not have liked Women’s Liberation and that she did not like the feminist streak, such as it was, in herself’. He argues that her perception of men should be viewed as the female equivalent of misogyny rather than a feminist demand for justice. No man could live up to her idealized colossus (Stade 1974, 74–75). On the other hand, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain both Plath’s misogyny and misandry as stages in a process of redefinition, of testing language and experience, which they see mirrored in her writing. Dissatisfied with gender imperatives, Sylvia Plath in Ariel finally entered into an open dialogue with literary history to redefine female selfhood. But she did not try to transform her dissatisfactions with gender imperatives into a theory, Gilbert and Gubar concede (1994, 297).

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A Profoundly Political Poet, or a White Woman Writing White? Sylvia Plath’s status as a leftist icon at the universities does not rely solely on the feminist ticket. The insistence that she was preoccupied with politics in general has also been decisive. Men, just as eagerly as women, have promoted this image of the politically conscious poet, and wideranging implications often follow. Hence, Sol Zollman takes on bourgeois critics for explaining Plath’s texts either in the light of her personal problems or of the modern condition. In ‘Sylvia Plath and Imperialist Culture’, an article from 1969 published in Literature and Ideology, Zollman brushes Stephen Spender off as a ‘reactionary poet of some fame’. Reviewing Ariel, Spender had severed the relation between American poetry and American life by speculating about form and rejecting content as hysteria, he claims. For Zollman, the overlooked connection is obvious. He believes that Plath’s work ‘indicts imperialist culture for mutilating and bending people’s lives’ (1969, 16). Although she writes from personal experience, it is the experience of living in an imperialist society that defines her work. Thus, he interprets The Bell Jar as an exposure of ‘imperialist culture in all its naked parasitism and decay’ (12) and the poetry as an acute reminder of ‘the mutilation of life in a decadent culture’ (18). Maybe Sol Zollman, like Robin Morgan, constitutes an extreme case. But the elevation of Plath’s political awareness has all the same been extensive, and a persistent topic also after the student movement abated. Janice Markey is another relevant example, along with Al Strangeways, the British scholar who in 1998 states that ‘[e]ven the most cursory examination of Plath’s life shows the depth of her intellectual and emotional engagement with political issues’ (1998, 78). Reproving Judith Kroll and others for mythologizing her work to the extent that no political content remains, Strangeways chooses the opposite approach and duly reduces the personal element. She maintains that Sylvia Plath treated political issues more or less directly throughout her writing. As to why Plath explicitly named big historical events only in the later poems, Strangeways points to Hughes’s moving out and the marriage breaking down. Their separation helped release a more powerful poetic voice in Plath and a new sense of possessing history, in accordance with a longstanding engrossment. While married, Plath had been affected by Hughes’s lack of interest in the political context of poetry, Strangeways claims (1998, 112–13). In other words, the poet was inhibited by a dominating husband even in this area of her life.

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Curiously, Strangeways contends that Linda Wagner-Martin’s biography is one of the few works on Sylvia Plath that acknowledges the poet’s political concerns. Just like Markey who overlooks Wagner-Martin, Strangeways sidesteps Markey. The fact is that many critics have had their say about the supposed politically engaged poet – especially since a variation of this discussion includes Plath’s use of history, the Holocaust, and Nazism. The contradictory views among critics, which were evident from the 1960s onwards, on why, how, and to what effect she incorporates historical references, were highlighted in the preceding chapter. Ten years after Zollman but well before Wagner-Martin, Markey, and Strangeways, Jerome Mazzaro, editor of Modern Poetry Studies and Professor of English at the State University of New York, writes not only about Sylvia Plath’s political interests but also describes her interests as activism (1979, 234). Mazzaro sees in her a poet who, like others in the same generation, perceived the era of non-involvement as coming to a close. Her concern with urgent political issues – militarism, radioactive fallout, and concentration camps – marked ‘an emergence from “silence” into an era of political and social activism’. This shift coincided, he emphasizes, with an ongoing public debate and the existence of a ‘massive literature’ (219). Seen in this way, as unfolding within the cycles of history, Plath begins the reversal from passivity by penning ‘Lady Lazarus’ (235). The ‘fissure’ in Plath criticism, as Tim Kendall calls it in Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (2001, 171), revolves around whether the poet exploits Dachau and Hiroshima opportunistically to inflate her own suffering or mediates convincingly between personal and collective experiences. Stan Smith, of Nottingham Trent University, opts for the second stand in Inviolable Voice (1982), a Marxist-inspired study of how poetry is conditioned by history and circumstance. ‘Waist-deep in History’ is the title of his chapter dedicated to Sylvia Plath. In her world, according to Smith, identity is ‘a secretion of history’ that mouthpieces the dead (1982, 2). Consequently, there is no gap between public and private in her poetry. He declares Plath to be ‘a profoundly political poet’ who ‘has seen the deeper correspondences between the personal and the collective tragedies, their common origins in a civilisation founded on repression at the levels both of the body politic and of the carnal body’ (219). From a similar platform, Alan Sinfield in Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (1989) offers a Marxist analysis of the women’s social position. He accuses most critics before him of overlooking Plath’s longstanding political commitment (1989, 222) and goes on to offer the same list of preoccupations that Mazzaro and others have put forth.

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Moreover, Sinfield claims that Plath increasingly relates her own experience to the violence and oppression produced in patriarchy and ‘is saying that Jews and women, both, have been among the victims of institutionalized violence in Western civilization’ (224). In the second edition of his book (1997), Sinfield defines his approach to literature as cultural materialist and argues for the necessity of investigating the historical conditions of textual representations. Placing himself on one pole within the binary framework of literary criticism which he seems to operate in, the other – non-materialist – approach in his telling ‘alleges that high culture derives from the human spirit, and hence transcends historical conditions’ (1997, xxiii). Yet his own footing on the materialist platform does not prevent Sinfield from trying to act as some kind of a medium for the poet. He states that the meaning he ascribes to Plath’s work is no more than ‘a thought struggling into consciousness’ and ‘scarcely anticipated in its period’. At the University of Sussex decades later, Sinfield is still able to divine what Plath intended and is unconsciously ‘saying’ (1989 and 1997, 224). Without a doubt, Sylvia Plath dealt intensely with most of what she undertook, and she expressed her own opinions about the big issues discussed within the circles in which she moved. When considering how much has been made of Plath’s noncommittal remarks, it is nevertheless not easy in retrospect to decide if the portrayal of her as a dedicated multiguru perhaps says more about (American) culture, the time, and wishful thinking or the politics of her advocates. According to Linda Wagner-Martin (1987), Sylvia Plath had started to see herself as a political person while at school, when her English teacher made connections between the literature they were reading and the contemporary socio-political scene. Like so many students around the world, the topics she wrote about in her assignments included the Korean War and other current affairs. At the same time, in the several hundred journal pages now published, such topics are rarely touched upon, and when they are, the references to them are largely indirect or in passing. A close reading of the extended edition does not support allegations that the earlier version actually conspired to restrict the presentation of a political Plath. There simply wasn’t much there in the first place. Although Karen V. Kukil’s index to the 2000 edition does its best with the few political references there are, entries on food, cooking, clothes, and emotions still greatly outnumber the sociopolitical ones. The same index reflects the discourse which prevailed at the time of publication, thereby distorting Plath’s image in line with the overall wishful picture. Apparently, she was quite race-conscious and writes about

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‘Afro-Americans’ and ‘Native Americans’. These politically correct terms were not around in the 1950s, however. Plath uses ‘colored’, ‘negroes’, ‘negresses’, and ‘Indian’ in the limited number of times non-whites figure in her journals, and very hastily at that. Jews are described as ‘greasyhaired’ (96), ‘slimy’ (261), and ‘oily’ (407). While these illustrations naturally do not make her an anti-Semite, they do show her as a person who repeats stock epithets without thinking about their linguistic or cultural significance. Another index entry is ‘Apartheid (South Africa)’. But on the given page for 10 May 1958, she just mentions a gigantic jar in the library entrance at Smith College ‘filling with dollar bills for African students’ scholarships which my conscience has been nagging me to contribute to’ (380). The entry does not allow us to see whether she actually donates money, what was behind the fund raising, or what she thought about the larger issues involved. Only in the end notes do we learn from the editor that the money was for ‘the African Medical Scholarship Trust Fund to aid victims of apartheid in South Africa’ (694). By contrast, the index in the first edition of her journals avoids such inconsistencies by limiting itself, with only a few exceptions, to names of persons, places, and titles of literary works. An even more consistently race-conscious approach from the same year explains Renée R. Curry’s attempt to position Plath within ‘white discourse’. In White Women Writing White (2000), Curry claims that Sylvia Plath, Hilda Doolittle, and Elizabeth Bishop were near-blind to aspects of their whiteness, both its privileges and limitations. Consequently, we ought to read them ‘as ignorant, but not innocent, inheritors and perpetuators of colonialism’. Curry’s engagement in whiteness studies is ideologically motivated. She draws attention to the whiteness of poets to whom ‘many white feminist scholars have devoted years of research’. Curry acts not out of disloyalty, she notes, but as a feminist devoted to unveiling feminism’s myth of innocence in relationship to racism and elitism and thereby contribute to the dismantling of white mastery and privilege (2000, 8–9). Nonetheless, the method she applies to a postcolonial settling of accounts with regard to other theoretical trends is not unproblematic. For White Women Writing White, white poets employ ‘a poetics of presumption’ (10). They adopt a white positionality marked by colour blindness, elusive mastery signifiers, and essentialist or Romantic racist language, thereby equating the word ‘white’ with positive things and ‘black’ with the opposite. Renée Curry, an Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing at California State University, describes herself as the first critic to treat Plath’s affirmation of her whiteness as ‘a significant racial

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marking’. In order to prove that Plath’s colour aesthetics have racial implications by way of their sheer accumulation, Curry presents lists of word combinations that include the terms white and black, and demonstrates how these show up in ‘a remarkable fifty percent’ of Plath’s 224 collected poems (125). However, no lists of other colours, poets, or dichotomies are supplied for comparison. Perhaps Sylvia Plath was more ‘obsessed’ with the white–black binary than most poets, but since White Women Writing White does not offer comparative statistics, we would have no way of knowing. Furthermore, for the comparison to be relevant, the material would have to include the use of colour imagery by a significant number of other poets from different cultures and times. Curry’s rhetoric of exemplarity functions in the same way as it does for critics who apply this concept with reversed signs. She concedes that her three chosen figures ‘would not have comprehended their poetic imaginations as racially encoded’ (170), nor would their numerous readers immediately infer a racial ghost hidden in quite common expressions. For Plath, this includes word combinations like ‘black air’, ‘black hair’, ‘black coat’, ‘black ducks’, and ‘white air’, ‘white hair’, ‘white coat’, and ‘white mice’. The analysis Curry presents does not take into consideration that, while simplistic, thinking in terms of polarities and organizing the world in binary oppositions like a chess board is fundamental to human behaviour. Such universal dichotomies as day–night, light–dark, white– black, and good–bad are conceptualized in myths, stories, and poems around the world without race or ethnicity having much effect on their appearance. This does not preclude, of course, that other clusters of meanings may be added as a consequence of social and cultural changes. And this is exactly what White Women Writing White does. With her raceconscious reading, Renée Curry moves Sylvia Plath’s poems from their historical context into twenty-first century postcolonial studies. In using Plath to construct a new white identity, Curry may also be said to diminish the meaning of Plath’s work. At the very least, her arguments and assumptions certainly shape it. Considering Plath to be a perpetuator of colonialism is a rather exceptional move in a reception dominated by the opposite view – that of a ‘political’ Plath – which persists despite a lack of substantial material to reinforce the image. Perhaps this is why Wagner-Martin sprinkles her biography with expressions like the following: ‘When she wasn’t worrying about international affairs, Sylvia worried about money’ (1987, 141), or ‘Political as always, Sylvia asked Olwyn to tell her more about De Gaulle, who had just founded the Fifth Republic in France’ (152). Such an understanding of Sylvia Plath concurs with how the poet presented herself

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in an interview with BBC radio, on 30 October 1962. In this instance, she describes herself as ‘rather a political person’, concerned with history and ‘very interested in Napoleon’, in addition to being ‘very interested in battles, in wars, in Gallipoli, the First World War and so on’ (in Orr 1966, 169). Stressing the importance of the personal element in her poems, she simultaneously distances herself from mirror-looking, narcissistic experiences: ‘I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on’ (170). The poems she read on the radio as a confirmation of this aestheticpolitical programme were, among others, ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, ‘Cut’, ‘Medusa’, ‘A Birthday Present’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, and ‘Purdah’. These have all been mainly received as confessional texts, personal in their content, and less apparently relevant to ‘Hiroshima and Dachau and so on’. Another widely cited document is the short piece entitled ‘Context’, which contains Sylvia Plath’s answers to a questionnaire in The London Magazine (1962), sent to a number of writers – Ted Hughes included. They were all asked about what influenced their work and what issues of the time concerned them.14 Declaring herself to be preoccupied with the genetic effects of fallout and with an article in The Nation documenting the collusion between big business and the military in America, Plath writes that such issues affected her work only indirectly. Her poems could be seen as ‘deflections’, being not about Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark. They are not about the terrors of mass extinction, but about the bleakness of the moon over a yew tree in a neighbouring graveyard. Not about the testaments of tortured Algerians, but about the night thoughts of a tired surgeon.

Readers unable to spot the ‘sidelong’ influence she claimed was there, might otherwise agree to the constant importance of ‘the hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms – children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings; and the conservation of life of all people in all places’ (‘Context’, 45–46). This was the era of the Cold War, military armament, and peace movements. The poet William S. Merwin, a friend of the Hugheses, was one of the protesters in London who participated in the three-day Ban the Bomb demonstration from the Aldermaston nuclear power station to Trafalgar Square during the Easter of 1960. Together with an acquaintance and baby Frieda, Sylvia Plath watched the demonstrators as they marched into London. A few days later, she writes to her mother about ‘an immensely moving experience’ and the pride that ‘the baby’s first real

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adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of world-annihilation’ (Letters Home, 378). Commentators have taken these remarks as a sure sign of her deep commitment. However, if we are to believe Dido Merwin, Frieda’s godmother and the wife of W.S., this episode was all about revenge against Ted Hughes, who had made an appointment to go to the march with Dido. They did not stay long and returned to Chalcot Square to find Sylvia’s note – ‘gone to the march’ – which had, as Dido Merwin puts it, the desired effect on Ted: ‘acute anxiety about Frieda’. She claims that Sylvia Plath had, ‘so far as anyone knew’, at no time expressed any interest in the march or a wish to see it. ‘If there had been the remotest suggestion of taking Frieda, they could have counted me out. Toting a two-week-old infant around in those huge crowds would have been something I didn’t want to know about’ (Merwin 1989, 328).15 Old friends did not remember Sylvia Plath as possessing any acute social conscience or political awareness. On the contrary, Nancy Hunter Steiner points at the banality of the topics they discussed while at college. The two girlfriends, labelled as twins by Sylvia Plath, preferred talking about themselves and their feelings: We never probed any significant social or cultural problem. In spite of the almost universal implications of the McCarthy era with its pogroms and suspicions, we never exchanged political observations. Like shopgirls we worked long hours, and the diversions we sought when we relaxed were pedestrian. We pursued boys, clothes, and entertainment as energetically as we pursued an education. We were engrossed with ourselves and we noticed the world beyond our doors only when it affected or touched us. Our egoism was colossal. (Steiner 1974, 22–23)

Sylvia Plath acted and looked like the prevalent middle-class stereotype. Except for her intelligence and poetic talents, she could have passed as ‘an airline stewardess or the ingenuous heroine of a B movie’. According to Hunter Steiner, Plath ‘actively disliked’ the little band of barefoot rebels at Smith College, feeling personally offended by their language and manners (18–19). The beat generation was not hers. When she came to England on a Fulbright scholarship in 1955, Sylvia Plath went about wearing a hat and white gloves. Her matching set of white suitcases was no less conspicuous among the more scruffy-looking students in Cambridge. ‘[E]ssentially a conservative’, despite ‘rather vague objections to the atom bomb and to Nixon’, is how Marjorie Perloff in 1979 (161) sums up her verdict on Plath. Perloff suggests that Plath camouflaged imaginative narrowness by introducing political and religious images. She finds the poet’s references

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to Jews, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima to be merely hollow and clever (173). Perloff’s arguments belong to the ‘formidable list’ – in Tim Kendall’s words – of critics who did not accept that the distinction between personal and collective could be so easily collapsed, as Alan Sinfield would have us believe (Kendall 2001, 171). A scholar then lecturing at the University of Bristol, Kendall rejects both Plath images – self-aggrandizing egotist versus politically engaged commentator – as caricatures which do not survive textual examination. In his view, there is also a limit to the gendered interpretations made by critics such as Margaret Dickie Uroff, Jacqueline Rose, and Al Strangeways, who claim that Sylvia Plath, in her poetry, condemns patriarchy. Kendall argues in his Critical Study (2001) that a close reading of ‘Getting There’ and other poems written around the same time (6 November 1962) allows for a new understanding of the relationship between her later poetry and ‘the recurring holocausts’ to which she alludes. ‘The fact that a poem about a child in the womb can also be about Hiroshima shows how threatening and intrusive Plath considers history to be’, Kendall writes. Her personal cycle is driven by the larger, inescapable movements of historic violence from which her poetry ‘repeatedly awakes into amnesia and rebirth’. What she – or her poetry – has to offer is a temporary reprieve from a carnage with no solution (185–86). A year after Tim Kendall’s effort at redirecting the focus back to Plath’s work and at mediating between contradictory approaches, Robin Peel’s Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (2002) came out. The book represents yet a materialist venture that aims to contextualize the poet as indicated in the title. Peel’s reason for choosing this angle is to declare – like quite a few critics before him – the lack of such a perspective: ‘Until relatively recently Sylvia Plath has not been regarded as a very political writer, except on the very specific subject of sexual politics’ (2002, 16). From his base at the University of Plymouth, Peel maintains that the major part of Plath criticism has ‘virtually ignored’ the influence of Cold War politics and events of the early 1960s on her later writing. This contextual influence, however, was a pertinent point in Jerome Mazzaro’s article from 1979, in James Young’s discussion of the ‘Holocaust Confessions of Sylvia Plath’ in 1987, and in a multitude of other published works on both sides of the Atlantic. When studies on ‘Plath and politics’ or ‘Plath and history’ continue to be justified by a previous lack of interest, the rationale has an automatic ring to it. To support his claim that Sylvia Plath underwent a politicization during her final years in England, Robin Peel introduces ‘the idea of

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disguise’, arguing that ‘the relationship between Plath’s poetry and the public events of her time is a concealed relationship’ (15; my italics). Hidden connections of many kinds may surely be found by those who keep searching. The insistence on the part of both Peel and Mazzaro that Plath’s concerns were typical for the time can moreover give the impression that political and historical references are no more than trendy ornaments. In addition to focusing on the pervasiveness of Cold War issues generally, Peel also enumerates traits that demonstrate her political reticence. What he finally settles on is that Plath’s writing was informed by an anxiety about rising international tensions, in the way that every sensitive, intelligent person with young children would be affected. The Bell Jar and the Ariel poems ‘are not “about” the Cold War. But, it needs reiterating, neither are they not about it’ (227). These meagre discoveries contrast strikingly with his upbeat description of how extraordinary Sylvia Plath was compared to Ted Hughes. Hughes is painted as a force pulling his wife away from society and politics. Yet in a letter to Anne Stevenson from 1986, Hughes writes of collecting material about ‘nuclear business’ and ‘fall-out’, both issues that occupied him and his wife jointly and made them decide on moving to Devon (Hughes 2007, 519). Peel’s defence for conducting a study that could be described as much ado about not that much is a diluted version of the argument he initially launched: Sylvia Plath’s texts ‘have a more contemporary resonance than is generally acknowledged’. Many of his forerunners – from Zollman to Strangeways – will dispute at least their own unawareness of the subject. However, in another book from 2002 concerning the same era, Deborah Nelson likewise observes that Plath is ‘a poet who is rarely considered political’ (2002, 80). Nelson’s work, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, is a cross-disciplinary study of ‘law and literature’ which investigates how and why the borders of privacy were tested in court cases and explored by confessional poets beginning in the late 1950s. Rather the opposite is noteworthy: the readiness of scholars to assert that Sylvia Plath dealt with any number of contemporary issues. Interestingly, these propositions are consistent with theoretical ‘turns’ in criticism, from environmentalism and gender politics to the denunciation of patriarchy, imperialism, consumerism, war, and armament. Nelson, for her part, terms Plath as ‘a remarkably astute cultural critic’ (2006, 21) and denotes her autobiographical writing both as ‘a political decision’ and as ‘a counterdiscourse to the official ideology of privacy in the Cold War’ (23). In Laura Frost’s words, ‘Plath explores democracy and pacifism’ (2002, 142). And on the back cover of Janice Markey’s ‘thoroughly researched and very accessible study’, Plath is described as follows:

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A gifted and successful poet, Sylvia Plath is less known for being a staunch and tireless champion of the vulnerable and underprivileged, who found herself subsequently derided and exploited for these efforts – by the very worst excesses of what was to become an increasingly destructive patriarchal culture.

It is not clear on what grounds these sweeping statements have been made. All the same, they have the unfortunate boomerang effect, where an examination of corroborating evidence easily leads to a search for material pointing in the opposite direction. The limited political references in Plath’s journals may then be seen as a defect when the common understanding for such a genre is that the world rotates around the main person, the diarist.

‘To Sylvia’ – Lesbian Saviour of All Children The strong identification that many readers feel with Sylvia Plath, and which a rhetoric of exemplarity relies upon, can clearly lead to exaggerated idolization. To be sure, Janice Markey has dedicated A Journey into the Red Eye (1993) ‘To Sylvia’, and since no other details about the dedication are mentioned, it is natural to assume that the dedicatee is Sylvia Plath. Considering that the book is not dedicated to her memory, the poet appears to be alive still. In her ‘journey’, Markey turns Plath into a modern saviour, who, towards the end, ‘accepted her identity as a rebel against a stultifying and oppressive tradition’. Supposedly, Plath saw herself as nothing short of ‘a spokesperson for the disenfranchised and the voiceless, a role she thought a writer should adopt’ (1993, 7). Not only was she ‘very concerned about the future and welfare of her own two children but also that of children worldwide’ (31). If this is the case, how is one to interpret Plath’s suicide? Strangely enough – as this has been a central line of argument in Al Alvarez’s version of the story all along – Janice Markey proclaims that ‘[m]ore than has ever before been acknowledged, her death was an illtimed cry for help’ (5). Likewise, Markey’s effort at ‘normalizing’ Plath is nothing at all new. In accordance with what is more or less a standard feminist procedure, she thinks critics have been too preoccupied with the poet’s suicide and depression. Lynda K. Bundtzen made the same point in Plath’s Incarnations (1983), and Jacqueline Rose directs her critique in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991) at those who, like biographer Anne Stevenson, pathologized the writer. Markey contends that there is no evidence in Sylvia Plath’s work that death was a condition she aspired to as a means of rebirth and purification (35–36). Instead, Markey argues for

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‘her evident hatred of death in any form’ (5). What, according to Markey, can be found in Plath’s poetry, are numerous lesbian and sado-masochistic elements. Interpreting ‘Ariel’ as a highly erotic poem about a sexual encounter between two women, Markey describes the text as ‘replete with female symbols only’, such as ‘furrow’, ‘neck’, ‘black sweet blood mouthfuls’, ‘wall’, and ‘the red // Eye’. Contrary to most of the relationships that Plath depicts between women, this one is entirely positive, with the speaker moving from total passivity, or ‘Stasis in darkness’, to active participation in a sexual interaction. Without Markey’s translations of the symbols – ‘vagina’, ‘cervix’, ‘menstrual blood’, ‘wall of the vagina’ – some of them might otherwise escape the notice of readers with a proclivity towards other interpretations (28–29). Prior to Markey, ‘Ariel’ has been read as the literal story about a horseback ride at high speed early in the morning; as a celebration of life, of artistic creativity, and of motion and energy in general; as representing a sexual sublimation, a visionary experience, an initiation drama, a divine androgyne, a protean sexual identity, a suicidal death wish, a desire for extinction; and as a ‘menstrual poem’.16 Perhaps Markey’s approach best illustrates that readers will find what they want or what they set out to discover. The title ‘Ariel’ points in multiple directions. Plath’s underlined Webster’s dictionary, now kept in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, shows that she was well aware of the word’s etymologies. But we can only speculate about other possible references. The rather elderly horse that Sylvia Plath learned to ride on while living in Devon was called Ariel. In Arabic, ariel is a species or variety of the African and West-Asian gazelle. In Jewish demonology, Ariel is a water spirit, whereas the word in Hebrew means ‘God’s lion’ or ‘God’s hearth’. It occurs as a man’s name in the Old Testament and is figuratively used to signify Jerusalem. From 1962 on, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has published a review of arts and letters called Ariel. It is also the name of a moon orbiting Uranus and a series of six satellites jointly owned by the Americans and British; Ariel 1 was launched on 26 April 1962, half a year before Plath created her poem ‘Ariel’. At the time, the British police rode the Ariel Leader motorcycle, produced from 1958 to 1965 by The Ariel Company located in Birmingham. Ariel may moreover be associated with Shakespeare’s sexless, airy spirit by the same name in The Tempest – appearing likewise in Goethe’s Faust, as well as with Milton’s rebel angel in Paradise Lost and with the head sylph in Alexander Pope’s mock epic poem The Rape of the Lock. Inspired by Shakespeare, the name Ariel has repeatedly been identified

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with poetic imagination and used as a title for literary journals. Over the front entrance of the Broadcasting House, built in 1932, where Sylvia Plath did recordings for BBC radio, there is a statue of Prospero and Ariel. And since 1936, BBC has published a staff magazine under the title Ariel. Percy Bysshe Shelley chose Ariel as a name for the boat he capsized with when drowning in 1822. André Maurois called his novelized biography based on the poet Ariel, ou La vie de Shelley (1923). In English translation, Maurois’s Ariel was among the first ten paperbacks published by Penguin Books during the summer of 1935. Faber has, in two rounds (1927–31, 1954–55), published a series of illustrated poems entitled Ariel, with which Sylvia Plath may have familiarized herself. Finally, T.S. Eliot’s contributions to this series were collected as his Ariel Poems.17 Anne Stevenson credits ‘Ariel’ with a unique position in the canon of Sylvia Plath’s work. She sees it as ‘a quintessential statement of all that had meaning for her’. Rehearsing the whole spectrum of Plath’s colour imagery, the poem opens in black, with stasis in darkness, immediately succeeded by a substanceless blue (1989a, 272). Both colours are picked up by several compound images (‘Nigger-eye / Berries cast dark’, ‘Black sweet blood mouthfuls’, ‘Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas’). The horse’s neck is brown; Godiva is white. At the end, the ‘I’ flies like an arrow into the red eye of the morning, ‘Suicidal, at one with the drive’. It could make sense to associate it with a flying Ariel satellite, which was considerably more exotic in 1962 than space technology is today. Incidentally, after World War II, the Red Hunter became the Ariel company’s bestselling bike, and in 1960 they introduced their Ariel Arrow. Sandra M. Gilbert finds liberating images in ‘Ariel’. As in other great Plath poems, the protagonist is catapulted – by a horse, like an arrow – ‘out of a stultifying enclosure into the violent freedom of the sky’ (1979, 251). Gilbert draws a parallel to Esther Greenwood’s protest against the opinion of Mrs Willard, the mother of Esther’s boyfriend Buddy. Mrs Willard claimed that men wanted a mate; women wanted infinite security: ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from’. But the last thing Esther seeks for herself is infinite security: ‘I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket’ (The Bell Jar, 58, 68). Gilbert then notes how the flight in ‘Ariel’ is terrible, ‘because it is not only an escape, it is a death trip’ into the red eye of morning. The final image of the poem is consequently one of rebirth and of a place ‘where one is cooked’ (1979, 259). Fifteen years on, Gilbert and Gubar are eager to trace the positive influence that Sylvia Plath has had on contemporaries and descendants. In

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No Man’s Land 3, Letters from the Front (1994), they downplay the destructive elements and concentrate on ‘a profoundly affirmative statement’, as deductible from Plath’s choice of title for her collection. Having considered and discarded titles such as ‘Daddy’ and ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, which emphasize male power and female victimization, the poet settled for Ariel. She thereby not only refers to her gallop on a horse with that name, but also ambitiously affiliates herself with Shakespeare. Gilbert and Gubar maintain that Plath was determined ‘to appropriate for herself as a womanspirit both Ariel’s tempest-making powers ... and his escape from patriarchal bondage’. When translating the Hebrew meaning of Ariel, Plath chooses to change the gender to ‘God’s lioness’ and blur the boundaries between horse and rider in ‘How one we grow’ (1994, 316– 17). For Linda Wagner-Martin, the arrow is ‘the key image’, and she leaves out the suicidal drive. Instead of turning to Esther Greenwood and The Bell Jar, Wagner-Martin draws attention to a possible biographical explanation, stating that the image recalls an actual opinion voiced by Mrs Norton.18 In this interpretation, the subject of the poem celebrates ‘her new-found freedom from male surveillance’. Being both the arrow and a lioness, ‘she takes on all the independence, the aggression, that her culture had attempted to deny her’ (1987, 220). No lesbian inclinations are indicated here.

Androgynous Flux During the 1980s, feminist criticism changed focus, from what Elaine Showalter describes as a concentration on women’s literary subordination, mistreatment, and exclusion, to the study of women’s separate literary traditions, to an analysis of the symbolic construction of gender and sexuality within literary discourse. (1985a, 10)

One reason for this change was the influence that French theorists, and their idea of a specific écriture feminine being grounded in the body, had on a predominantly materialist Anglo-American tradition. In Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (1986), a generic study of women poets and their struggle for articulation, Alicia Suskin Ostriker of Rutgers University discusses ‘the body language’ of Sylvia Plath, Robin Morgan, and numerous other poets. She claims that Plath, whose work is filled with body images, ‘appears most thoroughly to have internalized the larger culture’s principles of flesh-rejection and

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aspiration toward transcendence’ (1986, 99). Symptomatically for the time, the second volume of No Man’s Land is entitled Sexchanges (1989), and in the sequel, Letters from the Front (1994), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar portray Sylvia Plath as a feminist visionary whose mantel was taken up by Adrienne Rich. In Plath’s poems, Gilbert and Gubar find dreams of escape from gender and sexual differences, of gender transformation and androgynous transcendence. They now interpret Ariel’s arrow-self as ‘a prophetic figure of ferocious androgyny’ (1994, 299). Complying with this new focus, Jacqueline Rose uses ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ to demonstrate that Plath plays extensively on gender, sexuality, and power. Ted Hughes reacted strongly to speculations about his wife’s sexual identity and tried to make Rose see things his way before she published her book. Thus, in the preface to The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), she tells what was by then a familiar story of unacceptable demands from the estate and efforts at suppressing those opinions Hughes did not like. He had even argued that her analysis would be damaging to his adult children and insinuated that speculations like hers ‘would in some countries be “grounds for homicide”’ (1991, xiii). Rose was applauded by critics for not giving in to illegitimate pressure. Her own experience seemed to prove exactly what she sought to expose in her book: how Hughes notoriously meddled with texts and presented his subjective version of reality as the objective truth. Their dispute made it into The Times Literary Supplement. Once again the discussion revolved around the relation between fiction and facts and the rights of the involved. Hughes’s efforts at explaining himself in April 1992 highlights the distance between a scholar who insists on her privilege and freedom to interpret literary texts whatever ways she wants, and the individuals who must live with the results of the reading. While the University of London professor vows that she has presented a literary interpretation – not facts – for an audience well aware of the difference, the family, according to Hughes, constantly and embarrassingly discovered that the public had great problems in sorting fiction from reality. Hughes declares The Haunting of Sylvia Plath to be a ‘strongly feminist’ book, and sees the sanctity of the poet’s sexual identity as one of its major points, an identity which he supposedly distorted, reinvented, misrepresented, and forthright violated through his editing. Consequently, he thought it strange that Jacqueline Rose, in his opinion, made the same errors with her analysis of ‘The Rabbit Catcher’. When he failed to convince Rose that her ‘fantasy’ would travel the world thanks to Sylvia Plath’s fame, and by most readers be taken as ‘an attempted interpretation

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of the truth – therefore a “fact”’, Hughes tried to wake ‘her common (even maternal) sensibility’. He asked her to imagine how yet another portrait of their freaky mother might affect Plath’s offspring, both past thirty at the time. Hughes realizes that his concern for their feelings might seem disproportionate since to Jacqueline Rose the children were ‘irrelevant abstractions’. But to their father, they constituted ‘the absolute living centre of [his] world, totally vulnerable and alert through each moment of the day’. From his letter, we get the impression that Ted Hughes, almost in desperation, searched for arguments and examples that would make the situation more concrete for Rose. He therefore calls on her to contemplate what would happen if someone publicly speculated about the sexual identity of a local mother in a society with strong notions of honour. All he wanted, Hughes claims, was to wake her up; he had not predicted that she would react by feeling threatened. Thus, while he struggled to win her sympathy, Rose consulted a lawyer. In concluding his letter to The Times Literary Supplement, Hughes contemplates the slipperiness of language and what damage ‘interpretation’, ‘ideas’, and ‘fantasy’ can inflict on real people.19 The underlying dilemma is unsolvable. After publication, neither the author nor anyone else retains control of how a literary work will or should be read, although it might be tempting for those who have exclusive information to claim that they know best. The sorts of pains and problems this can cause for close relatives ought to be self-evident, especially when contemporary and controversial texts with an apparent (auto)biographical core are involved. To think that ethical questions can be avoided by insisting that the discussion is just about literature is too facile. Regardless of their method or theoretical approach, scholars and amateurs alike easily resort to literal readings and equate life with literature and back again. On the other hand, to involve the concept of shame and honour like Hughes did would seem far-fetched to most critics. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, as well as in her letter to The Times Literary Supplement, Jacqueline Rose rejects Hughes’s fictitious example – of the local mother in a society dominated by honour codes – as totally inappropriate for illustrating anything that had to do with her discussion of Plath. For rhetoric to be effective and contribute to conclusions on matters where there are only probabilities rather than indisputable truths, the speaker and his/her audience must meet on a common ground of opinion and belief. But Rose did not identify with the lesson in Hughes’s example. Furthermore, his ethos and credibility were from the outset ineffective within the feminist community to which he spoke. A rhetoric of exemplarity

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involving Sylvia Plath did not provide him with the kind of communal authority that feminists would immediately respect. Quite the contrary, his strategy backfired over and over again. Rose maintains that her book is not a biography, but a reading of Plath’s work. She is ‘never talking of real people, but of textual entities (Y and X)’. As a scholar, she simply did not take sides in the Plath–Hughes controversy (Rose 1991, xi, 5; 1992). It is certainly true that no reader would suspect Rose of siding with Hughes. Her detailed account of how Plath’s archive has been managed systematically paints him as a person who stands for control and restriction. In opposition to this image of him as a censor of Plath’s body and work, Rose presents herself as one who stands for intellectual freedom and interpretive diversity. Her own rhetoric and use of examples are, however, not above questioning. Throughout the book, she uses biographical names and never actually resorts to Y and X abstractions. What are we to believe when she draws on biographical material to supplement the fiction and comments on what different characters say and do? Discussing ‘Daddy’, Rose makes it clear that Sylvia Plath had written about a patriarchal father figure and not the character of Otto Plath. But then she goes on to quote from the real Otto Plath’s factual book, Bumblebees and their Ways, in order to exemplify the perverted paternal ideal to which his daughter referred (1991, 230–31). In his dissertation, the Professor of Entomology had depicted the coexistence of insects in disciplined troops as a positive phenomenon. Without a concept of fantasy, we can neither understand Plath’s work nor comprehend how she has come to haunt our culture, Rose claims. Applying a discourse typical for the time, she observes that ‘Plath is a fantasy, she writes fantasy. She is a symptom, she writes the symptom’ (8). Not only did Sylvia Plath express her own conscious and unconscious fantasies through her writing, thus producing ‘her own sexual iconography’, she also mediates collective ones (7). As a result, readers project their fantasies, fears, and wishes on her, generating a form of ‘psychotic’ commentary (14). Rose links male chauvinist criticism with a wideranging horror of femininity. She also interprets the opposition to Plath’s appropriation of the Holocaust as evidence that she was evoking culturally repressed memories, memories so traumatic that they were the hardest to recall. Still, to what extent did – or does – the Holocaust constitute a collectively repressed memory? As pointed out earlier, Jerome Mazzaro and others have argued that the Ariel poems reflect an open public debate that was ongoing at the time of their writing following in the wake of the Eichmann trials and numerous books dealing with the concentration camps.

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It is as if Jacqueline Rose wants to defend Sylvia Plath against biased men generally, and not only Ted Hughes. By granting considerable space to negative evaluations, Rose, according to Joyce Carol Oates, indicates that these critics are somehow more important – or, their psychotic criticism at least is more exciting – than the many respectful reviews which Plath received from first-rate commentators. Oates (1991) finds the very title, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, and Rose’s opening gambit, ‘Sylvia Plath haunts our culture’, to be excessive, unless ‘by “culture” one means “London literary culture”’. The views Jacqueline Rose articulates place her safely within poststructuralist feminist thinking. She reflects on the ambiguity of language and the divisions internal to it, on psychoanalysis, feminism, and the non-existence of history outside the subject. As a frame for the story she sets out to describe, Rose has chosen ‘Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten...’, which translates as ‘I do not know what it means’. Rose specifies how this is ‘the first line of a German song that Plath recalls from her childhood, one that her mother used to play and sing to her’ (1991, 112). Actually, it is the first line of Heinrich Heine’s famous ‘Loreley’. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, it exists as a refrain that runs through the various Plath texts. Rose reads it twice over as the expression of an irreducible hesitancy in language – the foreignness of the German, the incomprehension voiced by the content of the words, the whole line appearing in Plath’s writing as the relic of a cultural memory which she endlessly fails to retrieve.

However, she leaves out the next Heine line, ‘Daß ich so traurig bin’ (‘That I am so sad/full of sorrow’), which could be said to envelop the case just as nicely and supply the first line with quite another context. Ordinarily, ‘Loreley’ has been received as a memory poem and as a reverie at the riverside. Along with feminist scholars such as Hélène Cixous and Toril Moi, Jacqueline Rose puts great store in connecting bodily elements and processes on the one hand with language and writing on the other. Expressions like ‘the body of the work’ and ‘the body in the language’ are empowered with significance. Accordingly, the editing of Sylvia Plath’s work may be interpreted as both an effort at controlling her writing and at censoring her body. Rose does not appear to differentiate between the written and the printed word nor does she see the need for editing manuscripts, which perhaps were not meant for publication – as in the case of letters and journals. She describes Hughes’s editing generally as ‘weighed down by the heaviest of psychosexual, aesthetic, and ethical

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investments’ (74). Rose defines Sylvia Plath in Julia Kristeva’s terms, ‘as a writer of abjection, a writer for whom the limits of the body and of symbolization are constantly worked over or put at risk’ (37). Plath represents a drama about the origins of body and language in relation both to maternal and paternal speech, exposing the violence in the act of writing itself (63). In her examination of Plath’s work, Rose does not treat one literary genre as more serious or less fictional than others. She aims to bring out the ambiguous and transgressing nature of Plath’s writing; meanwhile, she reproaches persistent attempts among feminists to impose unity and a consistency of self. Those portrayed as opponents of Sylvia Plath and the stance taken by Jacqueline Rose herself, are not credited with much complexity, and their positions are pushed into a short-sighted extreme. The encounters between Plath and Hughes and Plath and her male critics are vested with farreaching sexual and political implications. Complying with feminist tradition, Rose detects a political core in most of what Sylvia Plath wrote, claiming that the first version of Plath’s journals intentionally had been edited to reduce this side of her. Without reservation or documentation, she states that ‘Plath was a pacifist’ (236), and she interprets ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ as a ‘political analysis of patriarchal power’ (141). Rose also argues that one effect of the erotic parts and descriptions of illness being cut from the journals was that we could not fully understand how much the poet had suffered. For Rose, the central issue in the debate about truth, facts, and the desecrated tombstone was Ted Hughes’s ownership of his wife. And at stake in this battle is ‘the issue of sexual difference and sexual politics’ (68). The defacement of the gravestone precisely contested Hughes’s pretension to speak for the facts, she believes. However, when Sylvia Plath committed suicide, her legal name was ‘factually’ Hughes.

Intertext and Leaking Palimpsest Crucial topics – aesthetic as well as sexual and cultural-political in scope (24) – are constantly on the line in the story Jacqueline Rose tells about Sylvia Plath and the public’s response to her. She claims the poet ‘is constituted as a literary object on the battleground of cultural survival’ (25) and made to symbolize ‘either the apotheosis or the apocalypse (or both together) of art’ (26), hence granting Plath with a social importance of the same scale as granted to exemplary figures in ancient history. Rose ultimately invests Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes with representative

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significance. People familiar with the controversies surrounding Sylvia Plath may therefore find the question she asks in her review of Birthday Letters contrived: ‘Why then does Hughes once again represent with such unremitting anger those who have responded to Plath’s writing, or who have been inspired by what she wrote to write words of their own?’ Rose gives a rather one-sided presentation of the conflicting parties here, asserting that ‘the continuing love of Sylvia Plath, by those who have only her words to go on’ was met by unjustified anger. She goes on to claim that Birthday Letters was used to caricature feminism (Rose 1998). However, Birthday Letters was also exploited by Hughes’s detractors when repeating old grievances. Newsweek reports Robin Morgan’s reaction to the publication as one of uncontrollable teeth grinding: ‘I want to make it clear that Hughes didn’t kill Sylvia, but that he drove her to suicide’, she elucidates (in Kroll 1998). The Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Massachusetts, recites Susan Van Dyne’s expectation that readers will not find ‘any truth’ in Hughes’s poems because they constitute a long-rehearsed script of the affair. The paper writes that Van Dyne, who teaches Plath at Smith College, looks up to the poet ‘as a sort of heroine’ (in Pfarrer 1998). Booklist quotes Marjorie Perloff’s question: ‘Why do all these people want to forgive Ted Hughes? He really did treat her terribly, and then made a lot of money out of it’ (in McQuade 1999, 1280). Rose herself was well received. Of all the ‘seminal’, ‘incisive’, ‘helpful’, ‘valuable’, ‘excellent’, ‘insightful’, and ‘informative’ studies that Claire Brennan analyzes in her Columbia critical guide to Sylvia Plath’s poetry (1999), The Haunting of Sylvia Plath is treated as the major contribution. Concerned with cultural phenomena, Rose articulates insights and preoccupations that are recurrent in the period, and she influenced feminist critics who followed in her wake. Elisabeth Bronfen, a key German gender theorist of the 1990s, describes Rose’s book as ‘the long-awaited critical response to the impasse of Sylvia Plath criticism’ (1998, 21) and as an ‘excellent psychoanalytic and deconstructive study’ (138). Rose’s approach resounds in Bronfen’s own account of ‘The Plath Myth’ and her short introduction to the poet. Referring to The Haunting of Sylvia Plath as a ‘landmark study’, Sarah Churchwell, who received her PhD from Princeton University in 1998, likewise discusses the different battlegrounds Plath has come to represent, such as the ‘struggle to control the body, both Plath’s dead body and the body of her text’ (1998, 104, 109; 2001). The ambiguity involved in these dynamics is reflected in Churchwell’s title, ‘Ted Hughes and the Corpus of Sylvia Plath’ (1998).

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Hughes, with his dispositions and editorial explanations, continued to receive attention. Birthday Letters offered new material to debate and reasons for seeing the relations between Plath and Hughes as an unfinished contest about the last and defining word. The effort to underscore an intertextual dialectic between husband and wife à la Rose has developed into a paradigm of its own. Once the original manuscripts and worksheets were made available, the evolution of Plath’s poems, the changes she made, and the paper she wrote upon have been studied intensely. Several scholars are particularly interested in the reverse side of her drafts. Sylvia Plath was an economical person and habitually made full use of every scrap of paper. Most of the Ariel poems are written on the back side of a draft version of The Bell Jar, and some on the back of poems penned by Ted Hughes. Among the first to study the manuscripts of the bee sequence, Susan Van Dyne in 1982 deems it unlikely that the poet, purely by chance, would begin drafting poems which ‘respond so immediately to the break-up of her marriage with Hughes on the reverse of the chapter that marks Esther Greenwood’s discovery of Buddy Willard’s deception’. Nor did Van Dyne think it a coincidence that Plath had been working on the reverse side of poems Hughes had written to celebrate Frieda’s birthday. Searching for an authentic and autonomous self, Plath, according to Van Dyne, needed ‘to re-examine her authority in producing babies and in producing poems. She also needed to sever her identification with Hughes as her alter ego and to will herself to survive the rupture’ (1982, 5). By describing the verso side of Plath’s worksheets, Van Dyne wants to restore an awareness which she thinks must have influenced the creative process. This case, moreover, provides a ‘literal realization’ of the palimpsestic nature of women’s writing that ‘Gilbert and Gubar have taught us to recognize’ (6). Continuing to retrace Plath’s history of reusing paper, Van Dyne next (1983) takes on the manuscripts of ‘Lady Lazarus’ before commenting (1988) on the interweaving of biography and textuality in the manuscripts of ‘Burning the Letters’. She points at ‘the phenomenon of the permeable page’ as a typical feature of Plath’s creative process, whereby Plath’s words reflect and refute those Hughes had written on the reverse side (1988, 254). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar did a bit of palimpsest speculation themselves. In volume one of No Man’s Land, published the same year as Van Dyne’s third article, they wonder about the association between Plath’s fox-haunted ‘Burning the Letters’ and Hughes’s ‘The Thought Fox’ considering that she had written her draft on the reverse side of his. Perhaps he both metonymically and metaphorically becomes a fox which is torn apart (1988, 222)? Jacqueline Rose, for her part, reckons this to be

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the most striking example of Plath responding to Hughes. Upon pairing ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ with those episodes from The Bell Jar which were drafted on reverse sides, she concludes: ‘It is impossible not to read some of this as leaking directly through the page’ (1991, 142). In a way so typical of a rhetoric of exemplarity, Rose blurs the relationship between dependent and independent statements. She turns the metaphor into reality, making as much as possible out of the context, and interprets as intentional what might just as well be merely coincidental. Lynda K. Bundtzen pursues several of the topics presented by Rose, Van Dyne, Churchwell, and others, exploring the dialectic relations of the writing, Hughes’s role as editor, and the multifaceted body/corpus of Sylvia Plath. In her preface to The Other Ariel (2001), Bundtzen accounts for problematic dealings with a censorious estate, although this time, since he was dead, Ted Hughes could not be made responsible. A visit to the Plath archive at Smith College figures prominently in her first chapter. Bundtzen, who confesses to feeling ‘haunted’ by the poet’s presence, notes how Plath’s textual body is entangled with that of Hughes, recycling his manuscripts, talking back, and ink leaking through and staining his work. Another book from the same year, Tracy Brain’s The Other Sylvia Plath, examines this phenomenon in a subchapter dramatically entitled ‘Bleeding Through the Page’. Difficulties with the estate and with what Christina Britzolakis calls ‘the metaphor of the unquiet grave’ have become intrinsic to the narrative. Dedicated commentators are quick to add their personal touches. Britzolakis introduces her book on Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (1999) by referring to a nightmare she had during the process of obtaining permission to quote from Plath’s work. She dreamt of stealing a box with the poet’s mortal remains and going into hiding. We then get an explanation of what this ‘almost too blatantly’ suggests: the extent to which Plath criticism is overshadowed by the poet’s suicide and by ethics concerning her posthumous legacy (1999, 1). Eighteen years after Plath’s Incarnations (1983), Lynda Bundtzen’s perspective is unwaveringly feminist. Her pursuit of male culpability results in a number of creative interpretations. She believes (2001, 8) that phrases in ‘Burning the Letters’, ‘Daddy’, and ‘Three Women’ allude to Hughes’s sometimes indecipherable handwriting, clotted with a thicket of curlicues, hooks, flourishes, and backward snarelike strokes that might literally tongue-tie a feminine voice, stuttering to assert itself in the presence of a stronger masculine one: ‘Ich, ich, ich, ich’. (‘Daddy’)

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In The Other Ariel, Bundtzen is not only concerned with the palpable friction between the ‘bodies’ of Plath and Hughes, but also with the correspondence between Aurelia Plath and Olwyn Hughes and the stories told by Aurelia’s ‘furious’ annotations on letters she had received (13). The archives and their contents have become increasingly important for Plath scholars. Without a visit there, ‘it would be impossible to comprehend just how prolific Plath’s output was’, according to Tracy Brain of Bath Spa University College (2001, 33). The physical state of her papers opens up for new kinds of questions and speculations. What should we make of Sylvia Plath’s tendency to cover every millimetre of paper when she was typing letters – perhaps an effort to shun both financial and ecological waste? And how should we read Aurelia Plath’s annotations? While in the archives, Brain, like Lynda Bundtzen, experiences ‘a strong sense of [Plath’s] physical presence’ (31). She records her reactions to making contact with the material residues left behind in various boxes: Plath’s hair, ‘still soft and silky’ (33), envelopes touched and presumably licked by the poet, a scarf she had presented to her mother. Hence, the title of Brain’s book, The Other Sylvia Plath, points in several directions and not only to the engaged environmentalist who had gone unremarked until the author situates Plath’s writing and how it ‘insists upon involvement’ within an ecofeminist framework (84).20 The poet’s concerns are apparently countless and up to date politically as well as theoretically. Everything in the archive becomes important just by being there – drawings, 118 paper dolls, 25 homemade cards. Each item is imbued with significance. Jacqueline Rose likewise deals with a collage Plath made in 1960, interpreting it as a multilayered image of feminism and of postmodern culture. Most of all, Rose prefers to see the collage as an example of how Plath works across psychic, political, and cultural boundaries without allowing opposing elements to completely lose their shape (1991, 9–10). Rose’s reading of the visual material supports her main thesis: that Sylvia Plath is an acute cultural analyst and a haunting ghost. Several of the mentioned archive items featured prominently in ‘Eye Rhymes: Visual Art and Manuscripts of Sylvia Plath’, an exhibition staged at Indiana University during the autumn of 2002 in connection with events commemorating Plath’s seventieth birthday. The exhibition focused on ‘the relationship between the artist’s two major disciplines’,21 presumably meaning Plath’s written and visual work. By placing her ‘visual art’, such as greeting cards, school projects, and cut-out dolls, on equal footing with her literary oeuvre, the mixed quality of the former could be said to undermine the quality of the latter. An even more unfriendly – but relevant – interpretation of the exhibition suggests that while alive, Sylvia Plath

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produced literature and after her death she produced memorabilia like any other saint or modern-day celebrity. Operating with a loose definition of both text and intertextuality, postmodern critics have been able to find whatever material they need within Sylvia Plath’s life, writing, and other work to prove whatever point they want to make or deconstruct. In her doctoral dissertation, From Victim of the ‘Feminine Mystique’ to Heroine of Feminist Deconstruction (2002), the Finnish scholar, Iris Lindahl-Raittila, discusses many of the intertextuality concepts that were applied by Jacqueline Rose and other contemporary Plath critics: intertextuality as dialogue between different genres of writing; as a cultural phenomenon read into Sylvia Plath herself; as interaction between Plath’s written texts and their edited versions; as influence from and protest against the male poetic canon; as Plath’s relations to female writers; as interplay between fiction, autobiography, and biography on Plath and authored by her. Biography itself is read ‘as intertext’, and intertextual relations are established between writing, culture, and life in general (Lindahl-Raittila 2002, 20–24). What is left, then, either inside or outside the archive that cannot be defined as text or intertext relevant for interpretation? Instead of text/intertext, one could choose to label everything as culture and analyze random photos of Sylvia Plath as intently as her meticulously worked out poems (cf. Helle 2007b). The notable preoccupation with archival matters marks, according to Anita Helle at Oregon State University, a second stage of debate around Plath’s canonicity, where the former stage consists of the scholarly and critical activity that followed in the wake of Collected Poems. The transition and re-grounding which she considers herself and her co-authors in The Unraveling Archive (2007) to be part of, Helle associates with ‘the turn toward historiographic textual and material research’ (2007a, 2).22 Keeping up with changing turns in criticism is not easy, and this turn seems to differ from the so-called historic(al) turn. Although Jacques Derrida appears to hover in her wings, and feminist and poststructuralist readings from the margins loom prominently together with advocacy of peripheral details, fragments, and the palimpsest as critical tools, Helle sees The Unraveling Archive as an invitation to dialogue across critical persuasions, theories, and languages of canonicity. Adopting a wider perspective on culture and signifying practices, ‘the myth of monolithic memory’ unravels, she observes in her introduction (7). Such a compound term as monolithic memory surely ought to be self-contradictory, even without the wide variety of archive concepts applied in this book. For those who now and then may get an overdose of Plath criticism, Helle offers a useful reminder. ‘Research on Plath is not conducted merely

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to produce new academic commodities – it is conducted out of love for her writing and a desire to do justice to the complexity of her art’ (11). Critics opting for a feminist approach have repeatedly returned to Plath’s writing as a way to explore representations of gender, sexuality, and female subjectivities. To such topics, and a variety of others accounted for above, The Other Sylvia Plath may in some respects function as a handbook. Tracy Brain argues that crucial elements in Plath’s writing have been missed because of critics’ fixation on her biography. One example that she points to is the poet’s ‘midatlanticism’ and her exploration of uncertain nationality. Straddled between England and America, Plath hosted ambivalent feelings towards both countries but refused to choose between them (2001, 46).23 Within a postmodern aesthetic, Brain calls for an awareness of the hermaphrodite tricks that Plath plays with gender as well as her awareness of hybridity and ambivalence, and the perpetual displacement in her work related to a larger crisis of identity. The emphasis in later years on performance and performativity in the construction of gender is more explicit in Deryn Rees-Jones’s Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets (2005). Rees-Jones draws on psychoanalysis and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) in her examination of Sylvia Plath’s search for a gendered writing self. She suggests that Plath resorts to the surreal and to dramatic dialogue as a strategy for resolving anxieties about her conflicting roles as a woman and a poet, and to quell her struggles with masculine and feminine identification – yet two topics that scholars repeatedly address from different perspectives. The readings Rees-Jones offers of canonical poems such as ‘The Colossus’, ‘Daddy’, and ‘Ariel’ demonstrate their great potential for interpretation. If we are to take seriously Alexander Gelley’s insistence that a rhetoric of example sets the stage for instances of judgment, and that to grasp the point at issue, readers must be able to weigh the probability of alternative cases and arguments (1995, 14). Indeed, we may come to find quite a few of these interpretations as rather fanciful. According to Tracy Brain’s essay in The Unraveling Archive, reading Plath involves a long-term relationship with her work, not least due to the many text versions that may be studied in the archives. Since Plath herself saw only The Colossus and The Bell Jar into print, the state of other manuscripts puts in doubt any notion of a finished object. Her indecision about which version she preferred lasted up to her death. This leads Brain to a line of argument somewhat related to Ted Hughes’s aforementioned reasoning in The Paris Review. Brain argues for ‘the indeterminacy of the Plath canon’ (2007, 21) and for treating even the restored Ariel edition .

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from 2004 as nothing more than ‘Plath’s latest draft’ (20). Thus, she recommends that scholars continue the poet’s own habit of always looking for new possibilities, ‘experimenting with different versions and orders and connections’ (35). Supposing the final form of any poem may be questioned, why not let readers come up with possible suggestions for changes they think would improve already printed editions? If, as a consequence of postmodernist textual criticism, there is no final text to which we can relate, only more or less well-argued, competing – and private – versions, then the public conversation about this threatens to collapse. It is the printed version that first and foremost offers itself to the reading public, and which has already produced a particularly rich reception history in the course of the five decades analyzed in this book.

CHAPTER FOUR BIOGRAPHERS

‘This is not a biography.’ The declaration that Jacqueline Rose delivers in her preface to The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, likewise constitutes the title of her 2002 article in London Review of Books. Since the article opens by asking ‘[h]ow not to write a biography of Sylvia Plath?’, one might suspect this to be a concession in the wake of previous card mixing (1991, xi; 2002, 12). But no. Once more we hear about the limitations of the Hugheses, who took everything in the worst, literal meaning, and the tendency of everybody else to read Plath’s work biographically. A kind of explanation offered for this inclination may be found in another one of Rose’s rhetorical statements: ‘Biography loves Sylvia Plath’. Along the lines of Martin Heidegger’s personification of language – ‘Die Sprache spricht, nicht der Mensch’ – Rose transforms a literary genre into an active agent. But it is the people and individuals who love biography, who read it and write it. Tim Kendall for one has demonstrated that of course it is possible to write A Critical Study (2001) of Plath without converting it into a biography. On the other hand, it is undoubtedly true that the interest in Plath’s life has been strong and consistent. And for this, publishers and biographers have loved Sylvia Plath. The shortness of her life and its violent end, the lack of long and uneventful periods that challenge the narration of so many biographies, the controversies surrounding her legacy, the added drama involving her similarly famous husband and their marriage, and the archives filled with a mixture of personal and professional materials, all make Plath an ideal biographical object. Needless to say, an additional contributing factor to this interest is the popularity of life writing generally, a popularity resulting from biographies supplying us with fascinating characters to identify with and the feeling we often get of actually knowing them. Biographies satisfy our appetite for human detail and historical facts about people, places, epochs, cultures, and societies. Hardly any genre is more dependent on a rhetoric of example, of portraying persons as incarnations of qualities and presenting the essence of a life with the help of illustrative examples. In Biography,

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the journal dedicated to genre-related scholarship, Peter Nagourney terms the use of anecdotal evidence to demonstrate both the unity we expect to find in a life and the change, development, and growth we also expect will take place as basic assumptions that writers, publishers, and readers share about literary biography (Nagourney 1978). The conviction that people reveal their true nature in particularly telling details and episodes is, however, not peculiar to literary biography or to Freudian doctrine. It has been integral to biography from the beginning. Describing the difference between historiography and life writing, Plutarch points at his own preoccupation with ‘the signs of the soul in men’ instead of with battles, armaments, or sieges of cities. He believes that a character is more likely to show itself in a jest or a phrase than in great contests. Devoted life readers like Montaigne and Virginia Woolf also swore by the telling detail.1 But what if the anecdotal evidence that biographers rely so heavily upon to persuade their readers is fabricated and/or based on far-fetched interpretations of people and incidents?

Edward Butscher and Method and Madness Late in the 1960s, Plath-worship was about to explode, and demand for biographic information was strong. Ted Hughes signed an agreement with a psychiatric social worker named Lois Ames and appointed her as his ‘official biographer’ in 1969. Hughes writes in a letter to Aurelia Plath that when Ames first approached him in 1965, he refused to oblige. He describes the idea of a full-scale, popular biography as ‘an awful constant turmoil’ and imagines that it must be even worse for Aurelia. Lois Ames knew Sylvia Plath from high school and Smith College and started piecing together a life on her own. The resulting ‘Notes toward a biography’ appeared in Tri-Quarterly in 1966 and was reprinted in The Art of Sylvia Plath (1970). Perhaps the essay made Hughes change his mind. Moreover, Charles Newman, the editor of both the journal and the book, recommended her cautious, thorough, and compassionate analysis, and her lack of academic pretension and gossipy aggressiveness (Hughes 2007, 252–56). Contracts with publishing houses in England and the US stipulated delivery of a book by 1975. According to Olwyn Hughes, her brother was to grant the authorized biographer exclusive assistance until December 1977, provide her with his own records and recollections, ask family and friends to do the same, and make Plath’s papers available to her.2 Lois Ames published only one other biographical sketch of Sylvia Plath, printed as an afterword to the American edition of The Bell Jar (1971). Several years passed before it became clear that no full biography

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from her hand would be forthcoming. Using the Ames contract as an alibi, the estate could in the meantime refuse similar cooperation when others came knocking. Unauthorized accounts emerged anyway, mediating views and information contrary to what the family appreciated. When Edward Butscher in 1972 approached Olwyn Hughes for assistance, he was not deterred by the estate’s exclusive obligations to Ames. At that time, there were no Sylvia Plath archives at Smith College or Indiana University libraries; no Letters Home, Journals of Sylvia Plath or Collected Poems existed. Still, after years of digging, Butscher presented a detailed life in Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (1976), based on more or less the same facts as succeeding biographies. A lot of what she confided to her journal or to her mother, Plath also disclosed to others, and often in different versions. Friends and acquaintances proved more than willing to share what they knew or thought they remembered. Several of Butscher’s sources contributed written memories to the collection of essays he edited the following year, Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (1977). In his introduction to the volume, Butscher accounts for his procedures, the kind of footprints citizens of the modern world leave behind, and all the public offices one may consult in the course of such investigations. The rhetorical function of ‘In search of Sylvia’ is foremost to enhance Butscher’s authority by underscoring his fundamental respect for facts and the troubles he had encountered while researching Plath’s life. Detailing his mental and geographical journeys, he gives the impression of not having spared himself in the quest for truth. Opinions voiced by ‘two of modern poetry’s finest critics, A. Alvarez and M.L. Rosenthal’, he calls ‘absurd’ (1977a, 28). Butscher considers his own conclusions not only better, but indeed brave, challenging, original, and trustworthy. However, for those who study Method and Madness more closely, reliability easily becomes a key issue. His publisher at Seabury Press in New York used the fact that Method and Madness was the first life of Sylvia Plath for all it was worth. The jacket labels it a ‘critical biography’, ‘ambitious’, ‘singularly perceptive’, and ‘thoroughly researched’, predicting that Butscher’s ‘detailed, probing analysis’ would ‘quickly establish itself as the definitive study of Plath’. Being a poet himself, he is deemed ‘uniquely qualified to explore the complex interfaces of Plath’s life and work’. Perhaps this qualification explains the somewhat high-flown, among-us-artists tone that he adopts in the preface. Butscher’s first collection of poems, announced on the flap, came out after the biography and was possibly part of a deal with Seabury. He has since published several poetry books and a life of Conrad Aiken.

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Method and Madness contains nothing about biographical theory or method. The main point of the preface is to classify Sylvia Plath as a bitch goddess, defined by Butscher as a discontented and fiercely ambitious woman whose brilliance is distorted in a society dominated by men. This perception of her personality re-echoes in his description of Plath as ruthless in her pursuit of success and calculating vis-à-vis other people. Her acting as the defiant queen bee when in the company of men also fits the portrait. He interprets her conduct as a rebellion against Aurelia Plath but explains her problems mainly as a result of unresolved feelings towards Otto Plath. Psychologizing assumptions presented as definite knowledge feature prominently in the way Butscher approaches his biographical subject. He claims that she felt rejected by her father and longed to ‘crawl back into her mother’s cave-safe womb’ (1976a, 67).3 Her mental condition is described with diagnostic terms like ‘narcissistic’, ‘lurking psychosis’, ‘splitting ego’ (67), ‘schizophrenia melancholia’ (114), and ‘multiple selves’ (125).4 While studying at Smith College, her split personality comprised ‘three Sylvias in constant struggle with one another for domination’: the hard-working, efficient student of middle-class Calvinist values, the admired and glamorous poet, and the destructive bitch goddess. There existed other, less domineering Sylvias in addition to these (67). Although he provides several examples of Sylvia Plath’s welldeveloped talent for making intrigue and for editing incidents after the fact, Butscher proves fundamentally uncritical to what she said and wrote. Presenting Plath as an acutely political person, he ends up drawing a picture of her which has a lot in common with that constructed by the same feminists he tried to distance himself from.5 The main culprit in Butscher’s narrative is no doubt Ted Hughes, with Aurelia Plath featured as a runner up. Biographical documentation is necessarily fashioned to support this casting, and his informers are conspicuously negative towards both of them. At one point, Butscher seems to admit this. He notes that Hughes, during the Cambridge year of their marriage, remains ‘a vague, perhaps distorted figure’ because the sources were hostile or did not know him personally and because Sylvia Plath herself delighted in ‘emphasizing his wilder, bohemian aspects’ (209). But this reservation does not result in any detached evaluation of the information he mediates. On the contrary, Butscher thinks the anecdotes give us insight into ‘Ted’s personality’ (210). In Method and Madness, Hughes is portrayed as a deserter. The biographer claims that at least on the surface, his defection looked like ‘another act in the conventional marital tragedy: the wife laboring selflessly

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to make her husband a success, only to have him abandon her when he has achieved it’ (325). This understanding of the case was consistent with Plath’s own version of the story. Butscher believes in sizing up people based on their social and economic background. He refers rather condescendingly to Aurelia Plath as the secretary who so willingly let herself be dominated by her professor husband. He knows all about old ‘Mrs. Hughes’ working-class mentality’ (280) and thinks this is the reason why she refused her daughter-in-law’s offers to help with household chores. But how certain is it that Edith Hughes thought of Sylvia as being too posh for such work? Could there be other explanations, such as guests being waited on, the kitchen perhaps being too small, the older woman protecting her turf, or wanting to keep some distance? In accordance with popular genre conventions, the biographer is literally on a first-name basis with his characters, sweeping over one after the other as if he had close and personal relationships with each of them. Butscher acts as an omniscient narrator possessing privileged information. He rarely gives any indication that his account of their thoughts and motives rests on assumptions. When Sylvia Plath at college rejects her more respectable, middle-class boyfriends, it was, as Butscher tells us, because they were ‘not Nazi enough’ for her (95). One of these, Mike Lotz, is made the object of a critical personality evaluation because of an alleged overachievement syndrome which ‘dominated everything he did’ (64–65). The biographer likewise appears to be well versed in ‘Ted’, who evidently was jealous of his wife’s growing fame – although at the time of her death, she was still quite unknown – and struggled long ‘to escape from the provincialism and humiliations of a working-class background’ (282). Other commentators and the poet himself have stressed the opposite, that Hughes was proud of his Yorkshire roots.6 Butscher relays gossip and prejudices without questioning the motives of his informers or the tenability of what Sylvia Plath reportedly told about her husband and in-laws following a break up to which she reacted strongly. According to one friend, she frequently accused Ted and Olwyn Hughes of ‘intellectual incest’ and left out the adjective when she was angry (254). The biographer operates with fictitious names for some people and places, thereby providing them with a rather ambiguous form of protection. Because the models for The Bell Jar’s unsympathetic Buddy Willard and his family are not mentioned by their factual name, the biographical core of the literary characters is accentuated. Chosen aliases and hostile characteristics reflect on the biographer, his informers, and

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their mutual need to speak up for the slighted wife at the expense of a deceitful husband and his mistress. To use ‘Olga’ as an alias for Ted Hughes’s other woman at first seems strange because the name evokes different associations from those conjured up by the name Assia Wevill. Moreover, Butscher portrays her as an outrageous character, ‘a person so vulgar in her sexuality’. Quoting witnesses who described her as ‘a very crude person visually’, ‘very physical’, and ‘very blatant’ (314; my italics), whose figure was ‘on the dumpy side and rested on “heavy legs and thick ankles”’ (315), readers might start formulating their own objections to the portrayal of her. What have Olga’s ankles got to do with the story of Sylvia Plath? Besides, in photos printed in A Lover of Unreason (2006), the biography of Assia Wevill by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, she looks strikingly beautiful. A reader might hesitate at Butscher’s grounds for passing judgments, whether disclosed in strange comments on ‘the unfortunate effect’ that Sylvia Plath’s hairdo supposedly had ‘of accenting her face’s German cast’ (103), or in his ethical and professional decisions. There are numerous additional examples other than Olga’s heavy legs. The following statement demonstrates the kind of rumours spread in Method and Madness – rumours based on a possible hint of something that might be remembered: ‘During our interview, Mr. Crockett mentioned a vague memory of Sylvia having suggested in a letter to him that Ted was a little too sexually aggressive for her’ (376). How does the content of this sentence add up with her earlier alleged love for Nazi types? How likely is it that she corresponded about such issues with her old teacher? Elizabeth and David Compton were among Butscher’s key sources. They became acquainted after the Hugheses moved to Devon, met them a few times, and took Plath’s side when the marriage broke down. She reported terrible things about her husband and dedicated The Bell Jar in their honour. Of Hughes’s story, the Comptons knew little. Without having been present, they all the same dwell on how Assia Wevill had pursued Hughes – blatantly so – in his own home. David Compton later regretted his outspokenness. Just as Butscher did not protect the people he portrayed against hostile and biased witnesses, neither did he protect his sources against themselves or give them any chance to influence how their information was put to use. Peter Davison, who had known Sylvia Plath relatively well, rejected the whole project: ‘How could one man get so many things so wrong?’ (in O. Hughes 1976, 42). Having read Method and Madness, David Compton sent a letter to Butscher expressing his distress. He particularly resented that only his most adverse comments about Aurelia Plath had been included – such as

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his belief that it must have been ‘hell to live with her, absolutely murder’ (305). The result as Compton saw it was a falsification of truth, ‘most certainly causing unjust and unnecessary hurt’ (in O. Hughes 1976, 42).7 One could, of course, say that Compton’s concern for the well-being of Mrs Plath came a bit late in the day. His pronouncements on Assia Wevill were of the same kind – easily uttered in a confidential and informal setting, impossible to withdraw once published in print. In his letter, Compton reminds Butscher that he at the time had warned him against his (by then ex-) wife’s tendency to colour her recollections with a vivid sense of the dramatic. If Butscher voices distrust, it is mainly at negative remarks about Sylvia Plath made by the sources of other writers and in memoirs written by persons he did not interview himself. It is as if he wants to ‘get’ at those who were ahead of him on memory lane, such as Elinor Klein. She had published ‘A Friend Recalls Sylvia Plath’ in Glamour, November 1966, a piece Butscher dismisses as ‘blatant hero worship’. In his version, Klein during her time at Smith College belonged to a group of ‘devoted drudges’ consisting of ‘less attractive girls’ who answered beck and call to their ideal in an effort to bask in her reflected glory (129). Strong Butscher ammunition is also fired against another fellow student, Nancy Hunter Steiner, whose ‘smug tone’ apparently ‘smacks of a cold cattiness that chills the reader with its dispassion’ (147). Despite noting that her observations about Plath’s attitude towards men were probably accurate, Butscher goes on to speculate how much Hunter Steiner was simultaneously projecting herself; for had not Sylvia written to a friend that Nancy was a ‘“user” of boys’ (372)? He questions Sylvia Plath’s claim of having been raped the summer she went to Harvard with Nancy Hunter Steiner, not because she quite willingly continued to see the alleged rapist, but because she ‘was not a virgin at the time, and not averse to sex’ (149). Nancy receives a smack on her fingers for similar reasons: ‘Although almost engaged to an Amherst student, Nancy was not averse to dating others’ (144). Butscher tracked down one of these men. In A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath (1974), Nancy Hunter Steiner describes an unforgettable twenty-first birthday celebration that Sylvia Plath had arranged for her, even providing her with a date. Some twenty years later, his failure to remember much of their evening together seems to prove for Butscher how unremarkable Hunter Steiner was, presumably both as a woman and a Plath commentator. When reviewers criticized his methods, calling him ‘a researcher researching into gossip’, Butscher through his counter-attack somehow

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illustrates what he was accused of. In The New York Review of Books, Karl Miller pronounced himself as sympathetic to Nancy Hunter Steiner’s ‘excellent memoir’, and he was not particularly impressed by all the sources Edward Butscher had interviewed: ‘What friends have to say won’t invariably be true or interesting’. Regardless of the gossip involved, Miller nevertheless thought it was worthwhile to read the testimonies of Cambridge dons Burton and Pitt because of the ‘farcical side’ that the misses inadvertently disclosed about the life at their esteemed university (1976a, 4). This remark provoked Butscher to load his guns when answering Miller. The two congenial English scholars – Burton and Pitt – represent in his account ‘the kind of cool female perceptiveness once celebrated by Agatha Christie’, and their judgments possess ‘an almost inhuman clarity that biographers tend to love – and vague reviewers detest’ (Butscher 1976b).8 Miller’s review was to Butscher not only vague, but ‘superficial’, ‘shabby’, ‘incompetent’, ‘droll’, ‘urbane’, ‘condescending’, and had an air of ‘snidely’, ‘languid sophistication’. Being cultivated by Butscher is, as Miller demonstrates in his reply, almost as dubious a pleasure as being lambasted by him, at least when one of his fine Cambridge scholars is recorded as having detected in Ted Hughes nothing else ‘than an uncouth, unlettered provincial, unfit for polite society’. Miller supposes that Butscher must have been highly addicted to belittling gossip in order to pass on opinions that did not make sense. Because the critique in Miller’s ‘Sylvia Plath’s Apotheosis’ was partly implied, Olwyn Hughes blamed him for harbouring covert hostility towards Ted Hughes. She classifies Butscher’s biography as a ‘patently rubbishy hotch-potch’ (1976, 42).9 The strong reactions from feuding parties proved Miller right in his misgivings about writing the commissioned review. In addition to Butscher’s biography, it covers Letters Home and Judith Kroll’s Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (1976), three books with a subject matter bound to produce abusive letters and phone calls, Miller believed. This did in fact happen. Referring to Olwyn Hughes’s letter, he predicts that ‘any biographer of Sylvia Plath will have trouble gathering evidence, and it makes richly intelligible Lois Ames’s reported failure to complete her authorized life’. Twenty years later, in ‘A Mug’s Game: Writing the First Life of Sylvia Plath’ (1996), Butscher comes through feeling just as wronged, piling up ironies concerning both critics, informants with cold feet, and subsequent Plath biographers. He verifies that Seabury’s eagerness to acquire Method and Madness involved accepting his first collection of poems before they had seen it. More clearly than what is evident from the biography, it

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appears that Butscher identified with his subject and thought they resembled each other in crucial ways. A sense of being persecuted and unjustly treated seems to prey on him. The same could be said for Sylvia Plath. According to Ted Hughes, the persistent accusation that the Plath estate actively attempted to suppress vital truths originates from Edward Butscher. Having resisted their long struggle to make Method and Madness less speculative and damaging for living people, Butscher published the book without obtaining permission to quote from Plath’s work, although he still complained that his freedom of speech had not been respected (Hughes 1989d). The book came out in a new edition in 2003.

Linda Wagner-Martin and Sylvia Plath Biography number two was released eleven years after the first. The manifest feminist attitude of Sylvia Plath: A Biography (1987) met with a positive response. Linda Wagner-Martin’s academic standing as a Professor of English, her long list of books about American writers, and her many poems published in an impressive number of journals and magazines, seemed to guarantee a more competent approach to the subject, compared to the one taken by Butscher. At the same time, her extensive publishing experience covering so many widely-discussed writers like Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, Dos Passos, and Denise Levertov, in addition to Sylvia Plath, might also cause hesitation about the depth and cogency of her analysis.10 The misgivings of sceptical readers are confirmed in the preface when they realize that the feminist arguments within this ‘outstanding’ biography (Wagner-Martin 1991, back cover) are based on shaky grounds. It is unclear how Wagner-Martin’s statement that Plath was ‘a feminist, in a broad sense of the term: she never undervalued herself or her work’ (1987, 11),11 tallies with all the self-reproach and doubt that Plath had towards her own talents, alongside high ambition and self-exaltation. Wagner-Martin underscores as something extraordinary and as a reflection of the breadth of her feminism, that Plath ‘sought out women as friends and mentors and long admired the writing of Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Sexton’ (12). By repeatedly calling attention to what could be seen as something quite ordinary, the reader might instead be struck by Plath’s lack of interest in and familiarity with her own gender and how unnatural female companionship must have been to her. Why should she not have women as

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friends? Why should she not like women poets? The biographer conveniently leaves out all her male mentors, among whom Hughes perhaps was the most influential. And she seems to know for a fact that when his friends in Cambridge were critical of Plath’s poems, they acted out of ‘[m]ale jealousy’ (132).12 Her manner of writing likewise undermines the book’s academic credibility. An incoherent presentation tends to make information disappear unnoticeably. Threads remain loose and episodes unclosed. Wagner-Martin writes in a cliché-ridden style that it is difficult not to ironize, such as when she claims that the reserved Otto Plath ‘loved his daughter deeply and insisted she be treated as a unique personality’ (15), while Aurelia Plath’s ‘eager manner complemented an obvious intelligence’ (19). No wonder then that Sylvia’s ‘mind was as active as her body’ (16) or that ‘[h]er dark eyes sparkled’. She was already ‘the curious, daring Sylvia she would be later in her life’ (17). ‘Her father’s death may have struck like a hurricane, but the efforts of her extended family helped her rebuild her young, promising life’ (30). Hating the cold, she ‘responded honestly to weather’, ‘opening out into the sunlight’ (35). The banalities are not merely of a linguistic kind. Sylvia Plath: A Biography clearly demonstrates the close connection between form and content in a literary text, how the quality of the expression is linked to the level of perception and reflection. After having followed her object through thick and thin, the biographer finally concludes that in the three years between signing the contract for her first book and committing suicide, ‘Sylvia had learned a great deal’ (243). Several things about the book and its heroine may confirm notions of what is ‘typical American’. Linda Wagner-Martin appears just as fixated on grades and ranking as her main character. Not only do we get details of Sylvia Plath’s big and small triumphs, even the school results of her mother and grandparents are specified. In the description of friends and lovers, their academic standing is routinely given: Mike Lotz was number one in his class at Yale, Perry Norton number two. Other running concerns for Wagner-Martin are Plath’s money worries, illness, and mood swings. The amount of repetition and examples of extreme temperament, of what one witness experienced as relentless aggression – rewritten by the biographer as ‘impolite behavior’ (174) – leave the impression of a person who would have been difficult to live with. Thus, Ted Hughes may receive greater sympathy than Wagner-Martin had bargained for. But he still gets most of the blame for breaking up the marriage. All Wagner-Martin’s sources, both oral and written ones, take Sylvia Plath’s side. The result is the same kind of partial and biased account that

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one finds in Method and Madness.13 We hear how terrible Plath thinks Hughes is during and after the autumn of 1962, but little is said of the contact they actually had (cf. Stevenson 1989a, 279). As a consequence, it seems strange when Wagner-Martin in passing mentions that he liked her new poems. Obviously then, she had shown them to him and was interested in his opinion. Stranger still, it appears that the hated and despicable Assia Wevill had offered to lend Plath furniture, which she accepted, for the apartment in London. Incongruities and oddities flourish. On behalf of mother and children, the biographer laments that few people cared enough to invite them to Christmas celebrations, and then en passant on the following page, we hear that Plath bought dressy clothes ‘and spent Christmas with some friends’ (232). As a biographer, Linda WagnerMartin resembles Edward Butscher insofar as being generally uncritical of informants. She claims that when the marriage started to collapse, Sylvia Plath ‘didn’t show her true emotional state to anyone except Elizabeth Compton’ (209). On what ground is this claim made and by whom – the biographer or her source? Nonetheless, Sylvia Plath: A Biography provides new factual knowledge and details for the reconstruction of Plath’s life, such as the information that she may have been disposed to a hereditary depressive illness. After her daughter’s breakdown in 1953, Aurelia Plath learned from her sisterin-law that women in the Plath family had histories of depression. Mrs Plath chose to keep this to herself (110).14 Wagner-Martin explains that in her work on the biography, she had taken advantage of all available material, including private papers belonging to friends and interviews with or help from more than two-hundred persons (13).15 Similar to subsequent biographers, she also had access to the Plath archives at Smith College and Indiana University. Compared to Butscher, she retained the added advantage of working at a time when nearly all of Plath’s writing had been published. The book received mixed attention. Although Linda Wagner-Martin’s work was not recognized as the authoritative life on Plath, stories about her dealings with the estate triggered goodwill. The publisher marketed Sylvia Plath as a ‘controversial biography, written despite the wishes of Ted Hughes’ (1991, back cover).16 In her preface to the American edition, Wagner-Martin accounts for a long correspondence with the estate. Olwyn Hughes had been helpful at the beginning but became increasingly critical, while Ted Hughes responded to a reading of the manuscript in draft form in 1986 with suggestions for changes that filled fifteen pages and would have meant a deletion of more than 15,000 words. (1987)

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Wagner-Martin made many modifications in order to secure permission to quote at length from Plath’s work. However, when the requests for changes kept coming, she claims to have realized that such permission depended on complete surrender. As a result, Wagner-Martin decided to limit the amount of quotations. ‘The alternative would have been to agree to suggestions that would have changed the point of view of this book appreciably’ (14). Reviewers who had weighty objections to the book still sympathized with the biographer. Mark Ford in The Times Literary Supplement had the impression that she was forced to discard ‘large chunks’ of her book ‘to avoid court action’ (1988). Despite Wagner-Martin’s prose, which he thought ‘shoddy and execrably dull’, and her ‘nauseously sentimental’ vision of Plath, he still seems to believe in her portrait of Hughes and deems it understandable that ‘Plath, naturally, was jealous’. In a long article in The Independent on 12 March 1988, Ian Thomson reports on ‘the continuing battles’ between Plath’s executors and her biographers. To his many examples of improper interference on the part of the estate, Olwyn Hughes retorted that she had responded to draft after revised draft ‘of leaden prose’ from Wagner-Martin full of invention and inaccuracies. She found the biographer’s ‘unscholarly methods shocking’, but the cutting had not been done by her, Olwyn (1988a). Nor did she let other allegations go unchallenged. She opens a letter to The Times Literary Supplement by claiming that ‘extreme feminists’ had been especially active in keeping alive the myth of Sylvia Plath. The same group was probably also behind a fast growing and equally unpleasant myth about the estate. She categorically rejects the idea that Wagner-Martin’s deletions resulted from threats of prosecution. Her publisher had, however, acted on mistakes and unsubstantiated gossip demonstrated by the estate. But many mistakes still remained, and Olwyn Hughes generally questions the standard of research within the biographical genre: The most outlandish speculations are presented as facts. Such information as is available is ‘shaped’ according to the author’s ‘point of view’ (in Wagner-Martin’s case this was crudely feminist, a bent much more in evidence in the fictions she was obliged to cut than in her final book). (1988b)

Wagner-Martin’s two closing paragraphs of the preface, in which she writes about her relations with the estate, are left out of the British edition (1988) – perhaps to avoid provoking overseas readers or the estate, or having her allegations scrutinized.

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Ted Hughes in The Observer offered his version of their negotiations. Having been prosecuted for damages of six million dollars because of material published in Method and Madness while Edward Butscher himself went free (see Chapter One, 27–28), Hughes states that he was alerted when Linda Wagner-Martin arrived on the scene. He agreed to check the chapters covering his marriage to Sylvia Plath and returned ‘several pages of factual corrections’. To his surprise, she rejected them, explaining that adopting my facts would have meant scrapping 20,000 words of her thesis. Whereupon she followed Butscher’s precedent and defied copyright laws. Her book is now received as a standard work on its subject. (Hughes 1989d)17

The condemnation of the Hugheses did not cease. Too many had their own tales to tell or had heard of others. Rumours said that even Anne Stevenson, Olwyn Hughes’s hand-picked biographer, had problems with the collaboration. Would Stevenson ever produce a book, or would she suffer the same fate as Lois Ames and supposedly numerous others? According to declarations she gave later, it was touch and go. The reception and publication story of Bitter Fame highlights complicated issues concerning the biographical genre and conflicting interests of the involved parties. In the debate that resulted from Wagner-Martin’s book, Stevenson expressed her sympathy for anyone who set out to write a life of Sylvia Plath. Were it not for the estate, her own contribution would already have been in bookshops (in Thomson 1988). Her role as an authorized biographer had been difficult, Stevenson maintains in a letter to The Independent, because she had ‘tried to respect both Plath and the witnesses, and to make objective judgements’ (1988).

Anne Stevenson and Bitter Fame The attitude of Anne Stevenson was from the start more reserved and less sensation oriented than others who occupied themselves with the life of Sylvia Plath. Most likely, this was also the reason why Olwyn Hughes became interested in hiring her. In an article from 1975, ‘Is the Emperor of Ice Cream Wearing Clothes?’, Stevenson criticized what she saw as the poetical legacy of Plath: self-centred and obsessively personal poems about guilt, despair, and breakdown kept at a constant shrill pitch. She furthermore argued that the poems were written in an extreme, singletoned, single-minded, and highly charged metaphoric language of outrage. The style was particularly popular among women, and Stevenson feared that American poetry would need a long time to free itself from the

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influence of the dead. Anne Sexton was another exponent of the genre. She committed suicide in 1974, eleven years after Plath. Contact with Olwyn Hughes was established when Stevenson was working on an introduction to Sylvia Plath for a Penguin series about modern women, commissioned by Emma Tennant. The same Emma Tennant later revealed her 1970s affair with Ted Hughes in Burnt Diaries (1999) and published a novel entitled Sylvia and Ted (2001). If we are to believe what Stevenson told Janet Malcolm, Olwyn Hughes thought that she – Anne – had misconceived almost everything but liked her cool style and proposed the following: Should Anne Stevenson withdraw her short study and expand it into a proper biography, she – Olwyn – would negotiate publishing contracts and large advances in England and America and also make certain that friends, who out of loyalty to Ted Hughes had kept silent all these years, would contribute.18 To Anne Stevenson, the offer was tempting for several reasons. She believed herself to be well qualified for the job and knew the relevant circles from the inside. In spite of her reservations to Plath’s way of writing, she pointed at affinities between them, comparing herself in ‘Writing as a Woman’ (1979) to Esther Greenwood. Similar to Plath, Stevenson was born of German-American parents and bred on east-coast puritanism. Their fathers were both university professors. The daughters went through the same kind of schools and started their university educations at the same time. They married English, had children, and found it hard to settle in their new country. Stevenson was periodically a heavy drinker and suffered several break ups.19 With time, she became an esteemed poet and lecturer at universities in Britain. The economic prospects were seductive in themselves, especially for a poet used to comparably low sales figures. Stevenson accepted the offer without realizing that it did not include the participation of Ted Hughes. As was usual for him, he kept his distance, and so did his children. Consequently, the biographer interacted more with Olwyn, who proved relentless in her eagerness to help. She allowed Stevenson to use her large Sylvia Plath library. She interviewed sources, offered her own reminiscences, analysed poems, and commented on drafts (Malcolm 1993, 111–12). Her fierce commitment as administrator of the estate and sister to Ted should probably be seen in light of their ongoing correspondence with Linda Wagner-Martin and a pressing need for a ‘correct’ account.20 After Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath had been published and the biographer accused of collaborating with the estate, Anne Stevenson tried to justify herself. To journalists and in lectures, she spoke about the pressure she had been under. Olwyn Hughes did not tolerate Stevenson’s

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own character assessments and interpretations. When she had qualms about publishing the compromised text under her own name, Olwyn refused to sign on as co-author. The project was only saved when both parties agreed to let the American editor, Peter Davison of Houghton Mifflin, decide the content of the final version. Davison was an experienced publisher and prize-winning poet who in addition had a short relationship with Sylvia Plath to show for himself. The difficulties he had when trying to balance the needs and feelings of the involved are evident from the collection of papers donated to Smith College by Houghton Mifflin Company.21 Bitter Fame finally saw the light of day in the autumn of 1989. It contained an author’s note in which Stevenson states that all the help she had received from Olwyn Hughes made the book ‘almost a work of dual authorship’. It also contained memoirs by Lucas Myers, Dido Merwin, and Richard Murphy. Printed as appendices, their contributions highlighted differences between Stevenson’s book and previous publications on Plath. Memoirs of her had so far been published separately or in collections of essays like the ones edited by Edward Butscher (1977), Paul Alexander (1985), and Linda Wagner-Martin (1988). Now, witness accounts siding with Hughes were offered in a biography about his wife. The first reviews by authorities like John Updike, Blake Morrison, and W.S. Merwin were positive, although Merwin could be seen as partial. Having been a friend of the Hugheses and married to Dido Merwin, he figures as a character in the text. Anne Stevenson was praised for her insight and for delivering a cool, intelligent, and balanced biography – by far the best of Plath in existence. But that was before Al Alvarez published his review, ‘A Poet and Her Myths’, in The New York Review of Books, on 28 September 1989. Alvarez denounced Anne Stevenson as an author of ‘more than 350 pages of disparagement’ and hinted that her work resulted from a minor poet’s jealousy (1989a, 36) – a cue taken up by several commentators. Hence, in her review for The Times Literary Supplement, Diane Middlebrook (1989) defines Stevenson as ‘a little sister in poetry’ and describes the enclosed memoirs as a reading that ‘leaves an aftertaste of shame’. But she credits the book with a ‘great distinction’: Stevenson’s vision of Plath’s development as an artist. Elizabeth (Compton) Sigmund (1989) thought Bitter Fame to be a ‘pathetically envious and cruel book ... motivated in part by envy for Plath’s superior poetic talent’. The allegation resurfaced when Stevenson in 1990 published a new book of poetry. According to Clair Wills (1990), reviewing The Other House for The Times Literary Supplement, the texts dedicated to Sylvia Plath reveal Stevenson’s ‘envy

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of Plath’s fame in a most disturbing way’. Wills describes her poems as bad, nauseating, and monotonous, constituting ‘an uncomfortable mixture of everyday pleasantries and envious bitterness’. Interviewed by Janet Malcolm for The New Yorker, Alvarez repeats his accusation against Stevenson’s supposed minor poet envy towards a major poet, and prides himself with having had a decisive role in the massive discrediting of Bitter Fame and for disclosing a strong element of ‘female bitchiness’ (in Malcolm 1993, 125). Bitch/bitchiness – habitually in combination with jealousy – is obviously a handy epithet for men to use on women, first Butscher on Plath, then Alvarez on Stevenson. Whether such labels stick is not only a question of applicability based on sources and documentation, but also of authority and cultural capital on the part of the definer, the vulnerability of the defined, and existing usage connected with gender, ethnicity, age, religion, and other primary identities. Alvarez insists in his review that Bitter Fame demonstrates in detail how ‘both living and dead, Plath had a great deal more to fear from her own sex than from any man’ (1989a, 36). However, considering what Alvarez ostensibly said to Malcolm about Plath and others, we may conclude that the spitefulness he believed to have detected is not exclusive to the female gender. In ‘A Poet and Her Myths’, Alvarez reiterates his by then well-known thoughts on Sylvia Plath, how she followed the logic of her main subject – death – to its desolate end and turned everyday trivialities into poetic gold. He quotes from Linda Wagner-Martin’s preface on her dealings with the estate, commending her perseverance. She is systematically referred to as ‘professor’, and her book is described as ‘a mildly feminist but otherwise careful and evenhanded account of the life’. Anne Stevenson, on the other hand, gets no sympathy from Alvarez. The proofs he received to review had contained an author’s note in which the biographer tried to distance herself from Olwyn Hughes more than Olwyn was willing to accept in the published version. Stevenson’s manoeuvre did not soften Alvarez one bit. On the contrary, he lumps the two women together with a common purpose to ‘correct the nice girl image projected in Letters Home and to present Plath as the engineer of her own destruction’ (34). Providing several examples of acidic and downgrading comments, Alvarez claims that throughout their book, she is portrayed as a profoundly disturbed person, unsympathetic and egotistic, her sickness increasing exponentially over the years. But in terms of venom, Dido Merwin surpassed the two vengeful ladies, and he thought it utterly tasteless that her memoir was printed in a biography commissioned and approved by the Plath estate.

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Olwyn Hughes was compelled to explain in a letter that she and not the estate was behind the commissioning. Alvarez evidently assumed that the agent of a bestselling author would want a biography portraying its subject in a good light, whereas she for her part firmly believed that ‘the light of truth’ would ‘throw a clearer beam on any real quest to understand Sylvia Plath’. Besides, Dido Merwin and the other main contributors to Bitter Fame had known Plath a lot better than Alvarez had, according to Olwyn Hughes (1989a).22 She publicly defended Anne Stevenson and her ‘marvellous book’ (1989c), but later declared to Janet Malcolm – and thereby to readers of The New Yorker – that choosing Stevenson had been a mistake on which she had wasted a year of her life. Stevenson is referred to as a non-intellectual who ‘never quite grasped Sylvia’s nature’, who put too much store in the poet’s emotions, and who ‘left all the interesting things out and put the dull things in’ (in Malcolm 1993, 102). At Smith College, we can find similar views expressed in Olwyn Hughes’s letters to Peter Davison and ironic annotations of an essay by Stevenson printed in Poetry Review 78 (1988/89). Janet Malcolm volunteers that she herself became captivated by the whole story because of the controversy that Bitter Fame provoked. A contemporary of Anne Stevenson, she had followed her career at a distance and claimed to sympathize with her troubles. However, everybody Malcolm contacted seems to have been overwhelmed by her sympathetic attitude, opening up as they would to a psychologist or a close friend in the hope of finally getting their side of the story through to the world.23 As it turned out, Edward Butscher, Al Alvarez, Olwyn Hughes, Anne Stevenson, and several others all found themselves shaped to fit the journalist’s personal account of the battle over Sylvia Plath’s posthumous name. ‘Annals of Biography: The Silent Woman’ appeared in The New Yorker in August of 1993 and was published as a book the following year. Stevenson unburdened herself to Malcolm about the strained relations with Olwyn Hughes, of whom she draws an unflattering portrait. She quotes from letters they exchanged, full of accusations and defensive arguments. Malcolm was also allowed to read a letter Ted Hughes had sent her in November 1989, after Stevenson reproached him for having dissociated himself publicly from Bitter Fame. Responding to one of many claims made by Ronald Hayman in the debate over Sylvia Plath’s grave (see Chapter One, 23–25), Hughes had declared it ‘simply another “biography”’ and not an authorized life that he could condone. In The Independent, on 22 April 1989, Hughes states that he had not objected to Stevenson writing the biography, but he had also explained that he was not going to contribute beyond checking facts produced by others. Several

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months later, accounting in The Observer for his contact with Stevenson’s predecessors, he once again underscores his limited involvement in Bitter Fame. After supplying a few details about a camping trip, he had urged her to stick to observed facts, to cut what he considered to be inaccurate, and to make it clear whenever she expressed her own opinions. If Stevenson complied with his advice, this did not mean that he approved of the book (1989d).24 In his letter to Stevenson, Hughes elaborates on the reason he had ended up ‘serving two masters’. Even though he by necessity had to accept the existence of a veritable Sylvia Plath industry and that easy money was to be made on her name, he did not welcome it with open arms. Neither had he written off his right now and again to defend himself and his family against what was published. Hughes felt his right to self-protection also encompassed material submitted by people who wanted to help him, particularly because he as a result of their actions was accused of asking others to talk ill of his wife in order to avoid doing so himself. He professes to have understood from day one that he was the only person who could not give an account of Sylvia Plath. All those who needed to find him guilty would simply not believe him. What he wanted was ‘to recapture for myself, if I can, the privacy of my own feelings and conclusions about Sylvia, and to remove them from contamination by anybody else’s’. His sister’s involvement had only made the matter more complicated. ‘[T]he moment you agreed to work with Olwyn you put me in this quandary of finding a way, any way, of dealing with this bizarre new twist in the situation’ (in Malcolm 1993, 133). Anne Stevenson could likewise be said to have gambled on two horses. The effort to detach herself from Olwyn Hughes, however, had the opposite effect. When Stevenson denied that she had written a malicious portrait, maintaining that she only made ‘gentle fun of Plath’s youthful absurdities’, and sympathetically at that, Alvarez (1989b) countered that it was hard to imagine her quite as tone-deaf to her own prose as she appeared to be. Perhaps she was just unaware of how strong an effect all the side comments and ironic remarks had when added up. The explanation for this ‘tone-deafness’ could be Stevenson’s feeling of kinship with Plath in spite of their many differences. Her expressed intention with Bitter Fame was to reveal in plain language a Sylvia Plath many of her friends attest to recognizing: a protected, middle-class, American girl of the 1950s, spoiled at home and at school because of her intelligence, exceptional industry and anxiousness to please. (Stevenson 1989b)

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The heady idealism, vanity, ambition, competitiveness, and underlying self-alienation so typical in Plath’s letters and journals, were also attitudes that Stevenson and numerous other contemporaries had unconsciously adopted but later grew out of, she observes. Similar to what is often the case, then, a personal project of the biographer may be found intertwined with the announced life story in Bitter Fame. When the biographer makes fun of her object, she at the same time makes fun of what she herself was like and settles scores with the rapacious self-centredness of a generation to which they both belonged. However, this was not equally evident for the readers. As the ambivalent jesting stands, Stevenson could be seen as removing herself from the very traits and experiences she admitted to sharing with Sylvia Plath. Jacqueline Rose for one reacted to what she called a ‘self-complacent, and terrifying, normality from which Stevenson claims to speak (and write)’ (1991, 98). The controversy surrounding Bitter Fame was just as much a result of the many sore toes it caused. The attacks on Stevenson’s life and poems about Plath could be interpreted as proof thereof. Al Alvarez may have felt particularly stepped on. He was, after all, the one who practically discovered Plath and created the image of her as a sensitive and suffering genius for which a cold society had no room. Faced with the brutality of existence, she had chosen to commit suicide but continued to live in her poems, according to his version of the story. Thus, it is understandable that Alvarez reacted to the launching of an alternative explanation when Anne Stevenson points at Sylvia Plath’s inability to make vital and continuous adjustments to other people, which survival in any culture and at any time depends on (1989b). Alvarez had not only Plath’s reputation to defend, but also his own reputation as her prime interpreter, in addition to defending the romantic concepts of poets as prophets and individualism personified. His Bitter Fame massacre may moreover be interpreted as a delayed response to the author of ‘Is the Emperor of Ice Cream Wearing Clothes?’. Although Stevenson did not mention any names in this piece, there can be no doubt about the addressee for her critique of a widespread tendency at the time to equate life with art. Stating the obvious, that ‘Art is not life’, she thought it criminal to argue that ‘self-inflicted death is a logical climax for a poet who wants to prove the authenticity of his or her “murderous art”’ (1975, 45). Alvarez was precisely the one who had used this expression – ‘Poetry of this order is a murderous art’ – as a stamp of quality on Plath’s poetry shortly after she died.25

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His review of Bitter Fame was consequently an opportunity for Alvarez to set things straight. And in that respect he was undoubtedly successful. Discussing ‘The problem of biography’ in 2006, Susan Van Dyne in The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath appears as critical of Stevenson as Alvarez had been, targeting the biographer’s inclusion of memoirs by ‘peripheral’ and ‘unreliable’ sources (2006, 10). In the same text, Wagner-Martin receives commendation from Van Dyne for having delivered ‘a responsible, temporate account’ (8), and Butscher is to some extent rehabilitated.26 But perhaps the assessments just follow the old pattern of taking sides. Around the same time, Roger Caldwell (2006) claims in a review of Anne Stevenson’s Poems 1955–2005 that the fuss stirred up by Bitter Fame repressed the fact that it ‘remains by far the best biography of Plath’. Saddest of all for him, it deflected attention from ‘Stevenson’s own considerable merits as a poet’. Caldwell sees her as nothing less than ‘one of the finest poets writing in English today’.

Biographical Dialectic Anne Stevenson has no reference to Linda Wagner-Martin in her biography, perhaps because they both were working on their projects at the same time. Published about two years later, Bitter Fame may nevertheless be read as a ‘reply’ to Sylvia Plath, just as Ronald Hayman and Paul Alexander more or less directly comment on Stevenson. A comparison between the biographies is therefore relevant. Differences can be found in their presentation of characters and use of exemplary episodes, their attitude to sources and to information which may be defined as private or sensational. Reviewers who accused Stevenson of being biased – that is pro Hughes, contra Plath – had not reacted against Wagner-Martin’s one-sided use of sources. Biographies written about Sylvia Plath during her family’s lifetime had to take the vulnerability of the living into consideration, even at the cost of completeness, Stevenson declares in the preface to Bitter Fame. In her opinion, earlier accounts suffer from an inadequate and incorrect presentation of Plath’s life with Hughes. A lot of the new material which she had access to was likely to surprise those who had condoned the prevailing perception of Plath. We get the impression that the witness reports by Lucas Myers, Dido Merwin, and Richard Murphy – ‘invaluable for the light they throw on Sylvia Plath’s mature years’ (Stevenson 1989a, xii)27 – to a large extent are included for the sake of balance. Nearly a decade on, Anne Stevenson describes Bitter Fame as ‘a biography written around a gap’. Notwithstanding the impressive amount of reportage accumulated after her death, first-hand evidence from those

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who had been closest to Plath was ‘oddly scarce’, and Hughes’s version of the story remained untold until Birthday Letters. Using his poems as supportive evidence, she believes they attest to the credibility of Bitter Fame. In a new preface to the second edition, Stevenson hopes her book may function as a guide and commentary to both Plath’s Collected Poems and Hughes’s Birthday Letters, providing the context for a better understanding of the poems (1998, viii–xii). Bitter Fame does not subscribe to the image of Sylvia Plath as a devoted feminist; comparing her contribution to the feminist movement with that of Adrienne Rich is ‘to misunderstand Plath with a degree of perversity equal to her own’ (1989a, xiii). While Wagner-Martin highlights the poet’s friendship with women, Stevenson writes about Plath’s difficult relations with her own gender and how she nurtured jealousy and contempt for women she met. Furthermore, Stevenson is critical towards sources on which Wagner-Martin builds her story, pointing at mistakes in Elizabeth Compton’s account. She claims that Compton only met Plath on a few occasions. At the same time, there are grounds for being sceptical towards some of the witnesses Stevenson relied on, such as the slighted lover Peter Davison. Feeling ‘used’ and ‘despised’ he might have wanted to hit back (62). Since the very same Davison was responsible for the American edition of Bitter Fame and acted as a mediator between Anne Stevenson and Olwyn Hughes, his chances of getting through with his views must have been good.28 Because the biographical data used in each of the projects vary somewhat, the focus of the lives also differ. Ted Hughes plays a more prominent role in Bitter Fame, and Aurelia Plath is portrayed with greater understanding when compared to how she is presented in Wagner-Martin’s Sylvia Plath or Butscher’s Method and Madness. Differences in style and approaches manifest themselves in several ways. Wagner-Martin confines herself to mentioning or generically typifying the writings of young Sylvia. Stevenson sees these early texts as proof of how the aspiring author was clearly ‘addicted already to the sugary adjectives of advertising, where calendar-pad prose was a prerequisite for success’. The magazines she wrote for were ‘slicks’ (20). While Wagner-Martin’s biography shows a tendency to get lost in trifles, Bitter Fame contains less detail from Plath’s everyday life. Stevenson may on the other hand be criticized for not offering enough examples and qualifying statements about Plath’s personality. The poet’s self-centredness is stated outright, as is her deception ‘into believing she was super-normal’ (15). Behavioural patterns are signalled by expressions like ‘as always’, ‘as expected’, and ‘of course’. For readers, it is confusing when the biographers show radically different

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understandings of what happened during the newly-weds’ stay in Benidorm in the summer of 1956. Based on her letters home, Wagner-Martin claims that Sylvia ‘loved’ almost everything about Spain and its people (134), whereas Stevenson’s reading of the journals leads her to believe that Sylvia was indeed fascinated, but she ‘could not like Spain’ and described the Spaniards as ‘piggy’ (93). In Bitter Fame, marital rows during the honeymoon are explained by Plath’s unaccountable and uncontrollable mood swings, which Hughes learned to live with. Drawing on Plath’s journal, Sylvia Plath in contrast offers more of a feminist interpretation: Sylvia reacted to expectations that she was supposed to keep house under primitive conditions. Wagner-Martin as well resorts to psychological speculations, but they take another direction than the ones in Bitter Fame. Disappointment that marriage was not a constant bliss might have awakened memories of her father, thereby strengthening the negative feelings, Wagner-Martin suggests. Stevenson for her part reads the journals as melodramatic playacting. Confronting the relevant entries with information from Olwyn Hughes and – at least indirectly – Ted Hughes, she quotes (92) from his poem ‘You Hated Spain’, which was written several years later. As a biographer, Stevenson consistently defuses Plath’s description of people and situations, believing that the poet was exaggerating and letting the drama of her interior colour the account she gives of what happened. Other commentators interpret these accounts quite literally. If this comparison of the material pertaining to Spain is extended to include the remaining Plath biographies, other differences unfold in the biographers’ rhetoric of example, their perspectives, and techniques. Edward Butscher sticks to ‘appearances’ and assumes the honeymoon to have been ‘a great success’ (191). The two biographies following Bitter Fame did not adopt Stevenson’s perspective, although Ronald Hayman intimates that Hughes was not solely to blame for possible clouds on the newly-weds’ horizon. Quoting from Sylvia Plath’s journals, Hayman notes that ‘endlessly interested in her own inner life, she seems to have been uncurious about his’ (1991, 91).29 As the only one to do so among the biographers studied here, Paul Alexander parades ‘a confidential source’ (1991, 375).30 He or she remains anonymous but is described as ‘a close friend’ to whom Sylvia Plath evidently confided years later – ‘[when] her marriage to Ted was under enormous stress’ (194) – about a frightening episode in Benidorm during which Ted Hughes nearly strangled her. She then wondered as to the wisdom of their marriage, Alexander informs us before adding: ‘Whatever the case, whatever happened on the hillside in Benidorm, Sylvia did nothing’. Here, Alexander apparently does not take sides, and by using

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expressions like ‘in Sylvia’s account’, he seems to keep his distance. But it is merely a rhetorical position, because when referring to the incident a few lines below, he has no reservations: Sitting on the bus [leaving Benidorm], Sylvia thought back over the past two months. In many ways, her honeymoon had been joyous and intellectually fulfilling ... but it also contained the choking incident. She herself had described Ted as a ‘breaker of things and people.’ But the scene on the hill scared her. Sylvia had known Ted barely three and a half months when she married him; seven months ago, they had not even met. Had she chosen a man who was too much for her? Should she tell someone about the assault? Was Mrs. Prouty right? (194)

Alexander’s method is intricate. What Sylvia Plath supposedly told after the fact, probably during the period when she elaborated on marital abuse and harassment to whomever was at hand, she neither talked nor wrote about at the time it allegedly happened. Possibly to compensate for the halting relationship that always exists between an example, the context into which it is inserted, and the argument it is meant to facilitate, and which in this case turns out to be particularly dubious, we are made to believe that the story is confirmed by two sources. First, it is corroborated by Plath herself when the biographer reproduces her thoughts. But since he has no access to her mind, what Alexander presents to his readers is pure fiction. Second, Mrs Prouty seems to be presented as a witness. For years, Olive Prouty, an author of popular novels, provided economic support for Sylvia Plath. Perhaps to shock a mother figure towards whom she had ambiguous feelings, Plath in a letter described Ted Hughes as a brutal womanizer. To Prouty, he sounded like a Dylan Thomas, and she promptly asked her protégé to stay away from him. When she met Hughes in person, the elderly lady took him to heart (Stevenson 1989a, 127). Alexander refers to this fact, in chronological sequence, nineteen pages further on in his book (213), but without commenting on the previous statements. He gives no source for his anecdotal evidence in the quoted bus scene.

Paul Alexander and Rough Magic Rhetorically Paul Alexander exploits the questionable ‘Benidorm episode’ to a maximum because it fits so neatly the picture he aims to draw of Ted Hughes as a violent man and irresponsible flirt. An arsenal of tropes and figures are used to substantiate his argument and make the rhetoric persuasive. Tenuous anecdotal evidence is ostensibly fortified with the

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help of analepses and prolepses. Discussing Sylvia Plath’s violent boyfriends at college in the US, Alexander takes the opportunity to allude to her future husband: Just as she now [1954] continued to date a man who she said had ‘raped’ her, she would soon become deeply involved with someone who would hit and spank her. Ultimately, there would be one man who, in part because of his violent nature, the brunt of which she often felt, captivated Sylvia so completely that only months after their meeting she had married him. (1991, 147)

Although his name does not surface, Ted Hughes is here introduced into the narrative one and a half years before the two main persons even meet. But the word ‘violent’ follows him throughout the text as an incarnate element of his history and character. Without reservations, the biographer recounts incriminating allegations that Sylvia Plath made about Hughes in unpublished letters written to her mother after their breakup. ‘[B]ecause of Ted’s history of violent behavior’, Sylvia worried that she and the children would need protection from him indefinitely. He had never loved their son and was negligent when taking care of him. He ‘used up’ her grant, ‘spent huge sums of cash’ from their joint bank account, and left his traffic tickets for her to pay (295). Furthermore, she evidently claimed that ‘he nearly murdered her as he tried to force her to give him the last installment of her Saxon grant’ and admitted that he and Assia had speculated about Plath killing herself, so that he would be free to sell the house ‘and take Frieda. (He did not mention Nicholas)’ (298). Alexander does not discuss the content of these accusations, whether they are credible or not. He just reports at length from the letters. Since no quotations are provided, it is difficult for the reader to distinguish between the biographer’s words and those of his subject. Pertinent questions resulting from his rhetoric are left for us to ask. If Ted Hughes was that terrible, why would Sylvia Plath want a reunion with him? Without any comment, Alexander reports that both Aurelia Plath and Al Alvarez thought this was what she hoped for (314). How does the negative portrait painted by Alexander fit with other details he hands out, including how Hughes accompanied Plath as she hunted for a flat in London, visited her regularly, and recommended that BBC produce a radio programme about her? If the disturbing images of Hughes were true, how could she leave her children in his care? The biographer does not quote Lucas Myers, one of Ted Hughes’s Cambridge friends who in a letter to Anne Stevenson (1989a, 76–77) writes that Hughes was the most considerate of persons, and he never saw

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Hughes make as much as a violent gesture or act violently in any manner.31 Instead, Hughes is portrayed as a product of nature and nurture. According to the summary Alexander gives of yet other letters from Plath to her mother, Olwyn Hughes felt threatened by Plath’s very existence in Ted’s life, on one occasion flinging hurtful remarks at her ‘out of hatred’. The relationship between brother and sister is described as ‘abnormally close’ and ‘incestuous’. ‘Obviously’, then, ‘Olwyn was extremely jealous of Sylvia’ (252). On the basis of a casual statement made in a letter, the biographer infers that ‘through the years, on the subject of Sylvia Plath, Olwyn Hughes has had an axe to grind’ (2). Proving this appears to be a major part of Alexander’s project. Plath’s parents-in-law, whom she early on had professed to love and somewhat condescendingly described as ‘dear, simple Yorkshire folk’ (Letters Home, 269), could not have been much better towards Plath than their children were, since Alexander seemingly in earnest reports that Plath ‘expected them to try to torture her until she did what Ted wanted her to do’ (300). Equally uncritical – or opportunistic – is Paul Alexander’s persistence in quoting sources who have insisted on anonymity.32 Because they do not want or dare to stand by their opinions in the light of full publicity, it is impossible to verify the content of their contributions. As readers, we cannot even be certain that they exist. For all we know, the sources themselves and what they say might be fabricated. Typically for Rough Magic, the faceless ‘friends’ and ‘confidential sources’ only speak ill of Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill. One of them is quoted as remembering that Wevill had ‘hips like the rear end of a 158 bus’ (265). Although Edward Butscher describes Olga’s thick ankles, one can get a feeling of déjà-lu and wonder whose ‘friend’ this is supposed to have been. Alexander also refers to anonymous sources when writing that Assia Wevill was pregnant early in 1963 and that she aborted in March of the same year. He then goes on to speculate whether Ted Hughes had told his wife about the pregnancy shortly before she killed herself and, if so, perhaps he had wanted to make her understand that he had no intention of returning to her (328). When piling hypothetical layers on top of each other in this way, the biographer can pitch whatever scenario he wants without having to argue for its validity and without fear of being prosecuted for defamatory slander. Rough Magic painstakingly constructs Hughes as a ruthless and egotistical man before giving the final stroke. While his wife sacrificed herself for him, Hughes in return indulged her ‘[o]n his good days’ (215), hypnotizing her and acting as her teacher. Consequently – as Alexander puts it – ‘friends of Sylvia’s later speculated’ whether ‘perhaps something

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more ominous occurred Friday night at Fitzroy Road’, a couple of days before she died (328). Even if the meaning is not stated directly, we understand very well in what direction Alexander and his anonymous informers are leading us. They are insinuating that Hughes induced his wife to commit suicide: After years of repeatedly being hypnotized by Ted and acting on his posthypnotic suggestions, Sylvia was highly sensitive to any signal – conscious or unconscious – that she perceived him to be sending. Several times during the fall she had told her mother that Ted wanted her to kill herself; if she believed this, it might have propelled her on some new and purposeful path of action tonight. (328)

If Bitter Fame was bitchy, what then is Rough Magic? Choosing his words deliberately, Paul Alexander depicts Ted Hughes as a vain man and indelicate sweet tooth. Cultivated by friends as their ‘undisputed poetic genius’, he ‘played his role, the center of the circle, for all it was worth’ (182, 181). During the cold winter of 1963, Hughes did not merely dress warmly ‘in all black’, he sported ‘a black scarf thrown dramatically around his neck’ (324). That he scratched himself and picked his nose, loved sugar, and took his baths more rarely than clean Americans, are to count for bagatelles compared to accusations of murder. No wonder Alexander’s sources preferred to remain anonymous. But credibility likewise appears to be an issue with some of the sources who perform under their full names. Unlike Ronald Hayman, who did a sparse amount of fieldwork and mainly based his account on secondary sources, Alexander can refer to ‘reliable eyewitnesses’ who until then had not told their story. Thus, contrary to the other biographers, he can claim that Plath popped over to the US in order to have an abortion shortly after the honeymoon. On the return boat to England, in September of 1956, she travelled like the previous autumn together with first-year Fulbright students, telling one of them: ‘Listen, some day I’ll marry a poet like you and kill myself’ (198). She had, however, just married a promising poet. According to Alexander, the informer, Kenneth Pitchford – who for several years was married to the explicit Hughes-hater Robin Morgan – did not know at the time why she was on the boat. We hear nothing about when or how he learned this intimate information. Sylvia Plath neither wrote nor talked to anyone about such a trip, and it contradicts the timetable and economy of the newlywed couple. Both Stevenson and Wagner-Martin report that they spent the whole month of September in Yorkshire, staying with Hughes’s parents, and Alexander concedes: ‘Plath’s letters indicate that, during September, she did not leave

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England’. Still, he insists that ‘one reliable eyewitness account’ places her on the boat (197). But he indicates – with the reservation ‘if she was pregnant’ (198) – a tiny bit of doubt as to the reason for her crossing the Atlantic. He has, however, no scruples against spreading the story anyway. Another source, a student of Sylvia Plath’s the year she taught at Smith, is instrumental in demonstrating the kind of womanizer Ted Hughes was. Judging from what Lee Camp is supposed to have told Alexander, there seems to have been no end to the number of attractive blondes spotted with him in eager conversation while walking along Paradise Pond at Smith College. Expressions like ‘[Hughes] would be seen’, ‘we all thought’, ‘there were several of them’, ‘whenever we talked about seeing’, ‘yet another blonde pageboyed wonder’, and ‘it was always in very hushed tones’, convey an invariable impression of repetition, of something that happened over and over again and was observed by many (212–13). The witness apparently confirms the legitimacy of Plath’s strong reaction to one particular time when Hughes was delayed in meeting her, and she saw him coming from the infamous pond with just the kind of ‘Seductive Smith girl’ that men were prone to fool around with (Journals, 390). Her outpouring in the journal afterwards unintentionally becomes somewhat comical; the accusations are frantic, and the situation is imbued with ominous symbols. The more he pledges his innocence – that it had been a chance encounter, that they did not know each other – the more she wants to believe the worst (447). All the biographers except Anne Stevenson, who minimizes the whole episode, include it in their portrait of Hughes as a philanderer and wife-cheater. For obvious reasons, they do not then quote Plath’s own analysis of her feelings half a year later: how she at certain times identified husband with father, and since the incidents drew forth echoes, they took on great importance. When Ted was not there as arranged, it triggered memories of her father’s death as a form of eternal abandonment. Convinced that all her life she had been ‘“stood up” emotionally’ by both her parents, she interprets the smallest delay as evidence of coldness and betrayal (455). This explanation, which Sylvia Plath had reached in therapy with Ruth Beuscher, does not comply with Paul Alexander’s scheme. He elects to note that ‘Ted’s behavior had caused her to think about suicide’ (1991, 219) because Plath believed she could get, under given circumstances, angry and violent enough to kill either herself or someone else. Lee Camp must have been quite a trophy for the biographer. However, the insisting tone in her account may potentially backfire on the messenger. Did Hughes have time for anything else besides chasing girls?

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When she claims that they – herself and whoever the unspecified ‘we’ may include – ‘instinctively felt some kind of fragility in all this’ (213), it is easy to think that the reaction is a result of hindsight. Alexander employs her story to propose yet another unconfirmed conclusion, which at the same time points ahead at what is to come: ‘As much as possible, Plath tried to forget about this new, threatening development’ (213). With the help of syntactic juxtaposition, causality and co-responsibility can be implied even when none exist: ‘While Sylvia suffered from pneumonia, Ted met with more professional accolades’ (213). Indeed, establishing connections between coincidences and making them appear as integral parts of a pattern is a classical technique favoured by writers since ancient times. Aristotle defined it as an important task for the rhetor (Rhet. 1367b). Alexander’s inclination for poetic licence, for rendering a person’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions without a basis in facts, is evident from the very first chapter. When he in ‘The Blue Hour’ almost calls forth Sylvia Plath sitting at her desk and describes in detail what she is doing, his manoeuvres are fairly easy to spot. The biographer gives the impression of having been present or having read eyewitness accounts, which he has not. He fictionalizes, doing the same when dramatizing what Otto Plath and Aurelia Schober were thinking of each other before they became an item. The description of Aurelia, how she acted ‘with dignity – her face, round and bold as a full moon, personified her forthright nature – yet she was shrouded by timidity’ (13), resembles Linda Wagner-Martin’s style. In other places, it is more difficult to differentiate between the textual layers, for instance, when the biographer adds something to existing sources without indicating the presence of his own voice. By comparing her journal entries with his description of how Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes met, it becomes clear that several details in Rough Magic are original Alexander contributions. Plath’s version is funny and violent, full of movement; his is rather tame and clichéd. Thus, it is Alexander, not Plath, who describes Hughes’s face as ‘sensual’ (178), featuring ‘demure lips’, a ‘wide forehead’, and ‘soulful eyes’. Equally, he is the one to claim that a ‘palpable sexual charge ... had formed between them’ and that she ‘felt pleasantly dazed’ (179). At college, Alexander was introduced to Plath’s poetry and ‘fell in love with the beauty of the language’, he informs us in his preface (1). Alexander then went on to edit a collection of essays on her work. His introduction to Ariel Ascending (1985) makes for interesting reading. In an

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effort to defend yet another book about such an intensely studied poet, he offers two commendable reasons: Ariel Ascending aims both to reflect ‘the current critical thinking’ and to counteract the tendency to sensationalize Plath’s life and death. Alexander laments that she has been portrayed as a champion of feminist causes, labelled as the ultimate confessional poet, and – ‘most sadly’ – turned into a legend or cult figure. He felt certain that she would have reacted to all these roles with disdain (1985, xiii). But how up-to-date was Ariel Ascending when it came out? Only seven of its eighteen essays, including the editor’s own introduction, were new. One essay had been published as early as 1966, seven between 1970 and 1973, and three in 1982. Some of the studies had been printed and anthologized several times: Elizabeth Hardwick’s ‘On Sylvia Plath’ (1971) three times before Ariel Ascending, ‘Sylvia Plath: A Memoir’ (1971) by Al Alvarez, and ‘The Death Throes of Romanticism’ (1973) by Joyce Carol Oates four times each (cf. Tabor 1987). Perhaps what is most striking about Rough Magic is the passionate resentment Alexander seems to bear towards Ted Hughes. The reason for this remains unknown to the reader. Still, it is tempting to speculate along Alexandrian lines. Has the biographer adopted his object’s vision of herself as a victim and sworn revenge against her hangman? In Ariel Ascending, he states that ‘the book belonged as much to Sylvia Plath as it did to me’ (1985, xv). Or was his aversion caused by the elementary human feeling of having been rejected? Alexander writes in his preface to Rough Magic that early on, he decided not to subject himself to the estate, adding that ‘I was, however, careful not to exclude Ted Hughes’s participation in this book’ (2). He had met the famous poet twice and succeeded in persuading him to contribute to Ariel Ascending. ‘Sylvia Plath and Her Journals’ was not a new piece; it had originally been published in Grand Street (1982) but still lent authority to the collection.33 Maybe Alexander entertained secret hopes that he would be the one to make Hughes change his habit of not speaking about his life with Sylvia Plath. When the aspiring biographer, according to his own account, received a slightly ironic answer to his first request for participation, and the next was met with silence, his disappointment may well have turned sour. Considering the way Alexander quotes from Hughes’s letter, this possibility cannot be excluded.34 Or perhaps his declared love for Plath’s work included ‘amorous feelings’ for the poet herself and thus a growing jealousy towards the man who got her. A more likely explanation for the systematic persecution of Hughes in Rough Magic could simply be commercial deliberations as to what would

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sell. Paul Alexander had big plans for his book. After publication in the US, he needed to find a publisher for the overseas market. But no British firm would touch it. On the front page of The Sunday Times for 16 February 1992, Alexander declares that all British publishers were ‘terrified’ because Rough Magic portrayed Ted Hughes negatively. Hughes had succeeded in frightening publishers in London because whenever he did not get his way ‘he screams and stomps’, the American claims. Hence, ‘no one in Britain can read what really happened’. The Sunday Times reports that public accusations of Plath’s husband had so far been confined to his selfishness and chauvinism. Alexander revealed physical and mental abuse as well. Inside the paper, Hughes is blamed for having been extremely irresponsible in leading his unstable wife down the path of the occult. We also learn that she ‘enjoyed rough sex’ (Rayment and Chittenden 1992). What is remarkable here is not only the portrait of Hughes but also his childish behaviour juxtaposed with the power he is supposed to have over the entire British publishing industry. One purpose of this Sunday Times article was to announce a possible interest in Hollywood for the Plath–Hughes story. We are told that no less than fifteen producers were busy reading Alexander’s first version of a film script based on Rough Magic. Alexander stuck to his contentions in a letter to the editors the following week and expressed being ‘outraged’ because Olwyn Hughes had said that he received no help from the family, when the two of them in fact had met several times. Dismissed by her as ‘a young man with an earring and bleached hair’, he by contrast refers to himself as a former university professor and journalist for Time Magazine, as well as a member of PEN and The Authors’ Guild (1992a).35 In her own letter to The Sunday Times on 23 February 1992, Olwyn Hughes denied that the estate had been active in suppressing Rough Magic. Neither she nor her brother were aware that it was being offered to British publishing houses. The newspaper refused to print a letter signed by several poets and writers who were protesting against ‘the sensationalism and slander to which the character of the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, has been subjected recently by sections of the British press’. The letter contends that if The Sunday Times had access to revealing documents, as the paper had hinted, it ought to identify them instead of printing unfounded insinuations. Nor was it ethical to refer to anonymous friends – ‘which friends? how well did they know her?’ – as sources of malicious rumours. And where were all the publishers Hughes had bullied?, asked the sixteen signatories who included Alan Brownjohn, A.S. Byatt, Peter Redgrove, Stephen Spender,

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and Anne Stevenson. Instead, their letter was published in The Times Literary Supplement and started – as usual – another round of debate (Abse et al. 1992). Paul Alexander’s script did not survive in Hollywood. He has, however, successfully published books on other cult figures that have considerable market potential like James Dean, Andy Warhol, and J.D. Salinger as well as books on politicians such as John McCain and John Kerry. He has also pursued a career as a playwright and director and wrote ‘Edge’, a one-woman play about Sylvia Plath’s final hours, for actress Angelica Torn. The first performance of ‘Edge’, directed by Alexander himself, took place on 11 February 2003, and was staged to begin at exactly the moment when Plath is believed to have died forty years earlier. Angelica Torn seems to share Alexander’s opinion of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In an interview with The Villager, she claims that Plath was murdered. Although not included in the play, there is according to Torn evidence that Hughes was in the apartment when she died: ‘And if he wasn’t the one to turn the gas on, he was the one who drove her to it’ (in Tallmer 2003). Something Alexander has Plath say about Hughes is: ‘This Nazi, this monster, this bastard – I’ll marry him!’ (in Beam 2003). Since the first production in New York, Torn and Alexander have gone on to tour the US and the world – London, New Zealand, Australia. ‘“Edge” does well. It makes good money’, Alexander told The Australian, revealing at the same time that Sylvia Plath has been ‘the defining force’ in his professional life from the age of twenty, when ‘he found the desperate saga of the Massachusetts-born writer taking over his life’. Angelica Torn likewise talks of a passionate relationship with a poet who ‘got’ her and ‘turned [her] life around’. Their play, then, may be seen – in Alexander’s words – as an appropriate ‘gift that keeps on giving’ (in Zimmer 2006). They have even copied their title from one of Plath’s final poems. Apparently, who ‘got’ whom is definitely a matter for discussion. And the quotation placed for marketing purposes on the front cover of Rough Magic may by some readers at least be taken as an ambiguous recommendation: ‘Finally, a biography worthy of Sylvia Plath …’.36

Ronald Hayman and Death and Life Sylvia Plath’s death has been a reliable sales recipe, at least since Alvarez’s The Savage God (1971). The same year that the biographies by Paul Alexander and Ronald Hayman came out, Diane Wood Middlebrook’s life of Anne Sexton, another poet who killed herself, was published.

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Newsweek did a cover story on suicide, and the manual Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying made it onto The New York Times bestseller list. According to James Bowman in The Times Literary Supplement, the idea that ‘self-destruction is sexy’ could not have escaped fashionable people (1991, 13). As signalled in his title, The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, Hayman taps straight into this appeal. In the British edition, his twist on the story is immediately followed up on the cover. The first paragraph on the inside flap goes like this: In 1963 the poet Sylvia Plath gassed herself at the age of thirty. Apart from the death of Marilyn Monroe – which is similarly surrounded by unsolved mysteries – no death in this century has taken a firmer hold on the public’s imagination.

For my own part, I would have thought that another violent death from 1963, that of John F. Kennedy, or the passing away of Elvis Presley and other rock stars exceeded Plath’s suicide when it comes to public attention and speculations. But that is obviously not the point. The comparison with sexy Marilyn and the indication that Hayman is about to tell a story full of mysteries has to be a calculated effort at stirring interest in the largest possible audience, thus targeting readers who are less concerned with Plath’s poetry than with the chance to hear a juicy tale. Ted Hughes is therefore immediately referred to as her difficult literary executor. On the next flap, we hear about the woman he had an adulterous affair with while Sylvia Plath was living alone with two tiny children during the worst winter in England since the war. With Assia Wevill’s suicide and the murder of little Shura mentioned next, the reader can look forward to a lot of good drama and a sufficient number of scandals to keep up the interest. To assure us of this, the publishing house promises ‘an uninhibited biographical study’ and ‘the first convincing account of the way her deep-seated death-wish joined forces with cruel circumstances she could survive for only four months’. Anne Stevenson is relegated to the corner because she had let herself be persuaded not to write about Plath’s death. The insistence that a biographer has discovered new, myth-shattering materials and is doing something ‘for the first time’, is a familiar move similarly used to market the other lives of Plath. Also recognizable is the final trump card: ‘Hayman’s book ... will undoubtedly be one of the year’s most controversial books’. Controversy sells biographies as it sells other kinds of publications in the mass market.

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Ronald Hayman was known to the British public from his work as a critic, playwright, and biographer. Both before and after Sylvia Plath, he has stuck to investigating big men, composing biographies of authors such as de Sade, Kafka, Brecht, Sartre, Proust, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, and Jung – a list almost as impressive as Linda WagnerMartin’s. In the preface to his work on Plath, Hayman points out that he has written a ‘biographical study’, not a biography (1991, xvii). To most readers, it is probably not immediately clear what the generic difference consists of, but most likely it has something to do with depth and thoroughness. Before The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, Hayman had expressed his thoughts about Ted Hughes via reviews and newspaper articles (Chapter One, 24–28). In ‘The poet and the unquiet grave’, he appears to identify with Sylvia Plath, stating from a seemingly privileged insider’s position that ‘[a]lthough divorce proceedings were under way, Ted Hughes still had control of everything she owned, including her body’. Evidence for this last allegation was that Hughes had brought his dead wife to Yorkshire, ‘which she had come to hate’, instead of burying her in ‘Cornwall’, ‘among the gravestones she loved’ (1989a).37 Hayman presents Plath’s person and writing in accordance with a common notion of her as a defenceless victim: ‘There she still is, a fragile, lovable creature, in danger of being crushed’. There is nothing fragile in the portrait he paints of Ted Hughes as husband, literary destructor, and biography obstructor. Whatever score, small or large, Hughes had been able to collect during their dispute in April 1989, Ronald Hayman made up for a few months later. Reviewing Bitter Fame for The Independent, he describes Sylvia Plath as ‘a naked ballerina on a tightrope’ unjustly treated in a ‘vindictive’ and ‘highly unbalanced’ book for which Anne Stevenson and Olwyn Hughes were responsible (1989b). Hayman interprets the former’s decision not to contact either Aurelia Plath or her son Warren as an inexplicable lack of interest in Plath’s childhood. When working on his own book, perhaps Hayman discovered that the two simply wanted to be left alone. He further objects to the fact that Bitter Fame contained so little about Assia Wevill and her relationship with Hughes. As it would seem, numerous people had interesting things to tell, among them, Trevor Thomas, Plath’s neighbour for her two final months in London. According to Thomas’s privately ‘published’ memoir (1989), which Hayman saw no reason to doubt, a party accompanied by bongo drums and records had been going on in her apartment on the very day she was buried.38 The contended episode provided Hayman – or The Independent – with the title

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for his review of Bitter Fame, ‘Plath: a poet mourned by bongo drums’ (1989), though it had nothing to do with the book. Two letters to the editor corrected Thomas’s account, which incidentally had been among the many sensations revealed two-and-a-half years earlier in a cover story run by The Mail on Sunday detailing the ‘secret life of the poet laureate’ (Walker et al. 1987).39 Anne Stevenson (1989c) addressed ‘the mind-boggling improbability of the incident’ for its utter tactlessness. Ted Hughes had been away in Yorkshire where the funeral took place, and it was inconceivable that his aunt Hilda, who looked after the children, would have condoned bongo drums at midnight. ‘This simply cannot be true’, repeats Jillian Becker (1989), one of Plath’s few London friends who went to the funeral. She confirms that Hughes stayed on in Heptonstall and that no one had been partying in the apartment of the deceased. The Independent had to print an apology, and in settlement of a libel suit, Trevor Thomas apologized to Hughes in open court on 18 December 1990. Most likely, this made Hayman more careful, but it did not change his attitude towards Hughes. In The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, he adds Thomas to Hughes’s list of victims in his role as literary oppressor. We get the impression that Hughes had taken unjust legal measures against an eighty-two-year-old man whose only mistake was to have ‘privately published a memoir giving details of his meetings with Sylvia and of events in the maisonette after the funeral’ (1991, 192). In his biographical study, Hayman pursues a few select themes, adopting supplemental material from other sources. From Bitter Fame, he mostly picks what can be used against Hughes, leaving out what might disturb his overall picture. Lucas Myers is used as a reference to confirm that Hughes owed his quick success as a poet to his wife’s help. But Hayman refrains from mentioning what Myers has to tell about Hughes’s importance for her development as well as his extraordinary generosity towards friends. Even things that ought to appear as positive acts may – when helped by a few insignificant words – easily be made to look suspect. The biographer gives examples of Hughes’s ‘emotional betrayal’ which he ‘may’ have committed against his wife (160). A letter written to Olwyn Hughes supposedly demonstrates that he was ‘[u]nwilling or unable to side with her against the family’ (96). By comparison, Anne Stevenson seems more disposed to take Hughes’s actual words in the letter at face value and accept it as an effort at explaining his wife’s offensive behaviour in a specific situation. Seen in this context, the letter could be interpreted as an act reflecting love rather than contempt. Several of their friends, including

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Lucas Myers, report that he was very loyal to and protective of her.40 Depending on the writer’s rhetorical needs, examples may – once again – be used to argue quite different viewpoints. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath traces Hughes’s alleged violent side from the moment he meets Sylvia Plath, observing that knowingly and happily ‘she chose a man capable of physical violence; afterwards she drew it out of him, partly through provocation, direct and indirect, partly through mythicising him in both verse and prose’ (88). Hughes is explicitly linked to the death theme running through the book, and we learn as a matter of fact that ‘her relationship with him was, from the outset, a relationship with the death that awaited her’ (85). Hayman’s contribution to the biographical information that he in 1989 had claimed there was such an urgent need for, is mainly to be found in gossip about Hughes’s love life and his relationship with Assia Wevill. According to statements from Fay Weldon, Assia felt that Ted’s parents disliked her, ‘that they blamed her for Sylvia’s death, as indeed, increasingly, did Ted: that they used her as a servant, punished her perpetually, and that her situation in the household was untenable’ (190). The description sounds very much like Sylvia Plath’s recriminations against her in-laws after the separation. Hayman also produces the ‘blonde social worker’, Brenda Hedden, who boasts an involvement with Hughes of the same duration as Plath’s and Wevill’s (190). At that time, the public at large knew little of Hughes’s erotic escapades later detailed by former mistresses and his biographer, Elaine Feinstein.41 Insisting that what he presents is true, it is as if Hayman at the same time can hear readers objecting to the inclusion of such material. On the final page of his book, he questions ‘how much access the reading public should have to biographical facts when the writer is dead while her husband and children are still alive’ (198). His answer is to declare Sylvia Plath ‘a special case’ because she broke with old conventions and used personal experience in a way that differed from almost all poetry written before Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959). Repeating what is in the minds of most literary biographers, he maintains that in order to understand her poems, it is necessary to know her life. He conveniently avoids considering the transformation which lived experience undergoes as the poet turns it into literature. And he totally skirts explaining how intimate details about the life of Ted Hughes after his wife’s death can increase our insights into her work from earlier periods. Modern practitioners of the biographical genre are expected to offer exhaustive understanding of their objects’ personalities. But when delineating good and bad sides of their objects, biographers often have

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problems keeping up with the dialectics of their own discourse. Not only do conflicting images of Sylvia Plath result from differences across biographies. They also result from conflicting images within the biographies, as conclusions drawn by the biographer are contradicted by other information he or she has incorporated into the presentation. In spite of the many insinuations made about Hughes in The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, such as the alleged irony in Plath’s dying intestate so that he gained control of his children, Hayman’s angle may all the same increase our interest and perhaps sympathy for Hughes. When the biographer relays Brenda Hedden’s astonishment at his attractiveness, even to women who had not met him but sent propositions based only on his poems, the curiosity in him grows (190). Hayman’s efforts at making Ted Hughes responsible for his wife’s death are not convincing. Many readers will on the contrary probably agree with the assertion on the book’s jacket that her suicide indeed was an almost natural or inevitable culmination of a consistent and deep-seated death drive, as evident in so much of her writing. Throughout this biography, Sylvia Plath is portrayed as an emotionally unstable person with whom it would have been difficult to get along. Hayman quotes witnesses who describe her as a ‘raving’ and ‘borderline psychotic’ towards the end (5). He sees the theories of R.D. Laing on the divided and false self as particularly relevant for our way of conceptualizing who Plath was. Partly citing Laing, Hayman explains the false-self system as ‘the structure which comes into existence when a schizoid individual develops a series of “part-selves none of which is so fully developed as to have a comprehensive ‘personality’ of its own”’. Schizoid persons may consider themselves as self-sufficient and self-fulfilled, but ‘[t]he feeling of omnipotence is no defence against the overwhelming sense of emptiness’ (45). Such statements pertaining to the likes of Sylvia Plath are hardly balanced by comments of the following kind: ‘Getting his poems accepted by all the magazines he approached – or she approached for him – Hughes was keeping a foot in the door to the golden world. No wonder he was more even-tempered than she was’ (103). Over and over again, the arch villain succeeds in getting the reader’s attention at the expense of the deserted wife and the biographer’s design, as seen in another Hayman strategy that also fails to function as planned. Both in the first and the final chapter, he tries to create a series of ‘unsolved mysteries’ around Plath’s death. Did she have money problems or not? Were divorce proceedings under way? – After all, ‘contradictory statements have been made’ (14). Was there a suicide note and/or a final letter to her mother which Aurelia Plath did not get to read? Did Sylvia

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Plath see someone at the house shortly before she died? Who was the unknown man at the inquest? What happened to the car that, according to claims made by a neighbour, disappeared and then reappeared? Ronald Hayman is not the first to address such questions. However, the way he depicts her life, Plath’s death does not seem that mysterious, even though the reasons for her suicide are not clear. Given that people found her to be quite confused, she probably both talked and acted inconsequently. Thus, gaps and inconsistencies are more likely to materialize when the story is stitched together from bits and pieces offered by a plethora of sources. Some of the ‘mysteries’ might have been created retrospectively by people who for various reasons wish to contribute but, like Trevor Thomas, are mistaken or mixed up about the order of events. Nevertheless, a number of questions posed by Hayman seem rather contrived. If the connection between Plath’s life and work is as close as he insists, it should be easy to understand why her last diaries ‘disappeared’ together with a rumoured manuscript about a married couple. How Hayman can find a mystery in Plath having two sets of keys to her own flat in London or in Hughes wanting them tracked down as fast as possible is equally odd. Who wouldn’t? For biographers to imply similarities between their kind of work and that of detectives is quite common, either through direct comparison with popular heroes or more indirectly by constructing mysteries, as seen in Hayman’s work.42 Romanticizing their own role, biographers at the same time indicate that revelations are an integral part of the genre. From exposure of secrets and hidden truths, it is not a long step to hint at scandals and possible crimes. In The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, it starts on the very cover. Whether legitimate or not, the chosen strategies of Paul Alexander and Ronald Hayman are in themselves not the least bit puzzling. To reach as large an audience as possible, they had to condone the accepted assignation of guilt between the parties and distance themselves from Anne Stevenson’s book. Janet Malcolm (1993, 93) explains this reasoning, as she sees it: [N]obody wanted to hear that it was Hughes who was good and Plath who was bad. The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not a negligible one, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living. There is simply no choice between a dead bad guy and a live one.

Even after his death, however, Ted Hughes continues to be portrayed as the bad guy in new editions of Alexander’s and Hayman’s books, published in 1999 and 2003, respectively. The question of culpability is

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still crucial to both biographers. In their account, Hughes in Birthday Letters takes too lightly his own responsibility for Sylvia Plath’s fate. Hayman reads the poems as biographical documents that do not add up with the facts as he knows them. Playing on Malcolm’s New Yorker article and subsequent book – ‘The Silent Woman’ – an additional chapter entitled ‘Silent Man’ contains new information that Hayman thinks is significant to offer in his second edition of Plath’s life. Picking up where he left the case, his main focus is ‘Ted’, as he repeatedly refers to his old adversary, and he rationalizes that Hughes’s later affairs with other women throw retrospective light on his relationship with Plath. In accordance with the rhetoric of biography, people and events are presented as extraordinary. The biographer at the same time supplies justifications for writing about them: ‘No one ever came closer to owning a poet as [Ted Hughes] did to Sylvia Plath’ (2003, 213) and ‘Never has fatalism seemed more like an excuse’ (229; my italics)43. Moreover, reservations which the family had about publishing Ariel back in the 1960s, because many of the poems ‘bristle with hatred and invective’, are dismissed: ‘[B]ut few people would have been hurt badly, apart from Ted, Aurelia and Assia’ (214). Their being badly hurt was – we must assume – of no consequence, perhaps even deserved. On the other hand, Hayman allows that during their marriage of six years, Hughes seems to have done little to provoke his wife’s jealousy, getting in fact ‘good conduct marks’ for taking her ‘[e]xorbitantly possessive and childish clinging’ in a ‘remarkably good-humoured and ungrudging’ way (218–19).

Publish or …? Published the same year as Hayman’s second edition, Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (2003) has taken the full consequence of Ted Hughes’s significance for the story of Sylvia Plath. Relevant here of course is the fascination Hughes himself inspires, especially since the biography of Plath has been repeated so many times now that it easily looks like old news. Offered on the inside flap, Her Husband is defined as a ‘biography of their marriage’. Complying with generic conventions, the book contains photos of the involved. As indicated by the position of their names in the title, Hughes constitutes the main subject. Middlebrook writes on their life together as husband and wife and on their creative partnership, which for him continued on for a full thirty-five years after Plath died. The book tracks the evolution of their vocation as poets and the construction of their Poetic Selves through a ‘call-and-response practice’ to each other’s work (2003, 263).44 Unlike her

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predecessors, Middlebrook had access to the unabridged edition of Sylvia Plath’s journals from 2000 and the Ted Hughes Papers made available at Emory University that same year. Biographers – and many Plath critics – habitually treat literary texts as documents to be harvested for hard facts about their object’s life. A former professor at Stanford University and the author of two bestselling biographies, Middlebrook is primarily concerned with the literary personae that Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes create in their writing and not with historical reality. She argues that very little knowledge of Plath’s dayto-day life can be found in her voluminous journals. What it details is the poet’s main project: ‘becoming a writer’ (121). Pointing to fear of abandonment as a determining influence on her emotional composition, Middlebrook singles out anger as Plath’s ‘most distinctive kind of inspiration’ (46). Desertion fuelled the anger, and ‘To Ariadne, Deserted by Theseus’, a poem written when she was sixteen years old, is according to Her Husband a founding image in the work of Sylvia Plath (48).45 Relations with her parents and husband are crucial in this respect. Motherhood and childbearing were likewise decisive for the development of Plath’s persona together with her changing views of Hughes and other idealized male figures. Contrary to a persistent tradition in Plath studies, politics play no role whatsoever in Her Husband, and we hear little about her illness. Nonetheless, the book ascertains that ‘[d]epression killed Sylvia Plath’ (211). Her Husband threads together the story Hughes told about his relationship with Sylvia Plath and the history behind it. Editing her papers over the years, he came to see himself within the role signalled by the book’s title and then went about turning their marriage into a resonant myth. According to Diane Middlebrook, ‘The Offers’ in Howls & Whispers (1998) is the central poem in his work of self-mythologizing, and he understood perfectly well that ‘after his death the story of their marriage would belong to the cultural history of the twentieth century’ (xx). It is within this perspective that she reads Birthday Letters, and hence, she differs from numerous reviewers in not treating these poems as a documentary of what happened. Actuality is absorbed into the storytelling, and discrepancies between history and poems are the products of what his myth needed, she claims. Only those well versed in Plath’s work will, however, recognize his departures from fact and grasp the clever subtext of Birthday Letters, where he puts his persona into dialogue with the persona of her texts. Middlebrook interprets his deliberate misquotations of Plath’s words as part of the subtle call-and-response effect and ‘the point, precisely’ of the whole thing (278). Judging from the

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reception of Birthday Letters, many obviously missed this point and instead accused him of exploiting Plath once more. What the poems imply to Middlebrook is that ‘Ted and Sylvia each stumbled into the other’s power to transform mere human beings into characters in a myth’ (280). Inspired by Robert Graves, Hughes imagined her as his White Goddess who was destined both to inflict devastation and to release creative fluency. Going through his wife’s writings, Hughes discovered that not only had she from the beginning been composing her own Poetic Self, but the literary character she had constructed for him was comprised of elements taken from other persons, among them Otto Plath. Middlebrook further believes that Hughes discovered a gender aspect which earlier had escaped him. The subjectivity manifesting itself in Plath’s journals was rooted in a female experience beyond his imagining. The turning point in her poetic coming of age, as described by Her Husband, is exactly when she permits rage to fuel her art; after Hughes leaves, she looks at desertion as ‘specifically a woman’s experience’ (186), for which she wants revenge. The way Middlebrook tells the story, and convincingly at that, there are no indisputable victims. They were all predators. Pursuing her artistic ambitions, Sylvia Plath used everybody ruthlessly in her writing. Ted Hughes was a hunter from the time of his childhood. He celebrated instinctual wildness in nature, saw the poet as a shaman, and feared domesticity. Assia Wevill took the men she wanted, but she did not quite catch Hughes. As it turns out, Middlebrook is not simply interested in literary personae. She is also interested in the kind of details that Ronald Hayman and Paul Alexander would have rejoiced at uncovering. While conversing with some friends, Assia Wevill evidently discussed Hughes and their evolving relationship, and one of the friends made notes from their conversations. Because Middlebrook had access to this source, we get to read about Hughes’s animal passion and his tendency to sweat profusely while making love. Remembering his strong reaction when Alvarez, in The Savage God, described how Plath’s hair had smelled the last time they met, one can only guess what he would have felt about Middlebrook’s cool (de)construction of him. In former times, bodily fluids and odours were considered private matters, and to pass on publicly what someone had confided in secret was considered morally problematic or at least not the business of literary criticism. The aforementioned source does not appear in Elaine Feinstein’s biography of Ted Hughes,46 and therefore it was perhaps all the more tempting to quote it, even for a professor emerita whose book according to

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the jacket ‘is a triumph of the biographer’s art and craft’. A side effect of this generic victory, reached after innumerable decisions about what to include and what to leave out of the book, is that readers may be left with an uncomfortable feeling of voyeurism. When biographers argue that they seek the true, the other, the hidden, the dark, or the real person behind the official image, they often end up in the bedroom. Claims of having found the key to unlocking a mysterious personality usually mean that one line of discourse or anecdotal evidence replaces another; the important thing is that everything supposedly fits the code. A written life is necessarily reductionist. In order to authorize her own project, that is to argue convincingly for seeing their marriage and Plath’s suicide as ultimately Hughes’s ‘true subject’ (inside flap), Diane Middlebrook, like her predecessors, has to highlight some aspects and downplay others. Mistresses who support the image of Hughes as a sexually magnetic man and who corroborate that no one could replace Sylvia as his muse, apparently belong in the picture she aims to draw. His wife of twenty-eight years, who stayed married to him in spite of everything, is virtually absent from the frame. But to dwell on Carol Hughes and their life together might have indicated that the story of Ted Hughes is rather more diversified than Her Husband allows for.

CHAPTER FIVE PSYCHOLOGISTS

Having examined more than forty poetry books for an October 1966 edition of Saturday Review, Assistant Professor of English, Dan Jaffe, terms Sylvia Plath’s kind of writing as ‘solipsistic poetry’ and argues that Ariel ‘is best viewed as a case study’ (1966, 29). Over the years, there has been a widespread willingness among specialists and laymen alike to do just that: to diagnose and psychoanalyse the poet as well as her work. They seem to have taken literally an admonition formulated in 1968 by another Assistant Professor of English, James F. Hoyle, this time fittingly published in Literature and Psychology: ‘It will be a strength of the psychological critic to realize that the two works [Plath’s poems and her death] cannot be rationally or humanly extricated’ (1968, 188; my italics). Hoyle’s contribution is to see her poetry as ‘an organic part of suicidal mania’ (193), to declare Plath’s family myth a fatal one (191), and to define her as an important poet because of the coherence of her work – ‘what might be called the honesty of her suicide’. Similar to Freud, her achievement is rooted in the family and its problems, he claims (199). Commentators on Plath have been uninhibited in their use of diagnostic terminology, as if nosology constitutes an integrated part of literary study and criticism. According to Robert L. Stilwell, the Ariel poems ‘find their fullest analogies in the visions and emotional states and awful insights of psychosis’ (1968, 531). Richard Tillinghast describes Ariel as ‘poems of schizophrenia, or rather poems by a schizophrenic who had painstakingly, over a period of years, mastered the craft of poetry’ (1969, 582). Many a far reaching conclusion on the exemplarity of her case for some theory or other have been based on surprisingly scant anecdotal evidence, and quite a few persons obviously believe that they have free access to her mind. Caught in the discourse of their time, some of the scholars give rather odd impressions when read decades later. In one study, the fact that Plath admired people who were good at things is interpreted as if she ‘idealized doers’. The commentator, an MD writing in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, then supports his verdict by mustering a number of experts who ‘have shown that gratification of aggressive drives

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promotes differentiation of self from object, increases pleasure in functioning, and furthers the development of both libidinal and aggressive object constancy’ (Orgel 1974b, 266). The poet herself was, however, schooled within the same interpretive models as her analysts. Through therapy and studies at university, she came to understand her life in Freudian terms and encouraged a reading of her work along the same, mythic lines, thereby complicating the question of what a psychoanalytical approach to literature involves: a ‘psychoanalysis’ of the author, the text, of both, or perhaps of the reader. Most of the time, there does not seem to be much difference between the interpretation of Sylvia Plath and the interpretation of her work. The way she chose to end her life has not exactly lessened these psychologizing propensities. The ethics involved are demonstrated not least in the Hoyle reference above. Maintaining that life and literature are inseparable, Hoyle regards her death on the one hand as ‘work’ ostensibly of the same kind as the poems and on the other hand as a contributing factor to the coherence of all her writing because of its – the suicide’s – ‘honesty’. Fortunately for the poet, then, her death was of the right sort, since an honest suicide presumably is more honourable and textually integrating than a dishonest one, whatever that might be. Plath’s story is discussed not only in works of literary criticism. She turns up as an exemplary case in psychological literature concerned specifically with suicidology, with artists and artistic genius, and the interminable discussion of how or whether creativity and madness are related. In fact, she has given name to a specific ‘Sylvia Plath effect’ (Kaufman 2001). Ignoring standard requirements for documentation and ethical conduct, psychiatrists investigating other topics have also found her useful for purposes of illustration. Plath’s work lends itself to contradictory employment, and the reception now seems almost inconceivable without the input that has come from psychoanalysis.

Freud in America In August 1909, Sigmund Freud, along with Sándor Ferenczi and Carl Jung, set sail for New York to give five lectures and receive an honorary law degree from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Acknowledging the degree, Freud called it ‘the first official recognition of our endeavors’ and later characterized his visit to Clark as the first time he was permitted to speak publicly about psychoanalysis (in Gay 2006, 207). It proved to be an important milestone for American endorsement of his doctrine and form of therapy.

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When Hitler and the Nazis started their systematic persecution of Jews in 1933, many psychoanalysts followed in the wake of Otto Rank and moved to the United States. Rank belonged to Freud’s inner circle in Vienna until he broke with orthodox psychoanalysis and emigrated in 1926. During the 1930s, Freudian theory was increasingly put to clinical use. After the Second World War, psychoanalysis spilled from the devoted community of mainly Jewish practitioners on the east coast into the public domain. Compared to the size of the population, more psychological experts have been educated in the US than any other country, and psychoanalysis dominated within psychiatric training programmes until the 1970s. The army and federal government enlisted Freud’s terminology and understanding of man to justify the prevailing view of the US, its friends, and its foes. At university, the classics of psychoanalysis were taught in several departments and not only to students of psychology. Freud’s perception of the unconscious and the relevance of dreams supplied artists with inexhaustible sources for inspiration. The general interest is reflected in a statement from 1947 by the editor of The World Within: Fiction Illuminating Neuroses of Our Time, a collection of short stories by different authors accompanied by psychological analyses of the fictional characters. According to the editor, ‘one password to popularity [for the contemporary writer] is psychiatry’ (Aswell 1947, viii). Sylvia Plath owned a copy of the book. In her journal, she comments on the ‘increasing market for mentalhospital stuff’ and is eager to exploit personal experience. She would be a fool not to recreate it (Journals, 495). And reviewers thought she succeeded in tapping into this popular fascination. Writing about The Bell Jar in 1971, Melvin Maddocks explains a tendency among modern readers to feed ghoulishly on other people’s madness, with mental illness having become so glamorous that it rates as ‘the ultimate badge of artistic sensitivity’. The following year, Webster Schott claimed that ‘Plath pursuers are after the troubled personality, not the troubling poetry’ (1972). Not only did the number of educational institutions and professionals practising depth analysis grow. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists belonging to various schools incorporated elements from ‘the talking cure’ into their treatments, and psychoanalysis was used more and more on patients with disorders other than those for which Freud originally had developed his method. In a culture where social dysfunctions and adjustments were seen as private matters, the public looked to psychoanalysis with an expectation of a sort of magical help for all kinds of problems, whether they were great or small, the result of chronic illness,

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a lack of talent, or an adequate philosophy of life. It was as if Americans believed that they had found in Freud the prescription for a successful and carefree life. Psychoanalyst Leo Stone therefore felt compelled to note in ‘The Widening Scope of Psychoanalysis’ (1954), that many of the difficulties or ailments most people inevitably experience should be met with old-fashioned courage, wisdom, and struggle rather than years on a therapist’s couch. His advice seems tailored for Erica Jong’s protagonist in Fear of Flying (1973). The aspiring young author, Isadora Wing, is as close as it comes to a professional analysand. Of the more than one hundred psychoanalysts flying from the US to a conference in Vienna, she had been treated by at least six of them and married a seventh. With few exceptions, they were in her experience astonishingly unimaginative and literal-minded: The horse you are dreaming about is your father. The kitchen stove you are dreaming about is your mother. The piles of bullshit you are dreaming about are, in reality, your analyst. This is called the transference. No? (Jong 1974, 7)

Although she is barely able to breathe without consulting her analyst and makes her husband do the same with his – the shrinks also consulting with each other – Isadora has started to protest against the whole therapy business. In addition to supplying the title for its second chapter, ‘Every Woman Adores a Fascist’, Sylvia Plath surfaces a number of times in Fear of Flying. Jong has on several occasions professed to a consuming obsession with her colleague in writing and adherent of the psychoanalytic movement. While at Smith College, Plath for her part became familiar with the works of Freud, his case stories, interpretations of dreams, and his views on male and female sexuality.1 After her breakdown in 1953, followed by electroconvulsive treatment and an attempted suicide, Plath underwent psychotherapy and electroshocks at McLean Psychiatric Hospital close to Boston. In Gracefully Insane, Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam’s story of The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital, she figures as McLean’s ‘first massmarket celebrity patient’ (2001, 151). Her treatment was conducted by the young resident trainee, Ruth Beuscher, at that time thirty years old. The two women formed a strong relationship which lasted until Plath’s death. Many years later, in interviews with psychologist and writer Karen Maroda, Beuscher talked about how they had ‘clicked’ and identified with each other, considering themselves as ‘two of a kind’. However, Sylvia

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Plath, her mother, and her sponsor Olive Prouty were unaware of the mismatch between Ruth Beuscher’s self-confidence and relevant competence, for instance, in suicidology. Beuscher was, in reality, a novice treating one of her first patients at McLean and lacked personal experience with therapy.2 She received psychoanalytically oriented supervision but did not go through analytic training and never formally qualified as a psychoanalyst. Eventually, she left psychiatry to enter the Episcopal ministry and taught at divinity school. According to Beam, who also met her, Beuscher strongly believed in the mysteries of healing (2001, 126). One result of the treatment that Sylvia Plath received at McLean was a serious father fixation and a conviction that she was suffering from an Electra complex, writes Professor of English, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, in an anthology on Daughters and Fathers (1989). This classical Freudian narrative offered Plath a way to articulate family relations and previously incoherent pain. Retroactively, in Cullingford’s words, ‘[o]n the common ground between myth and psychoanalysis’, she developed an elaborate incest fantasy and the fantasy of having killed and castrated her father. Only after her first analysis with Beuscher did Sylvia Plath begin to record expressions of agony about her dead father and explain her psychological difficulties in terms of losing him (Cullingford 1989, 244–45). At the age of eighteen – about three years before the therapy started and ten years after Otto Plath’s death – she had expressed the opposite: ‘But what do I know of sorrow? No one I love has ever died or been tortured’ (Journals, 33).3 Returning to Smith College after McLean, Sylvia Plath kept in touch with Ruth Beuscher. She changed the subject of her honours thesis from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to a study of the double in Fyodor Dostoyevsky, possibly to explore her own breakdown and psychodynamics. In conversations and in her diary, Plath repeatedly insisted that friends or people she met were her twins and/or doubles. Writing ‘The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels’, she relied mainly on old sources.4 Her preoccupation with the subject is moreover reflected in The Bell Jar. Living in Boston, free from the obligations of studies and teaching, which until then had structured her life, Sylvia Plath became overwhelmed with psychological problems. She worked part-time as a secretary in the psychiatric clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital, considered taking a PhD in psychology, and called on Ruth Beuscher again for help in December of 1958. Depressed, unable to write, and frightened of the future, she could have been particularly susceptible to an explanatory model which seemed to cover all her difficulties and contradictory emotions.

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By then, psychoanalysis was seen as a tool to realize the American dream. Few critical voices, so common from the 1970s onwards, were heard.

Sylvia and Dr B Sylvia Plath’s Boston consultations with Ruth Beuscher – or ‘Dr. B.’ as she calls her in letters home – are recorded in the diary and traceable through subjects she dealt with in poems and fiction. Investigating literary representations of psychoanalysis in The Talking Cure (1985), scholar Jeffrey Berman deems her therapy a particularly productive one because Plath made such remarkable progress in a short period of time, and the analysis dramatically freed her from writer’s block. Based on the journals, Berman observes that the analysis inspired Plath to examine nearly every aspect of her life within a positive transference relationship with Beuscher. Neither too close, nor too distant, it was untainted by disturbing countertransference, he states (1985, 134–37). However, the sources referred to by Berman give grounds for questioning some of his assumptions. In several ways, this was not a classical form of psychoanalysis. The patient went only once a week for half a year and paid too little.5 Early on, Plath wondered if Beuscher might not take their relationship too lightly because she did not pay for the consultations (Journals, 444) and was relieved when the therapist suggested five dollars an hour (455).6 The treatment likewise departed from standard procedure in that the two of them socialized during the process. In contrast to what Berman would have us believe, Beuscher did not heed one of Freud’s epic discoveries concerning the relationship between analyst and patient. Freud noticed that in the analytic situation, patients recreated and transferred to him ambiguous feelings which they had towards their parents or other persons close to them. As part of the therapy, the analyst consequently must explore the patient’s feelings directed at him. Sylvia Plath looked on her shrink as a good, permissive mother figure, tolerant and forgiving, with whom she could cry and confide without fear of reprisals. From Beuscher, she received permission both to be happy and to hate her mother, as if the first feeling depended on the second. At McLean, Beuscher had encouraged the patient to experiment with sex and stop suppressing her desires. The much quoted sentence – ‘I give you permission to hate your mother’ – uttered by Ruth Beuscher on Wednesday 10 December 1958 during their first session of her second round of therapy, had an effect on Sylvia Plath equal to a shot of brandy or a sniff of cocaine. Better than shock treatment, it made her feel terrific, like ‘a “new person”’, she writes

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in her diary (429). Afterwards follow page upon page detailing the many reasons for hating her mother, including the accusation that Aurelia had killed Sylvia’s father. Mrs Plath’s shortcomings were further scrutinized in poems and in The Bell Jar. This condemnation matched the attack launched on American mothers generally by Philip Wylie in Generation of Vipers (1942). Drawing on Freud and his theory of the Oedipus complex, Wylie coined the derogatory term momism as a delineation of the excessive attachment to mom and overprotective mothering. He finds the moms guilty of smothering their children and turning the nation’s sons into whining serfs. Megaloid momworship and conceited know-it-all moms were evidently to blame for many of society’s ailments. Wylie even compares momism to Hitler and to McCarthyism. Generation of Vipers stirred a national debate and sold more than 180,000 copies before its twentieth printing (1955, xi, 194–217). After one of the sessions with her therapist, Plath felt she had been participating in a Greek play (Journals, 455). All the psychological digging that unfolded made her exclaim about ‘[h]ow fascinating all this is’. Unearthed were hate and jealousy and the conviction that she missed out on receiving a mother’s love. Aurelia Plath had apparently only mimed the idea of love. Realizing that she at certain times had identified husband with father, images of Ted began to echo her fear of reproducing her father’s relations with her mother and with Lady Death. In Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Sylvia Plath declares to have found ‘[a]n almost exact description’ of her own feelings and reasons for desiring suicide: ‘a transferred murderous impulse from my mother onto myself’. She also claims to recognize how Freud’s vampire metaphor relates to a draining of the ego and maintains that her mother’s ‘clutch’ prevented her from writing (447). Plath’s misery was remedied by talking about it, she believed. But the journal gives no indication of fundamental changes in her preoccupations. Depressions and stressful relations appear as repetitions of old patterns. A contributing factor to the wanting results may have been the limitations put on curative talking. Ruth Beuscher did not encourage Sylvia Plath to discuss the transference process even though the patient herself recognized that ‘RB has become my mother’ (492). She writes of being ‘very ashamed’ to tell Beuscher of immediate jealousies, explaining her reaction as ‘the result of my extra-professional fondness for her’ (484). Uncomfortable with the situation, Beuscher according to Karen Maroda ‘gave Sylvia permission to hate her mother but not permission to express either love or hate toward her’. Instead, she focused on Aurelia Plath, Ted Hughes, and other important persons in the patient’s life. On a website

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dedicated to discussing the psychology of the arts, critic Norman Holland (2000) interprets their relationship as ‘a kind of love affair, at least on Sylvia’s part’.7 To Maroda, Beuscher ‘reluctantly admitted’ that the feelings had been mutual and that she loved her patient in return (2004). Maybe transference of emotions towards parents, husbands, and men in general went both ways. A recurrent topic during their sessions and in Sylvia Plath’s journal is the belief that she produced good grades and literary prizes for her mother in exchange for love. If that was the case, perhaps she also provided her surrogate mother with expected results in the manner of dreams, discoveries, and recollections which complied with therapeutic doctrine, or at least with emotions worthy of the permission she had been given. Perhaps she was a ‘“perfect” patient’ in more ways than the one Jeffrey Berman operates with: a person willing to go beyond symptomatic relief and seek the root causes of her conflicts (1985, 135). Psychoanalysis and other kinds of therapy can be seen as institutions that demand secrets, whereby confessions are an effect of coercion (Nelson 2006, 33). To some extent, the persona in ‘Lady Lazarus’ mediates such a view of what goes on in the process. Addressing the enemy as ‘Herr Doktor’, she declares herself his ‘opus’. If this reflects the poet’s personal experience, people close to her would also have had to endure the consequences of such coercion. In an interview with The New York Times, Aurelia Plath indicates that during her daughter’s breakdown in 1953, Sylvia became ashamed of their friendship. Not understanding what caused her problems, ‘somebody had to be the scapegoat’. As her mom, and therefore a despicable exponent of momism, Mrs Plath was a handy target (in Robertson 1979). Afterwards, she had to deal with Sylvia’s exulting letters about the marvellous ‘Dr. B.’ and the love she felt for her. ‘Dearest of Mothers’ received updates on B’s unrivalled capacity as a mentor and how she alone was responsible for making her daughter ‘a rich, well-balanced, humorous, easy-going person’ (Letters Home, 214– 15). Sylvia Plath cried a lot during the Boston sessions with Beuscher, felt like a child, and yearned for her praise (Journals, 474–75, 461; Stevenson 1989a, 149). We get the impression that at least parts of the treatment may have been led by her therapist. Not only did Beuscher during the first session give her notorious sanction to hate (Journals, 429), Plath is also reportedly asked ‘[w]ould you have the guts to admit you’d made a wrong choice [in husband]?’ (434) and ‘[d]oes Ted want you to get better?’ (437). The consultation resulted in the patient declaring her hatred for men while blaming her mother for almost everything that was wrong.

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Forty years later, Ruth Beuscher spoke willingly to Karen Maroda of her own brilliant and dominating father, a prominent clergyman, but ‘Ruth could not talk about her mother’. Beuscher married young, knowing within a month that ‘she’d made a mistake’, yet went on to have two children before she decided to get a divorce. The children stayed with their father, and she hardly saw them. Although Beuscher had five children by her next husband, this marriage was also ‘anything but blissful’. When she treated Sylvia Plath, the marriage had been unhappy for a long time and dragged on for another four years after her most prominent patient killed herself. Meeting Ted Hughes, Beuscher at first thought him charming and handsome, then ‘came to dislike him intensely and felt that Sylvia had made a bad choice’. To Karen Maroda, she spoke of him as ‘evil’. The therapist, who in her personal life had not been particularly successful either at choosing husbands or breaking with them, was unhesitant about giving advice from the other side of the Atlantic when Sylvia Plath’s marriage crumbled: don’t be anybody’s doormat, don’t repeat your mother’s martyr role, ban him from your bed, make it a clean break, read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, get a good lawyer and a really good nanny. She thinks Ted Hughes acted like a child, is furious with him, and appears to have had no misgivings as to the correctness of Plath’s account.8 Plath biographer Anne Stevenson, who speaks to Cynthia Haven in The Cortland Review from her own experience after three divorces, deems Beuscher’s marital counselling as highly irresponsible, considering that Plath clearly took to heart everything her mentor said. When a marriage is going wrong, a trial separation is needed, according to Stevenson, not an immediate divorce, especially since theirs was ‘such a close marriage, a marriage of two souls – two children to think of, too’. A psychiatrist advising someone in this situation should try to help the couple put the marriage back together (in Haven 2000).9 The finality of Beuscher’s advice, as well as Plath’s inability to accept failure, is decidedly American in its ‘all-or-nothing’ attitude, as much as the ambition and accompanying determination to have everything perfect is ‘so Emersonian’, Stevenson and her interviewer agree. Hughes’s title poem in Howls & Whispers (1998) may be read as a commentary on this fatal meddling in their marriage by a ‘go-between’, a ‘confidante’, a ‘double spy’, a ‘manquée journalist’, and a ‘professional dopester’. Via letters, her mother ‘like Iago’ reiterated ‘Hit him in the purse’, ‘“Hit him in the purse,” and “Be strong / To free yourself: go straight for divorce”’, while her analyst cautioned ‘Keep him out of your bed. / Above all, keep him out of your bed’ (Hughes 2003, 1178–79).

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A Freudian Showcase Sylvia Plath’s journal entry for 20 March 1959 is found complaining of regressing terribly with Ruth Beuscher and wondering what good it did to talk about her father except that she received a minor catharsis. At the time and seemingly for the rest of her life, Plath swore to the Electra complex as a paradigm that made sense of her own family relations and for her literary personae. On 20 March, she also mentions having finished ‘Electra on Azalea Path’, a poem about suicide and deadly love ending with the following claim: ‘It was my love that did us both to death’. The title of the poem refers to the place where her father was buried as well as to her mother’s name and to her own relationship with both of them. In ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’ from the same period, the Freudian symbols are striking and the incest explicit between a queen bee that no mother can challenge and the maestro of the bees, her father and groom. Reading ‘Daddy’ on the BBC’s Third Programme three-and-a-half years later, Plath introduces it as a poem about a girl with an Electra complex, whose father is a Nazi and mother is possibly part Jewish (Collected Poems, 293). ‘Daddy’ was written on 12 October 1962. Four days later, she begged her mother for help in two letters, and she finished ‘Medusa’, a poem easily read as an attack on none other than Aurelia Plath. Medusa is both the sorceress of Greek mythology who turned men into stone and the name of the jelly fish Aurelia. Mrs Plath herself had explained to Sylvia the double meaning of her name: jelly fish and golden.10 Family allusions of varying directness invited critics to engage in a double analysis of the author and her texts, inferring from one to the other. However, while keeping to our psychoanalytical terminology, what are the hidden meanings or unconscious taboos of programmatically explicit texts? Do Oedipal conflicts freely spoken constitute a person’s inner self and forbidden feelings? Plath psychologists usually avoid such questions, but they seem all the more pertinent here since her work, according to Lynda K. Bundtzen’s essay on Plath and psychoanalysis in The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath (2006), may be studied as a kind of selfpsychoanalysis on the author’s part. If the most painful and repressed material probably was left uncovered, the depth and therapeutic effectiveness of such an analysis is surely disputable. Without hesitation, critic Robert Phillips nonetheless readily accepted an overt, Freudian interpretation. In ‘The Dark Funnel’ (1972), he argues that a pattern of guilt over imagined incest permeates everything Sylvia Plath wrote. She is seen as a modern Electra whose libido poured into the Oedipal (Electral) mould, and whose father fixation precipitated a ‘psychotic

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disturbance’ that ended in suicide. Plath’s ‘unnatural love for her father’ made her hate all men after he abandoned her by dying (1972, 52–53). Documentation of this hatred Phillips finds in her poems and novel, maintaining that her fantasies remained unconscious until she started writing. He thinks the poet of ‘Daddy’ reached a level of self-knowledge far beyond The Bell Jar, and he makes a point of the fact that Sylvia Plath’s first book is set in Electra types (54). Publishing in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1974, Shelley Orgel similarly detects Oedipal elements of various kinds. Sylvia Plath supposedly ‘identified the sea as a sadistic oedipal father’. To repress instinctual longings for a ‘reunion in the ocean with the father as primal parent, as well as the oedipal consummation with the later father, she turned in her poetry to the preoedipal mother for aid’ (1974b, 263; my italics). Plath’s recollection in ‘Ocean 1212-W’ of how she as a little girl had been affected by Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Forsaken Merman’ is interpreted by Orgel as an instance of her dead father reaching out to her through the poem. He further asserts that Aurelia Plath had given permission for the reunion by reading Arnold aloud, the consequence being that ‘the sea in which the father dwelled called her back all her life’ (264). Still, the adult writer’s poetic description many years after the fact – ‘A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy’ (Johnny Panic, 118) – may just as well be discussed as a result of literary editing, the reminiscing adult imposing herself on the child she was back then. Stories of life-changing effects caused by literature are standard in interviews with authors and a common topos in autobiographies. Primarily, though, Orgel’s project in ‘Sylvia Plath: Fusion with the Victim and Suicide’ is to demonstrate how she exemplifies a phenomenon he had written about elsewhere: ‘a regressive vicissitude of identification with the aggressor which may be called “fusion with the victim”’ (1974a, 531). At the end of her life, the only resolution that appeared open to Plath was ‘a suicide that regressively re-established the “perfect” self through fusion with images of the idealized victim’, he states. Surrendering to the seductive death figure of her poems, she evidently gave in to an instinctual drive. Readers agreeing with Shelley Orgel’s sentimentalizing contention that a universal empathy pervades all of Plath’s writing might also agree with his same conviction that what ‘claimed her life in the end’ was ‘Plath’s ability to feel for, to become one with, all men and women, all animate and inanimate objects, both as aggressor and as victim’ (1974b, 281). There are, however, many competing explanations of her suicide.

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To better understand why Sylvia Plath killed herself, Murray M. Schwartz and Christopher Bollas – both of them trained in literary criticism as well as psychoanalysis – think it essential, like James Hoyle before them, to view her work and life as a unity. Seeking to reconstruct determining motives, they regard her art as a projection of psychic and somatic states and her suicide as ‘a convergence of actions, inner and outer’ (Schwartz and Bollas 1976, 148). Concurring with David Holbrook’s belief that an incapacity to love was at the heart of her experience, Schwartz and Bollas entitled their essay ‘The Absence at the Center: Sylvia Plath and Suicide’ (1976). Their diagnostic terminology indicates that this is mainly a psychoanalytical study rather than a literary analysis, despite being published in Criticism – ‘a quarterly for literature and the arts’. The writers see the poet as being one with her work, Ariel ‘so loaded with psychotic content as to obliterate the possibility of a supportive structure of external reality’ (150), while Plath herself progressively exhibited ‘the “concrete attitude” of the schizophrenic’ (152). When her inner world could no longer be ritualized in print, she acted out the ritual, they claim, quoting from Plath’s fiction and non-fiction alike to validate their interpretation. To what extent, then, are their conclusions impaired when it turns out that exemplary episodes which Sylvia Plath presents as her own personal experience and which the two scholars use as evidence and imbue with significance, were in fact not merely anecdotal but borrowed – or stolen – from other people?11 Even in her most autobiographical work, Plath’s tendency to fictionalize is evident. For the sake of art or rhetoric, she arranges and transforms experience to strengthen the story and the image she wants to create of herself, thus complicating any biographical or literal conclusion, and defying at the same time any simplistic interpretation that she herself invited readers to make. In order to deny the vacant space that her dead father had left behind, she persistently tried to reconstruct Otto Plath and identify with him through ritualized suicide attempts. Containing a crucial erotic component, this doomed project constitutes a central theme in her work, Schwartz and Bollas contend. ‘Her aggression, in its verbal and phallic form’ was supposedly ‘inseparable from the fantasized aggression of the father’ (1976, 157). They believe her compulsive ritual of self-destruction and need to recompose her father mirrors a strongly obsessive personality. For Sylvia Plath, ‘[p]resence and absence, love and hate, can only be united in the suicidal act’ (158). Her case as such confirms the theoretical framework subscribed to in ‘The Absence at the Center’, and the Freudian understanding of parent–child relationships complies with her own

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understanding of such relations. ‘To identify with father is both to join in incestuous union with him ... and to be his child again free from maternal retribution’ (159), Schwartz and Bollas insist. They continue on by claiming that below the Oedipal level are enacted ‘the deeper conflicts with the mother’ (162), against whom – on ‘the deepest levels’ – Plath’s aggression and murderousness are aimed (163; my italics). Bearing in mind how readily she admitted to such feelings, as well as her expressed intention to make literary use of them, this aggression may have been deep, but it was not all that hidden. The two scholars locate Plath’s identity problems in a failure to find consistent reflections of herself in the immediate human environment during the early months of her life. They think the poet’s husband and the separation from him functioned as ‘the precipitating factor’ in her final self-destructive journey. Her inadequate reconciliation with a mother who was conceived of as a Medusa, is termed ‘the ontogenetic factor’. Believing that she lacked the ability to love, Schwartz and Bollas deviate from their subject’s own understanding of her capacities. Plath preferred to see herself as an earth mother with boundless love to give. The opposite view would have been threatening to her. And this is what ‘The Absence at the Center’ suggests, that a crisis of motherhood gradually overwhelmed Sylvia Plath’s resources, flooding her with fear that she herself was the destructive mother. When her own rage coincided with the sense of abandonment caused by Ted Hughes, ‘she could no longer maintain the boundary between the needs, aims and fears of the mother and the needs, aims and fears of the child’. To them, her actual suicide was caused by an inner torment she could no longer speak of without intensifying the pain (170). Yet another theory on the suicide, one that differs from the theory advanced by Murray Schwartz and Charles Bollas, from Robert Phillips’s psychotic father fixation, and from Shelley Orgel’s fusion theory, had been launched in 1971 by Elizabeth Hardwick, who knew Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes briefly in Boston. Hardwick regards suicide as an act of desperation and a demand for relief, but she feels at the same time that it is impossible to ignore how suicide in Plath’s work ‘is edged with pleasure and triumph’. Passages in The Bell Jar and in her poems show a mind in a state of sensual distortion, ‘contemplating with grisly lucidity’ the mutilation of both soul and flesh. She thinks suicide for Plath also was ‘a performance’ and ‘an assertion of power’. The poet demonstrates the strength of her personality and teasingly enjoys death (1971, 4). In a later version of ‘On Sylvia Plath’, Hardwick clarifies that Ariel is about how suicide rather than death is the waiting denouement of every

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life. Hardwick declares Plath’s idea of killing oneself and the combined drama and sensuality in her earlier attempts as ‘a distortion, a decadence’ (1985, 107). According to critic Webster Schott (1972), towards the end Plath was at the edge of psychosis and belonged in a hospital. Since she had given up life well before actually killing herself, there were no consequences to pay for what she said or wrote, he observes. If this is so, it may help to explain the confessional level and strong emotions of her later poems, which have puzzled many a critic.

Further Death Studies Suicide can be defined as a medium of both communication and aggression. People may kill themselves because of despair and depression, illness, grief and pain, stressful life events such as the loss of a close relationship, personality disorders, delusions, loneliness, coincidences, insufferable external conditions, and a mixture of the above in combination with a host of other reasons.12 The variables may be divided into factors of a predisposing, precipitating, and triggering kind (Shulman 1998, 599) or similar labels such as those used by Schwartz and Bollas. But ‘no factor or set of factors has ever been shown to be either necessary or sufficient for suicide to occur’, suicidologist David Lester concludes in a 1998 special issue of Death Studies dedicated to Sylvia Plath (1998b, 665). When she killed herself, Plath fit several categories for increased suicide risk: earlier suicide attempts, hospitalization, and a history of mental problems, depression, marital separation, the death of her father when she was eight, residence in a foreign country, isolation, and so forth. On the other hand, people with children to care for are statistically less disposed to commit suicide, and Sylvia Plath had two children below the age of three who were dependent on her. She also had her poems to live for. In spite of many rejections, she was at least periodically convinced of their greatness. The way she left them behind does not indicate that she, at the end of her life, doubted their worth. Neither the complexity of the matter nor insufficient data has kept commentators from pronouncing conclusive explanations for this particular suicide. According to David Lester, psychologists have been interested in Plath ‘because her poems and novel give clues to the psychodynamic forces driving her life and her decision to kill herself’ (1998a, 595). What these clues are, where they may be found, and how they should be interpreted are questions with many answers. Contradictory hypotheses are launched no less by the ‘several experts’ invited to write on Plath for the issue of Death Studies edited by Lester.

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Addressing ‘Vulnerability Factors in Sylvia Plath’s Suicide’, Ernest Shulman is convinced that her father’s death initiated a chain of events which eventually led to her own death. His analysis of predisposing and precipitating factors apparently derives from indisputable evidence, but it says little about what specifically triggered the suicide (1998, 599), or so Shulman states before pointing the finger at Ted Hughes (610). He pronounces ‘Sylvia’s story … unusual in its clarity’ and ‘instructive because of the clarity with which we can see the interweaving of private thoughts and feelings with outward behaviour’ (611). Perhaps this clarity – and the sources that in Shulman’s opinion contain ‘clear evidence’ – may just as well be the result of a desire for neat explanations, narratives that add up, and a speculative rhetoric of examples. The reason Shulman gives for interpreting Plath’s literary protagonists as self-representations – that ‘[b]y general consensus, Sylvia is believed to have revealed herself accurately in all her writing’ (599; my italics) – is questionable regarding both the understanding of literature it reveals and the purported common assent it assumes. He takes what she writes quite literally and has great faith in her biographers, citing without pausing Paul Alexander’s ‘anonymous informant, who said Sylvia told her mother “several times during the fall” that Ted “wanted her to kill herself”’ (610). Details that he recounts from ‘Sylvia’s story’ are at best dubious, and his first-name familiarity with persons he has never met, but sets out to define on shaky grounds, sends out disturbing signals. However, one of Shulman’s co-contributors in Death Studies, Mark A. Runco, far from being put off, turns to Shulman himself as an authority on Plath’s marital problems, seeing her choice of husband as ‘self-destructive’ (Runco 1998, 649) and her writing as ‘authentic self-expression’ (644). Thus, to bolster the credibility and persuasive weight of anecdotal evidence, a writer may not only refer back and forth between the examples he introduces, as illustrated in the analysis of Alexander’s technique in the previous chapter, ‘rhetoricians’ of exemplarity may for the same reasons also refer to each other, the anecdotes passing through so many hands that their historical origin becomes obscure, and the content appears to be repeatedly confirmed. In some cases, totally new information may be constructed along the way. Without recourse to any sources, we hear from Runco – probably for the first time ever – that ‘[the Hugheses] were separated more than once’, and that after a car crash ‘her son was left with a deformity of the eye’ (647). Relying on a psychoeconomic approach to behaviour, Runco argues in ‘Suicide and Creativity: The Case of Sylvia Plath’ rather commonsensically that the more an individual has invested, the more she has to lose and the less likely she is to remain flexible and

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creative. Runco believes that Plath’s huge investment of time and energy in her writing may have contributed specifically to her sensitivity and thereby predisposed her to depression. The stress she experienced was magnified and significant enough to elicit suicidal ideation. In the end, she was unwilling to invest any more, according to Runco, be it in creative potential or in life (641). Antoon A. Leenaars and Susanne Wenckstern as well regard the role of writing as a potential death-facilitating process, which ‘was certainly true of Sylvia Plath’ (1998, 625). In ‘Sylvia Plath: A Protocol Analysis of Her Last Poems’, the authors approach suicide as ‘a multidimensional malaise’ requiring ‘a multidimensional perspective’ (620). The poems she wrote during her last six months are defined as personal documents of the same kind as suicidal notes and diaries that offer insight into the writer’s suicidal mind (616). Leenaars and Wenckstern find the following psychological themes to be omnipresent: unbearable pain; an emotional state of forlornness, deprivation, and distress; heightened disturbance; overpowered by emotion and mental constriction; a serious disorder in adjustment; frustrated and unsatisfied needs; and wanting, if not needing, to egress. (625)

Given their constant appearance in her poems, it follows by implication that these themes were likewise constantly in her suicidal mind, they claim. On the other hand, Benigna Gerisch sees Plath’s work as providing a feminist example of ‘the greater difficulty for women in achieving a positive femininity, physically and sexually’ (1998, 753). Rather than sticking to Plath’s individual fate and separation conflicts, Gerisch chooses a more abstract perspective compared to Leenaar and Wenckstern’s emphasis on unbearable pain. She intends to highlight paradigmatic aspects in women’s suicidality, outlining their project as nothing less than ‘an active killing of the female role’. In her version, female authors murder themselves mainly for reasons of gender. They have not been allowed to develop a mature sense of a self that comprises the roles of woman, writer, and mother, but achieve in death what they seem to have been refused in life: ‘a sense of self, power, and autonomy’ (757).13 The antagonist in Gerisch’s narrative of failed identity formation is Sylvia Plath’s mother and her ‘clutch’. She evidently has a lot to answer for. First, their traumatized mother–daughter relationship brought disappointment to Sylvia’s connection with her father, which then had other unfortunate consequences. Second, Aurelia Plath was by and large responsible for her daughter’s emotionally charged poetry. In an effort to

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appease sibling jealousy when caring for her baby son, Mrs Plath encouraged Sylvia to read the newspaper. What the busy mother with her hands full perhaps just devised as a way to redirect attention in specific situations, Gerisch invokes as an example to argue that her action brought about a desymbolizing and resymbolizing process in Plath’s inner world in which the emotionally loaded experience (jealousy and anger) is inadequately redirected into a world of symbolic speech, which binds and masks the emotion only enabling its distorted expression. (739)

Third, the eczema Sylvia Plath supposedly suffered from as a child was very likely a consequence of her mother’s profound ambivalence towards her, we learn here. At the same time, the alleged eczema is not an issue addressed in any of the biographies, and Gerisch gives no sources to confirm either its importance or its existence. Aurelia Plath describes her daughter as ‘a healthy, merry child – the center of attention most of her waking time’ (Letters Home, 13). Mrs Plath fares little better in a study by Lisa Firestone and Joyce Catlett. The authors propose a treatment that might have led to another outcome for Plath had she only been encouraged to vocalize negative thoughts and behaviours. Advocating the merits of voice therapy, they believe it would have made her ‘able to feel the death wishes that her mother must have felt toward her (on an unconscious level) throughout her childhood’ (1998, 687). Firestone and Catlett write that Aurelia Plath and Ted Hughes ‘both claimed to love her, while criticizing and attempting to control her life’. They further maintain that Plath’s hostile attitudes to herself, to others, and to life in general were more representative of her mother’s views than her own (673). No sources are stated in support of their pronouncements on either Mrs Plath or Hughes. The hypothetical voice therapy session Firestone and Catlett outline, in the form of a dialogue compiled from real statements made by patients with a similar family history, gives no indication of being a parody. Having been encouraged to really let go, ‘SP’ gratefully confides to her therapist that the negative voice which has told her so many times how worthless and what a no-good writer she is, actually came from her mother, together with ‘the final command’ to kill herself. After this revelation, they move on to discuss practical matters such as getting help with child care. Upon hearing that ‘[e]verybody has problems with their children sometimes and feels frustrated and even angry’, SP replies: ‘That’s interesting, I hadn’t thought about it that way’ (684–85). And voila: Most of her problems are solved.

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Their approach resembles how Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller used Sylvia Plath to serve her needs in a crusade against conventional childrearing. For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Child-Rearing (1980) contains a six-page chapter entitled ‘Sylvia Plath: An Example of Forbidden Suffering’. Even though her life according to Miller was not more difficult than millions of other lives, Plath experienced joys and sorrows more intensely than the rest of us. Yet it was not the suffering in itself which made her despair, but rather ‘the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another person’ – that is, to her mother. In one sentence, Miller summarizes the tragedy of Sylvia Plath, which contains ‘the explanation for her suicide as well’. She was not able to write aggressive and unhappy letters to her mother because Mrs Plath needed reassurance, or Sylvia at least thought she needed this reassurance. Thus it follows that if she had been able to write such letters, ‘she would not have had to commit suicide’ (Miller 1987, 255). Despite having no privileged information at her disposal, Miller is equally certain about Aurelia Plath’s reactions and her motivation for publishing Letters Home. She presumably did so for reasons of guilt, to prove that she could not be blamed for her daughter’s suicide. In the eyes of the psychoanalyst, however, Mrs Plath only demonstrates that she was not able to experience grief over her own inability to understand her daughter’s situation. But the example that Miller lifts from Letters Home to illustrate Aurelia Plath’s maternal deficiency is – like Benigna Gerisch’s example – not self-evident. Many parents would probably have acted likewise in the episode Mrs Plath recounts of how her daughter’s first poem with tragic undertones came about. Inspired by the accidental blurring of one of her pastels, Sylvia at fourteen had written ‘I thought that I could not be hurt’. During this time, she had treated the accident lightly, comforting the grieving vandal – her own grandmother. The same night, she wrote in a poem about ‘careless hands’ reaching out to destroy her ‘silver web of happiness’. Aurelia Plath renders the story rather humorously as a curiosity (Letters Home, 33–34). According to Alice Miller, she should have realized that the pain expressed in the poem was not caused by a damaged picture but instead symbolized the destruction of her daughter’s self. When a mother misunderstands her child’s emotions in the way Mrs Plath did here, a sensitive child will do the utmost to hide authentic feelings from her, Miller claims. We, on the other hand, may be permitted to ask how she, who did not witness the incident nor talk to any of those involved, can be so certain of her own judgments.

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Instead of psychologizing, we could take a literary approach to the chosen example and read ‘I thought that I could not be hurt’ as part of an expressive, melodramatic tradition favoured by pupils and teachers alike. In connection with her story, Mrs Plath reports of hearing from Sylvia’s English teacher, Wilbury Crockett, that a colleague of his had reacted to the poem with amazement, thinking it ‘[i]ncredible that one so young could have experienced anything so devastating’. To this, the young poet delivered a comment straight from a textbook in Literary Pragmatism: ‘Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader’. In her diary, she notes with satisfaction how Mr Crockett had read aloud four of her poems in class, preferring ‘I thought that I could not be hurt’ above the others. He had remarked that she had a lyric gift beyond the ordinary. Overjoyed by his comment, she was in the future ‘confident of admiration from Mr. C!’ (in Letters Home, 34). Sylvia Plath’s case fits nicely with the prevailing theories that Alice Miller endorsed. She contends that Plath’s letters home ‘are testimony of the false self [Sylvia] constructed (whereas her true self is speaking in The Bell Jar)’. By publishing the letters, her mother had accordingly erected ‘an imposing monument to her daughter’s false self’. With the exhibition of her findings, Miller pronounces ‘what suicide really is: the only possible way to express the true self – at the expense of life itself’ (1987, 257; my italics). To approach literary texts in the way of Shelley Orgel and Alice Miller – i.e. text as imprint of a personality directly mirroring the writer’s emotions – is a pursuit by no means practised only by non-critics or people outside the literary profession. Whatever indications of self-reflexivity we as readers detect in multilayered literature depend upon what we choose to focus on and want to see. Ironically, Ted Hughes, who as well was preoccupied with differentiating Plath’s false self from the real/true one, locates the most genuine self in places that Miller does not. With the exception of the journal and her later poems, he defined The Bell Jar and the rest of her production as waste products of her ‘old false self’ (Hughes 1987, xiv). It is thought-provoking that therapists, who ought to be familiar with people making up identities for themselves and with delusional patients having problems separating fantasies from reality, are so uncritical of written texts. They take memoirs, biographies, and other literary presentations as uncomplicated documents instead of analysing them as linguistic and rhetorical constructions created by an author for this or that purpose. But they must also take this same trusting attitude for granted in their own readers. If we employ Larry Scanlon’s definition of example as

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‘a narrative enactment of cultural authority’ (Chapter One, 34–35), it is time to ask what kind of credulous community Alice Miller, Benigna Gerisch, Ernest Shulman, Mark Runco, and similar professionals write for when they assume that their anecdotal evidence carries the portentous meaning they have invested in it without readers reacting to the shaky relationship that exists between the example, the text within which it is interpolated, and the principal argument it is cited to support. The ethics in this kind of accusative rhetoric is another area that begs for exploration.

Creativity and Madness – or the Aristotle Effect A perception of literature related to Miller’s is applied in Sounds from the Bell Jar: Ten Psychotic Authors (1990), written by Gordon Claridge, a lecturer in abnormal psychology, in cooperation with literary scholars Ruth Pryor and Gwen Watkins. The ten exemplary figures studied in the book – predefined in the title as psychotics – cover a long period of history, from a medieval mystic and a contemporary of Chaucer to Sylvia Plath. Everything these authors wrote is treated as reflections of their psyche and in Plath’s case as autobiographical documentation of, among other things, ‘her own inner worthlessness’ (Claridge et al. 1990, 207). Creativity and madness, the relation between the two states, and features which the chosen authors have in common are the topics that Claridge, Pryor, and Watkins examine. Biographical accounts of the authors are followed by case descriptions and a diagnosis. According to Sounds from the Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath ‘clearly meets’ established criteria for major depression, her existential anxiety so severe ‘that it can only be judged schizophrenic’. And now – that is, when the study was published – she would probably ‘be diagnosed as suffering from a schizoaffective psychotic disorder, with predominantly depressive features’ (211). Antonia White and Virginia Woolf are analysed in the same chapter as Plath. White describes how she in her periods of madness felt separated from the world, as if she were ‘gasping for air inside a belljar’. Plath, then, may have made the bell jar imagery famous, but she was not its originator. For many years, Virginia Woolf represented a literary model Plath aspired to emulate. From the description Claridge and his co-authors give, we can ascertain several similarities between them. Like many of the other writers investigated, they were both avid journal keepers and confessed to being dependent on putting into words what they saw and experienced. Their psychosis may have been the source of their creativity, but it also took their lives. They both talked about feeling every ten years or so a

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strong urge to kill themselves. Yet their journals show that during difficult periods they thought about suicide more often. Skinless and demanding in their need for affection, they were paranoid about the people closest to them and believed themselves betrayed and plotted against. Woolf and Plath both had a family history of mental illness. Friends found them unreliable. They made up stories about others and ascribed to them preposterous personalities. Before their breakdowns, they suffered from headaches and – similar to several of the other examples – they were obsessed with afflictions to the eyes, despite there being no evidence that any one of them had less than normal vision, or so we can read in Sounds from the Bell Jar. The qualities that Sylvia Plath incarnates as an exemplary psychotic author according to Claridge, Pryor, and Watkins are curiously negative, their assessment of her basically conducted on information from Edward Butscher. As a little girl, she was ‘consumed with jealousy’ towards her brother, ‘given to outbursts of rage, and frequently tried to run away’. She was very dependent on her mother and craved her father’s approval. Her feelings towards this ‘severe and rigid disciplinarian’ were ‘[a]lmost certainly’ partly sexual. At school, she was manipulative, affected, intensely competitive, strained, unadaptable, and demanding. She overreacted in every situation and was ‘never popular’. At Smith, ‘she was seen as a poseuse, a demanding and difficult colleague, a melodramatic loner’. And while at Cambridge, she was inconsiderate and difficult to get on with, consistently embarrassing fellow students ‘with her desperate pursuit of men and her attention-seeking behaviour’ (200–04). All this is plainly stated in a language marked by hyperbole and intensifiers but not validated by sources. The proof given of the ‘extreme jealousy’ which Plath developed towards her husband – ‘huge and authoritarian, like her father’ – is that she ‘would often burn his notes and drafts if he came home later than she thought he should have done’ (204– 05; my italics). She actually did set fire to his papers and desk debris once or possibly twice the summer before they separated, and at the same time she burned some of her own drafts. In addition, she once tore Hughes’s papers and his Shakespeare to fluff when his lunch with a lady who was working for the BBC lasted longer than she had expected. Contributing in 1998 to a book on Genius and the Mind: Studies of Creativity and Temperament, Gordon Claridge describes their procedure for establishing the psychiatric diagnoses they presented in Sounds from the Bell Jar. Based on manual scoring according to the Schedule for affective disorders and schizophrenia – life-time version (SADS-L),

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The fallibility of such a procedure ought to be obvious. Claridge states that the two literary scholars were ‘sufficiently familiar with the authors’ works and biographical detail to be able to provide the information necessary to arrive at a psychiatric diagnosis’ (236). But what does this imply? What is required for making a reliable diagnosis from a distance? How well did the key witnesses actually know the authors in question, given that two of them lived during the fourteenth century? Is not the interpretation of symptoms by necessity subjective and equally so the retrieval of supportive data from different kinds of literary texts? For his part, Claridge does not question either the feasibility or the ethics of their system, complaining only that ‘[a]s a doyenne of feminism, Plath has proved difficult to discuss objectively from a psychiatric viewpoint’ (1998, 237). Otherwise, he seems to think that their method was fair and objective enough. A later study, this time involving a polydiagnostic computer programme into which biographical and clinical information was fed, largely confirms the original results; according to Claridge in 1998, schizophrenia was still the prevalent diagnosis given to the authors. But human involvement is not avoided just by resorting to a computer. Somebody has to choose what to put into the programme and what to leave out, and the available data may be faulty and insufficient. Similar to numerous other commentators, Claridge, Pryor, and Watkins note the contrast between what Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal versus what she wrote in her letters during the same period, characterizing the discrepancy as ‘schizoid’ and as clear evidence of her being ‘a psychotic writer’. Plath’s poems and prose, they assert, show this ‘equally clearly’ (1990, 207). However, apart from declaring all her work autobiographical, they do not elaborate any further on the relations between life and literature or consider that content and form vary both with the genre, the public, and the purpose for which the texts have been written. Contrary to Gordon Claridge, Albert Rothenberg, a Professor of Psychiatry, argues that far from being the source or the price of creativity, mental illness is actually an obstacle to creative work. In Creativity and Madness (1990), Rothenberg defines creative thinking as a fundamentally conscious activity thriving best in ‘normal’ and mentally healthy conditions. According to his research, there is nothing pathological in creativity, although psychosis and outstanding creativity may coexist in

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individuals such as Plath. Under the chapter heading ‘Self-destruction and Self-creation’, he dedicates a few pages to her case as he understands it, claiming that she was unable to turn creative impulses into self-creation. She used poetry primarily to express destructiveness in order to control and expel feelings rather than strive for awareness and subsequent change. Poems such as ‘Edge’ and ‘The Detective’ he reads as suicide notes – not as written explanations to be found after the fact, but as cries for help saying ‘please stop me’ (1990, 76). Albert Rothenberg aims to overrule common misconceptions of interdependence between creativity and madness, yet he ends up spreading his own misconceptions about Sylvia Plath. He thinks many of her poems indicate that she struggled with hostile feelings towards her children and maintains that his interpretation is confirmed by the circumstances of her suicide: Turning on the gas in the kitchen stove early in the morning while her children were sleeping nearby, she made no provision for protecting them from the fumes that took her own life. They only survived by chance when an au pair woman came to the house. It is impossible to know now whether or not Plath had consciously intended to murder her own children, but there is little doubt about the expression of that type of destructive feelings toward children in the poem Edge. The serpents are white and are unbrutally enfolded into the mother, but they are murdered, nevertheless. (72)

Rothenberg’s version of what happened is opposed by several accounts published both before and after Creativity and Madness, detailing what Plath did to safeguard her children against the gas – stuffing towels and cloth under the doors of the kitchen and the bedroom, sticking adhesive tape around the edges, opening their window, leaving them food in case they got hungry.14 Hence, on what kind of information did Rothenberg base his serious allegation, that she ‘made no provision’ to protect the children because she probably wanted to kill them as well? No sources are stated. Does his concern, then, for correcting unfounded popular notions about artists and creativity – such as the idea that artists possess a very special talent, or the myth of the inspired poet who takes everything out from himself – not comprise an equally conscientious concern for presenting his own exemplary cases fairly? Is it the rhetoric of example that leads him and other such adherents astray, or does this practice offer writers an opportunity to argue – speculatively – for their opinions? In Creativity and Madness as well as in a letter to the American Journal of Psychiatry (1995), Rothenberg notes that the stereotype of the

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mad artist dating back to Antiquity has not been empirically substantiated, and he denounces the research methodology which gives the impression of proving the opposite: that there is a clear link between creativity and mental illness. The investigations can be criticized on the grounds of inadequate comparison subjects, biased selection procedures, poor statistical data, and misrepresentation of statistics, he claims. In addition to works mentioned by Rothenberg, David Lester’s Suicide in Creative Women (1993) qualifies for several of these objections. Commenting on a specific article, Rothenberg observes that the authors appear to be unaware that modern biographies of famous people, especially those in creative fields, tend to emphasize foibles rather than virtues and thereby continue the stereotype of the artist as mentally ill.

His warning that it is neither scientific nor clinically acceptable to make psychiatric diagnoses ‘without direct access to the subject and totally on the basis of secondary sources of media, biography, or hearsay’ (1990, 3; 1995, 815–16) sounds as if it were especially designed for studies involving Sylvia Plath. Lester, writing in 1993, relies on Edward Butscher’s biography from 1976 for details of her life and retains, oddly enough, the biographer’s use of fictional names for people and places several years after others had openly identified the personalities involved. Otto Plath is described as ‘a mild mannered academic’ (1993, 42), in opposition to Claridge’s ‘severe and rigid disciplinarian’ (1990, 200). Since Butscher ‘says little about Ted’, this gives Lester an opportunity to speculate: ‘Perhaps Ted was not enthusiastic about having children? Perhaps after being the more successful writer in the family at first, he was threatened by Sylvia’s growing skill and success?’ (1993, 40).15 Contrary to Rothenberg, Professor of Psychology James C. Kaufman asserts that the vision of writers living disturbed, troubled lives is supported by a multitude of studies which demonstrate their proneness to mental illness. According to Kaufman’s own investigations, female poets were significantly more likely to suffer from mental illness than other kinds of writers. In Journal of Creative Behavior, he dubbed these results ‘the Sylvia Plath effect’ (2001). They were confirmed in an analysis comparing female poets to an extended group of ‘eminent women’. But trying to explain his findings, Kaufman can only offer hypotheses, one being that instead of coping with their muse, young female poets at risk let themselves be swallowed. It is unclear to what extent he has actually taken in the consequences of Rothenberg’s methodological objections and considered likely sources of error in the biographical data which he picks from rather superficial reference works.

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When researching the relationship between creativity and madness, it is necessary to bear in mind the stereotyping of literary history and writers’ lives which I commented on in Chapter One (38–43). While the relationship between creativity and mental illness may still be unclear, we do at least know that the expectation that great artists are supposed to be more or less mad dates back to Antiquity. Socrates looked on the work of poets as irrational, and Plato developed his ideas into a doctrine on enthusiasm. Since we are also able to trace the convention of seeing writers as suffering melancholics specifically to Aristotle and to his connecting melancholy with exceptional individuals, it would, from my perspective, be more relevant to talk of an Aristotle effect than a Sylvia Plath effect. But it is doubtful whether this alternative term would have been as catchy vis-à-vis a large public. Looking at Ars Poetica, where Horace makes fun of Democritus, allows us to get a further glimpse of how Antiquity viewed poets. By emphasizing native talent and shutting sober and sensible poets out from Helicon – the mountain of the nine Muses – Democritus confirms the image of poets as possessed beings. The consequence according to Horace is that ‘a goodly number take no pains to pare their nails or to shave their beards; they haunt lonely places and shun the baths’. They appear motivated by the conviction that a person who never entrusts his head to the barber Licinus ‘will win the esteem and name of poet’ (Ars Poetica 295–301). However, in spite of all his insistence on the necessity of hard work for the ambitious author, Horace does not oppose another classical notion of the poet as seer. He associates himself with the role of vates, seer or prophet, in several odes and also calls himself a ‘priest of the Muses’.16 Seneca for his part calls Virgil ‘maximus vates’ and his voice divine (De Brevitate Vitae 9.2). The importance of inherited beliefs and expectations for our perception of the world and ourselves within it cannot be underlined strongly enough. As art historians Rudolph and Margot Wittkower observe in Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (1963), [m]ankind has always been tempted to believe in unitary concepts, and the simple reciprocity of an artist’s character and work is surely an attractive thought. It is so attractive that most people implicitly accept it as incontestable. (1963, 281)

The conviction of such interdependence between personality and creativity was rooted already in Antiquity. But the presumption that poets, philosophers, and other eminent men are melancholics did not extend to painters and sculptors. The painters were defined as craftsmen belonging

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to the class of slaves and therefore assigned a decidedly inferior status. They were not among the extraordinary talented discussed by Aristotle in Problemata. In Antiquity, only intellectual work – not manual labour – was imbued with greatness and inspired by God. Not until the Renaissance, when the painters as a group freed themselves from old hierarchical systems, did they develop an artistic role mirroring the poets’ and other similarly esteemed groups. Their idealized image involved contemplation and introspection from which loneliness and isolation followed almost by necessity. Or, so they thought. Painters adopted the temperament of the unique men of genius and turned melancholics en masse. Their persons then became objects of the kind of admiration earlier reserved for their works – and for writers (Zilsel 1972; Wittkower 1963). Social concepts and conditions influence the formation of people’s character. Rudolf and Margot Wittkower do not believe in a constitutional type of artist, arguing instead that the idea of a specific creative personality results more from a changing cultural climate than from an intrinsic artistic temperament. They summarize the last five hundred years as a hegemonic battle between proponents of sense on the one hand and of sensibility on the other. The part played by artists in these shifting manifestations of personality can easily be traced (1963, 293). Whereas melancholy according to the Wittkowers surfaces as ‘an ever-recurrent topos’ in Giorgio Vasari’s portraits of artists in Le vite de’ più eccelenti architetti, pittori et scultori italiani from 1550, and was a ‘foregone conclusion’ regarding the great masters (1963, 104), the melancholic character became unfashionable in the seventeenth century. None of the great painters of the period like Rubens, Rembrandt, or Velasquez showed signs of melancholy, nor were they described as melancholics. The temperament then re-emerges in Romanticism, as ‘a condition of mental and emotional catharsis’, the scholars point out (106). Consciously or unconsciously, biographers read into artists’ characters what they expected to find, and the artists complied with these expectations. For writers and intellectuals, melancholy remained in fashion throughout; the condition manifested itself under names such as the Elizabethan malady and The English malady. Thus, when poets are portrayed as exceptional melancholics, depressed and suffering, it is reasonable to ask whether they actually were like this or whether they, with traditional epideictic exaggeration, are adapted to conform with ancient conventions. What and how much may be attributed to the biographical genre and to common stereotypes, is impossible to decide. But it is worth remembering that from the earliest times, writers have not

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only been imitating other writers’ works, they imitate a particular role as well. And Plath was no exception to the rule. On 8 January 1958, she notes in her journal (459): ‘I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be: why not make it real?’

The Divided Self In addition to Freudian interpretations, another favoured model of explanation has been to portray Sylvia Plath as a split personality consisting of multiple warring selves. Versions of the theory may be found in combination with the doctrines of Freud, such as in Edward Butscher’s biography Method and Madness (1976), and it echoes in several of the works cited above, including Alice Miller’s assumptions and Ted Hughes’s interpretation of his wife’s inner drama as a struggle between her true and false selves. Two books made into films – The Three Faces of Eve (1957), by Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey Cleckley, and Flora Rheta Schreiber’s Sybil: The True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Separate Personalities (1973) – served as popular sources contributing to such an understanding of Plath. Not least important were theories on the divided self advanced by the British psychiatrist Ronald David Laing (1927– 1989). Jeremy Hawthorn, Professor of English Literature at the University of Trondheim, Norway, refers to all three – Eve, Sybil, and R.D. – in his 1983 study called Multiple Personality and The Disintegration of Literary Character. Hawthorn specifies the motivation for his book in this way: Reading accounts of multiple personalities, he had been struck by analogies between the clinical cases and the division within literary characters so typical of the modern period. By bringing kindred portrayals together, he hoped for mutual illumination and possible explanations of the fragmented personality. One chapter is centred on Sylvia Plath. Other authors dealt with are Dostoyevsky, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Faulkner, and Arthur Miller. Regardless of its topicality at the time, the outcome of Hawthorn’s Plath analysis is perhaps not all that illuminating. No multiple personality is uncovered, neither in the writer nor in her texts, only a few traits which multiple Sibyl shares with Plath and The Bell Jar’s Esther Greenwood. The chosen characteristics are also quite common for human beings of the modern era generally. His conclusion that Plath had internalized contradictory social values which she then externalized in her literature must surely fit any number of writers.

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When Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes came to live in London at the beginning of 1960, the British capital was turning into a centre of psychopolitics. R.D. Laing, a prominent figure within the growing international trend of seeing madness as a social construct, was testing out his ideas at the Tavistock Clinique and Institute. That same year, Laing published The Divided Self in order, as he explains in the preface, ‘to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible’ (1960, 9). He believed that insecurity about one’s existence could induce a splitting of the self into separate components. His conviction that the schizophrenia prevalent among his patients was a reaction to unhealthy social conditions won sympathy in anti-authoritarian movements. The Divided Self became a tremendous hit, and its author was received as a cross between a guru and a pop star. This was a period when madness served as a commanding metaphor, and Laing defined himself as ‘one of the symptoms of the times’ (in Evans 1976, lxxv). He put into words what thousands of people were feeling and thinking, that we are all truly mad, schizoid, doubly divorced from ourselves and from everyone and everything else. Several people even insisted that they had written The Divided Self (1976, xxiv). Laing’s work made him the spokesman of intellectuals, artists, and radicals. One reason for his position in these circles may have been the use he made of modernist ideas and literary techniques (cf. Showalter 1985b, 226). An article in The Times from 1972 describes Laing as the charismatic leader of the anti-psychiatry movement, ‘a darling of the New Left’, and the man who made madness ‘noble and chick’ (Brittain 1972). In an Esquire portrait, Peter Mezan (1972), who studied with Erik H. Erikson at Harvard, remembers people ambling down Battle Street towards their therapists’ offices carrying shiny new copies of Laing’s books. It is certainly not unlikely that Sylvia Plath knew of The Divided Self and Laing’s theories. At the time, it could have been considered a title of honour to be termed a Laingian heroine with a schizoid personality. This is how Marjorie Perloff sums up Sylvia Plath in a couple of her articles (1973, 94; 1979, 156). When analysing The Bell Jar’s Esther Greenwood in another essay, Perloff evokes Laing and The Divided Self as a way to improve the understanding of why the novel ‘has become for the young of the early seventies what Catcher in the Rye was to their counterparts of the fifties: the archetypal novel that mirrors, in however distorted a form, their own personal experience’ (1972b, 508). In Stealing the Language, a study of The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (1986), Alicia Suskin Ostriker explores the divided self and Laing’s theory from a gendered perspective. She finds it ironic that his description of a psychotic

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personality’s strategy to cope with an intolerable situation and fear of revealing himself to others ‘resembles so closely a normal woman’s dilemma’ (1986, 84). She believes Plath’s ‘In Plaster’ to be ‘the most brilliant single split-self poem of our time’ (81). Hence, Plath and Laing constitute two sides of the same period coin. Yet she has proved the more durable of the pair. Laing’s treatment of schizophrenia was controversial then, and it has not fared better with the passing of years. Long-term results were poor, and genetic and biological explanations have since taken precedence. A generation after The Divided Self came out, Ronald Hayman nonetheless based his evaluation of Plath’s personality in Life and Death of Sylvia Plath (1991) on Laing’s theories. One of the first to apply Laing’s ideas to Plath was, however, David Holbrook, a former Fellow of King’s College in Cambridge, with a background in teaching and adult education. In two articles published during the summer of 1968, ‘The 200-inch distorting mirror’ and ‘R.D. Laing & the Death Circuit’, Holbrook presented his thesis on Plath and the predominant modern literature. Schizoid is his verdict pronounced on both accounts. He thinks Plath’s work clearly demonstrates the ontological insecurity – a hollow core at the centre of identity and a fundamental weakness at the heart of being – which Laing describes as typical of schizoid feelings (1968b, 35). Although Holbrook finds that Laing has ‘penetratingly illuminated’ the characteristics of schizoid experience (1968a, 57), he disagrees with him in seeing schizoid poetry as good poetry and as an admirable sign of the avant-garde. He also disagrees with Al Alvarez, who according to Holbrook commends Sylvia Plath as the epitome of everything that is right about modern expression. To him, it is the other way round, and he has little respect for Alvarez’s ‘over-willingness’ to share her sense of being a victim of oppression (1968a, 58). Acting several years before any biographer, David Holbrook was the first to accuse the Plath estate of interference and censorship. After having published his essays, he complains in a letter to The Times Literary Supplement, on 24 October 1968, that Olwyn Hughes had reacted by denying him copyright permission to discuss Plath at all. And this, he states, meant serious trouble for a book he had written on schizoid elements in the works of Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath, a book in which he intended to pursue the consequences of her attachment to suicide and efforts to involve her readers in the pursuit of death (1968c). Olwyn Hughes replied that she could hardly prevent him from discussing whatever he wanted, but as Plath’s agent, she felt ‘obliged’ to withhold permission to quote copyrighted material. The samples of his work printed in New Society and Encounter had convinced her that ‘both as

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an individual and as an artist, Sylvia Plath risked being seriously misrepresented by David Holbrook’s book’. She found offensive the implication that Plath was insane and ‘dismayingly literal’ his autobiographical reading of poems and prose. Factual errors such as his contention that The Colossus had been written in a mental hospital, made her doubt the seriousness of his work (O. Hughes 1968a).17 For his part, Holbrook thought it preposterous that an author’s agent granted copyright permission pending her own judgments of scholarship. He maintained that she was trying to suppress the debate altogether (1968d). The allegation became a standard one in the years to come. Holbrook’s book, entitled Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath and the Symbolism of Schizoid Suicide, never saw the light of day.18 Instead, he published Dylan Thomas: The Code of Night in 1972, and four years later followed Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence, in which he expresses his debt ‘to Miss Olwyn Hughes for information about certain aspects of the poet’s life’. Since he ‘by arrangement’ was able to quote extensively from Plath’s work (1976, 6), their previous differences seem to have been sorted out, in spite of his argument still relying on studies preoccupied with ‘the schizoid problem’. But several years later, when participating in a Times Literary Supplement exchange on ‘Ted Hughes and the Plath Estate’ during the spring of 1992, Holbrook writes that his Plath book had been delayed two years because of Olwyn Hughes’s many disagreements and requests for changes. Colleagues applauding that she ‘had no right to interfere with comment in a critical work’, would probably deem his closing argument more problematic: Plath’s agent should have accepted that ‘the work of this artist was singularly dangerous and even terrifying, and ought to be subjected to every scrutiny and argument’ (1992). Holbrook reacted to Sylvia Plath as if she were a symptom of modern nihilism, believing that she had become the object of a fashionable cult largely because of her suicide, schizoid tendencies, and rejection of certain kinds of femininity. Much of what she actually expressed in her work was grossly distorted and false, he claimed. Thus, the object of Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence (1976) – stated in the very first sentence as an attempt ‘to use interpretation from psychoanalysis and kindred disciplines to improve our understanding of the poetry of Sylvia Plath’ (1) – was finally neither literary nor critical but of a moral kind. Concerned with destructive dynamics in contemporary culture, his goal was ‘to distinguish between true and false solutions to the problem of existence, between philosophies based on love and those founded on hate’ (2). Here, Holbrook articulates a project for himself which other academics would

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consider to be impossible – and naïve. While most critics, according to him, had refrained from addressing the moral effects of her work, he wanted to face these head on in order to unravel the schizoid nature of her false logic per se and Plath’s message about the schizoid experience in particular. Her popularity necessitates that ‘we’ defend ourselves against her falsifications. From Holbrook’s point of view, a poem such as ‘Edge’ is false because it idolizes suicide and infanticide as well as a libidinal attachment to death. In its ‘seductive beauty’, the poem conceals ‘a false logical step – luring us into accepting that the beauty-enjoying “I” has the right to destroy the life in others’ (3). The falsity in ‘Lady Lazarus’ results from its failure to recognize that ‘one cannot repeat suicide, as she believed one could. To do it well is the end’ (290). Holbrook argues that the poem rests on a logic of pure hate, and its cool invocation of the Holocaust manifests a disturbing lack of human proportion. He believed that Plath, through her work and example, contributed to a schizoid teaching of inverted values that, among other things, confused suicide with rebirth. Needless to say, the reasoning in Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence is heavily influenced by the psychoanalysts Holbrook swears by: R.D. Laing, Harry Guntrip, W.R.D. Fairbairn, and D.W. Winnicott. Plath’s particular poetic topography reflects, he claims, the world as the schizoid sees it. Like quite a few critics before and afterwards, Holbrook declares himself as ‘not a biographer’ because his material is constructed out of Plath’s writings alone (1). He nevertheless deduces personal traits from texts he takes to be autobiographical, offering a diagnosis of the author and her work. According to him, Sylvia Plath was full of hate and recrimination. She was ‘mentally ill’ (10), had a ‘dividual self’ (7), and ‘schizoid characteristics’ (6). He repeatedly refers to her ‘schizoid condition’, clarifying that she was ‘not schizophrenic’ (109). However, in her delusion about suicide, death, and the nature of re-birth she was unquestionably ‘psychopathological’ – ‘whatever Alvarez may say’ (287). His assessment of Plath is bolstered by literary interpretations and vice versa. He finds many signs that Esther Greenwood’s problem is ‘that of an insubstantial identity’ (16) and concludes that ‘Esther “is” Sylvia Plath’, with the The Bell Jar’s author ‘speaking of her own breakdown and recovery: the baby [that Esther eventually had] was Mrs Ted Hughes’s’ (5). In several poems, she gave herself over ‘to her psychosis’ (287): ‘Edge’ – ‘beautiful but psychotic’ (271) – being one of them. Plath’s schizoid state followed from a failure in the normal growth of her identity and more specifically in the processes between mother and infant, according to Holbrook. But he does not believe that Plath’s impaired

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identity was caused by actual faults on the part of her parents. For some reason, ‘she felt “let down” by “life”’ and turned the blame against those from whom she had expected something she did not get (9). Holbrook discovered no evidence that anyone did less for her than a human being could do. He considers her confusion of life and death as a basic fault and sees her condition as so serious that no one, except perhaps a therapist with unusual insight and infinite patience, could have helped her. Poetry and Existence defines Sylvia Plath as the voice of a schizoid culture that looks on care and love with contempt, preferring the great dramas of hate. Holbrook himself was not exactly a fashionable writer, even though many of the psychiatrists he referred to were popular enough at the time. Yet the moral crusade in which he involved their names was easily presented as reactionary and anti-feminist.19 Being long in the making, his book materialized when the influence of Al Alvarez was on the decline. For Holbrook, the exponent of extremist literature still represented trendy criticism, and he made Alvarez a prime target. Since their positions differed so radically, it is perhaps merely a curiosity that Alvarez thought the other worthy of inclusion in The New Poetry (1962, 1966), his anthology of favoured ‘depth poetry’. They also coincided in their use of Sylvia Plath as an exemplary figure to argue their separate points, but they equipped her example with contradictory qualities and significance. Alvarez felt she made sense of his own call for a poetry that combines experience and psychological insight with technical skill and intelligence, whereas Holbrook summoned her as a negative case in his campaign against destructive tendencies in modern culture. He opposes Alvarez’s labelling ‘remarkable’ the objectivity with which Plath handled personal material and regards it instead as that of a schizoid individual who did not know how to respond to human suffering. Lack of empathy is an accusation he likewise directs at Alvarez: ‘To applaud her more nihilistic poems (and her suicide) is to fail to encounter her suffering’ (278). Invoking the South-African writer Andrew Brink as a witness on his side, Holbrook reproves Alvarez for calling Plath’s self-destructiveness a ‘living energy’, when it actually led to her death (286). In an essay from 1968, Brink had explored the failure of redemptive elements in her work, noting how the poetry became encapsulated, cut off from love and forgiveness. To Brink’s observation that ‘[a]t some point nullification of all took over’, Holbrook adds: ‘How can those concerned with culture approve of nullification?’ (289). The nihilistic stance gets you nowhere, Holbrook claims. Once breakdown, paranoia, madness, and other manifestations of Alvarezian extremism have been examined, what then? He thought it striking that those like Plath and Alvarez who use the

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Holocaust as an aesthetic metaphor seem obsessed with hate and death, whereas Holocaust survivors like Viktor Frankl advocate the opposite values. Art and death camps had become a diversion for the avant-garde, he maintains. Some of the principal questions which he asked were overshadowed by the weighty concepts he addressed as a matter of course – love, truth, hate, humanity, responsibility, intention, and meaning. Still, his call for a discussion of what art finally should be about is as relevant now as it was then, regardless of whether we agree with the answer he proposed to his own query: the pursuit of meaning.

Reclamation Doxa Meanwhile, feminists objected strongly to the pathologizing of Sylvia Plath to which they felt Holbrook and other male critics contributed. Within feminist studies and literary criticism, ‘madness’ came to be seen as the outcome of and a metaphor for women’s conditions in a patriarchal society and the price gifted women had to pay for exercising their creativity. In The Female Malady (1985), feminist scholar Elaine Showalter investigates the cultural history of madness as a female malady. What went on in the annals of feminist literary history was a ‘reclamation of female “victims”’ (1985b, 219). Thus, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Anne Sexton entered the stage as heroines, starring as ‘our sisters and our saints’ (4). Plath fit the role particularly well. During the post-war period, the female malady is no longer linked to hysteria but assumes the clinical form of schizophrenia, Showalter notes (203). Compared to kindred novels from the same period, she thinks The Bell Jar ‘offers the most complex account of schizophrenia as a protest against the feminine mystique of the 1950s’ (216).20 A groundbreaking publication in this so-called reclamation project was Women and Madness (1972) by Phyllis Chesler, ‘a qualified psychologist and concerned feminist’ who called for a new understanding of female psychology.21 In her book, Chesler portrays Sylvia Plath alongside three other women authors who had been hospitalized in psychiatric wards – Elizabeth Packard, Ellen West, and Zelda Fitzgerald. The four of them are described as ‘uncommonly stubborn, talented, and aggressive’ women. When their repressed energies at long last struggled free, they paid with ‘marital and maternal “disloyalty,” social ostracism, imprisonment, madness, and death’ (1973, 5). Equally, they were all ‘treated and/or imprisoned by male psychiatrists – most of whom were, quite literally, agents for their husbands’ “will”’ (12).22 Chesler quotes Esther Greenwood’s

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experiences in The Bell Jar as if they were a total match with her creator’s. Ten years on, Lynda K. Bundtzen objects to the ‘rhetoric of accountability rather than explanation’ practiced by Murray Schwartz and Christopher Bollas. They depict quite ordinary sibling jealousy as abnormal and regard the ambivalence Sylvia Plath felt towards femininity and motherhood as signs of a personal neurosis, she observes in Plath’s Incarnations (1983, 46). Bundtzen argues for an opposite approach inspired by feminist theorists like Nancy Chodorow, advocating that both the poet’s habitual ambivalence and her lacking sense of separateness should be viewed as typical characteristics of the feminine psychology (51). She suggests moreover that Plath’s engagement with the world was sound. An important component in the reclamation efforts evident in Chesler and Bundtzen is the castigation of assorted oppressors – psychiatrists, husbands, and hostile readers. The rhetoric of accountability is not exclusive to the commentators that feminists criticize. Accountability is a crucial part of the reclamation process itself. The critique of reprehensible readers can also involve a kind of psychoanalytic perspective. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), Jacqueline Rose claims that David Holbrook may have believed that he describes the failure of Sylvia Plath’s femininity, but pursuing his subtext Rose can tell us what ‘he is actually doing’. And that is ‘projecting on to Plath a familiar fantasy of femininity which makes it accountable for the destruction or salvation (one or the other) of mankind’ (1991, 18). Rose asserts that Holbrook’s writing on Sylvia Plath plainly reveals ‘the economy of sexual fantasy which underpins one form of attack on feminism’ (19). According to her, ‘Holbrook may be ridiculous, exaggerated and excessive, but at the same time he is supremely representative of the sexual imaginary precipitated by Plath’s work’ (17). Other male critics found guilty of projecting their fantasies on Sylvia Plath are Stephen Spender and Al Alvarez. Projections exercised by readers who share the same opinions as oneself are more difficult to discover – or perhaps not as important to expose. Lynda Bundtzen seems less troubled by the charged accountability rhetoric of the ardently feminist Steven Gould Axelrod than by Schwartz and Bollas’s work. In ‘The Second Destruction of Sylvia Plath’ (1985), Axelrod compares Sylvia Plath’s missing journals, a loss for which Ted Hughes was responsible, to the destruction of Jews in Nazi Germany. Someone like David Holbrook would probably regard such a comparison to be at least as disproportionate as the poet’s own use of Holocaust. Perhaps because she, like Axelrod himself, appears to put books on a par with people, Bundtzen states matter-of-factly in a later article that ‘[a]s

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Steven Gould Axelrod’s comparison of Plath’s missing journals to a Jewish victim of the Holocaust shows, many critics regard Hughes as committing an act of desecration worse than Hitler’s burning of books’ and just lumps his comparison together with the ‘endless critical fury’ aroused by Hughes (Bundtzen 1998, 434). Axelrod not only pursues the Holocaust metaphor by calling the lost journals ‘a monument to night and fog’. He also evokes more recent political atrocities by drawing a parallel to the desaparecidos of Latin America. It is ‘our responsibility’ to recognize and remember the holes in history which the missing journals represent, he argues, since ‘[those holes] stand for our lost, our disappeared ones; and they remind us of the nothingness curled like a worm at the heart of being’ (Axelrod 1985, 17). He laments the disappeared journals for their value as historical records and because he is convinced of their literary worth. His readiness to ‘reasonably surmise that in quality, the later journal entries were to earlier ones as the poems of Ariel are to Plath’s earlier poems’ is at best wishful thinking. Diaries and poems belong to different literary genres. The former are normally written with no public in mind and invite linguistic and emotional unbosoming. But it does not follow that more necessarily means better. If Axelrod is correct in assuming that much of the diary written towards the end dealt with Hughes, it quite possibly was bitter, hateful, and private. Since we know she ended up killing herself, it is just as likely that the diary reflects her growing mental despair and disintegration versus an advance in literary ability. Perhaps there is something to be said for Hughes’s explanation, that he did not want his children to read the journal? Likewise problematic is Axelrod’s presumption that along with the journals, ‘a major novel has been lost’. Could not the marital problems, which supposedly also inspired the novel, have been too close and raw to function as literature? Whether it would have proved to be a major work is of course pure speculation. Everything Sylvia Plath wrote in her letters and poems Axelrod seems to take as literal truth, and he appears to know beyond doubt that at the time of her death she was ‘in the early stages of what promised to be an ugly and protracted legal suit over child support and maintenance’ (17). Consequently, he has problems answering his own question: How could Plath leave her masterpieces – and, we might add, her two small children – in the charge of a man she had considered ‘an enemy, her erstwhile “jailer,” the “vampire” who drank her blood for seven years?’. Axelrod does not consider the possibility that she was too ill to care, that perhaps Hughes was not so terrible after all, that she longed for a reunion, or that she might have blamed herself for her/their problems. Instead, he turns to

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Adrienne Rich for help and suggests a feminist explanation. According to Rich – as quoted by Axelrod – ‘the entire history of women’s struggle for self-determination has been muffled in silence’ (18). Plath, then, enacted the fate of women’s words in a patriarchal society. All the same, it was that very society and husband that published her work. As a Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Axelrod expands on his views in Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (1990) by juxtaposing Plath’s literary and family relations. His method is based on a psychoanalytic assumption that literary influences retrace the outlines of the initial parent–child bond in a process akin to transference. Axelrod believes that writing ‘unconsciously reproduces the writer’s developmental history while at the same time seeking to correct, to avenge, and to supplant that history’ (1992, 83). On the one hand, he applies a Bloomian paradigm of agon, demonization, and anxiety of influence, discussing how Plath positions herself against and within a tradition of both male and female precursors, particularly Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. On the other hand, Axelrod’s readings are predominantly psychological and biographical. Thus, ‘Daddy’ manifests an ‘apparent uncovering of repressed Oedipal material’ (60), whereas her ‘double bind’ to Dickinson and other women writers ‘uncannily reconstitutes her relationship to her biological mother’ (129). Positive reactions to The Wound and the Cure of Words are quoted on the cover of the paperback edition. Linda Wagner-Martin recommends it as an ‘exemplary work of criticism’ – probably meaning a model to emulate – and ‘a key book in the study of contemporary poetry, not only within Plath studies’. In his acknowledgements, Axelrod reciprocates the praise, pledging his indebtedness to Wagner-Martin for her generosity as a reader of his manuscript and for her works of criticism. He describes her biography as ‘evenhanded’ and Anne Stevenson’s as ‘hostile’ (19). After Axelrod confesses to an ‘obsession’ with Plath (xi), it is probably in character that his ultimate thanks should go ‘to Sylvia Plath for being herself. It is, finally, enough’ (xii). According to a review in American Literature, the author of The Wound and the Cure of Words ostensibly ‘raises the study of Plath’s writings to an extremely challenging level’.23 However, what Axelrod does not challenge is poststructuralist feminist doxa at the time. A onesentence version of his thesis goes as follows: Sylvia Plath was a persecuted, sensitive, and politically conscious genius who refused to be gagged and therefore protested against patriarchal society, but finally succumbed to a chauvinistic culture personified by her husband. In a charged rhetoric of example, his argument depends on Freudian theories,

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Laing’s true and false-self system, and a poststructuralist vocabulary supplied by Jacques Lacan among others. Axelrod terms his own book a ‘biography of the imagination’ because it meditates on Plath’s struggle for voice. To her discourse he has added his own, declaring thereby to have caused ‘what Roland Barthes called a “second language” to float above the first’ (ix).24 In reality, he refers extensively to her texts, or he quotes from them, incorporating her words into his sentences without making distinctions between the genres or categories of texts from which they are taken. Despite the carefulness with which Plath composed her life in words, Axelrod hardly takes into account that texts serve specific purposes within a composite work. Striking metaphors from poems or The Bell Jar are cited side by side with phrases from letters and journals to explain the poet’s reactions or feelings as he sees them, like here: ‘Split between a mark and a void, Plath indicated that whereas inscribed utterance was an “expression of life” (J 81), to be “dumb” was to be a “death’s head” (BJ 22)’ (4). A particular metaphor expressed by Esther Greenwood ‘indicates’, according to The Wound and the Cure of Words, ‘that Plath’s father was both basic to her imagination and inimical to it, a “buried male muse” and a “panther” on the stairs, stalking her discourse (J 223; CP 22)’ (31). We often do not know what poems or prose pieces he is referring to without consulting Collected Poems or Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. The relevance or applicability of these sources is not discussed, although he dwells on a lot more than imaginary figures. Musing about Sylvia Plath’s reasons for acting the way she did, he characterizes others freely along the way: For she knew herself to be a woman; and beyond that fact, her relations with her father, and eventually with her husband, were unsatisfactory. Her father dominated her and the other family members, then rejected them by dying. Her husband similarly dominated her, then deserted her. Each retained a lien on her creativity. (97)

The discussion in The Wound and the Cure of Words is full of explicit and hidden assumptions. In fact, the book may be used as a demonstration of textual criticism (Axelrod’s ‘second language’), appropriating the literary text (Plath’s ‘first language’) for its own needs and disregarding the problematic relationship between inserted exemplifications and critical text – his ‘biography of the imagination’. Axelrod is still convinced about the quality of the lost journals, repeating his arguments from 1985, suggesting that Plath might have left her manuscripts to Hughes because ‘she wished to continue to be his victim even after death, that she wished her work to share in her suicide’

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(19). Or – again following Adrienne Rich – Axelrod wonders if she was representing herself in yet another way as a being who ‘could hardly speak’ (CP 223)? In making her inscription vulnerable to dismemberment by male hands, was she lodging her final protest, delivering her final proof, writing her final text, the most bitter and unanswerable yet? (20)

Portraying the poet as a victim of an oppressive patriarchal tradition, Axelrod draws on a number of feminist theorists, activists, and authors. Sylvia Plath apparently rebelled ‘against masculine law that associates women with dumbness or with degraded language’ in exactly the same spirit in which Hélène Cixous describes women’s torment of speaking in assemblies and takes up ‘the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus’. He promotes Plath’s political awareness just as staunchly as Janice Markey does, claiming that the poet ‘related her struggle against silence to the larger struggles of oppressed peoples everywhere’. But despite all her efforts, ‘silence won a major victory over her in the end’. The reason for this statement is her lost or destroyed texts, which Axelrod now maintains constitute ‘a significant portion’ of what she had written (14). However, if we take into account how widely Plath’s work has been read and commented on, silence is surely not the first word which comes to mind. The significance that Axelrod ascribes to Victoria Lucas, the pseudonym Sylvia Plath elected for herself when publishing The Bell Jar, can serve to illustrate his technique further. The fact that ‘Victoria’ suggests victory he liberally interprets as ‘yet another instance of Plath’s conception of experience as a battle’. Her novel may therefore represent ‘a triumph over her enemies or over doubts that she could write a novel’. Without any reference, Axelrod speculates that Sylvia Plath ‘seems’ to have connected Victoria with Queen Victoria and ‘therefore with maternity, with the past, and with a life devoted to mourning’. She ‘probably’ thought of her own mother as Victorian and ‘undoubtedly’ intended an ironic contrast between the name’s nostalgic connotations and the novel’s shocking modernity, at the same time, ‘perhaps unconsciously’, suggesting that the novel represented a realization of Aurelia Plath’s own stunted aspirations (114–15). According to The Wound and the Cure of Words, Sylvia Plath may as well have conceived a number of other things when she decided on this particular pseudonym. Based on the number and duplications of letters, he argues for similarities between the names Victoria Lucas and Virginia Woolf and suggests that the etymology of Lucas ‘might even’ be traced backward through ‘Lupus’ (wolf) to ‘Woolf’. Still, no etymological connection exists between the Hebrew name ‘Lukas’ and the Greek noun

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lykos other than a typical Derridean false one. But the quick deduction gives him a chance to state that ‘as in Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man, a Woolf seems to be hiding in the Greenwood’ of The Bell Jar, and to continue his speculations. Axelrod’s reading may perhaps qualify as exemplary poststructuralist, yet in a logocentric world, it is nonetheless unreasonable and far from convincing. An intentionalist explanation of the pseudonym can be found in Bitter Fame. Anne Stevenson describes it as ‘drawn from Ted’s world: “Victoria” after his favorite Yorkshire cousin, Victoria (Vicky) Farrar, and “Lucas” after his friend Lucas Myers’ (1989a, 227). When The Bell Jar was published, Myers had similar associations: I narcissistically thought she had chosen the names of Ted’s first cousin Vicky and of his friend as a code for Ted himself and as an expression of the juncture between the partners in that marriage, a powerful unity which lasted most of its seven years. (Myers 1989, 319)

An Alternative Explanation? Psychoanalytic approaches to Sylvia Plath fall broadly into two categories, according to Al Strangeways. The first uses object-relations theory mainly inspired by D.W. Winnicott and Nancy Chodorow, and the second uses Lacanian theory. In Sylvia Plath: The Shaping of Shadows (1998), Strangeways asserts that both kinds tend to fall into the trap which besets most of the Plath criticism, in the sense that they move towards one of the extremes in a life–art continuum. While the object-relations criticism in its quest for the ‘real’ people behind the texts easily resorts to speculative biographicalization, Lacanian criticism is in danger of abstract generalization when severing the relation between a literary work and its originator (1998, 133–36). She consigns Lynda Bundtzen and Steven Gould Axelrod, together with David Holbrook, to the biographical borderline, Jacqueline Rose to the opposite abstraction end, and then announces that she herself intends to combine the merits of both sides in order to arrive at a more balanced judgment. Apparently unlike others, Strangeways aims to show how ‘psychoanalytic theory can be used without falling into the extremes of either’ (144). Her tidy binary model does not, however, sufficiently account for the role played by traditional Freudian theories or the influence of R.D. Laing. Several commentators fuse different schools and have not been as critically blind to Sylvia Plath’s interest in psychoanalysis, as Strangeways claims. She defines precursors’ contributions as limited, single-minded, and oversimplifying in their idealization of either male or female behaviour.

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But none of Strangeways’s exemplary extremists are likely to agree with the characterization she gives of them. Similar to most critics before and after, Strangeways included, they all consider their own interpretations to be more balanced and valid than those put forth by their opponents. Jacqueline Rose in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath argues eloquently for the necessity of embracing all sides of Plath’s complex and ambiguous work. And her stance is not too abstract – or poststructuralist – in its orientation to dismiss biographical material. Strangeways’s sceptical attitude towards critics who practise psychoanalysis on Sylvia Plath and read her work as a symptom of psychosis, echoes a warning that Henry James’s biographer, Leon Edel, offered to David Holbrook during his 1968 dispute with Olwyn Hughes: A critic who makes use of the writings of psychoanalysis is on dangerous grounds if he applies them to diagnostic ends and focuses on a fragment of an imagination instead of its totality. The theories invoked by Holbrook had been developed in a clinical context and were largely intended for use in clinical situations. The death-and-resurrection imagery of Plath may embody pathological elements, but it is nevertheless a profoundly humane theme, Edel (1968) observes in The Times Literary Supplement: To hypothesize ‘schizoid problems’ ignores many things, not least that her poems are not a record of ‘primary process’ but are at many removes from it. They cannot even be called ‘dream material’, for there are associations built into them – and a great deal of literary tradition as well.

A radically different medical hypothesis concerning Sylvia Plath’s psychodynamic profile was launched in TriQuarterly during the winter of 1990 and 1991 by Catherine Thompson. In opposition to traditional feminist and psychoanalytic efforts at explaining the ‘enigma of Plath’s psychology’, she offers a biochemical solution that is important, she contends, for understanding the logic of Plath’s poems. Having studied the poet’s journals and letters closely, Thompson finds indications that she was almost certainly suffering from a severe form of the hormonal disorder now recognized as premenstrual syndrome, or PMS. In fact, she manifests all the classic symptoms of severe cases, including extreme depression and attempted suicide. (1990/91, 221)

Thompson demonstrates the cyclical pattern in Sylvia Plath’s depressions – all the emotional ‘ricocheting’ and ‘catapulting’ between contrasting moods that she writes about in her journal, her irritability, anxiety, tension, vituperative rage, and hostility. Her physical ailments (fatigue, sinusitis,

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rhinitis, insomnia, headaches, sore throats, increased need for sleep, nausea, vomiting, changes in appetite, clumsiness, etc.) are likewise familiar PMS symptoms contributing to what appears as a Jekyll and Hyde personality. According to medical studies, the severity of such a disorder increases following an interruption of the menstrual cycle. During her final three years, Sylvia Plath gave birth to a daughter in April 1960, endured a miscarriage in February 1961, and gave birth to a son the following January. Thompson maintains that her reproductive history almost guaranteed some form of extreme emotional disruption once she began menstruating again after the birth of her second child, with a probable further disruption following the cessation of breastfeeding.

She adds that Plath seems to have suffered from lengthy postpartum depressions (230–31). These ‘emotional disruptions’ may not only explain episodes of incomprehensible and uncontrolled behaviour, but coinciding with the break-up of her marriage, and perhaps having contributed to it, they may also shed some light on her suicide. Catherine Thompson thinks Plath’s reactions in July of 1962 – ripping the telephone wires from the wall, driving twenty-five miles to some acquaintances, weeping uncontrollably, and burning Hughes’s and her own manuscripts in a bonfire – have a hysterical quality about them, which indicates hormonal influence as much as influences from jealousy and her stressful situation. She argues that for women who do not understand the biochemical origins of their problems, PMS usually creates secondary psychological effects in addition to the primary effects brought on by hormonal disruption. In Plath’s case, ‘insights offered her by psychoanalysis and her study of Freud only helped to cast doubt on her own instinctive perception of herself as a strong, vibrant, mentally healthy human being’, Thompson suggests. Plath’s sense of being at the mercy of something beyond her, she describes as ‘accurate’, whereas the culturally conditioned belief that severe depression is a psychological problem that can be altered by willpower only helped to reinforce her sense of personal failure (231). She points at numerous attempts in the medical literature that blame PMS symptoms on unresolved Oedipal complexes, rejection of the female role, guilt feelings about sex, or a generally neurotic personality (247). For Sylvia Plath, the controlling moon was a reality, according to Catherine Thompson. The violent and unsettling images in her late production, where she lashes out at everyone, reflect the poet’s effort to find objective correlations for her emotional state, the mood of the poems

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changing with her cycle. As a title for her article on Plath and PMS, Thompson has chosen to combine expressions the poet herself used about these poems (237, 241): ‘Dawn Poems in Blood’. She defines the colour red as a Plathian emblem ‘of the transforming power of female fertility’ (239) and lists a number of menstrual dawn poems which contain metaphors for ovulation and menstruation. Furthermore, she links Plath’s perception of death and rebirth to her menstrual phases, believing that her last poems show an increasing awareness on the poet’s part that her cycles of death and rebirth will continue no matter what she does, and reveal her sense of failure and abandonment. … The exhilaration of taking control of her own life by moving to London, where she could be among friends and pursue a literary career, has worn off, and, by February, the finality of her situation sinks in. (242)

In a later issue of TriQuarterly, two letters applaud Thompson’s major conclusions. Not quite convinced that PMS gave the whole answer, Olwyn Hughes all the same thinks it may explain the mysterious mood shifts of her sister-in-law, given how they had no discernible cause and were so disproportionate in their outward manifestations. She cites her brother who spoke of changes in Plath’s eating habits – another recognized symptom – and always felt that some chemical imbalance was involved. However, one reason why Thompson’s piece really ‘bowled [her] over’ was that their daughter – Olwyn’s niece – suffered from a severe form of PMS (1991, 210–11). Congratulating Thompson on the ‘huge step’ she had taken, Olwyn Hughes concedes: ‘It is quite a shock to digest all this – after thinking for so long that Sylvia’s subconscious mind was her prison, and to suddenly realise it may well have been in part, or wholly, her body’ (212). Anne Stevenson is so impressed by the article that she addresses Catherine Thompson as ‘Dr.’, even though on the contributor’s list, Thompson appears as a poetry student in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Characterizing ‘“Dawn Poems in Blood”: Sylvia Plath and PMS’ as ‘empirical, informed and convincing’, Stevenson declares that ‘no future study of Plath will be able to ignore the probable effect of premenstrual syndrome on her imagination and behaviour’ (1991, 212). Still, that is exactly what most subsequent studies have done. One reason for this may be that the writers have not checked earlier research well enough. Or, perhaps the biochemical explanation of Plath’s debilitating psychic upheavals has been largely ignored because if taken seriously, it limits the possibilities for psychological speculation. A rare exception, Kate Moses (2000) observes on Salon.com that the extended

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version of Plath’s journals supports the PMS theory, adding supplementary material herself to confirm Thompson’s argument.25 Fifteen years after publication, ‘Dawn Poems in Blood’ receives quite the opposite kind of attention from William Todd Schultz, editor and contributor to Handbook of Psychobiography (2005). Schultz reserves part of his chapter on Sylvia Plath to a polemic against Catherine Thompson for having produced ‘what is doubtless one of the most reductionistic and irresponsibly inferential case studies’ he has ever had ‘the misfortune to discover’ (Schultz 2005b, 160). Thompson accordingly represents the reverse side of what his own handbook allegedly contains: ‘the best that psychobiography has to offer, in the words of its most talented practitioners’ (2005a, 3), among whom Schultz himself is ranked as ‘one of the world’s most respected’.26 Personally, there are many other studies I would rather nominate for a ‘worst-of’ list. Perhaps Schultz’s attack on Thompson is best seen as a territorial defence to keep amateurs from meddling in psychobiography. Another reason for his curiously heavy-handed disparagement could be Thompson’s dismissal of Freudian explanations, since Schultz argues for reintroducing none other than Freud into the dialogue. According to Schultz, Plath ‘lived Freud’s [“Mourning and Melancholia”] to the letter’ (2005b, 172). In order to demonstrate his claim, that Sylvia Plath followed the stages of pre-Oedipal conflicts as outlined by Freud, Schultz, like Thompson, has to make assumptions. He takes literally what Plath wrote and states along the way that she had ‘several years of intense analysis’ (163), when one year of part-time analysis probably would have been a description closer to the truth. And now we are almost back to where this chapter started, ready for yet another turn on the merry-go-round of Plath readers interpreting the poet’s suicide and literary production in light of each other. Just as surprising as analysts’ disregard of ethical considerations and the carefree ease with which they speak as experts on Plath’s psyche, why she killed herself, and whose fault it was, is the role that anecdotal evidence plays in their scholarly work and the extent to which it is dominated by a rhetoric of exemplarity. As readers, we are drawn into a process of weighing probabilities and persuasive force in their arguments. We need to occupy the seat of ethical and scholarly judgement that such a rhetoric requires of us and beware of the ideology involved in its practice.

CHAPTER SIX FRIENDS

Published recollections of famous persons are motivated in several ways. In some instances, they may be written because the author thinks he or she knows something of interest or wants to set the record straight about a former friend. In other instances, the reminiscing may be part of a larger memoir that lends lustre to the main person: the memoirist. Quite a few use prominent relatives and acquaintances to increase their symbolic capital, perhaps without having much to contribute. Similar to epideictic rhetoric, memoirs may deal with things of the past but are rhetorically oriented towards the here and now. Pure and simple, the famous friend – dead or alive – can be used as an argument in a struggle for attention and influence in the field of cultural production. Some take the opportunity as payback for old grievances. When Sylvia Plath’s journals were published, it turned out that her habit of delivering verbal upper-cuts, of assessing people and treating them as possible models for literary characters, affected friends and foes alike. If economic profit is a motivating force, spicy details and marketable disclosures naturally follow. Kiss-and-tell memoirs by old lovers usually fall into this group. In the literature about Plath, we find all kinds of narratives grounded on inside information that contribute to the confusion between the public and the private realms, published separately or integrated as witness accounts in biographies. Mostly, the portraits of her are partial, the recollecting friends having known her only under special circumstances or for a limited period of time. She showed different sides of herself to different people, and many who met her never got beyond an efficient and enthusiastic façade. Yet this does not prevent them from launching sweeping evaluations all around. The extent of their relationships and number of meetings with her are exaggerated as a matter of course. The memoirs may be read as instalments in a competition over ownership. Who was Plath’s dearest friend? Who knew her the best? Who played a major part in her life and consequently has the right to express

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lasting verdicts about what she or others were like then, and what she later would have thought about specific matters? Or to put it a bit differently: Who has the best stories to illustrate that theirs was an exemplary relationship? Because the famous person is dead, communications from those who knew her are second best to the real thing. And in the celebrity culture to which Plath’s name has become attached, visualization, interviews, and other appearances are necessary for the dynamics to work. Since she was neither averse to conducting parallel love affairs nor stingy with declarations of having found her soul mate, confidante, Siamese twin, alter ego, or Doppelgänger, or having met the most wonderful person ever, the contenders have not been few. Similarities with eulogies – and their counterparts – are evident. Whether fundamentally laudatory or censorious, the memoirs often reveal more about the narrator than the person they aim to present. Several report verbatim conversations and surprisingly detailed accounts of incidents recollected several decades after the fact. Some seem to remember more and more as the years pass by. The memoirists routinely give us visions and dreams they have of her. They defend their ability to see their friend in a certain position or situation, to describe exactly what she was wearing, what she said, and what she looked like ages ago. But equal to other witness accounts, the descriptions of the same incidents, people, and places vary. An expression like ‘she would have understood [this or that reaction on their part]’ is another way to indicate a special rapport with Sylvia Plath. The professed feeling of being haunted by her memory – a feeling repeatedly found in these narratives – may of course be a genuine expression of guilt provoked by suicide. At the same time, such confessions can also have a rhetorical function, confirming assertions of a close relationship with the deceased and a right to expand on her life. Equally ritual is the rather wishful suggestion that if only this particular friend had been there or acted differently, the outcome would not have been so tragic. It further supports their assertion of closeness. Taken together, witness accounts and recollections constitute a genre of their own. It demonstrates the workings of the human mind and memory, and shows how we conclude upon what we think we see and what we choose to remember. These accounts are also important because of how biographers and others use such authenticating sources in order to authorize their story. Questions about relevance, validity, and ethics are necessary to ask even of first-hand witnesses and their narrations. Exposure of intimate details which are supposedly true but impossible to verify or disprove, affect our sense of propriety and what we regard as justifiable to disclose from private quarters.

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Prelude Addressing rather different readerships, the first memoirs of Plath appeared in the United States in 1966. ‘A Friend Recalls Sylvia Plath’ was published in the November issue of Glamour, written by ‘close collegeand-after friend’ Elinor Klein – at Smith known as Elly Friedman. According to an introductory note, she wanted to present a Sylvia Plath who ‘found great joy in living’ and highlight the ‘happy side to her nature’. A declared counterweight to the dark legend springing up, her Glamour piece may be read as a reply to reviews of Ariel in Time and Newsweek five months earlier. Klein emphasizes young Sylvia’s sense of humour and insatiable curiosity, how uniquely funny, brilliant, perceptive, charming, and lovely she had been when they knew each other; she was ‘willowy-lithe with great soft dark eyes, wide laughing mouth and a tumble of light hair’ (1966, 168).1 With its protective and proprietary air, ‘A Friend Recalls Sylvia Plath’ is tailored to the pattern of applauding portraits. The author writes about ‘my friend’, giving the impression that since their relationship was special, she is better equipped than others to pass verdicts: ‘Except for two illnesses, including the last which consumed her, Sylvia Plath was not the incarnation of the mad, obsessed poetess. Sylvia was a golden girl’ (184). We get different kinds of ‘proofs’ of their closeness: the magnitude of the loss Klein suffered when Plath died, examples of how her famous friend had cared for and comforted her, their endless conversations, the many letters she received, times they spent together, and visits she made to Ted and Sylvia in England, Northampton, and Boston. And Plath’s journals, published many years later, bear her out. In her diary, the poet expressed her love for Elly, their ability to ‘talk and talk’, and how she looked forward to a visit from her friend while in Cambridge (Journals, 201).2 However, as with most people she met and knew, Plath also considered Elinor Friedman’s personal strengths and tragedies as material for stories. Glorifying her ‘extraordinary and beautiful friend Sylvia’, who ‘seemed to have found her equal [in Ted Hughes]’ (184), Elinor Klein at the same time confirms her own worth as an esteemed companion. The reflected brilliance of the orator was an established function of epideictic rhetoric, and the crucial question as to what the laudatory piece parades or praises the most – the speaker, his subject, or the oratorical discourse – is equally relevant here. Reading her friend’s prized letters from Cambridge, ‘giantsized and explosive’, Klein draws a parallel to Chekhov and declares herself ‘deeply complimented to be asked along on her journeys’. She

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quotes what Sylvia Plath once said about her epistles, which she modestly rejects but just the same repeats: there is no one like my girl. she can very easily make hunks of america look like airmail letters and fool the postman, but then they open up and like those pop-up pictures: there is smith and the 5 & 10 and autumn and god and a damn lot of sun. (182)

Her humble excuse for including this quotation is that the description more aptly applies to Plath’s own letters. A wish to champion the author of ‘A Friend Recalls Sylvia Plath’ might similarly have been the case. After all, Klein earned her living as a journalist and writer.3 Elinor Klein tries to modify the image of Plath as a rabid Medea. Yet in the end, the author does not quite come across as the reflecting insider she probably hoped to communicate. Some of the facts are simply wrong, for instance when she claims that the children were not present in the apartment when Sylvia Plath committed suicide. And evidently she did not know of the Hugheses’ separation and marital problems, most likely because she was no longer a close confidante. Still, metaphors and language in this Glamour portrait blend well with the context, surrounded as it is by a model in a glimmering evening dress and matching make-up and by a woman named Georgeanne Alexander, who promotes the ‘marvellous’ Curl Free product that apparently solves all the problems that girls have with unruly hair. The perspective of ‘A Friend Recalls Sylvia Plath’ was much appreciated by Aurelia Plath. ‘Excellent!’ is her evaluation, written on a magazine copy. Mrs Plath expands in a letter to Elinor Klein, dated 3 December 1966, thanking her daughter’s friend for giving them a portrait they – Aurelia Plath herself, her son, and daughter-in-law – are able to recognize. ‘We three feel you are the only person who has written about our Sylvia. You knew her; you loved her.’ She laments that Time did not run the article ‘as a counterbalance to the poison it published June 6’. In another letter, dated 21 July 1966, she attests that Sylvia had loved Elly dearly in return and remarks that after the US publication of Ariel, it had indeed ‘been difficult to survive’.4 Shortly before Glamour came out, a memoir by Anne Sexton surfaced in a special Plath issue of Tri-Quarterly, Northwestern University’s journal of arts, letters, and opinions. Aurelia Plath comments to Elinor Klein that the journal contained much brilliant scholarship on her daughter’s darker poems but also ‘so much false conjecture, and I am so sick of the “legend,” the “image”’. Contrary to Klein, Anne Sexton does not claim any intimate and longstanding friendship with Plath, offering more of a

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snapshot from 1959 of their time together auditing Robert Lowell’s poetry class at Boston University. Sexton had no formal education when she in 1957, at the age of 29, wrote her first sonnet and proved to be a natural. It was her psychiatrist who had suggested that she should try writing as a means of sorting out feelings and gaining some self-respect. Like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, Sexton suffered for many years from a depressive illness. She tried to kill herself and was hospitalized at McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont outside of Boston, the same facility where Plath and Lowell had been treated after their breakdowns. ‘The barfly ought to sing’ tells of how Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, along with fellow student George Starbuck, after class went out together for Martinis at The Ritz. The three of them piled into the front seat of Sexton’s old Ford which she ‘always’ parked in a LOADING ONLY ZONE since that was what they were going to do – ‘get loaded’ (Sexton 1966, 89). Before they continued to the Waldorf Cafeteria for dinner, the ladies discussed their favourite subject: Often, very often, Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicides; at length, in detail and in depth between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it! She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail and her description in The Bell Jar is just the same story. ... We talked death and this was life for us, lasting in spite of us, or better, because of us. (90; my italics)

The topic may have been a serious one, but the recollecting tone is mainly humorous or ironic. Neither sentimental nor worshipping, Sexton like Klein nevertheless needed to authorize her reminiscences by indicating frequency and that she participated – together with Plath – in something that happened many times. This is, however, refuted by Starbuck, who remembers escorting the two talkative ladies ‘just a few times’ for drinks, not Martinis (in Middlebrook 1991, 107). A competitive attitude emerges in Sexton’s memoir. She describes Plath’s early poems as uninteresting insofar as ‘they really missed the whole point’. Half-heartedly, Sexton first disclaims the credit Plath had given her and Lowell in a BBC interview, naming them important poetic influences. But she then allows that ‘we might have shown her something about daring – daring to tell it true’ (1966, 92). The auditing student here puts herself ahead of her fellow student and on the same level as their teacher. Lowell received the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for Lord Weary’s Castle and published his influential Life Studies in 1959 during the poetry

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seminar. Sexton’s first book of poems, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, came out the following year with a recommendation from Lowell on the cover. What Sexton-biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook pronounces as a ‘refrain of “me, me too”’, also made its way into ‘Sylvia’s Death’, a poem ‘saturated with self-pity posing as grief’, according to Middlebrook. Dedicated to Sylvia Plath, the poem follows at the end of ‘The barfly ought to sing’. In ‘Sylvia’s Death’, Anne Sexton calls her friend a thief who had crawled ‘into the death I wanted so badly and for so long’. She had dreamt of a spectacular finale: a well-published suicide, leaving behind a book ready for the printer which would secure her name once and for all. Then Plath went ahead and stole the scheme. To her psychiatrist, Sexton declared: ‘that death was mine!’ (in Middlebrook 1991, 200).5 Perhaps to validate her belated claim to being the suicidal poet par excellence, ‘The barfly ought to sing’ includes a second poem, written, she explains, as an answer to the constant question: Why did she try to kill herself? ‘Wanting to Die’ depicts suicide almost as an addiction for people preoccupied with death and the tools with which to reach it. During their acquaintance in Boston, Sylvia Plath had been jealous of Anne Sexton, looking on her as a more successful rival. Plath’s suicide and the subsequent publication of Ariel dramatically changed their ranking as major and minor stars in the poetic sky. Containing both ‘barfly’ poems, Sexton’s third book, Live or Die (1966), was published about three months after the American edition of Ariel. Reviewers comparing the two did not favour Sexton, although it won her the Pulitzer Prize. She killed herself in 1974, eleven years after Sylvia Plath. Her suicide did not help a declining career. ‘The barfly ought to sing’ and the additional five Tri-Quarterly essays on Plath were reprinted in The Art of Sylvia Plath (1970). The book also includes a memoir first printed in Cambridge Review (1969) by Wendy Campbell, who met Sylvia Plath at Cambridge through Plath’s supervisor, Dorothea Krook. ‘Remembering Sylvia’ pays tribute to a brilliant student – alive, warm, and interested. Campbell’s Sylvia was collected, efficient, resilient, extremely intelligent, and charming to look at, a woman with a sort of natural excellence at whatever she turned her hand to, who ‘had found a man on the same scale as herself’. To the recently widowed Campbell, the young couple offered ‘enchanting company’, ‘spontaneous empathy’, and an incomparably restorative feeling that she was ‘understood and received’. How often they met is rather vague, as they ‘used’ to have dinner together ‘now and then’ (1970, 184).6

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Wendy Campbell’s portrait is like the others: a partial one in the way of eulogizing memoirs. She noticed no dark or disturbing side to Sylvia Plath. Even though she knew her only superficially and during an emotionally vulnerable period in her own life, Campbell towards the end of her memoir moves from a subjective perspective of ‘for me’ and ‘as I had seen it’ to formulate far-reaching generalizations about how ‘Sylvia was’, in words that hardly fit anybody, ‘wholly remarkable for being wholly authentic’, ‘true to herself, or truly herself’, ‘incapable of any sort of falsity or affectation or exaggeration’ (186).

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing The contributions made by Elinor Klein, Anne Sexton, and Wendy Campbell during the 1960s can, in several ways, be seen as a prelude for what was to come in the decades that followed. Their reticence in publishing private details and their positive – or neutral – attitude towards Ted Hughes proved, however, to be a thing of the past by the time Al Alvarez’s The Savage God appeared in 1971 with an extended memoir of Sylvia Plath included. His broadcast from 1963, reprinted for the fourth time in The Art of Sylvia Plath, had mainly focused on her poems and way of writing. In his preface, Alvarez states that The Savage God features Plath’s case as a prologue because he wanted to honour her poetic genius and give his study of suicide more emphasis by rooting it ‘in the human particular’ (1973, x). Thus came about the first detailed description of her final months. Equal to other memoirs, his account is written as if it was an insider’s perspective: one who really knew Sylvia Plath and the circumstances of her death, and had been there himself so to speak. The author’s own suicide attempt constitutes the epilogue of the book. Alvarez outlines Sylvia Plath’s background and describes her housewifely air when they got acquainted in London during the spring of 1960. At that point, the reputation of Ted Hughes was growing fast, and Alvarez in retrospect terms this ‘Ted’s time’ (1973, 5). Visiting them in Devon two years later, he believes to have noticed that due to the birth of her son and a resulting new poetic confidence, ‘the balance of power had shifted for the time being to Sylvia’ (13). Many have since adopted this division of the relationship into phases and his accompanying explanation. After her marriage withered, Plath started to drop in on Alvarez and read aloud to him her new poems, insisting that they had to be heard. The first time it happened, he thought the poems were difficult to grasp, hardly catching any of their subtlety. But Alvarez testifies to have immediately

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recognized ‘something strong and new and hard to come to terms with’ (15). Poems she talked of as ‘light verse’ appalled him. ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ felt more like ‘assault and battery’ than poetry, and he did not know how to respond to the part that Plath herself played in the action (16). On Christmas Eve, Alvarez stopped by her new apartment in London on his way to a dinner party. Hearing her read ‘Death & Co.’, he once again did not know what to say, the meaning now being all too clear. The critic blames himself for having ‘let her down in some final and unforgivable way’ (31), implying that he chose to overlook her invitation to engage in a love affair. Although he more than suspected that she was in a bad state, he also backed out as a friend, explaining that in his own depression, he could not cope with the responsibilities. Despite his preoccupations, Alvarez is several years later able to describe what the apartment looked like on Christmas Eve and how ‘her hair gave off a strong smell, sharp as an animal’s’ (29). That was the last time he saw Sylvia Plath alive. Resembling an expert witness and basing his testimony on the facts as he knew them, Alvarez interprets Plath’s suicide as a call for help in a difficult situation: ‘[T]his time she did not intend to die’ (33). But fatal coincidences conspired against her, and from her final gamble with death a whole myth has grown, he maintains. Strengthening his position as a uniquely favoured source, he describes her final hours and what precautions she took before sticking her head in the oven. He also lets us tag along when he follows Ted Hughes to the undertaker and reports how she looked in the coffin. His Plath prologue ends with confirmation of her genius and a rather standard proclamation of disbelief that she, having been so full of life, actually was now dead. When The Savage God was published, Plath had been deceased for more than eight years. Judging from a couple of long, outraged letters to Alvarez upon the publication of an extract in The Observer on 14 November 1971, Hughes was totally unprepared for the content of the memoir. Founded on information obtained through friendship and now exploited commercially, the piece was humiliating for Sylvia Plath as well as for her family, according to Hughes. Their correspondence is part of an archive which Alvarez later sold to the British Library.7 Why did you do it? How could you supply her most private moments for classroom discussion? This is the running theme in Hughes’s letters and perhaps the crucial issue in the ongoing controversy involving Plath: What in a person’s life is truly private, and what has the public a right to know? Who should decide where to draw the line? What considerations may apply if the life and welfare of others are involved? Principally, the relevance of such

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questions is not dependent on whether we sympathize with the persons concerned. In his first letter, Hughes declares that he had expected more from his friend than ‘the brutalised righteousness of journalism’. When writing his piece, Alvarez had put his own interests before theirs, without considering the consequences. If he had convinced himself that it was all part of literary history, that Sylvia Plath indeed belongs to the public she had given herself to, this was just ‘rubbish’. She didn’t give her family, + she didn’t hand over the inner life of her children to the officiation of critics. A heart-attack laid her mother out two months ago, but I’m even more concerned what role your article is going to play in the lives of Frieda + Nicholas.8

Hughes feared how the children, then eleven and nine years old, would react when others spelled out to them their mother’s death. As their only surviving parent, he had tried to keep her memory alive and circumstances of her death vague.9 Now Alvarez had deprived them of their special guardian angel, he claims. The death scenario which entailed five interesting minutes for the readers meant ‘permanent dynamite’ and intensified persecution for the family. Because of the details, Alvarez’s recollections would be taken as ‘the official text’, Hughes states, insisting at the same time that The Savage God only offered a fictionalized version of reality. In his account, Alvarez knew nothing at all of their marriage and had actually seen little of them. The implication that there had been some sort of artistic jealousy between him and his wife was ‘completely false’. Alvarez just presented what bits and pieces he had learned in an ‘excathedra fashion’ wrapped in pseudo-psychological theories and sold as the total story by ‘an intimate confidential uniquely-in-on-the-scene friend’. These opposing reactions to Alvarez’s reminiscences illustrate a fundamental dilemma: We may think we know other people and trust our judgments to be fair and objective whereas the actual person described may find the portrait reductive and virtually unrecognizable. Published characterizations exude an air of finality no matter how impressionistic they are. The portrayed ones easily feel invaded and boxed in – be it by journalists, biographers, psychologists, reminiscing friends, or relatives. Yet again, it is a question of who has the right to define and on what grounds. What Alvarez thought of as a tactful and considerate treatment, even a tribute to Sylvia Plath, Hughes reacts to as a careful piece of sensationalism. He takes the serialization in The Observer as proof that Alvarez is determined to maximize his exploitation of their misfortune.

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The letters are permeated by his rage and sense of betrayal at being turned into a prop in another person’s scheme, at being toted around ‘like a flea circus’ as if they were ‘relics dug up from 10,000 B.C.’. ‘What makes you think you can use our lives like the text of a novel’, he asks when specifying his reactions. It is infuriating for me to see my private experience + feelings re-invented for me, in that crude, bland unanswerable way, and interpreted + published as official history – as if I were a picture on a wall, or some prisoner in Siberia. And to see her used in the same way.

Alvarez responds with hurt pride, only confirming their contrary positions. He had neither intruded into their marriage nor made public any intimate details but had for more than ten years ‘taken a lot of trouble’ to get their poetry read with understanding and proper respect. To say that he was cashing in on Plath’s death or trying to turn it into an intellectual point was ‘a complete distortion’.10 On the contrary, he had implied just a month before, in reviewing Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, that it was Hughes who stood for improper financial reaping.11 In his letter to ‘Dear Ted’, he presents himself as a dedicated critic abiding by the law of disinterestedness as explained by Bourdieu (1993, 79), working ceaselessly for art’s sake and repressing manifestations of personal motives. Hughes retaliates that it was for him alone to detect whether there had been any intrusion into his marriage, insisting that Alvarez had ‘opened to the mob with official notices the most sacred part of mine and my children’s life’.12 He was right in assuming that the memoir would get a special, authoritative status in the Plath reception, enhancing the reputation of the reminiscer as well as his subject. A favoured source among scholars and biographers, Alvarez invited Freudian speculations about Hughes’s alleged jealousy towards his new-born son, envy of his wife, and his treatment of her in general. If the readers were to take Alvarez’s self-reproach seriously, they logically had to make the person closest to Plath, her husband, so much more responsible for her tragic death than a distant friend. Consequently, his philandering and deceit became more serious topics of concern. The two friends did not speak for six years. Even though they exchanged a few greetings after having participated in the same memorial event to honour Robert Lowell in October 1977, the trust between them was hardly the same as before. And in April 1989, Alvarez appeared as one of the eight signatories to the letter Ronald Hayman organized to criticize the management of Sylvia Plath’s estate and burial place (Chapter

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One, 23–24, 298). Alvarez had more to add when Janet Malcolm interviewed him for her long essay in The New Yorker, ‘Annals of Biography: The Silent Woman’ (1993). He talks of Hughes’s way with women, of his own knowledge about ‘far more’ (125) than he had been prepared to say at the time, of bending over backwards to keep the marriage break-up out of the story, ‘almost … to the level of falsifying the evidence’ (129). The only explanation Alvarez could find for the letters Hughes sent him in November 1971 was that he had gone ‘kind of barmy’ – driven crazy by the realization that ‘however tactfully handled, this was public-domain stuff’ (129–30). Alvarez also had more to say about Plath. According to Malcolm, it was not because of unwanted responsibilities that he pulled away from her. It was the lady herself he did not want, describing her as ‘a big girl with a long face’ and physically not his type at all (in Malcolm 1993, 125). Interpreted in connection with such statements, his guilt-ridden confession in The Savage God could easily be seen as having some sort of calculating quality to it.

Soulmates and Old Lovers The American edition of The Savage God materialized in April 1972. By October, Random House had ordered the seventh printing. In addition, the text came out in five different book club editions,13 hence confirming the position Plath had attained in the United States with the publication of The Bell Jar one year earlier, and how students and feminists took her to heart. Lois Ames’s two biographical sketches – printed in Tri-Quarterly (1966; reprinted in The Art of Sylvia Plath, 1970) and as a postscript to the US editions of the novel – were not enough to satisfy a growing desire for information. Former friends rose to the call. In 1973, Laurie Levy had a seven-page memoir published in The Ohio Review. ‘Outside the Bell Jar’ is based on the weeks she spent together with Sylvia Plath and eighteen other girls in New York, working as guest editors on Mademoiselle’s college issue for 1953. Levy confirms many of the episodes recorded in The Bell Jar but claims not to have found herself among the characters. The two of them – the writers of the group – were nevertheless apparently close and alike in many ways. We get to hear of a ‘bullsession’ when they ‘talked until the wee hours – a marathon of shared impressions, confessions of mutual ambitions and future plans’ (Levy 1973, 69–70).14 All the same, they did not keep in touch. Analysing the memoir, we sense a longing on Levy’s part to break away from anonymity and to prove herself as a writer. An additional motivating force may have been a desire to pronounce a rightful stake in

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the famous poet’s legacy that will set her apart from unworthy pretenders. At a writer’s conference, she meets an ‘imperious’, ‘large lump of a girl’ who ‘brays’ that ‘[Sylvia Plath] was one of us’ and whose poems ‘reek of omens and pitfalls’ (72). Levy on the other hand wins smiles and first prize in the short-story workshop. The way she tells her narrative in ‘Outside the Bell Jar’, Laurie Levy for many years led an ordinary family life in Chicago, working as a freelance journalist. Only when Plath had haunted her for a long time did she start to write again. She sees her friend’s ‘sunshine smile’, hears her advice, and ends her memoir by addressing the dead: ‘You are laughing, aren’t you, Sylvia?’ (73). The coveted writing career did not quite take off. Perhaps to get some help, Levy much later returns to the subject of Plath, this time writing ‘Beyond “The Bell Jar”’ (2003) for Chicago Sun-Times about a fifty-year reunion for the Mademoiselle bunch.15 Launching her first book of fiction in 2005, a collection of self-published short stories, Levy informs the journalist interviewing her for the same newspaper exactly two years later that Plath was the most confident woman she had ever met, and that she ‘finally’ had taken Plath’s advice to be more confident for her own sake. Once again, the long-ago month of June spent with ‘the nation’s brightest female college students’ is evoked (in Ledbetter 2005). A more complex portrait of Sylvia Plath emerges in Nancy Hunter Steiner’s memoir from 1974, where the author underlines that she can only offer fragments of a story, having known her well but briefly. The two of them roomed together at Smith after Plath’s suicide attempt and psychiatric rehabilitation. Steiner describes her roommate as remarkably talented and good looking. Yet the Sylvia of A Closer Look at Ariel is not quite the golden girl Elinor Klein recalls from the same period. Neither is she a martyr for poetry or feminism. On the one hand, Nancy Hunter Steiner depicts Sylvia Plath as stereotypical and apolitical in her American dreams of love, success, and money. On the other hand, she portrays her as uncommonly tidy and tight with her own possessions, a rather inflexible person, extreme in her inclinations and dependence on family and friends. To be chosen by Plath as her alter ego involved heavy obligations. Their mutual enthusiasm cooled off after they roomed together again during summer school at Harvard. Most difficult for Steiner to stomach was her friend’s increasing demand for constant and boundless support, as if others were expected to provide a missing piece in her machinery. Minor pain could ‘topple her flimsy defenses’ (Steiner 1974, 50). During the summer of 1954, Sylvia Plath dated a professor that Steiner had cautioned her against. The warning only increased her interest. One particular date resulted in haemorrhaging so severe that she had to go to

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hospital. Hysterical, Plath clung to her friend, fearing that she would bleed to death. Steiner failed to understand why Plath continued to see the man she accused of raping her. Crises seemed to arise especially when Nancy was having exams or was otherwise engaged and not that keen on dropping everything. Deciding that she could not act the role of Sylvia’s ‘deliverer’ while the other staged herself as the ‘suffering victim’, she ‘instinctively’ drew back (51). A Closer Look at Ariel may be received as a period portrait of student life in the 1950s and an effort on the author’s part to explain why their relationship changed. At its best our friendship was a happy, intimate interlude during which we wore each other like a pair of matching talismans. At its worst, it took on the dimensions of a Passion Play in which I was unwittingly cast as Judas’ (9–10).

The book is detached rather than vindictive, offering glimpses of a complicated and bewildering person. Nancy Hunter Steiner writes that even those closest to Sylvia Plath had problems adjusting their views of the competent and conformity-seeking girl they knew to fit with the violent feelings and disturbing pessimism that later echoed in her poetry. Ulterior motives beyond the memoirist’s expressed intention of producing ‘a fragment of Sylvia’s story’ (9) can, of course, not be excluded. But unlike several others, Steiner has not promoted her friendship with Plath in writing, and thereby herself, elsewhere. The complexity of Plath’s personality may account for the contradictory reactions she provoked, resulting in a variety of portraits. Lined up alongside her reminiscential friends were likewise discarded lovers. The first among these was the four-year-older Peter Davison, whom she had a short affair with after graduating from Smith College. At the time employed by Harvard University Press, Davison soon went on to work for many years as an editor at the Atlantic Monthly Press before moving on to Houghton Mifflin. He was also the poetry editor for The Atlantic Monthly. When Davison died in 2004, obituaries called him a pillar of Boston’s literary and publishing world for almost half a century because of his editorial work and his own eleven volumes of verse (e.g. Feeney 2004). Davison knew everybody worth knowing, and Plath is only one of the many prominent persons who crowd the pages of his autobiographical Half Remembered: A Personal History (1973). Robert Frost for one features as his mentor. From Half Remembered we may infer that Sylvia Plath and Peter Davison had much in common. Both were ambitious and worked hard to

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succeed at school and to live up to parental expectations. They lacked direction, suffered depressions, and needed psychiatric treatment. After studies at prestigious colleges – Davison attended Harvard in the late 1940s – they both went to Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship. Both give the impression of being generally conventional in their attitudes but sexually liberal, at least concerning their own activities. In stating that ‘she hardly waited to be asked to slip into my new bed’, Davison seems to imply that Plath was a bit too willing (1973, 170).16 He describes her rather condescendingly as a conventionally pretty and ‘attractive blond girl’ whom, to his ‘surprise’, he began to see all the time, although the intimacy she forced was ‘pressed, stilted’. So voracious was her appetite for experience and information, so seemingly inhuman her response to other people that she became too exigent for him, Davison writes. He felt ‘cross-examined’, ‘drained’, ‘eaten’, and ‘used’. Later he discovered that others reacted similarly. Only when she told him of her breakdown and suicide attempt did she seem to invest any real emotions. And only in that rare moment was he able to connect to her as a human being. According to Davison, who for the benefit of his readers still remembered ‘her chilly touch’ eighteen years on, Plath’s obsession with death left him deeply moved yet also alarmed. When he read some of her last poems, he ‘couldn’t help being amazed that artistry of such stature could have emerged from so deficient a personality’. To him she had shown herself as a ‘half-woman’. Half Remembered may, however, also be read as a report on Davison’s own flaws. Only through psychotherapy had he been able to retrieve his childhood emotions, we learn. While he draws a critical portrait of Sylvia Plath, she – not he – was the one who broke off their relationship, thereby perhaps injuring his pride and ego. The book charts Davison’s path towards discovering his true self and his ‘deepest instincts, to love and to write’ (153) – two fields where Plath, four years his junior, established herself well before him. Davison married in 1959, Plath in 1956, and he published his first book of poetry in 1964 at the age of thirty five. She was twenty eight when The Colossus came out in 1960. He does not figure in Plath’s journals until they meet again, when she returned to America with her husband, a prize-winning poet. She then gives decidedly chilly descriptions of this man who is both impotent and powerful and in a position to accept or reject poems for publication. In Letters Home, she accuses Davison of being jealous of her work. Once, when invited for dinner, she wonders whether his wife, a fellow student of hers at Smith, knows about his former mistress, adding ‘[o]r, for that matter, about me?’ (Journals, 491).17 To this question, he years later responds

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‘[o]f course she did, and only Sylvia would not instantly have known as much in the first exchange of glances’ (1994, 53).18 Davison returns to their love affair in The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston, 1955–1960 (1994) when reminiscing about a dozen poets in addition to himself, who for a few years made up what he describes as ‘one of the most vital milieux for poetry in the history of [the United States]’ (1994, 11). He now specifies the number of times they met during the summer of 1955 as ten in total and reveals that they broke up when Sylvia Plath on 23 August, ‘with the air of an executioner’, told him that she did not want to see him again. At the time, he had been ‘shocked and hurt’. But Davison quickly reassures us and himself that ‘despite the disappointing bruise to my self-esteem, once I had recovered I realized she had left me with a stirring of hope for myself as a poet’ (40). He seems, however, rather undecided on this point as he further on concedes that ‘for some years’ his injured vanity caused him to let out old grievances whenever he talked about her, and then maintains that regardless of her ‘difficult personality’, he found himself ‘growing in gratitude’ for everything she had taught him and for having known her ‘when she was young and not fully formed’ (159–60). Grateful or not, Plath’s defects in the way of jealousy, fierce ambition, grievance hoarding, violent mood swings, and recognition dependency continue to dominate the portrait that Peter Davison draws of her. At the Atlantic Monthly Press, he ‘painfully’ declined The Colossus for American publication, finding it ‘still dead, still cold, still disassembled’ (184). Their personal dealings and his part in the action – e.g. in The Journals – did not deter him from reviewing her work (1966, 1972, 1982). Notwithstanding his obvious efforts to dissociate himself from Plath on one level, Davison has used her and their affair in his own literary career. Besides the memoirs, he has written several poems to and about her, with titles such as ‘Epitaph for S.P.’ (1966), ‘The Heroine’ (1974), ‘The Hanging Man’ (1977), and ‘Literary Portraits: 4. The Heroine: A Sequel’ (1989). Another poem in the ‘Literary Portraits’ sequence has an epigraph attributed to Plath (cf. Davison 1995). In his last collection of poems, Breathing Room (2000), Davison even appropriates her perspective in the poem entitled ‘Sorry’, where the ‘I’ speaking lies ‘in his arms’ and recalls her suicide attempt for him. ‘A Ballad’ takes on the ‘immortal mismarriage’ of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, snipping bits and pieces from their poems. Whether true or not, Sylvia Plath at one point or another pronounced a sentence of impotence or mental and physical weakness about many a guy,

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such as Gordon Lameyer. A graduate from Amherst, she called him ‘the major man in my life’ between Dick Norton, the original for Esther’s boyfriend in The Bell Jar, and Ted Hughes (Lameyer 1977b, 32). They dated both before and after her suicide attempt, yet Lameyer was unaware of her growing depression, and the breakdown came as a shock to him. The first letter he wrote to her at the hospital was, she declared, one of the most important that she had ever received (Alexander 1991, 127–28). During the following two and a half years, when Lameyer for many months at a time was away in the Navy, he received over fifty letters from her, most of them typed and single-spaced and up to ten pages long. In the letters, she expressed her love and admiration for him to the extent that he by the summer of 1954 believed them to be ‘unofficially engaged’ (Lameyer 1976, 3; 1977b, 37). Both in his memoir entitled ‘Sylvia at Smith’ (1977) and in his commentary to ‘Letters from Sylvia’ (1976), which was published in the Smith Alumnae Quarterly, Lameyer takes care to point out that he does not appear in The Bell Jar, although he knew many of the people caricatured there. Instead, he can be found in Nancy Hunter Steiner’s A Closer Look at Ariel, figuring under the pseudonym of Jeffrey McGuire. He suggests that Steiner derived Jeffrey from an association of him with Lord Jeffrey Amherst. A Closer Look at Ariel presents Jeff McGuire as the proper middle-class choice whom ‘Syl had practically decided to marry’ (Steiner 1974, 33) – ‘intelligent, articulate, spectacularly handsome, and obviously devoted’ (32). But that did not stop her from dating several other men at the same time. After she returned to Smith for her senior year, Sylvia Plath kept Lameyer as a sustaining force albeit only at a distance, fending him off with excuses of being too busy when he was on leave from his destroyer. Gordon Lameyer increasingly felt that she used him ‘as a crutch for her wounded ego. Like Nancy Hunter, she needed to know that there was always a man around, ready to come at her beck and call when she waved her magic wand’ (1977b, 40). Because he refused to play this role – echoing here Nancy Hunter Steiner, whom he smacks in passing – they finally broke off in the spring of 1955. Considering that she kept several other suitors at bay, it is not certain that Plath would have agreed on the seriousness of their relationship. Lameyer claims to be relieved that things worked out the way they did. He had come to think that her narcissism prevented her from really loving anyone and closes his reminiscence by declaring devotion to the woman he later married. Sylvia and his Betty were supposedly ‘like night and day’, the former ‘essentially brilliant and egocentric; the latter essentially warm and magnanimous’ (41).

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Part of the mythology about Plath depicts Lameyer, who died in 1991, with a manuscript under his arm going from one publishing house to another, trying to find someone who would print an extended memoir of his old sweetheart.19 He never succeeded beyond ‘Letters from Sylvia’ (1976) and his two essays commissioned for Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (1977) – ‘Sylvia at Smith’ and ‘The Double in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar’ – the collection which Edward Butscher ‘threw together’ after having completed his biography (Butscher 1996, 14). Analysing The Bell Jar, Lameyer uses his personal knowledge to argue that neither Sylvia Plath nor Jane Anderson, the biographical model for Joan Gilling, were inclined towards lesbianism. He spoke from experience, having dated both of them, Lameyer asserts (1977a, 165). Ego-mending is an important motivating force for ditched lovers to reflect publicly about their exes. Feelings provoked by rejection colour much of what the poet herself wrote. In a letter to her mother while Sylvia Plath attended Cambridge, she comments on the difficulty of maintaining relationships after break ups, talking then from the more powerful position: ‘[Traveling with] Gordon was also a mistake. I should know by now that there is always bound to be a hidden rankling between the rejector and rejected’. She tells of being horrified by Gordon’s ‘utter lack of language ability’ before confiding to her mother that she has fallen terribly in love with ‘the strongest man in the world’, who among many other qualifications also happened to be a ‘brilliant poet’ (Letters Home, 233).

The Role Model and the Rival Four of Butscher’s contributors to The Woman and the Work write about Sylvia Plath’s two periods in England. Dorothea Krook, her favourite teacher in Cambridge and the one who mediated contact with Wendy Campbell, remembers Sylvia’s neat, fresh, and charming American appearance. In her recollections, Krook describes their relationship as fundamentally intellectual and impersonal. During tutorials on Plato and the English Moralists, they had enjoyed a rare and happy freedom of communication. Her student had been ‘extraordinarily modest, selfeffacing, unassuming, unspoilt; never inviting attention to herself’ (1977, 54).20 For all that, in written assignments she did not penetrate the subjects or her own experience as far as Krook had hoped she would. Just once did Dorothea Krook get a glimpse of the passionate rage evident in Plath’s poetry. More often, her Sylvia bubbled enthusiastically, talking quite a bit more than what the self-effacingly modest ones

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normally do. To her supervisor, who like Ruth Beuscher embodied the academic brilliance, success, and femininity that the young student admired,21 she presented the well-adapted front of ‘a creature breathing only spiritual health, vitality, and resilience’ (59). As readers, we might wonder how Krook could believe in such a fictitious character. Teaching at a competitive university like Cambridge, she must have met her share of high-strung students and colleagues. If it is true that people who reminisce about others simultaneously write about themselves, they will do this more or less openly and consciously. Every now and then, the reader may get a feeling of having stumbled upon the author herself in key expressions or sentences. Dorothea Krook admits to having written her ‘Recollections of Sylvia Plath’ with much hesitation because she had such a limited knowledge of her subject. She ‘only knew her, really, as a beautiful, sensitive mind, ardently enjoying the exhilarations of the life of the intellect, living intensely, joyously, in the calm sunshine of the mind, as Hume calls it’ (60). However, her first impression of Plath, recorded twenty years later, was less shiny: I noticed a conspicuously tall girl standing in one of the aisles, facing toward me, and staring at me intently. I was struck by the concentrated intensity of her scrutiny, which gave her face an ugly, almost coarse, expression, accentuated by the extreme redness of her heavily painted mouth and its downward turn at the corners. I distinctly remember wondering whether she was Jewish. This was a thought that could not have occurred to me more than half a dozen times in all my thirteen years at Cambridge ... I have remembered it often since, with the strangest emotions, as more and more has come to be known about her passionate feeling for Jews and her sense of belonging with them. (49)

Critics have disagreed strongly both as to the legitimacy of Plath’s Jewish imagery and to what extent she felt for the Jews or used them to increase sympathy for herself. Krook’s allegiance, though, was indisputable. A Jew herself from South Africa, she left England at the end of 1960 to settle in Israel. She never saw her student again after their Cambridge sessions but writes of having been tormented by the thought that in declining Sylvia’s many invitations to develop a more personal relationship she had perhaps abandoned and betrayed her. The fact that she killed herself on Krook’s birthday did not alleviate her sense of being haunted. She claims to have had a premonition of how terribly Sylvia Plath would suffer if something should go wrong with her idyllic marriage of true minds. And learning that this intuition had been ‘approximately

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correct’, Krook felt ‘her own kind of passionate, bitter rage’ (59). Their way of expressing themselves may have differed, but the opinion that Doris Krook formed of her American protégée does correspond with Wendy Campbell’s. Plath in return liked both of them and seems not to have nursed any of the ambivalence that marks her relations with other potential mother figures or the women she looked on as rivals. It was naturally more difficult for her to project an ideal self on persons she lived with and who could observe her backstage. Nancy Hunter Steiner and Jane Baltzell Kopp – an American housemate of Plath at Newnham College in Cambridge – provide several examples of how she lost control when she became irritated or felt threatened. The result was shattered friendships. She called both girls her ‘Doppelgänger’ and associates the one with the other in journal entries.22 In her contribution to The Woman and the Work, ‘“Gone, Very Gone Youth”: Sylvia Plath at Cambridge, 1955–1957’, Jane Baltzell Kopp portrays herself like Nancy Hunter Steiner does in her memories as embodying normality and reason itself. Being more concerned with ‘the business side of things’ than with the art of writing, Plath and her Americanisms evidently stuck out quite sorely. Her ambition to excel at any chosen activity was ‘formidable’ to the extent of being obsessive (1977, 62). Recapitulating her own impressions, Kopp states that Plath had presented herself at Cambridge as ‘an energetic, many-aptituded young woman’, confirming foremost a sense of capability (77). But her poetry had not been valued as anything extraordinary among the many hopeful Cambridge writers, and it was not easy to imagine that Sylvia Plath would become a great poet. We understand from the stories Jane Baltzell Kopp shares with us that Plath could be righteous and spectacularly furious. Perhaps Plath overreacted when Jane inadvertently locked her out of her own – i.e. Plath’s – hotel room in Paris for the night and again when she discovered that Jane had scribbled in several of her – i.e. Plath’s – books. On the other hand, it is not that strange for an owner to dislike having someone make free with borrowed goods. In her journal, Sylvia Plath writes of a ‘marvelous cathartic blowup with Jane’, and we get the feeling that she somehow relished quarrels. She also notes that Jane takes and breaks things, ‘never caring, utterly casual’ (Journals, 226, 199). Plath clearly regards her three-year-younger ‘twin’, or ‘the blonde one’ as she calls her in the journal, as a competitor: Turns out we’re too much alike, too much the same, ironically, to be friends closely here: One American girl who writes and is humorous and reasonably attractive & magnetic is enough in any group of Englishmen

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Jane Baltzell Kopp denies that the two of them resembled each other and that there had been any kind of rivalry between them. She had merely thought it would be a mistake to argue with her. However, Lucas Myers – an American himself – confirms in his 2001 memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath that at Cambridge the two women were compared: ‘Jane was thought to have been Sylvia’s academic equal or superior, and her demeanor was a good deal less staged if less arresting’. Even Ted Hughes had in the beginning compared Sylvia ‘unfavorably (on account of her forwardness)’ to Jane, although Plath was the one who fascinated him (Myers 2001, 45–46, 147). And in one of his Birthday Letters, ‘Visit’, he uses the expression ‘your American rival’. When Plath and Hughes met for the first time, at the party celebrating the first and only issue of St. Botolph’s Review, Jane Baltzell was present. She had been much impressed by Hughes’s three ‘excellent’ poems and came to the party specifically ‘to take a further measure’ of him. Sylvia Plath did the same. ‘Some said she came uninvited’, her rival points out (1977, 73). All the same, it was the ‘party crasher’ who won the admired poet’s attention. Curiously enough, the guy with whom Jane Baltzell went to the party writes in a memoir from 2004 that Plath actually received an invitation from him. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, a fellow American and friend of Lucas Myers, tells how he sold Plath a copy of the review, and when she excitedly returned for information about two of its contributors – Hughes and Myers – he asked her to the release celebrations (WyattBrown 2004, 361). According to Myers, who also knew both women, ‘Jane’s memoir is a serious and objective attempt to present Sylvia as she was without prejudice for the injuries she had suffered at her hands’ (2001, 147). He is less impressed with the portrait the later clergywoman draws of Ted Hughes. She only met him a few times, and the scene she evokes to document allegations of a violent personality, Myers finds highly improbable. Most likely Plath herself was Jane’s source. Thus, based on her own experience, she ‘of all people’ should have known that the descriptions of other people and their doings that emanated from Sylvia had to be taken with a grain of salt. Sylvia’s description of Ted in her journals and letters as a ‘breaker of things and people,’ one who could ‘blast’ her previous lover, was a description of Sylvia’s inclinations, not of the historical Ted. (148)

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Myers, as one of the St. Botolph’s organizers, further corrects the particulars about the party as presented in ‘Gone, Very Gone Youth’ – when and where it took place, the time of day, how Sylvia Plath was dressed, and whether she arrived alone.24 Wondering how history and biography get written, he questions the memory, credibility, and judgment of even the most reliable sources and the ease with which specific interpretations are accepted at a given moment in spite of observed facts. Reservations towards anecdotal evidence and presentation of persons as exemplary figures and incarnations of qualities are, however, relevant to all the memoirs referred to here, Myers’s own included.

The Fire Brigade Two memoirs in The Woman and the Work, by Clarissa Roche and Elizabeth Compton respectively, deal with Sylvia Plath’s second period in England. Janet Malcolm talked to both writers in the early 1990s, when preparing her own piece for The New Yorker. Clarissa Roche then confesses to a motivating force which so far had not been openly admitted to – namely money. Interviewed by Edward Butscher for his biography, she had not taken him seriously but had nonetheless accepted his commission for a memoir because he offered exactly the amount of money she needed to get a carpet dyed. She had in vain seen a hypnotist in an effort to retrieve additional memories of Plath and Hughes for a longer work she wanted to write. Conversing with Malcolm, Roche ‘was reduced to serving up insubstantial fragments of stories reflecting her dislike of Hughes’ (Malcolm 1993, 145).25 The antipathy is perceptible in ‘Sylvia Plath: Vignettes from England’ as well. An American herself and married to an English writer, Clarissa Roche felt a special connection to Sylvia Plath. They were first acquainted when her then husband, Paul Roche, had been a colleague of Plath’s at Smith before both families came to live in England. After Smith, they corresponded, talked on the phone, and saw each other twice, once in Devon and once in London towards the end of Plath’s life. But their relationship was perhaps not quite so close as we are led to believe. While Clarissa Roche declares the year in Northampton as ‘a rare time in [Sylvia’s] life, when she had a past, present, and future all in one’ (1977, 81), Plath’s own diary is a record of misery and depression. Exhausted by teaching chores and unable to write, she took it out on people she met, describing Paul Roche as a handsome ‘fraud’ (Journals, 384), Clarissa as a sulking ‘Miss Muffet in a private tantrum’ (354), and their children as ‘idiots’ (356). Why are they so intriguing, she wonders, considering that

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‘Paul is an obvious, a palpable sham, and Clarissa is simple, even deluded?’ (383).26 Depicting themselves as companions who were fond of one another, Roche mixes general comments about her friend’s personality with extracts from conversations and from what she observed, thought, and was told. Her stories have later become a part of the anecdotal repertoire, for instance, the one about a fire Plath made in the garden. Burning her husband’s papers – alone and with no witnesses – she performed some sort of ritual and had then allegedly seen the letter ‘A’ standing out on a charred piece: ‘Sylvia now knew the woman with whom Ted was having an affair’, Roche claims, pronouncing her friend as a successful sorceress exacting revenge. She believed that a need to deal with ‘Ted’s treachery’ had distracted Plath from suicide during the first months of his affair. Hearing of her death, Roche therefore ‘shuddered to imagine what curses she had hurled at Ted’ (1977, 85).27 Writing this, she was aware of Assia Wevill’s suicide and the death of their daughter Shura. ‘Vignettes from England’ portrays Sylvia Plath as a chameleon-like creature who changed with the surroundings and people she met, partly because she was ‘secretive and devious and selective’, partly because ‘aspects of her character were dispersed’ (89), thus making her personality seem incomplete. She is further characterized as ‘malicious and dishonest’ (93). The flexible attitude towards facts which such traits imply did not make Clarissa Roche noteworthy sceptical to Plath’s bitter accusations of her husband. Having seen her London flat, though, she rejects the rumour about poverty and economic desertion that originated from Sylvia herself. ‘Even for an American she was living reasonably well’, according to Roche, who describes the weekly payment from Hughes as ‘a large sum in those days’ (92). Roche experienced her friend as witty, vivacious, and amusing but also as somebody who craved undivided attention and support perhaps to the extent of making her own children uncommonly quiet and undemanding. At least that was how Roche remembered them: Sylvia talking incessantly about her children but not hugging or cuddling them. ‘In the same house together, it was as if they were already severed.’ Yet both children ‘seemed sure enough of her love’ (88). The little boy was just a few months old and the girl only two years of age. Another guardian of the poet’s memory has been Elizabeth Compton. By dedicating The Bell Jar to Elizabeth and her husband, Sylvia Plath ‘bequeathed’ her Devon confidante ‘a career’ (Myers 2001, 143). After remarrying, she has under the name Elizabeth Sigmund acted as witness to Plath’s genius, beauty, vitality, and suffering. Possibly because of negative

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experiences when contributing to Butscher’s biography, David Compton, a writer himself, remained in the background. In a letter to Butscher, he expresses distrust of his former wife’s narrative.28 In so far as Elizabeth Sigmund could supply information about the last year in Sylvia Plath’s life and had no objections to naming culprits, she has been a favourite with commentators. Olwyn Hughes, in a letter to Janet Malcolm, writes that Sigmund’s friendship with Plath had been ‘slight’. She said the same about Clarissa Roche and Al Alvarez. Considering that few other mutual friends of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes wanted to talk to the flood of journalists and would-be biographers who came knocking on doors, they had the field to themselves. In Olwyn Hughes’s words, the two women in particular pronounced ‘regally on anything to do with Plath as her great friends’ (in Malcolm 1993, 95). But Alvarez was hardly a second to anyone in the matter. Olwyn’s reactions may have been further affected by the fact that Elizabeth Sigmund generously reported on what Plath had confided to her about other persons, adding her own observations along the way. This is how she describes Olwyn Hughes in her memoir: The most difficult person in Ted’s family was his sister Olwyn, who feared and resented Sylvia’s talent and beauty, as well as her relationship with Ted. Sylvia felt this terrible jealousy deeply, and recognized an insurmountable anger. She often told me that Olwyn hated her, resented her position as another daughter in the family. When I met Olwyn after Sylvia’s death, I felt that she had understated Olwyn’s attitude; it was one which I found hard to tolerate even at second hand. Unfortunately, most of the censorship and angling of material available to people wishing to write of Sylvia comes from this source, and must therefore be regarded as somewhat suspect. (Sigmund 1977, 103)

Interestingly, the jealousy and rage attributed to Olwyn Hughes, who during her brother’s marriage had led a fulfilling life of her own in Paris, were emotions that numerous witnesses associate with Sylvia Plath. The negative comments on Olwyn quoted above, that Sylvia ‘often’ shared with Sigmund, were expurgated in the British edition of Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (1979) published two years after the American version.29 To validate the judgments she offers on everyone, Sigmund explains the extent of their contact like this: ‘We saw a lot of Sylvia and the children that spring, though Ted was usually working or in London. We became very close’ (1977, 102; my italics).30 She also notes that Plath never talked about her writing.

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Reminiscing, Sigmund sides socially and emotionally with her famous departed friend against pettiness and mistreatment. She is the wise one who knows, sees, and understands better than the rest. Meeting Aurelia Plath, she just ‘knew’ that the relationship between mother and daughter was close but difficult. Furthermore, she ‘could see’ that Aurelia made Sylvia nervous and ‘understood the tensions very well’. Hearing about Ted’s family, she realizes that her friend ‘didn’t seem to understand’ the north country ways which she, for her part, knew ‘so well’. Since she obviously also ‘knew Edith’, Sigmund asserts that difficulties between mother- and daughter-in-law must have resulted from cultural barriers. She tried to explain to Sylvia ‘the terrible, crushing class system’ which ‘people like the Hugheses suffered from’ and also asked her ‘if she didn’t think that, somewhere, Ted had a feeling of inferiority’ (103–04; my italics). These final remarks about Edith Hughes and her family have been deleted in the British edition of the text. Irrespective of her explicit side-taking, Elizabeth Sigmund many years later expresses amazement to Janet Malcolm at the Hugheses’ guarded view of her. When we learn more about their contact, we cannot exclude the possibility that her statements had a tit for tat aspect to them. After Sylvia Plath died, Elizabeth and David Compton moved to Court Green with their three children on the suggestion of Ted Hughes. They were to show the house to prospective buyers, but he changed his mind about selling and subsequently returned to live in North Tawton. The Comptons therefore had to find another house in the village. If we are to believe Elaine Feinstein’s biography of Hughes, Elizabeth kept coming back and sometimes visited Court Green as often as three times a day. Olwyn Hughes, who by then had left her job in Paris to help take care of her brother’s children, told the former house sitter that there was no need for so many visits. Perhaps this was a contributing reason to why Elizabeth Compton found Olwyn ‘bossy’ and why her hostility towards the Hugheses grew over time (Feinstein 2001, 152).31 She had in a sense been removed from the position of museum warden, a role she did her best to reclaim. In ‘Sylvia in Devon: 1962’, Elizabeth Compton Sigmund writes of being ‘enchanted and overwhelmed by [Sylvia] and Ted and their beautiful house’ (1977, 100). When they met, the Comptons lived in a primitive North Devon cottage, bringing up their children on a tiny income. Apparently, Plath came to see, or needed to see, the other woman as ‘something of an Earth Mother figure’ (102) and a politically committed one at that. Sigmund is careful to point out that this image of her was way too flattering yet has still passed it on, repeating twice Plath’s professed

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intention to include her friends ‘as saints’ (102) and ‘angels’ in the next novel (106). The focal point of this memoir is the question which Elizabeth Compton asked herself when Sylvia arrived on their door step late one evening crying incessantly with baby Nick in a carry cot, begging for help because her milk had dried up and Ted was in love with another woman: ‘What could I do to protect and help this amazing person?’ (105). Knowing what later happened, the answer is a brutal one. Her protective instinct was then transferred to Plath’s posthumous reputation. As keeper of the flame, she seems to act on behalf of herself as well, because she – Elizabeth Sigmund – has also cried and suffered. Hearing of her friend’s death, she reacted with incredulity: It was unbelievable. It couldn’t be. I remember walking in the dark country lanes, and saying over and over to myself, ‘Where is she?’ There were tracks of a fox in the snow, wandering this way and that, sniffing for answers to its own secret questions. I bent over the prints, tears making holes in the snow. She would have understood. (106)

Since then, Sigmund has had ‘to endure’ reading preposterous descriptions of Sylvia: ‘To die once is bad enough, but to be repeatedly crucified in this way by people who never knew her is unforgivable’ (106– 07). She has, however, not been averse to crucifying people herself. Others reacted to her version of the story, having problems recognizing the portrait she draws of a saintly Sylvia and the account she gives of specific incidents. Because Hughes in large part kept quiet, his friends for many years did likewise, although they implored him to write his own story (Myers 2001; Feinstein 2001, 202–03).

Revisions Encouraged by Olwyn Hughes to help Anne Stevenson form a more nuanced impression of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, several new witnesses stepped forward. Typical for these contributions is the poet W.S. Merwin, who indicates dismay at the notion of her as a pathetic victim of his heartless mistreatment, nurtured mainly by people who did not know them. Similar to so many others, what Merwin had seen was first the bright and smiling mask that she presented to everyone, and then, through that, the determined, insistent, obsessive, impatient person who snapped if things did not go her way, and flew into sudden rages ... I came to feel that there was something in Sylvia of a cat suspended over water,

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Merwin’s wife, Dido, testifies in ‘Vessel of Wrath: A Memoir of Sylvia Plath’ to this opinion of her, reporting several episodes that she had observed. Lucas Myers, in his memoir, was most of all concerned with countering the image of Hughes as a violent, selfish, and inconsiderate man, since the opposite – in his view – actually was the case. His friends in Cambridge had therefore been suspicious of the seemingly superficial and career-oriented American woman pursuing him. A third witness account included in Bitter Fame, together with Myers’s and Dido Merwin’s memoirs, was supplied by the Irish poet Richard Murphy, who refutes the version that Plath had given to Elizabeth Compton about a visit to Connemara in Western Ireland. Contrary to the way she told it, where Hughes was described as dumping his wife on him, Murphy, he believes that Plath had initiated the trip and engineered for the two of them to be alone in order to start an affair. When he declined, she became enraged. ‘All her warmth and enthusiasm, her gushing excitement that colored whatever she noticed with hyperbole, changed into a strangulated hostility.’ She opened her heart to a local woman and thereby ‘sowed in her mind a few seeds of the future myth of her martyrdom’ (1989, 352).32 But the new testimonies did not really help to authorize Anne Stevenson’s perspective or the conspicuous division she notes in how people responded to Plath: Some of her friends speak warmly of her charm, her humor, her great gifts and huge capacity for affection. Others recall a complex, completely self-absorbed, stubbornly ambitious American whose outer shell of bright capability contained a seething core of inexplicable fury. (1989a, xii)

Both the memoirs and Bitter Fame were seen as hostile to Plath and therefore dismissed as such. The biting tone in Dido Merwin’s recollections made her own title ambiguous. Whose wrath did it refer to? As argued in a longer memoir by Lucas Myers from 2001 entitled Crow Steered Bergs Appeared, which is a title taken from a poem penned by Hughes, the process by which he became known as a public villain may be divided into three phases. The first phase took recognizable form after Assia Wevill killed herself and Alvarez used his friendship with Plath and Hughes to sell his book on suicide. The second phase was initiated by the publication of Edward Butscher’s biography and the collection of articles

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he edited. The third phase started before the completion of the two previous ones ‘and went on and on thereafter’, Myers writes. In this phase, ‘crowds of hecklers followed Ted like Red Guards’, chanting ‘Daddy’ and Robin Morgan’s poem ‘Arraignment’ (2001, 137).33 He maintains that despite considerable efforts on the part of Olwyn Hughes and Anne Stevenson, the cumulative vilification met with no effective rebuttal until Janet Malcolm published her study in The New Yorker in August 1993. Malcolm’s collage of literary criticism, of interviews, travel descriptions, personal reflections, contradictory narratives, and quotations from written sources made ‘Annals of Biography’ engaging to read. Investigating the story behind the frontlines hardened by Bitter Fame, Malcolm sought out key players in the feud. Highly critical of biographers and journalists, she applied their own techniques to create sympathy for the predicament of Ted Hughes and remorselessly exposed people who had confided in her almost as if she were a psychoanalyst. The reception and publicity which befell Birthday Letters (1998) further reflected a more positive attitude towards Hughes that spread during the 1990s, even if some familiar voices remained – for instance, Robin Morgan’s declaration that her teeth ‘began to grind uncontrollably’ when she heard about his new book of poems (in Kroll 1998, 58). The kind of sympathy that Hughes’s story was met with after thirtyfive years of silence may be exemplified by one of his writing colleagues. Upon receiving a copy of Birthday Letters, P.D. James notes in her diary entry for 29 January 1998 that it was impossible not to begin reading the collection immediately and just as unthinkable to stop once she had started. Both James’s mother and husband had suffered from mental illness, and she indirectly expresses an opinion on Sylvia Plath, the reason for the Hugheses’ marital problems, and the outsiders who give verdicts without knowing what it is like to live with a mentally ill partner: Inevitably one’s response to the poems is influenced by the joint tragedies; how could it be otherwise? I have always felt great sympathy for Ted Hughes and huge respect for the dignified silence with which he has endured years of calumny. No woman who is the mother of young children and kills herself can be sane, and this degree of mental pain has its roots far deeper than the imperfections of a marriage. Equally no one who has never had to live with a partner who is mentally ill can possibly understand what this means. Two people are in separate hells, but each intensifies the other. Those who have not experienced this contaminating misery should keep silent. (James 1999, 151)

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After Hughes died, memoirs started surfacing individually and in The Epic Poise (1999), a collection of essays originally planned as a tribute on his seventieth birthday in 2000. Side by side with exulting eulogies of Hughes, devoted Plath friends at the same time stuck to their script. News of extensive philandering kept hitting the headlines along with surprising information about his belief in the occult – a belief so strong that he picked publication dates for his books based on astrology. While others rolled their eyes, Myers in Crow Steered Bergs Appeared (2001) wrote openly about their shared interest in shamanism, Taoism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and other Eastern traditions which Hughes from early on had integrated into his thinking. Although the subtitle defines it as A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Myers’s book primarily reads as the testimony of a devoted friend who finally feels free to defend Hughes against unfair accusations. In order to do that, he had to speak more openly – and critically – of Plath than his friend would have liked. Hughes’s protectiveness of her had been uncompromising, and Myers was clear about who had been the victim of whom. His opinions are founded on a friendship which started in Cambridge when they were both twenty-four years old and lasted until Hughes died almost forty-four years later. Having followed the development of his relationship with Sylvia Plath from the beginning, Myers sees their marriage as a binary combination of ‘extreme cases’, his friends personifying two types of energy: katabolic forces versus healing ones. She represented the negative pole and he the positive (2001, 157–58). This complementarity showed itself in their poetry as well as in their interpersonal relations. Aggression defines the poems in Ariel, and her limited compassion for other people is manifest in the journals. Hughes on the other hand was the noblest, most generous, and tolerant of persons, according to Myers. His way of dealing with her problems had been to nurse, humour, and avoid confrontation – ‘wrapping his life up in a cupboard while he tended her’ (65) in a manner he later came to recognize as a mistake. But nobody practised straightforward truth-telling with Sylvia, simply because she would not accept it, Myers declares. A reason for her admiration of Dr Ruth Beuscher was most likely that the psychiatrist never told her ‘anything she didn’t fundamentally want to hear’ (111). He believes that Plath probably was beyond salvation after her electroconvulsive treatment in 1953, arguing that she lacked a crucial element in her inner mechanism which makes social life and empathy with others possible. When she looked into herself, she ended up in the middle of the Sahara Desert, finding emptiness and no stable core. She depended on her husband to sustain and keep her going, thereby turning him into

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some sort of a prisoner. Her suffocating need to keep him to herself damaged his relationship with family and friends. Myers implies that ‘almost anyone else’ (76) would have left Sylvia Plath early on in the marriage after understanding what kind of commitment was involved. Pride and his strong affection for her prevented Hughes from departing and from discussing his marital difficulties with others. We get the impression that if she had not died, he would have. Hughes developed heart fibrillations that only disappeared when he decided not to die. Myers dates this decision to the winter or spring of 1962 (79). Crow Steered Bergs Appeared confronts many of the stock incidents in the Plath–Hughes saga, repeated over and over again as historical facts by people who were not present or – as Myers claims – who remembered wrongly. He disputes several myths which circulate about his friend, including a longstanding ‘sub-mythology about Ted’s “sexual magnetism”’, defining this as a general quality to which anyone in his company might respond. According to Myers, it would have been impossible for Hughes to have looked at other women as long as he was married to Plath. They were hardly away from each other, and ‘Sylvia’s abnormal jealousy’ would not have tolerated it (142).34 When she sensed something going on between her husband and Assia Wevill, she kicked him out. Yet Myers keeps silent about the many affairs Hughes had after his monogamous years. Elaine Feinstein’s biography reports of several long relationships conducted parallel to his time with both Assia Wevill and Carol Orchard, the woman he married in 1970. To one of his lovers, he spoke of ‘not wanting to be in any one woman’s power again’ (2001, 165).

New Accusations Not surprisingly, after Hughes died, his love life proved tempting to explore for insiders and outsiders. A quotation proving as much adorns the entire front page of Australia Book Review’s (ABR) August issue for 2001. It is an excerpt from a memoir by fellow poet Peter Porter who concedes to having known Ted Hughes ‘only slightly and Sylvia Plath hardly at all’ (21). Be that as it may, he felt free to expand publicly about them. Noteworthy in his ‘Bystander’s Recollections’ are factual mistakes and explicitly negative opinions of Hughes. A co-signatory with Al Alvarez and Ronald Hayman to the 1989 letter protesting Plath’s unmarked grave, Porter in ABR comments on the poet’s husband like this: ‘Leaving Plath must have been not just an imperative for someone who wished to love other women whenever it suited him, but also a move to defend his own

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talent from competition with a superior one’ (25). He thinks that Hughes ‘changed from an original and formidable poet into a near-caricature of extravagance chiefly through arrogance and masculine predatoriness’. In order to bed as many women as possible, Hughes moreover adopted the air of a daemon by practising life-changing shamanism (Porter 2001, 27). Not too keen on necromancy, novelist Emma Tennant nonetheless fell for him. The year after Hughes died, she spilt their 1970s affair in the third volume of her memoirs, Burnt Diaries (1999), portraying him more in accordance with Porter’s womanizer than the image of a shy recluse upheld by loyal friends. The title of Tennant’s book may allude to Plath’s journals, which Hughes had admitted to destroying, as if they now reappeared. On 5 September 1999, The Sunday Times presented extracts entitled ‘The hidden life of Ted Hughes’ adorned with photos of Hughes, Plath, and Carol Hughes. Obviously not finished with contributing to the Plath–Hughes legend or enjoying the resulting media attention, Tennant then wrote Sylvia and Ted (2001), a novel ostensibly all based on facts, according to an author’s note. However, readers would do well to question not only the proposed factuality but also the generic difference between Tennant’s two books, since the account she gives in Burnt Diaries of a dinner together with Ted Hughes and Jill Barber, another of his lovers, departs considerably from the version offered by Barber of the same occasion. In ‘Ted Hughes, my secret lover’, a piece published by The Mail on Sunday, on 13 May 2001, Barber ‘for the first time’ tells the story of her four-year affair with the late Poet Laureate. Aiming to undermine her rival’s hold on Hughes, she claims it ‘excessive’ to use ‘[e]ven the “submistress” tag’ on Tennant. Barber calls Tennant’s description of her – Barber – ‘pure fiction’, while writing of herself as his ‘ray of sunshine’ and noting both how much he loved being with her and that ‘[h]e loved women to be obsessed with him’. A rumour that Hughes had an illegitimate child stems, incorrectly, from a pregnancy that she was supposed to have had, Barber suggests (2001).35 What is true? What actually happened? The two women who were involved with Ted Hughes during the same period of time, draw quite different portraits of him in their kiss-and-tell tales, probably due to how he acted with them, what they wanted from him and vested in the affair, and how they wish to depict themselves. Parts of the Tennant memoir, such as the paragraphs concerning one of Robert Lowell’s wives, resemble Alvarez’s in that she publishes information obtained through friendship and, literally speaking, in private rooms. Sylvia and Ted portrays the characters in accordance with popular myths and expectations it raised by promising to offer ‘the story of the twentieth century’s most famous – and

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most tragic – love affair’. In appreciation of her help, she dedicated the book to ‘Elizabeth (Compton) Sigmund’, in this way echoing Plath’s own acknowledgements in The Bell Jar. Elizabeth, ‘the only woman who really seems to love Sylvia’ (Tennant 2001, 125), appears as ‘the kind woman’ (162), ‘the pretty woman’ (163), and ‘the house sitter’ (172) in the novel’s epilogue.36 Frieda Hughes implicitly refers to Tennant in the restored edition of Ariel, arguing that literary fictionalization of her mother’s story only parodies the life she actually lived. Her name creates more public attention for the writers than what would result from a story grounded in invented characters (F. Hughes 2004, xvi–xvii). By then, Kate Moses had joined the club with Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (2003), and there were more to come – novels by people who considered themselves friends in one way or another, whether they actually had known the famous couple or were just fascinated by them.37 Their work was, in either case, not particularly welcomed by the family. Neither was Jillian Becker, at whose house Sylvia Plath stayed the weekend before she killed herself. Published the year after Myers and Feinstein, her memoir, Giving Up: The last Days of Sylvia Plath (2002), may well be read as a comment on their accounts. When Becker knew her, Plath had been ‘lonely, almost friendless as well as husbandless. The flattering courtiers had departed with the king’ (1). They quickly became companions, she writes, but Becker’s role in many respects looks a lot like the labour of a social worker, taking Sylvia out, feeding her and the children, comforting her, and adopting her point of view: ‘Assia was, or seemed, both to Sylvia and me: vain and shallow’ (Becker 2002, 6), and ‘fashion – Sylvia and I agreed – was “probably just about all she understood”’ (21). The first week of February 1963, Plath’s need for support and attention ‘had begun to seem relentless’. Jillian Becker doubted that she could carry on much longer than she had during those final days and nights, caring for Sylvia and her children in addition to her own family, while her husband Gerry was sick with the flu (11). But seeing the state Sylvia was in, they pleaded with her not to go home on Sunday night, 10 February. She insisted, and early the next morning she was dead. Becker states her purpose with the memoir as a wish to set things straight, since information that she earlier had given to biographers was suppressed, distorted, or tailored to make a point: ‘If events in a writer’s life are worth recording, they should have the virtue of having happened’ (1). Further on in her booklet of forty-four pages, she explains that Olwyn Hughes, acting as a fierce censor out of loyalty to her brother, stopped

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Anne Stevenson from reporting what she had told her about the funeral (34).38 Only the Beckers, in addition to Warren Plath and his wife Margaret, had gone to Heptonstall and had been there ‘for Sylvia’. At the gathering afterwards, Ted Hughes ‘blurted out vehemently but quietly ... “Everybody hated her. ... It was either her or me”’ (26). She was also interviewed by Janet Malcolm, but Malcolm made no use of anything she told her, Becker maintains (34–35). In Giving Up, Jillian Becker portrays herself as a woman with no time for the kind of excuses which previously had prevented her from speaking her mind, characterizing opinions she disagrees with as ‘stupid’, ‘nonsense’, ‘twaddle’, or ‘blasphemy’. Whereas she in younger days had been addicted to poetry, Becker years later claims to have ‘no patience with poets, romantics, or aesthetes of any stripe’ (32). Her interests changed to the study of terrorism, on which she has published extensively. Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (1977) has been translated into many languages. Any sympathy which she may have had for Hughes and his plight is long gone. Becker scolds him for complaining at the funeral that his wife had introduced him to the commercial side of art. If his growing reputation and commercial success had been helped along by Sylvia pressing him to sell his work, ‘it was cause for gratitude, not resentment’ (27). She speculates what effect it could have had on Plath’s mood and final decision if Hughes – as he told them in Heptonstall – had assured her that they would be back together again at Court Green by the summer. This is how Becker recollects what she thought at the time: So off you’d go with Assia and have your fun, whatever that might do to Sylvia, and return when the fun’s over, whatever that might do to Assia, and expect Sylvia – knowing her as you do! – to be patient and forbearing when you leave, and grateful and forgiving when you return? (28)

She makes Hughes largely responsible for Plath killing herself and resents deeply that others have tried to implicate them – the Beckers. Anger and impatience colour Giving Up, anger at people who have written that the suicide came when it did because friends ‘let her go too soon’ (30), and anger at Plath herself, for abandoning her children and them without a word: Though both Gerry and I felt she had discarded us along with the whole intolerable world, we made every allowance for her. But now I don’t. Now I say that I did not deserve to be contemned by her. Other friends deserted her, men she courted in her loneliness spurned her, publishers refused her

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novel, the editors of The New Yorker rejected poems of hers on the grounds that they couldn’t understand them. But I had neither rejected nor hurt her. As a would-be poet, I deserved to be humbled by her talent; but I myself did not deserve to be humiliated by her disdain. (31–32)

If her children were not reason enough to keep Sylvia Plath alive, what could anyone possibly have done, Jillian Becker asks, thus at the same time pointing at how far gone Plath was – way beyond thinking of hospitable friends’ hurt feelings. Perhaps, then, even the responsibility placed on Hughes is disputable. By proposing that fame was Plath’s final desire, as it had been her first, she also hints at a calculating and posteritydirected motive behind the suicide. ‘Too much the writer and too little the mother, did she gas herself because the story she invented for her life demanded that ending?’ (42). Being Jewish herself, Jillian Becker is critical of Plath’s poetic claim to an empathetic understanding of Jews in German concentration camps. She sees this as a hollow dramatization of personal unhappiness and reproaches her friend for asserting that the poems conveyed to Holocaust survivors that ‘somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like’. Disagreeing strongly with Anne Stevenson, who argues that the poet’s suffering was not only ‘on a scale to compare with the Holocaust’ but ‘all the more terrible because it was self-inflicted and lacked a physical dimension’, Becker thinks that ‘Sylvia would have recognized this for what it is – stupid’ (41).39 Despite Plath’s self-dramatization, Becker does not consider her an anti-Semite. This label and her worst contempt she again reserves for Ted Hughes. Some of the vocabulary in ‘Dreamers’, his ‘sickeningly antiSemitic’ poem about Assia Wevill included in Birthday Letters, could according to Giving Up ‘have come spitting out of an issue of the Völkischer Beobachter, the organ of the Nazi party’, while some of its ideas ‘could have dripped from a mediaeval text on witchcraft’ (36). Jillian Becker does not accept Hughes’s defence for writing ‘Dreamers’. In an interview, he had described himself to be ‘like a second-generation Holocaust survivor’ because of his father and uncles having fought at Gallipoli in the First World War. Neither does she agree with him that the poem expresses his wife’s thoughts rather than his own. She terms his selfexoneration as blasphemous, maintaining that ‘[t]o pose as a victim at the expense of millions of real victims, is to sin against humankind’. For her, ‘Dreamers’ displays Hughes’s psychology and choice of words, not Plath’s. ‘She was not anti-Semitic; he was’ (38–39). Becker, then, redirects at Hughes the objection repeatedly raised against Plath: for making grossly disproportionate comparisons between herself and the Jews.

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Almost matching the discourse of Giving Up, Olwyn Hughes in The Independent, on 19 May 2002, dismisses the revelations as ‘absolute tittletattle’. What the biography-writing ladies do, ‘these gabbling, sensationhungry women’, is to ‘yap, yap, yap’ over things they know nothing about. Having no recollection of a joint meeting with Becker and Stevenson, she all the same concedes to censoring parts of the account about the funeral (in Morrison 2002).

The Never-Ending Friends Memoirs of Sylvia Plath continued to surface in the new century, signed by friends and acquaintances getting on in age. Some published their recollections for the first time, while others returned to the same episodes they had dwelt on several times before. The latest pieces do not necessarily bring much fresh information, but they do keep alive an interest of which the memoirs themselves are a product. Jillian Becker belongs to the first category as does Ruth Fainlight, a contemporary poet and American ‘sister-spirit’ of Plath, married to the English writer Alan Sillitoe. A Jew like Becker, Fainlight’s memoir does not contain any of the devastating accusations launched against Ted Hughes in Giving Up. Contributing to The Epic Poise, Fainlight had pronounced herself as happy to participate in the celebration of ‘an extraordinary man’ (1999, 178). And in ‘Sylvia and Jane: Women on the verge of fame and family’ (2003), printed in The Times Literary Supplement, she expresses pity for both Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill, whom she ‘over the next few years ... came to know and understand and then to love’. However, she also writes that Hughes later ‘anathematized’ Assia in Birthday Letters as ‘the alien demon-woman who lured him away from Sylvia’, whereas Assia eventually ‘succumbed to her despair at Ted’s seeming indifference’, killing herself and their daughter (2003, 15).40 Fainlight and Plath met through their husbands in 1961. The four of them ‘took to each other at once’ (14), and Plath dedicated her poem ‘Elm’ to Fainlight. When the Hugheses separated, their friends were spending a year in Tangier, where Fainlight cultivated her friendship with the Jane (Bowles) of her 2003 essay – yet another American woman obsessed with domesticity like Sylvia and Ruth herself. All three ‘struggled with the dichotomy of being writers’ wives as well as writers’ (13), and the article is just as much about the person narrating the story as it is about ‘Sylvia and Jane’. Writing to her in Tangier, Plath described ‘unsavoury’ details from the marriage break up, declaring Ruth and Alan ‘the dearest couple’ she knew

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in England, and noting how much she was looking forward to their return at the end of February (15). Fainlight was to bring along her Moroccan maid to look after the children so that the two women would have time to work and discuss poetry. Because of the plans they had made, The Observer’s announcement of her friend’s death seemed incomprehensible. We hear that for months Fainlight dreamt and had nightmares of her, that she was haunted and almost driven crazy, and had been wondering ever since whether it would have made any difference if she had been there when Sylvia moved back to London. Whatever the character of Ruth Fainlight’s relationship with Sylvia Plath, it was Elizabeth Sigmund who acquired the position in British newspapers as her ‘best’ and ‘closest friend’. Talking to Janet Malcolm, Sigmund complained of the absurdity that she should be seen as someone who tried to push herself forward ‘on the back of the poor dead girl’, considering that she only made calls or wrote letters ‘in reaction to something outrageous that somebody had done about Sylvia’ (in Malcolm 1993, 131). Bitter Fame represents one such instance when Sigmund felt compelled to protest in The Observer at how Plath was portrayed. She had been similarly provoked by negative statements Olwyn Hughes uttered in connection with the lawsuit over the film version of The Bell Jar. Via The Boston Globe in 1987, Sigmund ‘[wanted] to make sure her surviving family in America knows [Sylvia] still has some good friends left in England, who will come to her defense’ (in Erlanger 1987, 14). Approached by journalists, biographers, novelists, and film-makers, Elizabeth Sigmund has obliged by providing help and information seemingly without reservation, emerging as a star witness in numerous news items, stories, and headlines. She has been able to remember – or add – more details with the passing of time. As ‘Plath’s great friend’, she expands like an expert on all the involved. In her account, Hughes was both a ‘poetic genius’ and a man ‘fearful of women. After Sylvia, he never wanted any woman to have emotional control over him’ and ‘used to have two or three on the go at any time’ (in Thorpe 2001). ‘Prompted’ by an article on Assia Wevill in 1999, Sigmund produced a new piece of memoir, recalling ‘a moment of terrible realisation’.41 The Guardian could thus offer its readers ‘a heart-breaking new twist in the story of the lives and deaths of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’ (Sigmund 1999). Visiting Hughes in London after Plath’s suicide, Sigmund heard about an operation Assia Wevill had undergone and quickly jumped to the conclusion that it was an abortion. The resulting epiphany is condensed in her article title: ‘I realised Sylvia knew about Assia’s pregnancy – it might have offered a further explanation of her suicide’. How she knows that

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Sylvia knew is not revealed. Very few people at the time were privy to knowledge of the pregnancy and subsequent abortion. Elaine Feinstein writes in Ted Hughes that she had not been able to find any ‘independent evidence’ for it among close friends of Wevill’s (2001, 148), still Wevill’s own biographers, Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, later did. Based on their sources, Koren and Negev assert in A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill (2006) and in an extract (2006b) published by The Daily Telegraph that she had an abortion in the fourth week of March 1963. There are no indications that anyone told Sylvia Plath.42 But according to Christine Jeffs’s film Sylvia (2004), starring Gwyneth Paltrow, this is what happened. Elizabeth Sigmund functioned as an advisor to the film makers, endorsed an early script, and supplied the actors with inside information.43 On a website, she promoted the film with a ‘Note to audiences’, declaring her delight that the tragic story of her friend was being dramatized. In Devon Today (2000), Sigmund muses once more on their friendship, underscoring Sylvia’s ‘many’ visits and that she ‘often’ brought gifts from Court Green. The only surprising elements in this piece are the title, ‘Why it’s time to honour Sylvia’, and the introductory statement that ‘little attention has been paid to the genius of Sylvia Plath’, which echoes in a remark towards the end: ‘I will never forget Sylvia, and feel very sad that there has been so little attention paid to this important poet’ (2000, 35, 36). Even if Sigmund’s perspective here primarily is a local, Devonish one, the lack of notice is not what we first think of when hearing Plath’s name. Regardless of how much she may have contributed to the Jeffs film, contrary to Al Alvarez, she does not figure in it. After Sylvia was made, Sigmund distanced herself widely and completely. The Independent reports that Plath’s ‘closest friend’ said that ‘Paltrow’s poet is not the fun, humorous woman she knew’ (in Carrell and Stummer 2003). The New Zealand Herald quotes her as calling it a ‘misleading, over-miserable myth’, ‘unrealistic’, ‘cliched and simplistic’, enhancing the idea ‘that Sylvia was a permanent depressive and a possessive person, which just isn’t true’ (in Calder 2004). The Sunday Telegraph presents her views under this heading: ‘The awful truth about Sylvia: Plath’s best friend talks at last’. Having spoken out quite a few times over the years already, what Sigmund now reveals is her disappointment with the film – ‘though she befriended Paltrow’ – and that she thinks the personal details about Ted and Sylvia are better left alone; after all, ‘what good can it do, bringing it up again?’ (in Macdonald 2004).44 Presumably this insight did not include her own disclosures in the same at-home interview, where ‘Sylvia Plath’s confidante and “earth mother”’

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tells of her involvement in the film and events related to Plath’s suicide. Entitled ‘I paid for the gas that killed Sylvia Plath’, the ‘vivid memories’ include Sigmund receiving from Wevill a gas bill for Fitzroy Road, with ‘a little note at the bottom [which] said, “I believe this covers your occupation of Court Green”’. The period included 11 February, hence the title of the interview. ‘Assia knew I was Sylvia’s friend, and I loved her. ... She wanted to hurt me’, Sigmund explains. In a parenthetical statement made earlier in the interview, she, or the journalist at least, already explained the incident: ‘She was your friend, was the chilling implication: you pay the bill’. However, when the same anecdotal evidence was reported years before, in Rough Magic, Paul Alexander quotes this as the factual message that Wevill supposedly wrote on the reverse side of the bill: ‘She was your friend. You pay the bill’ (1991, 336). Interviewed by Marianne Macdonald in 2004, Elizabeth Sigmund – contrary to what she declared in 1999 – is no longer certain whether Sylvia Plath was informed of Wevill’s pregnancy. But if anyone had told her, ‘it would have been Assia, knowing what she was like’. Rendering the story now, Sigmund provides new bits of a conversation she had at the time with a strategically placed childminder. This story also materializes in Emma Tennant’s novel about Sylvia and Ted. The Sunday Telegraph’s journalist does her best to establish a sympathetic and trustworthy image of her source, claiming that ‘[i]t is obvious what Plath saw in Elizabeth. She has a sharp intelligence and honesty, and evidently loves life’. By quoting Sigmund’s admiring declarations about the famous deceased, the speaker as well – i.e. Elizabeth, the preferred friend – is reflected positively: ‘I felt as if Sylvia was my utterly brilliant younger sister,’ she says affectionately, in her musical, old-fashioned voice. ‘She was a person of importance: you could feel it and see it when you were with her. You knew she was special.’

We are made to understand that the situation is painful for Elizabeth. She ‘stiffens with outrage’, ‘shakes her head with horror’, and also ‘shakes her head grimly’ over Assia Wevill’s behaviour. It ‘affects her’ to talk about Sylvia. ‘She sniffs – even after four decades.’ Macdonald does not question Sigmund’s position as closest friend and as the one who knew Plath the best. When she asks her to comment on Frieda Hughes, who upon the release of the film criticized feminist vilifications of her father and compared them to the hounding of Prince Charles over the death of the Princess of Wales, she describes Sigmund’s disapproval as ‘clear’. Perhaps not all readers will agree with Macdonald

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about how ‘carefully’ her interviewee’s words are chosen. ‘“I think Frieda’s got a very hard path to travel,” she says. “But the Charles thing is nonsense.”’ When the British Library in 2001 acquired the correspondence between Ted Hughes and the critic Keith Sagar, journalists discovered that Hughes in one of his letters blamed Plath’s death on an adverse reaction to the antidepressants she had been prescribed.45 Approached by The Sunday Telegraph, ‘close friend’ Sigmund disputes that this could have been a key factor, even if Plath had reacted badly to the drug, and then puts Hughes back in the spotlight: [Y]ou have to look at why she was needing them in the first place. She was dangerously devoted to Ted, she adored him. When Sylvia discovered Ted was having an affair she said to me: ‘I have given my heart away and I can’t take it back – it is like living without a heart’. (in Milner 2001)46

That she had tried to kill herself, been medicated, hospitalized, and treated for severe depression long before Hughes came into her life was apparently of no relevance.

Me and Sylvia The role of most trusted friend and privileged insider had contenders in competing publications. Covering one and a half broadsheet pages, The Observer Review boasts ‘a uniquely intimate portrait of Sylvia Plath’ in the first edition of 2004. Written by its former poetry editor, who qualifies as both ‘her confidant and mentor’, Al Alvarez uses the experience of seeing himself portrayed in the new film as an opportunity to have his say once again, this time entitled ‘Ted, Sylvia and me’.47 His action in Janet Malcolm’s piece in the New Yorker (1993), directing her and readers to the exchange of letters between himself and Ted Hughes (now held in the British Library), had clearly damaged his reputation considerably less than Lucas Myers believed to be the case in his memoir (2001, 141). Alvarez has kept his leading part as the perceptive editor who appreciated Sylvia Plath’s greatness while rejecting her invitation to an affair. Public memory being what it is, he has been able to repeat the same material over and over again as if for the first time. When he participated in ‘Desert Island Discs’ on Radio 4 in March 2000, The Observer released a summary of what Alvarez was going to say, which was featured just below a presentation of Plath’s extended journals. The Observer’s Vanessa Thorpe depicts him as the one ‘who was fatefully with Plath for Christmas Eve 1962’, who ‘speaks out’ and ‘will speak

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openly about his failure to recognise Plath’s misery and his decision not to have a relationship with her’ – i.e. things he had confessed to repeatedly before (Thorpe 2000). Half a year earlier, in connection with the publication of his autobiography, Where Did It All Go Right? (1999), an edited extract recounts in The Guardian his visit to her apartment on Christmas Eve of 1962. Some metaphors and paragraphs are repeated straight out of The Savage God; others differ. Whereas in 1971 ‘her hair gave off a strong smell, sharp as an animal’s’ (Alvarez 1973, 29), in 1999 it ‘left a faint, sharp animal scent on the air’ (1999b; 1999a, 207; my italics). Like Elizabeth Sigmund, he is able to produce quite a few vivid new details. This time he elaborates on how she reacted when he looked at his watch and said he had to go: She said, ‘Don’t, please don’t’ and began to weep – great uncontrollable sobs that made her hiccup and shake her head. I stroked her head and patted her back as though she were an abandoned child – ‘It’s going to be OK. We’ll meet after Christmas’ – but she went on crying and shaking her head. So I went on to my dinner party and never saw her alive again. (1999b; 1999a, 208)48

According to Elaine Feinstein, commenting on the situation in Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, Alvarez was appalled. Plath’s needs were so extreme, the responsibility was so immense, and ‘[h]e had never found her particularly attractive sexually’. Besides, he was at the time getting back together with the woman who later became his present wife, and he detached himself from Plath ‘as gently as he could’. Immediately above this interpretation, Feinstein claims as a matter of fact that ‘[h]e knew she would have liked a sexual relationship to develop between them’ (2001, 137–38; my italics). Since no independent sources confirm the stated fact, the only thing readers can know for sure is what Alvarez has said, and then consider the effects for ourselves. In terms of status, it is obviously better to have been chosen and desired by the famous poet than the other way around. By not only regularly hinting that Plath fancied him, but also frequently referring to a budding relationship with his future wife, whom he preferred over the poetic genius, Alvarez projects both himself and his wife as desirable mates.49 However, if Plath did want an affair with him, she must have changed her priorities. Being tall herself, height was what she used to look for in men, and height was something Alvarez could definitely not offer her.50 A major bonus in the edited extract from his autobiography is signalled in The Guardian’s title: ‘How black magic killed Sylvia Plath’, thus placing the blame on Hughes and his dabbling in the occult. This had been

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a major hypothesis made by biographer Paul Alexander, but only a vague theme in The Savage God, where Plath’s suicide was explained as ‘an attempt to get herself out of a desperate corner which her own poetry had boxed her into’ (1973, xii). Now, the desertion on the part of her husband is spelled out. Alvarez’s own ritual acceptance of guilt – ‘I had let her down unforgivably’ – only functions to make the accountability of the other all the more conspicuous: After Hughes had left her for another woman, Plath was lonely and needed somebody to take care of her. Alvarez told himself that she was still Ted’s responsibility. Hughes was, moreover, the one who had shown his wife the fatal descent down to her dead father, perhaps ‘in the name of poetry’, so that she could tap her inner sources. At the same time, the ‘weird mishmash of pagan superstition and Celtic myth’, which worked fine for him, was foreign and dangerous for her. ‘By the end, the pseudo black magic which Ted used cannily to get through to the sources of his inspiration had taken her over.’ Given the personal nightmares that Plath had to contend with – the suicide attempt, shock treatments, and ‘an adored Prussian father who scared her stiff and died when she was eight’ – the working of Hughes’s creative strategies on her may, according to Alvarez, be compared to ‘say, the “recovered memory” games untrained rogue psychotherapists play on unwary patients – releasing the inner demons then stepping aside with no thought of the consequences’ (1999b). The black magic theme does not figure as prominently in the longer version of Where Did It All Go Right?, which contains a sketch of Assia Wevill so negative it rings the Sigmund bell. Alvarez’s ambivalence towards Hughes is apparent if we compare the newspaper record with his tributary piece in The Epic Poise (1999) from the same year. There, he disassociates himself from feminists’ ‘wild accusations’ of murder and treachery against Plath’s husband, remembering him as ‘quiet-spoken, witty, shrewd and modest’, a man who never came across as a poet and kept his beliefs strictly to himself (1999c, 210). In ‘Ted, Sylvia and me’ (2004), Alvarez covers familiar ground: how he got to know them through his work as poetry editor in The Observer and published the first account of her suicide. ‘When Ted walked out of her life in the summer of 1962’, she ‘used’ to drop by his studio, where he ‘would’ pour drinks, and she ‘would’ settle cross-legged on the floor and read to him new poems. We get an impression of habit and iterative action, equally implied in his earlier versions. Thus, readers may wonder a bit at Alvarez now writing that he ‘no longer remember[s] how many visits she made – three or four at most’. The way he expresses himself we cannot exclude that she dropped by even fewer times. However, he immediately

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assures us that ‘it was enough’ for him to hear a fair proportion of Ariel and recognize that it was new and extraordinary (2004, 1). True to his recycling habit, bits and pieces are repeated more or less verbatim from the 1999 account, although the fatal significance of Hughes’s ‘weird mishmash of astrology, black magic, Jungian psychology, Celtic myth and pagan superstition’ is toned down. Alvarez writes that he had ‘always believed’ that Plath’s unrelenting competitiveness helped to precipitate her final breakdown (2004, 2). His obligatory self-incrimination, which he here extends to a collective fault – ‘In the end, like everyone else, I let her down’ – is followed by a disarming excuse: ‘All I can plead in my defence is that, since her death, I have done my best to show that what she wrote matters a great deal more than how she died’ (1). Those who remember how much weight Alvarez has placed on Plath’s suicide and how strongly Hughes for that very reason reacted to the revelations in The Savage God, might disagree. We may, as well, wonder about one of the objections he voices against the portrayal of himself in Christine Jeffs’s film: [T]he scriptwriter has me telling Ted that Sylvia has made a pass at me. Treachery posing as confession and gossip may be the lifeblood of soap opera, but in the real world friends don’t behave like that, especially friends who know each other’s secrets and wish each other well. (2)

As the correspondence between them makes clear, it was exactly his breach of confidence and his misunderstanding of the ethics of friendship that Hughes reacted to back in 1971, when Alvarez claimed he was presenting the true story of Sylvia Plath’s death. But in 2004, only Alvarez lived to tell the tale of ‘Ted, Sylvia and me’. Wrapped in appraisals of the film, his own character in it, and a visit to the set when Sylvia was shot, it becomes somewhat muddled who plays the major and minor part in the drama. His objections to the final product are mainly with the dialogue and some factual errors. Alvarez thinks Gwyneth Paltrow’s performance is wonderful, and he characterizes the film itself as ‘an astonishingly restrained and serious movie … creating a portrait of a troubled artist that aims to be as beautiful and disturbing to look at as Plath’s poems are beautiful and disturbing to read’. As for the feel of the movie and the portrait of a married couple pulling each other down, ‘that’s how it really was back then’. Al Alvarez accordingly seems to condone a central motif in Sylvia, namely Hughes’s betrayal. It runs through the film right from their first meeting and is completed in a heartbreaking scene at the end, when the film’s Sylvia has decided to win back her husband from the woman with

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whom he is having an affair. They have sex, and Daniel Craig as Hughes tells her that he has really missed her. Not until she starts planning their future together does he spring the bomb. He cannot move in with her and the children again, because the other woman is pregnant. We then see Gwyneth Paltrow sitting naked, devastated, all by herself. She turns on the gas the same night. Cause and effect can hardly be linked more directly. However, the problem biographically – and ethically – is that the scene on the couch probably never took place. Not only are there no indications that Sylvia Plath knew about the pregnancy, but Ted Hughes also categorically denied seeing her at all the last night of her life and kept on insisting that they both wanted a reconciliation.51 Alvarez continued to promote his friendship with the famous couple. True to established practice on his part, The Writer’s Voice from 2005 parades some inside information from a conversation with Hughes and contributes to blurring the boundaries between private and public spheres. Based on lectures given at the New York Public Library, the book presents different authors’ struggles to find a voice of their own, Alvarez included. Sylvia Plath resides at the top of his prominent list.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE USE AND ABUSE OF A POET

Sylvia Plath started out as a poet with a restricted readership, was politicized and turned into an emblem for the feminist movement, and became an object of fascination and joined the ranks of modern celebrities. Changes in her status say less about Plath than the contexts within which her work – and life – has been interpreted and the ways she has been used. A reception study may thus function as a barometer for the hegemonic position that competing concepts and theories carry at certain times. Aesthetic and academic pluralism flourish in the new century, with popular culture gaining ground all around. As the internet does not distinguish the wheat from the tar, a Sylvia Plath search will reveal how mixed the interest in her is. Bibliographies, scholarly works, references to specialized archives and forums coexist with offerings of t-shirts, gossipy titbits, tributary poems of a motley quality, and personal statements from all sorts of devotees. The identification with the poet is as passionate as ever. In this book, I have mainly focused on different interpretive communities, their images and studies of Plath, rather than on the venues where these views have been published. Otherwise, a separate chapter might well have been set aside for the newspapers which have supplied me with so much of the material I investigate. Such a chapter could in an exemplary way have documented her spectacular career change from an unknown poet in review sections to a celebrity fit for front-page coverage and a household name dropped in articles on any number of subjects – baking included.1 Constituting a distilled version of the whole reception, the newspapers moreover reflect several points that are evident from the book at large: the increasing marketability of Plath and the diversity of her followers, the anecdotal nature of the evidence that writers employ to argue her – i.e. their – case, the cultural authority they seek to enact by evoking it, persistent traits in the coverage, and painstaking efforts at finding seemingly new angles to a familiar story.

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An account of recurring newspaper concerns may serve as a summarizing introduction to my attempt at tying up loose ends and my exploration of the public phenomenon that Sylvia Plath has come to represent. Ranging from scandal-mongering to perceptive analyses, the press coverage reflects on a small scale how the traditional barriers between so-called high and low culture have changed in the course of the last few decades. It similarly documents a point Joe Moran emphasizes in Star Authors (2000): the dependence on visual images in the commercial exploitation of writers and the modern commodification of personality. The perpetual reproduction of photos contributes to the elision of public and private spheres (2000, 122). Plath’s case by and large supports the idea of ‘a signature career arc for American modernist writers’, as advanced by Loren Glass. In Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (2004), Glass examines some of these writers’ passages ‘from the restricted elite audience of urban bohemia and “little magazines” to the mass audience of the U.S. middlebrow’ (2004, 6). Yet, the larger issues involved in such ‘passages’ are not confined to American modernists. The main question addressed in my concluding chapter – via newspaper concerns, changing functions of literature at universities and elsewhere, the canonization of Plath in particular, and the mythologizing of poets in general – is the reason for her unique standing. I aim to condense these queries into a final Sylvia Plath formula.

Why Won’t She Lie Down? Publicity about Plath naturally peaks around major events, such as the publication of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters in 1998 and the extended version of Plath’s journals in 2000. The opening of the Ted Hughes archive at Emory University in Atlanta that same year represented a noteworthy event in itself, providing scholars and journalists with inexhaustible material for new publications. Christine Jeffs’s film Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, likewise resulted in an overwhelming amount of columns before and after its worldwide release in 2004.2 Bookstores stocked up on works by and about the main subjects (Blais 2003). But books, essays, and interviews keep on materializing even without the pretext of a specific occasion. One reason is that the media coverage of Plath and Hughes is a means on the part of the publications to interpellate their increasingly dispersed audience in the same way that the modern saturation of celebrities functions, according to P. David Marshall, as a brand identity and unifying force that transcends categories of taste and interest (2006, 2–3).

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Suggesting scandals and hidden controversies which are revealed ‘freely’, ‘at last’, ‘for the first time’, and in an ‘untold story’ has been a reliable recipe for the media almost regardless of profile. The same could be said for their use of photographic images. While The Mail on Sunday on 1 February 1987 tempted their readers with the ‘Hidden story of Britain’s savage literary genius’ (Walker et al. 1987), The Observer on 6 May 2001 chose ‘Secret passions of a poet laureate’ as headline on a piece introducing Elaine Feinstein’s upcoming biography of Ted Hughes (Thorpe 2001). In its eagerness to follow up the promised revelations, the paper claimed to have ‘evidence that Hughes had an unacknowledged fourth child’ – which turned out not to be correct. To The Sunday Telegraph, on 18 January 2004, Elizabeth Sigmund told about the ‘shocking events she witnessed before – and after – Plath’s suicide’ (in Macdonald 2004). Whether headlines reflect the content of the articles or not is less important. ‘Last chapter in Sylvia Plath’s tragic love story’ (Gibbons 2000) actually reports of a blue English Heritage plaque being put on the house in Chalcot Square where the poet lived with her husband and daughter before they moved to Devon. All of these articles naturally contain several photos of the main characters. Newspapers contribute to the hyping of certain publishing events by printing excerpts. The Guardian made clear on the front page that it had ‘World exclusive’ rights to extracts from Plath’s unabridged journals edited by Karen V. Kukil, underlining that their readers were in for a special treat.3 Between 17 and 22 January 1998, The Times contributed decisively to making Birthday Letters front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic by serializing twelve of the poems, which were introduced by a lead editorial and accompanied by a running commentary.4 Hughes’s new book had been kept a secret until the first instalment in The Times, twelve days before the actual publication date. On 19 January 1998, Birthday Letters became a front-page story in The New York Times. As a kind of follow up, The Observer one month later boasts a journalistic coup: the first interview ever with the man to whom Assia Wevill was married at the time she met Ted Hughes. In ‘My wife, the other woman’, David Wevill speaks little and unwillingly about the different ménages, but the tragic outcome is highlighted in editorial summaries (Todd 1998).5 The first biography of Assia Wevill also received front-page coverage when The Daily Telegraph promoted exclusive extracts from A Lover of Unreason, by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, in September 2006. Declaring that Hughes had been revealed as ‘a domestic tyrant’, the paper perhaps not surprisingly had chosen to print the most sensational parts: the suicide of Plath and that of Wevill six years later. Outlined in flashy

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headlines and large photos of the central characters – children as well as adults, we get the impression that this is another opportunity to print the old story once more.6 The resulting media overexposure has given rise to inventive headlines just to get attention. ‘Love at first bite’, ‘The fatal attraction of Sylvia Plath’, and ‘Who’s afraid of Sylvia Plath?’ obviously play on popular film and drama titles.7 The overload itself is a favourite media topic, triggering seemingly exasperated questions, such as ‘What more could possibly be said about Ted and Sylvia?’ Going by the writings, journalists have been on a privileged first-name basis with the central characters for a long time. Signalling ironic distance to all the ‘Plathophiles’, ‘Plathologists’, and ‘Plathians’ with their booming industry of ‘Plather’, ‘Plathiana’, ‘Plathitudes’, ‘Plathophilia’, ‘Platholatry’, ‘Plathology’, and ‘Plathography’ engendered in the poet’s name, more critically minded commentators do not think of themselves as contributing to what has also been called ‘Sylvia Plath necrophilia’. Numerous theories have been launched to explain our continuous and collective fascination, which perhaps is just as much the media’s fascination as it is the public’s. ‘What generations have loved about the suicidal writer with the philandering poet-husband is the sheer, unadulterated depressiveness of the whole situation,’ as explained by The Los Angeles Daily News. To ensure their uniqueness and to justify writing about them, the paper rules Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes as ‘poetry’s unhappiest couplet’ (in Hodsdon 2003). Finding captive labels is a popular pastime. Others prefer ‘one of the most famous literary couples’, or they like to compare Ted and Sylvia with Charles and Diana. Similar to Prince Charles, Hughes rejected the very woman that women love to love. Interviewed in connection with her portrayal of Plath in ‘Edge’, the one-woman show written for her by Paul Alexander, Angelica Torn claims that [e]very woman in the world – every woman who can read – knows, or believes, that Sylvia Plath went to her death, leaving behind their two young children, because she had been ditched and coldly mistreated by her husband. (in Tallmer 2003)

The idea of the conflicted celebrity couple, ‘from Bill ‘n’ Hill to Whitney ‘n’ Bobby’, continues to bring out the heel, Achilles style, in most of us, states Julie Burchill in her Vogue effort (1998, 344) to explain why we are ‘still so enthralled’ by Plath (343). It must be because ‘suicide blondes never die’ (344) that Burchill does not have to address the halting comparison, since Syl ‘n’ Ted only became famous as a couple after they broke up and one of them was dead. She believes that Plath’s work will

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live ‘as long as women are torn between their muses and their hormones’ (345). The prevailing ‘era of the victim’ proves to be equally helpful to the poet’s standing. In ‘Great story, shame about the ending’ (2004), Charles McGrath of The New York Times nominates Plath’s suicide as the defining moment of her myth, citing the way it is depicted in biographies, memoirs, and fictional works. The suicide served as a great career move and ‘lent a creepy glamour to what would otherwise have been an unremarkable story of a marriage that, like so many, flourished for a while and then went bad’. Plath dying the way she did, the story dramatized in a film such as Sylvia would have to end with the main character sticking her head in the oven – hence the title of McGrath’s piece. But how seriously should we take his observation when the unfortunate end is clearly what makes the story for so many? New readers and commentators join the chorus all the time, (re)discovering Sylvia Plath and related issues over and over again. As a result, the public discussion in numerous areas seems to have reached a stand-still long ago. One reason is that writers refrain from checking or crediting others for what has been said before; another is that old observations appear like new because they are still relevant. The perennial question: Who is/was Sylvia (Plath)? – echoing the first line of Shakespeare’s poem ‘Silvia’ as well as a popular song from the early 1930s – is not only being asked repeatedly in books and essays searching for the real Sylvia Plath, but resurfaces in titles as well.8 By the 1960s and 70s, critics were already calling attention to the significance of Plath’s suicide, both career-wise and for the interpretation of her work. Irving Howe in 1972 explained much of Plath’s popularity as a glamour of fatality caused by her suicide. The glamour is obviously of a durable kind. In an account given by Carl Rakosi when reviewing Crossing the Water in 1971, Plath is a case study in the making of a great literary reputation. He names mystery, madness, and early death as the bewitching ingredients that give rise to a myth about her genius. Reporting on the reception of The Bell Jar a few months after it came out in the US, Helen Dudar cites the sadness and waste from Plath’s premature death as an explanation for her position as a cult object with the quality of romanticism invested in everything she wrote. It is highlighted in headlines such as ‘The poet who died so well’ (Kellaway 2000) and ‘Death becomes her’ (Barton 2003). Compressed in suggestive headlines, newspapers have conscientiously reported new explanations for the suicide without relating one hypothesis to the next or examining their validity. In 1999, The Guardian first

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announces Elizabeth Sigmund’s belief that her friend may have been pushed over the edge by hearing of Assia Wevill’s pregnancy.9 Five months later, the paper prints Al Alvarez’s autobiographical piece, quoted in Chapter Six (258), which claims that ‘black magic killed Sylvia Plath’ (1999b). And in 2001, a Sunday Telegraph title discloses how in a letter ‘Ted Hughes blamed drug for Plath’s suicide’. He believed that the key factor driving his wife to kill herself was an adverse reaction to the antidepressant she had been given (Milner 2001).10 On the publication of Jillian Becker’s memoir the following year, Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, The Independent is primarily concerned with Becker ‘controversially’ hinting that ‘the late Poet Laureate may have made an eleventh-hour attempt to win back his wife and that this could have been the final straw that caused Plath to take her own life’ (Morrison 2002). The early death, preserving her forever at the age of thirty, is likewise an explanatory key to the public’s preoccupation, according to Katharine Viner, editor of The Guardian Weekend. Reviewing the new edition of Plath’s journals in 2000 by asking ‘Who is Sylvia?’, she declares the poet an icon who has come to be identified by her death, ‘as if her life was worth nothing except as a preamble to the big event’.11 That this has been a common reaction, not least among so-called friends, Frieda Hughes confirms in The Times Magazine. When she refused to have the blue plaque placed on 23 Fitzroy Road, she was accosted in the street for choosing ‘the wrong house’ for such a dedication. However, to Frieda Hughes it was inconceivable that a marker honouring her mother’s achievement be put on the house in which she had killed herself after spending only eight miserable weeks there. In order to celebrate life and show that ‘she was worth more than just the sum of her death’ (F. Hughes 2000, 21), the plaque was unveiled on the poet’s ‘real London home’ (18), 3 Chalcot Square, where the small family had lived before moving to Devon. Three-and-a-half years later, in ‘Desperately seeking Sylvia’ (2003), written before the screening of Sylvia at the 47th London Film Festival, Katharine Viner expands on her subject, adding that great women writers are expected to be doomed and dead and preferably mad. She suggests other answers as well to the question constituting the opening of her article: ‘Why are we still so obsessed with the life and death of Sylvia Plath?’, pointing first to analogies as a reason why so many identify with the poet and her work.12 Although the collective pronoun seems to indicate differently, the editor makes it clear that not everybody is obsessed with Plath. For her, the obsessives are nearly always women and ‘typically start their campaigns in their teens’ by reading Ariel and The Bell Jar (Viner

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2003, 8). She points at Gwyneth Paltrow who, while researching her role in Sylvia, ostensibly found Plath’s novel uncomfortably close to her own experience. Katharine Viner goes on from Paltrow to offer a more all-inclusive observation to support her analogy theory. ‘The Bell Jar is, perhaps, about all young women’s struggles for self-definition – but at their most extreme and dangerous.’ Consulted even here, Elizabeth Sigmund observes that when seen together, the whole of Plath’s work contains a variety of conflicts familiar to women and that many things in her life still apply to young people now. Nevertheless, ‘mere analogies’ do not account for the existing cultural obsession addressed in ‘Desperately seeking Sylvia’. Al Alvarez, another omnipresent Plath friend, is called upon for a possible answer. He ascribes the cultural fascination to people being ‘wildly interested in scandal and gossip’ (8). Viner then lists the madly exciting and morbidly terrifying components in the Plath–Hughes relationship as ‘we’ see it: passion, tragedy, madness, and death, the meeting of great minds, and the Heathcliffian image of Hughes. The result is an intoxicating combination – ‘like a fantasy, and yet not fiction’. A further ingredient has been provided by the estate. Efforts on the part of the Hughes family to stay in control and to contain the obsession had the opposite effect and fed the mystique instead, Viner asserts, adding to it herself by stating that Ted and Olwyn Hughes, ‘always fascinated by the occult and supernatural’, thought that those who wrote about the relationship ‘would be cursed’ (9). When the journalist reports how Diane Middlebrook, in her ‘eagerly awaited’ analysis of the Plath–Hughes marriage, revealed that at the time of her death Plath was working on an autobiographical novel about a philandering husband, we are led to believe that new secrets are still popping up. For my purpose, Viner’s wording may demonstrate how the media and not actual disclosures keep alive the mystique, since knowledge of the manuscript and its topic had been around for years before Her Husband (2003) arrived on the scene. In the published letters home (1975), Sylvia Plath herself mentions working on a new novel. Information about it similarly figures in other books, such as Judith Kroll’s Chapters in a Mythology (1976), and biographies by Linda Wagner-Martin (1987), Anne Stevenson (1989), and Ronald Hayman (1991). In his introduction to Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Hughes writes (1977, 11) that when she died, Plath left behind around 130 pages of a novel provisionally titled ‘Double Exposure’, a manuscript which had ‘since disappeared’.13 Much of the explanation for Sylvia Plath’s continued hold on the public, Katharine Viner finds in the celebrity worship of our age. She

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insists on using the first person plural when describing typical reactions. Having read Plath’s work and hearing so much about the poet, we believe we know her. ‘We project our desires on to her; we read her poems and think she knows us; we fantasise about her glamorous, doomed life.’ Her fame means that we also think the poet belongs as much to us as she belongs to her family (2003, 9). Here Viner has described a classical object of fascination in line with studies of star authors and celebrity culture (Moran 2000; Glass 2004; Marshall 2006). She does not use the term exemplary figure, but the phenomenon she describes resembles how fame and celebrity worship functioned in classical Greece. Then, heroes worthy of worship became famous for their deeds; now, celebrities become heroes simply because they are famous. Anecdotal evidence and a rhetoric of example are fundamental in the portrayal of heroes across time zones. Keeping to the topic of ‘Desparately seeking Sylvia’, we might include additional suggestions by two of the scholars to which Viner refers, namely, Jacqueline Rose and Diane Middlebrook. For Rose, the ‘pull of the Plath story’ is its forceful language of blame and victimization that it shares with the soap operas into which it so effortlessly transmutes itself (1991, 6). Because Plath wrote so much about fantasy and psychic processes, displaying in her poetry cultural stereotypes like the symmetrical images of woman as seductress and victim, readers project their fantasies onto the poet, according to The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), thereby turning her into an object of desire. Rose believes this explains the many violently contradictory appraisals of Plath’s work. Diane Middlebrook, on the other hand, attributes the enduring interest to the war between the sexes. How mock-heroic this power struggle may seem, she still declares it ‘a real war’ (2003, 82). Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were so passionately in love and attuned at the outset. Yet their differences became irreconcilable, and the marriage ended catastrophically. To this day, allocating blame and taking sides has gone on in public view via self-appointed stand-ins. Thus, a reviewer in the online version of LA Weekly finds an important clue to ‘our enduring obsession with Sylvia Plath’ in the contrast between the achievement of husband and wife, with her work being ‘far greater’. Plath’s claim to true greatness – ‘perhaps a better claim than any other woman poet before or since’ – has been impossible to come to terms with ‘for anyone, including her husband’, Caroline Fraser (2001) maintains. Such an unreserved idol assessment is, needless to say, highly subjective, and others see it differently.14 Frieda Hughes, for one, testifies that her father had nothing but profound respect for her mother’s work in spite of being the target of her fury (2004, xiv).

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More significant in this connection is the obvious need for readers and commentators to proclaim unsurpassed excellence for people they admire, some of this enthusiasm as a matter of course reflecting back on the admirer. Worth noticing as well is the feverish tone in the Plathinfatuation. In ‘Death becomes her’, Laura Barton (2003) compares Sylvia Plath to a raw wound which many insist on scratching, defining her ‘the thinking woman’s Princess Diana’.

Converging Fields of Production Long before Lady Di became a sensation in her own right and a whole generation before Katharine Viner set out to investigate the Plath obsession, Judith Higgins in 1973 lists several causes that prefigure subsequent theories. Having consulted with teachers, critics, and poets, Higgins lands on the following reasons for ‘Sylvia Plath’s Growing Popularity with College Students’: (1) Professors of poetry had discovered Plath’s poetry early on and fostered it among their students. The first students to take her up wrote poetry themselves. (2) Others were hooked by The Bell Jar, responding to Esther Greenwood’s concerns about social pressure, identity, alienation, and how to live and find one’s place in society. (3) Plath became a cult figure for feminists because of the way she portrays the war between men and women. (4) Her self-exposure and probing of complex feelings ring true with young people. (5) The poet’s own suicide and her literary contemplation of suicide constitute a magnetic hold on the imagination. Reacting in an ‘awed, breathless, I-dare-not-gettoo-close fascination’, students, according to Higgins’s sources, regard Plath’s death as ‘an act of protest’ and her poetry as ‘suicide notes’ (1973, 29).15 Closing her inquiry, Higgins offers an additional, sixth reason for Sylvia Plath’s standing in the early 1970s, insisting that the single most important factor is the quality of her work. But since the difficulties concerning relative and absolute literary value have still to be resolved, her elaboration on the poet’s ‘leap into brilliance’ sounds more like a summary of former points. We hear that students respond ‘very strongly’ to the fierceness of Plath’s imagery (31) and that her disclosure of the darker side of life ‘delivers anger, hate, and dread to us purely; there are no qualifications, no second thoughts’ (33). The fact that Judith Higgins’s evaluation from 1973 by and large appears many years on as a well-founded explanation for the existing situation may seem to be a sign of wear resistance on the part of Sylvia Plath. The Higgins article can furthermore be invoked for illustrating how

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far-reaching social changes taking place at the time affected the literary institution. Most of the points accounted for in ‘Sylvia Plath’s Growing Popularity with College Students’ can be organized under the heading of ethical criticism. Readers practising ethical criticism use literary texts to discuss questions of personal and political relevance. Another essay published the same year, in College English, describes the liberating effect that Nancy Burr Evans experienced when she as a student finally was encouraged to associate ideas from The Bell Jar with her own life instead of just putting the text through the usual analytic wringer. The instances of oppression which she uncovered in the novel made her more aware of and able to vocalize oppression in her own life, Evans maintains. Applying such an approach to Plath functioned as consciousness raising, whereas the traditional interpretive method in her opinion confirmed existing power relations between men and women (1973, 246–48). Both of these reports from American colleges reflect an ongoing process within the teaching of literature. In the 1960s and 70s, New Criticism was increasingly challenged by other approaches to literature, notably Marxism and Feminism, parallel to attacks being launched on the ‘great white man’ tradition of the Western canon. Canon revisions also challenged the image of the representative American author promoted by magazines such as Time and Life, and the number of star authors expanded to new groups (Moran 2000, 50). Interestingly, canon as a literary term did not enter literary dictionaries until the 1980s and 90s, that is, after the notion of a unified canon had become controversial. This was a natural consequence of the syllabus being confronted with demands prescribing that texts ought to be relevant for an increasingly diverse student population. Sylvia Plath thereby came to be involved in the canon wars, enlisted on the side of the barricade-stormers. The notion of a central canon of English literature was undermined further by the plethora of canons – feminine or feminist, black, postcolonial, gay, regional – that emerged when modularization replaced single subject degrees at universities.16 During the first decade of Plath reception – and when Judith Higgins’s point number one presumably had more to say than later on – domineering advocates of her work, like Al Alvarez, Stephen Spender, and George Steiner, represented variations of modernism within what Pierre Bourdieu (1993) has termed the field of restricted cultural production. The reviewers were themselves authors and/or university professors writing for their own peers in rather elitist publications. Alvarez in particular resembles the kind of avant-garde critic described by Bourdieu: one who has the power to define what is good and interesting, who corroborates his own position by

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attesting to the genius of a certain artist he has discovered, and who acts as a spokesman and impresario for the artist as well as a theoretician for the school to which she belongs. Such a power to consecrate ensures an effective canonization. A vital element in the dual consecration of critic and artist is the insistence that they each represent something new, original, and fundamentally different compared to the generation they are trying to replace. Alvarez acted in concert with this role when he attacked ‘the gentility principle’ (1966b). Arguing for extremist poetry and against labelling Plath’s work as confessional, he could be seen as participating in the games of distinction that characterize the restricted field, where contestants compete for recognition and authority to legitimize their discourse. Plath attests to Alvarez’s influential position in a 25 October 1962 letter to her brother and sister-in-law, describing him as ‘the opinionmaker in poetry over here’. She is delighted that he has invited her over and thinks highly of her work (Letters Home, 476). Using slightly different words, Elaine Feinstein calls him ‘a kingmaker’ of the early sixties. ‘What he said in his column of The Observer, and the poems he selected to print in that paper, defined what was important on the literary map’ (2001, 101). But ten years later, things had changed and his opinion was no longer received as undisputed law. Nancy Burr Evans writes of taking issue with him for claiming that Plath had been just as fulfilled from bearing children as she had been from writing poetry. Evans felt that male critics like Alvarez failed to recognize the terrible conflict faced by women trying to reconcile the roles of mother, wife, and poet (1973, 246–47). With the second inrush of students seeking higher education after World War II, the numbers of those studying English and literature grew enormously, as did the academic periodicals dedicated to the subject and the abundance of tenure-struggling scholars writing in them. The social diversification of university education in most Western countries contributed to a merging of the fields of production, helped along by other historical processes, to the extent of large-scale production ‘invading’ the field of restricted production.17 The popularity of Sylvia Plath not only coincided with the advancing feminist movement but also with the related movement of students entering into the universities en masse. Thus, her career is linked to the era of mass education and what Joe Moran describes as ‘a constant demand for new authors as raw material for undergraduate courses, doctoral theses, critical monographs and articles’ (2000, 45). Plath’s work proved well suited for identification, seminar discussion, and academic writing.

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The importance of the educational system for the literary field can hardly be overrated. With the rise in college enrolment, the academy expanded, and the reading public interested in contemporary literature was greatly enlarged. When Sylvia Plath grew up, economic and cultural capital was less interchangeable than it is now. However, based on her orientation and literary production, Plath may easily be described as having had one foot in each camp. An avid reader not only of old and modern classics but of American glossies as well, she wrote for specialized markets on both sides of the divide, thus combining disparate traditions. Plath’s relationship with popular culture is a topic that scholars have set out to explore more systematically in recent years.18 In ‘Plath, Domesticity, and the Art of Advertising’ (2002), a study of rhetorical similarities between Plath’s work and ads in magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal, Marsha Bryant gives an example of genre mixing, where ‘Plath goes further than her peers in bringing the resonance of advertising into post-war American poetry’ (2002, 23). She argues that advertising proves Sylvia Plath to be more mainstream than we think. The surreal domesticity in her confessional poems matches the surreality of 1950s ads. In ‘Sylvia Plath and the Costume of Femininity’ (2007), Sally Bayley likewise finds that Plath’s preoccupation with images of domesticity, female glamour, and commodification, mirrors the popular films and magazines on which Americans of her generation were raised. The same can be said about the suburban theme, consumer culture, and a divided female self. Towards the end of her life, Plath increasingly offered a distorted version of the romantic clichés so often disseminated in these publications. The reviews of Ariel run by Newsweek and Time in June 1966 were indications that the poet – or at least the story about her – had the potential for reaching large audiences. A commodification of the poet had begun, her case mimicking other modern authors turned into media images. More or less willingly assisted by the authors themselves, publishers and mass media collaborated on fostering a public interest in the life behind the writing. Ernest Hemingway is an obvious example of the internationalization of personalities, as well as how cultural value can be successfully merged with commerce. Figuring twice on the cover of Time and three times on Life, he advertised for various products in the magazines where his profile appeared (Moran 2000, Glass 2004). With novels being more accessible than poetry, it was, as Judith Higgins and Nancy Burr Evans assert, The Bell Jar that made Plath truly popular. Released in 1971, the first American edition instantly went on the bestseller list and stayed there for six months.19 Received as a reference work on the modern self and an exemplary case of feminine suffering, the book complied with widespread

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demands at the time. The account of Esther Greenwood’s suicide attempt became a set text in schools and in consciousness-raising groups. The many students and action-oriented feminists preoccupied with Sylvia Plath belonged as much to the field of large-scale production as to the restricted one. It is difficult to determine where one field starts and the other ends. But a critical difference that Bourdieu identifies is a more explicit inclination towards biographical interpretations in the large-scale field, combined with a preference for establishing connections between author, work, and character, whereas aesthetic autonomy rules in the restricted field. Together with biographers writing for a general market, students and feminists dominated the Plath reception from the 1970s onwards. As the attention increasingly focused on personal affairs and intimate details, even the tabloids became interested. The call for easy access to everything by and about her was, nevertheless, not unanimous. Critics reacted with irony and discomfort to the publication of Letters Home. Bourdieu’s field concept is better suited for examining the dominant elitist literary taste and its popular counterpart than it is at examining the considerably more diffuse taste in between the two poles. Critics have not, however, been afraid of pointing at venues that represent ‘a culture of the middlebrow’. Considering that The New York Times Book Review apparently belongs in this middle category (Moran 2000, 28, 40), it is interesting to note that after her name became acknowledged in and by the American media – that is with the publication of Ariel in 1966 – all her books have been reviewed there. The Colossus came out before that shift happened and was not reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. Three titles received front-page coverage: Letters Home, Collected Poems, and The Journals of Sylvia Plath, thereby benefiting from what has been called a site of ‘unparalleled positional power’. Judging from the entries registered in Stephen Tabor’s bibliography (1987), Plath’s breakthrough in The New York Times Book Review ensued, not surprisingly, with the American edition of The Bell Jar in 1971. As a supplement to Bourdieu’s theory, our understanding of the evolution of the Plath reception may profit from seeing her work as ‘social facts’, in alignment with Czech structuralist Jan MukaĜovský’s discussion of the multi-functionality of art and literature. Basically, changes in the reception reflect transformations within the hierarchy that these functions constitute. The aesthetic dimension of art is neither autonomous nor timeless. In literature, the aesthetic function struggles with the communicative function for supremacy. The internal ranking between these two and other functions depends on the social setting and historical

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context, MukaĜovský states in Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (1936). Characteristic of the aesthetic function is the ability to cause social differentiation, to isolate objects from their utility function, evoke pleasure, and focus on the form. After the aesthetic function dominated during the first – high modernist – years of the Plath reception, didactic and practical functions came to the forefront as the poet was turned into a political icon. Underscoring the usefulness of her example for consciousness raising, feminists and radical students similarly activated the cognitive function. They invoked her example in their effort to bring about individual and social change, thereby amplifying the political function of literature. Appraising art’s social functions, these communities of readers opposed aesthetic purists and may – following Wayne C. Booth’s line of arguing in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988) – be labelled as spokesmen of ethical criticism, even though some of the means they employed did not exactly accord with other definitions of ‘ethical’. In other words, the manifold uses Sylvia Plath has been put to and the multitude of textual interpretations engendered in her name can be explained by the heterogeneity of functions coexisting in literature – functions that may be activated in turn or at the same time. To increase readers’ sense of community and imbue her work with importance, ritual and religious functions were activated parallel to political and other practical functions. According to MukaĜovský, neither of the functions can be reduced to one another, but they do mix. Discussing this typology in ‘The Place of the Aesthetic Function among the Other Functions’ (1942), he specifies the magical function as ‘an obvious mixture of the practical function with the symbolic’ (1977, 44). A religious fervour is certainly evident among different kinds of Plath readers – from ardent feminist activists to non-political poetry lovers. Emotional reactions are consistent with and possible within all the main approaches to art described by MukaĜovský: the practical, the cognitive, the symbolic, and the aesthetic. Still, it seems logical that when literary texts are treated as identification objects to the extent that Plath’s have been, conditions are better suited for strong emotions to develop than if the focus is on literariness and intra-textual structures. For those ascribing to the vision of a universal war between the sexes, the Plath–Hughes relationship can – like football or ice hockey – easily come to operate as a representational war and consequently assume proportions way beyond individual particulars. The sensation of dissonance which a powerful work of art elicits because of its rupture with the dominant norm at the time of publication

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disappears over the years as an aging aesthetic norm sinks down through hierarchical layers, socially and otherwise (MukaĜovský 1970, 37, 51). When Sylvia Plath was embraced by increasingly larger groups and the number of epigones multiplied, she could hardly be termed avant-garde or artistically progressive. The posthumous Pulitzer Prize awarded to Plath for Collected Poems (1981) can be interpreted not only as a confirmation of quality but also of wide ranging – even popular – acclaim. The Pulitzer has routinely been disparaged by leading and aspiring representatives of the economy of literary prestige (English 2005, 211). One effect of the poet’s growing popularity was the diminution of her power to distinguish and the erosion of the symbolic capital in her original, restricted readership, which at the same time reflects the reduced influence that her self-appointed spokesman has exerted. By committing himself so strongly to extremist poetry, Alvarez lost his position as supreme judge of taste when the norms were altered and his opinions accordingly became dated. Students like Nancy Burr Evans, critics, feminists, and colleagues of different leanings expressed their disagreement with the views he represented.20 Seen from the field of restricted production, the career of Alvarez to some extent matches Plath’s, the profile changing from ‘highbrow’ to decidedly more ‘lowbrow’. In a dialectic of cultural distinction grounded in a system of relational positions, reservations towards a prominent critic naturally extend to his protégés and vice versa. An Alvarez bibliography reflects the blending of literary genres, a postmodern era governed by subjectivity, and an entertainment industry of which Plath has also become a part. Educated at Oundle School and Corpus Christi College in Oxford, Alvarez tells in Where Did It All Go Right? (1999) of his relief when he decided around 1956 – well before earning a PhD – not to pursue a university career but to become a full-time critic and poetry editor. From Bourdieu’s perspective, this is a typical move made by daring agents operating within the restricted field. His work remained academic for some time, consisting of two books of criticism – The Shaping Spirit: Studies in Modern English and American Poets (1958) and The School of Donne (1961) – as well as assessments of contemporary authors in periodicals. Ten years on, Alvarez left criticism and The Observer to take his chance as a full-time writer, publishing poetry, novels, and books about subjects of special interest to him: suicide, poker, climbing, oil rigs, night life, and himself. No longer a kingmaker, Alvarez still held on to his role as a star witness in the continuing saga of Sylvia and Ted.

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Multiple Canonizing The strong feelings triggered by or associated with Sylvia Plath have opposite effects on readers. For followers, intense reactions confirm their belief in the poet’s importance. To recognize one’s own story in hers can be taken as an indication of how perceptive she was and endear her even more to the devoted. For others, the heated passions she elicits imply that something embarrassing adheres to her name which had better be kept at a distance. Plath’s bestseller status did not help her position as a serious writer, particularly since such a large part of her readership consisted of women. Critical reactions to Plath readers bear some similarities with German commentators at the end of the eighteenth century worrying about an expanding ‘reading epidemic’. Instead of dedicating themselves to contemplative close readings of challenging books, the new middle classes devoured literature mindlessly and tastelessly, critics claimed. And the group believed to be most in need of educational policing were consumers of inferior women’s literature – that is, female readers (Woodmansee 1994, 89ff). Fear of a reduced status for the man of letters as hero is notable in Thomas Carlyle’s 1840 lectures on the imperative of hero worship. Carlyle was one of many at the time lamenting the democratization of literature, which most of all was seen as the result of an unfortunate femininization process, whereby the number of ‘foolish girls’ reading ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ grew alarmingly (Egeland 2007).21 Not only were women in this way made responsible for the expanding popular book market. By using expressions such as a ‘femininization of the news’, women now seem to be made responsible for celebrity coverage (Marshall 2006, 5). Sylvia Plath’s name figures in both arenas. The tendency to pathologize Plath’s readers and criticize the autobiographical reception of an author as a naïve misreading may then be linked to an old and systematic devaluation of women competitors by dominant representatives of the cultural field. The image of the emotionally unstable, depressive Plath reader epitomized by scholars and popular culture alike is closely related to the mediated image of Plath herself from early on. Examining the relationship between ‘The “Priestess” and Her “Cult”’, Janet Badia accordingly notes that Plath readers were often regarded as either an obstacle to serious consideration of the poetry or as evidence of its inferiority (2007, 163). Badia believes ‘the quintessential Plath reader’ concurs with Elizabeth Wurtzel’s construction of herself in Prozac Nation (1994) and Bitch (1998) as ‘the consummate autopathographer’ (177). Conversely, a critique of autobiographical readings can also be seen as an effort at saving the poet’s standing, since

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the field of mass production habitually markets close connections between a writer’s life and work. The diversification of literary culture has pushed Plath, her critics, and her readers into the mainstream. The breakdown of a unified literary canon means that an author’s recognition and authority may be measured in several ways depending on what groups or readers we focus on, some parameters being literally tangible, others more indirect and obscure. The blue English Heritage plaque is an undisputable sign of official recognition while the bronze plaque erected by Plath’s classmates at Wellesley High School during their fiftieth reunion in 2000,22 is related both to a heritagelike appreciation – although not in the same, official way – and to a community endorsement of local people who have made a name for themselves. At the Smith College Libraries, a twelve-inch bronze statuette entitled ‘Lady Lazarus’ was unveiled by sculptor Nicholas Dimbleby in May 1997. One in a limited edition of ten, it was cast from a terracotta maquette originally commissioned by Elizabeth Sigmund to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death.23 Sigmund never raised the funds for a full-scale version of the sculpture that she had planned to place in Dartington Hall Gardens, Devon. In the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley, Plath’s poem ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’ is celebrated by landscape artist Shirley Watt in her installation entitled ‘A Garden of Mouthings’. Influence on other writers is often difficult to establish since it may be indirect and hidden. But there is no lack of sources testifying to the importance of Plath’s legacy for American and British poetry.24 One writer who appears to have held Plath as muse throughout her writing career is Erica Jong. She refers to Plath in her first three collections of poetry as well as in Fear of Flying (1973) and Seducing the Demon (2006), the memoir where she gives the impression that she could have had relations with ‘fiercely attractive’ Ted but opts for loyalty to Sylvia, her old idol (2006, 65).25 Tributary poems definitely indicate influence, and the number of texts somehow inspired by Plath and her work is impressive.26 Female apprentices have moreover repeatedly declared that the poet set an example for how and about what they could write. She sort of gave them permission to be tough and angry.27 According to Honor Moore, editor of Poems from the Women’s Movement (2009), Plath ripped the veil from decorous solemnity, holding up a mirror for women’s pain. Rephrasing a line from Muriel Rukeyser, Moore argues that for many American women and poets, ‘the world had split open’ with the publication of Ariel (2009a).28 However, both the title of Rukeyser’s poem – ‘Not to be Printed, Not to be Said, Not to be Thought’ (1976) – and the two lines of

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another poem by her, may in fact be read as a critical commentary on Plath’s legacy: ‘I’d rather be Muriel / than be dead and be Ariel’. Scholarly output and activities in the author’s name – publications, seminars, and conferences – are obvious indicators of importance within the academic field and are accounted for in previous chapters of this book. Searches in electronic sources like the MLA International Bibliography and Gale Literary Index confirm that as an object of study, Sylvia Plath has been very much alive and kicking all the time since she died. Availability of a writer’s work in bookstores and in libraries is just as obviously indicative of a larger public interest. Major Plath titles have hardly ever been out of print, and in libraries and well-stocked bookstores, one can find several editions of the same titles. Audio tapes and videos exist of The Bell Jar and of Sylvia Plath reading her own poetry.29 Bookselling on the internet has secured access without geographical limitations. In addition to market potential, decisions to publish everything or most of what an author has produced and not only collected works signifies canonization and interest in the writer’s life story. Such editions from scripta are the result of an already existing special status, which is enhanced even further by the publication of letters and journals. Translations into other languages yield the same effect. The Bell Jar and/or poems have been published in Bengali, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and probably many more. Letters Home is available in Dutch, French, German, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish; different editions of the journals may be read in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. Her children’s books and short stories have also been translated into several languages.30 Considering the high costs involved, adapting a poet’s life and work into a screen production must surely be a sign of high canon value as well as expected sales. In addition to films like The Bell Jar (1979) and Sylvia (2003), several educational television programmes are on offer,31 as well as an hour-long film about Plath by Ilana Trachtman featured on the US Biography Channel in April 2005. Before Sylvia was made, rumours of a possible biopic and who was to play the leading role – Molly Ringwald, Meg Ryan, or perhaps Cate Blanchett? – circulated for years, thus keeping the poet’s name warm in film quarters. Speculations about a new film version of The Bell Jar have the same effect.32

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A further indication of market potential is the number of short authorintroductions published separately or in a variety of different series, most of them simply entitled Sylvia Plath. Over an eight-year period, at least the following British and American series launched their own Plath title: Twayne’s United States Authors Series (1st edition 1978, 2nd ed. 1998), Writers and Their Work (1998, 2004), Literary Lives (1999, 2003), A Beginner’s Guide (2001), Great Writers (2004), Greenwood Biographies (2004), and Student Guide Literary Series (2006).33 Such books supplement the many longer, more extensive biographies and/or specialized monographs. Worth noting is that the new edition of Susan Bassnett’s Sylvia Plath was published separately by Palgrave Macmillian in 2005, whereas the first edition from 1987 was released during the heyday of feminist studies in Macmillan’s Women Writers series. Most of these introductions are written for the school market. Series aiming at the university level, like Longman Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, have similarly included Plath (cf. Brain 2001). In the prestigious Cambridge Companion series that consists of guides to the most prominent names in literature, Sylvia Plath figures as one of the few women who have been selected for presentation. The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath edited by Jo Gill in 2006 contains well-argued essays by scholars accounting for much debated topics within Plath criticism. Two years later followed Gill’s own book, The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath (2008). Anthologizing is yet another marker of recognition. Plath abides as naturally in more academic versions, such as the standard Norton Anthology of American Literature (2008) and The Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003), edited by Helen Vendler, as she does in textbooks for schools and in mass market trade books like The Top 500 Poems (1992), The 100 Best Poems of All Time (2001), 100 Essential Modern Poems (2005), You Drive Me Crazy: Love Poems for Real Life (2005), and Poems from the Women’s Movement (2009). She is featured in a plethora of thematically structured collections of or about sonnets, women’s spiritual poetry, women’s humour, classical myths, truth and lies, sadness and madness, the sky, nature, insomnia, values and virtues, gardening, family relationships, letters, and gothic tales. Her name surfaces in books of citations, different kinds of handbooks, almanacs, and encyclopedias and is a regular in histories of literature and in reference works.34 Many of these texts function as extended lists in the same way as Ladies’ Home Journal’s separately published 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century (1998). But Sylvia Plath even showed up on other lists in connection with the turning of the century, such as ‘The Books of the Century’ poll in the United Kingdom initiated by Waterstone’s booksellers

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in cooperation with Channel 4. More than 25,000 people participated. At the top of the resulting list of one hundred titles, announced three years prior to 2000, we find Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; Plath’s The Bell Jar finished as number fifty seven.35 Furthermore, she figured as the only woman poet in Time magazine’s review of the hundred most influential artists and entertainers of the twentieth century.36 So far, then, there is no danger that Sylvia Plath may be lost in history. After the feminist recession, her name and example have gained importance in new fields. To illustrate the diversity of her impact, books, essays, and web pages started to note manifestations of Plath’s influence on popular culture, namely how her name or lines from her work are mentioned in songs, films, and television shows.37 These are popular counterparts to the many poems somehow relating to Sylvia Plath written by other poets, composers setting music to her poems, or theatre companies staging dramatic adaptations based on her life and work.38 Just by looking at the wide range of people writing tributary lyrics – from wellknown poets to university professors, students, songwriters, and admirers of various types – we get an impression of the diversity.39 Specific events reflect this mixtum compositum as well. After more than a thousand people signed a petition, the mayor of Northampton, Massachusetts, proclaimed 27 October 2001 as ‘Sylvia Plath Day’. Poets, musicians, actors, scholars, and fans came together on Plath’s sixty-ninth birthday to praise ‘the most widely read poet of her generation’, in the town where she went to college.40 In November 2010, Sylvia Plath was inducted into the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. The event was celebrated with speeches, music, and poetry readings as well as an induction service.41 A notable interest in Plath’s art work has followed in the wake of her multi-level canonization. The National Portrait Gallery in Britain bought a drawing by Sylvia Plath of Ted Hughes for £27,600 at an auction in 2005. Although the focus in the press release is on Hughes being ‘one of the late 20th Century’s leading poets’, the gallery would hardly have spent that kind of money on any doodle. Described as ‘a major addition to the National Portrait Gallery’s relatively limited representation of images of Hughes’, a curator goes on to explain that they ‘had been very keen to acquire a really compelling likeness of Hughes made from life. This intimate portrait is a marvellous evocation of a major poet and of a fascinating literary relationship.’42 Prior to the acquisition, the portrait had been exhibited on two occasions: one in 1982 and another in 2000. The increased focus on ‘visual Plath’ or her ‘visual poetics’ reflects an upsurge in interdisciplinary art studies from the 1990s, a field neatly

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summarized in the title on a collection of essays by Roland Barthes and translated into English in 1977: Image, Music, Text. Even in this area, Plath emerges as exemplary. Growing up, she had been as eager making pictures as she had been with writing, winning prizes and attention for both sister arts and commenting on her artistic production in journals and letters. Essays she wrote for The Christian Science Monitor from 1956 to 1959 were illustrated with her own drawings.43 It was not until college that she gave up her aspirations of becoming a professional artist and dedicated herself to poetry. As a writer she was inspired by visual art, classical and modern. Colour images and visual motifs flourish in her work, and she wrote art poems on paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Rousseau, and Paul Klee.44 Since Aurelia Plath collected most of what her daughter wrote, scribbled, drew, and painted from an early age on, a whole new and welcome field of investigation opened up for scholars visiting the archives. In line with shifting perspectives, a big interdisciplinary event in honour of Sylvia Plath’s seventieth year, 29 October 2002, took place at Indiana University, where one of the Plath collections is located. The programme aimed to showcase her influence and explore the interconnectedness between poetry and art.45 At a commemoration concert headlined by composer Shulamit Ran, music inspired by and set to her poems was performed. Scholars gathered from all parts of the world to participate in a literary symposium. Plath’s visual arts and manuscripts were displayed in an exhibition called ‘Eye Rhymes’. The exhibition contained artworks she made as a child – illustrated cards and letters, paper dolls, and school projects – along with later drawings and colourings, pastels, tempera, and watercolour paintings, which are now kept in the archives. Five years on, a volume of essays entitled Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual was published in connection with ‘The Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium’ held in Oxford, October 2007. In Susan Gubar’s words, the essays ‘trace the continuity between Plath’s early visual productions and her later literary compositions’ (2007, 224). The contributors load her drawings and school projects with artistic and political significance, their treatment thus paralleling how Plath, according to Kathleen Connors, saw herself – ‘as a serious artist’ (2007, 4) – from the age of eight and nine when she had her first poem and drawing published. At age twelve, she apparently also had an awareness of herself as a critic (39).46 However, the ‘Plath’ discussed in this collection of essays is a posthumous construction by critics and reviewers. As a girl of eight or twelve, young Sylvia was no doubt talented in many ways, but her work all the same contains figures of speech and expression quite typical for what talented children around the

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world with access to similar kinds of education and art supplies produce. That she opted for literature as her favoured medium of expression was hardly coincidental. A pertinent question worth considering is how early Sylvia Plath constructed the artistic persona to which critics now relate. When did she begin to mythologize herself in accordance with the old, established roles, of which she was well aware? Another issue not raised in Eye Rhymes is what the consequence might be for Plath’s reception when amateur drawings are discussed on a par with her late poetry, what concept of art this implies, and the possible effects it may have on how professional artists are viewed, particularly artists invited to contribute at such conferences. At the interdisciplinary symposium in Oxford, artworks inspired by Plath were exhibited, a play was put on, films shown, and numerous artists participated in a celebratory performance.47 In the autumn of 2005, a different kind of exhibition was displayed at the Grolier Club in New York, America’s oldest and largest membership organization for bibliophiles and aficionados of the graphic arts. Entitled ‘“No Other Appetite”: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Blood Jet of Poetry’, it featured original letters, manuscripts, and photographs brought together for the first time from the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College and the Ted Hughes Papers and Library at Emory University.48 The couple’s companionship and working partnership were highlighted. Extended access to their personal papers, books, and archived manuscripts invite further investigation of their creative processes individually, in collaboration, and through their reading of others.

Mythologizing Much of the reception summarized here can be defined as an outcome of the extensive mythologizing of poets in general and Sylvia Plath in particular. A typical example of publications that both reflect and extend the myth is the Great Writers series referred to above. For the publishers, this series ‘explores the lives of contemporary popular literary figures whose iconic status is often shrouded in myth and mystery’.49 Writing about Plath, Peter K. Steinberg has to deliver what is expected of him and sound the correct keywords. The subtitle in his introduction is ‘Plath as icon’. Discussing her iconic status, he refers to the ‘mystery of her life’ and ‘the mythic quality surrounding her death’, claiming that ‘her life remains mysterious as long as her death takes precedence’ (Steinberg 2004, 5; my italics).

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Steinberg also pushes another affiliated myth-confirming button, stating that ‘Plath was once viewed as a “cult” author’. However, the continuation of his sentence – ‘but her rise in popularity and fame has drawn more serious attention to her life and work around the world’ (3) – makes one wonder how he defines Plath as a ‘cult author’. She was hardly a counterculture poet and received more serious attention than most authors from early on. In any case, Steinberg’s ambition is to answer the old question: ‘Who was Sylvia Plath?’ (8). The same query, followed by ‘Beyond the Icon’, heads the first chapter of Connie Ann Kirk’s Greenwood biography, likewise published in 2004. Continuing with the same tune, her final chapter is entitled ‘After Plath: Mysteries and Controversies’. Fresh angles are hard to find. Kirk does offer more about Otto Plath and more from Sylvia Plath’s earliest journals than what has been common. To make the biographer appear as an elect, and thus well suited to write about her mythic subject, the preface details ‘odd’ and ‘strange coincidences’ that have occurred in her own life which critically minded readers probably will not find all that magical (Kirk 2004, xi– xii).50 ‘Life was too small to contain her’, states the official website for Sylvia, the movie, equally confirming the popular myth.51 Many factors have contributed to what Marsha Bryant has called Plath’s ‘IMAX Authorship’: her super-sized, larger-than-life public image and the magnified bleeding persona in her poetry. Trailing the presentation of Plath in assorted publications, Bryant’s students were surprised to discover the prevalence of Plath depicted as a swimsuited pinup poet and that sensational characterizations of her life and suicide were common even in sources they had expected to be more sober (Bryant 2004, 243, 245). One reason for this type of mythologizing is that Plath and Hughes consistently interpreted their own lives and each other in mythic terms. They constructed a personal mythos inspired by the stories of Ariadne and Oedipus, Isis, the White Goddess, and the Eternal Mother. Moon imagery, religious metaphors, and symbolic numbers abound in their work, as do references to classical myths and folk tales. The resulting inter-textuality and cultural citations create a symbolic-mythic landscape which evokes a multitude of associations. A sense of recognition and familiarity is an obvious reaction when readers come upon (mythic) material they know from before, such as the understanding of man as split and possessing a double nature. The Doppelgänger is a universal figure in popular tradition and has been an author’s favourite from the twins of Greek mythology to the white and yellow ‘me’ in Sylvia Plath’s ‘In Plaster’. It similarly constitutes an explanatory concept for critics interpreting literature and

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writers’ psychology. The cultural stereotypes which Jacqueline Rose notes in Plath’s work are of mixed image-making kinds. According to Ted Hughes (1987, xv), the bareness of his wife’s style and lack of circumstantial detail excited the wilder fantasies projected by others onto the poet. Rose (2000), for the very opposite reason, thinks the journals can be used as evidence to support every single theory that has been produced about her, because ‘the writing here fires in all directions at once’. In the case of Sylvia Plath, then, both less and much is more. She arranged and rearranged her own life story – ‘exercising’, as Anne Stevenson calls it, ‘her talent for rewriting life to suit the audience’ (1989a, 46)52 – and claimed other people’s experience as her own when that was opportune. The narrator’s father in ‘Daddy’ dies when she is ten, in ‘Lady Lazarus’ she tries to kill herself every ten years, the numbers thus made neater and more symbolic than in real life. After the separation from Hughes, she presented herself as poor and a victim of his cruelty. The image that the couple had or conveyed of themselves as artists, agrees with persistent expectations of what poets are and should be, mirroring the classical role I describe in Chapters One and Five. When they met, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes both aspired to a life of exile à la Joyce, Hemingway, and Lawrence (Middlebrook 2003, 44). She was no bohemian and turned out to be of the nesting and sedentary kind, but her dying in a foreign country during the coldest winter in sixty years – deserted, poor, and misunderstood – more than met the exile requirements for true poets, which Mary Lefkowitz (1978) dates back to the fifth century B.C. The notion of the isolated writer, so much a part of the idealized poet’s vocation and life, even rubbed off on Plath’s existence before her separation. In Sylvia Plath: The Shaping of Shadows, Al Strangeways portrays her as isolated from society and from history after marrying Ted Hughes, due to ‘his lack of interest in the political context of poetry’ (1998, 112). For her own part, however, Plath lived up to traditional marital roles. Her outsider position as an American in England, and the conflicts which arose from that position, have been increasingly focused upon following the ‘cultural turn’ in literary studies. Perhaps because she could associate with it personally, such cultural issues were central for Anne Stevenson’s understanding of Plath in Bitter Fame (1989). The public depiction of her reflects how easily Sylvia Plath answers to expectations that creative individuals ought to be exceptional melancholics. She exists almost as a showcase for what Aristotle and the Hippocratic teachings ascribe to the melancholic temperament: extraordinary creativity,

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imagination, and intellect combined with suffering. The bipolar condition brought despair and creative satisfaction. A disturbance in the precarious balance between these two forces can lead to disease, and thus the melancholic person was considered to be crazy. Varying importance and diagnoses have been attached to Plath’s own illness, some feminists playing it down for political reasons. Still, most commentators agree that she suffered greatly, although disagreeing on what caused it: parents, husband, childhood traumas, patriarchal society, desertion, hardship, cruel circumstances, lack of recognition, society’s treatment of artists, conspiracy, mental illness, biology, her own personality, or all of the above. ‘The artist as exemplary sufferer’ is an essay by Susan Sontag from 1962 discussing Cesare Pavese’s diary. The expression applies equally well to how Sylvia Plath is both seen and used. Sontag claims that the public is interested in writers’ souls ‘because of the insatiable modern preoccupation with psychology’ and because ‘the Christian tradition of introspection ... equates the discovery of the self with the discovery of the suffering self’. The saint was for the modern consciousness replaced by the artist as exemplary sufferer. ‘And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able to express his suffering’, according to Sontag (1990, 42). For some, Plath ranks among the most persecuted of suffering victims. Jacqueline Rose draws a parallel between her writing about the Holocaust – references surfaced only during her final years – and the camp survivors: ‘Her tardiness mimics, or chimes in with, their own’ (1991, 216).53 The poet as victim is a greater hero if he too is a martyr, like Socrates or Christ. In addition to what results from melancholic introspection, a dedicated poet is, by tradition, bound to suffer because of society’s disinterest or downright persecution. As a consequence, his dual dedication to the chosen vocation and to his fellow man is tested at the same time. Sylvia Plath has been presented as a martyr for poetry, for feminism, a divided modernistic self, and écriture feminine. She has likewise been described as ‘a staunch and tireless champion of the vulnerable and underprivileged’.54 Opinions expressed on art and writing by Plath-admirer Erica Jong can serve as a resumé of author mythologizing. In the poem entitled ‘Mr. Lowell’, she defines a real poet as ‘a mythological beast’, and the suffering he knows – contrary to unworthy impostors’ – ‘is real’ (1979, 30). Jong ostensibly agrees with her grandfather who ‘used to say that the artist “carried the dead weight of the world on his shoulders”’ (2006, 231), thereby repeating a common view of the artist’s lot. The ‘godlike’ work that he does redeems his suffering (232–33). To illustrate Plath’s importance for her generation, Jong hails the poet as ‘our sixties Sappho –

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just after she leapt from the Leucadian cliff’ (54), the one who broke open the male-dominated literary territory to women and made it possible for her successors to lay the female mind and all its rage naked on the page. Killing herself, she proved to the public that ‘[p]oetry was so important you would die for it’ (52–53).55 Even though Jong in Seducing the Demon (2006) assures us that she vehemently hates the suicides of Plath and other female artists, longing instead for a world where women can write about their lives and live (2006, 61), she subscribes to another romantic conviction: that true writing is the result of inspiration. ‘What we all live for, hope for, would die for’ – she uses first person plural without hesitation – is to take ‘divine dictation’ (138). Religious terms, notions, and connotations are not far away when art and exemplary artists, poets included, are discussed. The religious component – together with the suicide – constitutes a kind of red thread in this reception study of Sylvia Plath. There are several interrelated reasons for the religious bent in the devotion. One cluster pertains to the role of the author, a second to how exceptional persons are looked at generally, and a third to the function of art in modern society. But all are linked with historical processes traceable to the beginning of the Western literary tradition. To worship exemplary figures may in itself be seen as fundamental for all religions. Thomas Carlyle defined the need to admire great models as the noblest of feelings, and he thought of the select few, the visionary men of genius, as sent from heaven. Exploring the concept of genius, Edgar Zilsel dwells on the religious element in the worship of exceptional individuals, particularly during secular times when people’s quest for existential meaning must be satisfied through means other than religion. Genius cult, genius relics, and visits to the graves of famous people resemble the faithful believer’s pilgrimage to sacred places. When the devotees of a genius invariably claim that their hero went unrecognized in his own time, he is turned into a martyr, and martyr legends are told in all religions. A comparison of the misunderstood genius’s dismal earthly life to his posthumous upgrading resembles religious doctrines on retribution and restoration in the hereafter (Zilsel 1972, 4–5). The exemplum engages the heart better than doctrines do and was therefore valued by the Church exactly for its power to persuade and convert (Scanlon 1994, 31). According to cultural historian Jacques Barzun, it required the Renaissance glorification of man, the scattering and weakening of creeds by the Protestant Reformation, and the general unbelief caused by the progress of science, before art and artists could achieve their present position in the world of intellect. (1974, 33)

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In The Use and Abuse of Art (1974), Barzun quotes authors like William Faulkner – ‘If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies’ (4) – and Ernest Hemingway – ‘A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practiced the arts’ (18) – to illustrate the elevated position that art and its practitioners have attained at the expense of ordinary people and their lives.56 The way I see it, the foundation both for the writer’s elevated position and for crediting his work with divine significance had been laid in Graeco-Roman times. From early on, writers have been cultivated as seers and prophets, their creative talents and inspiration believed to be a gift from above. Thus favoured by the gods, the poets were worthy of socializing with heroes and were themselves treated as such, especially those who made a name for themselves in history. Since a vision of eternal life was barely developed in the Greek and Roman religions, one way of securing immortality was through fame. Poets as well as philosophers sought distinction for themselves, or they acted as agents for others, safeguarding the memory of heroes and great men by writing about their deeds. The association of genius, creative abilities, selection, and melancholia still form an inseparable aspect of how authors like Sylvia Plath are perceived. Its persuasive power results not least from the history of author worship, from the spiritual need it seems to fulfil, and from its appearance as an indisputable truth for having prevailed so long. Most of the character traits ascribed to the figure of the artist by the end of the eighteenth century – the gift of creativity, social aberrancy, disengagement from the corruption of politics, a self-consciously erected singular subjectivity, a self-imposed solitude or alienation from society (McKeon 1991, 20) – belong to the image of the writer already established within Greek culture. The ideal was strengthened from the Renaissance period onwards with the cultivation of words – literature, reading, and conversation – partly for reformist-religious reasons, in what Jürgen Habermas termed bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit.57 As a new Versöhnungsparadigma (Bürger 1979, 178)58 art takes over many of the needs or tasks previously fulfilled by religion, and is idealized as a counterweight against capitalist efficiency and division of labour. Art resembles religion in that the artist, like the believer, gives himself over to an experience so different from those of his ordinary self that he deems it ‘loftier, truer and more lasting’, Barzun writes. Members of the public can partake in this experience if they are receptive to art and have the capacity to feel and to analyse (1974, 26). The religion of art promises

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harmonized feeling, understanding, and spiritual ecstasy. Art represents a gateway to transcendence for all those who have lost faith in religion. Their guide is the creative genius whose status is that of the prophet, placed high above ordinary consumers of art. Barzun states that visionary qualities were attributed to artists in the nineteenth century as an expression of credence and veneration. However, once more, I believe that due to the early connection that was established between melancholy and exceptional individuals, these qualities have been integrated into the poets’ traditional role, and into the painters’ as well, from the time of the Renaissance when they also became melancholics. Confidence in their prophetic abilities may then have been accentuated in the Romantic era with its intensified worship of the unique personality. Sylvia Plath counts among the best even in this sense. Ted Hughes for one emphasized her exceptional psychic gifts, while Jacqueline Rose remarked on her peculiar ability to reveal far-reaching insights about things that modern culture supposedly had repressed. The status of writers was consolidated by their elevation to society’s prime bearers of identity. Embodying a new and extended concept of the person, they interpret and express a changing reality. Economic insecurity heightened the melancholy and tragic elements pertaining to the prototype. But such developments represent more of a shift in emphasis than a radical change. When creativity was individualized and subjectivity in the creative process cultivated, readers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries demanded a complete illusion of life, according to Boris Tomaševskij. In ‘Literature and Biography’ (1923), he points to Voltaire and Rousseau, in addition to the romantic writers generally, as examples of how life and literature became inseparable. I would add that the equalizing of life and work was a staple already found in ancient biographies: a person was what he said, wrote, and did. The enduring question asked by readers, journalists, and reviewers – ‘from whom is the character drawn?’ – was an effect of readers’ demands for a living hero, Tomaševskij claims (1995, 84). Literary heroes were taken for living personages; poets epitomized this role, and their biographies were transformed into poems. One stereotype was the dying poet: ‘young, unable to overcome the adversities of life, perishing in poverty, the fame he merited coming too late’ (83). The confused interrelationship of life and literature makes it difficult to decide whether literary works recreate phenomena from real life, or if the literary clichés have penetrated into reality. Tomaševskij notes that readers were not interested in all kinds of poets, only in the stylized image dominating at the time. Their life stories were cultivated, anecdotes flourished, and

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legends established which the works seemed to confirm. Literary texts were read against the background of an idealized biography and, we may add, lives were written to validate the same story.

The Sylvia Plath Formula The mythologizing of writers outlined above conditions the response to Sylvia Plath’s life, work, and suicide. In addition to the notable religious component, there is a related ‘hysterical’ tinge to the cult and reception of her. As icons of popular culture well know, devotion comes in many forms, fanaticism being one of them. Observations by Elaine Showalter concerning modern culture and hysterical epidemics may be adapted to illuminate one side of the Plath reception. In Hystories (1997), Showalter highlights the effectiveness of literary conventions and people’s readiness to respond in accordance with classical prototypes and cultural expectations. She argues that hysterical disorders of the twentieth century, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, gulf war syndrome, recovered memory, multiple personality syndrome, satanic ritual abuse, and alien abduction, are spread as epidemics through stories developed by therapists and patients in collaboration. Entire movements are constituted when the stories circulate via autobiographies, newspapers, novels, films, talk shows, the internet, and self-help groups. Therapists and syndrome advocates of various types take similarities between the narratives as proof of factuality and literal truth. According to Showalter, they do not understand ‘the power of literary conventions, the morphology of folk tales, the repetition of rumours, and above all the way that suggestion works to produce confabulation’ (1997, 180). Common for several of these syndromes is, on the one hand, a markedly sexual context. On the other hand, recollections of trauma resemble Protestant conversion experiences. Scholars have therefore wondered whether a spiritual void and an unconscious quest for religious certainty lie behind the modern hysterical syndromes. Showalter lists a number of components necessary for hysterical epidemics to grow forth. These include theorists, physicianenthusiasts, and supportive cultural environments that believe in the symptoms and stories of unhappy, vulnerable patients (17). In the case of Sylvia Plath, we have critic-theorists like Alvarez and feminist scholars who interpret the poet’s life and work in concurrence with widespread cultural concerns, and readers who find their own experience reflected in these narrations. To understand fully the converting power of examples, on which preachers of all kinds rely heavily in their teaching, we have to acknowledge that it is the stories of people, their

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deeds, experience, courage, and suffering which have converting power. It is stories that persuade readers or listeners to identify with and imitate exemplary figures. The power of stories depends, like rhetoric and discourse generally, on shared aims and beliefs in the public. Without a favourably inclined environment, Plath would not have achieved the position she has now. The line between therapeutic narratives and public testimony is blurred in contemporary histories, and accusations play a key role in hysterical witch-hunts. Close relatives and neighbours risk being accused of heinous crimes. In the stories about Sylvia Plath, the finger has primarily been pointed at Ted Hughes and secondarily at her parents. Accountability and retribution for Plath’s suffering materialize as both message and motivating force in much of the literature, such as Robin Morgan’s poem ‘Arraignment’, where she in the first stanza insinuates that Ted Hughes murdered his wife and that the entire literary establishment colluded in denying it: ‘patronizing her madness, diluting her rage, / burying her politics, and / aiding, abetting, rewarding / her perfectly legal executor’ (1972a, 78). The passage, moreover, exemplifies another characteristic: the belief that Plath is the victim of a conspiracy. Hysterical movements feed on conspiracy theories. When Morgan’s publisher made her change the original version of ‘Arraignment’ in order to avoid a libel suit, she retaliated in the article entitled ‘Conspiracy of Silence Against a Feminist Poem’ (1972b; cf. Chapter Two, 90–92). Robin Morgan may, perhaps, be dismissed as a bizarre exception.59 But the eagerness revealed among psychiatrists in Chapter Five is a useful reminder that propensities at finger pointing are widely dispersed. Critics habitually detect censoring forces machinating against Sylvia Plath behind all the actions of the estate. ‘No woman living would have made such cuts without the pressure of a male hand’, Nancy Milford claimed when reviewing the first edition of Plath’s journals (1982, 31).60 Others have suspected censorship at work even before the poet died. In an effort to contextualize Plath within Cold War politics, Robin Peel maintains that not until the final months of her life does she seem ‘to be consciously writing directly as a woman, in a language that is no longer controlled by an agenda set by others’ (2002, 17). Sylvia Plath has been termed a survivor. According to Anne Cluysenaar, she appears in her poems as a typical ‘survivor’ in the psychiatric sense. Her work shows many traits which are recognized as marking the psychology of those who have, in some bodily or psychic sense, survived an experience of death. (1972, 219)

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Since ‘everybody’ knows that the poet killed herself at the age of thirty, perhaps those who tell her story and identify with her predicament get comfort from seeing themselves as survivors. Narratives of sin and blame have a special appeal in confusing times, Elaine Showalter notes in Hystories. True or fictional, the healing power of narratives is in any case indisputable and has resulted in a variety of therapeutic cures. This healing function was paramount in ‘the Socratic model’ I described in Chapter One (36–37). Tessa Rajak believes the creation of a martyrology helped Plato and other followers of Socrates in coming to terms with the shock that his death sentence represented for the group and for each of them personally. ‘A potentially shameful condemnation was transformed into a permanent triumph, and their grief into awe and wonderment’ (Rajak 1997, 59). A simplified explanation for the phenomenon discussed in Hystories is that troubled persons find solace in telling what they believe to be their own story and try to solve deep-felt personal and cultural conflicts through narratives. Within the Plath movement, people tell not their own story, but hers, as an exemplary tale of and for our time. But it is shaped congruous with the narrator’s specific needs, psychologically and professionally, and in many cases presented with a level of empathy clearly linked to an unmistakable identification. Her story is theirs and vice versa. Stories have a therapeutic effect for narrator and audience. Basic to the rhetoric of example is that it embodies the idea of reproducibility. We have now almost come full circle and back to the construction of an ideal object. One reason for ‘our’ so-called obsession with Sylvia Plath is that it is such a good story to read and tell, over and over again. If it is true that she for many constitutes a raw wound (Barton 2003), there is all the more reason to question why this is really such a gratifying story. Plath’s suicide and membership at the age of thirty in the dead poet’s society is an important and perhaps necessary ingredient, but not enough – I would argue – to explain the power of attraction in this narrative. Countless poets have killed themselves without attaining and keeping her kind of reputation. Ironically, Ted Hughes has probably provided a decisive component for the story to catch on, not because of the part he played in Sylvia Plath’s life, work, and publishing history, but because of his own position as a major poet and public figure who was embedded as much as she in modern celebrity culture. If he had been just an ordinary protective estate keeper, the preoccupation with his dealings would perhaps have been more in line with the attention given to the estates of, say, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, or T.S. Eliot.

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The Plath story – which actually has become a Plath–Hughes story – gives pleasure when readers recognize a familiar prototype and have their expectations fulfilled as to how a poetic genius ought to be. I will here refrain from repeating all the familiar traits recounted above except to point out their romantic and lingering appeal and the satisfaction commented on by Tomaševskij, which ensues when a writer’s life and fiction overlap. A confessional, auto-biographical persona may be especially attractive in a narcissistic celebrity culture fascinated by the idea that the self both can be reinvented and have a deep-seated identity at the same time (Moran 2000, 69, 144). Another explanation similarly involves the pleasure that familiarity and recognition bring: Sylvia Plath actually succeeded in making her literary persona(e) into ‘a statement of the generation’ and became herself its representative writer (Journals, 289). According to Diane Middlebrook, this was her oldest aspiration (2003, 110, 199). Judging from her continued popularity, she was not just a mere period poet but came to express the sentiments of subsequent generations as well. Thirty years after Judith Higgins discussed ‘Sylvia Plath’s Growing Popularity with College Students’ (1973), Psychology Today tries to determine why Plath ‘still seduce[s] the adolescent psyche’ (Quart 2003, 66). Young people’s bent towards melodrama is one of the explanations offered. They love her tragic story and feel they ‘own’ the emotions she describes. Because of her suicide, the poet is forever young, ‘trapped in the heady, furious emotions of the quasi-adult’, Alissa Quart writes (70). But ‘real’ adults are also fascinated. Perhaps the story endures because it is perceived as archetypal and exemplary in several ways, the coming-ofage-drama being one of the potential narratives it contains. In an extended version of her Plath essay from 1968, Alicia Ostriker claims that ‘Plath’s poetry is a withering into the truth of a national predicament’. By that she means the close connection between American narcissism and American self-destructiveness, as nutshelled in an untitled Emily Dickinson poem that starts with ‘The heart asks pleasure first’ and ends with ‘The liberty to die’. However, the predicament outlined here reaches beyond the national level to a fundamental paradox in Western culture. Although it makes people sick, we encourage individualism and the cult of experience because we have become addicted to it (Ostriker 1983, 57–58). Sylvia Plath embodies the most destructive version of this paradigmatic dilemma, for which she is both admired and mourned. Linda WagnerMartin has suggested that readers keep returning to the biographies of Plath as if desperate to find a narrative other than the saga of a brilliant young woman who kills herself, abandoning two small children and a

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promising career. Hard pressed to redress the terrible waste, ‘we’ adopt her claim to power (2004, ix–x). Our continued attention makes it a success story after all, and a variation of the Socratic model is thereby enacted. The why question may be rephrased in this way: What is it in – or with – Sylvia Plath and her writing that satisfies personal and literary requirements for so many different kinds of readers, cross-culturally and decade after decade? It is not only in the Western hemisphere that Plath’s work elicits a sense of ‘intimacy, revelation, and even prophesy’ (Connors and Bayley 2007, 3). The enumeration of essential ingredients listed above form an intoxicating recipe, which I will here concentrate in a Sylvia Plath formula, consisting of three factors that unite to make her a serviceable exemplary figure: (1) flexibility – or ambiguity – combined with (2) renewable actuality, and (3) a (conceived) close relationship between life and work. The first two factors are common for time-resistant literary works which end up being labelled classics because of their potential for (re)interpretation, while the third explains the fervour and personal involvement on the part of her readers and consequently has a reinforcing effect on the two previous factors. All three can be concretized and subdivided into many components. A variation of the first factor is the dual impression of power and powerlessness that Plath’s writing and biography mediate. In the war between the sexes, she acts as both hangman and victim. A consequence of her double existence as subject and object is that very different persons can relate to and identify with her example. It is difficult to decide who emerges as the most powerful/powerless – Sylvia Plath, who in her desperation committed suicide, or the poet that left behind literature of such quality, self-assurance, and ruthlessness that it can compete with any man or adversary. As a martyr for poetry, feminism, and the female condition, she is no less ambiguous: a victim of perpetrators whose stories cannot compete with the persuasive power in her own saga. The complexity of her literary work has supplied critics with innumerable topics for discussion and material to substantiate almost every conceivable hypothesis, literary trend, or theory. Because textual exemplification constitutes the common procedure of literary criticism, the same verses and passages may be quoted to argue quite different views. Sylvia Plath has moreover become a vessel for her readers’ manifold problems, frustrations, and sufferings. Functioning as a repository for everything that is painful and troublesome, she too is exemplary in this sense. Greek biographers used the four cardinal virtues – valour, wisdom, temperance, and justness – as ‘receptacles’ into which the information

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about a life was parcelled out, the virtues augmented by addition and subdivision to fit the expectations of how admirable men should behave (Stuart 1928, 65–66). Plath herself has become a multi-value container. As such, she has a role akin to celebrities’ connections with their fans. But since Plath is dead, this relationship also differs from celebrity worship. I would assume that pain and suffering predominate for many of Plath’s readers, whereas popular icons who apparently lead the kind of glamorous lives that their audience dreams of having, seem to elicit a more mixed combination of feelings. The stars’ omnipresence in the media fosters an illusion of intimacy and accessibility, indicating that others can succeed in the same way. They are objects of multiple desires for people who long to escape monotony and insignificance (Moran 2000; Marshall 2005). In this sense, celebrities supply meaning and direction, filling needs similar to art and religion. The plasticity factor which makes it possible to adapt Plath’s work and life story to a host of scholarly and emotional demands is intimately associated with the actuality factor and the experience of her as modern and up-to-date. To see her as a witness of oppression and a war of the sexes makes the poet relevant for large numbers of readers, as does the perception of her as an incarnation of the unstable – or split – self studied by psychologists and cultivated by modernists and postmodernists alike. Essential issues in Plath’s work, such as selfhood, self-mythification, and a perpetual tension between the personal, the private, and the public are no less crucial for people today. Whether we call it performativity, selfcreation, self-representation, or theatrical self-construction, the notion that life is a stage where we try out roles, masks, and identities is as old as it is modern. Already clichéd at the time of Shakespeare, Plath all the same took on the complexity of belonging in ways that speak to contemporary readers.61 In our time, victimization and the expression of dissatisfaction have almost become an ideology in itself, and Sylvia Plath may be painted as a victim with many faces. Her depression and mental problems sound a familiar bell for readers who struggle. Since the number of persons diagnosed with depression or a bipolar disorder has lately increased almost epidemically over large parts of the world, her case story will remain topical for years to come. The bipolar diagnosis might be added to our list of narratives invoked to explain the pain of modern living. On the other hand, Plath’s undiluted anger and readiness to slap people around appeal to the dissatisfied at heart, women who sympathize with the bitch, and those who long to be dark and difficult. She accordingly looms prominently in Elizabeth Wurtzel’s ‘bitchography’ (1998).

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The poet’s fierce ambition to succeed and become famous, always on the lookout for marketable scripts, seems equally present-day, although the quest for fame also drove aspiring writers to action in Antiquity. Even the notable influences of popular culture, advertising, and consumer rhetoric contribute to a contemporary atmosphere in her writing and keep her name current in cultural studies. Thus, the story of Sylvia Plath as a model martyr and poetic female genius who battled to succeed, to balance conflicting roles, and to heal her split self in a hostile world combines classical as well as contemporary elements. Basically, she personifies an exemplary (I-)identity that has a liberating function vis-à-vis power structures and at the same time legitimizes hegemonic thinking concerning women’s rights and individual liberty. Nevertheless, without the extra-literary dimension and the importance granted to Plath’s biography in the reception, her reputation would hardly have reached the level that it has. One might even ask what is now more famous, her biography or her work. Similar to romantic poets like Byron and Shelley, her life has become enchanting poetry. Autobiographical aspects have combined with the ‘I’-persona(e) narrating in the poems and The Bell Jar, lending authenticity to the work and strengthening the process of involvement and identification on the part of the readers. Whether we adhere to the reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss, Stanley Fish, Steven Mailloux, or Tony Bennett and argue that it is the reader’s ‘horizon of expectations’, their ‘interpretive community’, ‘rhetorical practices’, or ‘reading formations’, respectively, which govern changing interpretive practices, such practices may be taken to explain a literary work’s changing significance.62 Readers invariably seek to transform books and writers into their own contemporaries. Plath’s are no exception. When we say that classics are independent of time and place, this actually means that these texts still talk to us, in spite of having been written long ago. The reception of Sylvia Plath illustrates this point in an exemplary way. Co-existing in time, her readers around the world may be part of the same globalizing dynamics, but they still operate within different time zones and cultural contexts. Our judgment of their reading depends on whether we ascribe to the cultural authority enacted by her example and whether we are convinced by critics’ procedure of textual exemplification when they argue their case. Claiming Plath, do they make sense to others?

NOTES

Introduction 1

‘The real Sylvia Plath’ was the joint focus of two articles in The Observer, on 19 March 2000. In one article, poetry editor Kate Kellaway discusses ‘The poet who died so well’, and in the other article, Vanessa Thorpe reports on a radio programme in which former poetry editor, Al Alvarez, reminisces about Plath. On 1 June 2000, Kate Moses published a long essay entitled ‘The real Sylvia Plath’ on Salon.com. ‘The Other Sylvia Plath’ was the title of Irvin Ehrenpreis’s review of Collected Poems in The New York Review of Books, 4 February 1982. The Other Sylvia Plath by Tracy Brain and The Other Ariel by Lynda K. Bundtzen were both published in 2001.

Chapter One: The Constitution of a Poet 1

For much of the bibliographic information, I rely on Tabor’s analytical bibliography. 2 In The Other Sylvia Plath (2001, 1–12), Tracy Brain analyzes how the ‘packaging’ of Plath is constructed to milk and nourish the public’s interest in her biography. 3 In ‘Poets on Campus’, Sylvia Plath presents William Burford, Anthony Hecht, Alastair Reid, and Richard Wilbur, in addition to George Steiner. 4 In a letter to Robert Lowell, dated 29 December 1966, Hughes offers his apology for having ‘dragged’ him and Anne Sexton into his Tri-Quarterly article. Lowell had evidently reacted to the manner in which Hughes compared their poetry with Plath’s. Hughes insists that he had not intended any disparagement, only to point at differences between them, since the linking of the three names had become an automatic reflex for reviewers (2007, 264–65). 5 The deletions indicated in the quotations are Ames’s. 6 Letter to James Michie, her editor at Heinemann, dated 14 November 1961 (the Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College). 7 Philippa Toomey interviewed Aurelia Plath in 1976 and quotes from their conversation in her 1978 review of Letters Home. In a letter to Judith Kroll, author of Chapters in a Mythology (1976), Mrs Plath writes on 1 December 1978 that one particular sentence attributed to Esther’s mother had been spoken by ‘a wellmeaning Christian Scientist friend, who drove me to visit Sylvia every Saturday – I had no car; and this friend left her home and four children to do this for us’. She

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also tells of how Sylvia’s breakdown affected her own health, and that everything she did while trying to follow the advice of a respected psychiatrist was taken in the worst meaning (Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College). 8 Tabor 1987 gives the following data about the number of reviews: The Bell Jar, 86 reviews of British and American editions; Letters Home, 67; Ariel, 49; Winter Trees, 47; Collected Poems, 47; The Journals, 39; The Colossus, 38; Crossing the Water, 37; Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, 31; The Bed Book, 18. 9 Cf. information at the end of Rosenstein’s article in Ms. Magazine 1 (1972, 99). In a piece on forthcoming books within the Plath reception, The New York Times Book Review reports on 15 December 1974 that Rosenstein was working on a critical biography for Knopf. At the end of Rosenstein’s review of Letters Home (1975, 49), readers are informed that she ‘is writing a book on Sylvia Plath, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf’. But it never appeared. According to Cheryl Walker, in her review of Edward Butscher’s Plath biography, Plath’s estate had prevented the dissertation from becoming publicly available (1977, 540). 10 Phoebe-Lou Adams’s review of Letters Home, to which Frances McCullough had reacted, was printed in the February 1976 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. From the published letters of Ted Hughes, we understand that the editing of Letters Home had been a more complicated process than what was indicated by McCullough, amounting to a controversy between Hughes and Mrs Plath that involved lawyers. He was concerned with protecting the children and keeping his private life out of public view. Although Mrs Plath understandably liked certain letters, such as ‘those early love-letters which Sylvia somehow sent to you rather than to me’, for Hughes, these were ‘somewhat sacred documents’, which he preferred ‘not to have every college kid and viperous reviewer and thesis writer pawing over’ (Hughes 2007, 364–65, 366). 11 Letter to Judith Kroll, dated 1 December 1978 (Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College). Mrs Plath mentions a friend whose daughter also had a breakdown, calling her lucky not only because her daughter recovered and their relationship was re-established, but also because ‘her daughter doesn’t write’. The ambivalent nature of Sylvia Plath’s relations with her mother is further illustrated in the poem ‘Medusa’, which she wrote on 16 October 1962, i.e. the same day as the two desperate letters. Named after the jellyfish ‘Aurelia’, it contained a special message for her mother. 12 Letter to Judith Kroll, 1 December 1978 (Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College). 13 Aurelia Plath responded to a review of Plath’s journals signed by P. Albert Duhamel and published in Boston Herald American, on 9 May 1982. 14 This letter by Al Alvarez and others, printed in The Guardian on 11 April 1989, was instigated by Ronald Hayman and signed by eight well-known persons, among them Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, who later withdrew his name. It was triggered by the first letter from Julia Parnaby and Rachel Wingfield, dated 7 April in the same newspaper. More letters were published in the weeks that followed, including two by Parnaby and Wingfield, dated 13 and 26 of April 1989.

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15

‘The Burying of Hughes’, a poem by Robyn Rowland, describes five women hammering away ‘in the grey morning mist of a / Yorkshire fall’ to take back Sylvia Plath’s name for her. Quoted from Radically Speaking, eds. Diane Bell and Renate Klein 1996, 557 (which gives Up From Below: Poems of the 1980s, 1987, as its source). 16 In postmodernist discourse, the desecration as well as the newspaper pieces may be presented as equally justified expressions of ‘a disturbance of language and knowledge’ which ‘strikes at the most fundamental, if fragile, insignia of our symbolic identities – memory, grave and name’ (Rose 1991, 69). Alternatively, Plath’s grave can be read as a Barthesian ‘mythic signifier’ and thus ‘a paradigmatic case for the semiotic transformation at stake’ (Bronfen 1998, 3). 17 There are a few exceptions to Hughes’s rule of not giving personal interviews, notably in his final years. He talks with Drue Heinz, in The Paris Review in 1995, about himself and Sylvia Plath. A meeting with Israeli journalist Eilat Negev resulted in two Daily Telegraph instalments shortly after he died. In its 1999 winter issue, the American angling magazine Wild Steelhead & Salmon features an extensive interview that Thomas Pero conducted with Hughes. 18 The letter Alexander refers to, from Ted Hughes to Aurelia Plath, 15 March 1963, is published in Hughes 2007, 214–16. 19 The letter Middlebrook refers to, from TH to AP, 12 January 1975, is kept at Emory University, in the Ted Hughes Papers and Library, and is not included in Ted Hughes 2007. 20 In Frieda Hughes’s collection of poems, Forty-Five, the speaker’s grandmother appears in one of the poems ‘Threatening to steal us while / My father’s back was turned, / And take us overseas’ (2006, 67). 21 Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.9.29–35; Plato, Protagoras 325b, The Laws 659–61; Cicero, De partitione oratoria 69, 70; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 3.4.14. 22 For discussion of the rhetoric and changing use of example, see Lyons 1989 and 2006, Scanlon 1994, Gelley 1995, and Rigolot 1998.

Chapter Two: Critics 1

According to Sarah Hannah (2003, 232), there were as of the spring of 2003 ‘some five hundred articles and at least eighty-five full-length published books of criticism on Plath’. On 21 August 2002, the electronic MLA International Bibliography contained 574 scholarly studies that examine subjects related to Sylvia Plath and her work – i.e. more than twice the number of entries registered on poets she has frequently been linked to: Theodore Roethke (287), John Berryman (278), Ted Hughes (271), Adrienne Rich (256), and Anne Sexton (224). However, the main exponent of confessional poetry, Robert Lowell, exceeded her, totaling 596 studies. Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney counted 510. Five years later, Plath’s lead on all of them had increased – in some cases considerably so – and she surpassed Lowell. During this period, Hughes and Rich had both advanced two places on the list. The

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number of entries with ‘Author as Subject’ registered on 21 August 2007 was Plath with 717 (+ 143 since August 2002), Lowell 694 (+ 98), Heaney 638 (+ 128), Hughes 341 (+ 70), Rich 312 (+ 56), Roethke 308 (+ 21), Berryman 297 (+ 19), and Sexton 246 (+ 22). Several entries are overlapping; one work may discuss two or more poets (Plath and Hughes; Plath, Sexton, and Lowell), but it figures as an entry on all the relevant authors. 2 See Howe’s ‘Sylvia Plath: A Partial Disagreement’ (1972, anthologized several times as ‘The Plath Celebration: A Partial Dissent’), Ackroyd’s review of Letters Home (1976), and Bloom’s introduction to the collection of essays he edited on Sylvia Plath for Modern Critical Views (1989). However, Marjorie Perloff at one point similarly questioned Plath’s ‘majority’, in ‘Extremist Poetry: Some Versions of the Sylvia Plath Myth’ (1972a, 588). And in her review of Letters Home (1975, 2), Maureen Howard dubbs Plath as a ‘moderately gifted’ poet. 3 Linda Wagner-Martin repeats the statement in another anthology four years later, but leaves out the last qualifying part (1988b, 18). The two books of criticism are edited under the name Linda W. Wagner. 4 The Rosenthal quotation is from his review of a new edition of The Colossus, ‘Metamorphosis of a book’ (1967b). 5 The British edition of The Colossus was published by Heinemann on 31 October 1960 and contains fifty poems. With ten poems deleted, the American edition was published on 14 May 1962 by Knopf. Harper later became Plath’s publisher in the US. 6 Judith Jones in a letter to Sylvia Plath dated 28 December 1962, and Elizabeth Lawrence in a letter from 16 January 1963 (Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College). 7 The version with additional opening and closing paragraphs appeared in TriQuarterly (Alvarez 1966a), in Alvarez’s own collection of essays Beyond All This Fiddle (1968), and in Charles Newman’s edited volume The Art of Sylvia Plath (1970). Quoted from Tri-Quarterly, 65. 8 George Steiner and Marjorie Perloff were probably influenced by Alvarez when publishing their essays, ‘In Extremis’ (1969) and ‘Extremist Poetry: Some Versions of the Sylvia Plath Myth’ (1972), respectively. 9 The chapter entitled ‘Other Confessional Poets’ is partly based on his reviews of The Colossus and Ariel. 10 The preface was excerpted from Lowell’s review, ‘On Two Poets’, i.e. Ford Madox Ford and Sylvia Plath, in The New York Review of Books (1966). 11 On the back of a letter she received from Olwyn Hughes, dated 2 July 1968, Aurelia Plath wrote, ‘Have you ever known such horror that you couldn’t eat or sleep, Olwyn? For months in 1963, then, again in 1966 I couldn’t sleep or swallow solids’. Olwyn Hughes was trying to persuade Mrs Plath that The Bell Jar should be published in the US (quoted from Bundtzen 2001, 185). 12 ‘The Second Chance’, cover story on Robert Lowell, Time, 2 June 1967. ‘Whiskey and Ink, Whiskey and Ink’, profile of John Berryman by Jane Howard, Life, 21 July 1967. 13 ‘Poetry in an Age of Prose’ is printed across the Time logo on the front cover,

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above a drawing of a dejected looking Robert Lowell wearing a crown that gives associations both to Christ and to laurel wreaths worn by champions, and thus to the classical figure of poeta laureatus. 14 When accentuating his view in a later version of this essay, Howe adds ‘utterly disproportionate’ after calling the deliberate comparison ‘monstrous’ (1977, 233). 15 Chapter 12 in Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) is entitled ‘Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp’. 16 ‘Fascinating Fascism’ was the title of a review written by Susan Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl’s photography book called The Last of the Nuba, in The New York Review of Books, 6 February 1975. 17 Frost’s introduction is entitled ‘Fascinating Fascism’. Referring to Susan Sontag, she accounts for an upsurge in fascist images in contemporary popular culture as well as studies of the phenomenon. Within fashion and design, ‘fascist chic’ was a trendy look. Thus, approximately twenty-five years apart, Sylvia Plath is linked to ‘death camp chic’ and to ‘fascist chic’. 18 In addition to Lois Ames’s ‘Notes toward a biography’, Tri-Quarterly 7 contains Charles Newman, ‘Candor is the only while: The Art of Sylvia Plath’; A. Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’; A.E. Dyson, ‘On Sylvia Plath’; Ted Hughes, ‘Notes on the chronological order of Sylvia Plath’s poems’, and Anne Sexton, ‘The barfly ought to sing’. 19 The first US edition of Winter Trees was released in 1972. Besides Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, Tabor lists seven other separate titles published in 1971, three containing only a single Plath poem and most of them printed in a limited number of copies. 20 Ingrid Melander’s thesis, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Study of Themes, was published the following year, in 1972, in the ‘Gothenburg Studies in English’ series. Only fifty-two pages long, Doris L. Eder’s ‘The Life and Poetry of Sylvia Plath’, State University of New York, 1964, is one of the earliest studies (cf. Tabor 1987). 21 Such books often appear in series of guides to writers and literature. Aird’s book was published by Oliver & Boyd in their ‘Modern Writers’ series. 22 Howard’s contribution to The Art of Sylvia Plath is a slightly revised version of his essay from 1969. Quoted from 1969, 416, 421 (1970, 81, 87). 23 Eileen M. Aird regards the poems in Crossing the Water as more arresting and disturbing than The Colossus, representing ‘the earlier stages in the development which culminated in Ariel’. Written in the interim period, the new volume demonstrates ‘the unity of Sylvia Plath’s work’, showing affinities with poems produced both before and after (1971, 286). Douglas Dunn describes Crossing the Water as ‘much freer in style than the first book’. It had the same kind of ‘zany, accurate and unexpected imagery’ typical for both Ariel and The Colossus; but he thinks that only one of the poems actually belongs with Ariel (1971, 69). Victor Howes claims that the transitional poems in Crossing the Water ‘bridge the gap between the sober, workmanlike verses of “The Colossus” and the wild, expressionistic outcries of “Ariel”’ (1971). To Ted Hughes, all the interim work was ‘fascinating and much of it beautiful in a rich and easy way that we find neither in The

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Colossus nor Ariel’. The novelty in these poems was, according to him, ‘the freedom of the voice’ (1971a, 165, 170). 24 In ‘Note’, signed ‘T.H.’, Winter Trees (1971, 7), Faber and Faber. 25 ‘From Book to Cult’ was the title on a piece by Helen Dudar in The New York Post (1971), which treated The Bell Jar and its author as phenomena. 26 The expression ‘the tranquillized Fifties’ was taken from a poem by Robert Lowell, ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’, in Life Studies (1959). Lucas Myers used it as title for his review of The Colossus in 1962. 27 Ted Hughes wrote two letters to Al Alvarez in November 1971, kept within deposit 8878 of the ‘Literary manuscripts and correspondence of Alfred Alvarez’, at the British Library. The first quotations are from the second letter, the last quotation from the first letter, which is printed in Hughes 2007, 321–26. 28 The Sylvia Plath section of Cambridge Review 90 (1969) consists of ‘Early Poems by Sylvia Plath’; ‘Sylvia Plath: The Cambridge Collection’, by A. Alvarez; ‘In Extremis’, by George Steiner; ‘Sylvia Plath and the Problem of Violence in Art’, by David Holbrook; ‘I am I’, by Eric Homberger, and ‘Remembering Sylvia’, by M.W.C. [Wendy Campbell]. 29 The Observer, 10 October 1971. Faber’s statement, signed by director Charles Monteith, appeared below a letter from Olwyn Hughes declaring that Alvarez was wrong in thinking there existed ‘a sizeable cache of late poems’ that were still uncollected. The remaining five poems, composed by Sylvia Plath after The Colossus, were about to be published in an illustrated limited edition prior to inclusion in a fully annotated complete edition which was under preparation. However, the account that Judith Kroll (2007) gives many years later of her own involvement in establishing the final texts for Plath’s Collected Poems reveals that when Olwyn Hughes and the publishers made their promises, the process had hardly begun and was managed rather haphazardly. 30 Plath’s preoccupation with the monetary value of her work and how much she was making runs through The Journals as well as Letters Home. She furthermore kept track of what the various publications paid for the texts they accepted, and these lists are now kept in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College. 31 Cf. Ted Hughes, ‘Notes on the chronological order of Sylvia Plath’s poems’ (1966, 81): ‘The poems are chapters in a mythology where the plot, seen as a whole and in retrospect, is strong and clear’. Kroll’s book is an edited version of her doctoral dissertation submitted to Yale University in April 1974. 32 Letters of Ted Hughes (2007) contains a letter from Hughes to Robert Graves dated 20 July 1967, in which Hughes calls The White Goddess ‘the chief holy book of my poetic conscience’ (273). 33 In her ‘Foreword 2007’ to the British edition of Chapters in a Mythology published thirty-one years later, Kroll explains that Ted Hughes had not helped in her work and only confirmed conclusions after the fact – i.e. after she had submitted her dissertation to Yale University. Discussing Kroll’s work in June 1974, Hughes characterized the book as ‘brilliant’ and even seemed a little spooked by her ‘clairvoyances’ (2007, xxix).

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34

Perhaps because the 1976 foreword gave rise to misunderstandings that suggested Ted Hughes had coached her extensively, Judith Kroll in 2007 tries to distance herself from him and the estate. She thereby adopts the ‘standard practice’ that she in the 1970s had not foreseen herself ever taking on: that it would become necessary also for her ‘to disavow having been influenced by the Hugheses, or to introduce one’s book by saying that “historically”, the Hugheses granted permission in exchange for censorship’ (2007, xxxvii). Kroll moreover lets us know that she – unlike so many other women – did not find Hughes particularly attractive, and she quite negatively characterizes Olwyn Hughes. On the other hand, she cites his positive evaluation of her work presumably as an indication of quality. 35 In her preface to the first edition of Chapters in a Mythology (1976), Judith Kroll writes that the poems she quotes agree with the manuscript of Plath’s forthcoming Collected Poems. When the book finally materialized in 1981, she discovered that ‘discrepancies and errors had found their way’ into the definitive versions she had sorted out (Kroll 2007, xxxii). 36 See for instance Brain 2001, Rea 2003, and Gill 2008. Deborah Nelson (2002 and 2006) reads confessional poetry as a political response to the crisis of privacy in the Cold War era. 37 Annas’s book – labelled by the author as ‘a developmental study of the imagery of Sylvia Plath’s poetry’ (1988, 13) – is based on her doctoral dissertation with the same title, submitted to Indiana University in 1977 (cf. Tabor 1987). 38 For examples of the first category, see William Pritchard: ‘An Interesting Minor Poet?’, The New Republic (1981); of the second, see Denis Donoghue: ‘You Could Say She Had a Calling for Death’, The New York Times Book Review (1981); of the third, see Laurence Lerner: ‘Sylvia Plath & Others’, Encounter (1982), and Katha Pollitt: ‘A Note of Triumph’, The Nation (1982). 39 Ted Hughes claims to be ‘fairly certain’ of the chronology of undated texts; ‘approximations of order’ is nevertheless his own term, quoted by Hargrove (1994, 15) from Collected Poems (Hughes 1989a, 16, 17). Not until September 1960 did Sylvia Plath start dating the final typescript of each poem.

Chapter Three: Feminists 1

Cf. George Stade, in his postscript to Nancy Hunter Steiner’s A Closer Look at Ariel (1974, 74). 2 When reading at the Adelaide Literary Festival in Australia, March 1976, Hughes was met with angry abuse from the audience and with signs accusing him of killing Sylvia Plath (Barber 2001). In his review of Birthday Letters, Seamus Heaney (1998) tells of witnessing placards with slogans like ‘Ted Hughes Fascist’ at a reading in London. 3 Judith Kroll writes in her ‘Foreword 2007’ to the British edition of Chapters in a Mythology (2007, xxxiv) that she was ‘the first to mention Assia – the woman for whom Ted left Plath – in print and by name’ in the first, US edition of her book.

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However, Kroll’s book was not published until 1976, four years after Morgan’s Monster. 4 Incidentally, Robin Morgan served as a contributing editor to Ms. Magazine from 1977 and as editor in chief from 1989 to 1993. 5 According to May Swenson, who reviewed Monster jointly with Anne Sexton’s The Book of Folly, it was ‘a case of mislabelling’ to subhead Morgan’s collection ‘Poems’, given that ‘the main body of her book consists of sprawling manifestoes, diatribes, polemical essays and editorials, laments and excoriations – too much that is deliberately formless’ (1972, 26). Swenson’s review in The New York Times Book Review appears right next to a review by Joyce Carol Oates of Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees and Maxine Kumin’s Up Country. 6 The poem was by Mary Folliet, cf. letter in The New York Review of Books (1976). 7 The preview issue of the new magazine contained Plath’s poem ‘Three Women’. 8 The articles are by Sylvia Robinson Corrigan (Aphra I, Spring 1970), Nancy Jo Hoffman (College English 34, October 1972), Josephine Donovan (The Minnesota Review NRP 4, Spring 1973), Susan Sniader Lanser (Radical Teacher 6, December 1977), and Rachel S. Doran (Transition 1:2, 1977–78), respectively (cf. Tabor 1987). 9 Similar to Robin Morgan’s arguments, Perloff also claims (1984, 11) that the first allegation is ‘documented’ in Plath’s unpublished letters and ‘The Rabbit Catcher’. But Assia and David Wevill did not come to visit in Devon until 18 May 1962. The affair unfolded after Assia Wevill met Hughes again on 3 July (Koren and Negev 2006a). The second allegation (Perloff 1984, 12) is supposedly corroborated by Edward Butscher, who gives no source, and Letters Home, where Sylvia Plath writes that she would try to get a legal separation and tells of ‘a wonderful four days in Ireland’ (460–61). Aurelia Plath reminds her readers that Sylvia’s letters from this period were desperate and consequently difficult to read objectively. She asks us ‘to remember the circumstances in which they were written and to remember also that they represent one side of an extremely complex situation’ (Letters Home, 459). Neither of them actually started divorce proceedings and several sources – including Aurelia Plath, Al Alvarez, Lucas Myers, and Ted Hughes – maintain that they both hoped for reconciliation. 10 Probably just copying Winter Pollen without checking the information, Keith Sagar and Stephen Tabor give the same publication details in Ted Hughes: A Bibliography 1946–1995 (1998). However, what does appear in The Observer issue for 21 November 1971 is a letter from Ted Hughes protesting at the excerpts and an answer from Alvarez, on page 10, in addition to the second excerpt from The Savage God, ‘... Or not to be’, on page 25. The original manuscript to ‘Publishing Sylvia Plath’, now in the Ted Hughes Papers and Library at Emory University, does not exist in any printed version until Winter Pollen. 11 Compared with other sources, the information given in Hughes 1994c concerning the published and unpublished Ariel differs as to the title of one poem, the dating of another, and the number of poems which Plath’s Ariel manuscript contained (‘about thirty-five’ according to ‘Publishing Sylvia Plath’, 164, whereas the list given in Collected Poems, 295, specifies 41 poems).

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Ten years on, in ‘Ted Hughes and the Corpus of Sylvia Plath’, Sarah Churchwell credits Marjorie Perloff with having demonstrated how Ted Hughes changed the trajectory of Ariel, ‘from a narrative that emphasizes spring, hope, and rebirth, to one that emphasizes suicide, death, and completion’. While judging Perloff’s argument to be valuable and convincing, Churchwell nevertheless claims it is important to note that Hughes, too, consistently stresses the theme of birth and rebirth in his writing on Plath. Instead of ending Ariel with ‘Edge’, one of her two last poems, and the one that is often read as a suicide note, he chose ‘Words’, which was written four days earlier and explores the aggressive possibility of language: ‘Hughes’s conception of Plath’s “last word” seems to be less interested in suicide than it is in combating the hostile effect of her echoing language, even as he ambivalently (and thus inconsistently) attempts to protect the words she left on the page’ (Churchwell 1998, 113–14). 13 Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Plath’s journals are from the 2000 edition. 14 Answers from 26 writers (22 men, 4 women) appeared under a collective ‘Context’ heading in The London Magazine New Series, February 1962, where Hughes’s signature to the contribution preceded Plath’s. 15 Tracy Brain renders different versions of the ban-the-bomb story in The Other Sylvia Plath (2001, 13) to illustrate ‘how impossible it is to assert with any certainty the “truth” about any event in Plath’s life’. She summarizes the available accounts in this way: ‘Plath’s is that of a political and emotional woman, Stevenson’s is that of a prosecutor of Plath and defender of Hughes, Wagner-Martin’s is that of a feminist in sympathy with a tired new mother, Alexander’s is relatively neutral in tone’. Perhaps the neutrality in Paul Alexander’s biography of Plath is due to his belief – contrary to the witnesses’ accounts of Sylvia Plath and Dido Merwin – that the Hughes family went to the march together. Brain is not interested in the status of Dido Merwin’s ‘I was there’ version and its influence on Anne Stevenson. 16 See Broe 1980, Bundtzen 1983, McKay 1974, and Rosenblatt 1979 as examples of such interpretations. Thompson 1990/91 reads ‘Ariel’ as one of many ‘menstrual poems’ in Plath’s oeuvre. In ‘Notes on the chronological order of Sylvia Plath’s poems’ (1966), Ted Hughes tells about the horse in Devon named Ariel. He describes an episode where Plath went riding in Cambridge years before, when the horse bolted with her hanging around its neck at full gallop for about two miles. 17 Later Poems: 1925–1935 (1941) contains four of Eliot’s Ariel poems from the first series, and Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (1963) also contains a fifth from the second series. 18 Mildred Smith Norton was a friend of Aurelia Plath, and Sylvia Plath dated two of her sons. Buddy Willard in The Bell Jar is believed to have been based on the oldest, Dick. In her journal entry for 29 March 1951, Sylvia Plath recounts something the other boy, Perry, had quoted his mother as saying: ‘Girls look for infinite security; boys look for a mate. Both look for different things’ (Journals, 54). There is no arrow image here. Years later, on 31 December 1958, Plath muses: ‘DN’s mother was not so wrong about a man supplying direction and a woman the warm emotional power of

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faith and love’ (454). 19 Hughes’s letter appeared on 24 April 1992 in response to Jaqueline Rose’s letter on 10 April. Other letters were printed on 20 March (signed Tracy Brain), 27 March (Olwyn Hughes), and 17 April 1992 (David Holbrook). 20 Brain’s contribution to a volume of essays on ecocriticism and literature – ‘“Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?”: Silent Spring and Sylvia Plath’ (1998) – is integrated into The Other Sylvia Plath. The first part of the essay title is taken from Plath’s poem ‘Elm’. 21 The website of ‘Eye Rhymes’, http://www.indiana.edu/~plath70/exhibition.html; my italics. 22 Helle also calls it ‘[t]he historiographic turn in literary and cultural studies’(7). The Unraveling Archive consists of both new essays and previously published contributions. 23 Brain’s essay entitled ‘“Your Puddle-jumping daughter”: Sylvia Plath’s Midatlanticism’ (1998) is integrated into the book. The first part of the title cites Plath’s signature on a letter to her mother. Brain thinks this quote ‘nicely’ represents Plath’s midatlantic mindset (2001, 48). However, the letter in question, dated 13 March 1955, was written when Plath was still at Smith. In it, she tells of a busy week with exams and news of good chances for winning a Fulbright scholarship. Thus, ‘puddle-jumping’ might simply be read as a weather report and/or an expression of happiness (Letters Home, 164–65).

Chapter Four: Biographers 1

See Plutarch 1919, vol. 7 (225), the introduction to his life of Alexander the Great; Montaigne’s ‘On Democritus and Heraclitus’ (I:50) and ‘On books’ (II:10); Woolf 1967, 232. 2 Olwyn Hughes (1976) explained Ames’s terms in a letter to The New York Review of Books. 3 Unless otherwise stated, page references in my text are to this 1976 edition. 4 In Butscher 1977a, 29 (‘In Search of Sylvia: An Introduction’), he claims that she suffered from ‘schizophrenic melancholia’. 5 See Butscher 1977a, where he writes that his biography ‘would displease and possibly enrage many readers, especially those feminist extremists who had come to Plath’s work as if to an altar, deifying her life and being beyond recognition’ ( 29). 6 Al Alvarez (1999c) depicts him as fundamentally certain of himself, his background, and his own abilities from early on. Anne Stevenson calls our attention to his extensive reading and remarkable teachers at the local school (1989a, 77). Terry Gifford (1999) invites the readers into Hughes’s Yorkshire landscape, quoting from the poet himself. In interviews, Hughes has described his childhood as decisive for his attitude towards language, knowledge of nature, and interest in myths, and the West Yorkshire dialect as the basis for his writing (in Horder 1965 and Faas 1980, 202). 7 Olwyn Hughes received a copy of David Compton’s letter to Butscher. She herself

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likewise protested at the treatment of Aurelia Plath, soliciting the following reply from Butscher: ‘If Mrs. Plath feels offended or unfairly treated when she reads the book, she can sue me for libel, although, as you must realize, she would never win’ (in O. Hughes 1976, 42–43). 8 Miller’s rejoinder to Butscher followed in the same issue of The New York Review of Books, 30 September 1976, together with a letter signed by Olwyn Hughes, and one by a fourth writer, all under the shared heading ‘Reviewing Sylvia Plath’. 9 Karl Miller knew Ted Hughes from Cambridge University, and he published Hughes’s poems in different magazines he edited. There is nothing in Letters of Ted Hughes (2007) indicating that Hughes felt badly treated by Miller. 10 In my Cardinal paperback edition from 1991, she is presented as ‘the author of thirty books about modern and contemporary American writers. ... Linda WagnerMartin’s own poetry has appeared in over 100 magazines and journals’. When Method and Madness was published in 1976, Butscher’s poems according to his blurb had been printed in half that number of magazines. 11 Unless otherwise indicated, page references are to this 1987 edition of WagnerMartin’s biography. 12 Daniel Huws was the one who reviewed Plath’s poems unfavourably in Delta, a Cambridge literary magazine. Male jealousy does not come through as the motivating force, at least in his Memories of Ted Hughes 1952–1963 (2010). 13 Janet Malcolm (1993, 112) quotes a letter from Dido Merwin to Linda WagnerMartin. After having seen what the biographer made of the material with which she had supplied her, Merwin refused to stay on as a source: ‘You have your reasons for not wanting to acknowledge the crucial fact that Sylvia was a pathological punisher and Ted a constitutional forgiver. I have my reasons for not wanting to have anything to do with a book that attempts to cover this up’. In his memoir of Hughes, Daniel Huws (2010, 54) notes that ‘not much’ of what he wrote when commenting on a draft of Wagner-Martin’s book ‘turned out to fit her thesis’. 14 In some biographical notes about her daughter, entitled ‘Sylvia’s copyright’, which are now kept in the archive at Smith College, Aurelia Plath discloses the following: ‘Not until Sylvia was considered well again and back in Smith, did my husband’s youngest sister write me that in their family their mother, a sister, and a niece suffered depressions – the mother, seriously enough to have been hospitalized. All made some sort of recovery, however. I did not tell Sylvia of this, feeling I would do so when she was older, for she so revered her father’s memory – I didn’t want her breakdown with his background.’ 15 Two ‘S.J.’s in addition to 161 names are listed under ‘author’s sources’ (270–71). 16 From text on the back cover, Wagner-Martin 1991. 17 Hughes likewise writes about the case in The Independent, on 22 April 1989, where he refers to Hayman’s relaying Wagner-Martin’s claim that she had to delete ‘15,000 words’. The amount of suggested corrections, then, is also a matter for dispute. 18 The Houghton Mifflin Papers on Bitter Fame in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College contain a contract specifying an advance of forty-thousand dollars to Anne Stevenson.

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Stevenson in a lecture entitled ‘The Making of “Bitter Fame”’ and in a letter to Janet Malcolm (1993, 111, 113). 20 Olwyn Hughes confirms as much in a letter to The Observer, on 5 November 1989. Responding to a review of Bitter Fame, she denies claims made by Ian Hamilton (1989), who defines her as the book’s ‘real guiding influence’ and appears to think that ‘private rage’ is its dictating force. But she admits to reserving ‘something approaching rage for those mythmaking biographers, who have caused [Sylvia’s] family such grief. ... My unwillingness to face at some future date yet another onslaught of garbled fantasies, in the absence of real information, was certainly a factor in my wish that Anne Stevenson write as scrupulous and thorough a book as possible’. 21 In ‘To Edit a Life’ (1992), published in The Atlantic Monthly, where he used to be a poetry editor, Davison characterizes the editorial task of Bitter Fame as ‘the most harrowing’ he had ever undertaken. The editorial process lasted nearly two years after Stevenson completed her first draft. In the same place (96), Davison notes that out of the nine would-be Plath biographers he knew about, only five actually published their books – i.e. Edward Butscher, Linda Wagner-Martin, Anne Stevenson, Paul Alexander, and Ronald Hayman. 22 Olwyn Hughes’s letter to The New York Review of Books, on 26 October 1989, followed and preceded letters from Stevenson and Alvarez respectively, printed under the same heading, ‘Sylvia Plath: An Exchange’. 23 Stevenson confirmed this impression in an interview with me on 23 April 1994. See Butscher 1996, 15–17, who is embittered and felt deceived. 24 More than a mere correction of facts, his long response to a draft of Bitter Fame during the autumn of 1986 is an effort to explain what it feels like to have one’s emotions, motives, and thoughts constructed from hearsay, and then presented by total strangers as the final truth about their lives. An example of how their real lives were displaced by other people’s invention is his startled reaction to learning from Stevenson’s manuscript ‘that for a long time after his birth I would not touch my baby son. Maybe I’m mistaken, but I remember it otherwise. I wonder what dear friend of mine came up with this particular subtlety in their careful analysis of our decomposed remains’. Hughes furthermore objects to the image of himself as a chauvinist who expected his wife to slave at the sink. They had schemes for sharing chores and taking care of the children, he writes (2007, 520, 523). 25 In ‘Sylvia Plath’, a memorial broadcast made for BBC and subsequently printed in The Review (1963, 26). 26 That Ted Hughes (2007, 535) in a letter to Lucas Myers describes his friend’s memoir as ‘just’ and Dido Merwin’s case against Sylvia Plath as ‘[h]orribly accurate’, its animus ‘a mirror-image of Sylvia’s own’ would probably not make Van Dyne reconsider her opinion of Bitter Fame. 27 Unless otherwise stated, page references are to this 1989 edition of Bitter Fame. I return to the three memoirs in Chapter Six. 28 In Chapter Six, I discuss Davison’s memoir Half Remembered (1973), where he writes about Sylvia Plath.

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Unless otherwise stated, page references in the following are to this 1991 edition of The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. 30 Page references in the following are to this 1991 edition of Rough Magic. 31 In his list of sources, Alexander refers to his own correspondence with Lucas Myers (375). They presumably corresponded about other issues and not Hughes’s ‘violence’. 32 Alexander’s preface to the second edition of Rough Magic, published in 1999, names Aurelia Plath as one of his sources. 33 The publisher of Grand Street, Ben Sonnenberg, writes in a memoir of Ted Hughes (2002) that by contributing three poems to his first issue of Grand Street and then ‘Sylvia Plath and her Journals’ to the third issue, ‘Ted had blessed the magazine’. It made Sonnenberg feel ‘that the magazine was indeed established’. 34 Ian Hamilton’s reflections (1988a; 1988b) on his own motives for approaching J.D. Salinger and his subsequent reactions to getting snubbed off resemble my line of assumptions. 35 Letters by Olwyn Hughes and Elaine Ives-Cameron, who protested at the portrayal of Hughes as a villain, were published under the same heading as Alexander’s ‘Keep Hollywood off the laureate …’. In the paperback edition of Rough Magic, his academic merits appear somewhat subdued. A ‘former reporter for the Houston bureau of Time Magazine’, he had ‘taught at the University of Houston and at Hofstra University’ (1992b). 36 This quotation on the cover of ‘Second Da Capo Press edition 2003’ is ascribed to James Carroll, The Boston Globe. 37 Hayman probably meant Devon, because that is where they lived. Responding to Hayman’s claim about the choice of graveyard, Hughes comments, ‘[h]e has, of course, no idea what she felt about that graveyard next to our house, which has been (and had been then) closed to new burials for many years. My understanding was that she was fond of West Yorkshire. I know she told many different people many different things, and different things at different times, but I had to act on what I knew. Remembering her children too, who are also my family’ (1989c). 38 Thomas presented copy number 155 of his twenty-seven-page memoir – dated Bedford, England, 1989 – to the Neilson Library at Smith College. Entitled ‘Sylvia Plath: Last Encounters’, it is foremost marked by his dislike of Plath, Hughes, and people associated with the latter. They had snatched the best flat in the house from under his nose, treated him like a caretaker, were self-centred, and did not show him the respect he deserved as an artist himself. The author appears as ‘Professor Trevor Thomas’ on the title page, and his reason for writing the memoir is given in the opening statement: ‘[He] was the last person to see Sylvia Plath alive late on the Sunday night before she committed suicide’. The memoir is followed by nine poems that Thomas wrote in ‘a kind of trance’ after Plath’s death. An edited and abridged version of ‘Last Encounters’ was printed the following year in Zymergy, a literary journal published twice a year in Montreal between 1987 and 1991. 39 Figuring as ‘[t]he last person to see Sylvia alive’, Thomas told the paper about the ‘morbid episode’ involving ‘bongo drums, laughing and dancing’ (in Walker et al. 1987, 33). He discloses other memories in Linda Wagner-Martin’s Sylvia Plath

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(1987). Perhaps these interviews got him started on ‘Last Encounters’. 40 In a letter to The Sunday Times (1992), Elaine Ives-Cameron writes: ‘Far from Hughes being a villain, all evidence I extracted from Sylvia’s friends was quite the reverse: he loved her deeply and was an enormous help to her’. 41 Before the publication of Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (2001), Vanessa Thorpe writes in The Observer (2001) that Feinstein names a secret mistress who turns out to be Brenda Hedden. But as indicated, Hedden appeared in Hayman’s book ten years earlier. Judging from Feinstein’s version, the affair seems to have lasted two to three years and thus was considerably shorter than Hughes’s relationship with either Sylvia Plath or Assia Wevill. 42 James L. Clifford uses the detective metaphor in From Puzzles to Portraits: Problems of a Literary Biographer (1970) when describing how a biographer proceeds to find and control information. According to Humphrey Carpenter, the roles are ‘very, very similar’ (1995, 271). 43 The linguistic confusion in the first quoted sentence may also exemplify the many mistakes in the new material and the haste with which this edition appears to have been produced. 44 Page references in the following are to this 2003 edition. ‘Her Husband’ is the title of one of Hughes’s poems in Wodwo (1967). Functioning in his capacity as Plath’s editor, he occasionally refers to himself in the third person as ‘her husband’ (Hughes 1963; 1982a, 86; 1994d, 191). 45 ‘TO ARIADNE (deserted by Theseus)’ is not printed in Plath’s Collected Poems but appears in Letters Home (36). Aurelia Plath notes that this poem from spring 1949 marks the beginning of the appeal that the tragic held for her daughter. 46 However, Nathaniel Tarn figures prominently in Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev’s A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill (2006).

Chapter Five: Psychologists 1 Plath’s underlined copy of The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud may be studied in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, where her notes about Jung’s theories on marriage and the development of personality are kept in a memorabilia box. 2 Maroda’s interviews with Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse – as Plath’s psychiatrist called herself after her second divorce – were conducted in 1990 and 1998 and published on Salon.com, 29 November 2004. Barnhouse died in May 1999. 3 Plath’s entry is undated but was written sometime in late 1950 to early 1951. In September 1951, in a proposed effort to face herself, she announces: ‘I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself’ (Journals, 98). 4 Sixty-nine pages in total, including notes and bibliography, Sylvia Plath’s college thesis was published posthumously in 1989. Her main sources were James Frazer’s anthropological classic The Golden Bough (1890); three texts by Freud: ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’, ‘A Neurosis of Demoniacal Possession in the Seventeenth Century’,

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and ‘The Uncanny’; two by Otto Rank: ‘The Double’ (1919) and ‘The Double as Immortal Self’ (1941); an article by Stanley M. Coleman discussing the significance of ‘The Phantom Double’ (1934), and an article on schizophrenia by Edward W. Lazell from the collection Modern Abnormal Psychology (1950). 5 According to Anne Stevenson (1989a, 144), during the second round of therapy with Ruth Beuscher, which started on 10 December 1958, Sylvia Plath went every Wednesday for the remaining six to seven months of their stay in Boston. She did not keep a journal from the treatment at McLean in 1953. 6 Her suspicions had been prompted when Beuscher changed one of their appointments. Asking Beuscher about Plath’s reactions to the cancellation, Karen Maroda wonders whether the therapist was sufficiently aware of the consequences of her behaviour. According to Maroda, Beuscher ‘seemed oblivious to the therapeutic standard of consistency as a way of providing a safe environment for the patient’ (2004). 7 Holland moderates the web site, PSYART Archives. 8 Letters from Beuscher to Plath dated 17 and 26 September 1962, now in the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College. 9 In her review of Plath’s unabridged journals, Anne Stevenson (2000) refers to a paper entitled ‘Sylvia Plath and Ruth Beuscher: The Tragedy of a Patient’s Blind Love for Her Doctor’ that was presented by Swiss psychoanalyst Norman Elrod at the XI International Forum of Psychoanalysis, hosted by the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies, in New York, May 2000. Elrod, who died in 2002, was highly critical of Beuscher, suspecting that she was not up to the task of treating Plath and may have received personal gratification from winning her love. At the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium in Oxford, during October 2007, Stevenson, together with Dr Martin Schäetzle, presented Norman Elrod’s views on the relationship. Schäetzle helped Elrod with his research for a longer, unfinished work on Plath’s therapy. A copy of an extended version of the paper is in my possession. 10 Aurelia Plath writes in a letter to Judith Kroll, on 1 December 1978, that the meaning of her name had been ‘a joke between Sylvia and me’. The letter is kept in the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College. 11 According to Aurelia Plath’s version in Letters Home, it was her baby son who once had crawled straight into the waves, not her daughter, regardless of how Sylvia Plath depicted herself as the protagonist in ‘Ocean 1212-W’. And the wooden ‘baboon’ she claims to have found on the beach the very day her newborn brother came home from the hospital, and which she invested with symbolic meaning because of sibling jealousy, or so she alleged as an adult, was actually discovered by a family friend. The episodes are interpreted by Schwartz and Bollas 1976, 165–68. 12 Based on empirical data collected over three decades, Paul Joffe, director of the suicide prevention programme at the University of Illinois, refutes the distress model which regards the expression of suicidal intent as a ‘cry for help’. He argues that for college students who are engaged in a ‘suicide career’, suicide is a means of gaining power and control over their lives (Joffe 2003).

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13

Gerisch’s article, ‘“This is not death, it is something safer”: A Psychodynamic Approach to Sylvia Plath’, was originally commissioned for inclusion in the special Sylvia Plath issue of Death Studies, but it was published in a subsequent issue because of space limitations. 14 See for example Alvarez 1973, Butscher 1976a, Wagner-Martin 1987, Stevenson 1989a, Hayman 1991, and Alexander 1991. 15 These suggestions were partly launched by A. Alvarez in The Savage God (1971) and strongly refuted by Ted Hughes. 16 In odes 1.1.35, 3.19.15, 4.9.28, and 3.1.3 (‘Musarum sacerdos’). The English word ‘bard’ has become a synonym for vates in modern translations, but the primary meaning was seer, prophet, or fortune teller. 17 Olwyn Hughes repeats her main points in a second letter to The Times Literary Supplement, on 14 November 1968, two weeks after her first rejoinder to Holbrook. 18 Going by Holbrook 1968c and 1968d, the book existed in proofs. 19 According to Lynda Bundtzen, the enemy for Holbrook is feminism, and he ‘makes Plath’s poetry the occasion for several swipes at women’s liberationists’ (1983, 2). Jacqueline Rose sees him as an advocate of ‘the Right’ (1991, 19). 20 In addition to commentators previously cited in this chapter who use the schizoid/schizophrenic label, Sherry Zivley (1981) psychoanalyses the personae of Plath’s poetry, claiming they demonstrate the kind of extreme will-lessness characteristic of schizophrenics. 21 Quoted from the blurb on Avon’s paperback edition, 1973. 22 Sylvia Plath had her breakdown and was hospitalized several years before she met and married Ted Hughes. A male doctor prescribed outpatient shock therapy before she tried to kill herself in 1953, but her main therapist at McLean was a woman, and she ordained electroshocks as well. 23 Quoted on the back of Axelrod 1992. 24 On the back of the book, ‘biography of the imagination’ is described as ‘an inner narrative of Sylvia Plath’s life and work’, but it remains unclear what ‘an inner narrative’ is. 25 In 2003, Moses published a novel about Sylvia Plath’s final months, entitled Wintering. Peter Davison likewise refers to Thompson’s ‘persuasive article’ (1994, 178). 26 The characterization of Schultz is quoted from the promotional website for the book, http://www.psychobiography.com/book/book.html.

Chapter Six: Friends 1

In his biography, Edward Butscher cruelly portrays Klein as one of Sylvia Plath’s devoted slaves. 2 To be sure, Sylvia Plath here expresses the same positive feelings towards both Elly Friedman and another friend, Sue Weller, who according to Gordon Lameyer (1977b, 40) was Sylvia’s closest friend during her senior year.

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See http://www.smith.edu/libraries/fyi/plathconferencebios.htm#klein. Elinor Klein has donated thirteen letters and cards from Sylvia Plath, covering September 1955 to October 1958, to the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College. The folder also contains four items that she received from Aurelia Plath. Smith likewise owns Mrs Plath’s copy of Glamour. 5 As Sexton’s authorized biographer, Middlebrook had been given access to her taped sessions with Dr Martin Orne. 6 The memoir is a slightly revised and extended version of the one published in Cambridge Review 90 (7 February 1969, 253–54) signed M.W.C. 7 Within deposit 8878, ‘Literary manuscripts and correspondence of Alfred Alvarez’, at the British Library. The following quotations are taken from the first letter. It is undated but was written on 13 and 14 November 1971 and is published in Letters of Ted Hughes (2007, 321–26). In a letter to Lucas Myers, Hughes asks his friend to send him a copy of Alvarez’s article in New American Review (1971), where the memoir first was published, explaining that ‘[f]or some reason he’s very cagey about showing it to me’ (Hughes 2007, 318). 8 The first American edition of The Bell Jar was published in the US in April 1971, making Aurelia Plath’s life acutely difficult once more, after Ariel was published there in 1966. 9 Hughes’s biographer Elaine Feinstein explains that he had never found the right moment to tell the children that their mother had killed herself. When the extract from The Savage God appeared in The Observer, they were away at boarding school. ‘Unable to bear the thought of their reading of their mother’s desolation in Alvarez’s cool prose or hearing of it from some knowing school friend, he brought them home to tell them the story himself’ (Feinstein 2001, 180). 10 Letter written by Alvarez on 15 November 1971, within deposit 8878, ‘Literary manuscripts and correspondence of Alfred Alvarez’, at the British Library. Incidentally, the review that Alvarez wrote on Hughes’s first collection (Hawk in the Rain), Hughes in 1957 described to a friend as ‘very undergraduatish’, and he characterized Alvarez’s poems as ‘[v]ery crabby little apples’ (2007, 112). 11 Alvarez: ‘Publish and be damned’, The Observer, 3 October, 1971. In his second letter to Alvarez upon the publication of ‘Sylvia Plath: The road to suicide’, The Observer, 14 November 1971, Hughes calls Alvarez a ‘publish and be damned journalist, you publish and let the others be damned’. 12 Hughes’s second letter to Alvarez, November 1971. 13 The information is taken from the ‘Printing history’ given in my Bantam edition from June 1973. 14 Levy’s memoir was reprinted in Butscher ed. 1977. 15 Word plays are a favourite, with commentators writing ‘after’, ‘inside’, ‘outside’, ‘under’, or ‘beyond The Bell Jar’. Similarly, they may ‘peer into’ or ‘hear sounds’ from the same bell. The Mademoiselle 2003 reunion was also featured in The New York Times, in an article entitled ‘After “The Bell Jar,” Life Went On’. Interestingly, one of the other participants, Janet Wagner Rafferty, states that ‘I wanted to meet [Sylvia] most because she was the fiction winner, and she wanted 4

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to meet me most because I was the nonfiction winner’ (in Witchel 2003, 2), which somewhat contradicts Levy’s 1973 memoir. 16 Davison (1973) writes about Sylvia Plath 169–72; the following quotations are taken from these pages. 17 This part, as well as her final touch, had been left out of the first printed version of her journal, published in 1982: ‘God, story-situation after situation. Only to make them, to define them’ (Journals 2000, 491). 18 Davison had read the unpublished journals in the Neilson Library at Smith College. His wife, Jane Davison – Truslow at Smith College, was a resident of Lawrence House where Sylvia Plath moved after her breakdown. She writes of Plath in her own book, The Fall of a Doll’s House (1980), claiming that the other, better than herself, illustrates ‘the dangerous illusion’ they shared with so many female college graduates at the time, that they could have everything. With hindsight, Jane Davison describes their ‘belief in unlimited possibilities’ as ‘closer to greed than to innocence. A liberal arts education in the 1950s tempted us transitional women to overdevelop in one way, without fortifying us against underachieving in another’ (161). Dissatisfaction, breakdown, and hospitalization resulted for many of these women, including Sylvia Plath and Jane Truslow. 19 In both ‘Letters from Sylvia’ (3) and ‘Sylvia at Smith’ (37), Lameyer refers to this memoir as an existing and soon-to-be-launched book: ‘The events of the succeeding summer I have recorded in my longer memoir, Who Was Sylvia? (to be published by Stemmer House)’. Although the publication never materialized, the Sylvia Plath Manuscript Collection at The Lilly Library, Indiana University, contains Plath’s cards and letters to Lameyer, along with an unpublished manuscript by him entitled ‘Dear Sylvia’, to which Paul Alexander refers (1991, 373). 20 Alfred Kazin, Plath’s creative writing teacher at Smith, likewise highlights her perfect manners in addition to her guardedness and a ‘cool professional sheen to anything she wrote’ (1978, 227). 21 In her journal, Sylvia Plath mentions the two women, ‘Ruth Beuscher & Doris Krook’, in the same breath a couple of times, aspiring to take her place beside them (332, 338). 22 Kopp writes that Sylvia Plath called her ‘my “döppelganger” [sic]’ (1977, 68, 72). 23 Plath 2000 (Journals) refers to ‘the blonde one’ (207, 213, 215, 232). 24 Myers’s version (2001, 147), is confirmed by Elaine Feinstein’s Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (2001, 46–48) and Wyatt-Brown (2004, 361–62). 25 Clarissa Roche also spoke with little respect of Hughes to his biographer, Elaine Feinstein (2001, 80). 26 To spare them and other victims of what editor Frances McCullough calls Plath’s ‘very sharp tongue’ (in Plath 1987, x), some of the worst parts were left out of the first published edition of the journals. Most likely, Clarissa Roche was not aware of the content as she composed her memoir. Neither was Max Gaebler, who published ‘Sylvia Plath Remembered’ in the spring of 2000. A minister in the First Unitarian Church of Madison, Wisconsin, Gaebler was a friend of the Plath family, visiting them

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during his student days in Boston. Sylvia was then a little girl. When he looked them up again in 1959, she comments very negatively on him in her journal and how intensely she disliked him (Journals, 2000, 485). 27 Sylvia Plath evidently told Elizabeth and David Compton another story involving occult powers and her efforts to learn the name of her rival by burning papers in the fireplace in the parlour (Butscher 1976a, 303). 28 Olwyn Hughes, who received a copy of the letter which David Compton wrote to Butscher, quotes from it in The New York Review of Books (1976, 42). 29 The American version of Sigmund’s memoir covers pages 100 to 107, whereas the British version starts on page 101 following a blank page 100. 30 According to Anne Stevenson, their friendship was ‘based on about a dozen meetings in all’ (1989a, 241). 31 Lucas Myers lived at Court Green during the winter of 1963–64 and testifies to Elizabeth Compton’s frequent visits ‘on one pretext or another’ (2001, 143). 32 In The Kick: A Memoir (2002), Murphy writes once more about the same incidents. A comparison of the passages where Sylvia Plath supposedly made a pass at him reveals interesting differences: ‘Sometime during the meal, Sylvia gave me a gentle kick under the table. This alarmed me because I didn’t want to have an affair with her, or break up her marriage, or be used to make Ted jealous, or upset Mary Coyne’ (2002, 226). Mary Coyne was a local woman who helped Murphy in the house. Thirteen years earlier, he described the scene like this: ‘But sometime during the meal, in the presence of Ted and Tom, though not noticed by them, Sylvia rubbed her leg against mine under the table, provocatively. It made me inwardly recoil. My own marriage had begun to break up after a literary guest had seduced my wife on a weekend visit in 1957. I did not want to break up Sylvia’s marriage, or have a secret affair with her, or be used to make Ted jealous, or upset Mary Coyne’ (1989, 351; italics added in both quotations). 33 Incidentally, Morgan’s poem – originally from 1972 – was reprinted in 1990, in Upstairs in the Garden: Poems Selected and New 1968–1988 published by Norton, the same American publishing house which commissioned Elaine Feinstein to write the first biography of Ted Hughes shortly after his death. Myers incorrectly claims that an article by Alvarez about Sylvia Plath’s death was published in The Observer in 1969, the same year that Assia Wevill committed suicide and killed her daughter, when in fact the article was an excerpt from The Savage God that was printed in The Observer, on 14 November 1971, in connection with the book being published. 34 In his memoir, Daniel Huws guesses that ‘Sylvia was far more sexually experienced than Ted’ but is convinced that ‘he was loyal [to Sylvia] until Assia came on the scene. Later ... things changed’ (2010, 37). 35 Feinstein interviewed Barber for her book (2001, 200–01). Announcing Feinstein’s life of Hughes before it was published, Vanessa Thorpe (2001) claims in The Observer, that the biographer had uncovered evidence of an ‘unknown’ and ‘unacknowledged fourth child’. 36 In Britain, the book was entitled The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (Mainstream

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Publishing, 2001) and dedicated to ‘Karl and Jane Miller with thanks for advice and encouragement’ in addition to ‘Elizabeth (Compton) Sigmund’. 37 According to a review, Robert Anderson’s debut novel Little Fugue (2004) deals with Plath’s suicide and its aftermath but ‘quickly becomes a hate letter to Hughes’, with the author pointing out only a few pages into the book that the dead can’t sue for libel (Michael Schaub, ‘The Trouble with Ted’, The Washington Post, 16 January 2005, BW06). In 2006, the American novelist Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, who became friends with Hughes while on vacation in England, launched a roman à clef entitled Poison loosely based on his life, family, and love affairs. 38 As told by James Morrison in The Independent (2002), Anne Stevenson confirmed that she ‘was twice ordered by Olwyn Hughes not to include sensitive details’. 39 Becker quotes Plath from Letters Home (473), and Stevenson 1988/89 (14), explaining that the first italics – in ‘worst’ – are Plath’s own, whereas she herself has added italics to Stevenson. 40 The essay was also printed in Cross Roads 61 (Spring 2004, 8–19). 41 The ‘prompting’ article was ‘Haunted by the ghosts of love’, by Eilat Negev, in The Guardian, 10 April 1999. 42 In an e-mail to me, on 13 February 2005, Eilat Negev writes that no proof exists of Assia Wevill’s pregnancy having been known to Sylvia Plath. Plath’s friends – including Elizabeth Compton – never heard about it from her. There is nothing in her letters or in Hughes’s archive at Emory University. None of his friends they interviewed could throw any light on it. 43 See Gaby Wood’s interview with Daniel Craig, who plays Ted Hughes, in The Observer Magazine, 27 April 2003, 19. 44 ‘The awful truth about Sylvia: Plath’s best friend talks at last’ is a teaser on the front page of the ‘Review’ section of The Sunday Telegraph, 18 January 2004. The inside story, ‘I paid for the gas that killed her’ is an interview with Elizabeth Sigmund by Marianne Macdonald. 45 The letter in question is published in Hughes 2007, 444–47. 46 Consulted in the same article, Elaine Connell, the author of Sylvia Plath: Killing the Angel in the House (1993), is more open to drugs being an explanation. It had always puzzled her as to why Plath should kill herself at a time when she was writing fantastic poetry and loved her children passionately. 47 The essay was also printed in The Sunday Independent, on 11 January 2004, ‘Living’, 9. 48 The only difference between the two versions is that, in the book, he ‘stroked her hair’. 49 In ‘How black magic killed Sylvia Plath’ (1999b), he explains his withdrawal like this: ‘I was neither willing nor tough enough to shoulder her despair. It wasn’t a role I wanted, especially since Anne, who was to become my wife, had walked into my life a few weeks after Sylvia’s first visit to my studio’. The book version, Where Did It All Go Right?, contains the same explanation, but it also includes an additional mention of the preferred one: ‘Anyway, my head was full of Anne’ (1999a, 206, 209). In ‘“I

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failed her. I was 30 and stupid”’ (Thorpe 2000), he ‘had literally just started getting involved with [his] second wife’. 50 At least the younger Sylvia Plath requested that her boyfriends be over six-feet tall (Steiner 1974, 32). When she met Ted Hughes, she habitually praised his hugeness and that he in all senses was a man who could match her (Letters Home, 234, 240; Journals, 211). Alvarez compares his own size to Danny DeVito’s and expresses his delight that a ‘blue-eyed and six foot something tall’ actor had been casted to play him in Sylvia, the movie (2004, 1). 51 In an e-mail to me, 15 February 2005, Eilat Negev writes that researching their biography of Assia Wevill, she and Yehuda Koren were unable to establish when Assia Wevill told Ted Hughes about her pregnancy and how far she let it go before having an abortion in the fourth week of March 1963. Thus, we cannot know for certain whether Hughes himself knew about the pregnancy when his wife killed herself, approximately six weeks before the abortion took place.

Chapter Seven: The Use and Abuse o a Poet 1 See Kate Moses, ‘Baking with Sylvia’, in The Guardian Weekend, 15 February 2003; also published in The Readerville Journal, January/February 2003 and The Sydney Morning Herald Magazine, 12 April 2003. In an issue featuring George Clooney as cover attraction and a ‘56-Page Spring Fashion Handbook’, The Guardian Weekend offers a large portrait of Kate Moses – author of Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (2003) – baking muffins and cup cakes as well as recipes of ‘Tomato soup cake à la Sylvia Plath’ and ‘Cream cheese frosting’ forty years after the poet killed herself. 2 Sylvia had its UK premiere at the London Film Festival on 6 November 2003 and opened for regular showing on 30 January 2004. 3 Extracts from the journals were printed in The Guardian, on 18, 20, and 21 March 2000. On 19 March of the same year, The Observer devoted three quarters of a page to an article by Kate Kellaway about the journals and to a piece signed by Vanessa Thorpe summarizing what Al Alvarez planned to say about Plath during a guest appearance on ‘Desert Island Discs’ that same day. 4 The commentaries, written by Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times, constitute the genesis of a book Wagner published in 2000: Ariel’s Gift: A Commentary on Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes. 5 The paper states that Assia Wevill’s and Ted Hughes’s daughter, Shura, was two years old when she died with her mother. But she was four. David Wevill, who according to The Observer Review on 15 February 1998 ‘rejected interview requests for 35 years’ before talking to Tamsin Todd, had not been entirely silent all these years. He was contacted by The Mail on Sunday in 1987 and was quoted by Iain Walker et al., on 1 February 1987, 33. 6 ‘Ted Hughes revealed as a domestic tyrant who laid down law to mistress’, by Nigel Reynolds, was the front page headline that introduced the serialization in

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The Daily Telegraph. Quotations from Assia Wevill were used as titles on the two extracts: ‘I’m going to seduce Ted Hughes’, 9 September 2006, and ‘Die, die soon. But execute yourself and your little self efficiently…’, 11 September 2006. 7 The two first examples showed up in The Independent, on 2 April 2000 and 8 January 2004, respectively. ‘Love at first bite’ is a review of Plath’s journals and ‘The fatal attraction of Sylvia Plath’ comments on the ‘kerfuffle over Sylvia, the film’. In ‘Who’s afraid of Sylvia Plath?’, printed in The Guardian on 22 August 2003, John Brownlow tells of his work as screenwriter for Sylvia. 8 It was, for instance, used twice in 1970, on a review by Ian Hamilton of The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Charles Newman, and an article by Jan B. Gordon; in 1975 on a review of Letters Home by Margo Jefferson; in 1976 as the title on the first chapter of David Holbrook’s Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence; in 2000 on an essay by Katharine Viner in connection with the publication of extracts from the unabridged journals, and in 2003 on a piece signed by Richard Jerome. ‘Who Was Sylvia’ is also the title on an unpublished memoir of Sylvia Plath by Gordon Lameyer, referred to in Lameyer 1976 and 1977b. 9 The same connection is made in Sylvia, the film. However, Wevill’s biographers found no indication that the pregnancy was known to Plath. 10 Frieda Hughes endorses this explanation in a memoir of her own: ‘Sadly, my mother was prone to depression and was on medication harmful to her state of mind when she took her life’ (2005, 112). Guardian Unlimited reported ‘Drugs a “key factor” in Plath’s suicide, claimed Hughes’, by Emma Yates, 8 August 2001. 11 The title of Ronald Hayman’s biography, The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (1991), illustrates Viner’s point. 12 Readers of Viner’s piece may associate it with Desperately Seeking Susan, Susan Seidelman’s film from 1985, starring Rosanna Arquette and Madonna. 13 In the extended edition of Johnny Panic, Hughes indicates that the manuscript ‘disappeared somewhere around 1970’ (1979, 11). 14 In an essay on Ted Hughes from 1989, the later Nobel laureate Derek Walcott compares Plath – ‘the muse of aspirin’ – unfavourably with ‘the beautiful and terrifying honesty of Hughes’s poetry’ (1998, 178, 179). 15 As mentioned in Chapter Five (197), Albert Rothenberg also described the poems as ‘a kind of suicide note’ (1990, 76). 16 Cf. ‘Canons to the left’, Guardian Education (1993), an article by Deborah Wolfson reporting from Survey of Findings from The Changing Face of English (1993), by Tim Cook. 17 A possible exception is France, where a few institutions have kept their position as primary breeders for the political and cultural elite. As a professor of sociology at the Collège de France, Bourdieu was himself educated within this system, and his theories necessarily reflect the same influences. 18 Such issues had previously been discussed by, among others, Linda WagnerMartin in ‘Plath’s “Ladies Home Journal” Syndrome’ (1984), and Garry M. Leonard in ‘“The Woman is Perfected. Her Dead Body Wears the Smile of Accomplishment”: Sylvia Plath and Mademoiselle Magazine’ (1992).

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The ‘printing history’ given in my Bantam copy from 1972 lists eight printings of the first Harper & Row edition between February and September 1971, excerpts in two magazines, and an edition by Literary Guild of America. When the first American paperback edition appeared in April 1972, Bantam Books printed 375,000 copies according to Tabor’s Plath bibliography. Before the end of 1972, the publishers had ordered seven more printings. Through August 1981, there were a total of twenty-six printings (cf. Tabor 1987, 19). 20 In a poem entitled ‘Against Extremity’ (The Way of a World, 1969), and having Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton in mind as extremist cases, Charles Tomlinson, a contemporary of Alvarez, objected to poetry functioning as a vehicle of personality, while James Fenton, Tomlinson’s junior by twenty-two years, in ‘Letter to John Fuller’ (Terminal Moraine, 1972) ridicules a gentility-scowling Alvarez, who launches suicide as a way to divide the sheep of poetry from the goats. Tacitly implying Alvarez, Anne Stevenson (1975) criticizes those who regard suicide as a validation of art. Along with seventeen other poets, Stevenson and Fenton – but neither Hughes nor Plath – were featured in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982). Edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, the anthology manifests a poetic self-perception – detached, playful, anticonfessional – contrary to the teachings of Alvarez some twenty years before in The New Poetry. 21 The first quotation, ‘foolish girls’, is from Carlyle 1993, 11; the second is the title of an essay by George Eliot from 1856. 22 See The Wellesley Townsman, 5 October 2000, 11: ‘Sylvia’s class: A great poet’s Wellesley High School classmates pay tribute’. 23 The statuette appeared as part of a Plath exhibition in the main hall of Neilson Library during the summer of 1997 before residing permanently in the Mortimer Rare Book Room. 24 See for instance, Stevenson 1975, Corcoran 1993, and Wagner-Martin 2006. Alice Entwistle concludes her 2006 essay, ‘Plath and contemporary British poetry’, like this: ‘There seems little doubt that without Plath, late twentieth-century British poetics would look rather different’ (68). George Steiner (1969) and Erica Jong (2004) have written about the influence of Sylvia Plath on their generations and the reaction caused by the publication in 1963 of a series of Plath poems in Encounter and The New Yorker, respectively. In his ‘Freelance’ column in The Times Literary Supplement, Hugo Williams in 1991 labelled his American creative writing students ‘Plathites’ and ‘heavy-duty Sylvia Plath-heads’; what they produced for class he termed ‘Plathery’. 25 Allusions to Sylvia Plath can be found in the following Jong poems: ‘Bitter Pills for the Dark Ladies’, ‘In Sylvia Plath Country’ (Fruits & Vegetables, 1971), ‘The Critics’ (Half-Lives, 1973), ‘Sylvia Plath Is Alive in Argentina’ (Loveroot, 1975). 26 In addition to Erica Jong, other poets who have written to or about Plath are, in chronological order, Anne Sexton, ‘Sylvia’s Death’, ‘Wanting to Die’ (Tri-Quarterly 7, 1966; Live or Die, 1966); John Berryman, ‘Dream Song 172’ (His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, 1968); Douglas Dunn, ‘The Hour’ (The Happier Life, 1972);

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Robin Morgan, ‘Arraignment’ (Monster, 1972); Robert Lowell, ‘Sylvia Plath’ (History, 1973); Diane Wakoski, ‘Water Element Song for Sylvia’ (Greed, Part 9, 1973); Rachel Hadas, ‘Daughters and others’ (Starting from Troy, 1975); Muriel Rukeyser, ‘Not to be Printed, Not to be Said, Not to be Thought’ (The Gates, 1976); Richard Wilbur, ‘Cottage Street, 1953’ (The Mind-Reader, 1976); Anthony Thwaite, ‘Heptonstall: New Cemetery’ (A Portion for Foxes, 1977); Luciana Frezza, ‘Requiem for Sylvia Plath’ (Defiant Muse: Italian Feminist Poems, 1986); Anne Stevenson, ‘Three Poems for Sylvia Plath: Nightmares, Daymoths’, ‘Letter to Sylvia Plath’, ‘Hot Wind, Hard Rain’ (The Other House, 1990), ‘Invocation and Interruption’ (Granny Scarecrow, 2000); Diane Ackerman, ‘On looking into Sylvia Plath’s copy of Goethe’s Faust’ (Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, 1991); Jean Valentine, ‘To Plath, To Sexton’ (The River at Wolf, 1992); Alistair Elliot, ‘Sylvia and Me’ (The Times Literary Supplement, 2 August 1996); W.S. Merwin, ‘Lament for the Makers’ (introductory and title poem of a memorial anthology compiled by Merwin, 1996); Ric Masten, ‘Two Voices: For Sylvia Plath’ (The Sunday Herald, 12 January 1997); Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (1998); Frieda Hughes, ‘Readers’ (Wooroloo, 1998), ‘The Signature’ (Stonepicker, 2001), ‘My Mother’ (Tatler 298, March 2003), several allusions to Sylvia Plath/‘my mother’ in Forty–Five (2006). Carol Rumens has declared to have had a ‘Plathy voice’, particularly in early collections, and pays specific tribute in ‘Sylvia Plath’ (Poems 1968–2004) and ‘Against Posterity’ (Hex, 2002); W.K. Buckley, Sylvia’s Bells (chapbook with poems, 2002); Crystal Hurdle, After Ted & Sylvia (poems, 2003); Don Paterson, ‘The Forest of the Suicides’ (Landing Light, 2003); Kevin Kiely, ‘Breakfast with Sylvia’ (title poem in collection from 2005); Catherine Bowman, The Plath Cabinet (poems, 2008). Poems by Peter Davison are listed in the previous chapter under ‘Old lovers’ (233). About Sylvia (1996, limited number of copies), edited and illustrated by Enid Mark, contains poems mentioned above by Diane Ackerman, John Berryman, Peter Davison, Luciana Frezza, Rachel Hadas, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Richard Wilbur. A list of poems by devoted fans may be found on the ‘Sylvia Plath Forum’, http://www. sylviaplathforum.com/ poems.html. For novels about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, see Chapter Six (249) and note 37 (316). 27 Cf. Entwistle 2006 and April Bernard, interviewed by Reb Livingston (2003). In ‘My Plath Problem’ (2000), Bernard lays out the basic issues and arguments in the controversies concerning Plath as she sees them, criticizing the position adopted by Anne Stevenson and praising Jacqueline Rose. 28 The poem in question by Rukeyser is ‘Käthe Kolwitz’, where part III ends with the following lines: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open’ (The Speed of Darkness, 1968). Moore also quotes poet Jean Valentine, who rewrote a manuscript of poems after reading Ariel. 29 For information, albeit incomplete, on different editions, see Tabor 1987 and the web sites of Anja Beckmann, http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/biblio.html, and Peter K. Steinberg, http://www.sylviaplath.info/worksbysp.html. When searching for The Bell Jar on the internet, one not only finds thousands of results involving

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Sylvia Plath’s novel, including the movie adaptation from 1979, but also references to a journal with the same title dedicated to ‘Vacuum Technique & Related Topics for the Amateur Investigation’, http://www.belljar.net. 30 See Tabor 1987, http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/biblioo.html, and http://www.sylviaplath.info/worksnonenglish.html, for a selection of translations. 31 Examples of educational productions are The Growth of a Poet: Sylvia Plath, which was broadcast, according to Tabor 1987, ‘before 13 May 1976’ by the Nebraska Educational Television Network (available as a videotape in 1998); Sylvia Plath (1988), a ‘Voices and Visions’ college telecourse about American poetry, by the South Carolina Educational Television; Sylvia Plath and the Myth of the Monstrous Mother and Sylvia Plath and the Myth of the Omnipresent/Absent Father (2000), two programmes by Richard Larschan for the video series ‘Poets of New England’, University of Massachusetts Academic Instructional Media Services. 32 In ‘Being Julia’, a cover story of Harper’s Bazaar Magazine, May 2005, 156– 59, American actress Julia Stiles says she is developing a screen version of The Bell Jar, which she will produce and star in. Reports then followed about squabbles over rights. 33 The books were written (and published) by Caroline King Barnard Hall (Twayne Publishing), Elisabeth Bronfen (Northcote House), Linda Wagner-Martin (Macmillan), Gina Wisker (Hodder Education/Headway), Peter K. Steinberg (Chelsea House), Connie Ann Kirk (Greenwood Press), and Marnie Pomeroy (Greenwich Exchange), respectively. 34 For examples of (1) different kinds of CITATION BOOKS see: Quotations for All Occasions (2000), The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (2002), and The Quotable Book Lover (2002). (2) HANDBOOKS: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to American Literature (1999), The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems (2001), and The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (2003). (3) ALMANACS: A is for Abigail: An Almanac of Amazing American Women (2003) and Women’s Almanac 2002. (4) ENCYCLOPEDIAS: The Encyclopedia of Women’s History in America (1998), Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes (2000), and The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature (2004). (5) HISTORIES OF LITERATURE and REFERENCE WORKS: Notable Women in American History: A Guide to Recommended Biographies and Autobiographies (1999), Thematic Guide to American Poetry (2002), The Oxford Chronology of English Literature (2002), The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2006), and The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (2006). 35 See http://www.wesselenyi.com/top100books.htm, http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,,596137,00.html, and http://home.comcast.net/~antaylor1/waterstones100.html. However, Plath did not make it onto a similar top 100 list in December 2003, after the BBC launched ‘The

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Big Read’ to elect Britain’s best-loved novel, and three-quarters of a million votes had been received. Neither does The Bell Jar figure on the extended top 200 list. Once more, The Lord of the Rings was voted the most popular book. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/ and http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top 100_2.shtml. 36 Time 100 (New York), 8 June 1998, 74. The other poets highlighted were W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, and W.B. Yeats. Thus, Time excluded both Robert Lowell and John Berryman who back in 1967 were profiled by Time and Life as the main poets of their generation (cf. Chapter Two, 59). 37 Bryant 2004, 241, and Steinberg 2004, 7, mention a few instances. For a while, the ‘Sylvia Plath’ entry on Wikipedia gave several examples, until the ‘Trivia’ section was eliminated because it was considered too messy, long, and trivial. The cleanup project was closed on 24 March 2007 according to http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Wikipedia:Cleanup_Taskforce/Sylvia_Plath. (1) Examples of references to Sylvia Plath in MUSIC (lyrics/on albums) are: – The Bangles (four women, based in Los Angeles) has a song titled ‘The Bell Jar’ on their third album, Everything (1988). – The Blue Aeroplanes (mixed and changing membership, Bristol) set music to ‘The Applicant’ on Swagger (1990). – The Manic Street Preachers (four men from Wales) was voted best band at the 1997 Brit Awards and their album Everything Must Go (1996), containing ‘The Girl Who Wanted to be God’, best album. – Reject All American (1996) by Bikini Kill (three women and one man, formed in Olympia, Washington) features ‘Bloody Ice Cream’, a song about the story of Sylvia Plath told to girls who write, as if suicide is a must. – American Ryan Adams has a song entitled ‘Sylvia Plath’ on Gold (2001). – Liz Moore also has a song by that title. – Paul Westerberg performs a song in two versions about the poet’s suicide on Come Feel Me Tremble (2003), the title ‘Crackle and Drag’ taken from the last line of Plath’s poem ‘Edge’. – Nanci Griffith performs Le Ann Etheridge’s song ‘Back When Ted Loved Sylvia’ on Hearts in Mind (2004). – The Hush Sound (three men and one woman, Chicago) refers to Plath’s ‘Mirror’ in their song ‘You are the moon’ on Like Vines (2006). – The Envy Corps (four men, Ames, Iowa) features ‘Sylvia (The Beekeeper)’ on their EP I Will Write You Love Letters if You Tell Me To (2006). – The name of Manchester band Nine Black Alps (four men) is taken from a line in ‘The Courier’. (2) References to Plath in FILMS: Annie Hall (1977) directed by Woody Allen, Natural Born Killers (1994) directed by Oliver Stone, Fight Club (1999) directed by David Fincher, 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) directed by Gil Junger, Not Another Teen Movie (2001) directed by Joel Gallen. (3) TV SHOWS/SERIES: Cheers, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Simpsons, Dawson’s Creek, Gilmore Girls, Inspector Morse.

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Tabor (1987) lists several musical and dramatic adaptations. Sheet music and recordings may be found in large libraries and special collections. The musical scores vary from a tuba solo inspired by ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ to music set to different Plath poems for mezzo-soprano with orchestra, saxophone quartet, or other instrumental combinations. 39 In notes 25 and 26 above, I name some of Plath’s better known colleagues who have written poems inspired by her. For a considerably longer list of such poems by different kinds of people, see the following web sites: ‘Sylvia Plath Forum’, http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/poems.html, and ‘Sylvia Plath Homepage’, http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/inspired.html. 40 Quoted from a leaflet promoting the event. Among the performers was The Plath, a Toronto-based band. 41 The American Poets’ Corner, where Plath is commemorated together with over thirty writers of the highest repute, was created in 1984. It is modelled on the section for writers in Westminster Abbey, dating back to the sixteenth century. Ted Hughes was elected for recognition with a permanent memorial in the Poets’ Corner in March 2010. 42 See http://www.npg.org.uk/live/prelplath.asp. 43 Drawings were published in the following Christian Science Monitor articles by Plath: ‘Leaves from a Cambridge notebook’, 5 March 1956; ‘Sketchbook of a Spanish summer’, 5 and 6 November 1956; ‘Beach plum season on Cape Cod’, 14 August 1958; ‘Mosaics – an afternoon of discovery’, 12 October 1959; ‘Explorations lead to interesting discoveries’, 19 October 1959. ‘An American in Paris’, Varsity, 21 April 1956, likewise contains drawings by Plath. Several of her posthumous titles were subsequently published with drawings, such as Uncollected Poems (1965). The American edition of The Bell Jar (1971) had eight drawings; The Art of Sylvia Plath (1970), ed. Charles Newman, had three. 44 For explorations of her art work, dialogue with de Chirico, and development of a visual poetics, see for instance Ingrid Melander’s thesis (1972) and the contributions of Kathleen Connors, Christina Britzolakis, and Fan Jinghua in Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (2007). 45 See http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.php?id=12611. 46 In Sally Bayley’s essay, ‘Sylvia Plath and the Costume of Femininity’, printed in the same book, the object of study is referred to as ‘artist and writer Sylvia Plath’ (2007, 183). 47 Featured visual artists were Ann Dingsdale, Linda Adele Goodine, Amanda Robbins, Cassandra Slone, and Kristina Zimbakova. Edward Anthony’s play Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath (2007) was staged, Suzie Hanna and Tom Simmons’s animation The Girl Who Would be God (2007) and Sandra Lahire’s films Edge (1986), Lady Lazarus (1991), and Johnny Panic (1999) were shown. The two last mentioned Lahire films are part of her Sylvia Plath trilogy entitled Living on Air, which also includes Night Dances (1995). 48 A catalogue by the curators, Stephen C. Enniss (Emory) and Karen V. Kukil (Smith), was published for the exhibition.

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On the back of Steinberg 2004. Kirk’s book about Sylvia Plath is her fourth title in the Greenwood series. She has written biographies of J.K. Rowling (2003), Emily Dickinson (2004), and Mark Twain (2004) as well. 51 See http://www.sylviamovie.com/flash.html. 52 Stevenson’s example is the rewriting Plath did for Gordon Lameyer of the first words she spoke when waking up after her 1953 suicide attempt compared to the version Aurelia Plath gives in Letters Home. 53 It could, however, also be interpreted as a case of influence, the issue being widely talked about at the time. 54 The citation is from the back page of Janice Markey’s book, A Journey into the Red Eye (1993). 55 With a line from ‘Lady Lazarus’ as her title – ‘An Art Like Everything Else’ – Jong published an essay on Sylvia Plath in The New York Times Book Review, on 12 December 2004, and incorporated an extended version of it in her memoir, Seducing the Demon (2006). 56 I owe the title of this chapter to Barzun. He refers to the English title of an essay by Nietzche, ‘The Use and Abuse of History’, as inspiration for his own book. The original title of Nietzsche’s work in German is ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben’. 57 Cf. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1989). 58 In English, Peter Bürger’s term can be translated to ‘paradigm of redemptive reconciliation’. 59 Honor Moore, editor of the 2009 landmark collection Poems from the Women’s Movement, clearly sees Morgan differently. In Moore’s introduction, Morgan figures alongside Plath as one of the heroes instrumental in the emergence of her own and other women’s new (literary) consciousness in the 1960s and 70s. 60 That diaries and journals are cut and edited is, however, hardly noteworthy. When Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) decided to publish her diaries covering the years 1931 to 1966 in six volumes (1966–76, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann), Nin’s husband and other family members asked to be deleted from the manuscript altogether. Unexpurgated volumes started appearing in the 1990s. Editing Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947–1954 (2004), Douglas Brinkley aimed for readability. He excised whole or parts of journals, inserted fragments from one into another, made internal edits, and left out ‘some of [Kerouac’s] really sloppy thinking and poor writing’ (in Kerouac 2004, xxx). 61 Increasingly focused towards the end of the century, performativity topics were habitually introduced in the usual way – i.e. as if for the first time. In Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (1999), Christina Britzolakis argues that the dimension of self-reflexivity is the crucial and neglected dimension in Plath’s poems, which she then aims to redress. But this concept was hardly new at the time; neither were other topics that Britzolakis discusses in her book, such as Plath’s rhetoricity, historicity, and performativity of the feminine position. Seeking 50

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‘a critical language which does justice to her exploration of gender, subjectivity, and the unconscious, without reinscribing her within a poetics of unmediated expressivity’ (1999, 6), Britzolakis gives an instructive summary of trends in the reception as she sees it. 62 The theories of Jauss, Fish, Mailloux, and Bennett may be studied in Machor and Goldstein eds. 2001.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Sylvia Plath Ariel, 1965. London: Faber and Faber. Ariel: The Restored Edition, 2004. London: Faber and Faber. The Bed Book, 1976, illustrations by Quentin Blake. London: Faber and Faber. The Bell Jar, 1972 [1963], afterword by Lois Ames. New York: Bantam Books. Collected Poems, 1989 [1981], ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber. The Colossus, 1972 [1960]. London: Faber and Faber. ‘Context’, in The London Magazine New Series I (February 1962): pp. 45–46. Crossing the Water, 1971. London: Faber and Faber. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and other prose writings, 1979 [1977], ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1987 [1982], eds. Frances McCullough and Ted Hughes. New York: Ballantine Books. The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962, 2000, ed. Karen V. Kukil. London: Faber and Faber. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, 1990 [1975], ed. Aurelia Schober Plath. London: Faber and Faber. The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels, 1989. Rhiwargor, Llanwddyn, Powys, Wales: Embers Handpress. Winter Trees, 1971. London: Faber and Faber.

Other Sources Abse, Dannie et al. 1992: ‘Ted Hughes’. Letter in The Times Literary Supplement (6 March): p. 15. Ackroyd, Peter. 1976: ‘Dear Mummy, I hate you’. Review of Letters Home, in The Spectator 236 (24 April): p. 21. Adams, Phoebe-Lou. 1976: ‘PLA’. Review of Letters Home, in The Atlantic Monthly 237 (February): p. 111. Aird, Eileen. 1971: Review of Crossing the Water, in The Critical Quarterly 13 (Autumn): pp. 286–88. —. 1973: Sylvia Plath. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.

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INDEX

Abse, Dannie 162–63 Ackerman, Diane 320 Ackroyd, Peter 20, 47, 300 Adams, Phoebe-Lou 20, 298 Adams, Ryan 322 Adorno, Theodor 11 Aeschylus 37 Aiken, Conrad 135 Aird, Eileen 67 Review of Crossing the Water 301 Sylvia Plath 67, 301 Alexander, Georgeanne 222 Alexander, Paul 29, 152, 154–63, 169, 172, 189, 258, 308 Ariel Ascending 22f, 66, 147, 160– 61 ‘Edge’ 163, 264 ‘Keep Hollywood off the laureate’ 162, 309 Rough Magic (1991) 29, 83, 154– 63, 234, 255, 305, 309, 312, 314 Rough Magic (1992) 309 Rough Magic (1999) 29, 169–70, 299, 309 Allen, Woody 322 Alvarez, Al 4, 56, 61f, 70f, 78, 83, 90, 117, 135, 149, 156, 203, 205–07f, 229, 241, 244, 254, 267, 270–71, 289, 297, 302, 304, 313, 317, 319 Beyond All This Fiddle 54–55, 300 ‘How black magic killed Sylvia Plath’ 257–58f, 266, 316 ‘Inside the bell jar’ 72, 74 Letter to Ted Hughes (1971) 226, 228, 313 The New Poetry 54, 56, 206, 319 ‘The New Poetry’ 54, 271 ‘Or not to be’ 81, 304 ‘A Poet and Her Myths’ 28, 147–48,

151–52 ‘The Poet and the Poetess’ 49 ‘A Poet’s Epitaph’ 10, 42, 52f ‘Poetry in Extremis’ 55, 57, 72, 300 ‘Problems strewn on the path’ 23– 24, 28–29, 228, 247, 298 ‘Publish and be damned’ 69, 72, 81f, 99, 228, 313 ‘The road to suicide’ 81, 99, 226, 313, 315 The Savage God 28, 52, 67, 70f, 75, 81f, 99, 161, 163, 172, 225–29, 257ff, 312, 313, 315, 319 The School of Donne 275 The Shaping Spirit 275 ‘Sylvia Plath’ (1963, 1966, 1970) 52–54, 66, 68, 151, 225, 300, 301, 308 ‘Sylvia Plath: The Cambridge Collection, 82, 302 ‘Sylvia Plath: An Exchange’ 150, 308 ‘Sylvia Plath’, letter in The Observer (1971) 304 ‘Ted Hughes’ 258, 306 ‘Ted, Sylvia and me’ 256, 258–59, 316, 317 Under Pressure 54 Where Did It All Go Right? 257– 58f, 275, 316 The Writer’s Voice 260 Alvarez, Anne 257, 316 Ames, Lois 134–35, 140, 145, 306 ‘Notes toward a biography’ 134, 229, 301 ‘Sylvia Plath’ 18, 134, 229, 297 Anderson, Jane 28, 235 Anderson, Robert 316 anecdotal evidence 33, 38, 134, 136,

362 155–56, 173, 175, 186, 189, 194, 217, 239–40, 255, 261, 268 Annas, Pamela J. 63, 86, 303 A Disturbance in Mirrors 86, 303 ‘The self in the world’ 63 Anthony, Edward 323 Aristotle 5, 32ff, 38ff, 194, 199, 284 ‘Problems’ 39, 200 On Rhetoric 32–33, 36, 160, 299 Arnold, Matthew 185 Arquette, Rosanna 318 Aswell, Mary Louise 177 Auden, W.H. 78, 106, 322 Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus) 56 author commodification of 42–43, 262, 272 as genius 9, 41–42, 195, 200, 210, 286–88, 292, 295 as prophet 38, 42, 61, 63, 64–65, 72f, 75–76, 91, 151, 199, 287–88, 312 role of 9, 30–31, 36–43, 59, 75, 190, 198–201, 284–89, 292, 300–01 Axelrod, Steven Gould 208–13 ‘The Second Destruction’ 208–10 Sylvia Plath 210–13, 312 Babb, Lawrence 40 Badia, Janet 276 Baldwin, James 76f Bangles 322 Barber, Jill 248, 303, 315 Barnes, Djuna 106 Barnhouse, Ruth Tiffany see Ruth Beuscher Baro, Gene 72 Barthes, Roland 211, 281 Barton, Laura 265, 269, 291 Barzun, Jacques 286–88, 324 Bassnett, Susan 279 Baudrillard, Jean 3 Bayley, Sally 272 Eye Rhymes 281–82, 293, 323 ‘Sylvia Plath and the Costume of Femininity’ 272, 323

Index Beam, Alex 178 ‘The death, and rebirth’ 163 Gracefully Insane 178f Becker, Gerry 249f Becker, Jillian 249–52 Giving Up 249–52, 266, 316 Hitler’s Children 250 ‘No funeral party’ 166 Beckmann, Anja 320 Bell, Diane 299 Bennett, Tony 295, 325 Bergonzi, Bernard 77 ‘Correspondence’ 77 ‘The Ransom Note’ 49 Berman, Jeffrey 180, 182 Bernard, April 320 Berryman, John 54, 59, 299–300, 319, 320, 322 Beuscher, Ruth 104–05, 159, 178–84, 236, 246, 310, 311, 312, 314 Bialik, Hayim Nahman 78 Bikini Kill 322 Birstein, Ann 70, 74 Bishop, Elizabeth 59, 106, 111, 141 Blais, Jacqueline 262 Blanchett, Cate 278 Bloom, Harold 47, 63, 67, 300 Blue Aeroplanes, The 322 Bly, Robert 91 Bollas, Christopher 186–87f, 208, 311 Booth, Wayne C. 274 Bourdieu, Pierre 3, 41f, 44, 76, 80–81, 88, 91, 228, 270–71, 273, 275, 318 Bowles, Jane 252 Bowman, Catherine 320 Bowman, James 164 Brain, Tracy 129, 131–32, 306 ‘Or shall I bring you’ 306 The Other Sylvia Plath 1, 50, 128f, 131, 279, 297, 303, 305, 306 ‘Ted Hughes’ 306 ‘Unstable Manuscripts’ 131–32 ‘Your Puddle-jumping daughter’ 306 Brecht, Bertolt 165 Brennan, Claire 126

Claiming Sylvia Plath Brink, Andrew 206 Brinkley, Douglas 324 Brittain, Victoria 202 Britzolakis, Christina 128 ‘Conversation’ 323 Sylvia Plath 128, 324–25 Brodsky, Joseph 298 Broe, Mary Lynn 83 ‘Plathologies’ 83 Protean Poetic 305 Bronfen, Elisabeth 126, 299, 321 Brontë, Charlotte 94, 201 Brooks, Richard 30 Brown, Marcia 103ff Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 106 Brownjohn, Alan 12, 70–71, 87f, 162– 63 Brownlow, John 318 Bryant, Marsha 283 ‘IMAX Authorship’ 283, 322 ‘Plath, Domesticity, and Advertising’ 272 Buckley, W.K. 320 Bundtzen, Lynda K. 97, 128–29, 208, 213 The Other Ariel 1, 128–29, 297, 300 ‘Plath and psychoanalysis’ 184 Plath’s Incarnations 97, 117, 128, 208, 305, 312 ‘Poetic Arson’ 208–09 Burchill, Julie 264–65 Burford, William 297 Burgess, Anthony 51 Burgess, Theodore C. 31 Burton, Kathleen 140 Butler, Judith 131 Butscher, Edward 27, 135–41, 143, 145, 149, 152, 195, 239, 241, 298, 304, 306–07, 308, 315 ‘In Search of Sylvia’ 135, 306 Method and Madness 27, 67, 85, 135–41, 145, 148, 153f, 157, 198, 201, 244, 307, 312, 315 ‘A Mug’s Game’ 140–41, 235, 308 ‘Reviewing Sylvia Plath’ 140, 307 The Woman and the Work 66, 135,

363

147, 235, 239, 241, 244–45, 313 Bürger, Peter 287, 324 Byatt, A.S. 103, 162–63 Byron, Lord 91, 295 Calder, Peter 254 Caldwell, Roger 152 Camp, Lee 159–60 Campbell, Wendy 224–25, 235, 237, 302, 313 Carlyle, Thomas 42, 276, 286, 319 Carpenter, Humphrey 310 Carrell, Severin 254 Carroll, James 309 Catlett, Joyce 191 celebrity culture 3, 5, 9, 42–43, 44–45, 130, 178, 220, 261f, 264, 267–68, 276, 291–92, 294 Charles, Prince of Wales 255–56, 264 Chaucer, Geoffrey 194 Chekhov, Anton 221 Chesler, Phyllis 207–08, 312 Chirico, Giorgio de 281, 323 Chittenden, Maurice 162 Chodorow, Nancy 208, 213 Christie, Agatha 140 Churchwell, Sarah 126, 128 ‘Secrets and Lies’ 49 ‘Ted Hughes and the Corpus of Sylvia Plath’ 126, 305 Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) 32, 299 Cixous, Hélène 124, 212 Claridge, Gordon 194–96, 198 ‘Creativity and madness’ 195–96 Sounds from the Bell Jar 194–96, 198 Cleckley, Hervey 201 Clifford, James L. 310 Clooney, George 317 Cluysenaar, Anne 290 Cohen, Ed 1 Cold War 78, 113, 115–16, 290, 287 Coleman, Stanley M. 311 Compton, David 138–39, 240–41ff, 306, 315

364 Compton, Elizabeth see Elizabeth Sigmund confessional poetry 11, 55–57, 74– 75f, 88, 116, 292, 299, 303, 319 Connell, Elaine 316 Connors, Kathleen 281 Eye Rhymes 281–82, 293, 323 ‘Living Color’ 281, 323 Cook, Tim 318 Corcoran, Neil 319 Corrigan, Sylvia Robinson 304 Cox, C.B. 76–77 ‘After the Tranquillized Fifties’ 76– 77 ‘Editorial’ 51 Coyne, Mary 315 Craig, Daniel 260, 316 creativity and illness 39–40, 176, 194– 201, 207, 284–85, 294 Crockett, Wilbury 138, 193 Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler 179 Curry, Renée R. 111–12 Curtius, Ernst Robert 33, 73 Dale, Peter 51–52 Dante Alighieri 91 Davison, Jane 314 Davison, Peter 138, 147, 149, 153, 231–33, 314, 320 ‘A Ballad’ 233 Breathing Room 233 ‘Epitaph for S.P.’ 233 The Fading Smile 232–33, 312 Half Remembered 231–32, 308, 314 ‘The Hanging Man’ 233 ‘The Heroine’ 233 ‘Inhabited by a Cry’ 233 ‘Literary Portraits’ 233 ‘Sorry’ 233 ‘Sylvia Plath’ 233 ‘Three Visionary Poets’ 233 ‘To Edit a Life’ 308 Dean, James 163 Democritus 199 Derrida, Jacques 3, 130 DeVito, Danny 317

Index Diana, Princess of Wales 255, 264, 269 Dickens, Charles 201 Dickinson, Emily 68, 106, 210, 292, 324 Dimbleby, Nicholas 277 Dingsdale, Ann 323 Dinnage, Rosemary 21 Donoghue, Denis 13, 303 Donovan, Josephine 304 Doolittle, Hilda 111 Doran, Rachel S. 304 Dos Passos, John 141 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 39, 179, 201 double bind 93–94, 97, 131, 190, 210, 271, 295 Drexler, Rosalyn 60, 74 Dryden, John 91 Dudar, Helen 72, 265, 302 Duff, J. Wight 38 Duffy, Martha 70 Duhamel, P. Albert 298 Dunn, Douglas 301, 319 Dyson, Anthony Edward 49 ‘Editorial’ 75–76 ‘On Sylvia Plath’ 301 Review of The Colossus 49 écriture feminine 83, 120, 285 Edel, Leon 214 Eder, Doris L. 301 Egeland, Marianne 276 Ehrenpreis, Irvin 298 Eichmann, Adolf 63, 123 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 78f Eliot, George 319 Eliot, T.S. 56f, 106, 119, 141, 291, 305 Elliot, Alistair 320 Elliott, John 30 Elrod, Norman 311 Empedocles 39 English, James F. 275 Enniss, Stephen C. 323 Enright, D.J. 77 Entwistle, Alice 319, 320

Claiming Sylvia Plath Envy Corps, The 322 Erasmus Roterodamus, Desiderius 37 Erikson, Erik H. 202 Erlanger, Steven 253 Etheridge, Le Ann 322 Euripides 37 Evans, Nancy Burr 270ff, 275 Evans, Richard I. 202 exemplary figure see also rhetoric of example, and Sylvia Plath as example 2, 5–6, 9, 30, 33, 36f, 39f, 47, 62, 73, 194, 239, 268, 286, 290 exile 37–39f, 284 extremist poetry 54–55f, 74–75ff, 88, 206, 275, 300, 319 Faas, Ekbert 306 Fainlight, Ruth 252–53, 316 Fairbairn, W.R.D. 205 Fairweather, Janet 38, 40 Farrar, Hilda 166 Farrar, Victoria 213 Faulkner, William 141, 201, 287 Feeney, Mark 231 Feinstein, Elaine 30, 167, 172, 242f, 247, 249, 254, 257, 263, 271, 310, 313, 314, 315 Fenton, James 319 Ferenczi, Sándor 176 Ferrier, Carole 101 Ficino, Marsilio 39 Fincher, David 322 Firestone, Lisa 191 Fish, Stanley 43, 295, 325 Fitzgerald, Zelda 207 Folliet, Mary 304 Ford, Ford Madox 300 Ford, Mark 144 Foucault, Michel 6 Frankl, Victor 207 Fraser, Caroline 268 Frazer, James 84, 310 Freud, Sigmund 3, 86, 88, 175, 176– 79, 180f, 201, 213, 215, 217, 310– 11 Freudian 59, 76, 86, 134, 176f, 179,

365

184–87, 201, 210, 213, 217, 228 Frezza, Luciana 320 Friedan, Betty 9, 63, 301 Fromm, Erich 183 Frost, Laura 64, 116, 301 Frost, Robert 78, 141, 231, 322 Fuller, Roy 50 Furbank, P.N. 57 Gaebler, Max 314–15 Gallen, Joel 322 Gardner, Isabella 106 Gaulle, Charles de 112 Gay, Peter 176 Gelley, Alexander 35–36f, 131, 299 Gerisch, Benigna 190–91ff, 312 Gibbons, Fiachra 263 Gifford, Terry 306 Gilbert, Sandra M. 94–96, 127 ‘A Fine, White Flying Myth’ 94–95, 119 Letters from the Front 95–96, 107, 119–20f The Madwoman in the Attic 94 No Man’s Land 95–96, 119–20f, 127 Sexchanges 121 The War of the Words 95, 127 Gill, Jo The Cambridge Companion 47–48, 152, 184, 279 The Cambridge Introduction 48, 279, 303 Ginsberg, Allen 322 Glass, Loren 43, 262, 268, 272 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 78, 118 Goldstein, Philip 325 Goodine, Linda Adele 323 Gordon, Jan B. 318 Graves, Robert 79, 84f, 88, 172, 302 Greer, Germaine 89 Griffith, Nanci 322 Gubar, Susan 95–96, 127 ‘Afterword’ 281 Letters from the Front 95–96, 107, 119–20f

366 The Madwoman in the Attic 94 No Man’s Land 95–96, 119–20f, 127 Sexchanges 121 The War of the Words 95, 127 Guntrip, Harry 205 Habermas, Jürgen 287 Hadas, Rachel 320 Hainsworth, Bryan 31 Hall, Caroline King Barnard 321 Hamilton, Ian 25f, 53 In Search of J.D. Salinger 309 ‘J.D. Salinger’ 25, 309 Keepers of the Flame 26 ‘Poetry’ 53 ‘Who is Sylvia?’ 318 ‘Whose Sylvia?’ 308 Hanna, Suzie 323 Hannah, Sarah 299 Hardwick, Elizabeth 78, 161, 187–88 Hargrove, Nancy D. 87, 303 Haven, Cynthia 183 Hawthorn, Jeremy 201 Hayman, Ronald 23–25, 27ff, 149, 152, 158, 163–70, 172, 228, 247, 298, 307, 308 The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (1991) 29, 154, 163–70, 203, 267, 310, 312, 318 The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (2003) 169–70, 310 ‘Plath’ 165–66 ‘The poet and the unquiet grave’ 24–25, 165, 307, 309 Heaney, Seamus 79–80, 299–300 ‘The indefatigable hoof-taps’ 79–80 ‘A wounded power’ 303 Hecht, Anthony 297 Hedden, Brenda 167f, 310 Heidegger, Martin 133 Heine, Heinrich 124 Heinz, Drue 101, 299 Helle, Anita 130–31 ‘Introduction’ 130–31, 306 ‘Reading Plath Photographs’ 130

Index The Unraveling Archive 130f, 306 Hemingway, Ernest 48, 55, 141, 272, 284, 287, 291 Heraclitus 37, 306 hero worship 31, 41–42, 72–74, 139, 267–68, 276, 286ff, 294 Higgins, Judith 269–70, 272, 292 Highet, Gilbert 38–39 Hitler, Adolf 38, 177, 181, 209, 250 Hodsdon, Amelia 264 Hoffman, Nancy Jo 304 Holbrook, David 186, 203–08, 213f, 312 Dylan Thomas 204 ‘R.D. Laing’ 203 ‘Sylvia Plath’ (1968) 203f, 312 ‘Sylvia Plath’ (1969) 302 Sylvia Plath (1976) 67, 204–07, 318 ‘Ted Hughes’ 204, 306 ‘The 200-inch distorting mirror’ 203 Holland, Norman 181–82, 311 Homberger, Eric 82f ‘I am I’ 302 ‘The Uncollected Plath’ 82 Homer 33 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 199 Ars Poetica 199 Odes 312 Horder, John 15, 306 Howard, Jane 300 Howard, Maureen 300 Howard, Richard 11–12, 47f, 68, 301 Howe, Irving 9, 47, 49, 62, 63–64, 77– 78, 265, 300, 301 Howes, Victor ‘I am silver and exact’ 301 ‘Sometimes, a walker of air’ 60 Hoyle, James F. 175f, 186 Hughes, Carol 28, 30, 95, 173, 247f Hughes, Edith 137, 242 Hughes, Frieda 1, 12, 29–30, 83, 113– 14, 127, 146, 166f, 183, 216, 222, 242, 255–56, 264 ‘Foreword’ 30, 42, 83, 249, 268 Forty-Five 30, 299, 320

Claiming Sylvia Plath ‘A matter of life and death’ 266 ‘My Mother’ 30, 320 ‘Poetic License’ 318 Hughes, Nicholas 1, 12, 83, 146, 166f, 183, 222, 242f, 308 Hughes, Olwyn 12, 112, 129, 137, 157, 166, 214, 241ff, 245, 267, 300, 303 and Anne Stevenson 145–50, 153f, 243, 249–50, 316 and other biographers 134f, 143–44, 162, 165, 308 on feminists 144 and reminiscing friends 241, 252f as SP’s agent 12, 146, 149, 203–04, 241, 249–50, 252, 300, 302 Titles of: ‘The crucible’ 149 ‘Keep Hollywood off ’ 162, 309 Letter in The Observer (1989) 308 ‘The literary estate’ 144 ‘Reviewing Sylvia Plath’ 134, 138– 39f, 306–07, 315 ‘Sylvia Plath’ (1968) 203–04, 312 ‘Sylvia Plath’ (1971) 302 ‘Sylvia Plath’ (1988) 144 ‘Sylvia Plath: An Exchange’ (1989) 149, 308 ‘Ted Hughes and the Plath Estate’ 306 ‘Two Letters’ 216 Hughes, Ted passim and children 17, 19, 26, 29, 81, 101, 121–22, 168, 198, 209, 227f, 298, 308, 309, 313 as editor of SP 1, 9, 11f, 14–17, 20, 25, 81–85, 87f, 98–101, 104f, 121–25, 127f, 165, 171, 290, 298, 303, 304, 310 in interviews 15f, 26, 100–01, 251, 299, 306 and lawsuit 23, 27–28, 144, 166, 253 on the ‘Plath Fantasia’ 24–25, 121– 22 vilification of 1, 12, 23–24, 30, 90–

367

92, 157–58, 162–63, 167, 245, 247–51, 255, 257–60, 264, 290, 303 Titles of: Birthday Letters 26–27, 29, 126f, 153, 170ff, 238, 245, 251f, 262f, 303, 320 Collected Poems 183 ‘Context’ 113, 305 Crow 95f ‘The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother’ 26 ‘Dreamers’ 251 ‘Foreword’ to The Journals 16–17, 65, 101, 193, 284 ‘Freedom of Speech’ 26 Hawk in the Rain 313 ‘Her Husband’ 310 Howls & Whispers 171, 183 ‘Howls & Whispers’ 183 ‘Introduction’ to Collected Poems 84–85, 98, 100, 303 ‘Introduction’ to Johnny Panic 101, 267, 318 Introductory note (1963) 10, 15, 310 Letters of Ted Hughes 19, 28, 59– 60, 116, 134, 297, 298, 299, 302, 307, 308, 313, 316 Letters to Alvarez (1971) 81, 226– 28, 259, 302, 313 ‘Lovesong’ 95 Lupercal 97 Meet My Folks! 97 ‘Notes on the chronological order’ 15–16, 42, 65, 69, 75, 80, 301, 302, 305 ‘The Offers’ 171 ‘On Sylvia Plath’ 17 ‘The place where Sylvia Plath should rest in peace’ 24–25 ‘Publishing Sylvia Plath’ 82, 99– 100, 304 St. Botolph’s Review 107, 238f ‘Sylvia Plath’ (1965) 15 ‘Sylvia Plath’ (1971) 304 ‘Sylvia Plath and Her Journals’ 16ff,

368 161, 309, 310 ‘Sylvia Plath: The Evolution of “Sheep in Fog”’ 17, 310 ‘Sylvia Plath: the facts of her life’ 23, 25, 27, 149, 307, 309 ‘Sylvia Plath’s Crossing the Water’ 301–02 Tales from Ovid 26 ‘Ted Hughes and the Plath Estate’ 121–23, 306 ‘The Thought Fox’ 127 ‘Visit’ 238 ‘Where research becomes intrusion’ 28, 141, 145, 150 Winter Pollen 99–100, 304 Wodwo 96, 310 ‘You Hated Spain’ 154 Hughes, William 30, 157, 167 Hugo, Victor 78 Hume, David 236 Hurdle, Crystal 320 The Hush Sound 322 Huws, Daniel 307, 315 Ives-Cameron, Elaine 309, 310 Jaffe, Dan 175 James, Henry 106, 214 James, P.D. 245 Jauss, Hans Robert 43f, 295, 325 Jefferson, Margo 318 Jeffs, Christine 254, 259, 262 Jerome, Richard 318 Jesus Christ 33, 36f, 285, 301 Jinghua, Fan 323 Joffe, Paul 311 Johnson, Lyndon B. 58 Jones, A.R. 76–77 Jones, Judith 51, 300 Jones, LeRoi 91 Jong, Erica 94, 178, 277, 285, 319 ‘An Art Like Everything Else’ 319, 324 Fear of Flying 178, 277 ‘Letters Focus Exquisite Rage’ 20 ‘Mr. Lowell’ 285

Index Seducing the Demon 277, 285–86, 324 Joslin, Stacey 90 Joyce, James 179, 284, 291 Juhasz, Suzanne 93–94, 97, 102 Jung, Carl Gustav 165, 176, 310 Junger, Gil 322 Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) 38–39 Kafka, Franz 165 Kaufman, James C. 176, 198 Kazin, Alfred 314 Kell, Richard 77 Kellaway, Kate 265, 297, 317 Kendall, Tim 109, 115, 133 Kennedy, Jackie 58 Kennedy, John F. 58, 164 Kenner, Hugh 20 Review of Ariel 75, 77 ‘Sincerity Kills’ 75 ‘Sweet Seventeen’ 20 Kerouac, Jack 291, 324 Kerry, John 163 Kiely, Kevin 320 Kinzie, Mary 48, 57 Kirk, Connie Ann 283, 321, 324 Klee, Paul 281 Klein, Elinor 103, 139, 221–22f, 225, 230, 312, 313 Klein, Melanie 3 Klein, Renate 299 Kopp, Jane Baltzell 237–38f, 314 Koren, Yehuda 254, 317 ‘Die, die soon’ 263–64, 318 ‘I’m going to seduce Ted Hughes’ 254, 263–64, 318 A Lover of Unreason 138, 254, 263– 64, 304, 310 Kristeva, Julia 3, 125 Kroll, Jack 126, 245 Kroll, Judith 21, 108, 297, 298, 311 Chapters in a Mythology 21, 67, 79, 84–85, 140, 267, 302, 303–04 ‘Foreword 2007’ 84, 302, 303 Krook, Dorothea 224, 235–37, 314

Claiming Sylvia Plath Kukil, Karen V. 110 The Journals of Sylvia Plath 110– 11, 263 No Other Appetite 282, 323 Kumin, Maxine 106, 304 Lacan, Jacques 211, 213 Lahire, Sandra 323 Laing, R.D. 3, 168, 201–03, 205, 211, 213 Lameyer, Gordon 233–35, 314, 324 ‘The Double in Sylvia Plath’ 235 ‘Letters from Sylvia’ 234f, 314, 318 ‘Sylvia at Smith’ 234f, 312, 314, 318 Lanser, Susan Sniader 304 Larkin, Philip 77 Larschan, Richard 321 Lask, Thomas 48 Lavers, Annette 68 Lawrence, D.H. 106, 284 Lawrence, Elizabeth 51, 300 Lazell, Edward W. 311 Ledbetter, Christine 230 Leenaars, Antoon A. 190 Lefkowitz, Mary R. 37–38 The Lives of the Greek Poets 38 ‘The Poet as Hero’ 37, 284 Leonard, Garry M. 318 Lerner, Laurence ‘New Novels’ 51 ‘Sylvia Plath’ 303 Lester, David 188 ‘Introduction’ 188 Suicide in Creative Women 198 ‘Theories of Suicidal Behavior’ 188 Levertov, Denise 141 Levy, Laurie 229–30 ‘Beyond “The Bell Jar”’ 230 ‘Outside the Bell Jar’ 229–30, 313, 314 Life 59, 270, 272, 300, 322 Lindahl-Raittila, Iris 130 Livingston, Reb 320 Lotz, Mike 137, 142 Love, Ann Burnside 13 Lowell, Amy 106

369

Lowell, Robert 11, 15, 53ff, 59, 69, 72, 74, 77, 90, 94, 106f, 223–24, 228, 248, 285, 297, 299–300, 300– 01, 322 Day by Day 11 ‘Foreword’ 58, 60–61 For the Union Dead 55, 57 History 320 Life Studies 55f, 167, 223–24, 302 Lord Weary’s Castle 223 ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’ 302 ‘On Two Poets’ 300 ‘Sylvia Plath’ 61, 320 ‘Unwanted’ 11 Lucie-Smith, Edward 53–54 ‘A Murderous Art?’ 53–54 ‘Sea-Imagery’ 68–69 Lyons, John D. 34–35 Exemplum (1989) 34–35, 299 ‘Exemplum’ (2006) 5, 299 Macdonald, Marianne 254–56, 263, 316 Machor, James L. 325 Maddocks, Melvin 72–73 ‘Sylvia Plath’ 70, 72 ‘A vacuum abhorred’ 72–73, 177 Mademoiselle 13, 20, 22, 94, 229f, 313–14, 318 Madonna 318 Mailloux, Steven 295, 325 Malcolm, Janet 4, 82f, 89, 146, 148, 149f, 169f, 229, 239, 241f, 245, 250, 253, 256, 307, 308 Manic Street Preachers 322 Mann, Thomas 165 Mark, Enid 320 Markey, Janice 102, 105, 108f, 116– 18, 212, 324 Maroda, Karen 178, 181–82f, 310, 311 Marshall, P. David 44–45, 262, 268, 276, 294 Masten, Ric 320 Maurois, André 119

370 Mazzaro, Jerome 109, 115f, 123 McCain, John 163 McClatchy, J.D. 79 McCullers, Carson 94 McCullough, Frances 20, 50, 314 ‘Advice and Consent’ 20, 298 ‘Foreword’ 11, 17, 50, 60, 82f ‘Sylvia Plath’s Journals’ 104 McGinley, Phyllis 106 McGrath, Charles 265 McKay, D.F. 305 McKeon, Michael 287 McLellan, Joseph 84 McMurtry, Larry 20 McQuade, Molly 126 melancholy 38, 39–40f, 59, 76, 181, 199–200, 217, 284–85, 287f Melander, Ingrid 301, 323 Merwin, Dido 114, 147ff, 152, 244, 305, 307, 308 Merwin, William S. 106, 113f, 147, 243–44, 320 Mezan, Peter 202 Michie, James 19, 297 Middlebrook, Diane Wood 17, 170– 73, 267, 313 Anne Sexton 163, 223, 224 ‘The Enraged Muse’ 147 Her Husband 14, 29, 170–73, 268, 284, 292, 299 Milford, Nancy 290 Millay, Edna St. Vincent 106 Miller, Alice 192–93f, 201 Miller, Arthur 201 Miller, Jane 316 Miller, Karl 85, 307, 316 ‘Reviewing Sylvia Plath’ 140, 307 ‘Sylvia Plath’s Apotheosis’ 85, 139– 40 Millet, Kate 93 Milner, Catherine 256, 266 Milton, John 118 Mishima, Yukio 61 Moers, Ellen 89, 94 Moi, Toril 124 Momigliano, Arnaldo 37

Index Monroe, Marilyn 164 Montaigne, Michel de 6, 134, 306 Monteith, Charles 302 Moore, Honor 277 Poems from the Women’s Movement 277, 324 ‘When Women Blew Up American Poetry’ 277, 320 Moore, Liz 322 Moore, Marianne 59, 106, 141 Moran, Joe 42–43, 59, 262, 268, 270ff, 292, 294 Morgan, Robin 89–92, 102, 108, 120, 126, 158, 244, 304, 324 ‘Arraignment’ 89–92, 101, 244, 290, 315, 320 ‘Conspiracy of Silence’ 89–92, 290 Going Too Far 89 Monster 89f, 304, 320 Sisterhood is Powerful 89 Morrison, Blake 147, 319 Morrison, James 316, 252, 266 Moses, Kate 317 ‘Baking with Sylvia’ 317 ‘The real Sylvia Plath’ 216–17, 297 Wintering 249, 312, 317 Motion, Andrew 319 Ms. Magazine 91f, 298, 304 MukaĜovský, Jan 3, 273–75 Murphy, Jacqueline Shea 64 Murphy, Richard 244 The Kick 315 ‘A Memoir of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’ 147, 152, 244, 315 Myers, Lucas 156–57, 166f, 213, 304, 308, 309, 313, 315 ‘Ah, Youth ...’ 147, 152, 213, 244 Crow Steered 238–39f, 243, 244– 47, 249, 256, 314, 315 ‘The Tranquilized Fifties’ 50, 302 Nagourney, Peter 133–34 Napoleon Bonaparte 113 Negev, Eilat 254, 299, 316, 317 ‘Die, die soon’ 263–64, 318 ‘I’m going to seduce Ted Hughes’

Claiming Sylvia Plath 254, 263–64, 318 ‘Haunted by the ghosts of love’ 316 A Lover of Unreason 138, 254, 263– 64, 304, 310 ‘My life with Sylvia Plath’ 16, 299 ‘Poetry is a way of talking to loved ones’ 299 Nelson, Deborah 116 ‘Plath, history and politics’ 116, 182, 303 Pursuing Privacy 116, 303 Neville, Jill 19 Newman, Charles 67–68, 78, 134 The Art of Sylvia Plath 66–69, 78, 134, 224f, 229, 300, 301, 318, 323 ‘Candor is the Only While’ 67–68, 301 Newsweek 58, 126, 164, 221, 272 New York Times Book Review, The 13, 69, 273, 298, 303, 304, 324 Nietzsche, Friedrich 165, 324 Nims, John Frederick 68 Nin, Anaïs 324 Nine Black Alps 322 Norton, Dick 234, 305 Norton, Mildred Smith 120, 305–06 Norton, Perry 142, 305 Oates, Joyce Carol 65–66, 79 ‘Behind the icon’ 124 ‘The Death Throes’ 65–66, 161 ‘One for life’ 304 Oberg, Arthur K. 78 O’Connor, Frank 106 Orchard, Carol see Carol Hughes Orgel, Shelley 185, 187, 193 ‘Fusion with the Victim’ 185 ‘Sylvia Plath’ 175–76, 185 Orne, Martin 223f, 313 Orr, Peter 113 Ostriker, Alicia Suskin 120 ‘The Americanization of Sylvia’ 292 ‘“Fact” as Style’ 60, 65 Stealing the Language 120–21, 202– 03 Ouellet, Norma 19

371

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 39 Owen, Wilfred 64–65 Packard, Elizabeth 207 Paltrow, Gwyneth 254, 259f, 262, 267 paradeigma 33, see rhetoric of example Parker, Dorothy 106 Parnaby, Julia 23f, 29, 298 Paterson, Don 320 Pavese, Cesare 285 Peel, Robin 115–16, 290 Perloff, Marjorie 69–71, 78, 102, 126, 300, 305 ‘Extremist Poetry’ 70–71, 300 ‘On the Road to Ariel’ 69–71, 99, 202 ‘A Ritual for Being Born Twice’ 202 ‘Sylvia Plath’s “Sivvy” Poems’ 99, 114–15, 202 ‘The Two Ariels’ 98–99, 304 Pero, Thomas 299 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 78 Pfarrer, Steve 126 Phillips, Robert 184–85, 187 Pindar 37 Pitchford, Kenneth 158 Pitt, Valerie 140 Plath, The 323 Plath, Aurelia Schober 129, 137, 142, 153, 156, 160, 165, 168, 170, 227, 281, 309, 311 and Ariel 59–60, 300 and The Bell Jar 17–19, 22, 83, 181, 212, 300, 313 in interviews 19, 21f, 182, 297 and Letters Home 11, 19–23, 192 and the reception 21, 23, 222 role as SP’s mother 12, 21, 105, 136, 138–39, 180–82, 184–85, 190–93, 242, 298 on SP’s bequest 21, 23, 300 on SP’s illness 18, 22, 143, 297–98, 307 on SP’s writing 18, 21, 22–23

372 and TH 19, 29f, 81, 134, 299 strategy vis-à-vis reception 14, 22, 84 Titles of: ‘Introduction’ etc. in Letters Home 22, 191–93, 304, 310, 311, 324 ‘Letter Written in the Actuality of Spring’ 22–23 Plath, Margaret 21f, 250, 271 Plath, Otto 10, 12, 105, 123, 142, 160, 172, 179, 198, 283, 307 Plath, Sylvia archive 83, 88, 123, 128–30f, 133, 135, 143, 281f body/corpus of 68, 81, 83, 109, 120, 123–25f, 128f, 165, 216, 305 and children 9f, 14f, 21, 24, 52, 59, 65, 90, 92, 117, 143, 156, 164, 188, 197, 209, 240f, 245, 249ff, 264, 271, 292, 316 as confessional poet 2, 11, 15, 26, 55–57, 59, 61, 67, 69, 76, 84ff, 97, 105, 113, 161, 188, 271f doubles of 22, 114, 127, 179, 220, 230, 237, 283, 314 and Electra complex 86, 179, 184– 85 as example/exemplary figure 2, 5–6, 35, 40–41, 48, 53–57, 70, 76f, 79, 85, 90–93, 96f, 99, 102, 123, 125– 26, 129, 175–76, 184–93ff, 197, 204–06f, 210–11, 274, 277, 280f, 285, 291–95 as extremist poet 2, 10, 13, 54, 62, 67, 74, 76, 78, 85, 93, 145, 271 and father 10, 14ff, 22, 59, 62, 66, 84, 94, 123, 136, 142, 154, 159, 179, 181, 184–87ff, 195, 211, 258, 307 glamour 9, 49, 265, 272 grave 23–27ff, 125, 149, 165, 247, 298, 299, 309 and Hiroshima 63, 109, 113, 115 and Holocaust 2, 10–11, 62–64, 67, 97, 109, 113, 115, 123, 205, 207, 208–09, 251, 285

Index and Jews 2, 11, 62–64ff, 110f, 115, 118, 184, 208–09, 236, 251 and mother 16, 18–23, 104–05, 136, 159, 180–85, 190–93, 195, 205– 06, 210, 212, 242, 298 and motherhood 171, 187, 208 and Oedipus complex 16, 181, 184– 87, 210, 215, 217, 283 literary persona 12, 15, 20–21, 170– 72, 182, 184, 282f, 292, 312 poetic development 15, 55, 68–70, 86–87, 96, 127, 301–02 political awareness 48, 85, 108–17, 125, 129, 136, 210, 212, 230, 274, 281, 284, 305 publishing history 14, 69–70, 81–83, 98–101, 121, 298 selves 16–17, 127, 136, 168, 170, 193, 201–05, 294f suicide, explanations of 184–93, 311 visual art 129, 280–82, 323 Titles of: ‘All the Dead Dears’ 104 ‘The Applicant’ 322 Ariel 1, 11–13, 15ff, 51–52, 55–61, 64ff, 68ff, 74–75, 77, 89f, 94, 98– 100, 107f, 116, 120, 123, 127, 170, 175, 186f, 209, 221f, 224, 246, 259, 266, 272f, 277, 298, 300, 301, 302, 304, 305, 313, 320 Ariel: The Restored Edition 30, 83, 131–32, 249 ‘Ariel’ 86, 118–20f, 131, 305 Articles and drawings in The Christian Science Monitor 281, 323 The Bed Book 103, 298 ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’ 184, 277 The bee sequence 98f, 127 The Bell Jar 1, 11, 17–19, 22, 27, 48, 50–51f, 59, 67, 72–73f, 82f, 93f, 108, 116, 120, 127f, 131, 134, 137f, 177, 179, 181, 185, 187, 193, 201f, 205, 207–08, 211ff, 223, 229, 234f, 240, 249, 253,

Claiming Sylvia Plath 265, 266–67, 269f, 272–73, 278, 280, 295, 298, 300, 302, 305, 313, 320, 321, 322, 323 ‘A Birthday Present’ 113 ‘Burning the Letters’ 127f Collected Poems 11, 13, 48, 84–88, 98, 100, 112, 130, 135, 153, 211, 273, 275, 297, 298, 302, 303, 304 The Colossus 1, 11, 48ff, 52f, 55, 61, 68f, 75, 79f, 131, 204, 232f, 273, 298, 300, 301, 302 ‘The Colossus’ 131 ‘Context’ 113, 305 ‘Contusion’ 10 ‘The Courier’ 322 Crossing the Water 11, 14, 67, 69– 70, 81, 228, 265, 298, 301–02 ‘Cut’ 99, 113 ‘Daddy’ 53, 55, 59, 62ff, 76, 80, 84, 95–96, 98, 113, 120, 123, 128, 131, 184f, 210, 226, 245, 284 ‘Death & Co.’ 226 ‘The Detective’ 197 ‘The Disquieting Muses’ 23 ‘Eavesdropper’ 104 ‘Edge’ 10, 163, 197, 205, 305, 322 ‘Electra on Azalea Path’ 184 ‘Elm’ 80, 252, 306 ‘Face Lift’ 104 ‘The Fearful’ 10 ‘Fever 103’ 55 ‘Getting There’ 115 ‘I thought that I could not be hurt’ 192–93 ‘In Plaster’ 203, 283 ‘The Jailer’ 89 Johnny Panic 11, 14, 84, 101, 211, 267, 298, 318 The Journals (1982) 11, 16–17, 65, 87, 101–07, 125, 135, 151, 154, 180–82, 219, 273, 278, 290, 298, 311, 314 The Journals (2000) 104, 107, 110– 11, 117, 171, 256, 262f, 266, 284, 302, 317, 318 ‘Kindness’ 10, 59

373

‘Lady Lazarus’ 56, 58, 62, 95–96, 109, 113, 127, 182, 205, 226, 277, 284, 324 ‘Lesbos’ 69, 72, 90, 104, 107 Letters Home 11f, 14, 19–23, 72, 85, 101, 105, 135, 140, 148, 154, 192f, 267, 273, 278, 297, 298, 300, 302, 304, 310, 311, 318, 324 The Magic Mirror 179, 310–11 ‘Medusa’ 104, 113, 184, 298 ‘Mirror’ 322 ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ 323 ‘Morning Song’ 98 ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ 113 ‘Ocean 1212-W’ 23, 185, 311 ‘Poem for a Birthday’ 97 ‘Poets on Campus’ 13, 297 ‘Purdah’ 98, 113 ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ 113, 120f, 125, 128, 304 ‘Sheep in Fog’ 17 ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’ 95 ‘The Stones’ 80 ‘Three Women’ 128, 304 ‘To Ariadne, Deserted by Theseus’ 171, 310 ‘The Tour’ 104 ‘Wintering’ 98 Winter Trees 11, 14, 67, 69–70, 81, 228, 298, 301, 302, 304 ‘Words’ 79, 95, 305 Plath, Warren 18, 22, 29, 59, 165, 195, 250, 271, 311 Plato 32, 34, 36ff, 199, 235, 291 Apology 36 Crito 36 The Laws 299 Phaedo 36 Protagoras 299 The Seventh Letter 37–38 Plutarch 134, 306 poet see author poeta laureatus 301 poeta theologus 73 Pollitt, Katha 9 ‘A Note of Triumph’ 48, 87, 98, 303

374 ‘Peering Into the Bell Jar’ 9 Polybius 32 Pomeroy, Marnie 321 Pope, Alexander 78, 118 Porter, Peter 247–48 Presley, Elvis 164 Pritchard, William H. 303 Proust, Marcel 165 Prouty, Olive 155, 179 Pryor, Ruth 194–96 Pulitzer Prize 11, 48, 223f, 275 Quart, Alissa 292 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) 32, 299 Rafferty, Janet Wagner 313–14 Rajak, Tessa 37, 291 Rakosi, Carl 70, 265 Ran, Shulamit 281 Rank, Otto 177, 311 Rayment, Tim 162 Rea, Amy 303 Redgrove, Peter 162–63 Rees-Jones, Deryn 131 Reid, Alastair 297 Rembrandt 200 Reynolds, Nigel 317–18 rhetoric 5, 13, 36, 48, 67, 88, 97, 122, 133, 135, 155f, 170, 186, 193, 272, 290, 295, 324 deliberative (political) 31, 36 epideictic (laudatory) 6, 31–33, 36, 39, 40–42, 53, 88, 200, 219–21, 291 of example/exemplum 5–6, 31–37, 41, 53, 73, 79, 93, 112, 117, 122– 23, 128, 131, 133, 154f, 167, 189, 193–94, 197, 210f, 214, 217, 268, 286, 289–95, 299 forensic (judicial and of accountability) 6, 31, 36, 40, 42, 45, 90–93, 102, 194, 208, 258, 268, 290–91 Rich, Adrienne 26, 63, 94, 106, 121, 153, 209–10, 212, 299–300

Index Richardson, Maurice 82 Riefenstahl, Leni 301 Rigolot, François 299 Ringwald, Molly 278 Robbins, Amanda 323 Robertson, Nan 19, 21f, 182 Robinson, Robert 19 Roche, Clarissa 239–40f, 314 Roche, Paul 239–40 Roethke, Theodore 69, 106, 299–300 Rose, Jacqueline 115, 121–26ff, 213, 288, 320 ‘The happy couple’ 126 The Haunting of Sylvia Plath 64, 83, 99, 117, 121–29, 133, 151, 208, 214, 268, 285, 299, 312 ‘So many lives’ 284 ‘Ted Hughes and the Plath Estate’ 121–23, 306 ‘This is not a biography’ 133 Rosenblatt, Jon 85–86, 305 Rosenstein, Harriet 19–20, 92–93, 298 ‘Reconsidering Sylvia Plath’ 70, 78, 92–93, 298 Review of Crossing the Water 67, 70 ‘To the most wonderful mummy’ 20–21 Rosenthal, M.L. 48, 55–57f, 62, 66, 76, 94, 135 ‘Metamorphosis of a book’ 300 The Modern Poets 56 The New Poets 56–57, 300 ‘Poetry as Confession’ 56 ‘Poets of the Dangerous Way’ 55– 56f Rossetti, Christina 94, 106 Roth, Philip 106 Rothenberg, Albert 196–98 Creativity and Madness 196–98, 318 ‘Creativity and Mental Illness’ 197– 98 Rousseau, Henri 281 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 56, 288 Rowland, Robyn 299 Rowling, J.K. 324

Claiming Sylvia Plath Rubens, Peter Paul 200 Rukeyser, Muriel 277–78, 320 Rumens, Carol 320 Runco, Mark A. 189–90, 194 Ryan, Meg 278 Sade, Marquis de 165 Sagar, Keith 256, 304 Salinger, J.D. 25, 51, 106, 163, 309 Sappho 43, 106, 285–86 Sartre, Jean-Paul 91, 165 Scanlon, Larry 34–35, 193–94, 286, 299 Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg 316 Schäetzle, Martin 311 Schaub, Michael 316 Schott, Webster 7, 67, 177, 188 Schreiber, Flora Rheta 201 Schultz, William Todd 217, 312 Schwartz, Murray M. 186–87f, 208, 311 Seidelman, Susan 318 Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger) 39, 199 Sexton, Anne 11, 15, 53f, 56, 77, 94, 106, 141, 146, 163, 207, 222–24f, 297, 299–300, 313, 319, 320 ‘The barfly’ 222–24, 301 The Book of Folly 304 Live or Die 224, 319 ‘Sylvia’s Death’ 224, 319 To Bedlam and Part Way Back 224 ‘Wanting to Die’ 224, 319 Shakespeare, William 118, 120, 195, 265, 294 Shelley, Mary 94 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 119, 295 Showalter, Elaine 289 The Female Malady 202, 207 Hystories 289, 291 ‘Introduction’ 120 Shulman, Ernest 188, 189, 194 Sigmund, Elizabeth 138f, 143, 153, 239, 240–43f, 249, 253–56f, 263, 267, 277, 315, 316 ‘I realised’ 253–54, 266

375

‘In defence of my friend Sylvia’ 147 ‘Sylvia in Devon’ 241–43, 315 ‘Why it’s time’ 254 Sillitoe, Alan 252 Simmons, Tom 323 Sinfield, Alan 109–10, 115 Sitwell, Edith 106 Slone, Cassandra 323 Smith, Stan 109 Smith, Stevie 141 Socrates 36–38ff,199, 285, 291 Sonnenberg, Ben 309 Sontag, Susan 285, 301 Spender, Stephen 64–65f, 108, 162– 63, 208, 270 Stade, George 107, 303 Starbuck, George 223 Steinberg, Peter K. 282–83, 320, 321, 322, 324 Steiner, George 10, 13, 62f, 66, 72, 90, 270, 297 ‘Dying Is an Art’ 58, 62, 64, 94 ‘In Extremis’ 10–11, 13, 62, 300, 302, 319 Steiner, Nancy Hunter 67, 107, 114, 139f, 230–31, 234, 237, 303, 317 Stevens, Wallace 69, 78, 106 Stevenson, Anne 28, 116f, 145–54, 158, 162–63f, 183, 210, 243, 250, 252, 307, 308, 311, 316, 319, 320 ‘After Bitter Fame’ 63, 149, 251, 316 Bitter Fame (1989) 28f, 103, 119, 143, 145–54ff, 158, 165f, 169, 182, 210, 213, 244f, 253, 267, 284, 305, 306, 308, 311, 312, 315, 324 Bitter Fame (1998) 152–53 ‘A bitter pill’ 166 ‘Is the Emperor of Ice Cream Wearing Clothes?’ 145–46, 151, 319 ‘The literary estate’ 145 The Other House 147–48, 320 Poems 1955–2005 152 ‘Sylvia Plath: An Exchange’ 150–

376 51, 308 ‘Sylvia Plath’s Word Cage’ 311 ‘Two Letters’ 216 ‘Writing as a Woman’ 146 Stevenson, Robert Louis 201 Stiles, Julia 321 Stilwell, Robert L. 175 Stimpson, Catharine R. 43 Stone, Leo 178 Stone, Oliver 322 Strangeways, Al 108–09, 115f, 213– 14, 284 Stuart, Duane Reed 32, 293–94 Stuhlmann, Gunther 324 Stummer, Robin 254 Swenson May 106, 304 Sylvia, the movie 30, 254–55f, 259– 60, 262, 265, 266–67, 278, 283, 317, 318 Tabor, Stephen Sylvia Plath 10, 19, 50, 161, 273, 297, 298, 301, 303, 304, 319, 320, 321, 323 Ted Hughes 304 Tallmer, Jerry 163, 264 Tarn, Nathaniel 310 Taubman, Robert 50–51 Teasdale, Sara 106 Tennant, Emma 146 Burnt Diaries 146, 248 Sylvia and Ted 146, 248–49, 255, 315–16 Thigpen, Corbett H. 201 Thomas, Dylan 69, 72, 106, 155, 203f Thomas, Trevor 165–66, 169, 309–10 Thompson, Catherine 214–17, 305, 312 Thomson, Ian 144f Thorpe, Vanessa 317 ‘I failed her’ 256–57, 297, 316–17 ‘Secret passions’ 253, 263, 310, 315 Thwaite, Anthony 320 Tillinghast, Richard 175 Times, The 29, 202, 263 ‘The Critic’ 49

Index ‘New Fiction’ 51 ‘Poems for the Good-Hearted’ 58 Times Literary Supplement, The 121, 163 ‘Along the Edge’ 58 ‘Sylvia Plath’ 66–67 ‘Under the Skin’ 51 Time Magazine 59, 162, 270, 272, 280, 300–01, 309, 322 ‘The Blood Jet is Poetry’ 59, 221f, 272 ‘The Second Chance’ 59, 300–01 Todd, Tamsin 263, 317 Tolkien, J.R.R. 280, 322 Tolstoy, Leo 84 Tomaševskij, Boris 7, 49, 288–89, 292 Tomlinson, Charles 319 Toomey, Philippa 19, 22, 297 Torn, Angelica 163, 264 Trachtman, Ilana 278 Twain, Mark 324 Updike, John 147 Uroff, Margaret Dickie 96–97, 115 Valentine, Jean 320 Van der Poel, Priscilla 104 Van Dyne, Susan 63–64, 126, 128, 308 ‘Fueling the Phoenix Fire’ 63–64, 127 ‘More Terrible’ 127 ‘The problem of biography’ 152 ‘Rekindling the Past’ 127 Vasari, Giorgio 200 vates 42, 199, 312 see also author as prophet Velasquez, Diego 200 Vendler, Helen 86–87, 279 ‘An Intractable Metal’ 48, 86–87 ‘Sylvia Plath playing Pygmalion’ 69 Victoria, Queen of England 212 Viner, Katharine 266–68f, 318 ‘Desperately seeking’ 266–68 ‘Who is Sylvia?’ 266, 318 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 78,

Claiming Sylvia Plath 199 Vodiþka, Felix 44 Voltaire 288 Wagner, Erica 317 Wagner-Martin, Linda W. 27, 74–75, 102, 141–45ff, 152, 160, 165, 210, 307, 308 ‘Foreword’ (2004) 292–93 ‘Introduction’ (1984) 47f ‘Introduction’ (1988) 48, 50, 74–75, 100, 300 ‘Plath and contemporary American poetry’ 47–48, 319 ‘Plath’s “Ladies’ Home Journal” Syndrom’ 318 ‘Reflections on Writing the Plath Biography’ 26 Sylvia Plath: A Biography (1987) 13, 27, 109f, 112, 120, 141–45, 153–54, 158, 267, 305, 307, 309– 10, 312 Sylvia Plath: A Biography (1988) 144 Sylvia Plath: A Biography (1991) 141, 143, 307 Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life 321 Wakoski, Diane 320 Walcott, Derek 318 Walker, Cheryl 298 Walker, Iain 28, 166, 263, 309, 317 war between the sexes 95–96, 268f, 274, 293f Warhol, Andy 163 Watkins, Gwen 194–96 Watt, Shirley 277 Weldon Fay 167 Weller, Sue 312 Wenckstern, Susanne 190 West, Ellen 207 West, Paul 49, 61–62, 71 Westerberg, Paul 322 Wevill, Assia 12, 28, 90, 92, 95, 138f, 143, 156f, 164f, 167, 170, 172, 240, 244, 247, 249ff, 258, 263–64, 266, 303, 304, 310, 315, 316, 317, 318

377

Wevill, David 263, 304, 317 Wevill, Shura 12, 90, 92, 95, 164, 240, 317 White, Antonia 294 White Goddess 79, 84–85, 172, 283, 302 Wieseltier, Leon 63 Wilbur, Richard 22, 297, 320 Williams, Hugo 319 Williams, Tennessee 165 Williams, William Carlos 141 Williamson, Alan 25–26 Wills, Clair 147–48 Wingfield, Rachel 23f, 29, 298 Winnicott, W.R.D. 205, 213 Wisker, Gina 321 Witchel, Alex 313–14 Wittkower, Rudolf and Margot 39–40, 199–200 Wolfson, Deborah 318 Wood, Gaby 316 Wood, James 4 Woodmansee, Martha 276 Woolf, Virginia 106, 134, 141, 194– 95, 207, 210, 212, 306 Wordsworth, William 78 Wrinch, Dorothy 104 writer see author Wurtzel, Elizabeth 276, 294 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram 238, 314 Wylie, Philip 181 Xantippe 9 Xenophanes 37f Xenophon 36 Yates, Emma 318 Yeats, W.B. 78, 106 Young, James E. 63f, 115 Zilsel, Edgar 41–42, 200, 286 Zimbakova, Kristina 323 Zimmer, Elizabeth 163 Zivley, Sherry 312 Zola, Émile 91 Zollman, Sol 108f, 116