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This book is by no means the last word on Sylvia Plath. Over time, new material will surface and new questions will emerge. But it is, I hope, a richer, more accurate, and less pathological portrait of Sylvia Plath’s life than what now exists. By sifting through Plath’s poems, prose, sketches, journals, and letters, as well as the transatlantic archives of her husband and contemporaries—and listening to the testimony of dozens of friends, many on record for the first time—I have tried to recover what Plath gave to us rather than what she gave up. I hope to free Plath from the cultural baggage of the past fifty years and reposition her as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. Plath’s best poetry is as aesthetically accomplished, groundbreaking, and reflective of its historical moment as the poetry of her idols, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. She ought to be remembered for her transcendent, trailblazing poems, not for gassing herself in her kitchen.
Of course, what makes Sylvia Plath’s life compelling to so many readers is its tragedy. Her life, her fame, and her art will always be tied to her suicide—there is no changing that. But the most famous woman poet of the twentieth century was neither fragile ingénue nor femme fatale. She was no Medea, no Eurydice, no Electra. Rather, she was a highly disciplined craftswoman whose singular voice helped transform American and British literature, and whose innovative work gave new energy to the burgeoning literary and cultural revolutions of her time. The goal, then, is to recover Sylvia Plath from cliché—to offer an alternative narrative to the Plath myth, to debunk the sensational and melodramatic rhetoric that surrounds her, and, finally, to examine her life through her commitment not to death, but to art.
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Sylvia Plath was one of the most highly educated women of her generation, an academic superstar and perennial prizewinner. Even after a suicide attempt and several months at McLean Hospital, she still managed to graduate from Smith College summa cum laude. She was accepted to graduate programs in English at Columbia, Oxford, and Radcliffe and won a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge, where she graduated with high honors. She was so brilliant that Smith asked her to return to teach in their English department without a PhD. Her mastery of English literature’s past and present intimidated her students and even her fellow poets. In Robert Lowell’s 1959 creative writing seminar, Plath’s peers remembered how easily she picked up on obscure literary allusions. “ ‘It reminds me of Empson,’ Sylvia would say….‘It reminds me of Herbert.’ ‘Perhaps the early Marianne Moore?’ ”26 Later, Plath made small talk with T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender at London cocktail parties, where she was the model of wit and decorum.
Very few friends realized that she struggled with depression, which revealed itself episodically. In college, she aced her exams, drank in moderation, dressed sharply, and dated men from Yale and Amherst. She struck most as the proverbial golden girl. But when severe depression struck, she saw no way out. In 1953, a depressive episode led to botched electroshock therapy sessions at a notorious asylum. Plath told her friend Ellie Friedman that she had been led to the shock room and “electrocuted.” “She told me that it was like being murdered, it was the most horrific thing in the world for her. She said, ‘If this should ever happen to me again, I will kill myself.’ ”27 Plath attempted suicide rather than endure further tortures.
In 1963, the stressors were different. A looming divorce, single motherhood, loneliness, illness, and a brutally cold winter fueled the final depression that would take her life. Plath had been a victim of psychiatric mismanagement and negligence at age twenty, and she was terrified of depression’s “cures,” as she wrote in her last letter to her psychiatrist—shock treatment, insulin injections, institutionalization, “a mental hospital, lobotomies.”28 It is no accident that Plath killed herself on the day she was supposed to enter a British psychiatric ward.
Sylvia Plath did not think of herself as a depressive. She considered herself strong, passionate, intelligent, determined, and brave, like a character in a D. H. Lawrence novel. She was tough-minded and filled her journal with exhortations to work harder—evidence, others have said, of her pathological, neurotic perfectionism. Another interpretation is that she was—like many male writers—simply ambitious, eager to make her mark on the world. She knew that depression was her greatest adversary, the one thing that could hold her back. She distrusted psychiatry—especially male psychiatrists—and tried to understand her own depression intellectually through the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Erich Fromm, and others. Self-medication, for Plath, meant analyzing the idea of a schizoid self in her honors thesis on The Brothers Karamazov.
Bitter experience taught her how to accommodate depression—exploit it, even—in her art. “There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive, or recreate it,” she wrote in her journal.29 The remark sounds trite, but her writing on depression was profound. Her own immigrant family background and experience at McLean Hospital gave her insight into the lives of the outcast. Elizabeth Hardwick’s claim that Plath had “nothing of the social revolutionary in her” is simply not true.30 Plath would fill her late work, sometimes controversially, with the disenfranchised—women, the mentally ill, refugees, political dissidents, Jews, prisoners, divorcées, mothers. As she matured, she became more determined to speak out on their behalf. In The Bell Jar, one of the greatest protest novels of the twentieth century, she probed the link between insanity and repression. Plath set The Bell Jar in 1953, but she wrote it in 1961, when she was moving in left-wing circles in London and becoming interested in the anti-psychiatry movement of R. D. Laing. The Bell Jar, like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, exposed a repressive Cold War America that could drive even the “best minds” of a generation crazy. Are you really sick, Plath asks, or has your society made you so? She never romanticized depression and death; she did not swoon into darkness. Rather, she delineated the cold, blank atmospherics of depression, without flinching. Plath’s ability to resurface after her depressive episodes gave her courage to explore, as Ted Hughes put it, “psychological depth, very lucidly focused and lit.”31 The themes of rebirth and renewal are as central to her poems as depression, rage, and destruction.
“What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asked in his poem “Harlem.” Did it “crust and sugar over— / like a syrupy sweet?”32 For most women of Plath’s generation, it did. But Plath was determined to follow her literary vocation. She dreaded the condescending label of “lady poet,” and she had no intention of remaining unmarried and childless like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. She wanted to be a wife, mother, and poet—a “triple-threat woman,” as she put it to a friend.33 These spheres hardly ever overlapped in the sexist era in which she was trapped, but for a time, she achieved all three goals.
Then, in the autumn of 1962, her marriage ended. The edifice fell, but the poetry came fast and strong. Alone with her two young children in a cold thatched manor home in rural England, she began writing the poems that would, as she predicted, make her name. While her early, formally intricate poems helped her achieve modest success, these Ariel poems—with their speed, daring, and bravado, and their rage against personal and historical oppressions—sounded a new note in postwar poetry. Plath died just eight days before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published, but her work broke through a literary glass ceiling. Poems like “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” seethe at the sexist prescriptions of Plath’s society, while “Edge” concedes with a cool, horrific irony that only a dead woman is “perfected.” She seemed to have scored the emerging women’s liberation movement to poetry.
More than fifty years later, Plath’s poems now seem locked in a fixed context: “confessional,” “feminist.” Yet she wrote her poems before these terms entered the cultural imagination. While she learned much from Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, whom she met in the late fifties, her aesthetic impul
se was more surrealist than confessional. Indeed, she treated the “confessional” impulse ironically in poems like “Lady Lazarus,” where the heroine performs a striptease for the “peanut-crunching crowd” that has come to watch her bare all and attempt another suicide. (The poem practically predicts reality television.) And while Plath looked to female writers like Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edith Sitwell, and Anne Sexton for models, her education was grounded in male modernism. The psychological and anthropological writings of Carl Jung, Robert Graves, and James Frazer, as well as the poetry and prose of W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and Ted Hughes himself, were the bedrock on which she built her scaffolding. The psychoanalytic approaches that have dominated previous Plath biographies ignore this “impersonal” literary tradition in which she was steeped and out of which her work grew. Jane Baltzell Kopp, who knew Plath and Hughes well at Cambridge, spoke of “the old, High Culture” that permeated their student existence: “that tradition had everything to do with the way we in those days all saw ourselves, each other, and our lives.” Anyone seriously interested in understanding Sylvia Plath’s poetry, Kopp suggested, would learn more by studying her English Tripos exam at Cambridge than her relationship with her dead father. “The amount—and range—of reading implied by those questions tells the tale.”34
Plath mastered this body of work, from Chaucer to Eliot. Her literary expertise may not be immediately apparent in a poem like “Daddy,” with its stuttering lines and nursery rhyme cadences. But the poem is the product of a long apprenticeship; it is Picasso on the verge of Cubism. Plath had to master her tradition in order to create something new. Her Ariel poems explore family trauma, marital problems, and sexual jealousy, yes, but they also interrogate history, war, totalitarianism, and a male literary tradition that had shut women out. The allusions in “Daddy” to T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” are easy to miss amid the poem’s many controversies. Likewise, “Edge” responds to W. B. Yeats, Robert Graves, and Shakespeare. The Bell Jar uses James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a template, while “Ariel” argues with Ted Hughes’s “The Thought-Fox” about the sources of creative inspiration. Plath redefined the elegy in “The Colossus” and “Daddy,” making space for anger as well as love and pathos. She pioneered the poetry of motherhood and challenged the male Romantic notion that the moorland outside her door was more sublime than her baby’s nursery. She is one of the first poets in English to write about miscarriage, abortion, and postpartum anxiety. Her poems about depression’s ravages—“Tulips,” “Elm,” “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” “Sheep in Fog,” “Edge”—are some of the finest in the language. They, and Plath herself, deserve a dispassionate reappraisal.
As does her marriage to Ted Hughes. The sensational nature of their first meeting—Plath famously bit Hughes’s cheek when he kissed her at a raucous party—has obscured the literary context that brought them together. Their relationship was, from its first theatrical moments, soldered on the work of Lawrence, Yeats, and Thomas.35 On the night they met in 1956, both were searching for a new idiom, eager to smash false poetic idols. For all their outward differences, they were, as a BBC commentator perceptively suggested, “two of a kind.”36 Their best poetry would be incantatory and unflinching; original, yet rooted in tradition; composed as much for the ear as for the eye. During the happy years of their marriage, Plath and Hughes dedicated themselves to writing a new kind of poetry, something “unliterary,” as Plath put it, which would break from the “Elegant Academicians.”37 “Such unbelievable making of words do physical things—the words seem to be the things,” the artist Barrie Cooke said of Hughes’s poems in 1962.38 The same is true of Ariel.
Plath and Hughes were not only husband and wife, they were also aesthetic collaborators: “If SP and I managed to get through it all, it was because for crucial years we defended each other, we were a sufficient world to each other: our poetic folie à deux saved us from being isolated, surrounded and eliminated,” Hughes said.39 “I see now that when we met, my writing, like hers, left its old path and started to circle and search.”40 Though the marriage did not last, its legacy reverberates still in the cadences of postwar fiction and poetry: The Colossus, The Bell Jar, Ariel, The Hawk in the Rain, and Lupercal, five of the most important works of the postwar period, were all largely written during the years of Plath and Hughes’s marriage. Plath’s confidence in their future had been prescient. As she wrote to Hughes in October 1956, “Darling, be scrupulous and date your letters. When we are old and spent, they will come asking for our letters; and we will have them dove-tailable.”41
Hughes has been vilified for his behavior toward Plath, whom he left for Assia Wevill in 1962. At the height of the women’s movement, protesters disrupted his American readings; Plath fans still vandalize the name “Hughes” on Plath’s gravestone in Yorkshire. An American poet, Robin Morgan, accused Hughes in a poem of murdering Plath. “He was being haunted and tormented in the name of feminism,” the American poet Ruth Fainlight, who was close to Plath and Hughes in the early 1960s, remembered.42 Hughes’s mishandling of Plath’s papers and his rearrangement of her original Ariel manuscript did little to reassure Plath’s readers that he was a responsible steward; he claimed that he destroyed her last 1963 journal, and, under his watch, her 1960–62 journals and 1962–63 unpublished novel disappeared.43 Still, the venom baffled him. To him, Plath was “ ‘Laurentian,’ not ‘women’s lib’ ”—that is, a disciple of D. H. Lawrence’s sexually liberated, creative philosophy, not a campaigner for women’s rights.44 Hughes thought she would have resented the feminist label, as his friend Doris Lessing did, for Plath had often expressed contempt for “career women” who disdained homemaking and child-rearing. (Plath’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Beuscher, also felt that “Sylvia was not a feminist.”)45 Hughes did not recognize that Lawrence’s novels offered Plath a template for equality and autonomy before the advent of second-wave feminism. Hughes retreated, and he let his sister Olwyn handle the Plath estate. But the two women, who met only six times, were bitter enemies; Olwyn once called Sylvia, in a published interview, “a complete bitch.”46 Olwyn portrayed Plath as selfish and unhinged in Bitter Fame, the controversial 1989 biography she coauthored with Anne Stevenson, and over the years she denied many feminist critics permission to quote Plath’s work. As Edward Lucie-Smith said, Olwyn “made no bones about the fact that she detested Sylvia.”47
The end of Plath and Hughes’s marriage was indeed terrible and destructive. There was violence in the relationship—Hughes admitted to sometimes slapping Plath when she was in a rage, while Plath once wrote in her journal of bloody scratches, sprained thumbs, and broken crockery. After the couple separated, Plath told Dr. Beuscher that Hughes had hit her in February 1961 when he returned home from an appointment and found her tearing up his manuscripts. Plath told Dr. Beuscher it was an “aberration,” and there is evidence that Hughes deeply regretted this act for the rest of his life.48 Violence was itself part of Plath and Hughes’s shared mythology, something they explored in the bedroom and on the page. They felt British poetry was at a low point, full of a destructive gentility, and they were determined to shock it out of submission. Writing forcefully about the horrors of humanity and nature became part of their joint project—one that gave both much happiness before, as Plath wrote in an early poem, “the play turned tragic.”49
Despite its bitter end, Plath and Hughes’s experimental, creative marriage was progressive for its time. In the mid-fifties, most women abandoned professional aspirations when they married. Yet Hughes prodded Plath, sometimes to exhaustion, to become a better poet. He created exercises for her, made elaborate charts, hypnotized her, exhorted her to concentrate—all to access the inner depths of consciousness where he thought the raw poetic material was buried. Plath, too, constantly prodded Hughes to be more productive
. He published very little at Cambridge University before he met Plath; after graduation he drifted, worked odd jobs, and hardly qualified as a minor poet. Plath changed that. She acted as his agent, sending out his manuscripts and entering contests for him. Within a year of their meeting, he was on his way to becoming the most famous young poet in England. He later acknowledged that he owed his literary career to her. She would have gone on writing and publishing if they had never met; he might not have. Without Plath’s ambition at his back, as he wrote in a late poem, “I’d be fishing off a rock / In Western Australia.”50
Plath and Hughes were eager to support each other’s writing and ambitions during the early years of their marriage, but both eventually came to regret the time they spent tending to the other. Plath was furious about the precious, wasted hours she had spent advancing Hughes’s career—typing his manuscripts, sending out his poetry, keeping track of his rejections and acceptances, pasting his reviews in scrapbooks, and managing his finances. Hughes complained that he had spent too long attending to what he called Plath’s “helplessness” and “impending thunderstorm” moods.51 He wrote to his close friend Luke Myers in 1987, “Poor old Sylvia! If only I hadn’t humoured her, & nursed her like a patient, & coddled her like a child—if only I’d had the guts to carry on just as I was, instead of wrapping my life up in a cupboard, while I tended her. Then maybe she’d have emerged in better shape. And me too.”52 But still he felt that the marriage had been productive, despite what the public wanted to hear. When Myers sent him a draft of a memoir about their early years at Cambridge in which he discussed the couple’s poetic dialogue, Hughes asked him to remove the entire section: