Sylvia Plath Forum
Contributions from 12- 26th March 1998Christy's posting (3/25) raises the interesting point of SP's conscious and unconscious aggression against Aurelia Plath. Her well-meaning, smothering, highly goal-oriented, ambitious mother is the true savage god of Plath's literary universe, not Ted Hughes, and certainly not her father, whom she adored and whose death left her in mourning for the rest of her life. For Plath, the death urge is the urge to escape to Daddy, wherein lies Paradise ("Daddy" is misread as an attack on the literal Otto Plath. Rather, it is another example of Plath's apotropaic Gorgon persona, a sardonic and deadly serious struggle for survival against the death urge itself, pulling her "back, back, back to you.") No, it is alive with Mummy that Hell resides. Aurelia appears throughout Plath's writing, transformed into the Terrible Mother Goddess, the Medusa, the dark, sucking pools, the sea with its clinging tentacles, the umbilical cords that "shriek from my stomach like arrows." Aurelia Plath as chthonian Nature with sweet candies in her purse. "ABC, her eyelids say." The relationship between Plath and her mother was bizarre and complex, as the cheery, ebullient, strangely intimate Letters Home and her Journals attest. (I recall one passage in which Plath must reassure herself that her mother is "not...a witch.")
Another reading of "Costly Speech" strengthens my conviction that what was "forbidden" was the writing of The Bell Jar itself." The novel amounted to an attack and betrayal not only of her mother, but her Smith College benefactors, her childhood friends, the works. Hughes' imagery makes it apparent that this taboo is almost a natural law: one doesn't do this. The mountains, the hills, the skies "forbade it." This is the issue at stake. Hence, the dual reaction he gives us as SP breaks this divine decree: Superego "mortified," but the Id "smiling" with vengeful glee.
The official motive behind the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas," as Jack Folsom relates, was the fact that Plath found the book " a pot boiler" and not worthy of her, something she had to get out of the way in order to really write. But I would also certainly think Plath half-believed it would protect her from being "outed" to those who stood to suffer from it. I can't imagine how she thought she would keep it a secret from her mother, and so wonder how the Good Sylvia explained the novel away. Jack, was The Bell Jar's English publication a secret kept from Aurelia?
Stewart Clarke
New York, USA
26th March 1998
In response to Christy*s posting about *The Bell Jar* (hi, Christy!) -- I have re-read the novel probably hundreds of times over the past ten years, and I strongly feel that its tone is one of survival and resurrection. I think it*s obvious that the adult Esther recalling her suicide attempt ten years earlier has evolved as a person during that time. The college-age Esther feels that she probably won*t marry and can*t make decisions regarding her life. The adult Esther is most likely married (at least she has a baby) and is able to look back upon her experiences with a wizened eye. Of course, she makes it clear at the end of the book that bell jar may drop again ... but unless the reader is intimately familiar with SP*s own untimely end, Esther*s final thoughts seem to be positive in nature. Could it be possible that while SP didn*t want to hurt those she portrayed in the book, if they happened to see it she was comfortable in showing how far she had come since that suicide attempt? My opinion is that she knew she had written a good book, that the work stood for itself and that the message could be taken in a positive way. Dena said some of the same things in an earlier posting.
Onto another subject: Paul Alexander*s *Rough Magic* had a *reliable source* remembering Plath on a transatlantic crossing back to the States just before her second Fulbright year (and right after her marriage to TH), supposedly for an American abortion. Has anyone ever heard evidence of this? I find it hard to believe that SP would have made that trip without checking in on her mother; I*m sure that even if the abortion story were true, she could have found some excuse for her mother to explain her trip. Opinions?
Nancy
Falls Church, Virginia, USA
26th March 1998
I am relativly new at reading Sylvia Plath's work. But, there is something very profound in what she has to say. You always need to look deeply at her work; not for the surface message but the one she buries deep within the poem. Her poems are a part of her. I do not know if they are the best or worst part of her, but they are the real and painful parts of her. How dare Ted Hughes play the injured party! HE was sleeping with another woman, how did he expect her to react? No Mr. Hughes you and your kind get no pity from me, but Sylvia does for ever being fool enough to marry the likes of you.
Margheritta Tessitore
Hannibal, USA
26th March 1998
This is becoming heated huh? With some remarkable postings in the past several days, I have been wanting to put in my own two cents...Ms Toomer, you are right on target calling Hughes the martyr. I believe it a bit shallow that he writes this book and still, in a sense, has nothing to say. "Let the book speak for itself' is not good enough. Far from expecting fair, it stills is awfully cold of him. And Ms Reiner, noting the cultural differences was a great choice of subject. I have felt myself, that all along, in the reviews pouring out of Britain and America, that the Brits were favoring Hughes and the American's Plath. When you look at the sales, Britains' over 75,000 copies, BL has been on top since it's first weekend, save one week, and it America, on the NY Times list, it wasn't higher than 7 and has been dropping since. The Brits I feel are sensitive about Plath dying there (and possibly some are embarrassed), and they do respect her poetry very much, but it is Hughes who gives them a good name these days. And Plath that gives us all something to get excited about. So let this rage continue I suppose. I was one for giving Hughes a chance, for picking up his poems and reading them, trying to be fair. But it just can't be. It can't be that way. 'I could not run without having to run forever.'
Peter Steinberg
Alexandria, USA
25th March 1998
I've been thinking quite a bit about Stewart's posting regarding the strict lines that were drawn between the personal and the professional (and, as he puts it, personal and artistic) lives before our age of Geraldo.
I guess one of the things that has always struck me about SP is her willingness to discuss (and, by some accounts, her delight in discussing) her first suicide attempt. Even in our age of full disclosure, it strikes me as unusual to be so forthcoming about such a personal event, except with ones' closest friends (and of course, except for those who end up tabloid talk shows, but I think most of us would agree that those are not a representative sample of Western, or even just American, society). However, it seems as if Plath told just about anyone who would listen about the incident in her basement -- even what is published in LH seems to bear this out. Given that _The Bell Jar_ was such a thinly veiled account of her life at the time (sure to be recognized by just about ANYONE who happened to pick it up who knew Plath), doesn't it seem odd that she'd try to sell it in the US under a pseudonym -- putatively to save her mother's feelings? Doesn't it seem much more likely ! that it was an act of aggression (conscious or unconscious) against her mother, her identity meant to be kept a secret only from those who didn't know her well enough to recognize Ester Greenwood as SP herself? In other words, those who she would have been trying to "protect" are the very people who would have recognised the book as having been written by SP.
The line in TH's poem, 'half of your mortified, half of you smiling' could then mean something like this: mortified, not because her *mother* would be hurt, but because the public would also recognise Ester as Plath; smiling, not because the book was published, but because of the hurt and humiliation the publication of BJ caused her mother.
Or am I just reading way too much into this? Sorry for my stubborn perseverence on this one issue!
Christy
Ann Arbor, MI, USA
25th March 1998
In response to Dena Tooma's postings, I would argue that to downplay or discount Plath's death obssession is as incongruous as fitting the Medusa with a nice pair of sensible shoes. Attempts to sanitize her work as a hymn to rebirth are doomed to failure the moment one actually turns to the verse itself. For Plath, "rebirth" means not new life, but release from life.
The subjective landscape, "the light of the mind," in which Plath resides is a photographic negative image, an Underworld, an achievement comprable to Milton's Hell or Dante's Inferno. Here, love is a "grief" or a predator which flies by night, "looking, with its hooks, for something to love." Nature is an "atrocity," full of "malignity," "acids," "poisons," where the very flowers are "hell flames," mouths "just bloodied," and "full of dark advice." The diety that presides over this Sadean universe is the Moon, the Terrible Mother, "bald and wild. . . with the O-gape of complete despair," whose "blacks crackle and drag." This is the underbelly of the Rosseauist fictions (to use Paglian constructs) society uses to ward off the nightmare of chtonian Nature, with its triumphant violence, brutality, cruelty. Plath, poetic genius and suicide, the victim of torturous shock treament therapy, was given a rare, frightening opportunity to see clearly through society's comfortin! g, false constructs and the brilliance to communicate her appalling message in a clear, strong voice which continues to send her admirers scurrying to excuse it, to make it palatable, to politicize it, to find a positive spin.
An examination of the chronolgical composition of the poems composed during her last year (see "The Collected Poems") reveals Plath's clear trajectory towards suicide (or perhaps as she might term it, "perfection") interrupted briefly by a life and death struggle for survival ending in defeat. The Gorgon persona Plath assumes for this struggle is an apotropaion, a mask worn to ward off evil, to bar the encroachment of Death, her everpresent Rival ("No day is safe from news of you"), who has been "wandering about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me" but now returns in force, like a condor, snapping its beak. The charm works for a while, but ultimately fails, and the sharp, brilliant edges of her poetry , heady with self-hood, dissolve into hallucinatory self-disintegration. Her last poem, "Edge," a lovely murder/suicide fantasy which Plath envisions as performance art ("blacks" is a theatrical term for stage curtains), was recreated in life a few days later, complete with pitchers of milk at the children's feet (mercifully the children were spared).
Many critics tiptoe past the white elephant of Plath's suicide as if it were somehow unrelated to the poems, as if Ted Hughes' fingerprints were on the gas knobs, or as if it's a nasty fact that delegitimizes her work. On the contrary, I agree with Janet Malcolm that Plath's poetry achieves its hold on our psyches precisely because of her suicide. It gives her poems their horrible authority. She asks but one question: "Do I terrify?"
I agree with Elaine Connell's latest posting in placing Plath as a Romantic. While Plath's inspiration was fired by the new, burgeoning confessional school headmastered by Lowell and she experimented with their methods (most of the resulting poems from this experiment were excised from the published Ariel by the traditional Hughes, who found them intolerably personal and "aggressive"), her finest work places her directly in the lineage of the daemonic branch of Romanticism analyzed by Paglia in "Sexual Personae," an anti-Wordsworthian strain originating with Sade and Blake, developed by Coleridge, and extended through such nineteenth century "decadents" as Baudelaire, Huysman, Emily Bronte, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Emily Dickinson. Perhaps Hughes himself is the last of this tradition. It reaches its apotheosis in Sylvia Plath.
The life and legend of Plath and Hughes (with its adulteries, dabblings in the occult, psychic episodes, multiple suicides, and murder of a child), the violent, astonishing emergence of Plath's "Ariel" voice (so often described in terms of demonic "possession") , and the frenzied output of poetry, is comprable only to that of the doomed, legendary High Romantics --- Byron, Shelley, --- in its mythic force, its power to fascinate and disturb, its forbidden allure.
The unfortunate politicization of the arts and literature over the last twenty years has distorted Plath's and Hughes' achievements and co-opted them both into the battleground of the sex wars and political correctness. Thus, Plath, whose work is a brilliant evocation of the brutality and terror of feminine, chthonian Nature and which fairly bristles with misogyny, is misread and appropriated as a feminist poster child while Hughes' "Birthday Letters," a work of poetry clearly in the vein of the daemonic Romanticism outlined above, is disseminated as if it were a lawyer's brief. Hughes, whom Plath herself shrewdly admits is "a great scapegoat" ("Stings"), is my personal nominatation for THE Literary Martyr of the 20th Century: his crucifixion occurred not once but is doomed to be repeated each time the misguided Plath coven finds a new convert.
Stewart Clarke
New York, USA
25th March 1998
I found myself shocked and dismayed at Hughes' continued martyrdom in light of the fact that HE'S the one still alive. His silence has been understandable, his need to "protect" his children admirable, but once again he has done another grave disservice to the literary community. His unforgivable destruction of Plath's last journals notwithstanding, he continues to plod along, 35 years later, wrapped in his own anti-American bias. It colors his words first to last, never expressing any more than his frustration over cultural nuances. As for Hughes' professed lack of culpability in her ultimate demise, has one forgotten the second Mrs. Hughes, who five years after Sylvia's suicide made her own departure in the same manner, taking their young child with her.
Kate Reiner
Los Angeles, CA, USA
25th March 1998
BIRTHDAY LETTERS by Ted Hughes will be published in Germany by Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt, in autumn 1998. We also have the only edition of THE JOURNALS of Sylvia Plath!! Please contact me if you wish further information.
Dagmar Fretter
Frankfurt, Germany
25th March 1998
Thanks, Anja. I failed to mention that it is mostly an intro to the eight different poets. I bought it mainly for the poets featured other than Plath and Sexton. But I still love to open it and read the SP and AS poems over and over. The editor placed them in a compelling sequence, especially Sylvia's. They are a clear indicator of her maturation as a poet from 1956(I believe), to the time of her death. Sigh.
Dena Tooma
Toronto, Canada
25th March 1998
I wholeheartedly agree with Elaines comment on Plath speaking out the anger that most of us women sometimes feel or have felt. And Sylvia speaks in a personal way, which is very different from having a male writer who lets one of his characters appear as a woman in rage (like Medea).
I can also recommend the anthology mentioned by Dena Tooma, it is a good introduction to these poets. The selection of poems by Sylvia is a very good one, I think.
Anja Beckmann
Leipzig, Germany
25th March 1998
I have heard mention of Robert Lowell and the Confessional School in certain postings and want to let all interested know of a book called "Eight American Poets: An Anthology." The group of poets featured consists of Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and of course, Sylvia Plath. What a happy bunch, eh?
For each poet there is a short biography and an extensive selection of poetry. :)
Bibliography: Conarroe, Joel. Eight American Poets: An Anthology. Vintage Books: New York, 1994
Dena Tooma
Toronto, Canada
24th March 1998
I want to find out all that I can about this enigmatic and beautiful woman. Please, please, please, email me. Any subject matter will suffice!
Jason Paul Bokenkamp
Queanbeyan, Australia
24th March 1998
Mr. Clarke, isn't it ironic that Hughes, after being so frugal with the gritty in Plath's work, a man who was against the use of autobiographical details, presented us all with a book of poems so extremely personal in nature? Sure, a man can change over the course of 35 years, but did he have to do it at HER expense? It seems as though he has no qualms about baring the dark, the personal, or the taboo, so long as it is exposed through HIS eyes alone. Insert sarcasm here: Oh, what a paradox that man is, a bundle of mystery, surrounded, shrouded by a cloud of midges.
The publication of "Birthday Letters" is yet another slap in the face to Plath lovers. We are forced to look at IT as a final artifact of their relationship instead of anything Plath might have written in the last months of her life. How sad. How sad and maddening that Plath fans have been, and still are, at the mercy of Hughes' whims. And that annoying little habit of playing The Martyr. Someone hand me a paper bag, I think I'm gonna barf. . .
How about: You do not do, you do not do/Anymore Ted Hughes?
Dena Tooma
Toronto, Canada
24th March 1998
Regarding Christy's posting, it's obvious that Hughes' poem "Costly Speech" illuminates what must have been an ongoing conflict between SP and TH about writing The Bell Jar and about using autobiographical material in general. This was a time when there were strict, strict lines drawn between personal life and an artist's work; the burgeoning Confessional school headmastered by Robert Lowell was creating a huge storm in the literary world. SP was caught up in this conflict: exciting permission from one of the gods of her Olympus (Lowell) to use break dark, emotional, personal taboos versus the ethic she was raised in, that of keeping one's personal life actually separate (hard to fathom in the nineties) from one's work. I'm sure she and TH got into many heated discussions about the whole issue (his entire handling of the Plath legacy, his editing of Ariel, his silence, his apparent self-service in destroying her journals to protect the living, in fact the whole SP phenomenon, can be attributed to this clash of two conflicting artistic ehtics).
The apparent vow SP made to her brother, alluded to in "Costly Speech," seems clearly some sort of promise to protect their mother, to "fictionalize," if she wrote The Bell Jar (or perhaps a promise not to write it at all). The writing of the novel must have been a very conflicted and liberating struggle between her different "selves": what Hughes describes as "your left hand wrote in a mirror/ Opposite your right,/ Half of you mortified, half of you smiling." (I believe this schizophrenic imagery can be extended with equal accuracy to the composition of the Ariel poems, of which The Bell Jar was the seed.) It seems clear that Hughes' note of blame in this poem stems from his disapproval for her having written the novel in the first place (which devastated her mother), as well as his rage against the fates that dog them throughout the book (and their lives) -- manifesting in this instance as that copyright "loophole" forcing them to publish it against Aurelia's wishes.
Stewart Clarke
New York, USA
23rd March 1998
I would never be so bold as to call myself a Plathologist, however I have been reading her work and re-reading her work for some time and feel the need to clear up a common misconception. Sylvia Plath's poetry is not solely a tribute to the "art of dying," as some may think. I understand how her poetry may be construed as work that is primarily concerned with the theme of death and dying. Though, SP's use of death imagery is a complex one. Death, to Sylvia Plath was a mode of transcendence and rebirth. This belief probably stemmed in her suicide attempts and the rejuvenation of self-hood that she achieved after each one(particularly the one chronicled in The Bell Jar). Sylvia Plath's love affair was with the myth of renewal and a forging of new and better selves.
It is easy enough to view her poetry as an obsession with death, simply because she took her own life. Nobody knows, but she might have seen this final act as the ultimate transcendence--sadly, one in which we were not allowed to participate. But one has to scrutinize imagery and symbolism in her work, particularly that of the White Goddess myth; life-in-death and death-in-life and of the Moon Muse. Sylvia Plath's concerns with death were, as stated by SP herself, an obsession with self-renewal, not of some dark finality, a descent into nothingness. Plath's fierce poem, "Lady Lazarus" is a prime example of this belief, in which the speaker, "the Phoenix, the libertarian spirit" claims,
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout. . .Plath introduced this poem on the BBC: "The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first." Dying is the trouble, rebirth is the great gift. Sylvia Plath was not a lover of death, but a lover of life.
Poetry as bold, effective and passionate as Sivvy's can ONLY BE a tribute to life. Darkness cannot achieve what Plath has achieved. This forum is a small testament to her belief in renewal. With every poem she wrote she became a newer person, shedding her pasts, her lovers, her ideals, her obsessions, like skin. Life, Sylvia says, is about re-birth, never about death.
Please excuse any grammatical mistakes, or spelling mistakes. I wrote this in a feverish pitch and felt correcting any errors would be cheating myself out of the excitement I felt while writing it.
Any responses?
Dena Tooma
Toronto, Canada
23rd March 1998
On the subject of the mythology debate which has been developing on the Forum mainly between Stewart and Melissa. You're both right in a sense. For what is mythology but the attempt of people to make lasting stories and meanings out of the major events of their personal experiences? It doesn't matter that someone takes a scene from their own life and invests it with mythological significance because it is from these very scenes that mythology originates. I think that those of us who try to emphasise the mythological roots of Plath's work are trying to rescue it from the accusation that it is merely the product of some neurotic's overactive, if not mad mind. I know I've been profoundly influenced by the Eliot/Pound dictum on the necessity for impersonality in poetry and this stress on Plath's use of mythology makes her oeuvre conform. Perhaps we should just reject that particular model and claim Plath for the transcendent subjectivism of the Romantics?
I can't help but notice that if a woman uses her own experience in her art she is readily viewed as deranged or solipsistic; but a man using the same technique (such as Lowell for example) is interpreted as speaking for the human condition through the vehicle of his life. Many of the contributions to the Forum have attested to how much Plath speaks for Everywoman - possibly one of the few times this has occurred in literature (with due acknowledgement to Anne Bradstreet). Certainly it may be the first time that threatening female anger has been portrayed in all its terrifying fury expressed by an identifiable individual woman and not a character such as Clytemnestra or Medea. Perhaps the problem is that Everyman still can't fully understand, or is reluctant to contemplate, the rage which lurks so much in the female psyche. "Beware, Beware...."
Elaine Connell
Hebden Bridge, UK
23rd March 1998
In reply to Christy's query about the poem "Costly Speech" and its possible connection to the publication of THE BELL JAR in the U.S., the following account from Linda Wagner's biography (1987) might shed some light on the question of whether or not SP wanted the novel published in America:
"The confusions the New Yorker rejections [of some Ariel poems] created was intensified in early January [1963] when Sylvia received a rejection letter from Judith Jones, her Knopf editor of THE COLOSSUS, to whom she had submitted THE BELL JAR for American publication. Dated December 28, 1962, Jones's letter criticized the manuscript for its unbelievable point of view, saying that Plath's use of the college girl's voice did not prepare the reader for the seriousness of her illness or for her suicide attempt.
"Sylvia quickly submitted the novel to Harper & Row, eager to find an American publisher before Heinemann brought out the book in England on January 14, 1963. Even though she had earlier referred to THE BELL JAR as a 'pot-boiler' and would be publishing it under a pseudonym ('Victoria Lucas'), her attitude about the novel had changed. Reading it in proofs, Sylvia realized what she had accomplished." (p. 233)
I'm not sure where Christy got the idea: "despite her stated wishes that it not be published in the U.S." - Maybe I'm misreading what Christy said. At any rate, THE BELL JAR was not reissued in England until 1967 under Sylvia's own name, and of course not published in the U.S. until 1971, the same year that he brought out "Crossing the Water" and "Winter Trees." In any case, I'm sure that Aurelia was fit to be tied when it did come out!
Anyone else want to take a shot at this?
Jack Folsom
Sharon, Vermont, US
21st March 1998
I've been sort of lurking here for the last couple months, hoping that someone would offer an interpretation of "Costly Speech". It strikes me as beautiful in its use of language, but it's so blatantly autobiographical that I'm not sure it's even possible to appreciate the poem without some under- standing of its impetus.
Upon first reading, I assumed right away that the poem was about the US publication of The Bell Jar. (For those of you who haven't followed SP's & TH's personal life closely, here's the story in brief: TH wrote to SP's mother, asking if he could publish the book in the US, because he wanted to buy a new house. Aurelia, who hated the book, told him that she didn't want it published in the US, but that the copyright belonged to him, and that it was up to him. Apparently, he decided against buying the property, but a loophole in US copy- right law was leaving open the possibility of publication of the book, and, if I'm not mistaken, publication of the book under such circumstances would have deprived TH and his children of any royalties from its US sale. So, despite Aurelia's anguish, he decided to publish the book.)
However, if the assumption that the poem refers to the US publication of the The Bell Jar is correct, there are a whole host of lines that are puzzling (at least to me).
I quote:
Just as your own words
Irrevocably given to your brother,
Hostage guarantors,
And my own arier words, conscripted, reporting for duty.
Forbade and forbade and forbade it.They were simple guards and all were yawning,
Ignorant how your left hand wrote in a mirror
Opposite your right,
Half of you mortified, half of you smiling.And ignorant of the spooky chemistry
Of opportunity, of boom and bust
In the optic nerve of editors.
Ignorant of the tumblers in the lock
of US Copyright Law
Which your fingers so deftly unpicked.To me, it sounds like he's blaming SP for the publication of the The Bell Jar -- as if she'd done something, despite her stated wishes that it not be published in the US, to cause its publication anyway. Almost as if there was some sort of contract that she signed, or will that she left...
Is anyone out there able to shed some light on this poem?
Christy
Ann Arbor, MI, USA
21st March 1998
Contrast the Blatty-esque scenario in Hughes' poem "The God" with Plath's recording of several poems for BBC Radio (October 1962, including "Daddy," "The Rabbit Catcher," "Amnesiac" and several other poems blatantly damaging to Hughes for anyone "in the know"), in which one clearly hears that SP found these poems drolly humorous (I still chuckle to myself about a wonderful ancedote in Alvarez: SP crosslegged on his studio floor, pulling out her poems, saying in all innocence that she wants to read him her some "light verse" and launching into "Lady Lazarus!" This is the Scorpio sense of humor to a tee.). With spiteful relish, Plath, in her clipped, disdainful Boston Brahmin accent, sounds like Dame Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers reciting the collected works of Dr. Seuss.
There is a fascinating interview afterwards with Peter Orr of the BBC, in which Plath enthuses over the "new breakthrough, a very intense breakthrough" of Robert Lowell's Life Studies (which had rocked the literary world with its unabashed confessionalism) and the work of Anne Sexton. Like a hound hot on the scent, she applauds their crossing the boundaries of traditional poetry into "very serious, very personal experience," the "peculiar, private and taboo." (The Scorpio motto) Our girl sounds as if she's discussing gardening tips at a Sunday tea as she gaily speaks of "madness, torture" and other appropriate poetic subjects. Like Lowell and Sexton, she writes "immediately out of my sensuous and emotional experience. . . But "she states emphatically, "I CANNOT sympathize with these cries of the heart that are informed by nothing more than a cut from needle or a knife." The poet must be able to "control and manipulate these experiences." Writing of personal experience! "shouldn't be a shut box, a mirror looking, a narcissistic experience. It should be relevant to the bigger things, the larger things, like Hiroshima, Dachau, and so on." Here we have the crux of one of the greatest debates about Plath's work: How appropriate is it to imagine any "relevance" between one's personal experiences and, say, Auschwitz? Isn't this, perhaps, the zenith of "narcissism?" And in some way, unstable, "degenerate, or sensationalistic?" (see Peter Steinberg's posting below). Pundits?
Stewart Clarke
New York, USA
20th March 1998
Hi! I am doing a research paper of The Bell Jar. My topic is the self identity of Silvia in the novel. If anyone have some information that can be shared with me I will appreciate it. Thanks!
Priscilla
Puerto Rico
20th March 1998
Thank you, Elaine, for creating and maintaining this site. It's such a pleasure to visit it every day and immerse myself in my pet subject!
I visited London for the first time in January. I had slated my first full day -- January 17 -- in the U.K. for a pilgramage to 23 Fitzroy Road -- but as I was both jet-lagged and a bit nervous about setting out so far from my Mayfair hotel via Underground, I opted for a nap instead. Almost immediately I regretted that decision. My husband and I had a very full itinerary for our five-day trip, so I was sure I had missed my only chance to see that all-important Plath landmark. (My husband, by the way, is fully supportive of my SP obsession but not a fan himself.)
Well-rested yet disappointed that evening, I by chance picked up the Times -- and couldn't believe it when I found the news of "Birthday Letters" splashed across the front page and filling up several inside pages. Remarkably, my first trip to London coincided with this huge literary event. I avidly followed the story for the rest of my vacation and immediately ordered an advance copy of "BL" from the Times Bookshop, to be delivered to my home in the States. I'm on my third re-reading of the "BL" poems now and am trying to put my thoughts into words. There are so many that truly touch my heart with Ted Hughes' obvious love for SP -- but just as many that are blatantly self-serving. In the meantime, I'll be checking in regularly to hear what everyone else has to say. (By the way, it was this site that kept me sane and satiated during the six weeks it took for the book to come to me from overseas.) I'm sure the students who have posted messages asking for Plath information and commentary have been inundated with responses; I responded to one myself! However, I'd like to encourage those students to make an effort to dig out the information they want themselves. Sylvia Plath's life was as rich and interesting as her poetry and prose, and just about everyone will find something he or she will relate to -- you don't have to be American, a writer, a mother or even female to feel a connection to her. The many biographies of Sylvia Plath are fascinating reading, and her poetry truly opens up when you have an understanding of the life behind the words. I'm willing to bet that if you make this extra effort, before long you'll be posting messages to sites like this and arguing over the minutiae of her short life. At the very least, your exposure to Sylvia Plath should not be limited to a high-school or college assignment. Plathologists -- do you agree? Please back me up!
A happy postscript: We did make time to go to Fitzroy Road on our last day in London. If anyone is interested in seeing the photograph of my favorite London landmark, I would be happy to scan and e-mail it!
Nancy
Falls Church, Virginia, USA
19th March 1998
Today in abnormal pyschology class my instructor mentioned that Sylvia Plath was schizophrenic. I previously held the notion that she was severely depressed, possibly suffering from manic depression (bipolar disorder). If anyone can clear this issue up for me, please send me email on the matter. Much thanks.
Tobias
Belvidere, IL, USA
18th March 1998
Hello! I am currently reading "The Bell Jar" for the first time for a unit in my AP English class on Controversial Novels. I have to read the story and then talk about why the book was controversial in its time. If anyone out there has any comments about how Plath's work is controversial I would greatly appreciate it. Actually, any information would be interesting. I feel I,too, relate to some of what Plath went through. Thank you!
Gina Moore
Camp Lejeune, USA
18th March 1998
I just recently became acquainted with the works of Sylvia Plath. I must say, that when I picked up The Bell Jar for the first time, I was haunted by the story. But as I read it through again, and the again, I realized how much I was like her. I haven't yet gotten the new collections of her poems, but I hope to soon. I thank you for pouring out your minds and opinions to anyone who wants to read them.
Allison Platt
St. Louis, USA
18th March 1998
Reading Melissa Dobson's response to my identification of Plath as the Pythoness of Delphi, I feel like the man standing at the corner of 34th and 5th asking directions to the Empire State Building! Shrewd and insightful as ever, Ms. Dobson points out that Hughes gives the Delphic trope (if mere trope it is) full utterance in "The God." Here, we get a chilling picture of Plath almost at the mercy of the voice speaking through her:: "In your sleep, glassy-eyed,/ You heard its instructions. When you woke,/ Your hands moved. You watched them in dismay . . .You could not explain it or who/ Ate at your hands . . . you wrote in a fury, weeping,/ Your joy a trance-dancer/ In the smoke in the flames." Elaine, Melissa, perhaps we must abandon the confessionals, expressionists, and imagists altogether and proclaim SP as the last of the great Romantics!
Stewart Clarke
New York, USA
18th March 1998
Responding to Stewart Clarke's inspired reading of "The Rag Rug": Hughes makes this connection explicit later in Birthday Letters in "The God," with its telekinetic horror-flick machinations, when his dream-house becomes Plath's spirit-house and she intones, "God is speaking through me." Paglia notes in the passage from Sexual Personae referred to by SC that "usurpation of identity" is a consequence of oracular possession. This is the core, I think, of the argument against grouping Plath with the confessionalists -- the artistic distance she achieves through her oracular voice. Seamus Heaney, interestingly, places Plath with the imagists (Pound, H.D., etc.), saying that she achieves "the exhilaration of a mind . . . outstripping the person who has suffered." To touch on Peter Steinberg's (via Kroll) point about common misreadings of the poems as "degenerate," I think this happens primarily when readers disregard the act of Plath's writing, quick and generative, see! ing the Hindu god Siva as a god of destruction only, not regeneration. Yes her subject exudes a funk, the stench of death; but so much power her verse unleashes; she achieves the linguistic equivalent, perhaps, of splitting the atom, with all its frightful implications.
Melissa Dobson
Newport RI, USA
17th March 1998
I bought Birthday Letters some weeks ago. I'm still reading it, for the second time now. I still haven't forged an opinion. I'm confused by it's momentary authenticity and the moments where Hughes' words seem artificial and contrived. Nevertheless, it's fascinating stuff.
Dena Tooma
Toronto, Canada
17th March 1998
I had a Eureka moment this weekend, Plathologists. Due to my stimulating discussion with Melissa Dobson regarding Camille Paglia's essay, "Amherst's Madame de Sade" (see postings for March 9, 10) I was perusing Paglia's brilliant and outrageous book Sexual Personae. I came across a paragraph that made my head spin, rather like Linda Blair in the classic 70s horror film "The Exorcist" (soon to be re-released with new footage).
I quote from the poem "The Rat Rug," in Birthday Letters:
I dreamed of our house
Before we ever found it. A great snake
Lifted its head from a well in the middle of the house
Exactly where the well is, beneath its slab,
In the middle of the house.
A golden serpent, thick as a child's body,
Eased from the opened well. And poured out
Through the back door, a length that seemed unending ---
Till its tail tapered over the threshold,
The deep-worn, cracked threshold, soon to be ours.The house Hughes refers to in this chilling passage, of course, is the house in Devon where his marriage to SP fell apart, and where she wrote the poems that would eventually become Ariel. In Sexual Personae, Paglia notes:
I take one more model from Greek prophetic transsexualism, the Delphic oracle. . .. The Delphic oracle was called Pythia or Pythoness after the giant serpent Pytho, slain by invading Apollo. Legend claims the oracle was maddened by fumes rising from a chasm above the decaying chthonian serpent. But no chasm has been found at Delphi.
The oracle was Apollo's high priestess and spoke for him. . . The prophesying oracle was the instrument of the god of poetry, a lyre upon which he played. E. R. Dodds states, "The Pythia became entheos, plena deo: the god entered into her and used her vocal organs as if they were his own, exactly as the so-called control' does in modern spirit-mediumship. . ." This resembles the ventriloquism Frazer ascribes to entranced shamans. Michelangelo uses the Delphic metaphor in a madrigal comparing a Renaissance virago, intellectual and poet, Vittoria Colonna, to the oracle: " A man in a woman, indeed a god, speaks through her mouth." The Delphic oracle is a woman invaded by a male spirit." Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, Chapter 2, pp. 46,47.
Obviously Hughes, whether truthfully or not, is giving us a vision of the Devon house as a latter-day Delphi, complete with Pytho in the well. Alvarez, in his essay about Plath in The Savage God, refers to this time of the Hughes marriage as a reversal. Whereas Hughes had always been the one in apparent control with SP hanging back as the dutiful wife, in Devon Plath, fecund with her burgeoning voice as well as the unborn Nicholas, had definitely come into her own, had a new air of strenght and authority, while Hughes seemed content to fade into the background and play with little Frieda. I believe I read that he was also experiencing writer's block at that time. I put it that, in Hughes' prophetic vision, the serpent flees the house at the incoming invasion of the god of poetry, Apollo/Ariel. SP then becomes the Pythoness, the oracle (her "true voice" is so often referred to as a demon, or daimon), and Hughes her eunuch priest. Thoughts, cheers, jeers?
Stewart Clarke
New York, USA
16th March 1998
In Judith Kroll's Chapters in a Mythology, mentioned in several earlier submissions, she brings up the point that we often cloud what Plath's poetry actually says. Krolls says, 'Readers may tend to view all of her poems in which death or suffering appear in any form as suicidal or sensationalistic or degenerate, as if her interest in the theme of death could not have another, or larger, significance. (Kroll Chaper VIII)' So I offer this, which poems do we, the readers, most often confuse, and also why?
Peter Steinberg
Alexandria, USA
16th March 1998
Hi, I'm doing some research on Sylvia Plath for my English class and I was hoping that maybe if anyone had some info/links on her background as well as any analysis of/thoughts about "Lady Lazarus" they could E-mail me about that? ANY info you have would be much appreciated. I and my English grade thank you!
Tara Merchant
Beavercreek, USA
13th March 1998
Hello, I just recently bought "Birthday Letters". I was not very familiar with Silvia Plath other then the poem "Daddy" which I have always believed was as brilliant as it was angry. When I read "Birthday Letters" I became facinated with this women who Hughes is protraying. I am not attempting to write a thesis on "Birthday Letters" in relation to "Ariel", American feminism, protrayl of the author and such. I would love some opinions, advice about critics and research. Please email me with any aid you can give me.
Michele VanBalkom
Vancouver, Canada
13th March 1998
I like this poem a lot-- it made me think of Gillman's The Yellow Wallpaper. The one thing that struck me about this poem, though is that it really could be about any writer. The moment a writer puts a thought down on paper and shares it, that thought, those words no longer belong to him/her. They belong to the reader. It's part of the process. Admittedly, the Sylvia Plath fiasco has gotten a bit out of hand with her mother publishing her letters, her diaries being pried open, her life being held under a microscope. But she was a writer, and her poems at least, belong as much to us as they did to her.
Jamie
USA
13th March 1998
More tidbits to add -- this time from the current (16th March) issue of The New Yorker:
a) from "The Talk of the Town" -- "For Better or for Worse, it's the Ted and Sylvia show." The article is a reprise on the Cooper Union Symposium, at which A. Alvarez complained that people were buying BL for the wrong reasons. "It's the Oprah Winfrey element," Alvarez said disdainfully. Then at the end of the article: "But the real daytime-TV moment came when the panelists retired to Cafe' Loup for dinner, and Fran McCullough, who had earlier told the audience about Hughes aand Plath's interest in tarot, mentioned that she had been to have her own cards read the previous week. 'I asked the card reader, "How's Sylvia?" McCullough recounted. And she told me, 'She's very angry. It's keeping her from getting to the light. She's VERY angry'."
b) The cartoonist Roz Chast posts "Two More Poems from Ted Hughes:
I once knew a lady from Mass.
Who was sometimes a pain in the ass.
Every damn comma
Was really high drama
But she was quite a talented lass.Sylvia Plath was my mate,
She and I went on a date.
She learned how to cook,
Then published a book,
And the rest is all up for debate."Jack Folsom
Sharon, Vermont, US
12th March 1998
This forum is administered by Elaine Connell, author of Sylvia Plath: Killing The Angel In The House who lives in Hebden Bridge, near where Sylvia Plath is buried and where Ted Hughes was born. Web Design by Pennine Pens. This forum is moderated - contributions which are inappropriate, anonymous or likely to offend may be edited or omitted.
