“Sylvia Plath: A Voice That Will Not Be Still”

“What a million filaments.

The peanut-crunching crowd

Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot—

The big strip tease.

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands

My knees.”­­­

- Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus”

Sylvia Plath is a tabloid headline.

I can think of few instances in which we dissect the personal life of a writer so readily. Biographical curiosity is natural, but in the 57 years since the poet has died, we’ve plumbed what exists of her and mythologized it. Frozen at 30, she lingers as a ghost, her work unfinished. We search for answers that aren’t there, using those suppositions to reassemble her in our minds and become convinced that we know her, deeply and sincerely. What’s become of a woman whom we’ve dug into so indelicately, a sideshow, her journals passed through tens of thousands of hands, her most fragile moments recirculated through the news over and over? What’s left of the art when it’s the exposed soul on permanent display?

It always – always – begins with some riff on the gas. After that it’s the children. And then the affair.

The details come in pairs: “pretty young mother” with “her head in the oven and the gas jets wide open.”1 Or to describe the environment of the kitchen that day: “milk and bread for the two toddlers to find,” to be followed by “And then she turned on the gas.”2 You will speculate about manic-depression and previous suicide attempts, but in any profile, her death is primary – a lonely poet, a mother, the wet towels stuffed in the cracks of the doors, the babies asleep in the next room. All else is secondary. The specific words you choose don’t matter at all, because their message is always going to be the same: the portrait of a woman, unwell.

There’s something about Sylvia that turns us into voyeurs – a woman dead at age 30, a vast collection of journals and poems left behind. Surely if we just pry a little harder, if we read the subtext a little better, we can recreate the real Sylvia, hear her real voice and know all that is true about her.

The collective ‘we’ is her readership to some degree, but there’s a larger scope to this investigation. Sylvia Plath maintains deep cultural significance, whether it be for her contribution to feminist literature or as a subject for psychological study. (Although recently it’s with some alarm that I’ve understood Sylvia to maintain selective obscurity. I used to think saying her name was like saying “Emily Dickinson, heroine of poetry!” It’s not.) Despite uncertainty about exactly what illness may have plagued her, she’s often a subject of psychoanalysis.

When Sylvia died, she created a certain legacy. It’s not clear if she knew she was doing that, or even if some part of her wanted it. This is the one instance in which we don’t have her words on the matter – her husband, the Byronic Ted Hughes, burned her last journal, claiming it was to protect their children. The suicide was an unfortunate means to the literary success she sought, though. It made The Bell Jar and Ariel sell. In particular, it led them to a wide readership, not least of which were frustrated and bored women, suffocated at home. On Ariel reaching the hands of a female readership, writer Honor Moore made the following observation, now quoted in several write-ups about Plath: “Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified.” Whether the reader’s opinion of Plath is celebratory or critical, those are the themes that can be universally agreed upon: rage, ambivalence, and grief. Those are the last things we have from her.

I’m going to take a leap here. In Taylor Swift’s recent documentary, she posited that artists remain frozen at the age they were when they became famous. While Sylvia’s massive notoriety came after her death, I think the sentiment is true for her. I think her death hangs over all the discourse about her work, and, in the absence of her ability to respond, we’re left to consider details in a fractured portrait that will forever be incomplete. When she perished, she was the young mother of two small children and reeling after her separation from an adulterous husband. There is Sylvia, in perpetuity. We have her journals. We have The Bell Jar. We have Ariel. It’s as if we say, “What else could we need?”

What does it mean to be unable to separate the drama from the poetry? She’s an actor in a play she didn’t agree to, her texts unendingly scrutinized for their allusions to her mental illness, her marriage, her relationship with her parents, her own howling self-criticism. And the journals don’t make her more human; they mythologize her further. It’s like reading a second account of Esther Greenwood (the narrator in the autobiographical novel The Bell Jar) the real and the fictitious coming together to exist in uncertain proportions. From how many angles can an individual be studied, psychoanalyzed, then turned around and studied again? When The New York Times published her obituary 50 years late, it was part of a series about forgotten artists, prompted by the memory of a writer who lay dead in her apartment for eight days before she was found. And I ask sincerely, which is worse: a permanent spectacle, or to be forgotten?

Granted, I’m not sure that it’s possible to discuss her without giving in a little to this mythologizing. That was the lens through which she chose to study her own subjects, after all. Otto Plath wasn’t her father, but the titular figure of the poem “Daddy,”, “no less the devil for that, no not any less the black man who bit [her] pretty red heart in two” and Ted Hughes not her husband but “a man in black with a Meinkampf look and a love of the rack and the screw.” Even after their own respective deaths, those are difficult characteristics to withstand. She applies that same scrutinizing lens to her own descriptions of herself, too, and as a consequence, we seem to feel permitted to take our cues from that, studying self-insights from her youth or from her suffering as though they represent all there is to the woman.

For instance, so much of what’s written about Sylvia, be it journalism or literary criticism, quotes large swathes from her diaries. Published fully over the course of decades, the journals chronicle at least 15 years of her life in exquisite detail. Part of the problem with those scrupulous journals is the very fact that they feel like an authority on which extensive theories about her work can be predicated. It’s not unprecedented to publish an artist’s letters and journals, but I can imagine very few instances in which we feel so entitled as to make conjectures about a character based on diary entries, many of which were written in her late teens.

I read a book recently in which the protagonist, a woman detective, sees herself in the journaling of an English PhD student whose disappearance she’s investigating. “Manon was reminded of her own youthful diaries,” it says, “how much she too had been in love with a notion of herself at that age, energetically self-analyzing.”3 Energetically self-analyzing. She’s reflecting with a sense of humor, but it’s not inherently bad, that self-analysis. Sylvia is notorious for it; she studies her inner life as if it were a petri dish under a microscope. That fact slips frequently into criticism of her work. It can elicit dismissive attitudes and words like shrill. That’s a word closely associated with women, and there’s certainly more to be discussed about that observation. (Surely a 1950s husband like Ted Hughes had plenty of time for “energetically self-analyzing” when unencumbered by children and housework in addition to a day job. On innumerable occasions, Hughes – a poet, too, England’s poet laureate, in fact – proved to be absolutely consumed with himself.)

Sylvia gets punished for this, and so do her readers. Take this excerpt from Bruce Bawer’s “Sylvia Plath and the Poetry of Confession,” published in an essay collection about Plath:

“What, after all, could be more irresistible to a saturnine, self-romanticizing teenager than a passage like this, from Plath’s college journal: ‘nothing is real, past or future, when you are all alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future, which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.’ I think it is safe to say that these two groups account for the majority of Plath’s devotees and that neither group cherishes her work chiefly for its literary merit.”

Evidently I fall into one of those groups (the former of which are feminists politicizing Plath’s work), because an appraisal like that leaves me feeling like I have wounds to lick. Or maybe I’ve aged out, but I remember that teenaged experience acutely. (And the way Bawer describes it is quite true!) It’s hard not to wish for her that we could close those journals before they may be read, so that, at the very least, the sacred nature of the teenaged diary can be preserved for the dignity of the woman now immortalized at 30. To use a teenager’s diary as a standard for examining an adult woman’s self-absorption is unfair, and inappropriate context for her work. (Furthermore, might I say that, while a 15-year-old’s assessment of “literary merit” may not be deeply insightful, I would challenge anyone to find a teenager who hasn’t read her journal without first reading her poetry over and over again.)

The same writer I quoted above suggests that, among many things, her poetry is a clumsy, self-aggrandizing lesson in victimization. Ariel was a flurry born not from rage, but from heartbreak. Rage was only a symptom of that. It was heartbreak at Ted’s affair and their subsequent separation, heartbreak at her father for dying in her youth and continuing to haunt her, heartbreak from the chill she perceived from her mother following his death. (Even if one opts not to take a strictly autobiographical reading of the poetry, the presence of those themes cannot be denied.) And despite such circumstances, she was impassioned, writing poetry daily. I imagine her writing process to feel something like the horse ride in the poem from which the collection gets its name, charged and breathless, running headfirst into her feelings.

The presence of this heartbreak, when coupled with cherry-picked selections from her journals, is what gets recontextualized as a narcissist lashing out. Most can imagine how it may feel to wander alone in a cold house with two small children, processing immeasurable pain. That pained space is where her most famous poems take form, poems like “Daddy,” which illustrates a violent rebuttal to the men who have tormented her for – in her words – all 30 years of her life. To suggest that we can understand her poetry to be one last pre-suicidal self-analysis because of circumstance, though, is absurd.

It’s easy to sniff out that autobiographical content, reframe it, and dismiss a woman who lost ownership of her narrative when she ended her life. Ariel was published posthumously. In fact, it was collected posthumously (by Ted Hughes, who opted to add poems and change the arrangement that Sylvia intended.) Although the work is often framed as the key to understanding her suicide, it’s curious to know that this alleged spiral into mental illness originally ended with the line, “The bees are flying. They taste the spring.”

An artist’s suicide is tragic foremost for the loss of a life, and second for the unmade art. In Sylvia's case, not only was the ability to further generate art lost, but she lost privileges we enjoy – to respond, to edit, to change, to grow.  Even Hughes, for instance, enjoyed a level of redemption with Birthday Letters, a collection of poems primarily written to and for Sylvia, published not long before his death. He had 35 years to ruminate on the collapse of their marriage before his poetry about it met the public eye; Sylvia had three months. Her work is weaponized against her, and she’s unavailable for comment.

What a cultural fright it is to read those poems from Ariel and think that a woman could be an ambivalent mother, that a woman could allow mental space to be preoccupied with herself, that a woman could kill herself and leave her children. It’s easy to take hold of those themes, propping the journals beneath the poems, and say, “Yes, we know her. We’ve met her.” We turn over the circumstances of her suicide, insist that in order to read her we must violate her. Her life is just salacious enough, just subversive enough, and just achingly public enough that it becomes a show we watch with slack jaws.

And she isn’t there. “Daddy” is no more the answer to her suicide than “Lady Lazarus,” which is no more the answer than “Ariel” or “Lesbos” or “The Jailer.” And what could happen if, for a moment, we stopped asking them to be?

Sylvia and Ted’s daughter, Frieda, is a poet herself, and when she learned the news that her mother’s life and death were to be made into the 2003 biopic Sylvia, she wrote the following:

“They think I should love it—

Having her back again, they think

I should give them my mother’s words

To fill the mouth of their monster,

Their Sylvia Suicide Doll,

Who will walk and talk

And die at will,

And die, and die,

And forever be dying.”

It’s impossible to separate the context of her life entirely from her poetry. It’s impossible to suggest that by reading her diaries we can’t at least have some notion of her inner life. But to drag this psychodrama on is to miss valuable instances to allow her poetry to breath on its own. When “Daddy” ends, the narrator has triumphed. The titular antagonist is dead:

“There’s a stake in your fat black heart  

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.  

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”

The victory sings. I’ve never found it to read as pre-suicidal; I’ve found it to read as cathartic. I allow the work to be celebratory, to be grieved, to be high and low, thematically rich, an operation of a former Fulbright scholar – not merely a microscope through which to watch Sylvia die, and die, and forever be dying.

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