Representing Sylvia Plath

Citation preview

R e pr e se n t i ng S y lv i a Pl at h

Interest in Sylvia Plath continues to grow, as does the mythic status of her relationship with Ted Hughes, but Plath is a poet of enduring power in her own right. This book explores the many layers of her often unreliable and complex representations and the difficult relationship between the reader and her texts. The volume evaluates the historical, familial and cultural sources that Plath drew upon for material: from family photographs, letters and personal history to contemporary literary and cinematic Holocaust texts. It examines Plath’s creative processes: what she does with materials ranging from Romantic paintings to women’s magazine fiction, how she transforms these in multiple drafts, and the tools she uses to do this, including her use of colour. Finally, the book investigates specific instances when Plath herself becomes the subject matter for other artists, writers, film-makers and biographers. s a l ly b a y l e y is Teaching and Research Fellow at The Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. She is co-editor of Eye Rhymes:  Sylvia Plath and the Art of the Visual (2007) and author of Home on the Horizon:  America’s Search for Space, From Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan (2010). t r ac y br a i n is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Bath Spa University. Her book The Other Sylvia Plath was published in 2001. She is the author of ‘Dangerous Confessions: The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically’ (2006), ‘Sylvia Plath’s Letters and Journals’ (2006) and ‘Unstable Manuscripts: The Indeterminacy of the Plath Canon’ (2007). Her essay ‘Ted Hughes and Feminism’ will appear in The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011).

R e pr e se n t i ng S y lv i a Pl at h e di t e d b y s a l ly b a y l e y and t r ac y br a i n

c a mbr idge u ni v er sit y pr e ss Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107006751 © Cambridge University Press 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Representing Sylvia Plath / [edited by] Sally Bayley, Tracy Brain. p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-00675-1 (hardback) 1. Plath, Sylvia–Criticism and interpretation. I.  Bayley, Sally.  II.  Brain, Tracy. III. Title. PS 3566.L 27Z 847 2011 811′.54–dc22 2011013372 isbn 978-1-107-00675-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations

page vii viii xii xiv

Introduction: ‘Purdah’ and the enigma of representation Sally Bayley and Tracy Brain

1

Pa r t I: C on t e x t s  1 ‘Mailed into space’: on Sylvia Plath’s letters

13

2 ‘The photographic chamber of the eye’: Plath, photography and the post-confessional muse

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3 ‘O the tangles of that old bed’: fantasies of incest and the ‘Daddy’ narrative in Ariel

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4 Plath and torture: cultural contexts for Plath’s imagery of the Holocaust

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Jonathan Ellis

Anita Helle

Lynda K. Bundtzen

Steven Gould Axelrod

Pa r t II: P oe t ic s a n d c om p o s i t ion  5 ‘The trees of the mind are black, the light is blue’: sublime encounters in Sylvia Plath’s ‘tree poems’ Sally Bayley

v

91

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Contents

6 Coming to terms with colour: Plath’s visual aesthetic

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7 ‘Madonna (of the Refrigerator)’: mapping Sylvia Plath’s double in ‘The Babysitters’ drafts

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8 ‘Procrustean identity’: Sylvia Plath’s women’s magazine fiction

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Laure de Nervaux-Gavoty

Kathleen Connors

Luke Ferretter

Pa r t III: R e pr e s e n tat ion 9 Confession, contrition and concealment: evoking Plath in Ted Hughes’s Howls & Whispers

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10 Fictionalizing Sylvia Plath

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Lynda K. Bundtzen Tracy Brain

11 Primary representations: three artists respond to Sylvia Plath Adolescent Plath – The Girl Who Would Be God

203 203

Bodily imprints: a choreographic response to Sylvia Plath’s ‘poppy poems’

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Stella Vine’s peanut-crunching Plath

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Suzie Hanna

Kate Flatt (with Sally Bayley) Sally Bayley

Bibliography Index

235 244

Illustrations

1. Otto Plath as Pedagogue, c.193 Reproduced by kind permission of Susan Plath Winston on behalf of the Estate of Aurelia S. Plath. Copyright the Estate of Aurelia S. Plath.

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S t i l l s b y S u z i e H a n n a f rom (2 0 0 7)

The Girl Who Would Be God

2. ‘Autumn Leaves with House’ 3. ‘Typing’ 4. ‘Blue Dress’ 5. ‘Toy Theatre’ 6. ‘Castle Tightrope’ 7. ‘Two Blue Birds’ 8. ‘Colour Script for The Girl Who Would Be God ’ 9. ‘Princess’

204 204 206 207 208 209 210 211

I m ag e s b y Ol i v e r L a m f or d 10–18.  Dancer Natalia Thorn in Dance to Poppy Poems

216–222

Pa i n t i ng s b y S t e l l a V i n e 19. ted and sylvia (2004) 2 0. sylvia cooker (2003) 21. anne (2008)

225 226 230

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Notes on contributors

S t e v e n G ou l d axelrod is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is author of Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (1993). His areas of interest include American literature and American poetry. He has written on Robert Lowell and Wallace Stevens, and is co-editor of The New Anthology of American Poetry, vol. 2, Modernisms, 1900–1950 (2002). He is currently researching a booklength study of Cold War poetry. S a l ly B a y l e y is Lecturer in English at Balliol College, Oxford. She was co-director of the Sylvia Plath Symposium, a four-day international conference that took place at Oxford University in October 2007. She is co-editor of two collections of essays: Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath and the Art of the Visual (2007) and From Self to Shelf:  The Artist Under Construction, a book of interdisciplinary essays on artistic self-representation (2005). Dr Bayley is author of numerous articles on Plath and the Cold War, D. H. Lawrence, Stevie Smith and Tracey Emin. She has recently completed an interdisciplinary study of American space, Home on the Horizon: America’s Search for Space, from Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan (2010). Dr Bayley is also a memoirist and poet. T r ac y Br a i n is Senior Lecturer in English at Bath Spa University. Her book The Other Sylvia Plath was published in 2001. She is the author of Unstable Manuscripts: The Indeterminacy of the Plath Canon (2007), Dangerous Confessions:  The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically (2006) and Sylvia Plath’s Letters and Journals (2006). Dr Brain is currently working on a book about the representation of pregnancy and birth in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel and an essay on ‘Sewing in Jane Eyre’. She is also the author of ‘Ted Hughes and Feminism’ for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes. viii

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Ly n da K . Bu n d t z e n is Herbert H. Lehman Professor of English at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Her areas of interest include film, contemporary American women poets and feminist theory. She is the author of several critical volumes, including Plath’s Incarnations:  Women and the Creative Process (1983) and The Other Ariel (2001). Her essays for academic journals include ‘Mourning Eurydice: Ted Hughes as Orpheus in Birthday Letters’ (2003). K at h l e e n C on nor s was director of The Art of Sylvia Plath, the 2002 international symposium at Indiana University to mark what would have been Plath’s seventieth birthday. In 2007, she was co-director of The Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at Oxford University. Connors is co-editor of Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (2007). An authority on the Plath archive at the Lilly Library, Connors is the author of ‘Living Color:  The Interactive Arts of Sylvia Plath’. This major study of the archival sources of Plath’s visual art forms half of the text of Eye Rhymes. Connors is also the author of ‘Visual Art in the Life of Sylvia Plath: Mining Riches in the Lilly and Smith Archives’, in Anita Helle’s The Unraveling Archive (2007). As Visiting Scholar in Indiana University’s Department of English, Connors curates exhib­ itions and produces educational programmes with a focus on multi­ disciplinary arts, youth initiatives and Asian culture. Jon at h a n E l l i s is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is author of Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop (2006) and has also written on contemporary cinema. His current project focuses on the art and practice of letter-writing in modern and contemporary culture. L u k e F e r r e t t e r is Assistant Professor of Twentieth-Century British and American Literature at Baylor University. He has published two books of critical theory and is currently working on a book on Sylvia Plath’s fiction for Edinburgh University Press. He has published several articles on critical theory and on twentieth-century literature, including essays on D. H. Lawrence, on Hanif Kureishi and on Sylvia Plath’s relationship to feminist psychiatry. He is on the editorial board of Plath Profiles. K at e F l at t won a 2007 Rayne Fellowship for Choreographers. She is one of the UK’s best-known choreographers, whose large-scale work includes opera and music theatre for the West End (Les Misérables, Fiddler on the Roof, Carmen and Dr Faustus). She studied at the Royal

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Notes on contributors Ballet School, London Contemporary Dance and on a Churchill Scholarship in Germany and Eastern Europe. She was assistant to Léonide Massine for productions in New York, London and Australia. She has choreographed four productions at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, including Turandot, and productions for the English National Opera, Glyndebourne, Opera North, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera and Garsington. Flatt has also worked at the Châtelet and the Bastille in Paris, and in Orange. Film choreography includes The Avengers, Restoration and Chaplin. Her most recent work is Soul Play, a powerful piece of dance theatre for one actor and one dancer that explores the archetypal idea of ‘soul’ in a secular world. Soul Play is supported by Arts Council England, East and The Junction. Flatt is currently working on a piece about the embodiment of metaphor; here, she considers strategies for using script and metaphor in dance.

S u z i e H a n n a is Subject Leader in Animation and Course Leader for the Master of Arts in Animation and Sound Design at the Norwich School of Art and Design. Her work includes collaborations with composers, poets and dancers. Hanna is a regular contributor to literature festivals and conferences, and is a consultant for animation projects and productions. She also performs puppetry and is working on a book about animation and anthropomorphism. A n i ta H e l l e is Chair of the Department of English at Oregon State University. Professor Helle has published on mid-century modernism, archival criticism, and material culture in journals such as American Literature, American Literary Scholarship annual and Feminist Review. Her essay ‘Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Memory’ was included in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader (2007). Professor Helle is editor of The Unraveling Archive:  Essays on Sylvia Plath (2007) and a member of the Editorial Board of Plath Profiles. She is currently working on a book-length collection of essays on photo­ graphy and twentieth- and twenty-first-century authorship. L au r e de N e r vau x- G avo t y is a former Fulbright Scholar. She is lecturer in English at the Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne. Entitled ‘Writing Beyond Images: A Study of Sylvia Plath’ (‘Sylvia Plath:  la traversée de l’image’), her PhD dissertation explored the representation of visual processes and the dialogue with the visual arts in Plath’s work. Dr de Nervaux-Gavoty has published several articles

Notes on contributors

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on Plath in collections of essays in French as well as in English in the electronic journal E-rea (Revue électronique d’ études sur le monde anglophone). S t e l l a V i n e first came to prominence in 2004, when Charles Saatchi bought one of her images of Princess Diana and another of a dead heroin addict, ‘Rachel’, and displayed them in the Saatchi Gallery for his New Blood Show. Since then, Vine’s controversial paintings of iconic figures from our celebrity- and victim-loving culture have received constant attention in the press, with reviews and interviews in the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Times, Independent and by the BBC. Vine is admired by Germaine Greer, who wrote the Preface for the catalogue that accompanied Vine’s first solo exhibition, Stella Vine:  Paintings, at Modern Art, Oxford, in late 2007. Vine’s work appears in multiple forms and places, from high to low culture:  from her major Oxford exhibition to a collection of tee-shirts for Top Shop that were printscreened with images from some of her paintings. Vine was curator of an exhibition of youth art at Tate Liverpool in 2006, and has given a talk at the Tate Modern on a 1943 painting by Balthus, ‘Sleeping Girl’. Vine’s paintings sell for thousands of pounds, but she also donates work, alongside other contemporary artists.

Acknowledgements

Dr Ray Ryan of Cambridge University Press gave this project his editorial support and belief very early on. We have been extremely fortunate in having his expert guidance and sound advice. We are very grateful to Bath Spa University’s Contemporary Writing Centre, and especially to Professor Tim Middleton, for funding the costs of the visual images that are integral to some of the pieces in Representing Sylvia Plath. Sally Bayley would like to thank the staff of Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute  – in particular, Nigel Bowles and Laura Harvey  – for their kind and generous support in offering a quiet place in which to work. Tom MacFaul’s work on standardizing all of the references and on compiling the bibliography was of immeasurable help. His astute judgements and careful eyes were of immense benefit to the final version of the manuscript; he read this through in its entirety, delivering several important improvements. Richard Kerridge commented on our introduction, ‘Purdah and the Enigma of Representation’ as well as Tracy Brain’s piece, ‘Fictionalizing Sylvia Plath’. His careful responses are greatly appreciated. Tracy Brain is thankful to Imogen, Violet and Lily for so many reasons. Colin Edwards offered friendship and encouragement. Sally Bayley is grateful to Andrew Blades for the time he gave to discussing the musical implications of Beethoven’s ‘Grosse Fuge’ over tea at Browns. Kathleen Connors’ energy and vision were important to the earliest ideas of what this book might be. Like countless other Plath scholars, we thank Karen Kukil of Smith College’s Mortimer Rare Book Room for her superb archival knowledge and help. Stella Vine generously offered her paintings for reproduction at no cost, as did Suzie Hanna, who contributed stills from her animated film The Girl Who Would Be God. We are grateful to Oliver Lamford for his photographic contribution to Kate Flatt’s ‘Poppy Poems’ piece, and for his sensitivity and fidelity to the spirit of her work. We are grateful to Susan Plath Winston for giving permission on behalf of the Estate of Aurelia S. Plath to reproduce the photograph of Otto xii

Acknowledgements

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Plath as Pedagogue, c.1930. Sally Bayley would like to thank Edward Kanterian and Tom MacFaul for their assistance in readying the images for production. We would like to thank all of our contributors for their faith in this project. They gave Representing Sylvia Plath their valuable time and hard work before there was any guarantee of publication. Their adherence to tight deadlines and efficient handling of edits and citations have smoothed production at every stage. Without their commitment, this book would not exist. We are grateful to the two anonymous readers to whom Cambridge University Press sent our manuscript. Their detailed suggestions and knowledge made this a better book than it would otherwise have been.

Abbreviations

BJ Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London:  Faber and Faber, 1966; New York: Harper & Row, 1971) BL Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) CP Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Harper & Row, 1981) Journals The Journals of Sylvia Plath: 1950–1962, ed. Karen V. Kukil (London: Faber and Faber, 2000); The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (New York: Anchor, 2000) JP Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings (London:  Faber and Faber, 1977; New York: Harper & Row, 1979) LH Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950–1963, ed. Aurelia Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975; London: Faber and Faber, 1976) OED Oxford English Dictionary PM Plath MSS, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana SPC Sylvia Plath Collection (Poetry), Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Massachusetts

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Introduction: ‘Purdah’ and the enigma of representation Sally Bayley and Tracy Brain

In a sentence excised from her 1963 novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s ­ eroine, Esther Greenwood, confesses to the unreliability of representah tion, even when it appears to arise from first-hand testimony: ‘I never told anybody my life story, though, or if I did, I made up a whopper.’1 Esther warns against any easy acceptance of truthfulness.2 It is a caution that readers of all kinds of supposed representations of Plath would do well to heed. Representing Sylvia Plath re-evaluates Plath’s body of work, adding to a growing movement in Plath studies that is suspicious of an older but still lingering school of Plath criticism that sees her as a ‘confessional’ writer.3 The topics and contributors to this volume have been selected to reflect a range of new developments in Plath Studies. All explore Plath’s own paradoxical notions of self-presentation. The essays share an interest in what Plath’s many poetic speakers hide, veil, and leave out, as well as what they say directly. It is in the light of Plath’s awareness of the slippery nature of any representation that we turn to ‘Purdah’, for it is a poem that puts this problem at its centre. ‘Purdah’ is dated 29 October 1962, the day that Plath finished ‘Lady Lazarus’. Both poems are written in three-line tercets and can be seen as dramatic monologues. Reading them together is a useful way of revealing the multiplicity of archetypes always present in Plath’s representation of any single female figure. Christina Britzolakis notes that the poems share ‘the apocalypticdestructive power of other iconic female apparitions in Plath’s work: the Clytemnestra figure in “Purdah”, the red-haired avenging demon of “Lady Lazarus”’.4 If we push Britzolakis’s point further, we see that Lady Lazarus’s final and absolute declaration, ‘And I eat men like air’,5 is not simply a defiant statement of her dangerousness and power. It also suggests dependence. To eat anything ‘like air’ is to require it for sustenance, for survival. Without air, or men, the speaker could not breathe, 1

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and therefore could not live. The syntax of this final line means that the speaker does not just liken men to air, but also likens herself to it. This is the last of a series of images of her loss of bodily form, and is delivered at the moment when she supposedly regains that form by being reborn. ‘Purdah’ operates through a similar paradox. Tim Kendall characterizes the poem as ‘a stage-managed performance which both incriminates and exonerates Plath’s persona’.6 Along these lines, what Jo Gill describes as the speaker’s ‘resounding “shriek” of identity’ is only possible because that identity is ‘wrested from oppression’.7 ‘Lady Lazarus’ has been much discussed by critics. Steven Gould Axelrod is especially helpful: ‘The trope of the striptease emerges in the poem as a metapoetic element, a self-reflexive comment on the poetics of exhibitionism that are so fundamental to these poems, grounded as they are on Cold War concerns about privacy and exposure, in the interplay between body, gender, celebrity, and power.’8 The narrator of this ‘multiallusive’9 poem, to use Robin Peel’s description, provides a show of confident yet ultimately misleading confession. Nothing is truly told. Though Lady Lazarus hastens to insist that she is real, the assertion is only rhetoric. An excised stanza emphasizes the poet’s sense that her readers, and Lady Lazarus’s audience, will, quite correctly, doubt what they observe. Coming after the question, ‘Do I terrify? – ’10 are the cancelled lines, ‘Yes yes Herr Professor | It is I | Can you deny’,11 before the published version resumes: ‘The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?’12 Despite the verbiage of named body parts, we cannot help but doubt and ‘deny’ what we see, and Plath means us to do exactly that. Invisibility and absence lure Plath’s readers to peer more, and more closely, only to find that, however hard they look, they see only what the speaker of ‘Purdah’ calls ‘shifting clarities’.13 Our reading of ‘Purdah’ is made in the wake of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s sense of its ‘poetic artifice’14 and self-consciousness about the constructed nature of representation. It is also indebted to critics such as Alan Sinfield and Marjorie Perloff, who draw our attention to the poem’s plotting of female identity and its exploration of sexual politics within violent and oppressive male power structures.15 With the trope of the veil at the heart of its narrative, ‘Purdah’ is a ceremonial initiation into Plath’s theatre of ambivalence about display and concealment, and for this reason provides a useful focus for the intellectual and aesthetic concerns of this book. The speaker secures her defences by means of an explicit commentary on the complexity of self-representation, coupled with teasing gestures towards her audience. She tells us, ‘… I smile, cross-legged | enigmatical’.

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This smile is enigmatical, difficult to read and mysterious; it is hazy behind her veil, and so is her whole identity. Something similar takes place in Plath’s simultaneously revealing and concealing epistolary practices. As Jonathan Ellis suggests in the essay that opens this volume, her letters are more reflective of the ‘you’ she writes to than they are of the speaking ‘I’. When ‘Purdah’’s speaker declares, ‘I gleam like a mirror’, it is as if she wishes to be reduced to a pure shiny surface that only reflects back the gaze of others. What has the tone of a starkly open self-confession turns out to be a way of hiding. But it is also a strong image of imprisonment and self-negation, evidence of her powerlessness. She is an instrument of self-reflection for others, principally her husband, whom she sardonically describes as ‘Lord of the mirrors!’16 Virginia Woolf famously reminds us that ‘Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.’17 Paradoxically, this is something of which the speaker takes advantage. Her ‘visibilities’, ‘polishe[d]’ by the ‘sun’, are a reflective surface that hides her interior body and its reproductive secrets. The ‘trees’ or ‘bushy polyps’18 dragged by the moon are, in Plath’s cumulative poetic imagery, associated with reproductive organs and the menstrual cycle:  the bodily reality that the speaker cannot control as she controls her outward performance. In line with this version of Plath, choreographer Kate Flatt, towards the end of this volume, explores the poet’s representation of the body’s encounter with the world; the relationship of the body’s often fluid borders and boundaries to place and space. At the heart of ‘Purdah’ stands the question of who will act as subject by looking, and who will act as object and be looked upon. However much the poem turns on the traditional notion of the body of the bride as owned object, the speaker and bridegroom take both positions:  subject and object. The ‘silk | Screens’ in the speaker’s chambers and the ‘Veil’19 she wears, in keeping with the system of female seclusion called ‘Purdah’,20 are evidence to anyone who beholds her that ‘I am his’. They are visual impediments that make it difficult for us to read her face, and they also obstruct her own ability to read. The problem of what she represents is not just ours, but also her own, because the instruments of any possible self-representation – her facial features – are obscured. The ‘I am his’ marks the act of sexual penetration that is a ritual taking possession of the woman, without which the marriage is not valid: ‘It is himself he guides | In among these silk | Screens …’ The line break before ‘In’ provides an ambiguity. The silk screens are the curtains and veils that enclose

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the married couple, and also the part of her body he has to penetrate in order to possess her. The ‘concatenation of rainbows’ that is her ‘eye | Veil’ suggests not just the mixture of colours in the fabric that we might see when we look upon her, but also the colours on the inner surface of her eyelid as she closes her eyes to receive him, itself an ambiguous image since the eyes may be closed in pleasure or in pain. Anatomically, those colours are reflections produced by the eye itself, rather than anything perceived in the outside world. Another way of reading the ‘concatenation of rainbows’21 is that the colours of her veil’s fabric affect the speaker’s vision, tingeing everything she looks upon so that any authentic colour remains indecipherable. These various possible senses give us different layers of unreliable representation while at the same time commenting upon the complexity of looking and being looked upon. This is the case in ‘Lady Lazarus’ too. Its ‘peanut-crunching crowd’22 has a counterpart in ‘Purdah’, where the ‘Attendants’ who guard and serve the speaker breathe the same ‘chandelier | Of air that all day plies | Its crystals | A million ignorants’.23 The associative parallels between the two poems are numerous. There is ‘Lady Lazarus’s’ ‘million filaments’24 and ‘Purdah’s’ ‘million ignorants’.25 There is ‘Lady Lazarus’s’ ‘skin | Bright as a Nazi lampshade’26 and ‘Purdah’s’ ‘chandelier | Of air’.27 ‘Air’, as we have seen, becomes a simile for Lady Lazarus herself in the poem’s last word.28 By becoming air, Lady Lazarus in a sense gains entry into the curtained rooms and ‘chandelier | Of air’ of ‘Purdah’, inhabiting the latter poem well as her own. The ‘million filaments’ suggest not only the intense light given off by Lady Lazarus, as if she is an electric lamp, but also the filaments in the many eyes that look upon her. The optical images are another link between the two poems (recall the ‘concatenation of rainbows’ that affects the speaker’s vision in ‘Purdah’). Although many editions of the Collected Poems incorrectly print the word ‘flies’ at the end of the fifteenth stanza of ‘Purdah’, when Plath read the poem for her BBC recordings, and in all of her handwritten and typed drafts of the poem, she used the word ‘plies’.29 The one-letter slip is unfortunate, because Plath’s intended word makes clear that the environment in which the poem’s speaker must exist is one in which diligent performance is constantly supplied. ‘Attendants! | Attendants!’30 she cries. She appears not just to call for her servants so that she can issue instructions, but also in order to command the attention of her audience for the explosive show that is to come. But unlike the show that Lady Lazarus gives, and is at that poem’s centre, in ‘Purdah’ the speaker’s performance is a

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four-times-repeated promise or vow or fantasy: ‘I shall unloose’.31 Unloose has at least three senses: I shall release my furies and energies; I shall take off my clothes; I shall be newly constricted, and trapped again. The actual performance of Clytemnestra’s theatrical murder of her husband (which takes place offstage in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon) is not within the scope of the poem’s direct representation, but promised in its closing lines, lying in wait in the future tense. If Lady Lazarus eats men like air, the speaker of ‘Purdah’ is yet to do so. The speakers of ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Purdah’ rhetorically align themselves with Jewish and Asian identities. Plath certainly experimented with numerous other cultural and ethnographic costumes. In her chapter on the early 1950s poem, ‘Madonna of the Refrigerator’,32 Kathleen Connors examines Plath’s prototypes for post-war identity. Keenly committed to trying on different ‘selves’, Plath also sought inspiration in the idioms of women’s magazines. Luke Ferretter’s chapter shows how she engages with the kind of short story that these magazines would publish, recycling elements of them in her own fiction; while Lynda K. Bundtzen reveals the multiple layers of psychoanalytic sources that Plath drew on in order to construct the complicated ‘Daddy’ narrative that runs through Ariel. An avid maker of collages, Plath would cut and paste cultural, historical and personal images. This encapsulates an important aspect of her poetic technique. We see this in Steven Gould Axelrod’s argument that she used her work to examine the roles of victim and torturer that were reflected in contemporary materials about the Holocaust, and in Anita Helle’s unveiling of the archive of photographs that Plath’s writing animates and explores. We see it also in Laure de Nervaux-Gavoty’s uncovering of Plath’s colour-driven sensibility in her chapter on Plath’s visual aesthetic, and in Sally Bayley’s reading of Plath’s engagement with the tradition of Romantic paintings and the sublime. Representing Sylvia Plath tackles the intricate relationships between reader and text  – the various versions of Plath we think we encounter. Plath extracted subject matter and language from her own history and culture (her German roots, her possibly Jewish immigrant ancestry, her own and others’ artistic productions, her domestic life and society), but always at a carefully mediated distance. Our book reveals Plath’s particular process of extraction, but shows that it is a process that inevitably caused magnification, distortion or shrinkage. Perhaps ironically, though not surprisingly, ‘Plath’ herself has become a valuable cultural resource – even, like the speaker of ‘Purdah’, a kind of jewel33 – for other writers and artists. Jacqueline Rose opens her book

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with the words, ‘Sylvia Plath haunts our culture’.34 Certainly Plath’s image hovers around our contemporary imagination, perpetuating various forms of myth, some of which she may have intended, and others that she could never have predicted. In the closing section of this volume, Tracy Brain looks closely at Plath ‘fictionalizations’ and the ethical, aesthetic and generic questions they raise. By also including pieces by three creative practitioners who reflect upon their new artistic responses to and representations of Plath, this book, in part, continues this legacy of extended representation. Together, these three pieces seem to tell a story of ‘Plath’ at different stages of her development. The narrative begins with Suzie Hanna’s awardwinning animation, The Girl Who Would Be God. Drawing attention to the young Plath’s experiments with cut-out doll versions of herself, Hanna’s film creates the tale of a doll theatre, a contemporary Bildungsroman of a Disney-style becoming, in which a young woman dresses for the cultural ball and goes in search of her prince charming. Kate Flatt’s Dance to Poppy Poems looks at another facet of creativity, inventing a more mature ‘Plath’ who embraces pregnancy, birth and motherhood. Stella Vine continues to feed the myth, aligning Plath’s image with the often grotesque aesthetic of celebrity culture, crowning Plath a pop princess, along with Princess Diana. Vine’s paintings are cynical versions of an older Plath, post-lapsarian, where everything seems determined and fixed, no longer open to change. Ted Hughes, in his elegiac collection of poems, Birthday Letters, evokes Plath in many incarnations. Hughes turns Plath’s palette away from the colour red and its associations with emotional violence and distress  – what the speaker of ‘Poppies in July’ calls ‘hell-flames’35 – to a calm and benevolent blue. And so Hughes gently restores Plath to a private aesthetic, but at the same time Hughes, in the role of bridegroom, chooses visibility. Terry Gifford tells us that Hughes originally planned to publish the book ‘anonymously’, but the reversal of this decision, like the ideas in the book itself, can be seen as ‘a return to the fundamental notion … that individuals must take responsibility for their inner life’.36 While it is difficult to imagine that Hughes could have succeeded in maintaining anonymity, the publishing of Birthday Letters under his own name can be viewed as his attempt to reclaim some aspect of Plath’s representational legacy. In the last section of this volume, Lynda K. Bundtzen argues that the poems in Hughes’s Howls & Whispers are marked by contradictory poetic strategies that both disguise and reveal the poet’s emotional entanglement in Plath’s story. She uncovers the layers of mythical,

Introduction

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religious, Shakespearean, cinematic and personal allusions through which his poems construct Plath. ‘Purdah’, like the poems Hughes would write to Plath herself so many years later, works by likening its heroine to multiple, shifting archetypes. The speaker is Eve to her groom’s ‘green Adam’, and therefore holds her own potential power of seduction. Elementally, she is a woman whose reproductive body is responsive to the moon’s cycles. She is ‘like a mirror’,37 concerned only with reflecting others and hiding herself, and she is ‘like the peacock’, the extravagantly coloured male bird, and in this case, a potentially dangerous one. She is ‘quiet’ but with the potential to release ‘One’ ‘Shattering’ ‘note’.38 She is a ‘jeweled | Doll’ and she is Clytemnestra. She is her husband’s ‘heart’ and, at least in her fantasies, his potential murderer, the ‘lioness’39 stalking him. Plath makes ‘Purdah’s’ elusive yet prominent speaker represent all of these things at once, and these stark alternatives work in opposition to each other. The poem is a meaningful alternation between different possibilities, so that the apparently submissive woman is revealed as potentially murderous. But what is not clear is how metaphorical or serious this idea is. Are the violent impulses towards the husband mere fantasies hidden by the outwardly obedient and veiled bride, or is she really planning to kill him? What disturbs in this poem, as it does in ‘Lady Lazarus’, is the insoluble mystery as to how we should read this multiplicity of meanings and representational identities; the impossibility of choosing between them. And this is precisely what disturbs, and fascinates, readers about Sylvia Plath herself. Like Lady Lazarus and the speaker of ‘Purdah’, she is so visible and yet so hidden. Ultimately, however naked and exposed they think she may be, or however much they think they ‘know’ her, Plath remains enigmatic. No t e s 1 SPC, Box: Plath – Prose – The Bell Jar. Folder: Prose Works – The Bell Jar – Outline of Chapters. 2 The Bell Jar has a history, nonetheless, of being termed an ‘autobiographical novel’. See, for example, Elisabeth Bronfen, Sylvia Plath (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998), p. 112. 3 See, for instance, M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1967) and Robyn Marsack, who says of ‘Lady Lazarus’: ‘Plath is, in Sexton’s terms, “telling it true” here’. Sylvia Plath (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), p. 74. 4 Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 98. 5 CP, p. 247.

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6 Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 167. 7 Jo Gill, The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 70. 8 Steven Gould Axelrod, ‘The Poetry of Sylvia Plath’, in Jo Gill (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 84. 9 Robin Peel, Writing Back:  Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), p. 193. 10 CP, p. 244. 11 SPC, Ariel Poems, ‘Lady Lazarus’, typed copy 2 (revised). Plath oscillated between putting this stanza in and taking it out. By her undated fourth and fifth typed copies the lines were removed, but she restored them when she read the poem for her BBC recording a few days later. 12 CP, p. 244. 13 CP, p. 242. 14 This is the title Forrest-Thomson gives to her book, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978). 15 See Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-War Britain (London: Athlone Press, 1997). See also Marjorie Perloff, ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon’, American Poetry Review, 13 (Nov.– Dec. 1984): 10–18. 16 CP, p. 242. 17 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Harcourt Brace, 1929), p. 35. 18 CP, p. 242. 19 CP, p. 243. 20 Lynda K. Bundtzen tells us, ‘At the top of her manuscript for “Purdah,” Plath has inscribed the dictionary definition and derivations from Hindu and Persian (“Hind. & Per.”): “Purdah = veil. Curtain or screen. India. To seclude women”. The Other Ariel (Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), p. 83. The manuscript Bundtzen cites is in SPC, Ariel Poems, ‘Purdah’, first draft. 21 CP, p. 243. 22 CP, p. 245. 23 CP, p. 243. 24 CP, p. 245. 25 CP, p. 243. 26 CP, p. 244. 27 CP, p. 243. 28 CP, p. 247. 29 CP prints the word ‘flies’ (p. 243). The drafts of ‘Purdah’ in which the word ‘plies’ appears are in SPC, Ariel Poems, ‘Purdah’. 30 CP, p. 243. 31 CP, pp. 243, 244. 32 ‘Madonna of the Refrigerator’ was to become ‘The Babysitters’.

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33 Beginning with the ‘Jade’ rib of Adam to which the speaker likens herself, the poem is laden with jewel imagery, including her references to her ‘valuable’, ‘gleam[ing]’, ‘sun polishe[d]’ (CP, p. 242), ‘Priceless’ (CP, p. 243) self, which she speaks of in the third person as a ‘small jewelled | Doll’ (CP, p. 244). 34 Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago Press, 1991), p. 1. 35 CP, p. 203. 36 Terry Gifford, Ted Hughes (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 66. 37 CP, p. 242. 38 CP, p. 243. 39 CP, p. 244.

Pa r t I

Contexts

ch apter 1

‘Mailed into space’: on Sylvia Plath’s letters Jonathan Ellis

Sylvia Plath is hardly ever celebrated for her letter writing. In fact, letter writing is usually considered to be one of the few literary genres she never mastered. Whereas Plath’s other writings exist in at least two or more versions, the majority of her letters remain unpublished. Letters Home (1976), a selection of letters written mostly to her mother, is the only edition of her correspondence in print. That said, there are more than enough letters in the public domain to revisit this side of Plath’s writing life, challenging the idea that Plath was an endlessly cheerful but essentially immature epistolary writer. The letters are far less conventional than have been previously assumed, particularly in their frequent subversion of epistolary conventions. Virginia Woolf, one of Plath’s most important influences, viewed letter writing as a selfless activity that flattered the recipient, giving back ‘a reflection of the other person’,1 but also saw it as an egotistical affair, like staring at a looking glass. ‘This sheet is a glass,’ Woolf once told Ethel Smyth.2 Plath employed letters quite consciously for just this dual purpose, using them both to flatter the recipient’s vanity and show off her own writing achievements. But it is precisely as writing that her letters are rarely read. One can see this failure in many contemporary responses to Letters Home. In 1975, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop was commissioned to review the book. The unfinished review ‘cost her a good deal of anxiety’,3 but Bishop should have been the perfect person to review Letters Home. She taught a course on letter writing at Harvard and thought letter writing ought to be considered ‘as an art form’.4 Admitting this publicly proved a different matter. In her draft of the review Bishop doubted whether it was even possible to review a collection of letters: Of course one can’t really ‘review’ letters, or criticise them – at least, not perhaps the way a play, a novel, or poetry can be reviewed and criticised. Letters can only be discussed and then always in terms of the character and life of their writers (not authors). Some letters are better than others; almost all that eventually get 13

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published are, in one way or another, fascinating, to me anyway – but then, so are those that don’t get published.5

Bishop does not dismiss the study of letter writing out of hand, but she does question whether letters can be treated in the same way as other literary forms. She is especially keen on biographical readings of letters ‘in terms of the character and life of their writers’. Letters, in her view, are thus more factual than fictional. They can be ‘discussed’ among friends, but one must be careful of scrutinizing them too closely. This does not mean that a letter is above criticism. A belief in an aesthetics of letter writing, of significant if unarticulated differences between good and bad letters, and their relative worthiness of publication, creeps in. But what might make one letter ‘better’ than another? Bishop later compares writing letters to ‘getting dressed up and going to the symphony concert instead of sitting at home in pajamas and listening to it on the radio: no matter how illiterate, ignorant, or inarticulate, once one takes pen in hand, one has to make an effort; certain formalities are to be observed, unless one was either eccentric or a literary genius’.6 Plath’s correspondence implicitly fails Bishop’s letter-writing test. The draft of the review stalls at the very point her letters are about to be discussed in detail. ‘This brings up a delicate, possibly embarrassing question. What about family letters, duty letters, the weekly letter promised to mother from camp, college, or the job in another city?’7 The ‘embarrassing’ question, at least as it pertains to Letters Home, is never answered by Bishop, whose review ends here, a handwritten note in the margin (‘S. P. here!’) the only sign of further material to come, a promise unfortunately unfulfilled. What might Bishop eventually have written? The evidence is mixed. In a 1965 letter to Robert Lowell, Bishop appears in two minds about Plath’s poetry. While acknowledging that she has ‘a few perfect poems’ and ‘flashes that are incredible and make me feel weak’, the effect of reading the book as a whole clearly ‘troubles’ her ‘with its desperation’.8 Addressing Plath as ‘Sylvia’ is another ambivalent gesture. There’s a sense in which she is both patronizing her and at the same time treating her as an equal. In unpublished notes written a few years after this letter, Bishop protested against women poets who ‘stay at home’ to write poetry. ‘Sylvia Plath avoided this when she wrote about babies, ovens, etc. – but sometimes one extreme is almost as bad as the other’.9 Bishop’s characterization of Plath’s poetry in terms of ‘babies’ and ‘ovens’ is crude and unfair and a lot less nuanced than her initial response to Ariel in which she focuses on questions of form and subject matter.

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Bishop’s ambivalence towards Plath’s poetry does not provide the only explanation for her failure to engage with Letters Home in a more evenhanded way. Bishop had a personal reason not to like the majority of Plath’s correspondence and to find even the act of writing about it difficult. Plath’s letters, as the title to her selected correspondence indicates, were reminders of what Bishop herself never had, a home. As her signature poem, ‘One Art’, makes painfully clear, homes were something she spent a lifetime losing.10 Her grandparents’ house in Nova Scotia was probably the closest she ever came to finding home, though even this home was associated with her mother’s breakdown and her nightly scream.11 She found even the word ‘home’ difficult to say, particularly in a poem. The fact that Plath had a home of any sort to return to must inevitably have caused Bishop to feel envious or at least uneasy about pronouncing on something she knew little about. In Aurelia Plath’s Introduction to Letters Home she admitted that ‘it may seem extraordinary that someone who died when she was only thirty years old left behind 696 letters written to her family between the beginning of her college years in 1950 and her death early in February 1963’.12 As far as we know, Bishop did not write a single letter to her mother, her main carer for the first few years of her life after her father’s death when she was just nine months old. Bishop’s mother never recovered from this loss. She committed herself to a hospital soon afterwards and last saw her daughter when she was five years old. The very fact that Letters Home was edited by Plath’s mother must also have stirred painful memories. The book’s introduction, notes and novel-like structure constitute an elegiac framework that few readers can ignore, particularly one as astute as Bishop. It is as if Aurelia is attempting to bring Plath’s textual body home, or at least the version of it she loved best. Bishop had nothing like this material to mourn her mother. In ‘One Art’ the catalogue of losses poignantly includes ‘my mother’s watch’, the object’s disappearance poignantly standing in for the daughter losing her mother’s protection too.13 Bishop must have found it difficult to see past her own experiences to Plath’s book. The letters remained, if not literally, then certainly psychologically, unread. Letters Home, like all collections of letters, is the written record of more than one person and involves multiple audiences, contexts and readers. Plath views every act of communication as potential miscommunication, every secret shared a potential lie. This extends to her imagination of poetic space as well. Boxes, rooms and other hiding places in her poetry are often deceptively empty, flat surfaces unexpectedly multi-layered. In ‘Purdah’, for example, ‘visibilities hide’ rather

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than reveal the self-consciously ‘enigmatical’ speaker.14 Sally Bayley has drawn attention to the slipperiness of such self-projections in her reading of ‘Lady Lazarus’. She focuses on the extent to which Plath stages ‘the female artist at work … removing the female subject as “object” of her oeuvre, and repositioning her as director-auteur of her own narrative’.15 Plath’s letter-writing self is equally in control and just as staged. In the appendices to the Journals, for example, we find two self-penned letters, the first to ‘an Over-grown, Over-protected, Scared, Spoiled Baby’,16 the second to ‘a demon’.17 The journal letters show the influence of modernist prose and psychoanalytical thinking. Her epistolary voice is both an ‘I’ and a ‘you’, somebody who speaks and is spoken to. This is once again reminiscent of Woolf, who in a letter to Goldie Dickinson admitted to finding it difficult to collect herself ‘into one Virginia’.18 Plath’s epistolary presence, like her poetic performances, is just as protean. The idea of two human beings engaged in a private conversation through letters has always been something of a pretty fiction more than an observable fact. Putting to one side the author’s ‘other’ selves, nearly every epistolary friendship is haunted by the presence of other people, whether it be the literal hand of another person sharing in the writing of the letter in the first place, the material mark of the postal service, or after this the less visible traces of the editor who transcribes and selects the letter in a book, right up to our own presence taking up the letter to read again. The myth of two people, even with letters that are not published, is thus in most cases a reality of more than five or six – from letter writer or letter writers, through the hands of censors, thieves or, one hopes, in most cases, postal workers, to recipient or recipients. When thinking about letters, then, one should always think of a number greater than two. Plath’s correspondence with her mother is full of third readers. In a letter dated 7 December 1950, for example, Plath describes to her mother the thrill of reading a letter from her benefactor at Smith, Olive Higgins Prouty. Plath’s letter about letter writing appears banal on first reading. The absence of any kind of epistolary gusto is all the more striking given the subject of the letter:  Plath sharing with her mother the news that Mrs Prouty had recently complimented her for having ‘a gift for creative writing’, a gift that has been demonstrated through her original letter to Mrs Prouty who is now having it typed up. She thus shares news of her artistic success with her mother while at the same time keeping the actual content and style of the letter to herself. The same pattern of revelation and secrecy was obviously repeated later on when Plath was composing The Bell Jar and Ariel. In other words, the letter reveals the extent to which

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Plath was already keeping her mother at arm’s length even as a college freshman. She sends the ‘creative’ letters to somebody else. It is worth noting in passing Plath’s own archiving processes here, in particular the value she attaches to other people’s letters. Although she has received two letters in the post  – ‘your letter and one from Olive Higgins Prouty’  – the writer’s letter is the only one she ‘will always keep’, perhaps tactlessly omitting any mention of wanting to retain her mother’s letter. If Plath hurt her mother’s feelings in favouring her ‘literary mother’ over her biological one, Aurelia may have had her own form of revenge in her parenthetical comment:  ‘[Their meeting inspired an (unpublished) manuscript written for – and rejected by – Reader’s Digest, “Tea with Olive Higgins Prouty.”]’.19 An editorial gloss like this gives useful information about Plath’s writing, but the decision to insert it in the body of the letter rather than as a footnote or endnote can make Aurelia seem petty and perhaps even unsupportive. It is as if she is gaining revenge on Plath for not showing her the letter that Mrs Prouty thought so brilliant. Steven Axelrod asks whether ‘Aurelia Plath’s urge to correct her daughter, even after death, raises the question of her real feelings towards her’.20 It is worth remembering that Letters Home was also significantly edited by Ted Hughes. While Aurelia inflated the text, Hughes cut it down. Neither let Plath speak for herself. It is important not to be too sentimental about this process, however. Plath was as guilty as anyone else of absenting herself from her writing. She has a will-o’-the-wisp presence in many of her poems, drifting in and out of focus as the spirit takes her. ‘My mirror is clouding over’, the speaker teases us in ‘Last Words’. ‘A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.’21 The poem gives us a self, then a reflection, then ‘nothing’ at all. In many of the letters to her mother she is similarly fugitive. Her (writer’s) mind is elsewhere. Janet Malcolm describes letters as ‘the fossils of feeling’, thereby placing the biographer-critic in the role of archaeologist, digging back through time to reveal traces of an artist’s life. For Malcolm, everything else ‘the biographer touches is stale’,22 but letters are presumably authentic, fresh and true. At no stage does Malcolm question what I would like to term the epistolary fallacy: the idea that letters are autobiography by another name and that there is nothing composed or staged about them. This idea is particularly important in relation to Plath’s letters to her mother. One of the most honest and perceptive appraisals of Letters Home is Plath’s own. In a notebook entry dated 27 December 1958, Plath reflects upon the construction of a letter-writing relationship with her mother: ‘One reason I could keep up such a satisfactory letter-relationship

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with her while in England was we could both verbalize our desired image of ourselves in relation to each other: interest and sincere love, and never feel the emotional currents at war with these verbally expressed feelings.’ For Plath, family letters are not about the practice of good writing but the maintenance of good family relations, or rather ‘the semblance’23 of them. ‘A satisfactory letter-relationship’ (emphasis mine) with her mother is not the same as a satisfactory real relationship. Her letters home in this sense are variously and sometimes simultaneously attempts to create an ideal, build on, or even cover up a clearly flawed mother–daughter relationship. A little later in the same journal Plath questions:  ‘WHAT IS THE MATURE THING TO DO WITH HATE FOR MOTHER?’24 Arguably, Plath never made her mind up. For the rest of her life she continued to ‘keep up’ a ‘satisfactory letter-relationship’ with her mother while at the same time transforming her more ambivalent feelings into other forms of writing. This does not necessarily mean we should consider the letters insincere in comparison to Plath’s poetry or prose. As Susan Rosenbaum observes in a book revealingly titled Professing Sincerity: ‘Plath simultaneously performs and critiques claims to sincere feeling, drawing attention to sincerity as rhetorical performance.’25 The Letters Home voice is an important facet of Plath’s rhetorical armour, much as she later derided or rejected it. As Tim Kendall cautions: ‘Letters Home, the journals and Ariel may not seem, at first, to be the work of the same author. But the temptation to uncover Plath’s true self in one text, at the expense of another, makes problematic assumptions about a multi-faceted personality, and risks confusing aesthetic values with judgements about identity.’26 Kendall’s desire not to confuse ‘aesthetic values with judgements about identity’ is reminiscent of Bishop’s reluctance to criticize letters in the same way one might criticize other art forms. Yet, for all his good intentions, Kendall, like Bishop, cannot bring himself to write about Plath’s letters with any enthusiasm. While he admits that the Letters Home persona is also ‘the work of the same author’ as the journals and Ariel, it is not an area of her writing life he cares too much to investigate. Kendall is not alone in characterizing Letters Home as the most minor of Plath’s many outputs. Many Plath scholars dismiss the book. According to Christina Britzolakis, the publication of Letters Home revealed an ‘epistolary style [that] seemed the antithesis of anguished emotional intensity for which Ariel had been celebrated. It was a patently manufactured voice, the voice of “Sivvy”: invincibly cheerful, optimistic, and trite, radiating enthusiasm for every aspect of her life and career.’27 But what exactly is

On Sylvia Plath’s letters

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Britzolakis objecting to here? The fact that Plath has ‘manufactured’ an identity through letters or the realization that one can see through the disguise? Surely all epistolary voices are ‘manufactured’ to some extent, hence Britzolakis’s discussion of it as an epistolary ‘style’. In which case, her dismissal of Letters Home must relate not to the creation of a false persona in the letters, since she tacitly accepts this is true of all letter writing, but rather to the persona itself: the ‘invincibly cheerful’ Sivvy. Britzolakis clearly prefers the ‘anguished emotional’ poet to the ‘optimistic’ letter writer. As Tracy Brain has admitted, ‘If there is anything that readers  – and many critics  – cling to with respect to Plath, it’s melodrama.’28 Letters Home frustrates this desire. It presents Plath as a high-achieving but relatively well-adjusted teenager who grows into a similarly high-achieving and determined young adult. The most disturbing aspect for readers of Plath’s work is not the relative absence of melodrama, however, but the knowledge of how easily Plath could switch on and off these different moods. What troubles us most about Letters Home is not that Plath may be lying to her mother, or that her mother may have been lying to her, but the realization that Plath could fake happiness almost at will. And if she could fake happiness on an almost daily basis in letters home, why might her anger and rage be any more sincere? It is striking how often Plath immediately follows up a letter that appears almost pathologically self-pitying with one that presents the precise opposite face to the world. Can one person live through such extreme moods in a couple of days? On 25 February 1956, for example, Plath apologized to her mother for a letter sent the previous day in which she poured out ‘the blocked putridity’ in her head.29 Such sudden reversals in mood and tone lead to the conclusion that Plath’s Letters Home identity might be as deceptive and elusive as her Ariel voice. In fact, the more one studies the Collected Poems the more one finds images of letters as texts that disguise or even distort meaning. In ‘A Secret’, the letter appears to hide two people’s secrets or at least two voices (‘you, you’) behind which ‘nothing is reflected but monkeys’.30 In ‘The Couriers’, another anxious speaker warns of a delivery that is ‘not genuine’, contains ‘lies and a grief’, and may eventually be more akin to a ‘disturbance in mirrors’.31 Letters are either empty mirrors or frightening reflections for Plath. They certainly do not give back single faces or settled meanings. Plath saw letter writing as a performative art from an early age. The recent collection of Plath’s visual art, Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (2007), reproduces several illustrated cards, letters and postcards, nearly all to her mother, father or grandparents. In each of these acts of

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correspondence, Plath spends as much time on the look of the letter as the message itself. In a letter by the seven-year-old Plath to her father, we learn more about her colour preferences as a young girl than what she has actually been doing at her grandparents’ house.32 Letters like these suggest that Plath was well on the way to meeting Bishop’s criteria for good letter writing. Although the idea of ‘home’ bookends the letter to her father, appearing once in the opening line and again at the end, its main subject is the creation of art (the ink she gets on her fingers, the colours her mother and brother prefer her to write in). Even at this early stage, the relationship between an artist and his/her audience registers for her. She gives her father permission to read a previous letter to her mother and brother, a comment that implies that she did not consider it his automatic right. She is already aware of the extent to which her letters could be read by somebody else other than the addressee and may in fact become another person’s property. If we accept that an awareness of letter-writing etiquette is something else that distinguishes good from bad letter writers, Plath once again stands out. As a young girl, of course, this knowledge is pretty useless. As she got older, particularly when she began dating at Smith, correspondence became more than just a way of maintaining friendships and love affairs. It was another chance to write. As Kathleen Connors points out, ‘Many of her letters to and from boyfriends reflect extensive literary exchanges, where the young men make every attempt to keep up with Plath, writing poems and critiques of books they studied and each others’ [sic] work’.33 Connors cites as an example one such note34 to Plath’s lover Richard Sassoon, a distant relative of the English poet Siegfried Sassoon. Brought up in Europe and fluent in French, he was probably Plath’s most erudite and literate partner prior to meeting Ted Hughes. According to Anne Stevenson, this was Plath’s first letter to him.35 In drawing attention to their half-naked bodies and forest bed, its main function is surely to seduce, but Plath also has an eye on the poetic tradition here. Hegel and Sassoon are name-checked. Allusions to any number of Romantic poems can be traced in evocative references to the moonlit, starry night. The note also imitates the poetry of e. e. cummings, particularly in its playful disregard for capital letters and conventional punctuation. In a journal entry written during the summer of 1951, Plath admitted to feeling closer to Amy Lowell but loving ‘the whimsical, lyrical, typographically eccentric verse of e. e. cummings’.36 Plath appears at least half-conscious of the possibility of the note being read later, perhaps by herself, perhaps by somebody else. She has one eye on the note’s effect on her correspondent in

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the present and another on its effect on unknown readers in the future. Another boyfriend, Gordon Lameyer, certainly felt this to be the case when reflecting on his correspondence with Plath after her death, and his sense that hers were literary letters, written by a young woman already considering her own posterity.37 Tom Paulin considers practices like this contrary to the spirit of good letter writing: ‘The merest suspicion that the writer is aiming beyond the addressee at posterity freezes a letter’s immediacy and destroys its spirit. Posterity – the gathered jury of posthumous readers – feels cheated and refuses to be impressed.’38 Paulin’s complaint about letter writers who are more concerned with ‘posterity’ than the immediate addressee is written from the perspective of the ‘posthumous reader’. But one does not have to be ‘posthumous’ to find such practices frustrating. In 1954, Plath wrote to her former boyfriend Eddie Cohen to ask for her letters back. Cohen accused her of acting in bad faith: Has it ever occurred to you that you might make carbon copies of your personal letters? … The principle seems to be about the same, and would indicate in either case that you wrote them for the sake of your own ego rather than the illumination of, or contact with, the addressee. What you are asking, in effect, is the act of a woman who gets a great deal of pleasure from looking into a mirror. A very flattering mirror at that.39

Cohen takes issue with Plath’s use of letter writing as a vanity mirror. Like Paulin, he believes in an epistolary code of conduct in which the letter writer considers the feelings and thoughts of the addressee at least as much as their own needs and desires. In asking for her correspondence back, Plath breaks this code of conduct by implying that she wrote the letters for her benefit rather than his. In Cohen’s mind, she is guilty of behaving like a female Narcissus. Interestingly, this is more or less exactly how Plath later theorizes her own letters home to her mother, as a way in which ‘we could both verbalize our desired image of ourselves in relation to each other’.40 Plath’s letters, whether to a boyfriend or mother, can be concerned with how she looks and sounds to somebody else. They help her construct an identity in writing. It is not that Plath is necessarily more egotistical than other letter writers – even Paulin admits to ‘a keenly performative element in the epistolary art’41 – but that in requesting her own letters back and reusing them elsewhere she does put them to more egotistical uses than most writers. It must be said that Plath’s request to Cohen was made relatively early in her life, and writing life, but it would appear, here at least, that her ultimate aim in writing them was to make herself feel better.

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As Axelrod points out:  ‘Any reader of Letters Home must be struck by the insistent tone of self-praise that permeates the pages.’42 From the mid 1950s, not accidentally the same period in which she received Cohen’s letter, Plath began to keep copies of a great deal of her correspondence. Her motives for this are impossible to pin down. She may have kept them as examples of her feelings at the time (as a kind of extension of her diaries and journals). Perhaps she saw them as raw material for prose or poetry. Plath did not just use her own letters to prompt other forms of ­writing. She was equally adept at rewriting other people’s correspondence too. Vivian Pollak has drawn attention to Plath’s angry citation of a Marianne Moore letter in her 1962 poem ‘The Tour’. Pollak’s article brilliantly outlines the build-up to this moment: Plath’s careful reading of Moore’s poetry at college, her first meeting with Moore at the 1955 Glascock poetry contest and Moore’s subsequent reluctance to endorse Plath’s poetry. These events culminated on Moore’s part in two acts of career sabotage. In November 1961, Moore advised the Guggenheim Foundation to award a grant to Hughes rather than Plath because he has ‘twice the talent she has’ and she did not think that poets should be ‘subsidized for having a baby’. In April 1962, Moore was asked by Plath’s editor at Knopf whether she could offer an endorsement of the US edition of Plath’s first collection of poems, The Colossus. Moore replied that she could not. ‘I do like to like a book, especially anything by Sylvia Plath’, she explained. But she considered the poems ‘bitter, frost-bitten, burnt-out, averse’. As Pollak points out: Plath was stung by the criticism, which Jones [her editor] shared with her, and sought revenge in ‘The Tour,’ when she was in full Ariel bloom. The poem is dated 25 October 1962, and Moore is a prototype for the generic and censorious maiden aunt who visits the speaker and finds her too messy. ‘I am bitter? I am averse?’ Plath writes, flinging Moore’s words back at her. There was plenty of oral aggression to go around, and, picking up on the language of Moore’s antiColossus letter, she warns her not to stick her finger in a ‘frost-box’ that represents the speaker’s anger, her poems, and something obscene.43

Plath has metaphorically ripped up Moore’s letter, taken scissors to every word and phrase that offended her, and published her reply in a poem. The poem in this sense might be seen as a kind of verse letter in which one poet makes public a version of their epistolary exchanges. Plath’s Collected Poems arguably contains several other letters in disguise, not all of them addressed to other people. Her 1961 poem ‘The Rival’, for example, is addressed to an unnamed other woman that Stevenson suggests ‘was a projection of herself’.44 This interpretation of

On Sylvia Plath’s letters

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the poem certainly makes sense of the final stanza in which the speaker complains of receiving ‘news of you’ every single day.45 Who else but from oneself can one receive such regular communication? Plath accuses this other self of attempting to poison her by stealth. Her ‘dissatisfactions’ that ‘arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity’ are like letter bombs that secretly spread poison:  ‘No day is safe from news of you | Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.’46 Plath’s rival, her secret self as it were, is a letter writer who appears to be stalking her. The letters she receives from this alter ego are disturbing not because of anything written down; ‘White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide’, they are deathly, empty notes without any message inside. The nightmare of empty letters dramatizes the daily battle every writer faces to fill the empty page. It is this responsibility that arrives ‘through the mailslot with loving regularity’. Plath’s rival, in other words, is her writing self. As she admits in the opening stanza, the writing self is ‘beautiful, but annihilating’. It wants to make living things immortal. In the words of the poem, ‘your first gift is making stone out of everything’.47 Plath’s poems contain many other images of letter writing as a conversation with oneself rather than with other people. In ‘Wuthering Heights’, the very next poem she composed after ‘The Rival’, the speaker depicts another unnerving confrontation, this time with a flock of sheep. The sheep appear comfortable on the Heights. They ‘know where they are’. Plath depicts them comically as both extremely human and completely other-worldly. ‘Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds’, they are like Saturday shoppers rifling through bargain bins, an impression strengthened by her later suggestion that they are in ‘grandmotherly disguise, | All wig curls and yellow teeth’. At the same time, the ‘wool-clouds’ transform the sheep into creatures of the air. They are part of the sky, ‘Gray as the weather.’ In Plath’s nature poems, the observer’s state of mind is equally if not more important than what he or she actually sees. The same is true of this poem. In the middle of the stanza, the speaker compares being stared at by the sheep to ‘being mailed into space, | A thin silly message’. It is difficult to tell how Plath sees the sheep in relation to the speaker. ‘The black slots of their pupils take me in’ might be read several different ways. On the one hand, the sheep’s gaze might be said to ingest the speaker’s image. His/her own identity has been swallowed up by theirs, like Jonah being eaten by the whale. This might be a positive experience, however uncanny. Another meaning of being ‘taken in’ is to be welcomed in to a stranger’s home. What can be more strange than seeing through a sheep’s

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eyes? On the other hand, and this ambiguity of word choice is typical of Plath, to be ‘taken in’ is also to be conned by somebody else. Whatever interpretation one chooses to privilege, the poem returns to the speaker as the main object of attention. For it is the speaker who feels himself/ herself ‘mailed into space’ after being looked at by the sheep, not the other way round. The message might be ‘thin’ and ‘silly’48 but it is the speaker’s words that are being sent out there. Plath does not direct this particular mail shot to a particular place – where in ‘space’ are we meant to imagine her message being received? – though the title of the poem does provide a very literary return address. The Brontë sisters are not named in the poem but the sky that ‘leans on me, me’, threatening to obliterate the speaker’s existence, appears at least partially the weight of the literary past. The speaker is ‘the one upright | Among all horizontals’.49 Might some of these ‘horizontals’ be the gravestones of the dead? In a journal entry on her visit to Top Withens, the supposed origin of Emily Brontë’s description of Wuthering Heights, Plath notes that ‘the furious ghosts’ are ‘nowhere but in the heads of the visitors & the yellow-eyed shag sheep’.50 If ‘The Rival’ depicts the poet’s war with herself to make a difference, ‘Wuthering Heights’ stages a war with her main nineteenth-century predecessors. On this occasion she is writing imaginary letters to the dead. Two of Plath’s most famous Ariel-period poems, ‘Burning the Letters’ and ‘Letter in November’, contain further reflections on epistolary exchanges. ‘Burning the Letters’, as several critics have noted, was written on the reverse side of some of Hughes’s papers, including one of his most iconic poems, ‘The Thought-Fox’. According to Lynda Bundtzen, the poem represents a form of ‘back talking’ between poets.51 If so, both poetic partners are caught in the act: Plath, by burning the letters in which she allegedly discovered the name of Hughes’s mistress, Hughes, by delaying publication of the poem and later destroying at least one of Plath’s journals. Biographical context aside, the poem represents the culmination of Plath’s view of letter writing as a quasi-magical form in which the author and the recipient of the letter are somehow literally present. In most of her previous poems, she focuses on her role as a letter writer. Mailing letters is depicted as a way of sending her voice into space as if there were no addressee. Here Plath depicts the speaker presumably reading and then burning somebody else’s letters. For one of the first times in her poetry, she imagines herself as the reader of somebody else’s mail. These letters are more than epistolary reminders of another person, however. This ‘rival’ appears quite alive in their writing. Plath compares the scrunched-up paper in the wastebasket to the ‘white fists’ of a person.

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In making a fire of the paper, the poem’s speaker is to some extent lighting a match to an actual person, or at least the image of that person in her mind. Discarded information, the textual remains all human beings leave behind them, becomes an access point for mortal secrets. Letters, too, are mirrors again, trapping the person who has sent the letter long after physically writing it. In acting out her revenge on these letters – ‘And here is an end to the writing’, she announces in the second stanza – the speaker also attempts to bring an end to ‘the smiles’.52 But what are these ‘smiles’ and why does she find them so threatening? In an early journal entry written at Smith, Plath remembered the ‘nasty little tag ends of conversation directed at you and around you … Sometimes you can get a shot back in the same way, and you and your antagonist rival each other with brave smiles while the poison darts quiver, maliciously, in your mutual wounds.’53 ‘Smiles’ are equally deceptive and indeed deathly in her poetry. In ‘An Appearance’, ‘the smile of iceboxes annihilates me’.54 In ‘Edge’, another speaker ‘wears the smile of accomplishment’, though this accomplishment is only possible in death.55 Plath consistently imagines the smile as a sign of attack rather than welcome. Epistolary ‘smiles’ in ‘Burning the Letters’ constitute the same threat. No wonder the poet’s speaker fears them. In Plath’s mind smiles nearly always announce female rivalry that leads to psychological or sometimes even actual death. Plath’s speaker has thus summoned a live person from his or her letters. This act of bodily resurrection is a common trope in the Ariel collection. We find it in poems such as ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Fever 103º’. It is also reminiscent of Plath’s famous teenage diary entry: ‘I think I would like to call myself: “The girl who wanted to be God”.’56 What is unusual on this occasion is the speaker’s resurrection of another person. Or perhaps it is not so unusual. Plath may simply be describing the everyday process of reading a letter, a process that often involves the act of imagining that person present in the room. One definition of a good letter writer is an ability to appear both present and spontaneous in one’s writing. In a 1923 letter to Gerald Brenan, Virginia Woolf memorably compared letter writing to ‘a mere tossing of omelettes’,57 the implication being that a good letter was something thrown together at the last minute rather than drafted and planned. A decade later, she mocked authors who wrote letters to be published: I’m as vain as a cockatoo myself: but I dont [sic] think I do that. Because when one is writing a letter, the whole point is to rush ahead; and anything may come out of the spout in the tea pot. Now, if I thought, Ottoline [Morrell] will put this letter in a box, I should at once apply the tip of my finger to the end of

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the spout. When one was very young perhaps one did: perhaps one believed in immortality.58

Woolf’s letters have achieved ‘immortality’ in spite of her own wishes, perhaps because her impersonation of ‘rush[ing] ahead’ is so memorable. Plath’s letters are just as self-aware. She, too, is extremely adept at pretending to be an author in a hurry. But whose correspondence is actually being rubbed out in ‘Burning the Letters’? And whose body of writing is being consumed in the flames? Most Plath critics assume the papers to be those of Ted Hughes. According to Stevenson, ‘While Ted was in London, she invaded his attic study, hauled down what papers she could find – mostly letters – and made a bonfire in the vegetable garden. The mother watched, appalled, as her daughter performed whatever rite of witchcraft she thought appropriate.’59 Susan Van Dyne is equally confident about both the identity of the papers (‘Hughes’s letters’) and even their subject matter: ‘The whole poem is built upon a central irony: the very fire that the speaker builds to destroy the evidence of betrayal in Hughes’s letters unexpectedly betrays her purpose by delivering the name of his lover out of the flames.’60 Stevenson and Van Dyne sound as melodramatic as the poem’s speaker. As Neil Roberts points out, the absence of Plath’s own voice often encourages Plath critics ‘to stand in for her’.61 They find letters and names in the poem that are not actually there. Diane Middlebrook sensibly goes back to one of the original sources of the story, Plath’s own mother, who had been staying with the couple that summer. Aurelia witnessed the event, later describing it in a letter: I saw Sylvia furiously ripping apart the thick Ms., the sequel to the BELL JAR. Distraught, I later brought up the subject of the destruction. All Sylvia would say was that the manuscript had symbolized a period of joy that now proved to have been built on false trust – the character of the hero was dead to her – this had been his funeral pyre.62

The biographical origins of the poem do not matter any more. It is ­impossible to say whose letters were destroyed that day, or even if they were just letters. Each biographer reveals their own agenda here, to reach into the flames and rescue some trace of the original letter. Identifying the letter is imagined to be the same as identifying the truth, a methodology that underestimates the fictive, performative nature of all language, never mind epistolary writing. Plath critics are perhaps always searching after textual ashes, both in the sense of coming on the scene too late and focusing our attention on material that is completely irrecoverable.

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The aim of identifying the letter is, nevertheless, a perfectly human desire and one that Plath courts cleverly in her references to human characteristics visible in the fire (the ‘pale eyes’ and ‘stuffed expression’). But why are these eyes those of Ted Hughes any more than those of Assia Wevill? Might they, as Aurelia suspected, be Plath’s own fictional eyes caught in her unfinished second novel? And yet, can we really believe Plath would destroy a whole novel, leaving herself no way to recover it? (Even Rossetti left himself a way back, disinterring his buried manuscripts from his dead wife’s coffin.) There is, finally, no answer to any of these questions, however confident individual critics might sound. For whatever else the funeral pyre destroys in the poem, it certainly consumes the background to its composition. In the poem that Plath made out of the event, the one surviving letter as it were, ambiguity remains. The poem’s speaker confesses to not being ‘subtle’ in the opening stanza, but if anything I wonder whether she is in fact too ‘subtle’ here. The ‘pack of men in red jackets’, for example, seem both huntsmen and postmen. This ambiguity of roles continues throughout the poem. In the final stanza, the ‘ripped bag’ appears to be both the dogs tearing into the fox and the desperate speaker scratching at the contents of the mailbag. Plath’s choice of colour scheme is also difficult to pin down. Although red was one of Plath’s favourite colours,63 she does not seem in full or even partial possession of it here. The ‘red jackets’ arrange themselves against the speaker who depicts herself as vulnerable in ‘my housedress’. The ‘red burst’ in the concluding stanza, not to mention the flames that ‘lick and fawn’, are further red presences that threaten to blot out the speaker’s bleached identity. Plath’s Ariel poems often associate red with power and subjectivity. In ‘Ariel’ the speaker is ‘at one with the drive | Into the red || Eye, the cauldron of morning’.64 She is depicted as the embodiment of red, leaping into the flames. The ‘eye’ that controls red also controls the self. In ‘Cut’, another poem in which red features heavily, the speaker delights in spilling blood, describing the experience as both ‘a thrill’ and ‘a celebration’.65 In ‘Burning the Letters’, on the other hand, there is clear distance between the speaker’s partially ‘dumb’ eye and the more knowing eye of the letters. Most of Plath’s poems from this period analyse situations in which the speaker or the addressee attempts to hold back information that eventually slips out. At times the speaker has the upper hand as in ‘Daddy’ or ‘Amnesiac’. On other occasions, the speaker herself is being interrogated, as in ‘The Applicant’ or ‘Death & Co.’. Letters frequently function as the main object of desire in such interrogations. In ‘Letter in November’, the

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speaker paces her property ‘two times a day’ as if to prevent any letters being delivered.66 In ‘Eavesdropper’, another speaker keeps her neighbour at bay, conscious she wants to run her eyes ‘over my property, | Levering letter flaps’.67 In both poems, letters are part of ‘my property’. As such, the speaker can obviously do what he/she likes with them. ‘Burning the Letters’ takes this philosophy to its natural conclusion. The poem’s speaker considers it her right to clear the attic and destroy whatever she finds. Only then will the letters ‘have nothing to say’.68 At the same time, Plath’s poem acknowledges that the burning of letters is wrong. In the second stanza, the speaker’s fingers are tempted to retrieve something from the flames. ‘They are told | Do not touch’. But who is this voice in italics that warns her off? Perhaps it is simply her imagination, an imagination that thrives on breaking taboos and making art out of ashes, art too out of letters. Of course, Plath has destroyed art in the first place by burning letters. She chooses the poem’s ‘immortality’ over whatever potential for immortality the papers may have contained. Letters were an important form of dress rehearsal for Plath:  a place to test out various roles and voices and receive feedback and praise from different audiences. If for critics and readers it is sometimes unclear for whom and even to whom Plath was writing such letters, one should bear in mind her own confusion on the matter. Her letter-writing relationships operated like Woolf’s as both a vanity mirror for the recipient, attentive to their needs and wants, and a looking-glass for the author, inflating and perfecting her identity. Plath had one eye on the present day and another on posterity. While Plath may not have shown much respect for letter writing as an art form, that should not prevent us from seeing evidence of art in her correspondence. Bishop’s implied criticism of the Letters Home for not making much of an ‘effort’ is only true if by ‘effort’ one means taking into consideration the thoughts and feelings of one’s addressee. If ‘effort’ is understood in terms of energy and time spent on writing, Plath’s correspondence, particularly in letters to lovers like Cohen and Sassoon, and to a lesser extent in letters home to her mother, is worthy at least of being ‘discussed’. Indeed, I think a more complete edition of her letters may eventually reveal one of the twentieth-century’s most brilliant and varied epistolary voices. Plath may not meet the epistolary expect­ ations of some readers, many of whom require of a letter writer more than one might reasonably expect of an average person. But how many letter writers ever live up to such standards? If, as Woolf declares, the best letters are often akin to tossing omelettes, then something whole  – call it

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form, manners or simply one’s fantasy of a unified writing self – has to be broken in the process. Plath breaks it for the best of reasons: to make herself a better, more complete writer. No t e s 1 Virginia Woolf, Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Joanne Trautmann Banks (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), p. 256. 2 Woolf, Congenial Spirits, p. 265. 3 Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 504. 4 Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: The Selected Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (London: Pimlico, 1994), p. 544. 5 Elizabeth Bishop, Review of Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home, Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, undated. 6 See Jonathan Ellis, Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 145. 7 Ellis, Art and Memory, p. 146. 8 Elizabeth Bishop, Words In Air:  The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 586. 9 Ellis, Art and Memory, p. 95. 10 Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983), p. 178. 11 Elizabeth Bishop, ‘In the Village’, in Collected Prose (London:  Chatto & Windus, 1984), pp. 251–274. 12 LH, p. 3. 13 Bishop, Complete Poems, p. 178. 14 CP, p. 242. 15 Sally Bayley, ‘The Performance Art of Sylvia Plath and Tracey Emin’, in Sally Bayley and William May (eds.), From Self to Shelf:  The Artist Under Construction (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), p. 171. 16 Journals, p. 543. 17 Journals, p. 618. 18 Woolf, Congenial Spirits, p. 298. 19 LH, p. 63. 20 Steven Gould Axelrod, Sylvia Plath:  The Wound and the Cure of Words (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 93–94. 21 CP, p. 172. 22 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman:  Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (London: Papermac, 1995), p. 110. 23 Journals, p. 449. 24 Journals, p. 450. 25 Susan Rosenbaum, Professing Sincerity:  Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 130–131.

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26 Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 50–51. 27 Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 20. 28 Tracy Brain, ‘Unstable Manuscripts: The Indeterminacy of the Plath Canon’, in Anita Helle (ed.), The Unraveling Archive:  Essays on Sylvia Plath (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 35. 29 LH, p. 218. 30 CP, p. 219. 31 CP, p. 247. 32 Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley (eds.), Eye Rhymes:  Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 7. Dated 19 Feb. 1940. 33 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, p. 94. 34 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, p. 94. 35 Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame:  A Life of Sylvia Plath (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 50. 36 Journals, p. 88. 37 PM, Lameyer MSS, ‘Dear Sylvia’. 38 Tom Paulin, ‘Writing to the Moment: Elizabeth Bishop’, in Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays, 1980–1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 216. 39 Stevenson, Bitter Fame, pp. 51–52. 40 Journals, p. 449. 41 Paulin, ‘Writing to the Moment’, p. 218. 42 Axelrod, Sylvia Plath, p. 90. 43 Vivian R. Pollak, ‘Moore, Plath, Hughes, and “The Literary Life”’, American Literary History, 17/1 (Spring 2005): 109. 4 4 Stevenson, Bitter Fame, p. 217. 45 CP, p. 167. 46 CP, pp. 166–167. 47 CP, p. 166. 48 CP, p. 167. 49 CP, p. 168. 50 Journals, p. 589. 51 Lynda K. Bundtzen, ‘Poetic Arson and Sylvia Plath’s “Burning the Letters”’, Helle, The Unraveling Archive, p. 237. 52 CP, p. 204. 53 Journals, p. 37. 54 CP, p. 189. 55 CP, p. 272. 56 LH, p. 40. 57 Woolf, Congenial Spirits, p. 182. 58 Woolf, Congenial Spirits, p. 314. 59 Stevenson, Bitter Fame, p. 250.

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60 Susan R. Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 34–35. 61 Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 95. 62 Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (London: Little, Brown, 2004), p. 175. 63 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, p. 114. 64 CP, p. 240. 65 CP, p. 235. 66 CP, p. 253. 67 CP, p. 261. 68 CP, p. 204.

ch apter 2

‘The photographic chamber of the eye’: Plath, photography and the post-confessional muse Anita Helle

Although Plath’s visual world is becoming better known,1 little has been done to recognize the archive of domestic and vernacular portraiture her writing animates and explores. There are several reasons for neglect of the varied, inter-mediated, inter-textual world of photographic mater­ ials. Considering the immense scale of archived photographs available to scholars of Virginia Woolf or Robert Lowell – canonical writers to whom Plath is often compared  – Plath photographs at institutional sites are limited and diffuse. Photographs in primary collections number in the dozens rather than hundreds.2 There is no synoptic archival image bank; many photographs of Plath herself are duplicated across various collections; copies appearing in biographies often repeat, often without attribution or dating, so they tend to float free from interpretive contexts. While the study of photography and literature has taken off in recent years, a writer’s personal or public photographic collections are still understood to constitute ‘ephemera’ of artistic bibliography – in nineteenth-century usage the ‘fluttering’ image – compared to the holographs, manuscripts or drafts, for which scholars have established genetic models and interpretive procedures. In addition, Plath’s scrapbooks and albums, potentially rich quarry for studying conjunctions of words and images in the writer’s own hand, raise particularly complex issues of archival preservation; once disassembled, as Plath’s scrapbooks have been, it is difficult for scholars to reconstruct the ‘little books’ of photos and script exactly as the maker had intended them.3 In addition to these practical archival considerations, snapshots and portraits of the author present a host of less-tangible problems for an ethics and politics of representation. The excessive specularity of Plath in popular media is an extreme case, Marsha Bryant argues, of a problem of looking that besets representations of female ‘confessional’ poets more generally. When the ‘confessional’ is fully identified with the biographical, as Kathleen Lant has observed, too often ‘figurative nakedness fuses 32

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with literal exposure of skin’.4 The scathing sensationalizing of Plath’s suicide and her outsized iconicity as one of the ‘pin-up’ poets of twentiethcentury celebrity culture (her swimsuit photographs have been satirized, caricatured and glossed in popular songs) warrant that we attend to the role of spectacle (and spectral identifications) in shaping Plath’s cultural legacies, while cautiously resisting the voyeuristic, sensationalizing, literalizing, death-obsessed gaze. To this end, a turn to the cultural history of the photograph – and the recognition that Plath’s use of photographs is marked by a variety of photographic traditions, from the domestic and documentary to the surreal – signals an alternate point of departure, one that recognizes the inter-subjectivity of visual material in the public/­ private sphere of poetry.5 The photographic images I have been annotating, part of a collection at Smith  College, Massachusetts, illustrate a few of the ways that Plath’s photographic legacy may yield fresh perspectives, while also illuminating conceptual issues that follow from an assumption that photographs automatically record an image of the unqualified real. As Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright observe, the unquestioned assumption that the photograph shows what ‘has been’ too often governs the perception of the photographic portrait, despite the fact that photographs, like other kinds of texts, are edited and annotated in the process of their artistic transformations.6 The photographs referenced here are among a few dozen of the earliest pictures taken of Plath and her North American family against the background of New England settings referred to in her writing, alongside bits of correspondence, notes and familial narratives in which they are embedded. As artefacts, they are modest and unassuming – many 2 × 2 in. and 2 × 3 in. snapshots, mostly taken with a Kodak pocket camera of the kind widely available.7 Thanks to the lifelong collecting and documenting energies of Aurelia Plath (the source of most of the material), these artefacts might, from a quasi-ethnographic perspective, merely provide thick descriptions of the familial and domestic social practices of a pre- and post-World War II era German–Austrian, second-generation American immigrant family at home, at work and at play. Historians of photography have noted that in a Cold War era culture that sought to conserve ideological distinctions and boundaries, activities such as the production of home movies and family albums were well-suited to reinforcing national and ethnic boundaries, as well as affective and familial ties.8 The content and settings of these photographs also tie Plath photographs to the place-based writing of Plath’s sea-girlhood and to the autotelic myths of poetic creativity often found in her writing.

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But such myths of creation also have material origins. In and of themselves, what is immediately noticeable about the modest character of these artefacts is that they would be easy to overlook because they present a striking contrast to Plath’s ‘IMAX celebrity’.9 And, from a historiographic perspective, it is the contrast between the simple and unassuming artefacts and the images of people and things and the literary–theatrical modes of authorial self-representation for which Plath is known that should compel attention. Such contrasts draw the eye back to what I consider to be the ‘darkroom theatre’ of Plath’s photographic awareness, to questions about processes of artistic transformation involved in seeing and writing, and to a better understanding of how Plath herself animates, edits and annotates personally significant photographs in rich textural detail, calling attention to acts and practices of looking, seeing and not seeing, as distinctive aspects of representation. Owing to their fragmented, discontinuous, static nature, the separate photographic images in and of themselves do not constitute artistic ‘evidence’ or demonstrate how Plath reshaped the material of the past in context. However, in combination with letters, journal entries and poems, the interaction of media and text creates exciting possibilities for analysing transformative interferences, dialogues, relays, contests of meaning that shape the flow of interaction and perception as we read across different media.10 The second part of my title, the ‘post-confessional muse’, locates Plath’s use of photographic objects and images within revisionary paradigms of confessional authorship. Photographic portraiture has long been associated with myths of modern memory, thus contributing to a dialogue about the artist’s reshaping of the past. In twentieth-century modernism, the status of vernacular photographs, midway between mechanical recording technologies, domestic objects and artistic media, renders the powerful link between photography and literature both artistically suspect (for example, D. H. Lawrence’s diatribes against ‘Kodak vision’ protest at new media assaults on the isolate ego of the Romantic creator)11 and susceptible to auratic magnification (for example, scholars have traced Virginia Woolf’s fascination with the lyric time and ‘moments of being’ to photographic influences).12 As a writer, Plath came of age in the era of the photo opportunity, when the shifting boundaries of public and private gave added emphasis to the artefactual character of literary lives; in response to the changing shapes of literary authorship, poets of Plath’s generation make increasingly selfconscious explorations of seeing and being seen, through a photographic lens.13 In recent criticism, an emerging consensus has led to the understanding

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that, by the middle of the twentieth century, territory invoked by cameraand-snapshot metaphors in American and British lyrics significantly expanded, re-emerging in transnational discourses where the self is re-imaged in the field of the other. In postmodern paradigms of presence and absence, the lyric poet reckons with loss through ‘artifacts of the surviving self ’.14 What gives photographic images of familial and domestic life their interpretive purchase in Plath is the speaker’s ambivalent, restless posturing before the increasingly powerful camera’s eye. In Plath’s writing, the snapshot becomes a medium for anxious reflexivity, a counter-image of otherness and linguistic play, refracting the personal and the political. In Plath’s early and later poetry, as in the private writing, there is constant tension between the power of image-making technologies to contain – or ‘black box’ – the real in an impersonal way and assertions of wilful authorship. Plath’s own early experiments with ‘picture-taking’ range from photographs that are strictly documentary to others that explore symbolic codings in the manner of abstract compositions. For example, her juvenile scrapbooks include experimentation in making art photographs, among them several black-and-white images of barbed-wire fences against the expanses of snowy fields.15 In an early formal poem, ‘Tale of a Tub’, the lyric subject of Plath’s poem (a speaker in a lavatory is overcome by sensations of being watched) emerges through reflection on photography as a form of surveillance in an artificially lit, sterile environment. Here the image of inhabiting a ‘photographic chamber of the eye’16 succinctly updates Swift’s earlier ‘kingdom of absurdities’ and the sprawling spaces of incipient paranoia of T. S. Eliot’s screen images that ‘formulate’ and ‘pin’. By positioning a woman before a mirror that behaves like an intrusive camera and simultaneously serves as a medium for self-reflection, the poem exposes a split subjectivity. The split is manipulated to reflect on instrumentality that penetrates body and state.17 Regulatory images that compose such a private life intrude upon the supposedly private and ‘closed’ spaces of a lavatory, just as they expose and contain the private parts of a woman’s body. The consciousness of the speaker is riven from outside and within by the technology, as the disjunction between seeing and being seen opens up, the alien wince of the ‘stranger in the mirror’.18 Despite the quandary such reflections introduce, it is important, however, to emphasize that this camera image does not merely reflect. The ­figure of the camera’s eye also instigates: that is to say, as an instrument that is part human and part machine, the camera has the capacity for prosthetic memory, registering ideologies and practices that might otherwise remain

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hidden: ‘each day demands we create our whole world over,’ Plath writes in ‘Tale of a Tub’, rejecting the perspective of the anonymous ‘I’. The speaker’s interrogative leaves us thinking that the impersonality of the surveilling eye – it belongs to no one in particular – complicates agency, expressed as the capacity or the incapacity of the singular ‘eye’ to decode a visual pattern:  ‘Just how guilty are we when the ceiling | reveals no cracks that can be decoded?’, the speaker wonders.19 In this essay, I want to emphasize the particularly transformative, generative aspect of photographs as images and texts in Plath’s writing by considering several examples of different inter-mediated, inter-textual uses of the photograph. The first is an overt instance of photo-textuality, where the two media of photography and writing are explicitly joined by Plath in a page in her journal. The second instance is a case of photographic ekphrasis in which a portrait from the family album becomes an object of direct address in poems by Plath and Hughes, setting in motion an interplay of verbal and visual meanings. In these cases we may speak of the ‘photo-poetic’, for the distinction between the visual and the linguistic often blur.20 M a k i ng a fac e / c a m e r a wor k i n au t o -p or t r a i t u r e Mieke Bal writes that individualism in photographic portraiture, formal and informal, involves a ‘discourse of the face’, which is to say that the viewing of faces compels reflection on the acts of looking and attention related to primary attachments and their social codings.21 Ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes’s now-famous pronouncements about the invention of the camera as a ‘mirror with memory’ and a machine for self-improvement, writers in the American grain have wrestled with its duplicative, uncanny effects on their own portraits in terms of power and self-representation.22 There is a long tradition of philosophical reflection linking [auto]biography with the photographic self-portrait. This stems from the idea that photographic images were analogous to off-cast forms, membranes, films and skins. Hints of thinking and feeling through the photographic situation and the rhetoric of the photographic image appear in Plath’s journals from an early age, complicated by and contained within the modern spectacles of femininity.23 In an unpublished passage from an early journal (1949), on the occasion of just having had her picture taken, Plath yokes camera-image and mirror together around the theme of false selves and unforgiving appearances. Part of the now-famous passage in which Plath describes herself as an artist who wished ‘to be God … I am

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I’,24 her writing circles around the fear that the permanence of a flawed or homely snapshot in circulation would surely compromise her ego-ideal, introducing dangerous misrecognition to the unblemished surface imagined in the private mirror. And yet it appears Plath also kept and circulated photographs of family, friends and children, arranging and even fetishizing them. A letter to Mallory Weber, which I paraphrase here, complements the description Plath gives in Letters Home of the gallery she arranged in her Cambridge rooms, where the silent surfaces of pictures lent a shrine-like aspect to the furnishings.25 Plath did not live long enough to leave us explicit reflections on what it means to ‘think through photographs’. But we get a feeling for her ambivalence about being photographed, especially for commercial purposes, when she resisted the first opportunity she had to recommend mature work to the public with a photograph on a book jacket. In a letter, dated 12 December 1961, part of correspondence with Judith B. Jones surrounding the publication of The Colossus and Other Poems, Plath writes from Court Green that she does not have a camera. She notes wryly that, given the abundance of publicity photos from her days in college and at Mademoiselle, she expects her audiences will have enough of a visual record to sustain themselves.26 Almost as soon as she became a writer, Plath and her mother had been on the lawn snapping lectures with fresh rolls of celluloid – in some of her early publications a poem was routinely printed with a snapshot. Given that she had been much photographed as a young writer, it is difficult to know whether her refusal to be photographed for the public presentation of The Colossus was a principled refusal of crass trends in the marketing of authorship or merely an acknowledgement that motherhood and marriage at Court Green had taken her out of the feminine beauty business. These references to photography and autobiography in journals and letters are scattered and fragmentary, but they tell us something about how Plath felt about the intimate connection between face-making and having her picture taken. Her sharp responses evoke Roland Barthes’s oft-quoted apprehensions on having his face become the subject of a portrait: ‘Once I feel myself observed by the lens,’ Barthes writes, ‘everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing”. I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image … I feel that the photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice.’27 In the Journals, Plath’s references to cameras and to photographic portraits negotiate a dialectic between the perfectionistic, sublime image and the mortified, ugly, death-dealing body, in part through editing and

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manipulating what photographic exchanges mean to her and to others.28 A network of metaphors connecting cameras and snapshots extends to descriptions of what happens when her writing is successful or unsuccessful. When the writing is going well, she uses the Woolfian language of the photographic imperative, ‘making of the moment something permanent’,29 as if capturing a living ‘I’. Yet, in describing failure, she does so with respect to the mortification of the body as a frozen or flawed surface: ‘trying to keep myself from flying into black bits’;30 or to fail is to ‘fall stillborn’ with ‘limited fixity of view’.31 Notably, in a January 1953 entry in her Smith College journal, she has cut and pasted a studio portrait of herself and surrounded it with injunctions to self-improvement. When I teach Plath’s journals, what typically disturbs students about the writing surrounding the photograph is the unwarranted, doctrinal leap from personal ‘limitations’ to ‘original sin’ (‘You have had chances; you are wallowing in original sin:  your limitations’),32 especially because we already know where the biographical narrative leads. The one who excoriates her self-image in the photograph will, months later, take pills and dive into the crawl-space of the house. In the meantime, the passage is thick with flying imperatives, addressing the counter-self to ‘look at that ugly, dead mask here’, and ‘do not forget it’. The face in the portrait is lugubriously painted as a ‘chalk mask with dead, dry poison behind it’, and a ‘death angel’. In making the mask, then calling it out, the speaker achieves a momentary distance from a nameless ‘it’ that the portrait surface represents: ‘It is what I … never want to be again. The pouting, disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.’33 The type of seeing that the phototext proposes is so complex because it is utterly inseparable from the frustration that creates and results from it. The written text is seen as having permeability (and therefore depth) that the photograph lacks. Such permeability permits the writer to produce alternate figurations of the self, even if it is unable to resolve all the quandaries it sets in motion. Here are all the marks of what I have come to think of as Plath’s darkroom theatre – the metonymies of the verbal and visual portrait opening up a struggle with the material, and the feelings it provokes. Since photograph images for Plath were associated not only with misrepresentation, but with the possibility of making her own representational claims, it is important to note that her sensitivity to photographic media as a vehicle for artistic expression and her awareness of its social coding were encouraged by her education in modern art at Smith, where

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the curriculum emphasized integration of traditional genres of visual art with developments in modern technology and culture. In Plath’s journals from the winter of 1958, when she audited a modern art class with Professor Priscilla Van der Poel, she looks to images of African masks, doll masks and earthenware heads projected from an image screen. ‘O, to get my voice again’, she complains, looking to the reproduction of the face mask for inspiration. Here  – with a tinge of irony  – Plath acknowledges the uncanny malleability of the photographic portrait as medium of social and artistic exchange, and its ‘muse’-like effects of seeing the face at one remove on the screen. The photograph-portrait is seen as open to mythologizing (the archetypal allusion to soul-catching) and, via the Freudian unconscious, a fetishized piece of everyday life:  ‘ – how all photograph-portraits do catch our souls – part of a past world, a window onto the air and furniture of our own sunken worlds, & so to the mirrortwin, Muse’.34 ‘I n t h e pic t u r e I h av e of you ’: 35 a n no tat i ng a pho t o g r a ph of O t t o Pl at h Unlike many of the images in the domestic family album, the photographic image of Otto Plath as pedagogue, taken while he is standing at the blackboard in a classroom at Boston University giving a German ­lesson (Fig. 1), and presumed to have been taken by Aurelia Plath a year or two before Sylvia Plath was born,36 has not been consigned to the waste material of the archive. Its future as a canonical centrepiece for ‘Daddy’ was guaranteed by Aurelia Plath’s introduction of the photograph into the first printing of Letters Home (1975),37 where the family album is used as a metaphor for Plath’s literary production. One of the many ways that the experience of reading the published version of Letters Home differs from reading the unpublished archive of letters at the Lilly Library, is that the unpublished archive does not frame or enclose the letters in a family album – this was an invention of print, and of the pastedowns in which Plath’s photo albums were first published in the book of letters. Normally, we think of photographs as falling from letters, but in the construction of the book, Plath’s photo album becomes, instead, the frame in which the epistolary writing is enclosed, a naturalizing gesture that insists on the metonymic relation of mother and daughter. In fact, most of the photographic material that appears in the published version of Letters Home – extracts from the albums, for example – did not appear in Sylvia’s letters at all (it was not, in fact, Plath’s regular practice to include

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Figure 1.  Otto Plath as Pedagogue, c.1930 Reproduced by kind permission of Susan Plath Winston on behalf of the Estate of Aurelia S. Plath. Copyright the Estate of Aurelia S. Plath.

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photographs of herself in her letters to her mother). Editorial decisions to add Plath’s family album material and photo-signature pages made Letters Home the kind of ‘primary’ text it would eventually become – a seemingly handcrafted domestic product and a kind of urtext of maternal intersubjectivity. All that I have been able to learn about this photograph of Otto Plath suggests that the photograph is in need of further annotation. In organizing ‘Daddy’ around an explicit and central photographic reference, ‘the picture I have of you’,38 Plath’s poem insists that the annotation be performed more on the speaker’s own terms. Those terms evoke and explore tensions defined by the photograph as a public record or document of a life, and a representation arrived at in the relations between the photographer, the subject of the photograph and the daughter-writer who comes to possess the photograph in the course of the poem. The importance of any photograph of the absent father as a poetic resource for the daughter-speaker need not be belaboured. For Plath (as was the case with Virginia Woolf), the parent who died when the child was relatively young, before she could form many, if any, memories, may have been available only through photographs. But nothing in the extensive history of criticism on ‘Daddy’ has quite prepared us to say why this particular photograph would have been of such interest to Plath rather than other pictures of Otto Plath (that presumably would have been accessible to her from family albums and are now part of the Smith collections), such as the image of him in a marching band uniform with his oboe, which would also carry military overtones, or a photograph of the young Otto as a boy of seventeen, which Erica Wagner claims was favoured by Plath,39 or the photograph plucked from the family album and represented only as an empty space in paste-down album pages of Letters Home. The cultural question is, what we can we know about the rhetoric of the image of the German pedagogue that renders it legible for the public lyric at mid-century? And how do the particular details of this portrait artistically ground and mediate the speaker’s tenacious grasp on the ‘picture I have of you’, galvanizing associations between this figure and the father/führer already present in German folklore and Nazi propaganda? The figure of the German pedagogue has cultural precedents in another visual archive from the 1930s available to writers of Plath’s generation, the ‘portfolio of archetypes’ of the German people photographed by August Sander. Sander’s Weimar-period ‘geographical atlas’ of the German people (Antlitz der Zeit, 1929; Face of Our Time) aspired to be

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a record of the ‘character and nation’ of Germany through chronicling the rise of professions and professionals from the very rural settings of Plath’s German ancestors. Portraits such as Sander’s ‘The Teacher’ offer an ­analogue to the kind of visual and cultural thinking going on in Plath’s reframing of the ‘Man in Black’ image and suggest that the sources of its appeal go well beyond the biographical. Like the photograph of Otto Plath, Sander’s teachers were most often free-framed against the background of their workplaces, or in familial settings. Photographed centre and front, with space around them, Sander’s photographs are known for making figures appear not only to inhabit but to perform their roles  – thus imparting a tension between the static and the dynamic, between motion and arrested time. Similarly to the way Plath brings ‘Daddy’ to life as the father-in-history, Sander’s camera emphasizes a correspondence between the larger typological, mythical and psychological dimensions that attach to social and familial life. As in Plath’s poem, Sander’s camera work reveals that the face beneath the portrait is the mask, a ‘type’, albeit embedded in abrasions of place, class, region. In the aftermath of World War II, Sander’s Weimar-period photographs came to occupy a more prominent place in the political and geographical imagination for German-Americans when they were introduced to American audiences. Plath may well have seen them in popular magazines such as Horizon (1960), and in Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man (1955), a book that Plath owned.40 The photographs evoke a border between two national mythologies and their affective investments, of mistrust and betrayal, bereavement and culpability. Sander’s subjects could not, of course, have seen into the future, but, in Plath’s time, the figure of the German pedagogue galvanized and made legible the complicated burden of history. For post-war audiences in the 1950s and 1960s, the dark-suited men of the German professional classes were the very medium through which German-American audiences reflected on guilt, innocence and complicity. Writing in the heat of the Adolf Eichmann trials, even a sympathetic scholar such as Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr, who edited the Sander photographs for popular audiences, recognized the image of the German teacher for its archetypal potential, a touchstone of ‘ancient tribal giants’ presented through the ‘innocent eye’ of the photographer, a ‘little man’ from ‘within the heap’.41 That Plath’s portrait of the all-toohuman and all-too-German pedagogue in ‘Daddy’ uses the medium of the photographic portrait as the occasion for its own geographical circuitry, with its broad sweep of lands, people, oceans, continents, from the boot-shaped toe of Prussia to San Francisco and the ‘waters off beautiful

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Nauset’42 (all fixed in Otto Plath’s imaginary eye-beam) is consistent with the broader tendency in the camera work of the 1950s for photographic portraits of the German teacher to have become a ‘pivot’ for looking at the world.43 There is also a maternal portal for sharpening our view of ‘Daddy’ through the photographic image. When Plath picked up the photograph and engineered its place in ‘Daddy’, it had already acquired familial as well as cultural connotations. In the early 1930s, when Aurelia Plath was newly married, and at a time when German language teaching might still have signalled a progressive career move, Aurelia Plath enclosed the photograph of Otto Plath at the blackboard in a letter to friends and family members from whom he had long been distant.44 Frances McCullough, who worked with Aurelia Plath on the making of Letters Home, confirms my belief that the photograph was probably taken and circulated by her.45 Through Aurelia’s letters, in private circulation, the image of Otto Plath as a professional man of rising success is polished; the photograph circulates, arriving in multiple hands. Erica Wagner, in Ariel’s Gift, published another print of the photograph (or the same print cropped and blown up – it’s hard to tell which), and since there is no credit on the photograph it stands to reason that it was felt none was needed or that Hughes had lent her a copy from his files.46 The location of the snapshot of Otto in Ted Hughes’s later poem ‘A Picture of Otto’ implies the speaker’s fresh look, a private viewing of the same or a different print. But it is only in Aurelia Plath’s print of the photograph, the one published in Letters Home, that the smiling professional man faces the camera so intimately and directly. The high German teaching text is tucked in one hand. A script incorporating allusions to rural life crosses the blackboard and includes details relevant to vectors of desire and ambivalence in Plath’s poem. We can see, for example, that in Aurelia’s script Otto Plath is not in fact standing at the podium, which is barely visible as a table on the right, but has stepped down into the well of the classroom, apparently engaging in some way more directly, more intimately, with the person behind the camera. Although Otto Plath appears seldom to have been photographed in anything other than garments emblematic of the professional man, the photograph captures a more mobile facial expression than do his studio portraits. For this reason, it does not appear, strictly speaking, posed, but more spontaneous, taken by someone who knew him, although Plath will make good use of the institutional background. There are further associations, linguistic if nothing else, for thinking that poetic affects have been mediated by the photograph – for example, the

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poem’s insistence on subordination or dominance with the German term for the photographic object  – the German equivalent is ‘Foto-Objekte’, false friends, as linguists say, with the English word ‘foot’. We assume, in reading a scrapbook or family album, that tactile gestures – pointing, touching, arranging materials – are the means by which emotion borders on the hand and the eye. In the spatial coordinates of the family album Plath assembled for herself (represented in the pastedowns for Letters Home), she literally pasted her own baby picture at the base or ‘foot’ of the absent photograph of her father in the page in her scrapbook. The themes of possession, dispossession, estrangement and repossession, and resistance – all prominent in ‘Daddy’ – are erotically tinged in two poems with photographic references from Plath’s juvenilia:  ‘Bluebeard’ and ‘Sonnet to Satan’. In the juvenilia, camera and snapshot metaphors can be seen developmentally as part of perceptual fluency – where a visual image passes over a boundary and is given verbal texture, becoming intertwined with other literary narratives. These early poems may also be read as artistic statements in the making. And in each poem there is a suggestion of a ‘chamber’, an interiorized space that is both darkroom and light source, where power and desire circulate around seeing and writing, look­ing and being looked at: two different forms of intimacy and intelligibility. In ‘Bluebeard’, Plath is ramping up for ‘Daddy’. We can note that the nursery-rhyme stanza pattern, the repetition of ‘y’-sounds, the imagery of enclosure, the figure of the bloody chamber, anticipate the gothic image and line patterns in the later poem, in which daddy ‘bit my pretty red heart in two’.47 By the time Plath writes ‘Daddy’, the ‘study’ space just out of sight in ‘Bluebeard’ has been further verbalized, shifted from the relatively static chambered space evoked in ‘Bluebeard’ to an object to be actively studied, re-framed, through murderous ‘dissection’. In both examples from Plath’s juvenilia, however, something important has happened before the poem begins: a heart and body photographed have been cancelled, X-ed out: in his eye’s darkroom I can see my X-rayed heart, dissected body: I am sending back the key that led me into Bluebeard’s study.48

In ‘Sonnet to Satan’, Plath begins with virtually the same phrase, ‘in darkroom of your eye’, but the figure is distanced and the space of looking is expanded with the reversal of viewpoint, a switch from third to second person – from ‘his’ to ‘your’ darkroom. Here the language associated with

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‘light writing’ is explicitly heliotropic. Photographic processes mix with metaphysical and moral speculation, for Satan proves to be the expert in chiaroscuro. Extrapolating from analogies between mind and camera, the deity is ‘proud maker of the planet’s “negative”’, while Satan is master of darkroom techniques, ‘turning god’s radiant photograph to shade’.49 His authorial power is identified with imprinting of light-sensitive material from nature to paper and ink. By the time Plath writes ‘Daddy’, the ‘key’ to the ‘study’ that the speaker ‘sends back’, in a gesture of non-compliance in the juvenile poem, ‘Bluebeard’, has become nothing less than the speaker’s bid to access full powers of language. Such access requires that the speaker revisit the chambered scene of linguistic competence in the presence of the expert. But the stakes are poetry. With the initial stress on tight compartments, Plath’s speaker appears to be referring back to the darkrooms of the eye from ‘Bluebeard’. The first explicitly literary trans­ formation of the earlier material and of the photograph of Otto at the blackboard takes place in working from one medium into another, inhabiting and animating visual to verbal signifiers. But hers is not quite the first mimetic transformation, since the photograph arrives saturated with cultural and familial associations. What Plath accomplishes in the claim of the ‘picture I have of you’ is a re-possession of the photograph’s central figure, first from a mother who circulated the photograph in letters. Plath’s speaker wins by being the better student, studying the picture and recovering meanings not typically captured by family albums and their ideologies. Ted Hughes’s ‘A Picture of Otto’, coming near the end of the Birthday Letters sequence, provides yet another transformative rendering and editing of the photograph, and its lines play against those in ‘Daddy’. In its sequences of remembered images, Birthday Letters also evokes the family album metaphor, a collage-like framework in which photographs flicker towards each other, as if the speaker is turning over pictures and reviewing the memories stirred up by them as they pass through his hands. The deeper we go in Birthday Letters, the more darkly the photographic references glimmer, as if having gathered smoke or residue. The use to which photographic references in Birthday Letters are put is in one sense conventional for readers of albums, in that Hughes’s speakers, as in ‘A Picture of Otto’, peer anxiously for signs of recognition and resemblance, a search fulfilled in the matched genealogies that reframe its ending (‘Your portrait, here, could be my son’s portrait’).50 Photographs by convention make memories through imagined contiguities.

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In Plath’s poems the contiguities are notably to man-made objects (monuments, shoes, museums). In Hughes’s poem, a Manichean struggle of the natural – the ‘hidden’ and the ‘occulted’ – ensues, reflecting on the archival themes of stolen properties and identities. The claim of ‘occult guilt’ is made rhetorically effective in its claim to ‘just’ resemblances through ‘natural’ knowledge rather than artful principles. For Hughes, the photographic portrait itself stands accused  – it ought not to confuse the artefact with the faithful witness. The sudden ‘shock’ of re-encountering the image, as alluded to here, is that the figure of ‘Otto’ has been spirited back to life. Line for line, a juxtaposition of corresponding lines in ‘Daddy’ and ‘A Picture of Otto’ reveals the ways in which parallels develop and diverge. From Hughes’s side, it is an argument about whether family photographs are fit subjects for public lyric – a ‘big shock’, the speaker objects, to find ‘so much of your Prussian backbone’ ‘conjured into poetry’. ‘A Picture of Otto’ takes place (as does Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’, a poem to which it owes a great deal) in the tunnel of the spirit world. Hughes’s prosody picks up initially where Plath’s leaves off in her reference to the photograph  – for example, ‘you [Otto] stand there’ [emphasis mine]. The additional slack syllable, ‘there’, loosens Plath’s taut, wired line (‘you stand at the blackboard Daddy’), and allows Hughes’s speaker to crop the space as well as the time of the photograph with his own denotative reference to Elmet country, the dark ‘adit’ of memory. An extraordinary choice of a line end noun, the word adit, referring to both a mineshaft and a tunnel, makes room for an ‘audit’ (and ‘editing’) of memory to be conducted face to face and man to man. Similarly to the reading of the image in Plath’s poem, Hughes’s rendering of the image assumes familiarity with the conventions of documentary photographic ‘evidence’. Just as Plath’s had read the fatal ‘cleft in the chin’,51 Hughes’s, too, reads Otto Plath’s poses in physiognomic code, as military, upright (‘your Prussian backbone’) – but there is nothing of interest in the profession, only ‘character’. Ironically, in Hughes’s poem it is as if the photographic situation itself must be murdered in order to reveal ‘natural’ resemblance, so that the dead beloved will remain a private, living memory. In Plath’s poem the use of the photograph is nothing if not studied, denaturalized, diligent in its use of every inch of the photographic surface, from the visual syntax of the perpendicular figure against the wide horizon (recapitulated in ‘Elm’, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, ‘Man in Black’, ‘A Winter’s Tale’ and other poems) to the chiaroscuro light/dark effects and – as I will note in a moment – down to the writing on the

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board. She is dealing here with making memory ‘visible’, even when full presence (the dead remain dead) is impossible. We think of photographs as having meaning for those who took them; in reappropriating, Plath differentiates not only her use of the photograph but her own departure from familial legacies. And, given that our belief in the unvarnished ‘real’ of the documentary tradition is not quite what it used to be, twenty-first-century readers might have reason to speculate that the visual detail of this photograph, so weighted with national and familial associations, might simply have provided more grist for the mill for the poem’s flagrant essentialisms. However, photography is the art of time and reference, as well as space, and Plath’s timing in introducing the photograph is impeccable. Here one might appreciate the wit and visual design as well as dramatic timing in the way that the moment of evidence, the ‘picture I have of you’, is introduced into context as an ekphrastic reference – not in the beginning, as we might expect in a more typical ekphrastic instance, but more obliquely, well into the development of the verbal portrait of the figure at its centre. In a poem where imaginary constructions depend on impossible temporal sequences (for example, the sequence ‘you died before I had time’ in ‘Daddy’ directly contradicts the present tense of ‘you do not do, you do not do’), we should credit Plath for having introduced the photograph at the very moment when she does, as the culmination of a series of synecdochic displacements (shoe/ foot, statue/museum, map/nation).52 By introducing the photograph twothirds of the way through, the image gathers from what came before it and sutures the links between the indexical and the symbolic, the whole extravagant fairy-tale business and the hyperbolic invective made suddenly, aggressively present. In a poem where themes of containment and being contained are crit­ ical, the fact that the photograph is the smallest possible container in a series of larger containers into which Otto Plath has fit, suits the poet’s performance. The speaker declares she has to recover him from that childhood, watery, ambiguous and formless place she will especially associate with maternal origins (‘ … head in the freakish Atlantic’ ‘In the waters off beautiful Nauset’53) in order to stand up, head to head, toe to toe, as it were, ‘in the picture I have of you’. Of course, many readers now come to the poem having seen the photograph of Otto; but even if we had not, it is important to note that no reader attentive to Plath’s careful arrangement of space and sequence in the poem could make the mistake of thinking that the ‘picture’ refers to a painting instead of a photograph: Plath’s awareness of the documentary convention and the photographic image as

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reproducible is decisive to viewing this ‘moment of evidence’: ‘Look, here it is’, the performative rhetoric of the photograph declares, in its moment of foot-stamping tantrum (and glee). Finally, the strangeness of the verb tenses in the poem (contradictorily, you ‘died before I had time’) are congruent with the impossible tense implied by the photographic ­portrait, which proposes that ‘this is the way you looked’ long after the subject ‘looks’ at all. And yet, perhaps we have not quite tapped out this photograph’s complex fusion of the visual with the linguistic and the performative, until we consider the attention the poem brings to the impossibility of fully deciphering the language and the rules of grammatical transformation being presented through the writing on the board – the claim, in its most melodramatic and excessive form, that the speaker ‘can’t speak’ the language that is written in chalk. Both Jacqueline Rose’s insistence on ‘Daddy’ as a poem made of lines of ‘overlapping repetitions and translations’54 and Diane Middlebrook’s emphasis on Plath’s performative mimicry55 attain a broader frame of reference when we consider the terms of the written mise en scène in the background of the photograph. In unpublished material for Letters Home, Aurelia Plath describes Otto Plath’s well-known interest in foreign-language teaching and its pedagogies – one of the interests, according to her, that they shared.56 The likeliest candidate for the book Otto holds in one hand in the photograph is F. W. Meisnest’s Elementary German, a text designed to teach ‘high German’ and to identify the cultural content of German with masterful breadth and unity, epitomized by the colour-stained map of the Deutsches Reich spread halfway across Europe as the centrefold of the book.57 The author of the text, F. W. Meisnest, had been Otto Plath’s teacher and thesis advisor at the University of Washington. The text includes the vocabulary scrawled on the chalkboard in the picture of Otto Plath, and its pedagogical method (the student must answer only in German – hence, ‘ach du, ach du’) appears consistent with the poetic speaker’s melodramatically accentual performance. Motifs of village life are suggested by several photographs of open markets, where the reader of the text, presumed to be a US traveller taking advantage of a favourable exchange rate, is encouraged to learn the language of pointing and purchasing. Reading from left to right across the three panels, and distinctly visible in the writing on the board, are a string of related sentences adapted from the exercise book. Only the first two columns can be reliably deciphered. In the first column, reading left to right and top to bottom, the mise en scène is the purchase of potatoes in a village market.

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First, an English interrogative – Is that the basket the one that | is full of potatoes? 58 – is transposed, on the third and fourth line from the bottom, to read, Ist jener Korb der (derjenige) der (welcher) voll Kartoffeln. In the second column, the question posed in English continues in a similar vein. ‘No it is the one that cost fifty pfennigs’ is followed in parallel fashion by a three-line German translation of the question (only partially visible as backdrop to Otto’s head and shoulders). In the first column, the words in parenthesis refer to different forms of subordination (welcher and derjenige). Reading top to bottom in each column we can see a duplication of the pattern of question and answer – the requirement being that the form of the response must imitate in each instance the same form as the question the teacher has posed. What is at stake in the lesson, then, is similar to what is at stake for the struggling speaker in the poem, knowing how to ‘place’ the grammatical forms, culturally and linguistically. By locating the mis en scène of language instruction against the background of a marketplace, and transforming the writing on the board from a statement observed into a scene in which we overhear a virtuously indignant accusation hurled from behind (‘the villagers never liked you’), Plath does far more than turn potatoes into poems. Reading the details of the photograph, Plath’s speaker turns the visual figure from the photograph and the writing at its back inside out and upside down. As Frieda Hughes points out in her Foreword to Ariel: The Restored Edition, Plath made use of every emotional experience ‘as if it were a scrap of material’.59 In drawing the details of the ‘picture I have of you’ into close and deep conjunction with its cultural content, we can see that she also uses every scrap. Material and historiographic work on family photographs and lyric poetry allows us to consider the public face of privately consumed artefacts at points where literary history and the history of photography intersect. In Plath’s case, a more textured account of the use of photographs demonstrates how a poetic speaker inhabits and explores cultural resources. In doing so, Plath accomplishes what A. K. Voronsky describes as ‘essential’ to the art of seeing, ‘ … to burrow into a thing or person and creatively embody himself within them’,60 while at the same time maintaining disciplined adherence to material fact.61 By making cultural mediations visible, the reading of photographs has implications for other cultural intersections in Plath studies, such as the uneasy alliance of the aesthetic and the commercial, and the atmosphere of Cold War paranoia in which representations of childhood and family life come under increasing pressure

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as forces of containment or resistance. Because so much of Plath’s work is engaged with questions of the persistence of memory, survival and evidence (visual as well as verbal), consideration of photographic material is aesthetically warranted. It is also warranted in terms of the feelings and acts of attention her writing about photographs invokes. But does what we make when we peer into photographs change the moment of the photograph and the way in which it was intended? Does my fascination with the details in the photograph of Otto Plath demonstrate something about its validity as art or as material witness? My experience working with Plath photographs has reminded me again and again that archival knowledge of the photographic portrait, like the letter, arrives in fragments and conduits, as time changes our cultural viewpoint and we have different opportunities to look at materials as cultural metaphors and theoretical objects. No matter how open or immediately accessible to interpretation photographs might appear, however, their faces do not automatically yield the truthful ‘evidence’ or ‘real persons’ that we as Plath scholars and readers might desire to recover in them. For me, it is only by accepting that radical contingency of the photograph, including its capacity for introducing new and sometimes random details and associations into a context, that we can consider both the photographs and writing as mediated performances, constructing for us certain problems of looking and representation, and circumventing the desire for simple transparency. No t e s 1 See Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley (eds.), Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 2 At the Lilly Library, ninety-eight photographs can be found in Plath’s high school scrapbooks, forty-nine photographs in the notebooks, but of these only a percentage are portraits of Plath and her family. Smith College also acquired groups of photographs (many duplicates of the Lilly material) from Aurelia Plath and from Ted Hughes, along with a collection from Martha Plath’s family (Otto Plath’s sister) that includes around sixty photographs. The Robert Woodruff Library at Emory houses several dozen photographs of Plath and Hughes, many unpublished and rarely seen, informal portraiture as well as photographs enclosed in Hughes’s correspondence to family and friends. The Gordon Lameyer collection at Lilly Library includes several dozen coloured slides of Plath. A handful of photographs can be found at the Woodbury Library, Harvard and at other archival sites in the UK and USA. I thank Peter K. Steinberg for Lilly Library inventories, and for his research on additional Plath photographs published in journalistic sources.

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3 See Shannon Zachary (ed.), Conservation of Scrapbooks and Albums (Washington, DC: Book and Paper Group/Photographic Materials Group, American Institute for Conservation, 2000). 4 Kathleen Margaret Lant, ‘The Big Strip Tease:  Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath’, Contemporary Literature, 34 (1993): 621. 5 Paula Bernat Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere:  The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 5. 6 Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 17. 7 See Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 60–61. 8 See Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), pp. 8–9 and Judith Williamson, ‘Family, Education, Photography’, in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Ely and Sherry B. Ortner (eds.), Culture/Power/ History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 236–244. See also Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames, Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 9 Kate Moses, ‘The Real Sylvia Plath’, Part I, Salon (30 May 2000). www.salon. com/audio/interview/2003/02/18/kate_moses/index.html. Accessed June 2007. 10 I adopt here the language of Mary Ann Caw’s definition of ‘stressed’ readings in The Art of Interference:  Stressed Readings in Verbal and Visual Texts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 11 D. H. Lawrence, quoted by Graham Bradshaw, ‘Flash Vision, “Ted Hughes’s New Aesthetic”’, Cambridge Quarterly, 10 (1981): 172–178. 12 See Emily Delgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Visible World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures. 13 Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves:  Photography and Autobiography (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1997) and Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 14 Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet:  Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Charlottesville:  University Press of Virginia, 1999), p. 67. See also Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transatlantic Fictions and Transatlantic Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 15 PM, ‘Scrapbook – 1947’, c.1946–1947. 16 CP, p. 24. 17 See Nelson, Pursuing Privacy. 18 CP, pp. 23–24. 19 CP, p. 24. 20 See Robin Peel, ‘Body, Word, and Photograph’, Journal of American Studies, 40 (2006): 71–95.

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21 Mieke Bal, ‘Light Writing: Portraiture in a Post-Traumatic Age’, Mosaic, 37 (2004): 5. 22 Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, Atlantic Monthly, 3 (3 June 1859): 738–748. 23 Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). By contrast to the ugly mask-like images Plath writes about in her Journals, she responds to her viewing of a German–Yugoslav film by noting the ‘dirty shining faces’ of real people who were ‘human beings and … were not Grace Kelley [sic], but beautiful from the inside’ (Journals, p. 195). 24 LH, p. 40. 25 SPC, Letter to Mallory Weber, King’s College, Cambridge, 15 Dec. 1955; see also LH, p. 40. 26 Harry Ransom Center, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Records, 1973–1996; Series I: Correspondence. I thank Amanda Golden for bringing this letter to my attention. In Hughes’s ‘18 Rugby Street’ the speaker gives a very different account of Plath’s photographic self-consciousness: her nose made ‘every camera your enemy’. BL, p. 23. See also Gina Hodnik, ‘Early Public Representations of Sylvia Plath’, Plath Profiles, 3 (Summer 2010): 259–270. 27 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), pp. 10–11. 28 See Langdon Hammer, ‘Plath’s Lives’, Representations, 75 (2001): 61–88. 29 Journals, p. 338. 30 Journals, pp. 344–345. 31 Journals, p. 409. 32 Journals, p.154. 33 Journals, p. 155. 34 Journals, p. 333. 35 CP, p. 222. 36 Aurelia Plath dates the photograph around 1930. Her inscription on the reverse side notes that it was taken in her husband’s classroom at Boston University. 37 LH, p. 17. 38 CP, p. 222. 39 Erica Wagner, Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 72. 40 SPC. 41 Joseph J. Thorndike Jr (ed.), ‘Timeless Teutons’, Horizon (Mar. 1960), p. 43. 42 CP, p. 222. 43 Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006). 4 4 I review the circumstances of Otto Plath’s family connections in ‘Family Matters: An Afterword on the Biography of Sylvia Plath’, Northwest Review (1988): 148–160. 45 Conversation with Frances McCullough, 29 Oct. 2007.

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46 Wagner, Ariel’s Gift, p. 222. 47 CP, p. 222. 48 CP, p. 305. 49 CP, p. 323. 50 BL, p. 193. 51 BL, p. 193. 52 See Ann Keniston, ‘The Holocaust Again: Sylvia Plath, Belatedness, and the Limits of Lyric Figure’, in Anita Helle (ed.), The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007): pp. 139–158. 53 CP, p. 222. 54 Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 224–226. See also Rose’s citation (p. 183) from an early draft of ‘Medusa’, where the speaker is the object of a photographic machine. Rose discusses narrative repetition and translation. 55 For abridged versions of classic essays on ‘Daddy’, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (eds.), Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). 56 PM II, Box 9. Unpublished introduction and notes to LH. 57 F. W. Meisnest, Elementary German (New York:  Macmillan, 1927). See also John Oliver, ‘Cultural Content of German Grammar Texts’, Modern Language Journal, 26 (1942): 341–347. 58 All references are to the photograph of Otto Plath at the blackboard in the first edition of LH, p 17. I am grateful to Christian Stehr, Sebastian Heiduschke and German linguist Peter Sears for translation. 59 Frieda Hughes, Foreword, Ariel:  The Restored Edition (London:  Faber and Faber, 2004), p. xix. 60 A. K. Voronsky, ‘The Art of Seeing the World’, in Art as the Cognition of Life:  Selected Writings, 1911–1936, trans. Fredrick S. Choate (Oak Park, Mich.: Mehring Books, 1998), p. 370. 61 The point about scrupulousness is more generally observed in Helen Vendler, Last Looks, Last Books:  Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 2010), p. 51.

ch apter 3

‘O the tangles of that old bed’: fantasies of incest and the ‘Daddy’ narrative in Ariel Lynda K. Bundtzen

fugue:  Psychiatry. A flight from one’s own identity, often involving travel to some unconsciously desired locality. It is a dissociative reaction to shock or emotional stress in a neurotic, during which all awareness of personal identity is lost though the person’s outward behavior may appear rational. On recovery, memory of events during the state is totally repressed but may become conscious under hypnosis or psychoanalysis. A fugue may also be part of an epileptic or hysterical seizure. Also attrib. as fugue state. (OED)

‘But if that is so, there was no childhood memory, but only a phantasy projected back into childhood. A feeling tells me, though, that the scene is genuine. How is that to be accounted for?’ There is in general no guarantee of the data produced by our memory. (Imaginary patient and Freud, ‘Screen Memories’)

Sylvia Plath’s ‘Little Fugue’ is one of twelve poems Ted Hughes added to Plath’s Ariel, after excising several poems deemed too ‘personally aggressive’.1 Like many of Hughes’s editorial decisions, this one enhances the ‘Daddy’ narrative in Ariel, strengthening the story of Otto Plath’s culpability in causing Plath’s suicide while diminishing the story that Hughes’s abandonment of Plath and his infidelity contributed to her depression and suicide. When Plath read ‘Daddy’ for BBC radio in 1962, she introduced the poem with an explicitly psychoanalytic tale about the speaker: ‘Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish.’2 In popular notions of psychoanalysis (like this one Plath invents), just as a boy with an Oedipus complex longs for a sexual relationship with his mother, the daughter with an Electra complex is tormented by incestuous desire for her father. For the speaker of ‘Daddy’, this desire has 54

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been replaced by murderous rage, and, though she has in the past ‘tried to die’ to get back to him, she now redirects this self-destructive passion at her father: ‘Daddy, I have had to kill you’.3 In contrast to the angry speaker of ‘Daddy’, the daughter in ‘Little Fugue’ is affectively diminished, emotionally spent by a struggle to recover memories of her father. As in a fugue state, her mind wanders to ‘some unconsciously desired locality’ where her dead father may be glimpsed in fragmentary images, but neither heard nor comprehended. At the poem’s end, the speaker returns to a fugue state, a mere survivor of trauma, and barely capable of the simple effort of daily life. Her impotent assertion of control suggests a fragile grip on meaning and purpose to her existence. Plath’s speaker uses the odd word ‘arrange’ to describe her management of time, and then lists ‘my fingers’ and ‘my baby’ as items for attention, as if they are equal in importance. In the final line, ‘The clouds are a marriage dress, of that pallor’, she is swathed in clouds and wedded to a whiteness that numbs and drains the world of colour.4 In Birthday Letters, Hughes persistently describes Plath’s ‘unconsciously desired locality’ as a ‘private, primal cave’ close to her father’s encrypted body, invoking an incestuous scenario governing her unconscious. The encrypted body of the father is also textual, in the sense that a religious language attends it. Hence, in ‘Dream Life’, Hughes claims her nights are dominated by Otto Plath and dedicated to ‘father-worship’. She is a priestess in the cult of her dead father, and her poems ‘salvaged fragments’ of the ‘liturgy’, ‘the nightly service’ she conducts for him in her dreams and nightmares.5 In Hughes’s critical assessment, her poetry then becomes inextricably linked with a psychological relationship to the past mediated by a certain kind of discourse – Freudian psychoanalysis. Otto Plath is also cast as the controlling presence in Plath’s and Hughes’s sexual life – in their marriage. Hence, in ‘Suttee’, she is ‘a child-bride | On a pyre’, a human sacrifice to the dead father, while Hughes ‘was your husband | Performing the part of your father’ in a ‘myth’ destined to suffocate both Plath and Hughes.6 Again, in ‘The Minotaur’, Otto Plath waits in the labyrinth to consume his daughter, and in ‘Fairy Tale’, Otto is her ‘Ogre lover’ – ‘the sum … | Of all your earlier lovers’ and the beloved who replaces Hughes in her dreams.7 Daddy Otto Plath’s ‘resurrected’ body crawls into bed with them in ‘The Table’, and Hughes is cuckolded by this ‘German cuckoo’ in their nest, his cold and ‘shivering’ body robbing the marriage bed of warmth.8 Hughes’s incessant accusations against Otto Plath may be read – and have been – as defensive and self-exculpatory – i.e., ‘I am not responsible

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for my wife’s death by suicide; it was the trauma of childhood abandonment by her father’s death’. There is, however, strong evidence in Plath’s Unabridged Journals for Hughes’s case against Otto Plath’s domination of her emotional life and his importance to her in accessing an unconscious fantasy life for her poetry. The daughter mourns his absence, even while acknowledging her fear of him: ‘Me, I never knew the love of a father, the love of a steady blood-related man after the age of eight’, and, ‘I hate [my mother] because he wasn’t loved by her. He was an ogre. But I miss him.’9 Plath composed ‘Daddy’ on 12 October 1962, the anniversary of Otto Plath’s leg amputation on 12 October 1940 (he would die of complications on 5 November), and the poem’s emphatic farewell – ‘Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through’,10 would appear to signal an end to his tyranny over her creative life – a figurative amputation (a castration?) of paternal influence. But what of Otto Plath’s sexual omnipotence as implied by Hughes? Both the intrusion on her marital life and his sense that he and all her ‘earlier lovers’ are mere substitutes for this one great love? For Hughes, the seductions of psychoanalysis were at least as important as Otto Plath himself in shaping Plath’s creative myth and its eventual usurpation of their marriage. Plath’s Journals from 1957 to 1959 now include her notes on psychotherapy with Dr Ruth Beuscher. Together with her descriptions of dreams and nightmares, her obsessive complaints over writer’s block – what she calls a Panic Bird sitting on her chest like a ‘great muscular owl’ paralysing her – and her violent tirades of motherhating sanctioned by Beuscher, these notes suggest unresolved issues involving both of her parents and their impact on her sexual and artistic lives. As she describes this knot of problems, Got at some deep things with Beuscher: facing dark and terrible things: those dreams of deformity and death. If I really think I killed and castrated my father may all my dreams of deformed and tortured people be my guilty visions of him or fears of punishment for me? And how to lay them? To stop them operating through the rest of my life. I have a vision of the poems I would write, but do not. When will they come?11

Plath’s intuition throughout her therapy is that if she could understand her past she would find her story, and it would be ‘A great, stark, bloody play … [with] dark, cruel, murderous shades, the demon-animals, the Hungers’.12 Plath intuits and desires what psychoanalyst Adam Phillips describes as ‘one of the consequences of privileging Oedipus, as Freud did … that the patient’s real genre is tragedy’, and, further, ‘the Oedipus complex makes the unconscious intelligible; it gives it a discernible function, and a master-plot to keep the story going, the story of our forbidden

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life’.13 Finding the story of her forbidden life with the help of Ruth Beuscher would, Plath believed, overcome the blockage in her writing, but at the risk, Phillips proposes, of becoming a criminal: ‘what would psychoanalysis be if Oedipus had got away with it? If knowledge means evidence of a crime committed, and the self is essentially a criminal, then both are intelligible.’14 Both of these journal entries also link the blockage in her writing to thwarted desire, the unnamed ‘Hungers’, and blockage in therapy – a situation rather like that of the amnesiac in ‘Little Fugue’ who cannot recover the ‘dark and terrible things’ about her relationship to her father long enough to piece them into a coherent memory. One of Plath’s barely remembered dreams, when she is pregnant at Yaddo in the autumn of 1959, is overtly about incest: ‘Dream, shards of which remain:  my father come to life again. My mother having a little son: my confusion: this son of mine is a twin to her son. The Uncle of an age with his nephew. My brother of an age with my child. O the tangles of that old bed.’15 In the dream, Otto Plath impregnates both her mother and herself, evidence supporting Hughes’s fear that he is merely a surrogate for the father’s body Plath desires in her dreams, in her unconscious fantasy life. The intertwining of her father’s death, her own sexual activity, and her mother’s disapproval is also apparent in an account of another dream, this one written in late 1958. Here, Plath reports the dream as her mother Aurelia’s; but there seem to be embedded fantasies posing as memories of her own in this dream – of her mother scolding Plath for having sex and then blaming this sexual promiscuity for Otto Plath’s death, neither of which may be confirmed as happening. This dream, as Freud might say, is overdetermined with potential meanings, and even more heavily laden by virtue of its mingling of what is supposedly her mother’s dream with hypothetical memories of being disowned by Aurelia for unspecified sexual crimes. But at what age is Plath disowned? As an adult? Or is it as a child? The exasperated tone of the mother’s ‘Put her in a cell, that’s all you could do. She’s not my daughter. Not my nice girl. Where did that girl go’, sounds like maternal scolding and shaming of a teenager, not the grown-up daughter. Otto Plath is ‘floating dead, face down and bloated’16 in ocean water, similar to her father in ‘Daddy’, with his ‘head in the ­freakish Atlantic’.17 Likewise, the public shame of everybody knowing everything in the dream is like the villagers in ‘Daddy’ who ‘always knew it was you’, she gloats.18 But what do they know and about whom and what? The poem suggests that Daddy has at last been found out, that he is the real criminal, the bloodsucking vampire who has been cannibalizing the

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speaker ‘if you want to know’, and not the daughter. In the dream, however, it is not the father who is unveiled as a villain, but the ‘sticky white filth of desire’19 in her daughter’s pants that Aurelia finds so shameful. Whose desire? Or, whose semen? Or whose vaginal secretions? Or does the ‘sticky white filth’ belong to what Phillips calls ‘the forbidden mess of desire’ itself?20 Perhaps in Plath’s unconscious proximity to her father’s body, desire itself demands the ‘sticky white filth’ of sexual arousal and intercourse and, it would seem, of incest. The father’s rage and suicide in this dream seem to be linked to his fury at the daughter’s sexual precocity, which, in turn, provokes his flight and then – ­inevitably – public exposure of the whole sordid mess. How could this be, though, when Plath was only eight years old when her father died? One possibility is to read this dream as fantasized incest, an unconscious fabrication of parental betrayal in childhood sexual abuse and a projection of her own ‘criminal’ desire on to her father and mother (I am at no point suggesting that there is any evidence that Plath was actually abused). In ‘privileging Oedipus’, there is always collateral damage extending to both parents, whose actions, or failures to act, originate the tragedy. Hence, the fantasy is that Aurelia discovers the incestuous desire around father and daughter and then blames her daughter rather than her husband as the seducer. In the psychological literature on child abuse, this is not an uncommon scenario. The non-abusive parent often denies, looks the other way, or blames the child victim as the seducer. At one point, Plath blames a lack of maternal protection for her first suicide attempt:  ‘I lay in my bed when I thought my mind was going blank forever and thought what a luxury it would be to kill [my mother], to strangle her skinny veined throat which could never be big enough to protect me from the world. But I was too nice for murder. I tried to murder myself.’21 Does this mean that Aurelia did not protect her daughter from the world verbally? That she was unable with her ‘skinny veined throat’ to speak out against ‘The husband, brought alive in dream to relive the curse of his old angers’? In the dream, Aurelia fears public infamy more than anything. Maybe this is why Plath goes on a motherhating spree in therapy with Beuscher, why she has so much difficulty writing – because her blockage is that of inadmissible repressed fantasies/ memories  – and, finally, why the catharsis of ‘Daddy’ is so violent. As the formerly silenced speaker says, ‘I could hardly speak … And the language obscene’.22 In the first draft of ‘Daddy’, the word ‘incestuous’ follows ‘obscene’, but Plath crosses it out.23 Language, and by extension, the poet’s power over language, are dependent on ‘incestuous’ly derived

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authority from the father’s native tongue; but, Daddy’s ‘tongue stuck in my jaw’, if not silencing the speaker, then at least disarticulating a coherent self: ‘Ich, ich, ich, ich’, she stutters.24 The Daddy materials (poems, dreams, journal entries) must be viewed with scepticism, first because Plath was desperately seeking a narrative in extremis, ‘a great, stark, bloody play’, like a Greek tragedy, that would validate and explain her sense of victimization, her blockages; and, secondly, because child psychologists are far from in agreement on the issue of true and false allegations of child sexual abuse. From the very beginning, psychoanalysis has struggled with the authenticity of recollection. In Primal Scenes:  Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Ned Lukacher argues that Freud ‘learned that the task of analysis is that of convincing patients to accept the inextricable linkage of childhood memory and childhood phantasy’,25 and that Freud came to ‘recognize that no test, therapeutic or otherwise, will ever be able to establish in principle the status of a ­recollection … Whether the scene actually happened or not is immaterial, for what analysis has access to is the way unconscious phantasy structures the scene, not its “exact repetition”.’26 In his early writing on ‘Screen Memories’, Freud counsels an imaginary patient (really Freud himself) on the unreliability of memories where ‘the subject himself appears … as an object among other objects’, telling him ‘that people often construct such things unconsciously – almost like works of fiction’.27 For Freud, ‘the original impression has been worked over … as though a memory trace from childhood had … been retrospectively translated into a plastic and visual state at a later date – the date of the memory’s “revival”’.28 Recent psychological literature on the subject is even more cautionary, warning that ‘(1) not everything gets into memory, (2) what gets into memory may vary in strength, (3) the status of information in memory changes over time, and (4) retrieval is not perfect’.29 With children especially, memory development is ambiguous: ‘In cases of child sexual abuse, incidental rather than deliberate memory is involved at the encoding phase of the memory process … That is, the child is not aware that he or she will be given a “memory test” at some later time.’30 Children are also likely to ‘form generalized representations, or “scripts”’ of traumatic and repeated abusive acts and this is a ‘reconstructive versus a reproductive process’.31 With reconstructions, there is plenty of room for narrative proliferation, revision, embellishment and addition. Clinical researchers also encourage ‘caution when some presumed amnesic barrier is probed’,32 and there is a supposed recovery of repressed childhood memories. As they explain,

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Creating a fantasy of abuse with its relatively clear-cut distinction between good and evil may provide the needed logical explanation for confusing experiences and feelings. These memories could also arise from illusion or hallucination­mediated screen memories, or be internally derived as a defense mechanism. Alternatively, the person could have combined a mixture of borrowed ideas, characters, myths, and accounts from exogenous sources with idiosyncratic internal beliefs … once activated, the manufactured memories are indistinguishable from factual memories.33

Hence, in looking at ‘Little Fugue’, and particularly excerpts from earlier drafts of the poem, I will argue that Plath is creating ‘a fantasy of abuse’ because it will ‘provide the needed logical explanation for confusing experi­ences and feelings’, and, further, that what the poem enacts is the unsuccessful struggle to bring this frightening fantasy into consciousness. In some sense, the ‘talking cure’ of psychoanalysis is being subverted, because the poem instead leaves its speaker in a numb fugue state at the end, memories expunged rather than articulated. Finally, and as Lukacher points out, ‘whether the scene actually happened or not is immaterial’; what is important for interpretation is the way ‘unconscious phantasy structures the [unfolding] scene’ in ‘Little Fugue’. What is compelling then is the poem’s strategy of ‘probing … a presumed amnesic barrier’ to full understanding of her childhood desires surrounding the relationship to her father, and the way this barrier is linked to a blockage of meaning for the speaker. Poetic meaning, or its absence, is dependent then on a particular relationship to her personal history governed by the sexual tropes of psychoanalytic discourse. It may not lead to ‘understanding’ as self-knowledge (i.e., ‘Now I know why I am so troubled’), the (supposed) truth of what really happened or even to a critical assessment of how Plath might have been ‘saved’. Instead, what we might come to understand is the liminal territory between fantasy and reality and the consequences, both positive and negative, when the creative mind enters that space. ‘Little Fugue’ also raises questions for me about what Freud called the functioning of ‘screen memories’ or ‘concealing memories’. These are patently fabricated, even hallucinatory memories from childhood that may contain little or no affect and work to conceal other, intensely affective, memories that are completely forgotten. In ‘Little Fugue’, there are sporadic intrusions of fragmentary, but intensely affective, colour images, presumably from the speaker’s childhood memories of her father. Her sleep, she claims, is coloured ‘Red, mottled, like cut necks’ when she envisions her father slicing sausages in a delicatessen during World War I – the ‘Great War’.34

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In the first draft of the poem, the image is even worse:  the sausages are ‘like cut throats. | The quiet throats of Jews’ and instead of ‘sleep’, this is the world of ‘nightmares’.35 The speaker–daughter of ‘Little Fugue’ does not chronologically match the memories of Plath herself, who was born several years after World War I, although the anti-Semitic atrocities might well converge with the Nazi father depicted in ‘Daddy’ and the Otto Plath of the Journals who ‘heiled Hitler in the privacy of his home’.36 There are also more benign memories of the father’s ‘blue eye’ and his ‘briefcase of tangerines’.37 The dominant colourlessness of the poem is a resistance to these moments of intensity, and, by the end, the speaker is restored to numbness, affectlessness and forgetfulness. The clouds are as a death-like shroud, ‘spreading their vacuous sheets’, blotting out consciousness, ‘Death opened, like a black tree, blackly’. In looking at the drafts and Plath’s revisions for ‘Little Fugue’, the question is whether colourlessness is obviously screening, concealing colour, and therefore acting as a defensive barrier against memory and affect, or whether affect has not been somehow displaced from a more devastating fantasy/memory of parental betrayal that is clearly, in moral terms, black and white (i.e., colourless but not grey), where the players are either good or evil. When the speaker abruptly claims, ‘I am guilty of nothing’, the implication or question is, ‘Then who is the guilty one?’ Similarly, when she says, ‘I was seven. I knew nothing’, it suggests self-vindication: ‘I was an innocent child, helpless, but someone older and corrupt did know, and exercised that power over me.’ There is, however, the haunting ambiguity of ‘nothing’ in both declarations, as if this yawning absence is precisely what she knows, what she is guilty of and why she is ‘lame in the memory’.38 ‘Little Fugue’ was composed in April 1962 and is not part of the October miracle when Plath composed a poem a day. Nor was it intended to be included in Ariel where it serves as a counterweight to the daughter’s articulate rage in ‘Daddy’. Instead, it seems burdened with the blockage Plath so frequently writes about in her journals in an earlier period. A fugue is both a contrapuntal musical form and, from the OED, a ‘flight from one’s own identity’ – a form of amnesia or ‘dissociative reaction to shock or emotional stress’. Throughout the poem, Plath counterpoints black and white, non-colours, but also black ink on white paper, in a careful patterning of featurelessness and meaninglessness. She is literally ‘drawing a blank’, even as she attempts to create meaning with her words. Or she is intent on creating non-meaning  – a ‘semiotic collapse’.39 The impossibility of communication and production of meaning is apparent

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in the first stanza with the doomed efforts of the deaf and dumb yew tree, its leafy ‘fingers’ wagging, to get the attention of the blind clouds.40 This opening stanza goes through several versions in the first draft, and is also prefaced with a notation on the scene of writing that fills it with a throbbing and uncanny life. In the first version of this opening stanza, ‘Yew alone’ is its central figure  – no ‘disconsolate clouds’ until version two – and there is a heightened expectancy in the ‘humming’ lights and the silvery ‘queer light’ – almost like a movie screen. While the speaker seems to be in a state of visual contemplation of the yew tree, there is motion all around her. She exclaims, ‘How my small room rides’ (my italics) as if in rocking motion; the yew’s fingers ‘agitate’ and the tree itself ‘flings up’ like spurting ‘black blood’. Even the light ‘startles the green out of the grass’ – scaring colour away. The riding motion is repeated in the second version’s ‘rocking’ to and fro, back and forth. The ‘Yew alone’ also seems like an intrusive, dominant figure in the ‘small room’, and the speaker insists it is ‘always sorry’, but ‘there is no truth’ (repeated twice) in this figure. The non-communication between black yew and white cloud, where the difference is specified as deaf-and-dumb black v. blind white, goes through several remarkable revisions in the first draft. In the first draft of stanza two, the ‘featurelessness’ of the cloud is a lack specified as both a difference and/or deficiency in gender and in moral acuity: the cloud is without a beard and has ‘no moral sensibility’. By the end of draft one, the interaction between yew and cloud is exaggeratedly gendered and two parental figures emerge, one who is stubbornly silent and one who is foolish and blind. The yew tree is ‘black, masculine, certain’ and later ‘manic’, while the clouds are ‘fool-white, motherly’. The final line – ‘This mute, these blinds’ – also has a latent menace to it, as if something is happening that is silenced, ignored, behind lowered window ‘blinds’, a more common meaning for the word ‘blinds’. One possible interpretation is that this manic male figure insists on silence and the maternal figure wears blinkers. A stanza completely deleted from draft one begins as though it will explain what deafness is, but then takes a sharp turn to describe how the root of the yew tree  – its foot  – ‘stops | The mouths of the dead’. The yew tree’s one foot multiplies into many feet, and ‘Each foot stops a mouth’. Yet it is also a ‘go-between’ that ‘talks for the dead’. Everything is contradictory here, because this is not deafness at all, but ‘something else’  – the yew tree’s stoppage of multiple mouths by many feet, many roots. It looks forward to the you (yew) in ‘Daddy’, whose ‘foot’ is also a

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‘root’ and the German ‘tongue’ or language. The speaker could never talk to him because ‘The tongue stuck in my jaw.’41 Here Daddy’s silencing by foot, root and tongue – his tongue in her mouth? Or is she tonguetied in Daddy’s presence? – is unambiguous, while in ‘Little Fugue’ Plath persists with the contradiction that the yew tree both gags and facilitates the speech of the dead. Hence, in draft two, the yew becomes a ‘mute’s mouthpiece’. Of course, a ‘mute’s mouthpiece’ may also be read as gagging, muting speech – the source of the mute’s handicap. Similarly, the yew tree is ambiguously both her father and his go-between, the one who manages liaisons between the dead man and his daughter. The abusive, gagging father  – does he simultaneously facilitate and prevent speech? Does she need a penis-prop in her mouth to speak? The liaisons imagined between father and daughter are ‘romantic’ but also dangerous. While she portrays herself as the innocent heroine in a silent movie, too young for moral distinctions, the image of her male counterpart is ambiguous. As in a Gothic romance, the father-hero is Byronic and both ‘villain & lover’, both ‘bad’ and ‘good’. The perspective is dissociative:  the speaker sees her seven-year-old self in flickering images – ‘Black & silver, romantic shapes’ – ‘like in a movie’. It is significant that those motherly and fool-white clouds have ‘no moral sensibility’ and provide no protection against the ‘manic black upright’ presence of the yew. ‘Fool-white’ in this context sounds naive, but also wilfully unknowing – ‘turning a blind eye’ perhaps to what is taboo, what does not want to be seen. In the final version of ‘Little Fugue’, much of this ambiguity in the black/white imagery is lost, as is the dialogue between maternal and paternal presences. What is necessary for survival, according to some experts on sexual abuse, are ‘mind-fragmenting operations’ in order to preserve ‘the delusion of good parents’.42 Psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold notes the ‘establishment of isolated divisions of the mind in which contradictory images of the self and of the parents are never permitted to coalesce’,43 a description that seems to work nicely with Plath’s concluding stanza and its numb arrangement of her ‘morning’ and the itemization of fingers, baby and clouds. The pun on morning as mourning for her dead father has long been noted. She is a good daughter, faithful to Daddy. The association of the clouds with her mother has been lost, except in its relation to her own mothering in this final stanza. She wears, inherits from her mother, a marriage dress that weds her to the dead father, that is a sign in its shroud-like ‘pallor’ of her own deadness and of a mind wiped clean of memories – a tabula rasa signalling, once again, semiotic collapse.

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Again, although I want to make clear that there is absolutely no evidence to support the hypothesis that Plath was an abused child, there is, I would argue, a necessary relation between the fantasy of abuse and the narrative she needed to conjure and then violently exorcize in her final poems. The fury of ‘Daddy’ is not ‘real’. The best description I have read of this incendiary poem includes the testimony of a witness to satire: ‘When Plath read it to her friend Clarissa Roche during her visit to Court Green in November [1962, after separation from Hughes], Plath got the two of them rolling about the floor hooting with laughter.’ What were they laughing about? Not abuse, not incest. In Diane Middlebrook’s words, ‘Plath’s powerful fantasies about her father provide some high­octane fuel in the poem, but ‘Daddy’ is about more than that. It’s about a girl’s collusion with a man’s sense of entitlement to be in charge of her.’44 ‘Little Fugue’, on the other hand, is a poem in collusion with this fantasy and provides the ‘high-octane fuel’ for ‘Daddy’ that supersedes the earlier poem’s high seriousness with mockery. Like Swift’s Modest Proposal, Plath’s outrageous satire of paternal entitlement repels as often as it hits its monstrous target. With Ariel’s inclusion of ‘Little Fugue’, it is much harder to access ‘Daddy’ as satire or burlesque. I would like to conclude with a description of the abused child by Judith Herman. Its pertinence is not in how well it accords with what we know of Plath’s ‘real’ life, but in its persuasive power as a description of her fantasy life while in psychoanalysis. It seems almost perfectly in concert with descriptions of Plath by biographers, and with the personality who emerges from her Journals and letters. It does not, however, account for the voice of the poet who felt compelled to dismantle her victim-narrative in Ariel: The abused child cannot develop a cohesive self-image with moderate virtues and tolerable faults … moderation and tolerance are unknown. Rather, the victim’s self-representations remain rigid, exaggerated, and split … Similar failures of integration occur in the child’s inner representations of others. In her desperate attempts to preserve her faith in her parents, the child victim develops highly idealized images of at least one parent … She excuses or rationalizes the failure of protection by attributing it to her own unworthiness. More commonly, the child idealizes the abusive parent and displaces all her rage onto the nonoffending parent. She may in fact feel more strongly attached to the abuser … who may also foster this idealization by indoctrinating the child victim and other family members in his own paranoid or grandiose belief system … Such glorified images of the parents cannot, however, be reliably sustained. They deliberately leave out too much information. The real experience [of abuse] cannot be integrated with these idealized fragments.45

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In her introduction to Letters Home, Aurelia Plath describes Otto as exercising an ‘attitude of “rightful” dominance’ in their home. He supported the ‘Germanic theory that the man should be der Herr des Hauses’,46 and Sylvia Plath says, ‘He wouldn’t go to a doctor, wouldn’t believe in God’ and, again, ‘heiled Hitler in the privacy of his home’.47 Yes, she says, ‘He was an ogre. But I miss him’.48 And Aurelia – Plath’s mother? ‘hate her hate her hate her … I sure do hate her’.49 No t e s 1 Ted Hughes, ‘Introduction’, CP, p. 15. 2 CP, p. 293, n. 183. 3 CP, pp. 224 and 222. 4 CP, p. 189. 5 BL, p. 141. 6 BL, p. 149. 7 CP, p. 159. 8 CP, p. 138. 9 Journals, p. 431. 10 CP, p. 224. 11 Journals, p. 476. 12 Journals, p. 456. 13 Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 9–10. My italics. 14 Phillips, Terrors and Experts, p. 9. 15 Journals, p. 520. 16 Journals, p. 432. 17 CP, p. 222. 18 CP, p. 224. Author’s italics. 19 Journals, p. 432. 20 Phillips, Terrors and Experts, p. 27. 21 Journals, p. 433. 22 CP, p. 222. 23 SPC, ‘Daddy’, first draft. 24 CP, p. 223. 25 Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes:  Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 57–58. 26 Lukacher, Primal Scenes, pp. 56–57. 27 Sigmund Freud, Early Psychoanalytic Writings (New York:  Collier Books, 1969), p. 242. 28 Freud, Early Psychoanalytic Writings, p. 248. 29 Tara Ney, True and False Allegations of Child Sexual Abuse (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 99. 30 Ney, True and False Allegations, p. 101.

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31 Ney, True and False Allegations, p. 105. Author’s italics. 32 Ney, True and False Allegations, p. 184. 33 Ney, True and False Allegations, p. 179. My italics. 34 CP, p. 188. 35 SPC, ‘Little Fugue’, first draft. 36 Journals, p. 430. 37 CP, p. 188. 38 CP, p. 188. 39 Phillips proposes at one point that ‘Psychoanalytic theory is a theory of the unbearable, of what one prefers not to know.’ While ‘for Freud the unbearable is the castration born of incestuous desire … for Lacan [it is] semiotic collapse’. Terrors and Experts, p. 13. 40 CP, p. 187. 41 CP, p. 223. 42 Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York:  HarperCollins, 1992), p. 107. 43 Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder:  The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), p. 26. 4 4 Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (London: Little, Brown, 2004), p. 188. 45 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 106. 46 LH, p. 13. 47 Journals, p. 430. 48 Journals, p. 431. 49 Journals, p. 429.

ch apter 4

Plath and torture: cultural contexts for Plath’s imagery of the Holocaust Steven Gould Axelrod

Sylvia Plath’s torture texts are the eye of the needle though which pass various chronological and tropological threads: World War II and the ‘war on terror’, political trauma and familial abuse. In order to expose the presence of those threads in some of Plath’s most intense poems, I begin this essay in the post-9/11 era and move backwards to World War II, situating Plath’s Cold War texts, especially ‘The Jailer’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’, between the two. My examination suggests that Plath’s poems echo and swerve from the World War II torture texts that inspired them, set guidelines for interpreting the renewed torture discourse of the twenty-first century and crucially connect the representation of torture to that of domesticity. The attacks of 9/11 precipitated in the United States an era of torture. The zeitgeist propelled a new ruthlessness. It was not so much that Christianity was endangered as that our masculinity was on trial – female masculinity as well as male, as we see in the case of Lynndie England and other women soldiers convicted of abuse at Abu Ghraib.1 We did not want to be ‘pansies’ or sitting ducks. We fought aggression with torture,2 or perhaps we decided that the shock of 9/11 permitted us to explore for ourselves what Dick Cheney famously called ‘the dark side’.3 In the United States, it was without question an age of media torture. The Parents Television Council, using its own criteria for identifying ­torture scenes, determined that whereas prime time television depicted torture 102 times in the five-year span between 1996 and 2001, it depicted torture 624 times in the four-year span between 2002 and 2005.4 The study revealed that the Fox network series 24 alone showed sixty-seven scenes of torture out of 144 episodes between November 2001 and January 2007 – a ratio of almost one torture scene for every two episodes. Jack Bauer, the series hero, regularly choked, stabbed and electrocuted villains to make them talk. As one human rights spokesperson observed, ‘It’s unthinkable that Capt. Kirk would torture someone.’5 67

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Beginning in 2004, graphic torture films appeared, such as Saw I–VII, Hostel I and II, and Captivity.6 Hollywood labelled this genre ‘torture porn’, ‘gornography’ or ‘gorno’. On-line games such as The Torture Game 1–2 allowed players to ‘inflict pain on a ragdoll with spikes, razors, chainsaws, and more’.7 Evidence exists that military interrogators took their cues from media representations. For example, one interrogator at Abu Ghraib reported that ‘once, some fellow interrogators asked an Iraqi translator to pretend he was being tortured to strike fear in a prisoner, after they had just watched a similar scene [in 24] on a DVD’.8 The American public took similar cues. According to a 2008 poll, ‘the number of Americans who would condone torture, at least when used on terrorists in order to save lives, has risen over the past two years and now stands at over 40 percent’.9 Torture became the new trauma. Torture is perhaps a subset of trauma, a hyper-example of it, extreme state-sponsored trauma. Whereas torture has more shock value than trauma, it has less resonance in personal memory, in the narratives we improvise about ourselves. Most of us have undergone traumas  – violence or losses, scarring experiences with family members or strangers, a car accident, a painful injury or illness. But most of us have not tortured or been tortured, except in fantasy. Most of us can identify with it only through metaphor – a colleague’s behaviour ‘tortured’ us. Literal torture takes us out of ourselves, to other people and locales – and to politics. Although Americans ostensibly fought in Iraq to call a halt to Saddam Hussein’s torture practices, we ourselves soon enough began to explore Vice-President Cheney’s ‘dark side’. The post World War II era of the mid twentieth century was also preoccupied by torture, but to a lesser degree and in different ways. The United States committed torture in Latin America but by proxy, so as not to focus awareness on ourselves. Other characteristics distinguish the Cold War from the post-9/11 era. For one thing, Cold War torture scenes were often driven by images of Nazi Germany. Torture was perpetrated by others with foreign accents, and it was suffered by ourselves or by those like us. In the post-9/11 imaginary, however, Nazi symbols receded, even compared to a more recent past when they appeared as ‘kitsch’.10 In the narrative frame that dominated US culture in the post-9/11 era, Islamic terrorists forced Americans to torture. ‘The gloves had to come off’, as Jane Mayer summarized the mood.11 We had no choice and could risk no qualms. If we could force detainees to stand for four hours a day, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld wondered, why couldn’t we require ‘8–10 hours a day’?12 There was no moral deficit

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in practices of waterboarding, hypothermia, near-asphyxiation, electroshock, prolonged isolation, stress positions and sleep deprivation, because those practices were not actually torture, no matter what American legal tradition and the Geneva Conventions might stipulate.13 According to the prevalent narrative, we had to ignore the Geneva Conventions in the interest of ‘protecting the country from future terrorist attacks’ – though Cheney’s discussions with subordinates also suggested an unarticulated concern about ‘protecting themselves from future legal repercussions’.14 Although torture practices in Nazi Germany conditioned a widespread revulsion against torture in the post-World War II period, the Bush administration set in motion torture practices that were eerily similar to Gestapo ‘third degree’ techniques. It is an irony of our recent situation that the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a criminal complaint against American torture practices in Germany, seeking ‘an investigation of and prosecution against ten high level U.S. officials allegedly involved in the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in Iraq’.15 The Center chose Germany because the United States has no legal procedure under which victims can file complaints and because Germany, in the aftermath of the Nuremberg trials, now has an effective war crimes law. The Cold War era generally framed torture as being directed against defenceless women or harmless civilians, with whom the viewer was invited to identify. The victims were depicted as powerless, and therefore implicitly as effeminate. The torturer, weak except through his prostheses, was not only conceived as other but as feminized himself; failing to pick on someone his own size, he was portrayed as inherently small, and made contemptible by his sadism. Sometimes the torturer was literally small and female, such as Lotte Lenya’s character, Rosa Klebb, in the 1963 James Bond movie From Russia with Love.16 But, whatever the gender, the torturer was fantasized as being threatening only within his own arena and thanks to his technological apparatus. He was an object of ‘disidentification’. In recent times, however, the narrative has often been reversed. Those tortured were neither women nor harmless civilians but masculinized soldiers in an army of others bent on denying our own masculinity. Such narratives reframed torture as hypermasculine rather than feminine, as something that the all-American Jack Bauer of 24 must do rather than something the foreign-accented Rosa Klebb wants to do. To torture, in the new framework, was to be heroic, not contemptible. The shifting identifications of torture are a central mechanism in such poems as ‘The Jailer’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’. Sylvia Plath’s allusions to Nazi

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torture reveal both the limits of representation and, as Jacqueline Rose has suggested, the complex ways that fantasy, metaphor and identification interact in a literary text.17 Moreover, Plath makes political violence accessible as an imagined construct rather than as a first-hand account.18 She thus helped organize a new method for recalling Nazi atrocities, one based in figurative language rather than documentation. While preserving the contemptible quality of the torturer, she removed him from a factual to a fantasized world, and she introduced challenging, complicating and even dangerous motifs to the narrative, including the victim’s erotic attraction to her torturer and the reader’s unacknowledged pleasure in apprehending the scene of pain. At the same time, Plath also used torture as a critique of domestic ideology, as a trope for familial arrangements that had ‘choked’ and ‘starved’ her.19 A key event in her early domestic life was the loss of her father, Otto Plath, who died of complications from diabetes when she was eight years old.20 Plath’s mother did not allow her two children to attend the funeral, believing that the remaining family members needed to exercise their ‘courage’.21 That response might have initiated what psychiatrist John Bowlby called a strategy of detachment, ‘a defensive process’ against pain that, if persistent, leads to ‘dysfunction’.22 Plath’s feelings of detachment could be seen as echoing not only her mother’s strategy of denial but also her father’s strategy of limited, withdrawn parenting. Biographers have described Otto Plath as emotionally remote, eating meals privately and spending only twenty minutes a day with his children.23 If such were the case, one can imagine that there was little positive touching between this stern, hardworking German immigrant and his bright American daughter, starved of his attention. ‘What do I know of sorrow? No one I love has ever died or been tortured’, Plath wrote in her journal when she was eighteen.24 This comment may suggest that Plath’s detachment from her childhood loss continued for many years. Her adult poetry, however, explores feelings of ambivalent mourning for a lost father, often in figures of the torturer and his victim. Plath’s interrupted childhood found an echo in the ontological insecurity of the Cold War, with its doctrines of deterrence, brinkmanship and mutually assured destruction. In the months before her suicide, Plath wrote that she was preoccupied by ‘the incalculable genetic effects of fallout’ and the ‘mad, omnipotent marriage of big business and the military in America’.25 She portrayed herself as being ‘sleepless enough before my vision of the apocalypse’ – her vision, that is, of nuclear war.26 Such retrospective and prospective losses gave rise to what Christina Britzolakis has

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called a ‘theatre of mourning’ – poems populated by ‘figures of mourning which exceed their apparent pretexts’.27 Plath’s figures often take the roles of torturer and victim, who simultaneously enact the traumatic history of World War II, the excruciations of the nuclear family, the dread of nuclear holocaust and a proleptic vision of torture scenes to come. In such poems as ‘Lady Lazarus’, Plath portrays torture in the popular imagery of her time, in which the female or feminized victim suffers at the hands of a Nazi-style sadist with whom identification is impossible. The torturers reduce their victims to mere ‘skin and bone’, and so it is no surprise that a victim may vengefully wish to ‘eat’ her tormentor.28 These metaphors call to mind the Nazi institutions of Hungerhäuser (hunger houses) and Sonderkost (special diet), which provided victims with ‘a slow death’ from starvation.29 Plath’s lines were also intended to evoke the annihilated flesh of nuclear war victims, as the original ‘skin and bone’ tercet makes clear:  ‘These are my hands, my knees | I may be skin and bone, | I may be Japanese.’30 ‘Lady Lazarus’ depicts the torturer as ‘Herr Doktor’,31 a male physician like Dr Josef Mengele or his subordinate Dr Horst Schumann. Dr Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’ at Auschwitz, earned particular infamy through his pseudo-scientific experiments. He injected chemicals into children’s eyes to see if he could change eye colour, performed amputations with inadequate anaesthetic, killed twins in order to dissect them and electro-shocked female prisoners, usually precipitating their deaths.32 A Times news article on the Eichmann trial, which Plath may have read, referred to both Mengele and Schumann, and it quoted testimony from a prisoner who was transferred to Mauthausen, ‘where the prisoners were relieved of the threat of gassing but where people died of starvation’.33 Another news article described a bunker of those sentenced to death by starvation, in which ‘a dead prisoner was found, bent over whom was a second prisoner, also dead, grasping the liver of the corpse of the first’.34 Plath’s ‘Herr Doktor’ evokes Mengele and his medical staff, four members of which were described in Leon Uris’s 1958 novel Exodus: ‘Here in Block 10, Dr. Wirthe used women as guinea-pigs and Dr. Schumann sterilized by castration and X-ray and Clauberg removed ovaries and Dr. Dehring [sic] performed seventeen thousand “experiments” in surgery without anesthetic.’35 This sentence, which was substantially true,36 became the focus of a well-publicized libel suit filed in London by Dr Wladislaw Dering in June 1962.37 Knowledge of the suit would have been fresh in Plath’s mind when she composed ‘Lady Lazarus’ in October of that year. The identificatory power of ‘Lady Lazarus’ resides in the female victim, her body destroyed and commodified, yet her spirit defiant and deviant

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as she rises from her own ‘ash’ like a Phoenix to ‘eat men like air’, an act of both symbolic revenge and Freudian incorporation.38 Yet the poem’s final words unsettle the conventional relationship between torturer and victim. The torturer, as frail in his depths as the victim appeared to be on her surface, seamlessly transforms into a passive object of not only anger but yearning – as Otto Plath did for his grieving daughter. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, which Plath carefully read and annotated, Freud writes that the melancholic ego wants to absorb the lost object ‘into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it’.39 In reaction to this disturbing wish, the melancholic frequently refuses nourishment, a psychological complex visible in Lady Lazarus’s wish to eat men who are ‘like air’. Here the domestic and historical narratives touch, as Plath’s speaker mimics both melancholic anorexia and the starvation of concentration camp victims. ‘The Jailer’ presents an even messier version of torture – a premonition of some of the post-9/11 interrogation techniques revealed in the Bybee memo of 2002 and the Red Cross report of 2007,40 as well as a recirculation of Holocaust documents of the post-war period. The poem retains vestiges of the identified-with torturer that we glimpse in ‘Lady Lazarus’ and especially in ‘Daddy’  – vestiges that come to the fore in the final stanza of ‘The Jailer’ when the victim solicitously asks what her tormentor would ‘do, do, do without me’.41 But, for the most part, the ‘rattler of keys’ remains an emotionally remote sadist, his face covered by ‘masks’, his voice as ‘impotent as distant thunder’. A figure of sexual violence, he creates an absurd carceral space in which the speaker can be neither herself nor ‘free’.42 He has methodically ‘hung, starved, burned, hooked’ her. These tortures re-enact as fantasy the reports from Eichmann’s trial that were widely disseminated in the press in 1961 and 1962. Many witnesses recalled seeing victims ‘hanged in public’.43 Others recalled the camps in which ‘people died of starvation’.44 Numerous witnesses recalled victims being burned alive, including one incident in which Nazis ‘poured paraffin or benzene’ on praying Jews ‘and set them alight’.45 Another witness remembered an incident in which ‘the firemaster (who kept the pyres burning) was in the lead. He was dressed like a devil in a special uniform and carried a hook.’46 Beyond evoking genocide, Plath’s torture victim at times tortures herself, re-inscribing wounds initially received from without, blurring the distinction between sadist and sufferer. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood scars her face in her attempted suicide.47 The scarification articulates her

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identity of pain through the visual body rather than through speech. Perhaps Plath’s classic text of self-injury is ‘Cut’, in which the dyad of victim/victimizer appears in one subject. The speaker adumbrates a history of political violence in references to Pilgrims, Indians, Redcoats, Saboteurs, Kamikazes, Klansmen and Soviets, which are then associated with images of the self as a war survivor (‘trepanned veteran’), a prostitute or runaway (‘dirty girl’) and an object of mutilation (‘thumb stump’).48 Upon injuring her finger, her first utterance is ‘What a thrill’, suggesting both throbbing pain and tingling pleasure. In this verbal ambiguity we see the motive for Plath’s obsession with the dynamics of torture. As the early story ‘Among the Bumblebees’ implies by connecting the ‘red marks’ the father made on students’ papers with the ‘blood that oozed’ when his daughter cut her finger,49 the bodily injury summons the lost father, himself an amputee, an object of both fear and longing. The wound completes the circuit of numbing, yearning, searching and ultimately self-directed anger that can make melancholia ‘so interesting – and so dangerous’.50 Plath not only depicted scenes of torture, she also regularly tortured her readers with these graphic scenes of sadism, thereby awakening them to the complexities of torture. The poems confront readers with torture’s ambiguous powers of repulsion and gratification in our fantasy life and with the pointless, painful and often fatal recurrence of it in our political life. In scenes of gruesome violence, Plath forces readers to collaborate with her in fantasizing about a dimension of experience most would prefer to suppress. Such scenes, like melancholy itself, bring readers momentarily closer to apprehending what Julia Kristeva calls ‘the Thing’51 – the real that evades signification. Plath, who combined the traditional poetic roles of historian and prophet, understood the fearful, desirous nausea that the scene of torture may evoke. She represented the moment of torture in many of her most intense poems, thereby registering the bewildering roles that aggression, suffering and death play in our fantasies and in our lives. Organized in 1932 to investigate suspected subversion and espionage, the Geheimstaatspolizei (Gestapo) routinely employed torture in its interrogation chambers. In questioning the French-born British agent Odette Sansome in Paris in 1943, for example, the Gestapo repeatedly burned her back with ‘a red-hot poker’ and then proceeded to pull the nails from her toes with steel pincers.52 Miraculously, she survived both the torture and a concentration camp, and she was able to tell her story in biographies published by Jerrard Tickell in 1949 and 1950 and in a film called Odette

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released in 1950. Whether Sylvia Plath was acquainted with Odette’s story is unknown, but Plath’s representations of women being burned with cigarettes (in ‘The Jailer’) or being forced to occupy ‘white chambers of shrieks’ (in ‘Three Women’) resonate with such discourses. Another British agent, Forest (Tommy) Yeo-Thomas, was handcuffed, beaten and plunged into a bath of icy water. According to Bruce Marshall’s The White Rabbit (1952), as soon as Yeo-Thomas began to drown, he was ‘given artificial respiration’, and then the treatment was repeated.53 These were the torture techniques now known as waterboarding and hypothermia, widespread in American detention and rendition prisons subsequent to 9/11, and defended by CIA Director Michael Hayden in 2007 as ‘special methods of interrogation’.54 Hayden’s phrase, ‘special methods’, contains an eerie if possibly unconscious echo of ‘special measures’, the Nazi euphemism for the extermination of the Jews. Moreover, as Andrew Sullivan noted, another Bush administration phrase, ‘enhanced interrogation’, a euphemism for waterboarding and stress positions, bears an unnerving resemblance to the German phrase Verschärfte Vernehmung, (intensified interrogation), which the Gestapo coined to describe torture techniques that left no scar.55 Although Plath’s texts include no exactly parallel scenes of waterboarding, the pain of drowning recurs as a motif. We recall the drowned father of ‘Full Fathom Five’ and ‘Daddy’ and, perhaps most pertinently, the scene of Esther’s near-drowning in The Bell Jar. A male acquaintance named Cal rushes Esther into the sea and then pushes her ‘under’.56 She surfaces, thrashing around, her eyes ‘seared with salt’. She then swims out towards a distant rock with the intention of drowning herself but fails. After Yeo-Thomas survived his own ‘halfdrowning treatment’,57 he was repeatedly beaten and starved, and, once, the Gestapo attached him ‘to a hook’ on the end of a chain hanging from a pulley on the ceiling, and he was raised until ‘his heels left the ground’.58 Again, we do not know if Plath read this particular World War II memoir, but she is likely to be alluding to some similar account in ‘The Jailer’. Plath’s torture texts compose a nexus, or contact zone, in which commingle not only the discourses of World War II and the ‘war on terror’ but also the discourses of public history and personal relations. Elaine Tyler May and Alan Nadel have shown that the American Cold War policy of ‘containing’ the Soviet Union, initially articulated in the writings of diplomat George Kennan in 1946–1947, led to a ‘containment culture’ and specifically to an ideology of ‘domestic containment’, in which American women were contained within their marital and maternal roles and, if they were middle-class and white, within newly constructed suburbs far

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from the urban centres where their husbands spent their days.59 To be ­representative of the American ideal, women needed to be white, married, fertile and suburban – and, often enough, frustrated, trapped and sedated (giving the Constitution’s rhetoric of ‘domestic tranquillity’ a new dimension). The pacification of the populace through rigidly differentiated gender roles and racial locations – literal geographic separations – complemented the American battle against the Soviet Union within the larger Cold War epistemology. In a similar vein, Plath’s texts make apparent how wife abuse and torture policy intertwine with each other as modes that perform domination and maintain order. In ‘The Jailer’, for example, the speaker’s husband has ‘drugged and raped’ her.60 He ‘has been burning’ her with cigarettes. She has eaten nothing but ‘lies and smiles’. Treated as an ‘indeterminate criminal’, she dies ‘with variety’.61 These hyperbolic passages link domestic abuse in the Cold War era with classical torture discourse. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, physicians commonly treated women’s depression by prescribing the new, powerful and highly addictive sedative Miltown – then understood to be a mild tranquillizer but now banned from sale. Physicians also prescribed dangerously addictive ‘sleeping capsules’ such as Nembutal and phenobarbital as cures for insomnia. (Ironically, phenobarbital first came into wide use by Nazi doctors wishing to kill deformed children and concentration camp victims.) In the same era, attorneys and jurists did not generally categorize marital rape as a crime, because, as the cautionary instruction delivered to juries asserted, an accusation of rape ‘is easily made, and once made, difficult to defend against, even if the person accused is innocent’,62 and moreover because ‘a woman’s body was effect­ ively presumed to be offered at least to any appropriate man she knows’.63 Plath’s ‘The Jailer’ conflates such abusive domestic conditions with a tradition of torture discourse, and it also forecasts torture discourse emanating from our own time. Guantanamo prison, for example, constructed at ‘the least bad place’ by Halliburton Corporation on behalf of the United States government, housed a maximum of 800 prisoners, though this number was reduced to 330–400 by January 2007, the other prisoners having been released or transferred or having committed suicide.64 The remaining prisoners, virtually none of whom was charged with a crime, endured up to seven years as what Plath called ‘indeterminate criminals’. Only 8 per cent of detainees were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda, and 55 per cent ‘were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all’.65 Hunger strikers had feeding tubes inserted up their nostrils and down into their throats twice a day.

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Prisoners received ‘an average of 23 hours a day in isolation, six hours of direct sunlight a month’, but never the chance to see an attorney, friend or loved one.66 They inhabited a ‘legal black hole where a human being has no rights’. To cite another notorious example of recent torture practice, Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen and unemployed car salesman, was arrested while vacationing in Macedonia on the last day of 2003. CIA agents flew him to an extraordinary rendition prison in Pakistan. For five months, he was ‘kept in a small, filthy cell and was shackled, drugged and beaten’ while being interrogated about his non-existent ties to terrorist organizations.67 The US Court of Appeals dismissed El-Masri’s subsequent lawsuit on the grounds that the case could expose state secrets. The Supreme Court declined to consider the case on 9 October 2007. El-Masri, confined and tortured simply because his name matched that of a suspected terrorist, could say with Plath’s speaker, ‘I am myself. That is not enough’.68 Thus, Plath’s domestic portrait of a ‘rattler of keys’ standing guard over an emaciated, drugged and bruised captive connects forms of domestic abuse that were generally invisible in her own day to the torture practices revealed in World War II survivor testimony circulating through the public discourses of her time and also to the practices perpetrated recently in the name of the United States and gaining visibility in discourses only now being disseminated. The speaker of ‘The Jailer’, her ribs showing as she silently eats her ‘ghost ration’, is a particularly telling example of Plath’s identification with Holocaust victims. Plath ultimately referred to the Bergen-Belsen death camp as both a ‘physical’ and a ‘psychological’ space,69 blurring boundaries that historicists wish to keep in place, but revealing her sense of kinship with Anne Frank, who died in Belsen, and opening up torture and genocide to new forms of poetic figuration. It is worth recalling that torture, war and genocide are enmeshed phenomena. As Saul Friedländer reminds us, the Nazi regime began by merely torturing Jews.70 Later, many Jews were hoping to be tortured rather than killed. One witness at the Eichmann trial described the feeling as she carried her young daughter in a line towards a death pit: ‘We were still hoping that we were only going to be tortured. There is always hope – the hope of living’.71 By the end, however, many victims were hoping to be killed rather than tortured. Plath resolutely opposed war, as her participation in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally in Trafalgar Square in April 1960 makes clear. Having taken her newborn daughter to the event, she later wrote to her mother that she felt proud that ‘the baby’s first real adventure

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should be as a protest against the insanity of world-annihilation’.72 She obviously knew of President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about the ‘military-industrial complex’ in his farewell address, and she read Fred J. Cook’s ‘Juggernaut: The Warfare State’ when it appeared in The Nation magazine.73 She was also acutely aware of colonial and neocolonial torture practices in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and specifically of the systematic use of torture by the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). In ‘A Comparison’, written in July 1962, she analogized the brevity of lyric poems to the life of an insurgent or an enemy of the state:  ‘I can take about a minute’, ‘the poet becomes an expert packer of suitcases’.74 In ‘Context’, written the same year, she even more explicitly associated her poems with the victims of atrocity. She explained that her poems operate indirectly. The poems ‘do not turn out to be about Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark’.75 They are ‘not about the terrors of mass extinction, but about the bleakness of the moon over a yew tree’. They are ‘not about the testaments of tortured Algerians, but about the night thoughts of a tired surgeon’. She concluded that ‘in a sense, these poems are deflections. I do not think they are an escape.’ Despite protesting that she was ‘not gifted with the tongue of Jeremiah’,76 Plath found herself recurrently writing a new kind of jeremiad, against what Robin Peel has called ‘the two holocausts  – the holocaust of Hiroshima and the holocaust of the camps’.77 In her political writing, Plath was concerned above all with what she termed ‘the conservation of life of all people in all places, the jeopardizing of which no abstract doubletalk of “peace” or “implacable foes” can excuse’.78 In the autumn of 1962, those humanitarian concerns clung to images of Nazi torture in ‘Daddy’, ‘The Jailer’, ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Mary’s Song’. A convergence of cultural events occurring before and during the period must have brought the trope of Nazi torture to the forefront of Plath’s consciousness. Such Holocaust texts as Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys (1947), Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ (1948), John Hersey’s The Wall (1950), Eugen Kogon’s The Theory and Practice of Hell (1950) and Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl (1952) had been available for a decade or more.79 Plath had read Kogon’s account of the camps,80 and she had almost ­certainly read Anne Frank’s Diary as well, since she refers to Frank’s fate in a medita­ tion on suffering in her journal of 1958: ‘Cremation fires ­burning in the dead eyes of Anne Franck [sic]: horror on horror, injustice on cruelty … how can the soul keep from flying to fragments?’81 The late 1950s and early 1960s brought many new depictions of Nazi horrors. The focal event was

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the capture, trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi lieutenant in charge of the mass deportation and extermination of the Jews. This trial, debates concerning its legal basis and especially its revelations about Nazi death camps dominated the news from the time the trial began on 11 April 1961 to the day Eichmann was executed on 1 June 1962. Between 1 October 1960 and 29 October 1962, the date Plath completed ‘Lady Lazarus’, no fewer than 146 articles about Eichmann appeared in The Times of London. Before and during the Eichmann trial, a host of Holocaust documentaries, plays, motion pictures, novels and memoirs also appeared. Alain Resnais’s wrenching documentary, Night and Fog,82 was shown from 1955 on. In the same year, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s Pulitzer-prize-winning play, The Diary of Anne Frank, appeared, which was followed in 1959 by George Stevens’s film.83 Elie Wiesel’s memoir of adolescence in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Night, was translated into English in 1960.84 Primo Levi’s memoir, Survival in Auschwitz, appeared in English in 1959.85 Dr Miklos Nyiszki’s memoir, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, was published in 1960.86 Leon Uris’s Exodus, published in 1958, became the most popular American novel since Gone with the Wind and was turned into a film directed by Otto Preminger in 1960.87 In 1961, Uris produced another controversial, best-selling novel, Mila 18, which focused exclusively on Holocaust experience.88 Stanley Kramer and Abby Mann’s fictionalized film about the Nuremberg trials, Judgment at Nuremberg, played in cinemas in 1961 and 1962.89 I am not certain if Plath saw this film, but if she did, its powerful inclusion of documentary footage from the death camps would surely have worked its way into her fantasy life, as would the portrayals of victims by Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland, both of whom (in their tortured public personae as well as their performances) externalized the qualities of mental fragility, sensitivity to suffering and ambivalence towards celebrity that haunted Plath herself.90 Finally, William Shirer’s two-volume historical narrative, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, was a best-seller in 1959 and 1960.91 The circulation of all these texts, combined with the daily reportage of the Eichmann trial, generated, on the lower reaches of global culture, and specifically Israeli culture, an array of pulp novels in which ‘busty blond female Nazis’ sexually tormented Jewish men in concentration camps, who ‘usually rose up and overthrew the Nazi vixens’.92 On the higher reaches of global culture, the spate of Holocaust documentation and narrative during this period moved Plath’s fantasy life in a direction not entirely different from that of the pulp imaginings. In place of

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masculine porn, Plath produced a feminist art in which porn and highart textual practices mingled. Her texts acknowledged that the spectacle of pain – the mere representation of pain being inflicted – may produce a multitude of reactions among viewers, including one of pleasure. The Holocaust texts circulating through world culture provided Plath with tropes for her domestic suffering and her wish for attention, while at the same time offering historical data that her gifts for language, feeling and allusion could reanimate. In this complex of motives and opportunities, she discovered her lyric subject in history, and she imbued history with a vivid literary presence. If many readers recall Plath through the lens of the Holocaust, many also recall the Holocaust through the lens of her imaginary. Written just prior to the appearance of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem,93 Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ does not incorporate Arendt’s key concept of ‘the banality of evil’. This is just as well, considering the compelling arguments by most historians that the concept does not actually apply to ‘Eichmann himself’.94 Eichmann may have fooled Arendt into believing he was a banal bureaucrat, but these historians show that he is more accurately understood as a conscious agent and instigator of genocide. Thus, Plath’s portrayal of ‘Herr Enemy’ as a sadistic persecutor is actually closer to the truth of Eichmann and, one might add, Mengele, than Arendt was able to come. Although Eichmann’s testimony was ‘a mass of lies’,95 it included credible first-hand accounts of slaughter. Plath may have used such accounts to trigger her own fantasies of historical and domestic torture. For example, Eichmann recalled seeing ‘a column of naked Jews’ entering a large building to be gassed.96 His visual – and habitually pornographic – fascination with the nakedness of his victims emerges in Plath’s poem as a sardonic burlesque. Her speaker describes a ‘big striptease’ in which some unnamed force unwraps her body for the amusement of ‘the peanut-crunching crowd’.97 Plath’s striptease imagery also parallels the testimony of an Eichmann trial witness, Esther Goldstein, who recalled that ‘when the women had to undress for the selections of Dr. Josef Mengele, who sent the lean and the weak to the gas chambers, the women would pinch their cheeks to give them colour to make them look healthier’.98 In ‘Lady Lazarus’, Plath presents an eroticized spectacle of cruelty that echoes what art historian Stephen Eisenman calls the ‘classical pathos formula’ of medieval and Renaissance art, whereby ‘victims are shown welcoming their own torture or death’.99 This formula receded with the Enlightenment but returned in such phenomena as Nazi-era museums

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and 9/11-era photographs from Abu Ghraib.100 Plath’s depiction of a human self as ‘trash’ thus looks back to an antique tradition of Western art and forward to ‘War on Terror’ imagery, in both of which ‘people are used as mere (disposable) means to ends, the latter being the gratification of the torturer’.101 Another dimension of the performativity of Plath’s poem is that Eichmann required Jews to sing, dance and play music for their captors or for those being led to gas chambers.102 Paul Celan, a concentration camp survivor, writes of prisoners being forced to ‘sing’ and to ‘play death’ in ‘Death Fugue’,103 a depiction that initially received criticism but which has since proved authentic. Plath’s portrayal of Lady Lazarus performing her dying as ‘an art’, as a ‘theatrical’ event presumably accompanied by music, thus has provenance in Holocaust historiography. In a confessional passage quoted in Life magazine in June 1960, Eichmann claimed that ‘hell opened up’ for him when he first saw corpses of gassed Jews ‘thrown into a pit where one man pulled gold teeth with a pair of pliers’.104 Eichmann had watched as the Jews undressed and then were forced naked into a truck. When the doors closed, he declined the attending doctor’s invitation to witness the gassing through a peephole, but he listened to the screams. After it was over, the corpses were thrown out, their gold teeth were pulled; and Eichmann claimed he felt sickened. Lady Lazarus in effect impersonates a Jewish woman in this remembered scene, addressing the attending doctor as ‘Herr Doktor’ and perhaps Eichmann himself as ‘Herr Enemy’.105 She is their ‘opus’, their ‘valuable’, the ‘pure gold baby’ that ‘melts to a shriek’. Burnt to ash, she is reduced to a ‘cake of soap’, a ‘wedding ring’, a ‘gold filling’. Plath’s details of a body salvaged for gold could have emerged from various documentary accounts. William Shirer, for example, wrote that ‘the gold fillings in the teeth’ were retrieved from the ashes and then ‘melted down and shipped along with other valuables’.106 The ashes were then used for fertilizer.107 Articles about Eichmann and news accounts of his trial would have reinforced such stories. In The Times, for example, Plath might have read about Jewish women ‘having their hair shorn and their teeth extracted by the SS before being pushed into the gas chambers’; workers lifting an apparently dead body to put it in the fire and being startled when ‘it started to scream and yell’; the reduction of victims’ remains to ‘ashes and dust’; and the use of slave workers to remove ‘the bones, gold teeth and rings that remained’.108 Lady Lazarus’s mockery of her torturer’s ‘great concern’ may have come directly from the newspapers too. Eichmann testified that he could not ‘possibly look’ at the

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gassed bodies, maintaining that he had ‘recoiled’ from his job and was ‘too sensitive’ for it.109 Other details in Plath’s poem – the body turned into a ‘Nazi lampshade’ or a ‘cake of soap’110 – refer to less common practices. In the Gusen Medical Unit at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, a woman clipped victims’ tattooed skin for use as lamp shades, which were then displayed at the unit’s ironically named ‘Pathological Museum’.111 A similar story, retold by William Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, arose from the trials of Ilse Koch in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The wife of the commandant of Buchenwald and Majkanek, Koch allegedly ordered inmates killed so that their skin could be preserved as decorative souvenirs or lampshades.112 Shirer also quoted a document claiming that the Nazis had developed a method ‘for making soap out of human fat’,113 a notion that was subsequently written off as a myth. Nevertheless, a recent chemical analysis in Poland has indicated that soap produced at Stutthof concentration camp does indeed contain human DNA.114 Plath’s final image of an ash pit out of which a flame-haired Lady Lazarus triumphantly arises suggests a fantasized transformation of the daily actualities Eichmann described:  ‘Corpses, corpses, corpses. Shot, gassed, corpses being burned, and fountains of blood pressured up out of the mass graves. An inferno. A hell.’115 Lady Lazarus also describes a ‘hell’,116 but she emerges from it – or she wishes she would emerge  – not as a fountain of blood but as a magically reanimated, autonomous female subject. ‘Lady Lazarus’ looks forward as well as backward. Its imagery of the victim’s nakedness and lack of privacy and of the perpetrator’s dominating, pornographic gaze forecasts the photographs of tortured inmates and gleeful captors at Abu Ghraib as well as the al-Qaeda decapitation videos and the ‘blood-drenched insurgent videos from Iraq’ that flooded the internet during the height of the Iraq War.117 Whereas these recent ‘gornographic’ visuals represent an uncanny return to an ancient conception of torture as pathos, with the spectator’s identification adhering to the powerful perpetrator rather than the dehumanized victim, Plath’s poems are different. Like Goya’s Inquisition Album or Picasso’s Guernica, they propose that the viewer identify with the autonomous victim, despite the victim’s own complex internalizations and identifications, and they encourage a view of torture as transgressive horror. Yet Plath’s texts resist the lure of presenting their victims as saints. The stories of those who survive torture are rarely uplifting. Extreme suffering does not usually make a good person better. Although the victims in ‘The

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Jailer’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ ultimately recover a modicum of agency, they do so at a cost. They ricochet among fantasies of revenge, dependency and suicide. Nevertheless, as Maurice Blanchot has written, ‘What remains to be said is the disaster’.118 It is the suffering that matters most in Plath’s texts  – that and the yearning for ‘the conservation of life of all people in all places’,119 however vanishing that prospect may have seemed in her own time and may seem in ours. No t e s 1 Tara McKelvey (ed.), One of the Guys:  Women as Aggressors and Torturers (Emeryville, Calif.: Seal Press, 2007). 2 Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight Empire:  From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 3 See Dick Cheney, Interview with Tim Russert, Meet the Press, NBC television network, USA, 16 Sept. 2001. www.emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/ nbcmp.htm. Quoted in Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 9. 4 Parents Television Council, ‘Torture and Television’, Rights Readers website, 10 Feb. 2007. http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com/2007/02/torture-and-television. html. 5 Parents Television Council, ‘Torture and Television’. 6 Saw I–VII (films), directed by James Wan and various hands, written by James Wan, Leigh Whannel and various hands (USA:  2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010); Hostel I–II (films), directed and written by Eli Roth (USA:  2005, 2007); Captivity (film), directed by Roland Joffé, written by Larry Cohen and Joseph Tura (USA: 2007). 7 The Torture Game, video game. www.freewebarcade.com/game/the-torturegame/. 8 ‘US Rights Group Says Torture Seen on Television Influences Interrogators in Iraq’, International Herald Tribune (2 Dec. 2007). www.thefreelibrary.com/ Group+says+torture+seen+on+television+influences+interrogators+in+Iraqa01611348315. 9 ‘Sizable Minority of Americans Condone Torture  – Poll’, TPM website, 25 June 2008. www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2548139720080625. 10 Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death [1982], trans. Thomas Weyr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 11 Mayer, The Dark Side, p. 215. 12 Mayer, The Dark Side, p. 223. 13 Jay Bybee, an Assistant Attorney General in the Bush administration, made this case in his ‘Memorandum for John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency’, reprinted at Future Fastforward website, 1 Aug. 2002. http://futurefastforward.com/images/stories/military/ olc_08012002_bybee.pdf (hereafter ‘Bybee memorandum’). More recently,

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a study by students at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government examined how waterboarding has been discussed by America’s four largest newspapers over the last century. The study found that the technique was generally called ‘torture’ until the US government began using it in 2002, at which point it ceased to be categorized as a torture practice, at least when the US was responsible. From the early 1930s to the early 2000s, the New York Times characterized waterboarding as torture in 81.5 per cent of news articles on the topic and the Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3 per cent of such articles, but between 2002 and 2008 the New York Times characterized waterboarding as torture in only 1.4 per cent of such articles and the Los Angeles Times did so in just 4.8 per cent of its articles. Neal Desai et al., ‘Torture at Times:  Waterboarding in the Media’, Joan Shorenstein Center, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. www.hks.harvard. edu/presspol/publications/papers/torture_at_times_hks_students.pdf. 14 Mayer, The Dark Side, p. 304. 15 Michael Ratner and Peter Weiss, ‘Litigating Against Torture: The German Criminal Prosecution’, in Karen J. Greenberg (ed.), The Torture Debate in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 261. 16 From Russia with Love (film), directed by Terence Young, written by Johanna Harwood, Richard Maibaum and Ian Fleming (USA: 1963). 17 Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 207–238. 18 See Steven Gould Axelrod, ‘The Poetry of Sylvia Plath’, in Jo Gill (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 78–79 and Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 178–179. 19 LH, pp. 550, 559. 20 Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath:  A Biography (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 28. 21 Aurelia Plath, Introduction to LH, pp. 22–23. 22 John Bowlby, Loss:  Sadness and Depression (New York:  Basic Books, 1980), pp. 21–22. 23 e.g., Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath, pp. 24, 26. 24 Journals, p. 33. 25 JP, p. 64. 26 JP, p. 64. 27 Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 7. 28 CP, pp. 245, 247. 29 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors:  Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide [1986] (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 98. 30 Included in Plath’s recording for the British Council days after the poem was drafted, but subsequently omitted. See BBC website. www.bbc.co.uk/ arts/poetry/outloud/plath.shtml. 31 CP, p. 246.

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32 Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, pp. 337–383. 33 ‘Auschwitz Survivor Carried Out of Eichmann Court’, The Times (8 June 1961): 13 (hereafter ‘Auschwitz Survivor’). 34 ‘Eichmann Reprimanded by Himmler for Cruelty’, The Times (19 Apr. 1961): 10 (hereafter ‘Eichmann Reprimanded’). 35 Leon Uris, Exodus (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 146. 36 Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, pp. 248–249. 37 Mavis Hill and L. Norman Williams, Auschwitz in England: A Record of a Libel Action (New York: Stein and Day, 1965), p. 16. 38 CP, p. 247. 39 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1915, revised 1917) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of PsychoAnalysis, 1953–1974), xiv. 249–250. 40 ‘Bybee memorandum’ and Red Cross, ‘ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody’, Feb. 2007. www. nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf. 41 CP, p. 227. 42 CP, pp. 226–227. 43 ‘Eichmann Court Hears of Nazi Effort to Hide Massacres’, The Times (3 May 1961): 10 (hereafter ‘Eichmann Court Hears’). 4 4 ‘Auschwitz Survivor’, p. 13. 45 ‘Eichmann Court Told of Jews Burned Alive’, The Times (29 Apr. 1961): 7. 46 ‘Eichmann Court Hears’, p. 10. 47 BJ, p. 142. 48 CP, pp. 235–236. 49 JP, p. 309. 50 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 252. 51 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 13–15. 52 Jerrard Tickell, Odette:  The Book of the Film (London:  Chapman & Hall, 1950), p. 68 and Brian Innes, The History of Torture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 164. 53 Bruce Marshall, The White Rabbit (London: Evans Brothers, 1952), pp. 110–111. 54 ‘Supreme Court Rejects CIA Torture Case’, CBS News, CBS television network, USA, 9 Oct. 2007. www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/09/supremecourt/ main3346689.shtml. 55 Andrew Sullivan, ‘Bush’s Torturers Follow Where the Nazis Led’, Sunday Times (7 Oct. 2007). www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ andrew_sullivan. President Bush’s assertion that ‘this government does not torture people’ was as credible as President Nixon’s that he was not a crook and President Clinton’s that he did not have sex with that woman. See ‘President Bush Discusses the Economy and Protecting Americans from Terrorism’, White House Press Office, 5 Oct. 2007. http://merln.ndu.edu/ archivepdf/terrorism/wh/20071005-2.pdf.

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56 BJ, p. 129. 57 Marshall, The White Rabbit, p. 119. 58 Marshall, The White Rabbit, p. 121. 59 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound:  American Families in the Cold War Era [1988] (New York:  Basic Books, 1999) and Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 60 CP, p. 226. 61 CP, p. 227. 62 Arlene Skolnick, Embattled Paradise:  The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 172. 63 Susan Estrich, Real Rape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 41. 64 ‘Factbox: Five Facts about the Guantanamo Prison Camp’, Reuters UK (4 Jan. 2007). http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKN0417794920070104. 65 Mayer, The Dark Side, pp. 184–185. 66 Clive Stafford Smith, ‘Gitmo:  America’s Black Hole’, Los Angeles Times (5 Oct. 2007). http://articles.latimes.com/2007/oct/05/opinion/oe-smith5. 67 David Stout, ‘Supreme Court Won’t Hear Torture Appeal’, New York Times (9 Oct. 2007). www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/washington/09cnd-scotus. html?_r=1. 68 CP, p. 226. 69 LH, p. 473. 70 Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination:  Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 27–28, 612. 71 Edward Russell, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann (London: Heinemann, 1962), reprinted as The Record: The Trial of Adolf Eichmann for His Crimes Against the Jewish People and Against Humanity (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. 114. 72 LH, p. 440. 73 JP, p. 64; Dwight D. Eisenhower, ‘Farewell Address’, 17 Jan. 1961. www. ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=90&page=transcript; Fred J. Cook, ‘Jugger­ naut: The Warfare State’, The Nation, 193 (28 Oct. 1961): 277–337. 74 JP, p. 62. 75 JP, p. 64. 76 JP, p. 64. 77 Robin Peel, Writing Back:  Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), p. 186. 78 JP, pp. 64–65. 79 Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys (New York:  Ziff-Davis, 1947); John Hersey, The Wall (New York:  Knopf, 1950); Paul Celan, Poems [1952, 1976], trans. Michael Hamburger (New York:  Persea Books, 1988); Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them [1950] (New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006); Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl [1947], trans. Barbara Mooyart-Doubleday (New York: Doubleday, 1952).

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80 Peel, Writing Back, p. 40. 81 Journals, p. 414. 82 Night and Fog [Nuit et brouillard] (film) directed by Alain Resnais, written by Jean Cayrol (France: 1955). 83 Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank (play: 1955) (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1958); The Diary of Anne Frank (film), directed by George Stevens, written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (USA: 1959). 84 Elie Wiesel, Night [1958] (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960). 85 Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Turin: De Silva, 1947), reissued as If This Is a Man (Turin: Einaudi, 1958), republished as Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Orion Press, 1959). 86 Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz:  A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, foreword by Bruno Bettelheim [1960] (New York: Arcade, 1993). 87 Leon Uris, Exodus (film), directed by Otto Preminger, written by Dalton Trumbo (USA: 1960). 88 Leon Uris, Mila 18 (New York: Doubleday, 1961). 89 Judgment at Nuremberg (film), directed by Stanley Kramer, written by Abby Mann (USA: 1961). 90 Newsreel scenes of liberated death camps had already entered Plath’s fantasy life, as her 1957 poem ‘The Thin People’ demonstrates (CP, p. 64). 91 William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:  A History of Nazi Germany [1959, 1960] (New York: Touchstone, 1981). 92 Laura Frost, ‘S&M and Tea’, Los Angeles Times (11 Apr. 2008): A25. 93 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963). 94 Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories:  Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), p. 3. 95 Browning, Collected Memories, p. 11. 96 Browning, Collected Memories, p. 14. 97 CP, p. 245. 98 ‘Eichmann Court Sees Film of Burial by Bulldozer’, The Times (9 June 1961): 12. 99 Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). 100 ‘KZ Mauthausen-GUSEN Info-Pages’, Gusen website. www.gusen.org/ gumed01x.htm and Mark Benjamin, ‘The Abu Ghraib Files’, Salon website (16 Feb. 2006). www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/02/16/abu_ghraib. 101 CP, p. 245; Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect, p. 14. 102 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 154; Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 970; Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), passim. 103 Celan, Poems, pp. 61–62. 104 Browning, Collected Memories, p. 17. 105 CP, p. 246. 106 Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 973.

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107 Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 971 and Friedlander, Years, pp. 503, 616. 108 ‘Eichmann Court Hears’, p. 10; ‘Eichmann Reprimanded’, p. 10. 109 ‘Eichmann “Ready to Hang Myself Publicly”’, The Times (20 Apr. 1961): 10; ‘Eichmann “Recoiled” from Slaughter of Jews’, The Times (7 July 1961): 11. 110 CP, pp. 244, 246. 111 ‘KZ Mauthausen-GUSEN Info-Pages’. 112 Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 983–984. 113 Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 971. 114 ‘Tests Show that Nazis Used Human Remains to Make Soap’, Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), 6 Oct. 2006. www.mg.co.za/article/2006-1006-tests-show-that-nazis-used-human-remains-to-make-soap. 115 Browning, Collected Memories, p. 19. 116 CP, p. 245. 117 Michael Moss and Souad Mekhennet, ‘In Internet Jihad Aims at US Viewers’, New York Times (15 Oct. 2007): A1. 118 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster [1980], trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 33. 119 JP, 64.

pa r t i i

Poetics and composition

ch apter 5

‘The trees of the mind are black, the light is blue’: sublime encounters in Sylvia Plath’s ‘tree poems’ Sally Bayley T h e t h e at r ic a l l a n d s c a pe In the writing universe of Sylvia Plath, landscapes wield an almost incantatory power. Drawn in particular to the form of the tree, Plath adopted trees as the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich did: as an emblem of the solitary subject hovering on the edge of a sublime encounter. In Plath’s particular mythos, trees figure as aspects of the mind: ‘The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue’, as she put it in ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ (1961).1 These are poems that suggest a search for mental structure and compositional form, a process akin to what the speaker in ‘Stars Over the Dordogne’ (1961) describes as watching stars fall into a ‘twiggy | Picket of trees’.2 What forms and capacities are hidden within this dark picket, the speaker asks? And what is their relation to the world? How does the night sky that crowns the poem’s larger composition reflect what lies within the human mind? Like Kant, whose work she encountered as an undergraduate at Smith college,3 the speaker of ‘Stars Over the Dordogne’ looks into the night sky and ponders infinity.4 What can the mind see and hold in place? and what remains invisible, unknowable? asks the speaker, like the German idealist philosopher before her. As a young writer and visual artist, Plath drew aesthetic succour from the German Romantic tradition:  from her undergraduate reading of Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence. The latter’s work in particular taught her the striking literary effects of gothic lighting.5 From Lawrence, she also took her imaginative relationship with wooded landscapes, where her delight in the gothic dance between light and dark  – her fondness for poetic chiaroscuro – shines through. Writing from her Benidorm honeymoon the year after graduating from Smith College, she describes a moonlit walk through almond trees, in which the ‘black’ and ‘twisted’ forms of the trees are ‘floodlit’ by moonlight.6 Plath’s imagination responds vividly 91

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to Lawrence’s poem, ‘Bare Almond Trees’, written during his sojourn in Sicily, about a variety of tree that appears throughout his essay series Twilight in Italy (1916).7 Lawrence’s essay, ‘The Crucifix in the Mountain’, inspired by his wandering across the Bavarian uplands, verbally insinuates the aesthetic of German Romantic artist, Caspar David Friedrich. A typical Friedrich composition involves the moon with its dramatic lighting effects playing off against the dark, writhing shapes of the trees. In Plath’s journal the ‘soft purple mountains’ she describes evoke the scenery of Friedrich’s Morning in the Riesengebirge (1810), a ‘weird’ and phantasmagoric form towards which the honeymooning twenty-four-year-old Plath ‘strike[s] out with her husband’.8 The final elements in this composition are the young poet and her new husband whose emotional separateness reflects a larger encounter with an uncanny environment. Plath’s journal entry records a moment of brutal emotional disengagement, a breakdown in the relations between subjects and objects: between the thinking and feeling human world and the world of nature. Despite the intensity of lighting and mood, and a great effort to generate drama, the mental plot holding them together has unravelled. Something or someone has snapped. Locked into a mood of ‘cruel separation’, the honeymooning couple carry this division home with them:  ‘Two silent strangers. Going back … ’9 Plath’s Benidorm passage is a neatly distilled example of her engagement with the tradition of the gothic sublime she first learnt through Lawrence, but whose roots lie elsewhere. The leading example of the northern Romantic tradition, Caspar David Friedrich, is Lawrence’s aesthetic progenitor, and, in turn, Plath’s. Steeped in the language of the Romantic sublime, Plath’s journal entry is a record of a moment of dramatic disconnection, a moment in which ‘all could happen’.10 Unsurprisingly, her vocabulary closely resembles that of Romantic philosopher Edmund Burke, for whom the sublime encounter constituted a passionate arrest of an ‘astonished’ soul. According to Burke, the sublime emerged from a contrapuntal tension of contraries, a struggle between light and dark in which darkness must necessarily play the protagonist, being more ‘productive of sublime ideas than light’.11 Such an aesthetic of opposition would filter to Plath through the works of William Blake as well as through later writers and painters. This chapter traces Plath’s aesthetic involvement in the tradition of the Romantic sublime. In particular, it reads her attraction to Romantic landscapes as a means of poetic self-representation in which the process of painterly composition functions as a metaphor for self-constitution. This

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process involves the proportional relations between the subject and its environment, foreground and background; what will be seen and what, as in the case of the Dordogne sky, remains invisible, lying just beyond the frame. For the purpose of this chapter I will focus mainly upon the manuscript drafts of the 1961–1962 ‘tree poems’: ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, ‘Elm’, ‘Little Fugue’, ‘Winter Trees’ and ‘Crossing the Water’.12 The elements of Plath’s compositional arrangements reveal a great deal about her own spiritual education as a poet; what the German Romantics called Eigentümlichkeit or ‘peculiarity’; one’s ‘characteristic quality’ or properties of being.13 Although Plath subscribes to no particular version of the sublime, I will focus chiefly upon the Burkean formula, whose analysis is closest to the poet’s preoccupation with a split lyrical ‘I’ running back and forth between two versions of itself: one dwelling in light, the other in darkness.14 Underpinning this split identity is a struggle for distilled selfrepresentation; this is a process that can be still, quiet and contemplative. And yet, as the speaker of ‘Stars Over the Dordogne’ puts it, frustratingly, these subliminal aspects of identity are often opaque and cannot be seen. Encased in their own ‘twilight’ ‘dust’, they remain sublimely out of reach.15 Like her Romantic forefathers, Plath associated trees with self-­discovery and growth, and, in the tradition of Ruskin, she borrowed the discipline of accurate and methodical drawing as a metaphor for self-delineation. Well-versed in the western tradition of landscape painting from her undergraduate study of art history, as well as her own artistic practice, she adopted drawing and sketching as a means of focusing her mind and testing the accuracy of her observations.16 As a visual artist, Plath enjoyed exacting detail and her November 1962 poem ‘Winter Trees’ traces the careful art of botanical drawing in the figure of trees emerging from the inky ‘blue dissolve’ of dawn. The poem is an investigation of artistic selfemergence by means of exacting mimesis, of which botanical drawing is the most thorough test. Perception is here self-perception, and, in this sense, the trees figure as accurate forms of self-knowledge. Most essentially, it is a form of knowledge that is ‘incorruptible’,17 and pursues a favourite trope of Plath’s ‘tree poems’: the roots of the tree as a visual conceit for the nervous system. Friedrich and other Romantic artists, including the American Thomas Cole, took the structural forms of trees as a signifier of the pathways of the nerves.18 Plath’s poetic juvenilia brim with examples of poetic identity being felt out through the form of the tree; they are early studies

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in the fractional relations between light and dark, the aesthetic of the Burkean sublime. ‘Silver Thread’, an unpublished 1946 poem, is accompanied by a wintry landscape of pine trees poking through a blue winter sky. The composition is similar to what will become her mature poem, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ (October 1961), in which the form of a tree against a night sky is accompanied by a moon. Also from 1946, her poem ‘A Winter Sunset’, offers an early study of the Romantic motif of natural spectacle, in this case the expository illuminations of the sunset and the moon in which the latter strips back the form of black trees to a ‘bare black skeleton’.19 Aged 14, it is clear that the young Plath was already imaginatively preoccupied with nature’s theatre, the oppositions and elisions between forms of doubleness  – the sun and the moon, light and dark – the sublime’s aesthetic extremities. ‘E l m’’s e e r i e s e l f -r e v i s ion i ng Doubleness is a subject Plath pursued fondly in her student days, as her Master’s study of Dostoevsky’s ghostly doppelgänger undertaken at Smith College in the early 1950s, attests.20 Indeed, it is a conceit she adheres to throughout her poetic career, most emphatically in her poems ‘Two Sisters of Persephone’ (1956) and the later ‘In Plaster’ (1961).21 Alongside doubleness, Plath draws keenly upon the wider tradition of the gothic sublime, whose definition is the suspension of self-expression in the face of overwhelming psychic terror:  in this case, language and speech. The net result, as with any form of subliminal encounter, is that something remains unnamed and unspoken, something is perpetually being lost, and in the case of Plath’s tree-speakers, perhaps identity itself.22 In her reading of the split Plathian speaker, Christina Britzolakis aligns gothic subjectivity with the staging of an identity crisis in which repressed aspects of selfhood return to haunt the speaker. Britzolakis draws attention to the phrase ‘stigma of selfhood’ scribbled in the margin of the draft of Plath’s April 1962 poem, ‘Elm’, her most developed exploration of subjective transference through the figure of the tree.23 ‘Stigma’ here suggests those buried aspects of the speaker’s psyche that the ‘Elm’ drafts in some form reclaim and reconfigure. In this sense, the thirteen drafts of ‘Elm’ are a thoroughly directed journey through shifting self-perspectives analogous to the preparatory sketches of a landscape painter. Ultimately, what the ‘Elm’ drafts deliver is perhaps the most substantial process of poetic revisioning of Plath’s poetic career; a process conjunctive to its poetic ­predecessor, ‘Little Fugue’, begun earlier the same month.

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As a close poetic predecessor, the drafts of ‘Little Fugue’ offer an important comment on the processes of the ‘Elm’ manuscripts. Framing both poems is a sense of an acute historical moment in modern poetry: Laura Riding’s renunciation of the poet’s false self, which was broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme on 2 April 1961. Plath recorded this event in a scribbled note across the top of the first draft of ‘Little Fugue’.24 Riding’s is a dramatic announcement; a turning away from the false ‘mould’ of poetic panache, the reliance upon clever phrases and aural effects, the linguistic ‘freakishness’ of words she blames for removing the lived ‘reality’ of poetic truth, and with it, any coherent sense of being.25 Riding’s is a pronounced statement against the aural suggestiveness of poetic language; its false and hollow sounds:  another ‘stigma of selfhood’. As a starting point for the composition of ‘Little Fugue’, Riding’s broadcast importantly secures the central theme of the extraordinary poetic transformation of ‘Elm’, begun ten days later. With Riding’s voice drifting through Plath’s poetic consciousness, ‘Elm’ performs a similarly astonishing reversal of compositional fortune, in which the traditional elements of painting are inverted as Plath’s new and revised speaker emerges into the poetic foreground – half-way through her drafted journey. The poem begins as a piece foregrounding atmosphere and environment: nature’s mood and setting. Scribbled alternative titles testify to the distractions of stagey ‘natural’ effects – ‘Wind in the Elm’ and ‘The Sea the Door’ lie across the top of the first draft as evidence of conjured effects – potential poetic narratives as yet untested. At this early point in ‘Elm’’s life cycle, the poet is more interested in forms of outer narrative; and it is the spectacle of the natural show that consumes her; what her speaker, in a Wordsworthian phrase, calls ‘gigantic antique presences’; the external marks made by the ‘blue pool’ of the night and the ‘white dot’ of the moon.26 The language of ‘truthfulness’ Riding solicits disappears beneath the scaffolding of narrative landscaping. ‘Elm’ is here more a poem of the traditional natural sublime in which arresting forms of nature, skulls ‘like bulbs on the hills’, fill the canvas. The world of nature stills and governs the mind. In these early drafts of ‘Elm’, Plath’s speaker is still responding to a natural world that lies beyond her. The proportions and divisions between speaker and nature are quite clear. Nature offers curiosities to which the speaker is drawn and the simile indicates their parallel but distinct existences: ‘air stirs & unsettles … | It ripples like the reflection of a tree’.27 There is none of the radical mobility of the later poem ‘Ariel’ (October 1962) in which the speaker, a flashing ‘white Godiva’, streaks across the

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natural canvas, tearing through the poem’s conscious construction. ‘Ariel’ manages to dismantle the ‘natural’ effects of simile; instead of holding together two distinct worlds of speaker and Nature, the poem metonymically merges the natural canvas of the speaker’s body, the figure of ‘white’ Godiva, into Nature’s own canvas. In ‘Ariel’, the proportions between speaker and landscape are indivisible. What Plath’s hurtling and ‘haul[ing]’ narrator achieves is to break down the representational barriers between figure and landscape. By sheer velocity of being, Plath’s speaker rips through and bypasses the static, compositional elements of sublime landscaping, as Nature’s elements are grabbed and taken along for the ride. And so the ‘blue | Pour of tor and distances’ that is the landscape lurking around the opening edges of the poem is catalytically converted into the consuming ‘drive’ of a primally renewed subjectivity: the ‘red | | Eye … of morning’.28 Becoming a vortex of subjective consumption, ‘Ariel’’s furious rider eats up the subjects of Romantic landscape painting  – Friedrich’s ghostly male bystanders in his ‘Two Men Contemplating the Moon’ (1817) – as the speaker of ‘Lady Lazarus’ eats up her male audience and other bystanders. Similarly, in its process of creative emergence, ‘Elm’ moves away from the blue ‘distances’ of the watching external world and takes her creative goods inwards, towards a downward spiralling self-narrative, towards the roots of the tree. Turned inwards, ‘Elm’’s ‘I’ confronts a dystopian version of itself: something fragmented and broken, something contrary. It is a manifestation of the ‘dark thing’ that emerges in the final drafts of the poem that indicates a disruption of self-identity between the earlier version of herself and what is, at the end of the poem, a revised identity. The ‘cry’ that accompanies the recognition of the ‘dark thing’ is her own moment of double-take between the present and the past.29 But, as the early draft of the poem already hints, this is not an ‘easy’ or ‘peaceful’ temporal relationship.30 ‘Elm’, more than any of Plath’s poems, is a text whose body is manifestly revisionary. It is a poem of contestation between inner and outer worlds, subjective and objective landscapes, conflicting versions of time and space – a fact emphatically marked out across the slew of scribbled drafts. In the published version of the poem, the struggle for artistic control is still quite apparent; we see this in the tension between the tradition of sublimity reflected in the presence of the moon that ‘scathes’ and the image of sunsets full of ‘atrocity’ – poetic forms intent on muffling the urgent protests of ‘I’. And yet peace must be made, the speaker must live within her context, and so early on in the ‘Elm’ drafts, by draft

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two, she is already ‘gather[ing] the landscape in [her] boughs’; reconciling herself with the natural sublime. She consumes aspects of her landscape because, as she confesses, she is ‘thoroughly emotional’, and so she pushes herself forward, as a tree, to the ‘nervous system of the sky’, where she feeds off its energy.31 Intent on the foreground, she lends herself to the sky, and so we witness the beginning of more cooperation between inner and outer worlds, the subject and its context. But Plath’s subject is a knowing one; her intention is to use the sky to throw herself into greater relief, to generate the painter’s chiaroscuro effect and so wield her own drama. These are early hints of ‘Ariel’’s kinetic transformations. But still there are the compromises of tradition. The trope of the sunset indicates that her speaker has indeed ‘suffered’, as she claims, a long tradition of the Romantic sublime, the sunset being the most ‘scorching’ but perhaps effective of sublime symbols.32 The sunset is Plath’s transcendental inheritance from another painter of the sublime, Emily Dickinson, who wrote of the savagery of the sublime as a ‘leaping … leopard’ that rises across the American sky, ‘blazing in gold and quenching in purple’.33 And there are the same tones radiating from Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘The Cross on the Mountain’ (1807–1808), from Lawrence’s short story, ‘The Prussian Officer’,34 and, indeed, from Plath herself in a journal entry brainstorm for a poem on crucifixes whose central conceit is the ‘flesh sublimed to gold’.35 The tradition surrounds her. ‘Elm’, then, is a poem whose symbolic field is torn between external elements of landscape  – the moon and sunsets, traditional tropes of Romantic painting whose visual effects gear themselves to renditions of the natural sublime – and the internal call of a self rooted in a landscape of existential crisis. The figure of the sunset emerges in the ‘Elm’ drafts as a spectacular rival to the subliminal self in crisis. Its chronic spectacle ‘alarms’ Plath’s emerging speaker, who, at a point just over halfway through the drafted series, is still to secure her own version of identity.36 It is not until she can confidently declare that she ‘know[s] the bottom … with [her] great tap root’ that her spectacular rival begins to fade.37 It is at this point that the inner world of the poem takes on the lead role: that moment at which the bolshier sounds of self-knowledge begin to push out more established symbols. And it is that moment at which the fragmentary sounds of her future radio play, Three Women, creep in like projected phantoms of future selves. In the seventh draft, the image of the sunset emerges with a fanfare of ‘redness’, a rival spectacular event to the blood-redness of the event of childbirth.38 Sunsets and childbirth play a game of counterpoint through

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the following draft in which the speaker honestly announces her fear of the ‘passion’ of the sunset consuming her more ‘gentle’ passion for bearing children.39 The forms of the Christian passion haunt the midpoint of this draft in the deleted lines; ‘holy forms of stained glass’. Clearly, the poet is grappling to arrange some centrepiece to the poem, to build into her composition a ‘significant form’, to adopt Clive Bell’s formalist term.40 Her image of stained glass is the visual equivalent of Lawrence’s stunned Prussian officer lying in the middle of a ‘dark’ pine forest, overcome by the ‘deep [religious] atmosphere’ of Nature, slowly losing consciousness against a backdrop of snowy peaks and scarlet skies;41 or of Friedrich’s ‘The Cross on the Mountain’. In all cases, this is a version of sublimity in which the soul is utterly ‘astonished’, as Burke put it: that is, stunned, deprived of sensation,42 by the weighty objects of religion. But something more personal takes up the poetic centre:  something more to do with the ‘me’ than the religious ‘Creator’ of her earlier drafts.43 Halfway through her revisionary journey, Plath’s speaker suffers a philosophical and personal dilemma: to conceive or not to conceive; to embrace or not the ‘dark thing’ that is the gestating form within her; to accept or refuse a new aspect of what constitutes the poem’s ‘me’. In doing so, she is forced to do away with the artificial props of natural and religious spectacle – the passion of sunsets and pietàs – and to embrace the relationship of mother to child. And so, at this midway point in ‘Elm’’s development, draft eight, she begins a conversation with her potential mother self: ‘I am gentle with children. I am a mother really’, she declares.44 On the level of composition, she replaces draft seven’s ‘atrocity’ of the twilight hour and its sunsets with the ‘quiet’ of the dawn hour, which is also ‘Ariel’’s temporal moment; a moment of eclipse gives way to a moment of birth. This is her poetic and temporal revolution, the real and emerging ‘stigmata’ of self. And so, by the end of draft eight, the speaker has ushered in dawn with all of its quiet; her canvas ‘is whitening’, but in anticipation of the blood and shrieks of delivery that is her ‘Ariel’ poem six months on. ‘Elm’ is a study of the topology of self and its particular ‘stigma’, to employ Plath’s own term again, a marked sign system of personal and psychical history that maps the journey towards self-identity. In the widest sense, it is a poem about locating and localizing self, about putting down roots and ridding oneself of the ‘not peaceful’ aspects of being, as the speaker of draft four declares of her adopted third person voice. And it is the process announced by Laura Riding in her 1 April 1962 broadcast: an elimination of the ‘extensity’ of being whose needs are answered by language. Riding’s detoxification of poetry is a rather puritanical dismissal

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of what she considers to be the distracting and detracting aspects of poetic language; a language, she argues, that borrows from the soul, and in doing so reduces the quality of the singular self.45 Through its process of dramatic self-unfolding, ‘Elm’ also follows a process of detraction:  a pulling away from the symbols of others mimicked in the shift from the third person to the first person voice. By the final draft of ‘Elm’, everything rides upon the speaking ‘I’ whose pounding ‘hooves’ anticipate the galloping lyricism of ‘Ariel’.46 L a n d s c a pe s ‘i n m e’ ‘Elm’ begins and ends with movement: the wind in the elm that is ‘ferrying meanness’ and ‘great cold’.47 Similar conceits of sensory vibrations also appear in the first draft of ‘Little Fugue’ (April 1962), whose yew tree has fingers, sensory nerve endings with tips that ‘agitate’ ‘back and forth’; the yew tree ‘rocks’ and is ‘bitterly supple’.48 It is a body of nerves and tension in keeping with the landscapes of consciousness Robert Rosenblum identifies in Friedrich’s wooded landscapes.49 Plath’s yew tree is almost humanoid, a network of nerve endings reaching skywards. As in ‘Elm’, this sentient tree moves away from the deadening symbols of organized systems – in this case, religion – extracting itself from the form of Mary enfolded within a pietà. ‘Who are these Pietàs?’, the speaker of the second draft of ‘Little Fugue’ asks – ‘What are these lifeless symbols doing hanging from my motherly leaves?’50 The speaker’s desire is for what she calls a place of ‘otherworldliness’, a desire that makes its way into the final draft of the poem. In this last revision, she achieves a representation of an alternative world/self, a self that reclaims the psychic territories of her ‘history’, a self directed inwards. Incorruptible self-knowledge dominates the early drafts of Plath’s slightly later ‘Winter Trees’ (November 1962  – originally entitled simply ‘Trees’). But this point recedes into the background as the form of the trees takes over and the question of self-knowledge becomes directly associated with personal history, ‘memories’ that spiral inwards through the trees’ rings.51 The issue of corruptibility or misrepresentation with which the poem begins starts to shift in the second draft, and this perhaps explains why the Catholic imagery of ‘ring doves black as shadows, chanting in Latin’ are exorcized – along with the ‘Pietàs’.52 Like ‘Elm’, this is another involuted and shifting self-narrative. Rivals to reliable history are the ‘face lifts, abortions, affairs’,53 hidden or exorcized aspects of self that nonetheless are carried through into the final version of the poem as

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‘abortions’ and ‘bitchery’.54 These are similar to ‘Elm’’s earlier confession of a ‘false relation’ or disingenuous discourse between tree and speaker; ‘it is stupid, this relationship’, says ‘Elm’’s speaker in the fourth version of the poem.55 Abortions, affairs, bitcheries and facelifts, as she relates it in the earlier drafts of ‘Winter Trees’, are part of a ‘false’ self she must leave behind; a self badly altered by surgery and gossip. Plath’s mature ‘tree poems’ adhere to the tenets of the Romantic artist: that the artist should paint not only what he sees in front of him but also what he ‘sees within himself’.56 This is ‘Elm’’s particular shift, from the perspective of the moon to that of the sentient tree; and it is also the subjective descent of ‘Little Fugue’ through the competing sensory experience of sight and sound. Abortions, bitcheries and facelifts are part of a ‘radical surgery’ of self-alteration, as ‘Elm’’s nascent speaker puts it; a form of interference (be it by babies or other women or men). And these interferences perhaps explain why Plath’s speakers must move away from ‘scathing’ glances; why ‘Elm’’s speaker in particular must turn from the perspective of the moon to the tree and why the trees of ‘Winter Trees’ seek out a more solid self-understanding than that reflected in the vagaries of gossiping women. Plath’s ‘tree poems’ also conjure phantom histories, histories whispered and rumoured: the psychic inheritance of familial and cultural legacies. This is the substance of ‘Little Fugue’, a poem tangled with the language and memories of others and other places. A poem of psychic rehauling, ‘Little Fugue’ is also a statement of visual compensation for auditory failure. Plath’s cultural reference is the last movement of Beethoven’s Opus 130 string quartet, published separately as Opus 133 – his Grosse Fuge – a piece written during the period of his final descent into deafness one year before his death. Defiantly opposing resolution, the fugue form is sound for sound’s sake. It is a music that springs from silence, frustrated by its inability to hear itself out loud. In other words, the Grosse Fuge is a composition waiting to be rescued from the pain of not being heard, and in the volatile rising and falling of its volume, the frustrations of the deaf composer can be heard. In Plath’s version of the fugue, sight and sound battle it out in a form of counterpoint imitative of the fugue’s musical structure. Hers is a poem of revenants, of cultural haunting and buried memories revisited; it is a mental graveyard. And as with ‘Elm’, there is something showy about the poem’s internal unfolding drama, its creation story. Indeed, the first line scribbled along the top of the first draft, noted as Plath listened to Laura Riding, reads, ‘The lights are humming  – how my small room rides’.57

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Carried away by Riding’s voice, Plath’s first draft is intensely aurally conscious. But this is perhaps unsurprising in the light of its subject matter: the buried voices of the dead. A deleted line reads, ‘A carbon balloon rooted in the mouths of the dead’. Underscoring this image is a great deal of heavy-handed allusion to ‘blackness’, a flurry of deleted lines in which the black hat of a rector and his black cat carry this first draft almost into the realm of nonsense verse. But, after a while, the poet manages to join the aural to the visual in a line that is carried through into the poem’s final draft, ‘I like black statements’: statements that lie buried and unheard.58 A form of psychic polyphony, Plath’s poem – like the Grosse Fuge – wages war against itself. It turns inward, towards its own ‘black statements’, and its deictic fingers, like those of the yew tree, point to an unconscious and disordered place. In terms of the secondary psychiatric sense of ‘fugue’, the poem is a flight from a personal drama. Read this way, the topology of the yew tree becomes a place that is ‘deaf and dumb’, unspoken and unvisited, an aspect of the gothic sublime.59 Collapsed and stored away, this site of trauma remains two-dimensional: the fingers of the yew tree, only ‘cut-outs’ of a past.60 Remaining silent and ‘featureless’, the poem’s images give nothing away. But what cannot be spoken or heard can perhaps be touched, and so it is that the figure of the blind pianist resorts to feeling for his food.61 Trauma, after all, is always felt. The speaker can feel through the past, even if the relationship between her sense impressions is somewhat disordered, catachrestic.62 As a poet, she can ‘see’ the voice of her father, if she cannot hear it. The pianist can feel for his food, even if he cannot see it. It is perhaps only through a synaesthetic crossing of sensory wires that the speaker can deal with the black (buried) statements of her past. A full sensory report on the past would be too much to bear. Artistic licence must be curtailed; some aspect of self must be blocked off, intercepted, sent underground. In order for privacy to exist, something should always go unspoken. I n t e rc e s s or y f igu r e s But what cannot be heard, can perhaps be seen, and the recurring image of the ‘eye’ suggests an obsessive clinging to tropes of subjectivity, figures that infect the poem’s objects with their paranoiac gazing. And so the white eye of the cloud and the eye of the blind pianist become visual food for the ‘I’ of the speaker who cannot ‘stop looking’. For the speaker,

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looking is a compulsive act. This is a poem, after all, about sensory consumption, about an insatiable appetite for lost forms (‘empty and silly as plates’) and the efforts to replay ‘the big noises’ of the past.63 But what are these noises and how are they sounded? In the poem’s final movement, the figure of the yew tree intervenes between the blind pianist/Beethoven and the German father figure in what is the poem’s major chordal tension. And yet silence surrounds this stand-off between the poem’s male protagonists. Nothing is spoken on either side. And so the yew steps in as a Christly intercessor on behalf of voices apparently so disturbed (distorted) they cannot speak. A deleted line from an earlier draft reads, ‘He talks for the dead’.64 The ‘great silence’ that descends is the gulf between past and present, the gulf separating us from those characters in the speaker’s psychodrama who can be seen, but not heard. And so the yew tree must facilitate dialogue. He has ‘presence’, as one of Plath’s exorcized words reads,65 and, as a ‘go-between’, the yew carries the counterpoint between the ‘motherly clouds’ and the ghostly forms of buried men;66 this enables a dialogue between the speaker’s current maternal and domestic environment, the ‘motherly clouds’, and that which lies cryptically locked away: her buried black statements. Muteness and deafness produce only ‘lame’ memories in ‘Little Fugue’. The loss of sight or sound produces false and distorted mental images – pure expressionism without the facts. As for the speaker of the earlier ‘The Eye-mote’ (1959), retrospective sight is ‘warped’ by the distorting splinters of the past colliding with the present.67 And in this moment of blurred vision the speaker loses aspects of the past from her visual archive. In ‘Little Fugue’, memory loss is fused to loss of sight and sound in which visual and aural records warp and splinter. Images shift and alter through memory’s unreliable utterances. Past and present selves are interrupted by the figure of death and a series of poorly integrated psychic characters. The tensions between past and present are resolved only when the speaker removes herself from her jumble of fragments and re-enters the present where she can, at least, speak of ‘surviv[ing]’ a daily chronology. Intervals of half-time  – a morning  – preoccupy her. This is all she can manage. And the landscape of memory marked by the wagging metronomic time of the yew’s ‘black fingers’ converts, in the final stanza, into the speaker’s own digits that can only gesture at the ‘vacuous sheets’ of blank memories; her landscape of lost narratives.68 ‘A place, a time gone out of mind’, declares the speaker of ‘The Eyemote’, while the speaker of ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ (1956), another poem of tree topology, admits to some ‘desire’ for ‘backtalk | From the

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mute sky’.69 Memories lost and forgotten; places removed from time and place; an overwhelming sense of dislocation; a lack of dialogue between self and world: these are the concerns and frustrations of Plath’s tree-personae. The speaker of ‘Black Rook’ awaits some form of sublime revelation, something to colour her subjectivity. She sits and waits upon her subjectivity like a lost form she hopes will resurface through the course of an overwhelming sensory experience; some form of sublime intercession. In between, there is only the ‘desultory weather’ to keep her company and the ‘minor light’ shed by everyday objects.70 But in this earlier poem the speaker is already searching for a grander design, a more sublime arrangement: her Grosse Fuge moment. She confesses her desire for an intercessory figure to forge a way between herself and the world. Currently, she sees things too clearly, and it disappoints her poetic sensibility. Aesthetically speaking, she would prefer some obfuscation, something more cloudy. She prefers the tension of anticipation rather than the release of revelation. For the speaker of ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ (October 1961), it is objectivity she awaits. She cannot see ‘where there is to get to’. She lacks direction and context. She desires new forms of consciousness; for the moon to open up a door. But the moon ‘is no door’, and the struggle that faces the speaker and, indeed, the poem at large, is the struggle between form and content that impels the desire for new poetic figures. Furthermore, the moon is a worn symbol; there is nothing original about her invocation as a mother-goddess. Writing the poem as a poetic exercise assigned by her husband, Ted Hughes, Plath is merely sharing in his mythological inheritance.71 The poem’s dramatic crisis is that the form of the tree cannot hold the subject matter: the o-gape of the moon’s despair, an inversion of the agape that is divine love in the Christian tradition, reminds us of her mythic and often tragic inheritance in her various guises as Isis, Hecate and Venus.72 The sublime light of the moon in Plath’s poem is too much for the mind of the tree, and, in turn, the mind of the speaker, for whom the tree speaks. Subjectivity has been brought to its realizable limits, and although the projecting ‘gothic shape’ of the yew tree points towards sublimity, it cannot contain it; it cannot speak of it.73 And so the ‘bald and wild’ statements of the moon go unrepresented. There is no form adequate for her terminal o-gape of sublime despair. In the end, the speaker returns to ‘blackness and silence’ as language fails to translate the overwhelming experience of pain and terror. ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ is a poem that admits to aesthetic limits: what cannot be said or heard; what cannot be held by artistic form. It

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is a poem of artistic identity crisis reflected in the split between the ‘it’ aspects of the tree persona and the ‘it’ aspects of the moon, both of which converge upon the ‘I’ of the speaker with aspects of subjectivity, threatening to consume her. But she cannot mediate both through her identity. Something must be lost, and it is at that point that the moon converts into a ‘she’, a third-person subject identified as ‘Not-I’. A familiar subject within a familiar tradition – in this case, that of the Catholic’s intercessory Mary, Mother of God – the moon can be pushed away because she is now ‘not sweet like Mary’. The negative comparison to Mary connotes a false self, an unwanted ally in the search for secure identity. Her blue garments usher in gothic nightmares: ‘small bats and owls’. In her resides the full terror of the gothic sublime. Hers are not comforting effects, and so the moon is left out in the cold; formally eliminated. As the first line of the poem suggests, the process of selecting creative content is a brutal and rather clinical process, and in the case of ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, in particular, an exercise in creative processing, perhaps somewhat automatic. Indeed, the whole tone of the poem hints at automatic writing, forms that emerge from the surrealist’s dream world. Stunted phrases chafe uncomfortably against each other:  ‘The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.’ There is poetic logic, but it is tossed out naively: the division between black and blue, between trees and sky, remains childish and naive. And there is something desperate in these aborted forms, reminiscent of the daily half-intervals by which the speaker of ‘Little Fugue’ measures her quotidian existence. Formally speaking, something has only been half made up. In the final stanza of the poem, the representation of Mary falls away and only impressions of her form remain: the ‘blue and mystical’ effects of the night sky into which she retreats. The moon is dissolved because, in the schema of the poem, hers is an irresolvable form of consciousness. She is a creative form that fails to translate. ‘Bald and wild’, she is the Caliban of Plath’s poetic transformation whose identity is necessarily usurped for the sake of newness. Ultimately, the moon serves the yew tree as Caliban served Prospero: in order that the speaking, ruling ‘I’ knows the differ­ ence between I and Not-I and also therefore knows who or what retains artistic sovereignty. T h e da r k t h i ng w i t h i n Plath’s association of trees with self-discovery and growth was deep and abiding. In these poems, epistemological forms of growth combine

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with artistic and creative processes in which old forms are replaced by new. Laura Riding’s denunciation of modern poetry for its lack of epistemological truth is significant as a background voice not only to ‘Little Fugue’ but to all of Plath’s tree personae that involve abdication from a former subject position. These are personae rooted in internal forms of doubleness, a root system too complex and overwrought, doubled up on themselves. Plath’s tree personae are all crying out – most plaintively in ‘Elm’ – for release from an aspect of selfhood. To apply Sartre’s term, her speakers experience an overwhelming sense of nausea that begins with the contemplation of an external form, but develops into a sensation so saturated that it is now, as Sartre’s speaker puts it, commensurate with ‘I’. Nausea is a study of the false commensurability of things; the futility of ordering reality around relational equations, of devising any coherent formal arrangement of objects to subjects. And so it is that the failed arbitrator of reality, Roquentin, surrenders his philosophical position in any rooted scheme of things. Observing the roots of the chestnut tree, this philosophical inquisitor attempts to deliver a precise language for the existence of things, but fails. Something, as he puts it, gets ‘in the way’. It is the same experience for the speaker of Plath’s ‘Elm’, where a ‘dark thing’ that ‘sleeps’ within her obscures her view of herself.74 Unfamiliar, its movements are uncanny, obfuscatory. Roquentin loses his identity in the root of the chestnut tree; the existence of the root subsumes his consciousness and he is enfolded entirely in ‘it’.75 In other words, the pure material fact of the existence of other objects confounds his ability to measure his own existence. And so he remains incommensurate to himself; unknown. Burke’s discussion of the sublime in language follows a similar logic. In any sublime encounter, something is lost: speech, form, history, time, space, horizons. Something collapses in the consciousness of the perceiving subject into darkness.76 Darkness, after all, as Burke concluded, is more productive of sublime ideas than light.77 The best ideas come out of the dark; this is the premise for the Creation story. Poetry emerges from sublime encounters, and, as Laura Riding suggested, it is a form of ‘telling’, an ‘enactment’.78 It must unfold. And, always, there is a gap in understanding between that which is seen and heard and that which is told by the poet. As Riding opined, any form of being that is exercised through language is necessarily delimited,79 and it is these limits that produce the essential tension in Plath’s ‘tree poems’. These tensions constitute the fulcrum of Plath’s poetic forms, provide the aesthetic lever that produces the necessary ‘terror’ and ‘unnatural tension’ Burke associates

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with sublime production.80 In Plath’s case, these tensions are the result of competing artistic interests. The moon cannot exist alongside the yew tree as the dominant creative source. One has to be overrun, or outdone. The image of the sublime sunset in the drafts of ‘Elm’ produces the anxiety of a natural rival: ‘Shall I measure myself against this,’ Plath’s speaker asks herself: ‘this much passion?’ It is the ‘spectacle’ of passion that causes her speaker to cower.81 How will she, with her limited perception, produce such spectacles? An earlier version of ‘Crossing the Water’ (April 1962) faces similar creative difficulties. Within her Manichean schema of black on white there emerges another form of blackness: a sort of palimpsestic haunting of the first. ‘The black is another black’ declares this earlier speaker, a blackness associated with the ‘spirit of blackness’ that can affect feeling but produces no successful form. It is perhaps the essence of blackness itself but it produces only ‘expressionless stars’ and, from the point of view of the artist, it is a lost cause. Producing only the ‘silence of astounded souls’, this version of blackness, in essence, is a manifestation of the sublime effect: an experience so confounding it cannot be reckoned by consciousness. Furthermore, Plath’s draft struggles into being because, as yet, it has not hit upon its central ‘unnatural tensions’; as the speaker admits, only a ‘little light’ filters through the ‘black trees’.82 Here is a poem that falters because it has not developed a successful argument between its basic elem­ents. It is still in search of a creative dynamic. The image of split blackness is one associated with death and prehistory – more of the psyche’s buried matter – and, importantly, this does not carry into the final version of the poem. In the Plathian universe, as with Milton’s ‘universe of death’,83 dark shades are essential for sublimity to translate successfully into form. But blackness must be relieved by light in order to avoid the ultimate artistic crisis: that of blankness. And blankness is precisely the fear of the speaker of ‘Little Fugue’: the ‘featurelessness’ of unrealized forms, or, as she puts it in the poem’s first draft, the ‘graveyard of the mind’. Empty memories like ‘empty and silly plates’ mean no forms from which to write; and forms must be dug up from somewhere  – even if it means uncovering dead bodies.84 And so Plath’s ‘tree poems’ turn towards forms of inner darkness, the subliminal self of ‘Elm’’s ‘dark thing’. What emerges is an extraordinary poetic-­psychic root system that spreads over thirteen drafts of itself before settling upon a particular version of self-representation. Here is a sort of Hades of the mind, an underground territory that frees itself from external events or symbols to conjure sublimity. The tree-speaker devises her

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own sublime encounter, and in doing so eliminates the crisis of representation intrinsic to that experience. It is a way of doing away with ‘false relation[s]’ with the world. What ‘Elm’ effects, and what Plath’s other ‘tree poems’ effect to a greater or lesser extent, is a wresting of complete artistic control to the dictates of the inner world. In the end, it is the ‘dark thing’ within that is the God of the mature poet’s universe. No t e s 1 CP, pp. 158–159. 2 CP, p. 165. 3 Journals, p. 167. 4 Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 58–59. 5 See Sally Bayley, ‘“I Need a Master”: Sylvia Plath Reads D. H. Lawrence’, English, 57 (2008): 127–144. 6 Journals, p. 251. 7 Bayley, ‘I Need a Master’. 8 Journals, p. 251. 9 Journals, p. 251. 10 Journals, p. 251. 11 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1998), p. 121. 12 For earlier reading of the drafts, see Robin Peel, ‘The Bell Jar Manuscripts: Two January 1962 Poems, “Elm” and “Ariel”’, Journal of Modern Literature, 23/3–4 (Summer 2000): 441–454 and Tracy Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath (Harlow: Longman, 2001). 13 Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), p. 59. 14 For an early example of this split self, see ‘Two Sisters of Persephone’ (1956), CP, p. 31. 15 CP, p.165. 16 Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley (eds.), Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 101. 17 SPC, ‘Winter Trees’, first draft (originally entitled ‘Trees’). 18 Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), pp. 39–40. 19 PM II, Writings: Poetry, Sylvia Plath’s Scrapbook. 20 Journals, pp. 305, 308. 21 CP, p. 31. 22 Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 23. 23 Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 108–109. 24 SPC, ‘Little Fugue’, first draft.

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25 Laura Riding, ‘Introduction for a Broadcast’, Chelsea, 12 (1962). The broadcast was featured in Apr. 1962 on the BBC Third Programme, with a selection from The Collected Poems of Laura Riding. 26 SPC, ‘Elm’, first draft. Cf. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 version), I. 490– 640, in William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 387–391. 27 SPC, ‘Elm’, first draft, these lines being struck out (the word ‘stirs’ more fully struck out). 28 CP, pp. 239–240. 29 CP, pp. 239–240. 30 SPC, ‘Elm’, first draft. 31 SPC, ‘Elm’, second draft. 32 CP, pp. 239–240. 33 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. T. H. Johnson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), no. 228, p. 104. 34 ‘The Prussian Officer’ is filled with references to green-gold and glittering gold; the palette of Plath’s poetic juvenilia; see in particular ‘Gold Mouths Cry’, CP, p. 302. 35 Journals, p. 302. 36 SPC, ‘Elm’, eighth draft. 37 SPC, ‘Elm’, tenth draft. 38 SPC, ‘Elm’, seventh draft. 39 SPC, ‘Elm’, eighth draft. 40 See Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1913). 41 ‘The Prussian Officer’, in D. H. Lawrence, Selected Short Stories (Harmonds­ worth: Penguin, 2000), p. 191. 42 OED: ‘astonish’, v. ‘To deprive of sensation, as by a blow; to stun’. 43 SPC, ‘Elm’, fourth draft. 4 4 SPC, ‘Elm’, eighth draft. 45 Riding, ‘Introduction for a Broadcast’, p. 8. 46 SPC, ‘Elm’, tenth draft. 47 SPC, ‘Elm’, first draft. 48 SPC, ‘Little Fugue’, first draft. 49 Rosenblum, Modern Painting, p. 39. 50 SPC, ‘Little Fugue’, second draft. 51 SPC, ‘Winter Trees’/‘Trees’, first draft. 52 SPC, ‘Winter Trees’/‘Trees’, second draft:  the Latin-chanting ring-doves fade to the final ‘shadows of ring doves chanting’ as this draft evolves. 53 SPC, ‘Winter Trees’/‘Trees’, first draft. 54 CP, pp. 257–258. 55 SPC, ‘Elm’, fourth draft, these words being crossed out. 56 Helmut Börsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich, trans. Sarah Twohig (New York: George Braziller, 1974), pp. 7–8. 57 SPC, ‘Little Fugue’, first draft. 58 CP, pp. 187–189.

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59 OED gives the secondary meaning of ‘fugue’ as:  ‘A flight from one’s own identity, often involving travel to some unconsciously desired locality.’ 60 SPC, ‘Little Fugue’, first draft. 61 This image remains apparent in both main drafts of the poem, until the final version, CP, 187. 62 Christina Britzolakis makes this point in The Theatre of Mourning, p. 116. 63 CP, pp. 187–189. 64 SPC, ‘Little Fugue’, second draft. 65 SPC, ‘Little Fugue’, second draft. 66 SPC, ‘Little Fugue’, fourth draft. 67 CP, p. 109. 68 CP, pp. 187–189. 69 CP, pp. 109, 56–57. 70 CP, p. 57. Cf. the ‘major weather’ Wallace Stevens finds in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’:  Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (London:  Faber and Faber, 1955), p. 404. 71 Ted Hughes, ‘Notes on Poems 1956–1963’, CP, p. 291. 72 Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), pp. 111–112. The ‘O’ constitutes a terminal omega replacing the initial alpha in the Greek word. 73 CP, pp. 172–173. 74 CP, p. 193. 75 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), pp. 184–189. 76 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 97–98. 77 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p. 121. 78 Ella Zohar Ophir, ‘The Laura Riding Question’, Modern Language Quarterly, 66/1 (Mar. 2005): 90. 79 Riding, ‘Introduction for a Broadcast’, p. 8. 80 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p. 86. 81 SPC, ‘Elm’, eighth draft. 82 SPC, ‘Crossing the Water’, second draft. 83 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1998), II. 622. 84 SPC, ‘Little Fugue’, first draft.

ch apter 6

Coming to terms with colour: Plath’s visual aesthetic Laure de Nervaux-Gavoty

C ol ou r e d i n k s Colour plays a central role in Plath’s visual aesthetic, illuminating both her writings and the artwork she produced as a child and a student. Her delicate use of the primary colours in an early drawing accompanying a letter to her mother (1940), the elaborate variations on pink, green and blue of her technicolor Snow White (c.1944–1947), her artistic balancing of cold and warm colours in her Chinese Jug pastel, as well as the lush palette of her doll outfits (1945)1 bear witness to precocious ‘colour-driven sensibilities’.2 Her impatience with conventional, merely decorative uses of colour is apparent in her bold, unexpected colour-schemes. The unnatural purple mountain reflecting the setting sun in The Happy Camper (1945) and the arresting, Picasso-like blue of her Portrait of Man (1946–1947),3 make it clear that she regarded colour as a privileged way of conveying an individual artistic vision. Its vital meaning for the child-artist appears in an early journal entry describing tapestries and flags seen at school: ‘Each one had a separate color glow – they were really living colors … held before the light  – ahh! each color lived  – shining for all it was worth! What reds and golds and blues there were. Everyone just groaned because they were so beautiful it just hurt to look.’4 Far from being submitted to the artist’s purpose, colours have a life of their own for Plath; they appear as autonomous entities the sheer intensity of which can hurt the eye of the viewer. Plath’s lifelong engagement with the sister arts gives special relevance to a study of colour, inviting comparisons and contrasts between the two parts of her work. Her highly self-conscious use of coloured inks in a letter written at age seven and in her early journals5 as well as the drawings that adorn the latter6 foreshadow more complex forms of interaction and contamination between her favourite media. As her many ekphrastic poems make clear, Plath’s style owes much to her painterly sensibility. Colour haunts her poems but also her prose writings, especially her Journals. 110

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In Les Couleurs et les mots, Jacques Le Rider notes that while language can hope to emulate music through rhythm and melody, ‘confronted with colour, [it] experiences its powerlessness … The writer who tries to emulate the visual arts is made acutely aware of the limits of language.’7 Plath’s repeated attempts to capture and incorporate into her texts what most eludes writing – its absolute other, one might say – point to crucial dimensions of her aesthetic. The immediacy of colour and its capacity to convey states of mind may explain its appeal for the poet. As her Journals suggest, however, Plath’s attraction to colour reaches deeper; the latter is repeatedly coded there as an expression of aesthetic fullness. Benidorm is remembered as ‘a blaze of color and light’8 and one of her epiphanic visions of nature reads like a vivid Fauve painting: ‘A walk today before writing, after breakfast. The sheer color of the trees: caves of yellow, red plumes.’9 Plath’s handling of colour in her poems alters dramatically with time. The violence of the overwhelming, sublime visions quoted above points to a latent danger that may explain why she refrains at first from giving full expression to the power of colour. As David Batchelor and Jacqueline Lichtenstein have shown, the history of colour in painting is bound up with that of its repression.10 Colour’s subversive power  – its capacity to assert itself at the expense of the design – has prompted many attempts on the part of theoreticians of painting and artists to hold it in check.11 Although Plath resorts very early to pictorial and chromatic effects, it is only in her later work that she fully confronts and exposes herself to its violence. As opposed to the polished, somewhat static pieces she wrote between 1950 and 1959, the poems of 1962 envisage writing as a process. Colour is part and parcel of this poetics that turns the flat surface of the poem into a field of forces, a scene onto which energies erupt. At first submitted to the poet’s formal designs, colour gradually asserts itself as an autonomous entity. This shift goes hand in hand with an inscription of psychic pain and of the body, both kept out of her early poems. ‘ Wat e rc ol or mo od’:   t h e p oe m a s v e r b a l ic on A quick glance at Plath’s early writings and artwork makes it clear that she saw colour as a dynamic force. Her Journals contain vivid notes strongly reminiscent of Pound’s and HD’s imagist poems: ‘Girls bicycle in brief spurts of color and motion’;12 ‘life is amazingly simplified, now that the recalcitrant forsythia has at last decided to come and blurt out springtime in petalled fountains of yellow’.13 Colour’s powerful presence

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also comes across vividly in Plath’s response to contemporary painting in ‘The Arts in America’, an unpublished essay written for the Prix de Paris contest in 1954. Its eruption connotes fertility for the fledgling writer, who consistently uses organic metaphors in this piece: ‘John Ferren’s “Spring Fronds” is a sprouting of yellow, brown and orange roots and seeds in a whitish medium, where the force of life thrusts outward through incorrigible shoots and tendrils.’14 Colour overflows all boundaries here, the sheer force of the medium taking priority over mimetic representation. Plath’s own artwork also exhibits an acute sense of colour’s dynamic properties. The immobility of the subject of Yellow House (1950–1951) stands in sharp contrast to its vivid colour scheme. Plath’s sweeping, circular paintbrushes lend movement to the lawn, which seems to be alive with some kind of secret energy, while the touches of brown in the yellow house endow it with a throbbing quality. The energy that radiates from her Swaying Cityscape (1947–1950) is an effect of the movement she imparts to the scene, but it also results from her expert variations on the primary colours. The energy of her technique, like that of Ferren in her essay, starts to put mimetic representation under pressure: in Chapel Meeting at Green Hall Auditorium (1950), the faces are not rendered in a realistic way, but as little coloured flames. The entire composition has a vibrant quality that owes much to Plath’s daring use of a limited range of colours.15 She described the painting as a ‘splashed color impression of Chapel Meeting’ in a letter to her mother,16 thus emphasizing the dynamic impulse at the root of the work. The capacity of colour to undermine lines and shapes comes to the fore in Plath’s experiments with abstraction. A Colourful Explosion (1948–1950)17 strongly reminiscent of Kandinsky’s compositions brings into sharp focus colour’s dissolving power, the threat it poses to representation. The centrifugal composition seems to contain faint traces of a landscape dissolved by the artistic gesture. This acute sensitivity to colour permeates the writings of the young poet, who saw painting as a model to emulate: ‘Technically, I suppose the visual appearance and sound of words, taken alone, may be much like … the color and texture in a painting.’18 The manifold references to colour in ‘Aquatic Nocturne’ and ‘Southern Sunrise’ read as a verbal equivalent of the dabs of painting the artist applies to a canvas:  ‘deep in liquid indigo | turquoise slivers | of dilute light | | quiver in thin streaks | of bright tinfoil | on mobile jet … ’;19 ‘Color of lemon, mango, peach, | These story­ book villas | Still dream behind | Shutters … ’20 Plath’s use of pictorial devices in her Juvenilia and in her early poems is strongly indebted to the new critical conception of the poem as a highly wrought, self-contained

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artefact. Underpinning Robert Penn Warren’s, Cleanth Brooks’s and W. K. Wimsatt’s approach to literature is a vision of the poem as a closed space modelled on the visual arts. The titles of some of their works, The Well-Wrought Urn and The Verbal Icon,21 as well as Brooks’s claim that ‘The essential structure of a poem … resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses’22 bear witness to the visual and spatial orientation of their approach. What matters is the play of the signifiers within the tightly knit structure of the poem. The words struck a chord with Plath who underscored them in her copy of the book. This underlining points to a central preoccupation of the young poet. The act of writing is underpinned in her New Critical, formalist poems by an attempt to keep loss and pain at a distance by enclosing them in the ‘well-wrought urn’ of the poem. The idea that the aim of poetry is to build organic units in which life’s chaos is held in check and transmuted keeps recurring in her Journals: ‘I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.’23 This hidden agenda may account for a central difference between her early poems and the works we have just examined. While her Juvenilia leave no doubt as to her sensitivity to colour, they do not exhibit the same dynamic quality as her Journals and her artwork. Colour is held in check, harnessed for specific purposes in her early poems. ‘Black Pine Tree in an Orange Light’, an archetypal New Critical poem inspired by Gregorio Prestopino’s Pine Tree, is a case in point, bearing witness as it does to Plath’s acute susceptibility to colour and to her tendency to rein it in at this stage. The structuring pattern of black and orange is emblematic of the New Critical vision of the poem as a place of resolved tensions. What might be disturbing in the violent chromatic contrast at the heart of the painting is blotted out by the elaborate web of interpretation woven by the poet around it. The unnerving friction of the two colours is channelled, converted into a series of embryonic narratives that strive to account for the enigmatic ‘Rorschach blot’ at the heart of the abstract painting. The orange and black pattern structuring the composition becomes the visual matrix of the elaborate aural and formal play of signifiers that underlie the poem. Colour is thus enlisted in an exploration of the poet’s imaginative skills. The final twist, which claims to praise the painter’s imagination, is actually a metapoetic celebration of her own inspired response to his work: ‘but more pragmatic than all of this, | say how crafty the painter was | to make orange and black ambiguous.’24 Conjuring up self-contained pictorial worlds becomes a way for the poet to reassert her creative powers and stave off loss. Plath’s ‘watercolor

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mood’ in ‘April Aubade’, her careful arrangement of soft colours (‘veils of green’, ‘milky dawn’, ‘pink-fluted feet’) within the space of the poem is a direct expression of this aesthetic imperative. Colours do not surge the way they do in her artwork or the abstract pictures she admires; they are part of a wider composition that reflects the young poet’s partiality for the individual, decorative word at this stage. The interweaving of a religious lexicon (‘worship’, ‘saintly’, ‘cardinal’, ‘papal’, ‘solomon’)25 with pictorial notations points to Plath’s vision of the poem as a verbal icon, a sacred, self-contained world of rare and precious words. This sacralization is closely linked to the New Critical vision of the poem as a sanctuarized, pure form immune from the corrupting threats of the age.26 These early ekphrastic poems are ultimately about writing itself: ‘jonquils sprout like solomon’s metaphors’ in the ideal world of words depicted in ‘April Aubade’.27 Metapoetic considerations are also at the heart of ‘Midsummer Mobile’, a performative poem that, under cover of proffering advice to a painter, actually narrates its own creation. Plath’s ‘mellow palette’ of ‘blue’, ‘white’, ‘turquoise’, ‘amber’ and ‘orange’ strives to capture and give permanence to the fleeting essence of a summer day. The resulting work of art, enshrined in the final couplet of the sonnet, is the poem itself: ‘Suspend this day so singularly designed, | Like a rare Calder mobile in your mind.’28 Art is at this stage a mirror that helps Plath shape and articulate her conception of writing as a way of keeping loss at bay and salvaging beauty from the flux of time. Plath often drew her inspiration from exhibitions she visited during her free time as an undergraduate.29 Her early poetic practice is firmly located on the scene of the museum – that of art but also that of literature. Oddly filtered through the prism of her laboured formalism, the influences of Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore loom large in the Juvenilia.30 Plath’s imitative attitude, attempting to create a verbal equivalent of paintings seen in institutional places, uncannily echoes the weight of influence in her early poems. The frozen quality of her work is an effect of her allegiance to a formalist ideal that sees the poem as a closed space, but also of a paralysing relationship to tradition. Plath’s apprentice use of colour is as static, decorative and tame as her early poetic work; these colours do not threaten to overthrow the delicate architecture of the poem. A college essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald sheds light on the meaning of colour for Plath at this stage. She interprets his palette as a coherent and personal system.31 Her need to stabilize Fitzgerald’s spectrum by assigning a fixed meaning to each nuance echoes her flat, decorative approach to colour in her early poems.

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T h e f e a r of c ol ou r The tension between Plath’s sensitivity to colour and her restrained use of it comes to the fore in the journal entries and ekphrastic poems of 1958. Looking for inspiration, Plath audited a course on Modern Art at Smith in the spring. Professor Van der Poel’s remarks about the autonomy of colour in Matisse’s and Dufy’s works apparently caught her attention: ‘color: like a character growing in a book, assuming control of an author – tree trunks: not brown – but orange, blue and violet’; ‘Objects in motion – color overflows contours – Contours take place within area of color.’32 Surprisingly, Plath’s visual sensibility fails to come across fully in the poems she composed in the wake of these classes. While her Journals display an acute sense of the energy and violence of colour, her ekphrastic poems of 1958–1959 seem to shy away from a confrontation with it. A parallel reading of the material she gathered in her Journals for the poems commissioned by ArtNews and the resulting works reveals her reluctance to unleash the violent powers of colour within the closed space of the poem: Today:  Matisse, exploding in pink cloths & vibrant rich pink shadows, pale peach pewter & smoky yellow lemons, violent orange tangerines & green limes, black-shadowed and the interiors: oriental flowery – pale lavenders and yellow walls with a window giving out into Riviera blue – a bright blue pear-shape of a violin case – streaks of light from the sun outside, pale fingers – the boy at the scrolled piano with the green metronome shape of the outdoor world – color: a palm tree exploding outside a window in yellow and green and black jets, framed by rich black red-patterned draperies. A blue world of round blue trees, hatpins & a lamp. Enough.33

Colour is experienced as unbearable excess here. The word ‘rich’ is used twice to describe colours at their highest pitch of intensity. Plath mentions no fewer than twenty adjectives, as if she were trying to cover the entire chromatic spectrum. Blue, red, yellow and green seem to have a life of their own; they radiate well beyond their limits, as revealed by the word ‘vibrant’. The encounter with colour is extremely violent in this passage; it is experienced as a shock, an ‘explosion’. Plath experiences the dissolving force of painting and especially of colour in this passage. Just as colour asserts itself against lines in Matisse’s paintings, the author’s colourful notations undermine the linearity of writing. Their extreme violence challenges language’s ordering power. The jagged, jerky, disconnected style of the passage reads like a symptom signalling Plath’s confrontation with an otherness that refuses to be tamed.

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The length of the sentence, the accumulation of non-verbal clauses, the many adjectives and the syntactic disruptions reveal her incapacity to impose any form of order on what she sees, her failure to turn the visual into the verbal. Colour resists assimilation, it will not be translated into something it is not. Overpowered by this vision, Plath can only close the book. The word ‘enough’ can be interpreted as a protective gesture; the vision, no matter how exhilarating, represents a threat. This violence appears even more clearly in a passage in which Plath reminisces about a posthumous exhibition of Nicolas de Staël’s work: ‘boats against a dark green sky, pale flavors and slender bumpy pears arranged, three, on a dark purple and green ground, blue squared Paris rooftops, black & white balancing brushstrokes … ’ Plath’s attention to the arrangement of shapes and colours on the canvas then lurches towards a medi­ tation on the hidden, disturbing meaning of Nicolas de Staël’s palette: ‘I adoring, alone, lonely, absorbing all that paint, reading how he jumped off at the Cap d’Antibes. What drove him? All those hot reds & blues and yellows spurting from his fingertips? What vision of madness in a mad world?’34 The primary colours surge forth from the painter’s body the way blood would, turning painting into an expression of his innermost self. Interestingly, blue and red are also the colours of blood, depending on whether it runs within the body or out of a wound. The passage suggests a continuity between the artist’s body and his work that stands in sharp contrast to the self-contained, impersonal ideal of the New Critics. These passages from the Journals stage an encounter with writing’s other. Colour resists interpretation; it will not be subdued or turned into something it is not. It is what Bernard Vouilloux calls ‘the unnamable’,35 an opaque, insistent core of pain and madness that cannot be converted into language, leaving instead a smouldering hole on the surface of the text. Such violence allows us to understand why Plath eventually turns, in her ekphrastic poems of 1958, to pictures more subdued in their handling of colour. Interestingly, she leaves Klee’s most daring abstract compositions aside, selecting instead the more figurative Battle Scene and its reassuring array of pastel colours: ‘pink and lavender’, ‘gently- | Graded turquoise tiles’, ‘pink plume and armor’, ‘pastel spear’, ‘pinky purple | Monsters’, ‘Rose and amethyst’.36 Colour does not feature prominently in the ‘no-colour void’ of ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’ – inspired by Klee’s picture of that name – confined as it is to a punctuation mark: ‘A point of exclamation marks that sky | In ringing orange like a stellar carrot. | Its round period, displaced and green, | Suspends beside it the first point’.37 Not only is colour circumscribed, it is also textualized and therefore

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decipherable in this poem. Revealingly, Woman in a Tree and Perseus, two other works by Klee selected by Plath as models for her poems, are not paintings but etchings. Colour vanishes altogether in this case. Rousseau and de Chirico, on whose work Plath modelled her four other ekphrastic poems, offer an interesting paradox. While their palette is unquestionably a daring one, colour is kept under control, reined in by firm outlines in their paintings. Even in ‘Snakecharmer’, where green is given pride of place, Plath does not surrender to colour’s power.38 While the repetitions do reflect the dominating colour of the original painting, her poem makes no attempt to render the countless hues of Rousseau’s landscape. The ‘blue’ of the ‘unseen waves’39 is the only colour mentioned in ‘On the Decline of Oracles’; the painting that served as a starting point for the poem recedes into the background, giving precedence to the poet’s vision.40 F e e di ng on r e d:  ‘ Y a dw ig h a’ With the exception of ‘Yadwigha’, which revolves around an enigmatic red sofa, colour is thus tamed. These ekphrastic poems are actually the scene of a painful confrontation with Plath’s literary fathers, an attempt to reclaim a voice for herself. The paintings she refers to work as catalysts that provide her with a starting point, help her to focus her vision, and in some cases to vanish in the process: the daughter aiming for mastery and control cannot afford to yield to colour’s haunting powers. The central role Plath ascribes to painting is by no means incidental. The ekphrasis is underpinned by a sexual dichotomy generally played out in conflictual terms:  ‘the contest it stages is often powerfully gendered: the expression of a duel between male and female gazes, the voice of male speech striving to control a female image that is both alluring and threatening, of male narrative striving to overcome the fixating impact of beauty poised in space’.41 Plath takes up and reverses this fundamental structure, staging ambiguous or inadequate father figures in ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’, ‘On the Decline of Oracles’, ‘Snakecharmer’ and, to a lesser extent, in ‘The Disquieting Muses’.42 Her ekphrastic poems are above all metapoetic texts. ‘Perseus’43 and ‘Battle-Scene’, which do not explicitly stage father figures, take issue with the question of literary tradition, while the exposure of the patriarchal discourse embedded in myths in ‘Virgin in a Tree’44 also challenges masculine literary authority. Emulating painting is therefore not so much an end in itself as a means to confront and defeat formidable father figures.

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The pivotal quality of these ekphrastic poems stems from their profound ambiguity. The resistance to the fathers is paradoxically enacted in classical poetic forms that reflect her allegiance to the poetic values they embody. This conflict is brought into sharp focus in ‘Yadwigha’, where the representation of a metapoetic artistic scene is complicated by the presence of a female model. As many feminist critics have shown, the relationship between the painter and his model generally has a fundamental underlying asymmetry that turns the female model into an object of the masculine gaze.45 The many eyes mentioned in the poem undermine the traditional gendered structure of the gaze that normally ascribes vision to a male viewer invested with authority. The word ‘eye’  – the crucial importance of which is emphasized by its position as one of the rhyme words – is indeed attributed to such various figures as the critics, the artist, Yadwigha, the tigers and the moon.46 This reversal paves the way for further negotiations. The intricate relationship between the critics and the final work on the one hand, the painter and his model on the other, allows Plath to dramatize her conflictual relationship to tradition. The critics’ unsuccessful attempts to interpret, flatten the red sofa into an understandable, digestible structure are reminiscent of the New Critics’ work on poetic texts. Red appears as a figure of excess that cannot be converted into language and which challenges the analytical skills of the experts. The obsession of the painter with the colour (‘feed his eye with red’) is another symptom of the reversal of gender roles that underpins the poem. The painting does not so much reflect a submission of the female model as a subjugation of the artist. The critics’ failure to come to grips with the red sofa reflects their refusal to acknowledge its secret violence. In Chromophobia, David Batchelor notes that ‘Colour threatens  – or promises  – to undo all the hard-won achievements of culture. It threatens – or promises – chaos and irregularity. Colour threatens disorder – but also promises liberty.’47 Plath exploits colour’s subversive power to the full here. The red sofa can indeed be read as an elusive trope referring to the model’s body, whose disruptive erotic power is metonymically displaced to a piece of furniture. Safely banished from the New Critics’ sanitized approach to literary texts and from Plath’s own early poems, the body returns with a vengeance here. Plath’s use of a painting, which qualifies as ‘primitive’ both by its topic and its naive technique, is integral to her attempt to break out of the confined space of the museum of tradition in which she has locked herself. Primitivism stands for her as a welcome counterpoint to the literary

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sophistication and formalism of her literary models and to the constricting literary institutions in which she served her apprenticeship. It becomes a way to turn the space of the museum against itself, to unlearn her legacy. Plath’s evocation of the ‘[i]nnocence, naivete [sic] of untutored artist’48 in her notebook eloquently highlights the appeal of an aesthetic that stands in sharp contrast to her own painstaking apprenticeship of poetry. Located at the intersection of femininity and primitivism, red is the nexus of a subversive web of meaning tying together Plath’s resistance to literary tradition and its institutions, as well as her need to tap into deep subconscious forces. Interestingly, the word ‘red’ is not one of the rhyming words; it is therefore not submitted to the strict patterning of the sestina and instead circulates freely as a disruptive principle within the neatly structured poem. The inbetweenness of the model, sitting on a sofa in the middle of the jungle, is also that of the poet herself, uncomfortably poised between the genteel, civilized world of the New Criticism and formalist poetry on the one hand, and the alluring savagery of ‘no well-bred lilies’ and unexplored poetic vistas on the other. The regular, highly crafted and constricting form of the sestina bears witness to Plath’s difficulty to part from a tradition the inadequacy of which she fully perceives. C ol ou r, b ody a n d voic e :  Pl at h’s e x pr e s s ion i s t p oe m s The strict forms of Plath’s New Critical poems were used as a way of keeping loss and pain at a distance by enclosing them in the well-wrought urn of the poem. In 1962, however, Plath’s poems become the scene of a confrontation with pain that is conveyed in an expressionist vocabulary of forms and colours. This aesthetic turn is actually the culmination of a lifelong interest in this artistic movement. The vivid palette of her early artwork owes much to the daring experiments of expressionist painters. Plath’s artful way of playing off white against primary colours in Backstage (1946),49 the bold, contrasted colour scheme  – flaming red and intense green  – as well as the angular, distorted body of her Woman in Green at Table (c.1948–1951)50 are strongly reminiscent of expressionist compos­ itions. Interestingly, her second art scrapbook includes a reproduction of Franz Marc’s Blue Horses, a painting emblematic of the movement.51 The art history course Plath audited at Smith in 1958 no doubt fuelled her long-standing affinity with expressionism. Though it did not influence the poems she composed at that time, it clearly left a lasting imprint in her

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mind, which was to resurface a few years later. Reading her notes sheds light on the poems she wrote in 1961–1963: ‘Group of young men in Dresden, Berlin – painting a catharsis – splashing inner feelings over canvas: raw wound  – direct immediacy of unleashing feelings.’ Another paragraph also seems to herald later poetic experiments:  ‘Expressionism:  arbitrary choice of color to express emotion. Contours pressed out of shape to express idea, emotion – Distor[t]ion of any kind.’52 The use of sharply contrasted colours going over the edges as well as the violent physical distortions described in Plath’s poems are reminiscent of expressionist pictures staging dislocated selves. The all-pervading psychic blue of ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’,53 the ‘troublous | Wringing of hands’ and the ‘dark | Ceiling without a star’ of ‘Child’54 are steeped in expressionist iconography. This reliance on colour’s expressive power comes across most forcefully in ‘Event’, Three Women and ‘Apprehensions’. ‘Event’ is a powerful dramatization of angst. The rhetoric of pain and dismemberment as well as the choice of vivid, sharply contrasted colours – indigo, red, black and white – turn the poem into the verbal equivalent of an expressionist painting. Colours are almost always associated with the lexical field of the mouth in the poem; they become a visual equivalent of screams, another favourite expressionist motif: I hear an owl cry From its cold indigo. … The child in the white crib revolves and sighs, … His little face is carved in pained, red wood.55

The poem spatializes emotions and voices through colour in a very pictorial way. The word ‘white’, which may refer to a lost state of innocence, appears three times, reminding the reader of the arrangement of colours on a canvas. The sound effects themselves bear the stamp of an expressionist aesthetic based on the intensification and distortion of certain elements; rhymes are scant in the poem, but they all include the sound ‘I’, thus underscoring the presence of a suffering subject: ‘solidify’, ‘lie’, ‘cry’, ‘sighs’, ‘eyes’. Voice, body and colour are also closely interwoven in Three Women.56 Plath’s emphasis on pictoriality in her early poems was the result of a deficiency of the voice, of an entrapment in closed spatial forms. Pictorial effects no longer stand in the way of the poet’s voice here. In this piece written for radio, the characters’ violent emotions are conveyed, bodied

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forth by references to colour: blue, red, white, black and, to a lesser extent, yellow and brown. Although Plath occasionally resorts to the usual meanings associated with the spectrum, using red to signify blood and pain, for instance, she often unsettles fixed associations to build a private colour alphabet. Black is not synonymous with death, but with oppression in all its possible forms, whether bureaucratic, physical or patriarchal. White does not refer to purity or innocence, but to the sanitized, deadly world of the hospital. Yellow and brown are associated with the central motif of transition. Plath’s symbolism is anything but static; colours circulate rhythmically from one voice to the next, highlighting secret affinities between the three experiences of birth and imparting a dynamic effect to the text. The uniquely physical and painful experience evoked in this poem set in a maternity ward may explain Plath’s wish to avail herself of colour’s sensory properties. She fully deploys its power of remanence, its ability to remain in the mind’s eye, to heighten the emotions and sensations expressed in the poem; each colour seems to reverberate within the stanza in which it appears, thus intensifying the feeling to which it is attached. As in expressionist paintings, psychic pain is conveyed in ‘Apprehension’ by vivid colours and a projection of the self outside its boundaries. The rising anxiety of the speaker is reflected in the darkening colour of the wall. The stanzas are turned into a series of vivid, flickering monochromes mirroring her state of mind:  ‘There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself – ’; ‘A gray wall now, clawed and bloody’; ‘This red wall winces continually’; ‘On a black wall, unidentifiable birds | Swivel their heads and cry’. The poem describes an undetermined, oppressive psychic space: ‘Is there no way out of the mind ? | Steps at my back spiral into a well’.57 The sense of confinement is conveyed by the leitmotif of the wall, but also by the absence of enjambments and the neat separation of the stanzas, sealed off here as independent grammatical units. The room has been pared down to essentials, a series of elements connoting anxiety and terror, which might come straight out of the setting of an expressionist film or painting:  crosses alluding to Christ’s torture, sinister birds and a stairwell that may also be a well here. The bodily dimension of colour comes into sharp focus in the poem. In a displacement typical of expressionism, the wall is described as an extension of the woman’s body: ‘This red wall winces continually: | A red fist, opening and closing’.58 Psychic disturbance is intimately tied to the body here and colour seems to act as a link between them. It represents emotion in its purest state, an emotion closely woven to the body, whose cause remains enigmatic.

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Plath’s expressionist aesthetic also permeates ‘Daddy’ and ‘Little Fugue’, whose stark and deliberately restricted range of colours (black, white, grey, red and blue) plays a central role in the rhetoric of terror deployed in these poems.59 Plath’s spectrum is a highly idiosyncratic one that does not lend itself to any straightforward deciphering. Her surrealistic, dreamlike colours heighten the fragmented quality of the world and the self featured in the poems of 1962: ‘the smashed blue hills’ mentioned in ‘For a Fatherless Son’, ‘the red furrow, the blue mountain’ of ‘The Detective’, the ‘green stars’ and the ‘yellow knife’ of ‘By Candlelight’ create a palpable sense of disturbance.60 Colours become part of a private code dramatizing the subject’s estrangement. Red  – Plath’s emblematic colour according to Hughes61  – features prominently in her poetic palette. The exploration of its disturbing properties was at the heart of ‘Yadwigha’; the insistent motif threads through her work, surfacing in ‘Tulips’ in 1961 before coming into full bloom in the poems of 1962. The red tulips act as a disruptive force that brings the subject back to life by putting an end to the process of depersonalization and self-erasure signalled by the ubiquitous white. The symbolic connotations carried by the colour red, which is here synonymous with blood and therefore life, are overshadowed in the poem by the sheer intensity of the vision. Plath’s Journals also bear witness to the psychic and symbolic importance of this colour. Red is the colour of the empowered self, as an entry dating from 1958 describing the ‘incandescent fire’ of her new stockings suggests: ‘the color feels amazing … I can’t stop looking – the stocking goes almost flesh-color, but gathers rose and glows at the edges of the legs as it cuts its shape on air, concentrating the crimson on the roundingaway, shifting as I shift.’62 The exhilarating properties of the colour red as well as its bodily dimension come to the fore in this description. Its vividness is synonymous with an intensified sense of self:  Plath is mesmerized by the transformation worked on her body by the new garments, as if it had brought a new self into being. Behind the fashionable young woman fully aware of her physical power of seduction looms an elusive, highly mobile (‘shifting as I shift’) creature bathed in a moving aura of red and carrying potential danger (‘cuts its shape’). Plath’s lambent stockings uncannily foreshadow the masks she was going to put on four years later. Red features prominently in the formidable personae of Ariel, encoding as it does both vulnerability and indomitable strength; the

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queen bee of ‘Stings’ is both a ‘red Scar’ and a ‘red comet’,63 while the final lines of ‘Lady Lazarus’ celebrate a transfigured self risen from the dead in the guise of a Hayworthian femme fatale: ‘Out of the ash | I rise with my red hair | And I eat men like air.’64 Plath’s late poetic performances call for an approach based on effect rather than on meaning. Poetry is no longer conceived as a careful arrangement of signifiers but as a field of forces on which the self repeatedly stages its undoing and rebirth. This process is closely linked to the colour red, whose disturbing intensity is ambiguously described as either fatal or redemptive. In Le Petit Livre des couleurs, Michel Pastoureau notes that the notions most closely associated to this colour are blood and fire, two concepts characterized by their deep ambiguity in Western culture, as they refer both to Christ’s purifying blood and the regenerating fiery tongues of Whitsun on the one hand, and to murderous crimes, the impurity of biblical taboos and the fire of hell on the other hand.65 This semantic reversibility permeates such poems as ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Burning the Letters’66 and ‘Daddy’, but it finds its most striking expression in the ‘Poppies’ diptych. The destabilizing power of colour, kept at bay in the early poems, comes to the fore as it becomes an autonomous entity, no longer an ancillary element of the poem but one of its governing agents. The burning intensity of colour is experienced physically in these poems. Disrupting the uniformity of the outside world, the red flowers can either convey energy or exert a visual violence that calls into question the subject’s vision and her supremacy. The scene of ‘Poppies in July’ is a psychic landscape, a half-external, half-internal hallucinatory vision poised on the brink of waking consciousness. The self experiences its own undoing in a dream-like setting of ‘little hell-flames’ drawing both on Greek mythology67 and Christian imagery. David Batchelor notes in Chromophobia that ‘[c]olour requires, or results in, or perhaps just is, a loss of focus, of identity, of self’.68 The threat it poses appears quite clearly in the poem. Tropes of burning register colour as an unbearable excess imperilling the speaker’s integrity: ‘And it exhausts me to watch you | Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.’69 It is actually the instability of the colour, its ‘flickering’ quality, together with its intensity, which the spectator cannot bear. Red has no outlines; it calls into question the distance between subject and object, threatening to consume those who look at it. The consistent association of the poppies with a wounded female body (‘A mouth just bloodied. | Little bloody skirts!’) turns the flowers into an emblem of femininity mirroring the speaker’s subjection to and wilful

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embrace of a patriarchal order epitomized by the institution of marriage:  ‘If my mouth could marry a hurt like that’ (my emphasis). It is actually this hallucinatory externalization of her condition that the mesmerized female spectator cannot come to terms with. The recurring image of the wounded mouth indicates her incapacity to articulate her identity, thus paving the way for a Keatsian relinquishing of self: ‘Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?’70 The poem illustrates the growing power of colour in Plath’s 1962 poems. The personification and feminization of the poppies parallels the speaker’s undoing, turning the landscape into a place of transference where the subject’s vital principle is passed on to the blazing flowers. Colour is not only the visual but also the rhythmical matrix of the poem; the couplet stanzas and the lines of varying lengths register the pulsating intensity of the flowers and their impact on the viewer’s consciousness, while the short, clipped sentences reflect her intermittent perception. If colour is experienced as unbearable intensity in ‘Poppies in July’, it brings the subject back to life in ‘Poppies in October’. The lyric stages a transitional moment, the recovered unity of a divided female subject who refers to herself in the third person at the beginning of the poem. A secret connection between the woman in the ambulance and the flowers is hinted at by the metaphor of the ‘bloom[ing]’ heart, whose beating movement is echoed by the pulsating colour red and its attendant rhythmical effects (‘A gift, a love gift’, ‘Palely and flamily’, ‘By a sky … by eyes’). The poppies wrench the self from its numbness here: ‘O my God, what am I | That these late mouths should cry open | In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.’71 The bloodied mouths of ‘Poppies in July’ are no longer silent; the vivid red is perceived instead as the synaesthetic equivalent of a voice announcing the emergence of a speaking ‘I’ in a ‘dawn’ heralding a new beginning. The energetic properties of colour are closely linked to its bodily dimension in Plath’s late poems. Blood is the ink of Ariel. It surges from the speaker’s body in an ambiguous celebration in which pain and poetic renewal are inextricably interwoven. Poetry appears in ‘Kindness’ as an expression of the speaker’s innermost substance: ‘The blood jet is poetry, | There is no stopping it.’72 Plath’s aesthetic runs counter not only to the stasis, but also to the suturing, healing impulse of her early production. Pain is sought as a fertile source of inspiration by a poet distrustful of the ‘poultice’ of ‘Dame Kindness’.73 Similarly, the flow of images released by the wound in ‘Cut’74 comes directly from the speaker’s body. Colour acts as a governing force, conjuring up image after image in an ambiguous,

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elliptic, jagged narrative. The self-inflicted wound reads indeed both as a masochistic punitive gesture and as an exhilarating sacrificial rite accompanying a demythologized version of history. Plath’s dramatization of the body in pain is a highly problematic one, however. The speaker’s exhibition of her bleeding self reads like a pledge of sincerity, the guarantee of authenticity of a discourse authorized by pain. Britzolakis shows that Plath’s spectacular mise en scène and ambiguous utterances invite the reader to read her image of the bleeding self as an elaborate trope. As ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Cut’ or ‘Ariel’ suggest, vulnerability and power are closely interwoven in Plath’s last poems; the wounded body is a theatrical scene where an authentic exploration of pain is harnessed into a manipulative performance that allows the poet to reassert her power over her audience. C om i ng t o t e r m s w i t h c ol ou r : t h e s e c r e t v i s ua l a rc h i v e The evolution of colour motifs in Plath’s work reflects both her reluctance and her desire to incorporate a principle that threatens the writing subject. Colour gradually becomes a literary device in its own right in her late poems, just like repetition or her use of the vernacular. It is not used so much for its mimetic, aesthetic or symbolic qualities, as for its immediacy and its expressivity, which turn it into an objective correlative of violent emotions. Plath moves away from a decorative approach to an exploration of its complex significance: ‘Understanding colour means freeing it from the order of signs, communication and plot. Colour is an affect, a bodily substance’, writes Jean Louis Deotte.75 Plath’s chromatic poetics turns the page into a place of inscription of the body – that of the speaker but also that of the reader. She takes writing to its limits in the poppy poems, trying to reproduce with words the violent impact colour makes on the eye of the viewer. Her burning and bleeding reds point to the specificity of Ariel: Plath’s performative poetry does not describe but enacts experience; it is above all a poetry of effect that strives to draw its reading audience on the scene of the poem and act upon them. Studying the development of Plath’s chromatic poetics argues against a compartmentalized vision of her work. The examples of ‘Yadwigha’, ‘Tulips’, ‘Poppies in July’ and ‘Poppies in October’ bring to light unexpected continuities between the various stages of her poetic development. Delving into her visual and verbal archive also sheds light on the complex interactions between the various parts of her work. Plath displays greater

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boldness in her pictorial compositions and her Journals than she does in her poems. For all its limits, her artwork appears as a locus of experimentation where she can fully deploy the expressive and dynamic powers of colour. Similarly, her Journals are a place of confrontation with extremity where she allows herself experiences denied by the narrow confines of her formal poems. What is remarkable is the dynamic woven between her artwork, her Journals and her poems. Far from merely existing alongside her poems, this visual archive secretly nurtured her imagination, becoming incorporated into her later poems. Plath’s early exploration of colour’s dissolving power comes into full expression in poems she wrote more than ten years later. Similarly, the image of paint spurting from Nicolas de Staël’s fingers in the above-mentioned journal entry appears retrospectively as an embryonic version of ‘Cut’ or ‘Kindness’, calling into question the division of her career into clean-cut periods and inviting dialogic comparisons between the different genres she experimented with. No t e s 1 Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley (eds.), Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), plates 1, 6, 10 and 15. 2 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, p. 20. 3 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, plates 3 and 16. The comparison with Picasso is made by Kathleen Connors, ‘Living Color: The Interactive Arts of Sylvia Plath’, in Eye Rhymes, p. 27. 4 PM II, Diaries and Calendars, 7 May 1947. 5 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, pp. 6–7 and 20. 6 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, plate 9. 7 Jacques Le Rider, Les Couleurs et les mots (Paris:  Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), p. 60 (my translation). 8 Journals, p. 264. 9 Journals, p. 520. 10 David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London:  Reaktion Books, 2000) and Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color:  Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, trans. Emily McVarish (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1993). 11 See John Gage’s in-depth analysis in Colour and Culture:  Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993). 12 Journals, p. 31. 13 Journals, p. 540. 14 PM II, ‘THE ARTS IN AMERICA: 1954. Collage by a Collegian’, p. 4. 15 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, plates 28, 13 and 24. 16 LH, p. 53. 17 PM III, untitled abstract composition, tempera.

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18 Journals, p. 88. 19 CP, p. 305. 20 CP, p. 26. 21 Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947) and W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon:  Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (London: Methuen, 1954). 22 Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn, p. 186, Plath’s underlining; Sylvia Plath’s Library, SPC. 23 Journals, p. 184. 24 CP, p. 328. 25 CP, p. 312. 26 ‘the organic integration of the poem represented a kind of sanctuary for traditional values and their enriching concreteness; outside this sanctuary of artistic form, there raged the twin evils of soulless capitalism and mindless sloganizing communism’. Chris Baldick, Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present (London: Longman, 1996), p. 87. 27 CP, p. 312. 28 CP, p. 324. 29 ‘Black Pine Tree in an Orange Light’ (CP, p. 328), ‘Midsummer Mobile’ (CP, p. 324) and ‘Prologue to Spring’ (CP, p. 322) were inspired by a visit to the Whitney Museum. See ‘The Arts in America’, cited above. 30 See Steven Gould Axelrod, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (Baltimore, Md.:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) and Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1999). 31 PM II, ‘The Spectrum of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of Color Imagery in Tender is the Night’, p. 6. 32 PM II, Modern Art Notes. 33 Journals, p. 324. 34 Journals, p. 317. 35 Bernard Vouilloux, La Peinture dans le texte XVIIIe –XX e siècles (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1994), p. 94. 36 CP, p. 84. 37 CP, p. 91. 38 CP, p. 79. 39 CP, p. 78. 40 The first version of the poem, published in Poetry 94 (Sept. 1959): 368–369, includes a stanza that refers explicitly to Chirico’s The Enigma of the Oracle. See Stephen Tabor, Sylvia Plath: An Analytical Bibliography (London: Mansell, 1987), p. 118. 41 James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words:  The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 1. 42 CP, pp. 74–76. 43 CP, pp. 82–84. 4 4 CP, pp. 81–82.

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45 See in particular Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16/3 (1975). 46 CP, pp. 85–86. 47 Batchelor, Chromophobia, p. 65. 48 PM II, Modern Art Notes. 49 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, plate 8. 50 PM III, Woman in Green at Table, c.1948–1951, tempera. 51 PM II, Art Scrapbook, no. 2. 52 PM II, Modern Art Notes. 53 CP, p. 172. 54 CP, p. 265. 55 CP, p. 194. 56 CP, pp. 176–187. 57 CP, p. 195. 58 CP, p. 195. 59 CP, pp. 222–224 and 187–189. 60 CP, p. 206, 208 and 236–237. 61 ‘Red was your colour’, BL, p. 197. 62 Journals, p. 379. 63 CP, p. 215. 64 CP, p. 247. 65 Michel Pastoureau, Le Petit Livre des couleurs (Paris:  Éditions du Panama, 2005), p. 33. 66 CP, pp. 204–205. 67 Christina Britzolakis notes that Persephone, who was gathering poppies when she was abducted by Hades, stands in the background of the poem. See Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, p. 80. 68 Batchelor, Chromophobia, p. 51. 69 CP, p. 203. 70 CP, p. 203. 71 CP, p. 240. 72 CP, p. 270. 73 CP, p. 269. 74 CP, pp. 235–236. 75 Jean-Louis Deotte, ‘Benjamin, Lyotard:  au cœur de tout art, la couleur’, in Michel Costantini, Jacques Le Rider and François Soulages (eds.), La Couleur réfléchie, Séminaire de l’université Paris VIII Vincennes Saint-Denis (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), p. 86 (my translation).

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‘Madonna (of the Refrigerator)’: mapping Sylvia Plath’s double in ‘The Babysitters’ drafts Kathleen Connors

In October 1961, two days after her birthday of 27 October, Sylvia Plath completed a poem about her and her best friend Marcia Brown’s summer 1951 jobs as live-in mother’s helpers for neighbouring families in Swampscott, Massachusetts, a wealthy community located up the coast from Boston. This essay gives a close reading of Plath’s creative process exhibited in nine drafts of ‘The Babysitters’ as they shift from an affectionate and sensual depiction of Brown in the household setting  – the ‘Madonna (of the Refrigerator)’ of draft two’s title  – to shared ordeals and reflections on their day-off visit to the deserted Children’s Island. Plath’s final encapsulation of this island event, where she describes the babysitters as inseparable ‘cork dolls’ floating in the salty sea water, suggests the classic Double she explored in many works, in this case a close sisterhood. The poem’s final lines, ‘And from our opposite continents we wave and call | Everything has happened’, wistfully expresses their current separation by the Atlantic Ocean the two played in, and the ten-year span between their initiation into housewifery and raising their own children among the ‘glittering tools’ of middle-class domesticity. Reverting to biography, the babysitters are referred to herein as Plath and Brown, upon whose experience the poem is undoubtedly based. When Plath and Brown took summer jobs in their Swampscott homes, they had just finished their freshman year at Smith College, living together at the Haven House dorm, where Brown had been instrumental in helping Plath adjust to the pressures of attending one of the country’s premier schools for women. It was the first friendship Plath found after leaving a home dominated by her mother and maternal grandmother. For July and most of August she was in charge of three children, a girl nearly two, a girl aged four, and a boy aged six, while Brown took care of three older children at an estate two houses down from Plath’s. They met almost daily to take their charges to the beach and kept company during their weekly day off. The two would often commiserate about the surprisingly heavy 129

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load of child care and housework that found them exhausted at day’s end, a situation highlighted in most of the poem’s drafts, as well as letters and journal notes during these two months of service. At age fourteen, Plath had written an essay for English class, ‘From the Memoirs of a Babysitter’, that echoed ‘The Babysitters’ in spirit. She described the uncooperative and demanding children as ‘a nuisance’, and her failed attempts as a cook.1 Her attempt to make popcorn ended in billowing smoke filling the kitchen, and corresponds to the burning of cookies that characterized the failed domestic of her poem. The implication in both cases is, if you cannot bake cookies and pop popcorn – iconic ‘comfort foods’ of youth – you are truly not up for serious child care. Plath’s candid approach to this essay on her babysitting episode may be due to the dramatic voice she began cultivating as a young teen, and the fact it was not written for publication. Along with the poem ‘Solo’ composed for her poetry class following her Swampscott employment, Plath wrote an illustrated article on the topic, ‘As a Baby-Sitter Sees It’, that was published in Christian Science Monitor. For this article she made three cute ink drawings of the children, and used perky language honed from reading stacks of girls’ and women’s magazines, in contrast to her poem of 1961, where she wrote sardonically of ordeals the ‘put-upon ­sisters’ had to endure. Yet in the final lines of this article Plath provided sound advice to other readers considering the vocation, hinting at her extra duties that went beyond child care, commenting that the job ‘was nowhere near the rest I had anti­ cipated’. Always competitive and usually a winner, Plath also made it clear she had again won the prize in stating, ‘Out of a group of 20 other girls, I was the one fortunate enough to walk away with the job.’2 Escorting her readers into this new world with appropriately constrained wonder, she wrote of being even ‘more amazed’ than she had expected to be upon seeing the eleven-room white manse that sat on top of a green hill sloping down to the sea in a ‘landscaped curve of freshly mowed lawns and closeclipped hedges’. At the side of the house there was a vegetable garden, a small fruit-tree orchard and a large yard with a playhouse for the children. She then positioned her new bedroom in contrast with that of her humble family home in Wellesley, which did not have the benefit of being near the sea, as did her childhood house in Winthrop: ‘My room on the second floor was about as big as the whole first floor of my own little white home, and best of all, my windows overlooked the sea, which showed blue and glittering through the starched white curtains.’ The words ‘glittering’ and ‘white’ would also appear prominently in ‘Madonna (of the Refrigerator)’, suggesting either her phenomenal memory or a habit of reading former

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works to garner detail and inspiration for new compositions, a layering of her self-representations, visual memories and word play recorded from childhood on. Plath wrote of relishing her leisure time, where she could prop herself on the big four-poster bed to read and view the ocean. When the children’s parents were home for the evening, she would walk on the beach, go for a night swim or visit with ‘other baby-sitter friends of mine’ – while there was in fact no one other than Brown in that category. She concluded that her ‘whole conception of life’ was much broadened by staying with and observing a family who lived ‘on a scale to which I was completely unaccustomed’ – but a lifestyle emulated in glossy magazines she was reading. She added, ‘My desire to open new horizons, as well as new awareness of life and of human beings, was thus filled.’ By the time this babysitting experience became a subject of her 1961 poem, however, Plath gleefully admitted being depressed by babies (the final version softened from draft three, where she wrote, ‘I hated babies’), being treated poorly at times by her employers and working too hard at domestic chores she was handling for the first time. While growing up she had watched her mother or grandmother cook on a daily basis, but preparing food and housework outside of minor chores was not included in her many activities. She was instead encouraged to be well-rounded and creative, and acquire top grades at school, which she dutifully accomplished. And even during a period when the family was on a tight budget, there was hired help to assist her grandmother in cleaning house.3 Brown was also new to the childcare experience, though the extensive domestic help and resources at her household provided her with more leisure and privileges, a contrast that is placed prominently in the final draft. F i r s t i m pr e s s ions ‘The Babysitters’ begins as a handwritten, intimate exercise in portraiture, where drafts one and two include the idealized term ‘Madonna’ in their titles, similar in sound to the name Marcia. The first line in draft three ends with ‘Madonna, Madonna’, while using the final title retained throughout subsequent drafts. The role of the Madonna, the human-­yetsacred mother figure providing pure love, nourishment and protection for her own child as well as her worldly acolytes, initially provides an undercurrent of reverence for Brown (who was raising her own twin boys in 1961) that becomes a declaration of love and respect  – perhaps with an undertone of sarcasm as well, as a sideways comment on the sanctifying

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of motherhood derived from the Victorian casting of the ideal maternal figure as the ‘Angel in the House’. Yet Plath’s pivotal line – ‘O what has come over us, my sister, my love!’ – seen for the first time in draft five, appears not only to be genuine, but also takes the poem to a level of emotional intensity not present in previous revelations about her frequent crying, anger or other sensations of suffering. The passion of this statement even overawed Plath, to the point where she deleted ‘my love’ – the only significant edit made to the poem’s eighth draft. In the completed poem this amended line marks the transition from complaints of household affairs featured in the first three stanzas to the poignant recollection of the babysitters’ rowing trip to the tiny island, situated in the final two stanzas. All stanzas in ‘The Babysitters’ have nine lines, where the concluding line of three to five words provides pithy and theatrical transitions between topics. ‘M a d on n a’ dr a f t on e The first draft of ‘The Babysitters’ (written above the original title of ‘Madonna’ with the following title words blacked out) is neatly handwritten without stanza breaks and with only one edit, suggesting Plath employed her habit of rewriting original notes to make a good-looking and unmarked text. This initial poem vividly demonstrates how Plath interwove shapes and colours of objects and concepts to approximate a splashy and complex watercolour, revealing her deep engagement with visual art expression and fascination with word play. It also evokes an adult looking down on the fully furnished doll’s house of her childhood – in line with the poem’s final draft, where Plath presents a meta-narrative as the poem’s inventor, in that she could still ‘see’ the two friends as cork dolls on the water, a focus on Children’s Island as the place where Plath’s memories coalesce with a nearly inexpressible ache. In sorting out the interacting and overlapping references to outdoor spaces and indoor items found in draft one, a diagram of Brown’s body is formed that serves as locus for the vigorous movement of associative imagery. The draft begins with ‘Military, a kitchen Napoleon, her cannonball head | Rides low on the body of a pink radish.’ The first fifteen lines are dedicated to physical description of Brown, employing martial associ­ ations in describing her as a ‘kitchen Napoleon’ with a ‘cannon-ball head’, and hinting at the battle of the sexes that is often played out in the home. Brown’s body is first located in relation to household and seaside objects, as her form merges with various instruments of work and play. Her eyes

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are then likened to animals and animal skins:  they are ‘spaniel-Brown’ and ‘patent leather’ whose pupils are ‘monkey-bright’. Her hands ‘walk the white piano’ while a ‘strawberry dress | Jazzes the mahogany glazes’. The text continues with the itemization of her body parts and her clothing, where Brown’s hands are connected not only to the white piano they ‘walk’ as if they are feet, but also to ocean life in their ‘sand colors, starfished with freckles’ and ‘scalloped keys’ – again, a repeated reference to both the piano keys and sea animals. Her body has been ‘baked in honey like breakfast cake’ and the ‘sea-colors’ of her clothing she wears at times ‘square themselves into plaits; No ruffles allowed’. Just as her body is a pink radish, her arms are a ‘good basket for turnips’, a vegetable that connects to the next line about pumpkin-heads that ‘doff’ their candles. The double pink ‘pinqué’ of her dress, and changing references to the colour throughout the drafts, is the form of word play  – sound and ‘eye rhymes’ – that characterizes much of Plath’s mature poetry. Brown’s subservient manner, brisk movements and work ethic are then referenced, and her physical strength is exaggerated as Plath gives her an increasingly heavy workload generally assigned to men, alluding to the impossibility of her multiple tasks:  ‘Bedsteads, chairs, tables, refrigerators & ovens | Doing a double quickstep & subsiding to her orders’. The next line brings her lowly position into the perspective of other household help by highlighting her skin darkened by a tan:  ‘Hot as palms, a suntan, bread just out of the oven’. This is followed by ‘The negroes people her brain, black-spore-heads of a good cause’  – associated with plants bursting with seed that will fertilize the great outdoors, just as Brown, whose skin is the colour of ‘bread out of the oven’, is linked to fecundity. Brown’s sexuality is also sustained in the context of nature’s primal forces and mixed archetypal male and female entities of the fiery sun and the watery sea. In her Smith College scrapbook, Plath inserted commentary under two photos she and Brown took of each other on Children’s Island, where Brown is captured in a ‘surrealistic aphrodite pose’ behind a twisted piece of driftwood with only her torso showing.4 Although Brown is originally named ‘Madonna’ in this version, she is also closely associated with the outdoors, part of the world of nature and the pagan divine. Her pose for the camera is likened to the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty. Indeed, in a mixture of self- and mutual-adoration as well as pagan phallic worship, Plath doubles back on Brown’s persona as sex goddess to include herself in a similar role – for she always delighted in being baked by the ‘sun-husband’ on those life-giving waters. Under her far-more-suggestive

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black and white picture, Plath lies on her back, stretched over the rockstrewn shore, eyes closed, arms spread out to her sides as if offering herself up to these undeniable forces. Her use of ‘cult’, ‘obeisance’ and ‘altar of rocks’ also underscores the pagan realm they inhabit.5 In the centre of ‘Madonna’ draft one, before shifting from Brown’s physical qualities to her loving and generous character, Plath uses a more direct vocabulary of sexuality and male fertility that connects to the colour black. We see this in the black spore-heads of the ‘negroes’ that ‘people her brain’ like the spore-heads of other round pods, and in the recognition that the male ‘Sun’ gives her all she needs, a ‘true husband, | Warming the spermy waters’, who satisfies all of her physical needs (sexual and for basic material comfort) as well as waking her up emotionally and intellectually like strong ‘black coffee’, so that ‘The crow, flying, is her notion of logic.’ Five lines later the narrative returns to procreativity, the stuff-of-life and fertility in the stand-alone line, ‘A nut tree with double kernels’ – an image linked to the source of mother’s milk and the shape of breasts, as well as the male life-giving organs. The sun-husband’s warming of this spermy sea is juxtaposed with Brown’s fertile body, likened to a sweet delectable to be consumed with pleasure – also the standard trope of the era, perpetuated endlessly in print media during this ‘Catch your man with Wonderbread’ era of American advertising, where taking care of the husband’s stomach and libido are the two major duties of wifehood. Brown – and all ‘good’ women by extension – is a sustaining breakfast cake, and the basic food of life: bread from the hearth and heart, but with the purity and wholesomeness of the Madonna and whole grain. In fact, this presentation of ‘Marcia’ as engaging in first-stage mating rit­ uals, and as a red-coloured consumable, wrapped in cellophane (an image brought into draft two) and placed among food items, was first developed in Plath’s ‘Den of Lions’ story published by Seventeen magazine in May 1951, where a protagonist named Marcia is presented in the company of an older, more sophisticated crowd who saw her as their ‘meat’.6 In describing the girl, Plath writes, ‘there she was, wrapped in transparent, crinkled cellophane of mirth … her voice as astringent as vinegar’. Marcia later makes a half-hearted attempt to chat with a boy who interests her, saying, ‘Think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?’ Brown’s heart is at the centre of this original draft on many levels, as is her mind. It receives ‘a beautiful bolt of silk’, which she ‘signs’ and stretches to make it fit. Her love, noted in the next line, ‘exits’ from her fingers, not her heart, though this organ is implied in the following line where it is described as ‘generous as a pie cut’ divided not into

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sixths but quarters. Yet it is also the colour of the heart here that suggests the ­overarching outcome of battle – the blood that will inevitably be spilled  – the war imagery of the first two lines, and the stubborn qualities that both babysitters may have in common. Brown’s body and mind are also ‘practical’ as a ‘filing cabinet’ – qualities Plath would see herself as sharing, though perhaps stopping short of Brown’s skill in shorthand. For this is the secretarial language Aurelia Plath pushed on her daughter for years, as a ‘practical’ skill she could use to supplement her income, and which the rebellious Sylvia stubbornly resisted. This household battleground, therefore, is both between and among the sexes. It entails coming to terms not only with the husband’s demands for obedience and conformism, but also the mother’s. But the pressure to maintain the home and sustain its inhabitants, an endless round of boring and exhausting jobs that defined the woman of the 1950s and beyond, is inescapable for women of both generations. For their assumed raison d’ être as seamless support system for husband, home and family – a role Plath railed against from an early age – was one she adopted as a married woman. Marcia Brown, in any case, has all the qualities that Plath admires: she is good, generous, deliberately cheerful, sunny, upright, neat, organized and glowing with health and innocent freckles. Yet she is also tough, a no-nonsense personality, a quality Plath valued in her life and her work, as seen in the summation of her own writing as ‘Woolfish, alas, but tough’.7 And like all rightful housewives, Brown’s working space as well as her play space is full of furniture, appliances and machines – the doll in her doll’s house. Draft one first sees her in the kitchen, and then other rooms, where she plays the piano and sews. It is these essential objects, in fact, found in virtually all households at the time, where one’s ‘creativity’ may be expressed, for they serve as a common and acceptable ‘pastime’ and the ‘domestic performances’ of women and girls for generations. As late at the mid twentieth century, it was still a common cultural assumption that most women would learn to sew, a necessary skill for the middle and lower classes who could not afford their own seamstresses or store-bought clothing. And accompanying sewing is the vexing chore of starching and ironing, where linens as well as clothes must be pressed – that is, until the invention of polyester made the habit unnecessary. It is this duty (kept in the final version) that Plath abhors, where in her ineptitude she burns her fingers ironing the children’s fussy clothes with their ‘tiny ruchings and puffed sleeves’ – which is compared to Brown’s sewing, that allows for ‘no ruffles’.

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In sounds that duplicate the typewriter (Plath learned to type at the age of nine), Brown’s interior space is ‘neat & tinkly as a Swiss music box’. The enclosed square of this music box (a shape shared by the dominant piano and refrigerator) calls to mind the well-known neatness and practicality of the Swiss, including the rhythm of their famous watches and clocks marking off time. This is a theme to which Plath would return in the poem’s later versions, where time is kept by the shadows of wild grass stalks. In another set of contrasting images, Brown’s exterior is rich, warm, expansive, immediate, nourishing, yet the refrigerator she is linked to is an icebox: cold, white, and containing, where consumables, including ice cubes – ‘like children’ – are compartmentalized and stored, as if in a frozen womb. Brown is concise in her actions, and has no interest in fuzziness (‘the devil himself’) or darkness, where the only black she acknowledges appears in the sharps and flats of piano keys and sharp, black coffee. Unlike Plath, who wrote of death as a near-lover, and whose celebrated poem, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, centres around an old graveyard, Brown has no use for these ‘quarry stones’ that are dead in meaning. And the crow is the symbol of logic for Brown, not the charged icon and ominous totem of Plath’s husband Ted Hughes. Nor is there any grey space for Brown, where white appliances, mahogany-brown furniture, pink- and sea-coloured dresses, green vegetables, blue bleached and folded laundry, along with her pink and tan skin, and the implied red blood of her warm heart, form the elements of her essential being. The draft’s final lines contain the theme of a tugging remembrance, where Plath’s red, pink and orange flowers again evoke the colours of her own Marty Brown, a concept of visual memory that would shape the remaining drafts, where the two dolls would soon become real, living adults. ‘M a d on n a (of t h e R e f r ig e r at or )’ dr a f t t wo Just as Plath’s 1951 poem ‘Solo’ and article ‘As a Baby-Sitter Sees It’ feature the singular babysitter, the initial 1961 draft of ‘The Babysitters’ begins with a new description of the friend she called ‘my alter ego’8 before changing to include both babysitters. The second draft of the poem contains experiments with ideas and imagery that would largely be preserved in the final version. Many of the sentences are crossed out and reworked over the course of the page, yet its title and first lines keep the poem within the domestic and culinary framework that Brown inhabits:  ‘Tan and American, seen through the gilded cellophane | that takes the place of Dutch veneer’. The all-American Brown is still a consumable, kept fresh

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and golden in her refrigerator. Yet the third line becomes the first of successive drafts, where Plath notes the number of years passed since the friends visited Children’s Island. Unlike the daily visits to the ocean that found the babysitters surrounded by children and beachgoers, the ‘dead’ objects of the broken-down and abandoned buildings of this island stand in direct contrast to the luxurious and busy households they were managing. The second draft also begins the shift towards the negative qualities of these employers, where Plath applies a dead-on critique of the 1950s culture that would become one of her trademarks. Her inadequacy in the role of faux-mother does not compete with the real mother’s shortcomings as a snob and racist, a detail not mentioned in other drafts: ‘and the mother I worked for | my boss | Wouldn’t let me speak to Jews on the beach because of the children’. Plath’s journal of the period contains numerous entries about the job’s downside, but nothing as damning as this prohibition. At this point the narrative moves back to Brown’s better working conditions: she has a key to the bourbon drawer, a car to drive and, as seen clearly in the final version, a number of other servants in the house that form the complex flow of work. This juncture marks the positioning of Brown in time and space, over ‘the map of America’ at age thirty, with her twin children in her lap. Yet here it is Plath’s voice that rebounds among the washing machines, the refrigerators – ‘How they glitter!’ she exclaims. These appliances, likened to ‘square white Alps’ (again with the implication of the towering Swiss Alps and rigid culture), are also Plath’s unthinking companions. She too was immersed in child and house care while writing this poem, surrounded by glittering white tools of the domestic trade – though Plath had to order or import some of them to complete her toolkit (she complained frequently about the English kitchen, which held far fewer appliances than her Wellesley home). The whiteness of the machines that form behind Brown in the first draft and Plath in the second serve as a transition to the white sea caps and the deserted island the babysitters visit on their day off work. The narrator’s reminiscence of Children’s Island also forms the beginning and ending imagery of the poem’s final version. Dr a f t t h r e e The third draft of ‘Babysitters’ marks the turn from a singular and sincerely affectionate focus on Brown to the supposedly hallowed yet often heinous life of homemaking and motherhood – with plenty of servants. This version begins with, ‘It is a dozen years since we rowed to the island,

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Madonna, Madonna’, where the sun ‘comes straight down’ at noon on the water off Marblehead Harbor, using imagery, tone and structure that continues through to the remaining drafts. Instead of hearty brown bread out of the oven, there are fancy cakes baked by the cabin boy, the poor maid’s burnt cookies and food purloined from the refrigerator belonging to the ‘grownups’ for the trip to the island. There are no more turnips and strawberries of the first draft, or bolts of loving silk. It is now their eyes that are red from crying, and the ‘little put-upon sisters’ must wear sunglasses to hide them. The children are spoiled and depressing to care for, and Plath has to learn to cook  – though it seems it was the maid and children’s mother who made their hot lunches.9 Whether she actually achieved this goal during her summer stint is uncertain. But by the time she was caring for her own husband and children she was thoroughly immersed in The Joy of Cooking and prepared gourmet meals on a regular basis. At night (where there is ‘no place to go’) Plath is not strolling to the beach, but instead writes spitefully in her diary, her hands ‘struggling and pink’ – again, an image of pain in opposition to the attractive pink of Brown’s skin and dress. Of her employers, who keep going on cruises, the wife is ‘sporty’ and the husband is a doctor who never seems to go on night calls. References to trees, the moon and the sea, important to Plath’s mature poetry, are positioned and then removed – pinecones have fallen overnight, the moon has ‘sailed up, huge & useless’, and mysteriously, ‘The man came out of the sea’. The division of class and race, however, remains in place. There seem to be numerous blacks in service at Brown’s mansion, and the poor white college girls are clearly part of the lower orders. The English visitor, ‘the sweetheart’ with creamy skin and Yardley cosmetics, takes Plath’s room, forcing her to sleep on a cot too short for her long limbs, and the cookie-burning Irish maid who is nervous and worried about failing in the job is indeed fired. Perhaps the most stinging (if humorous) commentary kept in the poem suggests the troubling side-effects that preening and privilege may have on a child, likened to a sensibility surely not evident in fresh-off-the-boat Irish or American-born ‘negroes’: the boy Plath cares for would not go out unless his jersey stripes matched those of his socks. Dr a f t s f ou r t o e ig h t Draft four is the first of the series to be typed. Containing few changes from draft three, this version and those that follow are partial edits of a

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segment or stanza, with numerous crossings out and overwriting of words and lines. The comparison of Plath’s and Brown’s jobs – ‘you were better off’ – is now established. But only in draft five does any implied resentment turn to feelings of outright competition and abandonment, words in turn abandoned in draft six: ‘In the end, you deserted me – you acquired a fiancé | I wrote about fog the color of fingernails & felt let down.’ The deleted lines are analogous to discarding an unflattering snapshot, dispensing with an image she does not wish us to see, a part of the story she decides not to tell. For this is emoting in hindsight, the poet retrieving feelings of inadequacy, mental fog and self-doubt expressed in her first college journals of autumn 1950, when she wrote of being depressed, and fretted about not fitting in, not keeping up with the pack who viewed a girl without a weekend date as a failure, or a single woman of age twentyfive as an old maid. This petulant quip is followed by the poem’s turning point – ‘O what has come over us, my sister, my love!’ – that begins the island journey. In draft five, a continuation of draft four, the babysitters are identified as being 18, when their lives are beginning to unfold. Lines and words continue to be scratched out and written in pen over the final typed pages as Plath worked the ending – the ending about the impossibility of return, where the ‘blue sky & choppy waters’ have also ‘slid away’ – struggling to bring it all back in words, retracing their movements, beating off seagulls that act as if they ‘owned everything’. For that day, the island did not belong to them, but to the babysitters enjoying their rest, snapping photos of each other lying on the shore. Plath here notes that she had rowed as Brown read aloud  – sitting ‘crosslegged on the stern seat’  – from Generation of Vipers. This 1943 bestselling essay blames the American mother’s emasculation of husbands and sons – coined as ‘momism’ – for the deterioration of contemporary culture, using Freudian analysis as its foundation. Of all the poem’s components, it is this book reference that has caught the attention of numerous Plath critics.10 Plath was familiar with Freudian thought, and with the upsetting of the gendered division of labour when women became empowered by jobs and financial independence after joining the workforce during World War II. Hollywood also featured gutsy hero­ ines wearing broad-shouldered fashions, speaking in bold and bawdy language and facing life on their own terms. After all, many of this generation were raised by mothers coming of age during the ‘roaring twenties’, when, along with other Victorian inhibitions, Flapper girls shed their constricting petticoats and underwear altogether, drinking

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booze under prohibition, and making love in the back seats of their boyfriends’ Model T Fords. Draft five continues with the two ‘bobbing out’ to the island, the first inkling of the poem’s key vision of the floating dolls. The noon sun comes down on the scene with a ‘dead smell’ and calls their attention to its emptiness. Plath extends this feeling of emptiness and death, writing that she felt ‘crossed out’ – words also crossed out and replaced with ‘Stopped & awful as eternity’. The sky and water and ‘things we said’ had ‘slipped down a crack, impossible to get back to’. Again, the reference to the babysitters’ talk did not survive into the next draft, as if its slip down a crack finished the thought, to be replaced by the silence of visual memory. It is the scratchy grasses standing that she initially ‘sees yet’ in her mind’s eye. Draft six offers a close-up and ‘stopped’ frame the poet now views clearly, yet works hard to position. First their limbs ‘bend | warp under us’ in the water, ‘pale and flat as paper | flimsy as paper’ – words immediately rendered in the next line as, ‘I see us floating there yet, inseparable, two dolls’ (a verbal link possibly inspired by the two paper doll women and their eighty elaborate outfits Plath made when young). In a continued play of words that mimic the actions of the writing poet and her Double, these paper pages are also transitory, flimsy, bending and warping as Plath experiments with the movement and sound of objects in the final drafts. She repeatedly refers to the seagulls’ call as the ‘miaowing’ of cats before transferring the movement/sound elements to the ‘gallery of creaking porches’ and ‘basketwork rockers’ that contrast the still interiors of the shack. The slip down a crack in the final version becomes a shut door, a keyhole the two have slipped through, concepts that recall Alice’s initiation into Wonderland. Plath returns to the world of nature in lines where the grasses stand up, ‘Glittering in the sun and green as snakes | Impossible to row back to’, as if commenting on the difficulty not just of recovering the past, but also, in turn, of any attempt to represent it. Plath then incorporates the visual movement of time, where the grass shadows act as sundials, standing and ‘inching around’ to form the hands of the clock – also reminiscent of Wonderland, where the White Rabbit (not unlike Plath) is always following the dials of his watch with trepidation. The creaking porches and dilapidated interiors of draft seven become the final ‘stopped and awful’ objects, as empty as the photograph of somebody laughing, dead now for what Plath originally notes as ‘half a century’. This time period is changed to ten years, just as the original dozen years of draft two is corrected. From this position the subtle vision of

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potentially ill-fated loved ones captured in those photographs is transferred to Plath’s representation of the two sisters who wave and call to each other over the Atlantic Ocean, where they spent so much time together during that summer of 1951. From that moment in time, as stated in the poem’s final line, ‘Everything has happened’. Indeed, this decade saw Plath’s breakthrough in publishing poems and stories as a mature teenager; her breakdown, suicide attempt and recovery as the glamorous blonde Golden Girl; her first real love affair with the cultured intellectual Richard Sassoon, whom she would visit in France on her first trip abroad; her triumphant graduation from Smith College with numerous literary prizes and a scholarship to Cambridge University; her notorious meeting and swift marriage to Ted Hughes; her first and last job teaching college students at Smith College; her return to psychoanalysis with Ruth Beuscher and decision to quit academia to become a professional writer; her composition of breakout poems while at Yaddo and the couple’s final move to England; publication of The Colossus poems and birth of daughter Frieda; miscarriage, appendectomy, and pregnancy with son Nicholas; the abandonment of her Falcon Yard novel and completion of The Bell Jar while immersing herself in the London literary scene and winning more awards. While Plath wrote of her babysitting episodes throughout her life, ‘The Babysitters’ was composed when she was facing her own childcare needs. Her daughter Frieda was nineteen months old, and she was six months pregnant with her second child. Two months before writing the poem she moved with her family from London to Court Green, a large cottage in Devon that required a good deal of repair, interior decorating and yard work to achieve what Plath considered to be a comfortable and attractive home. In a habit that interests Plath critics, she wrote the last five drafts of ‘The Babysitters’ on the versos of typed drafts of her only completed novel. And a year later she would compose the ‘October poems’ that form the foundation of Ariel. Yet her relationship with ‘alter ego’ Marcia Brown remained as an important touchstone during key moments and throughout her life. We may not be surprised that the last archived letter of Sylvia Plath, written one week before her death on 11 February 1963, is addressed to Marcia Brown Plumer. In this letter Plath encourages Brown to visit her in England, where she hoped to show off her own beautiful children.11 After giving birth to Frieda in the early morning of 1 April 1960, Plath was advised by her midwife to stay in bed for a day or two and rest well. But the new mother was soon getting up to telephone her own mother, and that afternoon she typed a lengthy

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letter to Brown. Nine months later, as recorded in a BBC interview, and nine months before writing ‘The Babysitters’, Plath stated that her poetry is derived from her ‘sensuous and emotional experiences’,12 and expressed her admiration for the ‘masters’ who address practical experience in their writing. While the ‘sensual’ and ‘practical’ runs throughout ‘Madonna (of the Refrigerator)’, it is Plath’s emotional life that is most clearly expressed in ‘The Babysitters’. And even though the poem is rarely critiqued as one of her more dynamic works, it signals an important and often overlooked aspect of her personality:  her dependence on close women friends to shape her own self-identity and ‘comfort zone’ over a sustained period of time. Sylvia Plath has often been characterized as intensely jealous and competitive with other women  – no true friend to any. But the poem’s first draft in particular offers a clear reflection not only on how Plath saw her best friend Marcia Brown, but also how she saw herself. In this sense, ‘Madonna (of the Refrigerator)’ forms a unique ‘lost poem’ – a discarded portrait of first and lasting impressions drawn into a pastiche of colourful metaphors, associations and objects that relate what these two women faced in a common and contrasting self-awareness at the beginning of the 1950s. The image of Brown as a sun-kissed, bright-eyed, resourceful and organized woman is akin to Plath’s own self-portrait, but the Brown who finds graveyards to be uninteresting, shoos away ‘old notions’ like moths and lives a compartmentalized life that resembles that gleaming icebox, is like the innocent Alice who passes ‘through the looking-glass’ to the opposite shore. Her Double of this alternate universe presents a far more mysterious, shape-shifting and darker reflection in this magic mirror: Plath found gravestones useful, meaningful and intriguing, she was obsessed with old notions and festering memories and was at home in her creative exploration of the subconscious and the macabre, all of which were regularly mined for her art. And while Brown may have outdone Plath in common sense and straightforwardness, showing one face instead of the two Plath was continually being accused of wearing, the poet outdid her sister in workings of the imagination  – the life of an artist. For it is Plath’s voice that rebounds and bounces off the gleaming household machines, retelling the scene in loving detail and longing, for what was given and also lost. All of this she treasured, and captured, in words. The juxtaposition of Plath’s self-presentation as the writer-Double expressing human love for a divine presence while steeped in a mundane

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reality – the lover of life and teller of powerful and disquieting tales – is also present in Sylvia Plath’s most ambitious essay and deepest exploration of her topic, ‘The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels’.13 And while ‘The Babysitters’ touches upon the painful nature of envisioning the Other within a setting that is as ‘stopped’ and ‘awful’ as someone dead ten years, Plath kept this vision within the edifice of emotional ambiguity and nostalgic loss – what one might call ‘Double Lite’. Plath’s Special Honors thesis for her Smith English degree, however, is another story altogether, as it ventures into literary fiction that closely parallels Plath’s own self-identity on a far heavier playing field – namely, her identity as an artist. Sylvia Plath originally attempted to write on the Double in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, but the subject was too daunting, especially after her summer 1953 breakdown.14 When planning this thesis at her family home in Wellesley, and after sloppy electroshock therapy to treat her depression, she lost her ability to read – an unprecedented crisis that was surely instrumental in her suicide attempt of late August. Upon returning to Smith College after losing the autumn semester to illness, Plath was invigorated by her course on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and was also keen to get started on her Honors English thesis, due the following year. In the preface to her 1954 class essay on suicide and duality entitled ‘The Devil’s Advocate’, she writes of relating to Dostoevsky’s novels on a deeply personal level, stating that his characters’ conflicts are ‘colored in my own mind, the dualisms he describes are reflected in my own attitudes’.15 Perhaps treating this essay as a form of one-way talk therapy, Plath even provides a surprisingly intimate note suggesting that her own ‘disbelief in God and immortality’ contributed to her own suicide attempt. It is this revelation that ultimately propels Ivan Karamazov to the forefront of her Honors thesis, where her strong identification with the character may be considered its outstanding feature. In Plath’s introduction to her senior thesis on The Brothers Karamazov and The Double, she states, ‘By seeking to break the riddle of his soul in its myriad manifestations, man is brought face to face with his own mysterious mirror image, an image which he confronts with mingled curiosity and fear.’16 But this brilliant essay not only outlines man’s ‘enigma of his own identity’ in relation to the Double, but her own identity when facing the ‘legends’ of Ivan  – a figure who ultimately appears as her ‘literary Double’. Regardless of her preface statement in ‘The Devil’s Advocate’, Ivan as a soul tortured by lack of faith does not resonate with what we

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know of Plath’s lifelong ‘conflicts’ and ‘inner turmoil’ (if these can truly be known). It is Ivan the storyteller, the one who is able to articulate his dilemma with ‘devastating clarity’, with whom she aligns: ‘he is an ­artist in his own right, and like Dostoyevsky, the creator of polemical ­articles and legends which give literary form to his psychic division. Ivan is intensely self-conscious and analytical, a Russian Hamlet who can probe his psychic sores with tormenting finesse … ’17 Plath’s portrait of this ‘Russian Hamlet’ may serve as the real ‘magic mirror’ here, reflecting her own self-awareness as a writer and philosopher, as well as her confidence in her creative abilities. Like few other writers of her generation, it is Plath who probed her own ‘psychic sores with tormenting finesse’ throughout her life and work, as seen in the legendary personae found in Ariel and other poems, as well as her extensive journals, essays and stories. And it is also Plath who wrote to her mother at age sixteen: ‘I can’t let Shakespeare get too far ahead of me, you know.’18 As if talking of the dual nature of her potential effect on readers, Plath relates that the ‘dangerous embodiment’ of the Double in Dostoevsky’s novels can embody ‘good, creative characteristics’ as well as destructive and evil ones.19 Indeed, in a segment entitled ‘The Crucible of Doubt’, Plath states that it is ‘the very eloquence’ of Ivan’s denials that ultimately ‘crucify’ him in the tug of war between the realms of logic and intuitive faith his soul embodies.20 She also discusses what Ivan identifies as his key inheritance:  the ‘Karamazov love of life’ that includes nature – ‘the sticky little leaves as they open in spring’ and the ‘blue sky’ – as well as ‘some people’.21 These items that Plath singles out are certainly allied with her own acknowledged loves. In her concluding paragraph, Plath writes that recognizing and reconciling our various mirror images will ‘save us from disintegration’,22 implying her ‘successful’ psychotherapy at McLean may have done just that. But this reconciliation that can save us, she adds, does not mean ‘a simple or monolithic resolution of conflict’ but ‘a creative acknowledgement of the fundamental duality of man’.23 It is the words ‘creative acknowledgement’ here that may reveal Plath’s operating principle in the conclusion to this college paper and to her identity as a writer, her ‘unstill’ voice. The most important outcome of Plath’s study of Dostoevsky, and his own alter-ego Ivan Karamazov, may thus be lessons learned in articulating her own stories in the manner of the master, one who provided a luminous and ‘safe’ fictional ground from which her own exploration of the Double could be played out. After all, she was the central figure of her

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changing palette, the main character of her many dramas. Whether sad, happy or somewhere in between, she revelled in the intricate workings of the creative mind  – both the conscious and the unconscious  – and her unstoppable imagination. And she was also a superlative student of literature and Jungian thought. Yet as surely as Dostoevsky’s characters coloured the mind of Sylvia Plath, and sharpened her awareness of the role the Double played in her own brief life, it was Marcia Brown who served as her living friend and truest sister, with her in spirit until her final days. The unused portrait of Brown painted in ‘Madonna (of the Refrigerator)’ was in the end distilled and reconstituted in its essential form, where a hint of its glory stained the final pages like indelible ink. As seen in all drafts of ‘The Babysitters’, Plath would never disown the inseparable bodies, souls and fates of the two cork dolls, forever floating in the cosmic laps of her other lifelong loves – the sun and the sea. No t e s 1 PM II, Writings: Prose, school essay. 2 ‘As a Baby-Sitter Sees It’, published in two parts, in Christian Science Monitor, 6–7 Nov. 1951. 3 PM II, Diary of 1 Feb. 1947. 4 For photos Plath and Brown took of this event, Plath’s drawing of Brown at the piano and draft 2 of “The Babysitters”, see Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley (eds.), Eye Rhymes:  Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), illus. 20–22. 5 See the quotation from Plath’s Smith College Scrapbook in Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, p. 81. 6 PM II, Misc. Publications, Scrapbook, pp. 10–12. 7 Journals, p. 315. 8 Plath’s term for Marcia Brown in an essay on Smith College life. See Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), p. 41. 9 Butscher, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness, p. 56. 10 See, for instance, Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago Press, 1991), pp. 165–169. 11 SPC, Handwritten letter to Marcia Brown Plumer, 4 Feb. 1963. 12 Interview with Peter Orr, Sylvia Plath, Plath Reads Plath (Cambridge, Mass.: Credo Records, 1975), recorded 30 Oct. 1962. 13 PM II, Writings: Prose. College thesis. 14 See Journals, p. 545. 15 PM II, Writings: Prose. College essay. 16 PM II, College thesis, p. 1.

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17 PM II, College thesis, pp. 58–59. 18 PM II, Correspondence. 19 PM II, College thesis, p. 3. 20 PM II, College thesis, p. 31. 21 PM II, College thesis, p. 33. 22 PM II, College thesis, p. 60. 23 PM II, College thesis, pp. 57–60.

ch apter 8

‘Procrustean identity’: Sylvia Plath’s women’s magazine fiction Luke Ferretter

Sylvia Plath wrote fiction for women’s magazines throughout her career. From her early successes in Seventeen and Mademoiselle as a high school and college student through to the last eighteen months of her life, in which she was submitting stories to British women’s magazines, Plath harboured a constant ambition to publish fiction in the women’s magazine market. Ted Hughes wrote, ‘Her ambition to write stories was the most visible burden of her life.’1 Plath wanted the money, the freedom and the professional self-respect, he added, that came from mastering the craft of writing and selling fiction: ‘Her life became very early a struggle to apprentice herself to writing conventional stories, to hammer her talents into acceptable shape.’2 Plath wrote a considerable body of ­women’s magazine fiction, which has received very little critical discussion. In 1955, she wrote the three stories, ‘The Smoky Blue Piano’, ‘Platinum Summer’ and ‘The Christmas Heart’, and submitted them to a range of women’s magazines. In 1957, she wrote and submitted a further four, ‘The Laundromat Affair’, ‘The Fabulous Room-Mate’, ‘The Trouble-Making Mother’ and ‘Operation Valentine’ (familiar to readers of Plath’s journals as the story about a mother’s helper to which she frequently refers).3 Only the first and last of these four stories are now extant, and those only in fragments. In Britain, in 1960 and 1961, Plath wrote four more stories for the British market, ‘The Lucky Stone’, ‘Day of Success’, ‘Shadow Girl’ and ‘A Winter’s Tale’. The first of these was the only one of her stories ever accepted for publication by a women’s magazine, appearing (under the title ‘The Perfect Place’) in My Weekly in October 1961. In this chapter, I will discuss the stories Plath wrote for the American women’s magazine market. I will argue that they are best understood in the cultural context of the discourse of the magazines for which they were written. Plath’s women’s magazine fiction, I will claim, is a complex and contradictory body of writing, and it derives these qualities from the features, adverts and stories of the magazines of which she intended it to be a part. 147

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There have been three studies of the significance of women’s magazines in Plath’s thinking and writing, none of which has focused on the fiction she wrote for these magazines. The first two, by Linda Wagner and Garry Leonard, work from within the early feminist perspective, first established by Betty Friedan, that the middle-class, high-circulation women’s magazines of the 1950s, which Plath read and for which she wrote, are ­vehicles of the feminine mystique. Plath, in this view, has to struggle against the messages she absorbs from these magazines in order to express herself as the creative woman she wants to be.4 More recent cultural studies approaches to the post-war period have argued that the women’s maga­ zines Plath read are more complex than Friedan or subsequent critics acknowledged. In ‘Beyond the Feminine Mystique’, Joanne Meyerowitz argues that ‘domestic ideals coexisted in ongoing tension with an ethos of individual achievement that celebrated nondomestic activity, individual striving, public service and public success’.5 Eva Moskowitz adds that women’s magazines recognized their readers’ discontent with their domestic roles as wives and mothers in addition to promoting these roles.6 In the most thorough study of post-war women’s magazines to date, Nancy Walker has argued that they articulate a fluid and complex concept of the domestic, reflecting the conflicts and developments of wider cultural debates on women and the home in the marketplace to which they need to appeal. ‘Each issue of a magazine was the product of negotiating a variety of often competing interests, and the result of a vexed but earnest, sometimes contradictory image of domestic America.’7 The most recent study of the significance of women’s magazines in Plath’s work, by Marsha Bryant, takes into account this body of work, but argues for its relevance only to the Ariel poems. Indeed, Bryant writes, ‘Plath’s fiction may tend to pit art and domesticity against one another, but like Ladies’ Home Journal her poetry often integrates them.’8 In this chapter, I will argue that the fiction Plath wrote for the American women’s magazine market is a body of work as ideologically complex as the magazines in which she aimed to publish it. H e l p wa n t e d:   wom e n’s m ag a z i n e f e at u r e s In speaking of ‘women’s magazines’, I will be referring primarily to the middle-class, high-circulation periodicals that emphasized the domestic life of their readers, the most popular of which in the 1950s were Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s and (until it folded in 1957) Woman’s Home Companion.9 These magazines strongly emphasize beauty,

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fashion, marriage, family and the home as the primary concerns of their readers, but these values are by no means the only ones articulated in their pages. I will begin with an analysis of a feature in the Ladies’ Home Journal to illustrate the conflicting ideological messages that can be found not only within a single issue of a magazine but also within a single article. The ambiguity of the title of the article, ‘Help Wanted!’, from the July 1951 issue, directly represents the ambiguity of its ideological content. A feature in the Journal’s ‘How America Lives’ column, it is about a housewife and mother of three small children who is unable to cope with this situation. Journal writer Betty Hannah Hoffman explains that she is writing it ‘with the hope of striking a sympathetic response in millions of young mothers who are doing their best to play a variety of conflicting roles – wife, mother, housemaid, civic doer, and living companion to their husbands’.10 The Journal publishes numerous features like Marlene Dietrich’s ‘How to be Loved’, and the four-part ‘How to be Marriageable’, which speaks of marriage for women with the force of a conversion narrative.11 Without being able explicitly to articulate the relationship of her article to features like these, Hoffman can nevertheless expect that the difficulties of the housewife and mother about whom she writes will be shared by ‘millions’ of women. Algy Peterson, the subject of this article, has everything that the feminine mystique tells her to want – she is married, her husband has a good job, they have a new house and three children. Like Plath, she is an artist, and like Plath she was sufficiently outstanding as a college student ‘to be invited back as a member of the faculty’.12 At the time of her Journal interview, however, she cannot cope with her children, as the photographs of them screaming, crying and fighting show. She lives on the edge of nervous breakdown, shouting at them, spanking them, weeping, locking herself in the kitchen and then worrying that she is bringing them up badly. With an understated anger that no doubt expresses that of the interviewee herself, Hoffman makes clear that Mr Peterson is one of the causes of the problem. The photographs are juxtaposed provocatively, so that amidst pictures of Algy surrounded by screaming children, there are pictures of her husband playing squash and golf. Beneath a photograph of the couple at breakfast, facing away from each other and performing separate activities, the caption reads: ‘“Happiness is based on service,” Andy feels. “When you take on a family you really have a chance to be happy”.’13 The structure of Hoffman’s feature says what she cannot quite allow herself to represent Algy as saying for herself: that her husband neither helps her with nor understands her difficulties as a housewife and mother,

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and that this is part of her problem. At one point, Hoffman cannot resist translating. Algy’s husband, she writes, tells Algy to get a babysitter during the day, but she replies that she would rather stay home. ‘What Algy really means’, Hoffman comments, ‘is that she would like to stay at home without the house full of children. She no longer wants to be a career girl, as she once did, but still has creative desires that are largely unsatisfied.’14 Hoffman’s article well sums up the conflicting ideological messages at work in the Ladies’ Home Journal. In the first place, it pos­ itions its subject primarily as a housewife and mother. It is accompanied by a column written by a psychiatrist, who comes to visit the family, which says explicitly that Algy only needs to make adjustments to her existing situation in order to improve it. There is even a page that gives her favourite recipes. On the other hand, the article makes clear that the very situation of housewife and mother is Algy’s problem. Her creativity, social life, intelligence and mental health are all declining under the burden of these roles, and Hoffman clearly implies that they need to be changed. Her article both enforces the dominant ideology of femininity, positioning its readers primarily as wives, mothers and home-makers, and at the same time articulates a countercurrent of protest against precisely this ideology. A similar articulation of this contradiction can be seen at work in Mademoiselle magazine, with which Plath had a close relationship during her college years, winning the 1952 College Fiction contest, a place on the magazine’s College Board and a Guest Editorship in June 1953. Indeed, the conflicts at work in the gender discourse of Mademoiselle are at their most acute in the College issues. When Plath won the Guest Editorship, among the materials she was sent in preparation for her month at the magazine’s New York office was a short history of Mademoiselle, which described its place in the women’s magazine market: ‘[MLLE] is edited exclusively for the 18-to-30 age group above average in education and taste. Our readers are college girls, career girls and young-marrieds. 79% have college backgrounds.’15 The magazine prides itself on editorial firsts such as the College Forum, in which students debate political questions with experts, the College Fiction contest and the Merit Awards, given each year to women who have excelled in ‘the professions, the arts, science, politics, sports’.16 It is a journal consciously aimed at the most intelligent, talented and creative young women in the country. This is borne out by the College Board contest that Plath won in 1953, which was advertised the year Plath entered as ‘a step ahead on a career’, ‘a trail blazer for the future’ and ‘real brain work’.17

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The College issues produced by and for this elite group of high achievers, however, are remarkably low in intellectual content, and never more so than in the 1953 issue on which Plath worked. In the early 1950s, the College issues of Mademoiselle are about three times the length of the other issues, and almost the entire space of these approximately 400 pages is given over to advertising. The first message of these issues is thus sent even before one begins to read their few articles:  the reader may be among the most intelligent, able and creative women in the country, but her social position is primarily that of consumer of fashion and beauty products. This message is reinforced by much of the copy. In numerous feature adverts, college students are portrayed as women whose first concern is their personal appearance. In one such advert in the 1953 issue, for example, the copy begins with a question-and-answer motif, in which the question on the minds of college women concerns their wardrobe: ‘We seldom see snow down here but we love tweedy-looking clothes’ was the word from Alison Rymer, class of ’56 at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. We rushed down with our solution  – a tweedy looking wardrobe that won’t heat up because it’s made of featherweight wools, jerseys, cotton tweeds, corduroys.18

In the January 1953 issue, in which Plath’s first College Board assignment was published, there is a fashion article that follows up the progress of a Guest Editor from 1949. It begins with a paragraph describing the work of Lucile McLean, who graduated in fine art from Duke University, and got an executive job in the art world. The rest of the article, however, along with all of its accompanying photographs, is about what she wears to work. In each of the pictures, she models different sets of clothes, and in two of them she is watching male artists at work. One of the captions reads, ‘Lucile poses in the A.A.A. Galleries in a suit that meets her specifications.’19 If Mademoiselle claims on one hand that women can and should achieve highly in every social field, it articulates on the other an ideological message all the more powerful for being simply assumed rather than directly stated, that a woman’s fundamental role is to be an attractive object of the male gaze, since it is men to whom such social achievement primarily belongs. While the magazine values and promotes achievement in every social field for women, nevertheless, with the limited range of images and discourses with which it interpellates its readers, it quickly and firmly reinforces precisely the feminine mystique from which it claims to offer a way out.

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Even scholars who recognize the plurality of the ideological messages of the women’s magazines of the 1950s tend to concede that Betty Friedan was right to find that the fiction in these magazines simply promotes marriage and family. Meyerowitz writes, ‘The nonfiction articles I read may well have included more contradictions and more ambivalence than the fiction on which Friedan focused’.20 Nancy Walker, who pays most attention to the fiction, sees good-quality stories to have been maintained mostly by Mademoiselle, with its college-age market. Although she notes that ‘magazine fiction sometimes hinted at marital infidelity’, in fact the stories to be found in the middle-class magazines for which Plath wrote are, in their own ways, as ideologically plural and complex as the features.21 The stories primarily promote marriage, family and the home as the highest values for women, but, like the non-fiction features I have discussed, they articulate a range of other, conflicting ideological messages at the same time. Some stories constitute a protest, albeit veiled, against the feminine mystique enforced by the majority of the fiction. ‘The 12 Hour Magic’, published in Ladies’ Home Journal in November 1952, works in this way. Camilla Westlake, the heroine, becomes a witch during the twelve hours of the story’s action, and in doing so redresses all the wrongs of her situation as a housewife and mother. She has been an obedient subject of the feminine mystique, but has received no reward for this obedience. As she reads the book of witchcraft she finds in her attic, she realizes that this is ‘the first time in seven years that she had done what she felt like doing instead of what she was supposed to do’.22 The story is explicit about the depersonalizing experience of the role of housewife:  ‘“I’ve been nothing,” she said aloud, “just nothing at all”.’ The book of witchcraft gives her what she needs, ‘practical advice on how to be a regular American witch – nothing fancy, just able to work a little magic’.23 The phrase ‘regular American witch’ carries much of the social protest articulated by the story – it says in fiction what Betty Hoffman’s ‘sympathetic response in millions of young mothers’ said in her feature article: that Camilla’s dissatisfaction with the roles of housewife and mother is widely shared, that it is an institutional rather than merely an individual problem. Camilla’s magic allows her to stand up for herself, to insist on other people treating her as a person in her own right. The story’s plot is a series of encounters with the different kinds of people from whom she wrests

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this right – her son, her mother-in-law, her neighbour, the Women’s Club president, her husband. The result of her witchcraft is that she ceases to be dominated in each of these relationships, and that she conducts them as a fully human subject. The contemporary imagery is telling. When Camilla speaks forthrightly to her mother-in-law, instead of meekly, as she is used to doing, the author writes, ‘The atom bomb could not have dropped more suddenly.’24 The kind of change constituted by a housewife establishing relationships of mutual respect rather than of domination, the story thus says, would be as radical as the change constituted by dropping the atomic bomb. It would be the end of the world. As a result of Camilla’s new attitude, the Women’s Club ‘elected her head of a committee to study the politics in Oak Valley’.25 She anticipates this task with relish, planning to take on the mayor and the school board, and thinking to herself, ‘You won’t know Oak Valley when we get through with it.’ The story articulates a vision of the transformation of the role of women that explodes the boundary between private and public. The moment most critical of the feminine mystique promoted by most women’s magazine stories, however, is the response to Camilla’s new behaviour by her husband’s dinner guest. After she has had everyone share the task of preparing the meal, he comments, ‘It’s a treat to find a family … that really knows the meaning of the word “home”.’26 The meaning of the word ‘home’ is precisely the concern of the Ladies’ Home Journal and its rival magazines. This story tells us that the magically transformed relationships its heroine forges are in fact authentic relationships. If the word ‘home’ is to be given its true meaning, that is, the marriage, family and community lives of many of its readers need to be changed. If this story, and others like it, articulates a countercurrent of protest against the ideologies of marriage and family promoted by most women’s magazine fiction, there are also stories that express both ideological pos­ itions at the same time. ‘Into the Here’, from the Ladies’ Home Journal of July 1951, is a good example. This is, in structure at least, a typical marriage and family story. A young wife is not adjusting well to her coming baby, but with the help of her husband and family, she comes to learn the value of motherhood. The structure of the story is evident from the first paragraphs; it is going to be about a woman who comes to change her misconception of the value of motherhood. At the same time, however, it uses this clearly signalled structure to explore and express a protest against the values enforced by precisely that structure. The heroine spends a lot of time angry that her husband and her family care more about the baby inside her than about her: ‘It’s as if I didn’t exist, she thought for the

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thousandth time. All any of them care about is this jumping jack of a baby.’27 In an extremely unladylike moment, indicating by its social unacceptability the intensity of her distress at this sense of non-existence, Mary, the heroine of the story, spits on the floor. Of course, the anagnorisis comes, and she realizes that she has been selfish, and that, in fact, she is ‘so grateful that [she] just almost can’t stand it’. She learns, ‘I – I want to start a family, too, like this one – a family that loves babies … and all.’28 There is no reciprocal transformation in the attitudes of the other characters towards her, however. Rather, they continue to treat her in the same way that caused the anger and distress from which she has learned to move on, as someone whose existence is less important than that of others. When she says, with contrition, that she does not deserve all the work her family has put into making things for the baby, we read, ‘“No,” her father said, “but the baby does”.’ The obstetrician, when she goes into labour the next day, addresses her in a similar manner: ‘She said, “Well, I didn’t think it would take this long,” and he laughed and said, “I don’t think you ever thought about it.”’29 The story ends with the peace of mind that follows from Mary’s having learned her lesson that motherhood is the highest value for a woman: ‘“Oh,” Mary said, hugging Peter, “I was a fool then. But now I’m a mother!”’30 All her conflicts seem to be resolved. But the attitudes that caused her the anger and distress in the first place, and which caused her to rebel against the ideology of motherhood that the story’s ending enforces, remain. Where does her anger go? The story does not and cannot say, but simply tells two different stories at the same time. On the one hand, it says directly that becoming a mother resolves Mary’s conflicts with her prescribed social roles, and on the other it shows indirectly, through its silence over the continuation of her treatment as less than a person, that it does not. Fiction like this, published in the women’s magazines to which Plath submitted stories, is as complex a discourse as the non-fictional features, articles and adverts that have been more frequently discussed. While magazine stories of the 1950s tend to promote the ideologies of marriage and family, there are also stories and elements within stories that, as with the non-fiction in the same magazines, express countercurrents of protest and resistance against these ideologies. I n de f i n a bl e s om e t h i ng s: Pl at h’s s t or i e s I will now turn to the fiction Plath herself wrote for the American ­ omen’s magazine market. We have a good example of Plath’s ability w to write in the style of this market in ‘The Christmas Heart’, a story in

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which she rewrote an earlier, more literary story, ‘In the Mountains’, as a women’s magazine story. ‘In the Mountains’ was written for Alfred Kazin’s creative writing course during Plath’s senior year at Smith, and was published in the Smith Review in 1954. In January of the following year, she writes: ‘I have decided to rewrite … “In the Mountains” so it will be suitable for Seventeen in spring vacation. It is not suitable now and needs much more development of the inner struggle of the girl.’31 There is no evidence to show whether or not Plath submitted a version of the story to Seventeen, but in March 1956 she recalls having submitted it to the Ladies’ Home Journal, who rejected it. She asks her mother to send it to five more women’s magazines, McCall’s, Woman’s Home Companion, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Day and Everywoman’s, providing her with the address of each one and instructing her to address the submission to the Short Story Editor.32 ‘In the Mountains’ was, Plath wrote, ‘an attempt to be understated and cryptic as Hemingway, which is fine for a lit. course’.33 ‘The Christmas Heart’, on the other hand, which consists of the bulk of the original story more or less verbatim, contains many short additions and one long addition that nearly doubles the story in length, and which transform the story into the kind of romance Plath hoped would be accepted by the women’s magazines she specified to her mother. There are several minor changes that reflect Plath’s detailed sense of the market for which she is writing. First, she irons out any language that may seem too sexual. Whereas the heroine of ‘In the Mountains’, sitting next to the hero on the bus, can feel the ‘hard length of his thigh’ against hers, in ‘The Christmas Heart’ she simply feels the ‘warmth of him’ next to her.34 Secondly, Plath excises all the minor blasphemies in her characters’ speech, replacing exclamations like ‘God!’ with innocuous substitutes like ‘Why!’, and simply deleting a phrase such as ‘his parents are as upset as hell’.35 The most significant change, however, is the addition of a new, inner story about the heroine’s developing emotions towards the hero. In ‘In the Mountains’, we see only external actions. In the opening scene, in which the heroine and the hero ride up through the mountains, Plath writes, ‘Austin put his arm about her shoulder. The old man at the far end of the long back seat was looking at them, and his eyes were kind.’36 In ‘The Christmas Heart’, these sentences remain, but Plath inserts between them a passage on the heroine’s emotions during the events they describe – she ‘felt, as from the distance of another planet’ that there was ‘something … missing’ between herself and the hero. She no longer feels compelled, as she once did, to walk the ‘narrow tightrope of his approval’.37 This emotional story is inserted

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into that of ‘In the Mountains’ in passages ranging in length from half a sentence to a six-page episode, in which (as in The Bell Jar), the heroine breaks her leg skiing down a mountain to the hero, before she has learned how to steer or stop. This new story cannot be reduced to a single genre, nor can a single position be identified as the one Plath adopts towards her narration. It is at once a pastiche of romantic fiction – an exercise in writing for a market – and the statement of certain feminist values to which Plath is deeply committed. Ted Hughes describes Plath’s women’s magazine stories as ‘efforts at pastiche’.38 The value of a shared creative relationship, however, as opposed to the domination of the girl’s intuitive nature by the boy’s scientific outlook, which the story privileges, is one towards which Plath herself passionately works in her journal meditations on her relationship with Dick Norton that she fictionalizes in this story.39 Plath does not see women’s magazine fiction entirely as a minor or inferior kind of writing, compared, for example, to writing in the style of Hemingway. Rather, she sees it as a kind of writing that, although often formulaic, superficial and wish-fulfilling, is at the same time potentially full of meaning for women, quite as full of meaning as the works traditionally identified as literary have been for men. In ‘The Christmas Heart’, in the scene in which Sheila has to ski down to Michael, she compares this journey to their relationship – she can either go down ‘taut with terror’, as her old self would have done, looking for ‘protection in his arms’, or she can go straight down, to face him with the ‘daring of an equal’. It is only like this, she decides, that the two of them can ‘grow together’.40 Although this is formulaic romance fiction, Plath uses it to express a value – a creative relationship between two equals – to which she could not be more committed. This is the kind of women’s magazine fiction Plath writes. When the Ladies’ Home Journal rejected her story ‘The Smoky Blue Piano’, they wrote that it ‘lacked an “indefinable something” that made a Journal piece’.41 In fact, rather than lacking an indefinable something, Plath puts too many somethings in, at least for the editors who repeatedly rejected her stories. She cannot make a truly minor genre out of women’s magazine fiction, but finds that, as well as being dismissed as an inferior mode of writing, it is also full of potential for women in which to express themselves. In ‘Platinum Summer’, written shortly after graduating from Smith in June 1955, Plath not only writes a story to be published in a women’s magazine, but the story is about the ideological effect of such magazines on its heroine. In the spring and summer of 1954, following her return to Smith after her breakdown, Plath experimented with dyeing her hair

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platinum blonde, which she felt had a corresponding effect on her personality.42 In ‘Platinum Summer’, the studious, brown-haired heroine Lynn does the same thing, drawing the attention of numerous male admirers, all but the quiet, bookish Eric in whom she is interested. When she finally succeeds in attracting his attention, he prefers her natural hair colour, and the story ends with her dyeing it back to this colour, much to his approval. The first thing that Plath’s story makes clear is that the complex network of identities through which the heroine travels is initiated by the fashion and beauty articles of the women’s magazines she reads. Lynn dyes her hair because she sees a feature telling her to do so in a magazine. ‘BE A NEW WOMAN!’ the article tells her, Plath’s capitals emphasizing the force of its message, ‘EMPHASIZE SOME ONE FEATURE. MAKE IT A TRADEMARK.’43 Plath’s fictional article closely reproduces the rhetoric of the magazines of the 1950s. The Ladies’ Home Journal, for example, runs a ‘Beauty Workshop’, which features a series of ‘Beauty Commandments’, including this one about hairstyle: ‘Experiment with a new length, a new rinse or a new permanent. Change the arrangement often enough to keep you feeling and looking like an up-to-date beauty!’44 Plath’s article contains the same string of imperatives, the brisk tone and the motif of the new self that she found in countless contemporary features like this one. Indeed, the Journal’s Beauty Workshop is illustrated with two photographs of women at the salon, following its advice about a new hairstyle. In just the same way, as Lynn flicks through the pages of her magazine, she is ‘stopped … cold’ by the photograph of a beautiful model with bleached blonde hair. As with the pictures in the Ladies’ Home Journal feature, the photograph in Plath’s fictional magazine calls out to the reader to identify with the image and to transform herself into it. Plath also knows how the magazines of the 1950s play on the insecurities of their readers in order to sell their advertisers’ products. ‘IS YOUR HAIR DRAB?’ the feature demands of Lynn.45 There are countless questions of just this kind in the women’s magazines of the 1950s. Drene shampoo asks, ‘Does your hair look dull, slightly mousy?’46 Good Housekeeping’s ‘Beauty Clinic’ column wants to know, ‘Do your curls sag on damp days or suffer from five o’clock droop?’ and simply ‘What’s the matter with your hair?’47 Plath portrays the ideological effect of these questions – their interpellation is instantly effective. No sooner has Lynn read the caption suggesting that her hair may be too drab than she physically examines it and, as if she had surrendered her power of judgement to the discourse of the magazine, decides that it is ‘definitely drab’.48

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Plath emphasizes that the identity of the reader of these magazines is structured by their discourse. Despite the speciousness of the claim that the product Lynn reads about can make her a new woman, this is exactly what she finds herself becoming. As she turns platinum blonde on the outside, she begins to turn platinum blonde on the inside too. She starts to feel ‘phosphorescent’. She feels glamorous, and it shows – men start to compete for her attention, and before she knows it she has ‘more prospects … than Princess Margaret’.49 We see the hair dye seep into her soul, or rather that her soul exists on the surface of her body  – in her hair, in her image. She has, as she reflects later on the difference between her experience as a blonde and as a brunette, a ‘blonde self ’.50 She has read so many fashion and beauty articles that they have come to structure her sense of identity. Whether blonde or brunette, as a reader of women’s magazines in the 1950s, her identity exists on the surface of her body, in her appearance to the ultimately male gaze. At the end of the story, Eric tells Lynn he prefers her natural hair colour, and asks her to change it back. Here Plath sets up a divergence in gender experience. Eric likes Lynn’s natural hair colour precisely because it is natural – he agrees that she has an outgoing, blonde personality, but tells her that she can be herself without ‘stage props’ like hair dye.51 For the male character in the story, Lynn is simply who she is, whatever her hair colour. For the female character, however, things are not nearly so simple. Eric likes her to be natural, Lynn reflects, but it took the detour of an artificial hair colour for him to feel this way. It takes something as counter to reason as women’s experience, she concludes, for men to be managed rightly. Plath’s story thus articulates a minimal resistance politics for the readers of women’s magazines. If they, like Lynn, are so thoroughly interpellated by the features and adverts of these magazines into consumers of fashion and beauty products who lack even an identity until they use these products, nevertheless they are not merely helpless subjects of this ideology. Despite the fact that Eric thinks Lynn’s use of beauty products is artificial, even a kind of character flaw, Lynn uses them skilfully to get what she wants. At the end of the story, Lynn dyes her hair back to its natural colour to please him. She remains fully within the feminine mystique, which tells her that she is primarily an object of the male gaze, but she is also able to use this objectified status to her advantage. If Plath can see no way out of the ideology of beauty in ‘Platinum Summer’, she shows at least how women can use it in the meantime for their own ends. I have argued that Plath’s women’s magazine stories articulate a range of conflicting ideological messages, in the same way as the magazines

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themselves to which she submitted these stories. I will conclude this discussion by addressing the question of why, given this structural similarity, the fiction editors of the American magazines to which Plath sent her stories consistently rejected them. The first story Plath submitted to the Ladies’ Home Journal was ‘The Smoky Blue Piano’, which she wrote during the Christmas vacation of her final year at Smith, 1954–1955. It was rejected in January 1955, with the comment that the diary method of narration was awkward, and that if Plath would rewrite it as a simple narrative the Journal would reconsider it.52 In February, however, it was rejected a second time, with the response that ‘the narrative improved the writing, but that it lacked an “indefinable something” that made a Journal piece’.53 A comparison of ‘The Smoky Blue Piano’, ‘Platinum Summer’ and ‘The Christmas Heart’ with the stories published in the Ladies’ Home Journal at the time allows us to go some way to defining this ‘indefinable something’ that the fiction editor found lacking in Plath’s stories. In the first place, Plath’s heroines are more forward, more independent, especially in their relationships to men, than those usually found in the Journal and the other service magazines in the mid 1950s. At the very beginning of ‘The Smoky Blue Piano’, for example, the heroine of the story and her room-mate discover they have an attractive male neighbour. Indeed, in the first drafts of the story, he is described as precisely the sort of character whom the heroines of ‘those “Ladies’ Home Journal” stories’ would have as a neighbour.54 In those stories, however, in one way or another, the woman is lucky enough to have an encounter of some kind with this desirable man; she is too ladylike simply to pursue him. Plath’s heroines, however, do not wait passively. The narrator and her friend Lynn go on the offensive that very night, turning up at their neighbour’s door with an excuse to meet him. Women’s magazine stories of this period do not use concepts like going on the offensive in portraying their heroines’ pursuit of a man, at least not without a considerable amount of hedging it around with self-deprecating humour. That Plath’s heroines simply see an attractive man and go after him, without amusingly feminine failures and faults that teach them the error of their ways, makes her story from the very beginning not quite a Ladies’ Home Journal story. In a similar way, Plath’s heroines are more comfortable with their sexuality than those of the Ladies’ Home Journal. This is especially true in ‘Platinum Summer’. The story opens with a description of how good the heroine looks in a bathing suit, driving a sports car. While she does not approve of the anti-hero Ira, whom she is dating, and while she leaves him

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at the end of the story in order to end up with the virtuous and marriageable hero, nevertheless she does not quite disapprove enough either of him or of their relationship to be a Ladies’ Home Journal heroine. Each year, we read, Ira is in the habit of choosing a waitress, a college girl working for the summer at the hotel where the story is set, and ‘giving her a whirl’ through the excitement and glamour of his playboy life. These summers leave the girls with passionate memories of Ira that take a long time to fade once the ‘party was over’.55 Nonchalant language like ‘giving her a whirl’ and the ‘party’ does not articulate the kind of unequivocal condemnation required by Ladies’ Home Journal stories of a relationship other than that with a good man leading towards marriage, which is their all but universal ideal. By the time the fiction editor had got to the ­bottom of the first page, and found that Lynn was going out with Ira just for fun, she had probably decided to reject it. A third quality in which ‘The Christmas Heart’ in particular differs from the stories published in contemporary women’s magazines is that the moral of these stories tends to be for their female readers, whereas the moral of Plath’s story is directed at the men to whom those readers relate. It is the man who needs to change in her story, rather than the woman, and this kind of feminist moral is rarely found in the women’s magazine stories of the 1950s. The heroine of Plath’s story believes that the hero professes to love her only because he has none of his usual distractions while on a rest cure for tuberculosis. She tells him that wanting to get married to avoid being alone is a destructive emotion, which surprises him. But this is how she has come to think of marriage, she tells him, as a ‘creative’ relationship that can only be forged by ‘two strong people’.56 This lesson about marriage is one that the man in the story, rather than the woman, learns throughout its action. The woman already knows how he should behave, and he comes to learn, thereby winning her affections. Plath captures the domestic, emotional morals of Ladies’ Home Journal stories well as the doctor’s wife, with whom the heroine is staying, tells her that it can be more difficult to accept the ‘need to receive’ than to give love.57 But in a Ladies’ Home Journal story in the mid 1950s, this moral would be learned by the heroine herself, not by the hero. This is the third ‘indefinable something’ that this story lacks – women’s magazine stories articulate morals for women, not men. In the world of these stories, men are fixed and unalterable, like gods, and it is simply a question of finding the right one. The feminist desire of Plath’s heroine to make the right one, in a story in which the hero learns how to love the heroine in the way she wants, is surely one of the qualities for which the fiction editor of the

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Ladies’ Home Journal judged her story almost but not quite suitable for the magazine. I have argued in this chapter that, like the places in which she aimed to publish them, Plath’s women’s magazine stories are complex and contradictory discourses, both conforming to and subverting, both loving and hating, the gender ideologies of which they are part. The complexity of the relationship between the conflicting ideologies at work in the discourse of women’s magazines makes it difficult to state the nature of this relationship simply or precisely. Joanne Meyerowitz speaks of their ‘bifocal vision’, Nancy Walker of their ‘schizophrenia’ and Marsha Bryant uses Lefèbvre’s concept of the everyday to speak of the ‘surreal’ juxtaposition of their heterogeneous discourses.58 I will conclude this chapter with a contribution towards defining the relationship between the disparate elem­ents of the women’s magazine discourse that Plath read and wrote. The metaphor I want to suggest is taken from R. D. Laing’s contemporary interviews with women who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and with their families. In these interviews, published as Sanity, Madness and the Family in 1964, Laing observed that every one of the women he interviewed had grown up under irreconcilably contradictory assertions and demands about themselves from their families, from which it had been impossible for them to synthesize a stable sense of identity. In the case of Ruth Gold, he writes, ‘Mr and Mrs Gold share the same point of view on the course of Ruth’s life. Their account appeared to be simple and uncomplicated at first. As the picture unfolds, however, we shall see that the “identity” Ruth has for them has the simplicity of a Procrustean bed. One might speak here of a Procrustean identity’.59 For Laing, what has been diagnosed as schizophrenia is not the result of disease in the organism but of discourse in society. The contradictory lack of identity in which Ruth lives is a result of the contradictory discourses in which she has been brought up, in which she learned who she was and how she should behave. It is no coincidence that one of her ‘symptoms’, according to her parents, was that she wanted to be a writer.60 Laing’s concept can be used to characterize the ideological complexity of Plath’s women’s magazine fiction: her stories are tales from the Procrustean bed of femininity in the 1950s. They are complex and contradictory, because these are the qualities of the gender discourse in which Plath has grown up as a writer, and of the women’s magazines of which she intends them to be a part. If she never succeeded in publishing a story in a mainstream American women’s magazine, it is because she was simply less able or willing than other writers to reconcile the conflicting ideological

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materials with which she had to write. She could not break out of the Procrustean bed of the gender discourse available to her, but she shows clearly what the tortuous experience of lying in it is like. She did so too well for the fiction editors of her time. Today, however, we can understand that her women’s magazine fiction is not an anomaly, a sideline or a puzzle in the multiform canon of her work. Just as much as the Ariel poems or The Bell Jar, Plath’s women’s magazine stories are articulations of her struggle against the contradictory gender discourses from within which she wrote and out of which her writing pointed the way for a generation of women. No t e s 1 Ted Hughes, ‘Introduction’, JP, p. 12. 2 Hughes, ‘Introduction’, p. 13. 3 Journals, pp. 287, 288, 292, 295, 296. 4 Linda W. Wagner, ‘Plath’s “Ladies’ Home Journal” Syndrome’, Journal of American Culture, 7 (1984):  32–38 and Garry M. Leonard, ‘“The Woman is Perfected. Her Dead Body Wears the Smile of Accomplishment”: Sylvia Plath and Mademoiselle Magazine’, College Literature, 19/2 (1992): 60–82. 5 Joanne Meyerowitz, ‘Beyond the Feminine Mystique:  A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958’, in Joanne Meyerowitz (ed.), Not June Cleaver:  Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1994), p. 231. 6 Eva Moskowitz, ‘“It’s Good to Blow Your Top”: Women’s Magazines and a Discourse of Discontent, 1945–1965’, Journal of Women’s History, 8/3 (1996): 66–98. 7 Nancy Walker, Shaping Our Mothers’ World:  American Women’s Magazines (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), p. 19. 8 Marsha Bryant, ‘Ariel’s Kitchen:  Plath, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Domestic Surreal’, in Anita Helle (ed.), The Unraveling Archive:  Essays on Sylvia Plath (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 218. 9 See Walker, Shaping Our Mothers’ World, pp. xv–xvi. 10 Betty Hannah Hoffman, ‘Help Wanted!’, Ladies’ Home Journal (July 1951): 107. 11 Marlene Dietrich, ‘How to be Loved’, Ladies’ Home Journal (Jan. 1954): 37, 85–87; ‘How to be Marriageable’, Ladies’ Home Journal (Mar. 1954): 46–49; (Apr. 1954): 48–49; (May 1954): 54–55; (June 1954): 50–51. 12 Hoffman, ‘Help Wanted!’, 109. 13 Hoffman, ‘Help Wanted!’, 110. 14 Hoffman, ‘Help Wanted!’, 110. 15 ‘A Short, Short History of Mademoiselle’. PM II, Box 12, Folder 10. 16 ‘A Short, Short History of Mademoiselle’. 17 ‘Mademoiselle’s College Board Contest’, Mademoiselle (Aug. 1952): 353.

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18 ‘Sunshine College Clothes’, Mademoiselle (Aug. 1953): 298. 19 ‘What’s Happened to a Mlle Guest Editor Since She Left the Fold in 1949’, Mademoiselle (Jan. 1953): 93. 20 Meyerowitz, ‘Beyond the Feminine Mystique’, p. 250. 21 Walker, Shaping Our Mothers’ World, p. xiii. 22 Gladys Taber, ‘The 12 Hour Magic’, Ladies’ Home Journal (Nov. 1952): 106. 23 Taber, ‘The 12 Hour Magic’, 106. 24 Taber, ‘The 12 Hour Magic’, 109. 25 Taber, ‘The 12 Hour Magic’, 110. 26 Taber, ‘The 12 Hour Magic’, 111. 27 Jean O’Connell, ‘Into the Here’, Ladies’ Home Journal (July 1951): 67. 28 O’Connell, ‘Into the Here’, 70. 29 O’Connell, ‘Into the Here’, 70. 30 O’Connell, ‘Into the Here’, 70. 31 LH, p. 155. 32 Sylvia Plath, Letter to Aurelia Plath, 18 Mar. 1956. PM II, Box 6. 33 LH, p. 155. 34 Sylvia Plath, ‘In the Mountains’, in JP, p. 162; ‘The Christmas Heart’, p. 2. PM II, Box 8, Folder 11. 35 Plath, ‘In the Mountains’, p. 167; ‘The Christmas Heart’, p. 7; ‘In the Mountains’, p. 164. 36 Plath, ‘In the Mountains’, p. 161. 37 Plath, ‘The Christmas Heart’, p. 2. 38 Ted Hughes, ‘Introduction’, in JP, p. 8. 39 See Journals, pp. 97–102, 104–108. 40 Plath, ‘The Christmas Heart’, p. 13. 41 LH, p. 156. 42 See LH, pp. 138, 141. 43 Sylvia Plath, ‘Platinum Summer’, p. 5. PM II, Box 8, Folder 16. 4 4 Dawn Crowell Norman, ‘Journal Beauty Workshop’, Ladies’ Home Journal (Sept. 1952): 157. 45 Plath, ‘Platinum Summer’, p. 5. 46 Drene Shampoo, Advertisement, Good Housekeeping (Jan. 1945): 9. 47 Ruth Murrin, ‘Spray to Make Your Hair Behave’, Good Housekeeping (Aug. 1955):  125 and Ruth Murrin, ‘The Private-Eye Beauty Hour’, Good Housekeeping (Oct. 1955): 89. 48 Plath, ‘Platinum Summer’, p. 5. 49 Plath, ‘Platinum Summer’, p. 5. 50 Plath, ‘Platinum Summer’, p. 14. 51 Plath, ‘Platinum Summer’, p. 14. 52 LH, p. 150. 53 LH, p. 156. 54 Sylvia Plath, ‘The Smoky Blue Piano’, p. 1. PM II, Box 8, Folder 17. 55 Plath, ‘Platinum Summer’, p. 1. 56 Plath, ‘The Christmas Heart’, p. 8.

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57 Plath, ‘The Christmas Heart’, p. 11. 58 Meyerowitz, ‘Beyond the Feminine Mystique’, p. 232; Walker, Shaping Our Mothers’ World, p. 208; Bryant, ‘Ariel’s Kitchen’, p. 218. 59 R. D. Laing and A. Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family:  Families of Schizophrenics, 2nd edn (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 147. 60 Laing and Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family, p. 150.

Pa r t I I I

Representation

ch apter 9

Confession, contrition and concealment: evoking Plath in Ted Hughes’s Howls & Whispers Lynda K. Bundtzen

The publication of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters in January of 1998 was a major event, and not only in terms of its literary significance. In anticipation of its publication, the London Sunday Times’s 17 January headline for its Books Section read ‘Tragic Affair:  The Literary Love Affair That Turned to Tragedy’, with subheadings borrowed from the poems but worthy of a tabloid: ‘Scar from the past warned: stay clear’ and ‘Bite left tooth-marks on his cheek’. In contrast, when later in the spring of 1998 Hughes published a second volume of poems, Howls & Whispers, it was barely noticed – probably because it was published in a costly limited edition (110 copies by the Gehenna Press) meant for special collections. This volume consists of eleven poems with illustrations by Leonard Baskin that run the gamut from morbid to bloodcurdling. Seven of these poems are addressed to Plath, as are most of the Birthday Letters, while four of them look retrospectively at himself and as something of a fool: ‘a befogged buffoon’ who cannot decipher ‘what’s eating his wife’ is how he describes himself in ‘The Hidden Orestes’. Hughes’s motives for writing these poems also seem somewhat different from those for Birthday Letters. For Hughes, Birthday Letters were hardly poems in the usual sense, but, in his words, ‘occasions … in which I tried to open a direct, private, inner contact with my first wife … thinking mainly to evoke her presence to myself, and to feel her there listening’.1 In a letter to a friend, read by Frieda Hughes at the Whitbread Prize ceremony three months after Hughes’s death, Hughes explains the necessity for publication as the need for catharsis: I think those letters do release the story that everything I have written since the early 1960s has been evading. It was a kind of desperation that I finally did publish them – I had always just thought them unpublishably raw and unguarded, simply too vulnerable. But then I just could not endure being blocked any longer … Even now the sensation of inner liberation – a huge, sudden possibility of new inner experience. Quite strange.2 167

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It is hard to read Howls & Whispers as motivated primarily by Hughes’s loving desire ‘to evoke [Plath’s] presence’ for intimate conversation, since there are several passages that are excessively vituperative or self-pitying (though vituperativeness and self-pity are particular forms of intimacy). At one point, in ‘The City’, driving through a city populated by her literary works, he suddenly sees her ghost staring back in confusion, wondering whether to speak with him – or even to acknowledge a former relation to him: ‘I see you thinking: ought I to know him? | I see you frown. I see you trying | To remember  – or suddenly not to remember.’3 Catharsis, though – the release and expression of formerly blocked emotions – is still important in Howls & Whispers, because what initially strikes a reader is the venomous charge and lack of control in some of these poems. They feel in some instances ‘unpublishably raw and unguarded’, to borrow from Hughes, which may explain why they were isolated from the more emotionally controlled poems of Birthday Letters. The title Howls & Whispers also tells a reader that these utterances are very different from those in Birthday Letters. More visceral and instinctual and certainly less reflective expressions of emotion than letter writing, howls and whispers approximate the non-verbal. Howls suggest pain and rage, while whispering reminds a reader of gossip, rumours, nasty innuendoes, and the sharing of secrets, all of which Hughes clearly attaches to the smirking communication among women in the volume’s title poem. Whispers can also evoke intimacy between lovers, though. Unlike correspondence, dated and signed, howls and whispers have no temporal rationale. The semblance of chronology in the progression of Birthday Letters is missing in Howls & Whispers. Despite a frame that begins before Plath’s shrieking entrance into Hughes’s life in ‘Paris 1954’, and almost, but not quite, concludes with Hughes grappling with her after-death visitations in ‘The Offers’, there is a temporal loop created by the concluding poem, ‘Superstitions’. ‘Superstitions’ takes us back to ‘Paris 1954’ and implies his narrative entrapment in a plot as laden with enigmatic oracles as Greek tragedy. Carol Bere, in her essay ‘Complicated with Old Ghosts:  The Assia Poems’ on Capriccio, Hughes’s 1990 volume of poems about Assia Wevill, similarly argues that ‘Hughes has deliberately created a circular pattern’ between these two volumes by giving Capriccio’s opening poem, ‘Capriccios’, a new title, ‘Superstitions’, and placing it at the end of Howls & Whispers. The end of one relationship begets another still ruled by, in Bere’s words, caprice, the ‘unpredictable, unmotivated nature of events, and more important, the impossibility of fulfillment of transforming or

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completed myth’.4 He is the story’s victim rather than its agent or protagonist. Hence, the opening poem of Howls & Whispers, ‘Paris 1954’, depicts a youthful Hughes, sitting in a cafe, touchingly innocent, ‘So new to his unlived life, so ready for anything’, and oblivious to the scream headed his way in the form of a young girl, obviously Plath, who is ‘trying to sound like laughter and hope’ for the future, but more accurately represents a catastrophe Hughes describes as a nuclear holocaust – a shriek that will make his ‘world untouchable’ unless he is willing to suffer the ‘penalty’ of a ‘radio-active burn’.5 He watches this earlier version of himself with the horrific and helpless knowledge of how he will be variously immolated, or consumed by a panther, or forced into a labyrinth with the minotaur. Not content with smuggling one analogy in to dramatize his helpless condition, Hughes commingles multiple types of nemesis to doom him. The predatory image alludes to Plath’s poem ‘Pursuit’, written shortly after her first dramatic meeting with Hughes, but Hughes reverses the relationship of the panther to its prey, making Plath the hunter, and himself the panther’s quarry.6 The poems that follow ‘Paris 1954’ will extend this self-portrayal in various forms of horrified wonder, anger or self-pity at his lack of understanding and control over a story, a destiny, that seems to have robbed him of his own narrative possibilities. Although all of the poems in Howls & Whispers are marked by contradictory poetic strategies designed both to disguise and reveal Hughes’s emotional entanglement in Plath’s story, the title poem and the two concluding poems, ‘The Offers’ and ‘Superstitions’, are especially encoded with allusions and private meanings. Significant digressions are necessary to illuminate what Hughes is simultaneously trying to conceal and to confess obliquely in these poems. Why the conflicting impulses? As Hughes explains this paradox in a 1995 interview with Drue Heinz, ‘Maybe all poetry … is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say, but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of … so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies … Maybe, if you don’t have that secret confession, you don’t have a poem  – don’t even have a story.’7 At first glance, the title poem of Howls & Whispers, even with its smuggled and pervasive analogies to Othello, lacks any strategy of concealment or obliquity. Instead, it appears to be an unrestrained attack on Plath’s mother and Ruth Beuscher, her psychoanalyst. The poem’s speaker openly accuses Aurelia of writing a letter inciting her daughter to hurt him financially. Like Iago, who tells Roderigo repeatedly to ‘put money in thy purse’ (I. iii. 335)8 in order to bankroll Iago’s plotting

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against Othello, Aurelia gleefully instructs her daughter to ‘Hit him in the purse’, apparently as delighted to nurture her daughter’s jealous rage against a son-in-law she despised – whom she regarded as a ‘bacterium’ to be rid of, according to Hughes – as Iago is to arouse Othello to murderous fury against Desdemona. After Plath’s suicide, Hughes says he found Aurelia’s hate-filled letters and others from her analyst Ruth Beuscher, whose advice is to ‘“Keep him out of your bed. | Above all, keep him out of your bed.”’ Here, the poem’s words exactly match those of an actual letter from October 1962 that he must have seen.9 In blaming busybody women who do not want to see Plath reconciled with him, Hughes does not stop with Plath’s correspondents from America. He goes on to describe a ‘go-between’ like ‘honest Iago’ who knows all the parties involved – ‘the confidante on all sides’ – and who does not hesitate to dish dirt liberally with all of them, enjoying her privileged role as the one in the know. While he does not openly identify this woman he compares to a parasitical bedbug  – as if his bed is bugged because his lover Assia Wevill has made this creature privy to their pillow talk  – she is probably Suzette Macedo,10 who knew and talked to both Plath and Wevill as friends. She is the ‘double spy’ who passes on ‘Garblings of what I was said to have said, | Was said to have done’. Other women friends are electrical ‘step-up transformers’ who overload Plath’s already ‘smoking circuits’ with even more gossip, and are thereby responsible for Plath’s suicide on Monday, 11 February 1963. Leonard Baskin’s illustration for ‘Howls & Whispers’ is a four-headed elfin creature with large pointed ears and several gaping mouths with ghastly little teeth, presumably broadcasting all the poison of marital betrayal in ‘Howls & Whispers’ that would, if we believe Hughes, ultimately precipitate Plath’s suicide. Yet the precise metaphor is taken from ­electricity. The women are ‘step-up transformers’ converting low voltage and high current electricity into high voltage and low current electric power, and the voltage – gossip – is fed into Plath’s ear. This is what kills her, according to Hughes, ‘even as you [Plath] screamed it at me’. The most obvious meaning for this metaphor is that Plath’s women friends delivered a deadly electroshock treatment to her. The masks they wear suggest deceit – false friends – as does the ‘placebo anaesthetic’ they administer along with the gossip. The stories and rumours swirling about Hughes and Wevill may have, like a placebo, briefly satisfied Plath’s urgent desire to know what was going on  – what Hughes reputedly said and did  – but these ‘garblings’11 only intensified her emotional fury, her screaming accus­ ations at him that made any reconciliation impossible.

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Still, that metaphor, ‘step-up transformers’, is odd, as is the vague ‘it’ Plath screams at him in the poem’s final line. Another place where this term appears is in an unpublished analysis by Hughes of Plath’s ‘The Munich Mannequins’ at the Emory archive, which also may provide clues about what the concealed ‘it’ was being screamed at him.12 Hughes hypothesizes that ‘The Munich Mannequins’, composed only two weeks before Plath’s suicide, was written out of a compelling need to ‘state her case’ to a husband who was ‘reluctant to hear’. He reads the poem as if Plath were a lawyer presenting a closing argument. The opening line of ‘The Munich Mannequins’, ‘Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children’,13 he observes, is an ‘aphorism’ that works on two levels – broadly attacking procreative sterility in general and, more narrowly, the woman who chooses to be barren. Even more specifically, this aphorism, with its ‘virulent brio’, is directed at Assia Wevill, the rival Other to Plath, and as such may be read as a curse, an ‘inspired piece of defamation’ against a woman Hughes names a ‘Lilith of abortions’ in ‘Dreamers’.14 The yew trees in Plath’s poem, ‘Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose’15 symbolize the Other’s reproductive organs and the monthly ovulation that never leads to conception, translating Assia Wevill’s body into a deathly ‘graveyard’. He goes on to claim that the ‘blood flood’ of the poem is a heavily laden allusion to women’s menstrual cycle, with particular and ‘painful’ associations to both Assia Wevill’s abortions and Plath’s own miscarriage, ‘the Other’s deliberate crime and her own involuntary loss’. He describes Plath’s intention as a bold intervention, in as dramatic terms as she can invent, to remind him of her own ‘suffering livingness’ and to impress on him the bloodstream she shares with him in their children as ‘the flood of love’. The poem thereby serves as an appeal, a final supplication to him, as to a jury, of her righteous cause. Hughes’s most startling claim, though, is that Plath’s naked and bald mannequins in furs represent a ‘mythic intuition’ on her part and a telepathic intrusion into Hughes’s own psyche, as Plath searched desperately for an archetypal figure to ‘wake him up’. Hughes believes that the image of these mannequins is evidence for Plath’s discovery, through this poetic mind-reading, of a mythical figure from the Kabbala: Nehamah. Nehamah, it turns out, is demon-sister to the more widely known and infamous Lilith. Nehamah’s name means ‘the Charmer’, indicating that ‘she is a demoness of extraordinary, irresistible beauty’ – indeed, ‘so beautiful that she led the angels astray’.16 In the Kabbala she is transformed into a ‘semi-human, deathless being, who, like Lilith, fulfils the double task of seducing men and strangling children in their sleep’.17 Hughes

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admits that Plath herself had absolutely no familiarity with this obscure mythological figure  – a seductress who is the ‘mother of demons who lie with men and take the spirit of desire from them, and … make sport with the men (in their sleep) and causes them to emit seed’.18 Yet Hughes believes she still managed with ‘clairvoyant divination of a high order’ to conjure up Nehamah, admittedly a ‘cultural fossil figure’ for most people, but for Hughes ‘a step-up transformer of some power’. As in the poem ‘Howls & Whispers’, step-up transformer connotes something shocking, electrifying, but is also linked to heightened poetic and telepathic ­powers of communication. Does Hughes mean to imply that all of the gossip Plath learned about Assia Wevill (described by a friend as an exotic femme fatale, a ‘Babylonian beauty’)19 heightens, as in a step-up transformer, her poetic powers to create ‘The Munich Mannequins’? Did Plath have an opportunity to show the poem to Hughes? Or, rather, was this ‘uncanny’ projection of a deadly future and unlucky fate for both Hughes and Wevill telepathically screamed to her husband as a warning? More familiar than Nehamah and the Kabbala, or step-up transformers, for that matter, is the probable influence of filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. It turns out that the original title for Hughes’s Howls & Whispers was Cries and Whispers, the title of Bergman’s first colour film. According to Lisa Baskin, she and husband Leonard Baskin warned Hughes that he could not just usurp this title for his own, and in Ann Skea’s photocopy of the proof version, she says, ‘Howls’ is printed by hand above the crossed-out Cries in the title.20 This film has important and specific analogies to ‘The Offers’, but I would also argue that Hughes shares certain traits with Bergman in his final poems about his wife. As Hughes describes the work of these poems, they led to an ‘inner liberation’ and ‘freer psychological life’. Similarly, Bergman describes filmmaking as a way to become ‘unneurotic’ and to rid himself of demons.21 There are several reasons why the film may have stirred Hughes’s imagination. First are the film’s female characters, who share traits with women in his own life. Cries and Whispers brings together three sisters: Agnes, the middle sister, who is dying of uterine or ovarian cancer; Maria, the beautiful youngest sister, a narcissist and an adulteress, who provokes her husband to stab himself; and Karin, the eldest, masochistic and self-wounding, and wed to a much older husband.22 Assia Wevill resembles the adulteress Maria, who is portrayed as beautiful, sensual and selfish. Just as Maria drives her husband to wound himself with a letter opener, so Wevill drove her husband David to overdose on sleeping pills. Mad with jealousy and armed with a knife, David Wevill pursued Hughes

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to Waterloo Station where Hughes was leaving after a second rendezvous with Assia. When he ‘failed to find Ted’, he ‘returned to an empty house’ and ‘swallowed twenty or thirty pink Seconal sleeping pills … Finally, gripping a silver-handled Burmese knife with which he hoped to end his misery once he found the necessary courage, he lay down on the couch.’ Assia found him unconscious with the knife in his hand after her return home from the rendezvous with Hughes.23 As for Karin, she resembles Hughes’s lurid portrayal of Plath in ‘Red’, the final poem of Birthday Letters. For Hughes, Plath’s obsession with the colour red reflects an inner life that was ‘catastrophic, arterial, doomed’, and Hughes, in revulsion, ‘felt it raw – like the crisp gauze edges | Of a stiffening wound’.24 As with the melodramatic incident surrounding David Wevill’s fury and despair and his resemblance to Maria’s husband, a scene between the eldest sister Karin and her husband may well have stirred Hughes’s memories of Plath, who ‘reveled in red’ – a colour Hughes compares to ‘blood lobbing from a gash’.25 In one of Bergman’s most shocking sequences from Cries and Whispers, Karin mutilates her genitals with a shard of glass from the dinner table. While she cuts herself, her tongue voluptuously circles her lips, as if in enjoyment of the self-inflicted pain. When her husband enters their bedroom, presumably for marital relations, she throws back the quilt to show him she is bleeding and then rubs her mouth with the blood, again smiling, because she has successfully managed to avoid sexual relations with her husband, who is clearly repelled. The moment is not unlike some of Plath’s masochistic performances  – in ‘Cut’, ‘Lady Lazarus’ or ‘Daddy’. The fact that Karin’s husband is so much older, and so authoritarian, also may have reminded Hughes of Plath’s self-destructive attachment to her father Otto, an attachment Hughes obsessively returns to in so many of his final poems. Finally, as in the poem ‘Red’, the bedroom here is red. Indeed, Bergman has chosen a predominantly crimson set – a womb-like space – as the backdrop for his exploration of his female characters. The most convincing piece of evidence for a specific relationship to the poem ‘The Offers’, however, is in Agnes’s ghostly return from the dead. As in ‘The Offers’, where Plath returns from the dead three times to haunt Hughes and to make an offer or to command something from him – the nature of the ‘offer’ is unclear – so Agnes returns from the dead to ask each of her sisters and, finally, her maid Anna, for succour and assistance in her passage to death. If Hughes is alluding to Cries and Whispers in ‘The Offers’, then he is also portraying a failure in human feeling on his part – obliquely to be sure – akin to Karin’s and Maria’s characters in

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the film. Karin and Maria are each overcome with disgust at the thought of tenderly embracing their sister’s body, her already rotting corpse, and taking her to their breast as the maid Anna finally does. In ‘The Offers’, Plath’s final command is ‘This time | Don’t fail me’,26 implying that he has failed her offers the first two times, just as Karin and Maria fail their sister Agnes. There is also a likeness between Bergman’s description of Agnes’ state and what Hughes feels when he gazes at Plath’s double in her first appearance. For Bergman, ‘Death is the extreme of loneliness; that is what is so important. Agnes’ death has been caught up halfway into the void.’ When Agnes’ maid Anna tries to tell her that ‘It’s only a dream,’ Agnes says no, ‘For you perhaps it’s a dream. But not for me.’27 Hughes is similarly befuddled with Plath’s first appearance. He watches Plath as she gazes intently at ‘the film’ of her life, a passenger in ‘the unspooling track and shudder’ of her underground journey. Like Agnes, Plath’s ‘saddened substitute’28 is caught between ‘this dream | Which was the whole of London’s waking life’ and an existential void like Bergman’s – ‘Northwards’ she leaves, ‘back into the abyss’. When he gets off at Chalk Farm, Plath ‘stayed. | It was the testing moment’ and Hughes does nothing – like Karin and Maria, failing the test. He watches her leave, and then finds himself in an ‘original emptiness’,29 reliving the moment of loss like Orpheus in the underworld losing Eurydice a second (and, for him, final) time. ‘The Offers’ begins with a line  – ‘Only two months dead’30  – that has reminded others of another ghostly visitation – that of Hamlet, since it echoes Hamlet’s disgusted exclamation in his first soliloquy about his mother’s ‘wicked speed’ (I. ii. 156) in marrying Claudius: ‘But two months dead, nay, not so much, not two’ (I. ii. 138).31 As Anne Whitehead reads this allusion and its relation to Hamlet, it is the ‘important question of responsibility Hughes addresses in “The Offers”’, and perhaps ‘the ethical responsibility of survival’ – of ‘bringing her poetry into the public eye’, or ‘what her vision did to his. It is certainly not guilt. It is a deeper poetic duty he has.’32 As I have already indicated, I believe Hughes is harder on himself than this. But much depends on how we read Plath’s second visitation. Diane Middlebrook does not believe that the second ghostly visit is Plath, but a she-demon impersonator who ‘has ransomed herself by leaving him in the land of the dead, where, he now realizes, he has been stranded’.33 Middlebrook does not explain the she-demon’s ‘gentle ultimatum’, or why what he does – the change Hughes makes in his life – leads to the relaxation of its hold on him. The ‘land of the dead’ and the ‘ultimatum’ may

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also be read as oblique revelations of what Hughes’s life felt like in the years after Plath’s death. As he wrote to Keith Sagar, ‘Sylvia’s poems and novel hit the first militant wave of Feminism as a divine revelation from their patron saint.’ ‘Sylvia’s reputation’ then became ‘my environment’.34 He foresaw that this would happen only a few months after Plath’s death, in a letter to Plath’s friends Leo and Ann Goodman in May of 1963.35 Perhaps this is ‘the land of the dead’, in the sense that Plath’s reputation, the celebration of her new literary life – ‘Young as before, untouched by death’,36 as he says in ‘The Offers’ – left him entrapped in her story as her husband and thereby creatively silenced.37 If there were she-demons, they were also feminists. Hughes was so concerned about the hostility to him in the US, complaining about being stared at in bookshops there, that he decided to erase the US as a source of income from any lectures or reading tours.38 Finally, there is much evidence in the archives that Hughes felt creatively blocked in the years immediately following Plath’s suicide, and that his domestic life was a complete disaster as he struggled to care for ageing parents, motherless children and an ongoing relationship with Assia Wevill. Unlike Whitehead, I think there is plenty of guilt in ‘The Offers’, and, unlike Middlebrook, I read the second visitation by Plath in terms of what happened with Assia Wevill. If the Hamlet analogy works, then Hughes’s continued affair with Wevill after Plath’s death is a betrayal like Gertrude’s swift marriage to Claudius, and he is a procrastinating Hamlet of sorts, caught in ‘the mere | Inertia of [his] life’s momentum’, unwilling or unable to extricate himself from Plath’s rival, and therefore incapable of responding swiftly to the ‘offers’ of Plath’s ghost. Only after ‘indolently like somebody drowning | [Hughes] kicked free’ of what I believe is the affair with Assia, does Plath’s unspecified ‘ultimatum’ relax ‘its hold’39 on him. The second visitation is portrayed as deceptive. While Hughes seems to take comfort in this woman, he also describes her appearance as a ‘hallucination’, a ‘migraine image’. At some level he knows that ‘you | Were not you’. Indeed, this version of Plath is an ‘other’ who borrows ‘the name of your oldest rival – | As if it had lain handiest’. Perhaps Plath has inhabited, usurped the body of an ‘other’, and he both knows and does not know it is that of her rival Assia Wevill, the ‘handiest’ woman because closest to Hughes. Everything about this second appearance hinges on a perception of this new Plath as both uncanny and familiar: both ‘not you’ and ‘so much yourself’ that his brain feels ‘twisted out of phase’.40 This is not the only place where Hughes suggests a similar uncanny possession. In ‘The Other’, an earlier poem about Assia Wevill, Hughes

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describes Wevill’s tragedy as a loss of identity to Plath, even in her victorious theft of what Plath left behind, and her inhabiting of Plath’s life. When Assia reaches a tipping point of being too full – possessing or possessed by ‘much too much’ of what the dead Plath left behind – the process begins to reverse itself, until Plath has back what was originally hers and Wevill nothing: ‘Only you | Saw her smile, as she took some. | At first, just a little.’41 Relentless in these analogies, Hughes describes Wevill in another poem, ‘The Error’, as having ‘selflessly incinerated [her]self | In the shrine of [Plath’s] death’.42 In Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson reports that Plath told Helder Macedo that she ‘conjured up’ her rival: ‘To her Assia was her opposite – the Other.’43 Hughes similarly stresses her fascination with Assia in ‘Dreamers’, ‘As if your dream of your dream-self stood there’.44 In ‘The Offers’, Hughes describes his life with the second Plath as a strange limbo in which he ‘breathed a bewildering air – the gas | Of the underworld in which you moved so easy’, a doubling allusion to the deaths by asphyxiation of both wife and mistress, and also to the ‘smoke’ in ‘Dreamers’ that hovers between Plath and Wevill as they converse. This doubling of the two women ­paralyses Hughes in a ‘show’, he says, with the ‘same masks, same parts’ in ‘The Offers’, until Hughes manages to free himself from Assia Wevill  – or until her suicide in 1969 breaks the spell. Hughes may well have regarded Assia Wevill’s copycat suicide as testimony to her absorption by the more powerful Plath, whose spirit survived and asserted itself to make her rival’s fate her own. At the end of this second visitation, though, Hughes describes himself as Plath’s ‘hostage’. Indeed, Hughes’s suffering after Plath’s death could only be worse after Assia’s, and his infamy for being the cause of both deaths makes him their ‘bail’, insuring they will reappear. As long as he is alive, and famously – or infamously – so, their premature deaths are remembered, stopping him somewhere between life and death, in what is a ‘doubled alive and dead existence’. As he would describe this condition in a letter to Keith Sagar, four months before his own death, it was only the publication of these final poems that liberated him from this hostage condition – but too late. He ponders only what might have been if he had published Birthday Letters earlier:  then he might have arrived at the freedom to deal with the tragedy ‘on deeper, more creative levels’. ‘If’, he adds, ‘things cannot be got off the autobiographical level and on to the creative level then they simply stay as if they were a recurrent stuck dream that simply goes on delivering its inescapable blows’.45 As Hughes describes himself in ‘The Offers’, ‘Less and less | Did I think of escape’

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from this hostage condition, from what must have seemed ‘a recurrent stuck dream’ of exquisite pain. As ‘The Offers’ ends, the final request from Plath’s ghost remains a riddle. What does she demand here? Tracy Brain tentatively suggests that Plath might be offering ‘a promise of reincarnation’46 either to Hughes himself, after his death, or her own reincarnation with Hughes’s publication of Birthday Letters, poems in which she is vividly recalled to life. For Middlebrook, Plath’s command, ‘This time don’t fail me’, is ‘the voice of poetry itself’, summoning him to the task of ‘self-mythologizing’ as a ‘persona created in his work’. This persona, Middlebrook claims, is ‘her husband … his contribution to the history of poetry’.47 As such, this poetic climax would seem to confirm Hughes’s total absorption in Plath’s story and an inability to break free from his poetic identity as, merely, ‘her husband’. In my own very tentative view, Plath is simply asking Hughes to join her in death, but is obscure about what that might mean. Rather like Orpheus, a figure whose story he felt to be his own, Hughes has only been barely alive – looking back and losing Plath over and over again as a hostage to her fame. Howls & Whispers does not end, however, with Orpheus joining his Eurydice. Instead, the volume concludes with Hughes in the clutches of his ‘Superstitions’ – what other people find laughable, but Hughes fully believes. ‘Superstitions’ is even more enigmatic, more oblique, than ‘The Offers’, and possibly more encrypted with analogies, allusions and biographical references. First, the poem returns to a Friday the thirteenth when Plath and Hughes had a rendezvous in London that turned into a night of serious lovemaking (13 April 1956), a night that is also memorialized in one of the Birthday Letters, ‘18 Rugby Street’: ‘You were pausing | A night in London on your escape to Paris. | April 13th, your father’s birthday. A Friday’.48 On that occasion, he listened to her cries, which included the story of her attempted suicide  – but he did not heed the ‘whispered’ warning of ‘a sober star’ to ‘stay clear’.49 What is odd about Hughes’s narrative in ‘18 Rugby Street’ is that Plath is leaving for Paris on her spring break from Cambridge, when she was, in fact, returning on that date, and, further, 13 April 1956 did not fall on an unlucky Friday. Hence, in one of Plath’s small tablet diaries at the Lilly Library, she records on 14 April 1956, that she met him in London when she came back from a disappointing trip to Europe and engaged in ‘Bloody exhausting night of love-making’ with Hughes and ‘lovely horizontal talk-sorrow’. This is a strange reversal and confusion in Plath’s departure and arrival times, or perhaps an astrological convergence of the

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two (making them star-crossed lovers), because Plath also visited Hughes on her way to Paris on Friday, 23 March. In her journal entry of Monday, 26 March, she has arrived in Paris after what she describes as ‘a sleepless holocaust night with Ted in London’ before leaving.50 Was it simply and understandably an inaccurate memory on Hughes’s part, or a deliberate fictionalizing of dates to serve his poetic story? Is Hughes conscious of this manipulation, or is it a Freudian slip on his part? Whatever the explanation, it creates a temporal loop in Howls & Whispers’ structure – or a noose, if you will, tightening around Hughes’s narrative destiny. If he is sitting in Paris at the beginning of the volume, unaware of the shriek, the ‘holocaust’ (also Hughes’s metaphor) headed his way in the form of Plath, and if he is sending her off to Paris on Friday, 13 April in ‘18 Rugby Street’, when she was, in fact just returned from Paris on that date, then perhaps what Hughes is saying – what is slipping out obliquely – is the conviction that ‘she’s got me both coming and going’, that there was never any escape from what fate intended. In yet another poetic palimpsest of Plath with Assia Wevill, Hughes writes over his first lovemaking with Plath with the date for his second rendezvous with Assia on Friday, 13 July 1962, when David Wevill attempted suicide. The two women’s fates are thereby mythically linked in the two poem cycles: Howls & Whispers and Capriccio. Superstition has it that Adam was cast out of Eden on a Friday, religion that Christ was crucified on a Friday – ‘a fable told | Of the bloodied halo, the sponge, and the nail’ – and Friday belongs to the unlucky mother of Norse mythology, Frigg, wife to Odin. In Norse myth, Frigg is prompted by Odin’s misgivings about their son, Baldur, to exact ‘an oath from fire, water, iron, and all kinds of metal, stone, earth, trees, diseases, beasts, birds, and venomous snakes, that they would not injure her son’. Believing that Baldur was invulnerable, ‘the gods were accustomed, by way of sport, to let Baldur stand forth at their assembly, for all the [gods] to shoot at him with the bow, or to strike or throw stones at him, as nothing caused him any harm’.51 Only the trickster god Loki is full of spite and displeased at this game. In disguise, he visits Frigg and, to her son’s misfortune, she reveals that ‘the mistletoe, a little insignificant plant … was the only thing from which she had not required an oath’.52 Loki immediately contrives Baldur’s death, asking one of the gods in Valhalla to throw mistletoe at Baldur. It kills him. There is no rebirth for Baldur, even though the death of a fallen warrior is normally reversible in Valhalla. Loki is unrelenting in the fate he wishes on Baldur and refuses to pray with all living things for his release from Hell. Frigg’s gift then is

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deceptive – ‘two-faced’ as Hughes says, and as ‘two-faced’, doubled, as his own fateful Friday entanglement with Sylvia Plath and her Other Assia Wevill. In reverting to this pagan myth, Hughes also introduces the first in a series of events in Norse mythology that will lead to Ragnarök, also known as ‘the twilight of the gods’, and the end of the world. Odin is swallowed by a wolf, the world goes up in flames, and there is an end to Valhalla. There is no eternal return in Norse myth for its gods, and no afterlife for mankind. What this suggests for me is no reincarnation, no life after death for Hughes. Hughes wrote to Aurelia Plath, in a 15 March 1963 letter to be held unseen until his death, ‘if there is an eternity, I am damned in it’.53 ‘Superstitions’ may be read, then, as providing its own peculiar form of solace in its invocation of Norse mythology: no afterlife, no damnation. In Hughes’s poem, ‘Life After Death’, he depicts himself as both Odin and the unlucky figure of ‘The Hanged Man’ in the Tarot pack. Only ‘a hook under my neck muscle’, he fancies, can explain the spiritual pain of living after Plath’s death.54 Like Odin, who will eventually be swallowed by a wolf, he listens to the howling of wolves, and is figuratively engulfed by their mournful music:  ‘They wound us and enmeshed us | In their wailing for you, their mourning for us. | They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death.’55 Imagining life after death in these terms of unrelenting misery, Hughes may find the promise of Ragnarök attractive – the end to everything, total erasure of human misery, especially the life after death for those who are survivors. In one of his unpublished manuscripts he speaks of poetry as a means of escape.56 Or, in the words of ‘Superstitions’, Hughes longs for a place ‘where this one | Forgot death. Where that one | Forgot life’ and still another ‘Sank without a cry’. This is a blessed amnesia, a blessed immersion in nonentity, and perhaps the best Hughes can hope for himself, as he remembers with sweaty palms, and blistering skin, those he has lost. No t e s 1 From Hughes’s letter to the judges of the Forward Poetry Prize, 1998, and quoted in Sarah Churchwell, ‘Secrets and Lies:  Plath, Privacy, Publication and Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters’, Contemporary Literature, 42 (Spring 2001): 102. 2 Quoted at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/263541.stm. 27 Jan. 1999. 3 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 1180.

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4 Carol Bere, ‘Complicated with Old Ghosts:  The Assia Poems’, in Joanny Moulin (ed.), Ted Hughes:  Alternative Horizons (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 37. 5 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 1173. 6 CP, p. 22. 7 Drue Heinz, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXI’, Paris Review, 37/134 (Spring 1995): 55. 8 All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd edn (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), pp. 1246–1296. 9 SPC, Letters. 10 Suzette Macedo is a key source for accounts of Assia Wevill in ­multiple biographies. See Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame:  A Life of Sylvia Plath (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, pp. 243, 273); Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (London:  Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), pp. ­121–124, 125–143; and Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill (London: Robson Books, 2006), pp. 95, 115. 11 Hughes, Collected Poems, pp. 1178–1179. 12 MSS 644, Ted Hughes Papers, Subseries 2.4:  Prose. Box 115, Folder 7. ‘Unidentified typescript with revisions’. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga. 13 CP, p. 263. 14 BL, p. 157. 15 CP, p. 263. 16 Raphael Patai, ‘Lilith’, Journal of American Folklore, 77/306 (1964): 305. 17 Patai, ‘Lilith’, p. 305. 18 Patai, ‘Lilith’, p. 306. 19 Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband:  Hughes and Plath  – A Marriage (London: Little, Brown, 2004), p. 164. 20 This information came to me in an email response from Ann Skea (8 Nov. 2001) to my query about whether she knew if Bergman’s film was an influence on Hughes. She had not heard of the film, but this led to her revelation about the original title. 21 Charles Thomas Samuels, ‘Ingmar Bergman: An Interview’, in Stuart Kaminsky (ed.), Ingmar Bergman:  Essays in Criticism (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 107. 22 Ann Skea also thought it was significant that Hughes would choose a title from a Bergman film about three women, just as Plath had earlier been influenced by Bergman’s Brink of Life for her long dramatic poem Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices. 23 Lover of Unreason, pp. 98–99. 24 BL, p. 197. 25 BL, p. 197. 26 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 1183.

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27 Ingmar Bergman, Four Stories by Ingmar Bergman (New York: Anchor Books, 1977), p. 86. 28 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 1181. 29 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 1182. 30 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 1180. 31 Riverside Shakespeare, pp. 1183–1245. 32 Anne Whitehead,‘Refiguring Orpheus:  The Possession of the Past in Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters’, Textual Practice, 13/2 (1999):  239. Whitehead is quoting John Carey from Richard Woods’s piece in the Sunday Times on the same day Hughes died: ‘Hughes Saw Ghost of Plath on the Tube’, ‘News’ (28 Oct. 1998), p. 6. The date is notable also because Hughes dies one day after what would have been Plath’s 66th birthday on 27 Oct. 33 Middlebrook, Her Husband, p. 281. 34 Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), p. 719. 35 SPC, Letters. 36 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 1182. 37 In a poignant letter to his son Nicholas, dated 2 Feb. 1998, shortly after the publication of BL, Hughes tells him that Plath’s death and her growing public fame made it virtually impossible to write again. He compares his life to ‘living on the wrong side of the glass door’, and his inability to break through that door, a metaphor for feeling trapped in Plath’s story. The fury of fem­ inists, he claims, combined with Plath’s ‘public fame’, made it impossible to express his own feelings, for fear of being scrutinized for evidence of his part in her death. Only life-threatening illness made it possible for him to publish the poems in BL and gain freedom from this ‘log-jam’. Letters of Ted Hughes, p. 712 (author’s underlining). 38 Letter to Keith Sagar, 2 Dec. 1993, British Library. 39 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 1183. 40 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 1182. 41 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 790. 42 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 796. 43 Stevenson, Bitter Fame, p. 273. In Plath’s ‘The Other’, composed on 2 July 1962, she describes her double as a mirror reflection, but in this she is alienated from herself: ‘Cold glass, how you insert yourself | Between myself and myself’. CP, p. 202. 4 4 BL, p. 157. 45 Letters of Ted Hughes, p. 718. 46 Tracy Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath (Harlow: Longman, 2001), p. 189. 47 Middlebrook, Her Husband, pp. xviii–xix. 48 BL, p. 21. 49 BL, p. 24. 50 Journals, p. 552. 51 Benjamin Thorpe, Thorpe’s Northern Mythology, 3 vols. (London:  Edward Lumbley, 1851), i. 72.

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52 Thorpe, Thorpe’s Northern Mythology, i. 74. 53 Letters of Ted Hughes, p. 215. 54 BL, p. 182. 55 BL, p. 183. 56 MSS 644, Ted Hughes Papers, Subseries 2.3:  Uncollected Poems. Box 84, Folder 3; verso of Peterson, Jimmy / Entry No: 17982 (poetry contest). Dated 1969. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.

c h a p t e r 10

Fictionalizing Sylvia Plath Tracy Brain

This chapter considers those moments where Plath becomes a character in somebody else’s text, whether a novel, a poem, a film or even a biography. Such a representation can be central and sustained, or momentary and incidental. It may involve describing Plath and her actions, or inhabiting her viewpoint, or inventing dialogue for her. To fictionalize a real person in this way risks intrusion into the lives of people connected with her. Artists are often aware of the various problems involved in such intrusion. To consider such representations critically is necessarily to explore the ethical questions involved. It is not only to ask whether a work is written well or badly, but also what responsibilities, if any, the writer owes to accuracy and the feelings of people associated with the person depicted. In the course of such an investigation, one is led to questions about the boundary between fiction and biography. An examination of these portraits must be selective, for there are too many to consider them all. To convey this, I will list some of them now. Kate Moses’ novel, Wintering (2003) depicts Plath during the last months of her life. Emma Tennant’s The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (2001) attempts to cover Plath’s and Hughes’s relationship from beginning to end, as does Robert Anderson’s Little Fugue (2005). Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s Poison (2006) fictionalizes the aftermath of Ted Hughes’s death. Plays have not been so numerous. Rose Leimen Goldemberg’s Letters Home (1979) is about Plath and her mother. Paul Alexander’s Edge (2003) imagines Plath recollecting her whole life during her last hours. We will see that Elisabeth Gray’s play/film Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath raises difficult questions for those who write about real people. Films about ‘Plath’ vary greatly in nature: from a mainstream ‘romantic film’1 such as Sylvia (2003), starring the Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow,2 to supposedly serious documentaries that dramatize Plath’s most desperate moments. In a 1990 BBC television Bookmark episode 183

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on ‘Literary Biography’, a voiceover discussing Plath’s death is intercut with interview material and a melodramatic visual depiction of her suicide preparations. The last shot is of the broken oven dial, rocking on the floor, the word ‘Off’ clearly visible. Because this sensationalism comes after a sustained and thoughtful analysis of the problems of literary biography, its sudden appearance is startling. Art house experimental films use distancing devices that hold off any direct admission that they are actually depicting Plath. They foreground their own awareness of the mimetic impossibility of such a project in quite sophisticated, though not always stable, ways, suggesting that they are based on fact yet purely works of the imagination:  both true and made-up. Suzie Hanna’s and Tom Simmons’s animated short film, The Girl Who Would Be God (2007) deliberately avoids casting an actress who is physically similar to Plath. The actress ‘was not meant to represent Plath literally’3 but to be the imaginary idealized girl conjured by Plath at seventeen. The actresses in Sandra Lahire’s Living on Air trilogy do not look like Plath, nor does the heroine of Elisabeth Gray’s Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath. All of this contrasts with the obvious efforts of a biopic such as Sylvia to style Gwyneth Paltrow’s make-up and hair so that the actress resembles Plath as closely as possible. One distancing device in Lahire’s Lady Lazarus arises from its description as ‘a film spoken by Sylvia Plath’. Another film in Lahire’s trilogy, Johnny Panic, is ‘Inspired by Fragments of Sylvia Plath’s Journals’, and lists the puzzlingly described ‘Plath’s Fictional Self’ in its credits. ‘Spoken by’; ‘Inspired by’; ‘Fictional Self’: Lahire produces powerful imaginative responses to these materials that are, in complicated ways, representations of Plath, but at the same time never cease to be thoughtful, nuanced responses to her work. Her films, like Hanna’s and Simmons’s, stem from a deep, primary engagement with the Plath archive as well as Plath’s writing and ideas. Numerous poets have cast Plath as a character, and these ‘imaginative’ texts raise important questions about Plath representations. Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters is probably the most well known. In ‘Sylvia’s Death’, written by Anne Sexton six days after the event of its title, Sexton speaks of Plath as a ‘tiny mother’, ‘funny duchess’, ‘blonde thing’.4 Sexton writes about her friend intimately; as someone who loved, knew and was sometimes fondly exasperated by her. Spoken in the first person, Hughes’s and Sexton’s poems (for the most part) address themselves to Plath in the second person. Unlike many of the prose pieces I will consider below, they do not attempt to inhabit Plath’s point of view. Hughes describes his

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own reason for using this poetic form: ‘I tried to open a direct, private, inner contact with my first wife … thinking mainly to evoke her presence to myself, and to feel her there listening.’5 Anne Stevenson’s ‘Letter to Sylvia Plath’ also addresses Plath as ‘you’, but is the antithesis of Sexton’s poem, and seemingly written out of a bitter jealousy towards Plath. Stevenson’s is one of the many poems about Plath composed by those who did not actually know her. These include the dozens of ‘Poems inspired by Sylvia Plath’ on the Sylvia Plath Forum,6 Robin Morgan’s notorious ‘Arraignment’ (1972), with its horrifying imagining of Hughes’s sexualized murder, some of the poems in Joyce Carol Oates’s The Fabulous Beasts (1975), Crystal Hurdle’s After Ted and Sylvia (2003) and Catherine Bowman’s The Plath Cabinet (2009). Hurdle’s book prompted Bert Almon to voice two of the objections that frequently emerge in response to depictions of Sylvia Plath:  ‘Now that Hughes is dead and has no way to defend himself in the courts there are no limits to the exploitation of this painful story … Hurdle’s poems assume she can speak for their living children, who are adults and could speak for themselves.’7 Bound up with the problem of exploitation, what seems to be at stake for Almon is the question of who has the right to speak for whom. Almon impugns the credibility of anyone who does not have a direct connection to his or her subject. Should depictions of Plath by those who knew her be considered more trustworthy – and ethical – than those by writers who did not? Do Ted Hughes, Frieda Hughes and Anne Sexton have more authority to depict Plath than Joyce Carol Oates and Crystal Hurdle? Is there a hierarchy of inside knowledge that would suggest Ted Hughes’s depictions are the most credible? Who would win a contest between Frieda Hughes and Anne Sexton? Plath died when her daughter was a toddler. How much could Frieda Hughes really remember? She may have spent more hours with Plath and been cared for by her intimately, but should Sexton’s adult contact as a female friend and sister poet to Plath carry more weight? Clearly, these imagined contests are absurd and irresolvable, not to mention mean-minded, but they raise important questions not just of who has the right to interpret Plath’s work8 but also of who, if anyone, has the right to represent Sylvia Plath at all. Sarah Churchwell points out that Birthday Letters itself can ‘be read as a public response to disputes over the politics of publication, representation, and literary authority’.9 She goes on to argue that Ted Hughes ‘objected … to becoming an unwilling audience to his “own story” – to becoming reader, rather than author’.10 Hughes famously wrote, ‘I hope

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each of us owns the facts of his or her own life.’11 For Hughes, there is an assumption, understandable in human terms but debatable in others, that those who are close to a subject own it, have a direct line to its truth, and are therefore licensed to write about it – while others are not. This chapter’s primary concern is with such ‘unlicensed’ fictionalizations. What happens when novelists and filmmakers12 behave as if they are biographers, and write about ‘real’ people? First, and perhaps most obviously, boundaries between genres, already easily challenged, entirely break down. Is this a poem or a biography? Is that a novel or a biography? Is the other a documentary or a romantic drama? Are these true, or are they made up? Sandra Gilbert asks, ‘Should Emma Tennant’s Sylvia and Ted and Kate Moses’ Wintering be scrutinized for their biographical accuracy, or at any rate their psychological insight?’13 The British edition of Moses’ novel is simply called Wintering, but the American edition added the subtitle, A Novel of Sylvia Plath, raising the question of just what kind of book it is, and whether, through the inclusion of Plath’s name, it is more biography than novel. The surprising, slightly awkward syntax is effected largely by the preposition ‘of’:  a novel of Sylvia Plath rather than by or about her. Perhaps Moses means ‘of’ in the sense of ‘origin, derivation, cause’:  so that Plath is the novel’s point of ‘origin’; she is its ‘cause’; Wintering is ‘derived’ from her. Books such as Moses’ and Tennant’s are a type of historical fiction, in that they are set in the past and feature real historical events and people. Brian McHale argues that in postmodernist revisionist historical fiction ‘history and fiction exchange places, history becoming fictional and fiction becoming “true” history – and the real world seems to get lost in the shuffle’. The same can be said of the novelistic accounts of Plath’s life, and the ‘biopic’ Sylvia, though it is only in rare instances that the novels and the film about Plath intentionally and self-consciously raise the question that postmodernist revisionists foreground as central: ‘real, compared to what?’14 The Author’s Note that Emma Tennant provides in The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted, probably written to ward off any legal challenges, is an inversion of the customary disclaimer that swears and affirms that the work is purely fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is entirely coincidental. McHale describes the standard form of the disclaimer as a statement that presumes that art can be unproblematically mimetic.15 The disclaimers we find on fictionalized versions of Plath’s life are deviations from this standard form. Their strange ambiguity inadvertently calls into

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question the truth and accuracy of narrative representation. They swear and affirm that their contents are both true and false. Tennant’s disclaimer is the only occasion in The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted where there is any self-conscious foregrounding of the book’s uncertain status or any awareness ‘that history itself may be a form of fiction’.16 It reads: ‘Events described in the book are based on fact, and in the case of the story of Assia Wevill, Sylvia’s rival, who also committed suicide, many of the facts were previously concealed or unknown. The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted is, nevertheless, a work of the imagination.’17 Fact or fiction? Biography or novel? Tennant wants it both ways. The book is biographical (‘based on fact’). The book is fictional (‘nevertheless, a work of imagination’). Sandwiched between these two contradictory claims is the sales-boosting promise of more titillating revelation. It is the sort of promise biographies make: secrets will be uncovered. Wevill’s ‘previously concealed or unknown’ story will be told. Yet much of Tennant’s material about Wevill is tired and speculative, and has been the stuff of biography for some time.18 A central question we might ask of a novel about real people – or what we might even call a biographical novel  – is one that should be asked of any novel:  what is its quality and coherence as a work of art? Will we more readily forgive a writer who impressively parodies a Plath poem or Hughes letter than one who attempts this feebly?19 If we evaluate The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted in terms of its aesthetic qualities, the book can only be described as bad (the narrative is unclear and confusing, full of messily choreographed scenes), portentous (‘the oracle doesn’t speak; the forest where she lives provides the answers’),20 overwritten (‘He sees the hare he ran over and killed, as its blood turns to flowers and the bouquet blossoms in his lover’s hand’)21 and littered with tabloid sensationalism (‘Ted knows … that this baby will kill Sylvia’).22 An unsigned reviewer succinctly described the problem with the novel’s dialogue by entitling his or her review ‘Real Poets Don’t Gush’.23 The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted dwells on histrionic banalities of human behaviour with little depth of realism (realism here signifying not ‘true life’ but true to life). If we open up these questions about the quality of Tennant’s novel to include criteria about its representation of real events and people, as her disclaimer invites us to do, the judgements are even more damning. Tennant’s book has Plath visit Hughes and Wevill the night before Plath kills herself, and, during that visit, learn that Wevill is pregnant. Here, as throughout the book, the scene is garbled and hard to follow, the writing melodramatic and clichéd. At the same time, the scene is based on

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conjecture and hearsay: ‘Her composure melts in the heat of her humiliation. For surely, as all three stand there silent … the knowledge must come to her of Assia’s condition, her shame and guilt and joy.’24 In the end, it is difficult to say whether The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted is a poor novel, a bad biography, or both: it fails as fiction; it fails as information. Like The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted, Kate Moses’ 2003 novel, Wintering, begins with a disclaimer. Unlike Tennant’s book, Moses’ does not try to seduce its readers with promises of tabloid revelation. While the interests of The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted are trivial, the same cannot be said of Wintering. Exceptionally among attempts to fictionalize Plath, Moses’ novel takes Plath’s poetry seriously. The narrative of Plath’s last winter is framed by chapters that take their titles from the poems of Ariel, arranged in Plath’s intended sequence. Moses engages in primary archival research25 and provides a scrupulous account of her sources (something that cannot be said of all biographers). While classic historical fiction ‘camouflag[es] the seam between historical reality and fiction’, Wintering ‘seeks to foreground this seam’26 by embedding the titles of Plath’s poems and through the hefty scholarly apparatus Moses provides. This scholarship further blurs the boundaries between biography and novel, and contributes to the difficulty of being able to say just what sort of book Wintering is. John Brownlow, who wrote the screenplay for the 2003 film Sylvia,27 remarks that when Plath and Hughes ‘were doing the washing up, they didn’t speak in verse’. He ‘cut dialogue’ ‘wherever possible’ in his script.28 The challenge, though, for anybody who turns Plath and Hughes into characters, is to balance everyday banality with those moments when they would have had interesting conversations. It is the latter that few writers manage to accomplish, or even attempt. Partly this is because to do so is so difficult. Partly it is because it is the soap opera story of the romance and breakdown that interests readers, as it did Brownlow, for whom ‘the story was blindingly clear … It was a love story between two giants … But it was a marriage only one of them could survive’.29 Here, with a spurious sense of inevitability, as if rehearsing for the film’s poster,30 Brownlow speaks in a sort of tabloid headline in which the beginning of Plath’s marriage is reduced to a slogan. A consequence of depicting the life as a soap opera – the narrative of a life that never dies, that comes to us in an unending series of instalments, disclosed decades after her death in lurid titles and sensationalist newspaper stories31 – is the failure to say anything serious or important about the poetry. Alison Owen, Sylvia’s producer, says, ‘You do have a duty to get things as right as possible … I don’t think you should be obsessive about detail,

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but … you need to remain sensitive to it’.32 Certainly, in terms of the few facts that are absolutely knowable and verifiable, there are inaccuracies in Sylvia.33 In her week-by-week spiral calendar for 1962, Plath made a detailed note of what she planned to serve34 on Friday, 18 May to her weekend guests, the Wevills. Should it be classed as an inaccuracy that the Plath character in the film is shown serving something entirely different? The answer is probably not. Plath may even have changed her mind about that night’s menu. Whatever she served, nobody’s sense of Plath and Hughes will be drastically distorted by such an error; nor will their reading of the work. Certainly it is possible to produce a good film or novel that is unfaithful to the life. The measure of success cannot be that everything must be absolutely true and verifiable; this is of course impossible. There is, however, a more serious level of misrepresentation. One example of this occurs in Sylvia when Plath is shown expertly testing the temperature of a bottle of formula on her forearm. We cannot be certain that this did not occasionally happen. Plath mentions in a letter that she organized a ‘relief bottle’ for her baby daughter so she could attend a literary dinner at the home of T. S. Eliot.35 However, to show Plath only feeding her baby in this way elides something that is central to Plath’s writing and her sexual politics, where there are frequent references to her pride in breastfeeding and her knowledge of what she was doing: ‘she sucked at me … like a little expert and got a few drops of colostrum.’36 Plath thought breastfeeding was an important subject for poetry. In ‘Morning Song’, written on 19 February 1961, a breastfeeding mother addresses her baby:  ‘One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral | In my Victorian nightgown. | Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s.’37 The speaker of ‘Morning Song’ is much more than a version of Sylvia Plath, breastfeeding; the film’s failure to show the fictional Plath doing this does not deprive the audience of biographical information that they can then bring to her poem. Rather, the omission deprives them of an awareness of Plath’s interest in women’s roles as mothers and in the female body. This is the kind of awareness that informs Wintering, as we see in Moses’ depiction of the infamous and often represented weekend visit of Assia and David Wevill to Court Green in May 1962. The moment does not involve Assia Wevill’s dream about a pike, or her supposed engulfing of Ted Hughes beneath her nightdress. It is this:  ‘Sylvia smoothes the back of her hand across the cheek of her baby, sated now and calm, then gently slides the tip of her pinkie into the corner of his mouth to break his latch on her breast.’38 What seems important here is not any certainty that

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it happened like this. Rather, it is the plausibility that such a moment did occur, and Moses’ sensitive rendering of a breastfeeding mother’s perceptions, the small details that make the act appear natural and meaningful. This taste of dailyness comes as a relief in the wake of so many melodramatic depictions of the episode.39 In Emma Tennant’s rendition, by contrast, the scene takes inadvertently comic, exaggeratedly operatic, proportions: Inside the nightdress that now enveloped him, Ted felt the heat of Assia’s body and smelled her night-smells. He stood shivering beside rivers and plunged his head between her breasts. Then, lifting her great white net high in the air, Ted’s captor walked away from him across the kitchen, as Sylvia and her baby came in.40

One way of not being serious about poetry and writing is to concentrate instead on the marital problems and suicide, but to do this misses what is important about Plath’s and Hughes’s writing. Tom Payne entitles a 2003 newspaper article about Plath, ‘Her Words Prophesy Her Own Suffering’,41 while Philip Hensher writes in 2004, ‘However good she became  – and those late poems are brilliant, no doubt  – she worked great damage. They are not poems to live with.’42 Payne and Hensher typify the idea that Plath’s ultimate confession was her death, and, in particular, that Ariel, the finished manuscript she left when she died, prefigured and caused that death.43 Some forty years later, Sylvia gives us the visual equivalent of such criticism, perpetuating what is perhaps the most oft-repeated and fallacious link between Plath and her work. We are shown the snowy white manuscript of Ariel, and when Hughes bends to kiss it, the page blends into the whiteness of Plath’s dead face, as if the first caused the second, as if Plath and Ariel were the same. To focus on Ariel in this way is to evade thinking about the actual poems, which is always a difficult thing for a plot-driven film to do. This was made even more challenging in the case of Sylvia, because the producers were unable to secure permission from the Plath estate to cite her poetry.44 Curiously, though, the compromises necessitated by this refusal resulted in a scene that made suggestive connections between texts that are usually read as quite disparate. Towards the end of the film, Plath is shown writing, excitedly juxtaposing lines and phrases from different poems. The level of discussion of poetry in Sylvia is, however, not high. After Plath reads ‘Daddy’ to the character based on Al Alvarez, she asks, hanging on his answer, ‘Is it any good?’45 Plath’s journals and letters are full of her expressions of artistic doubt. Nonetheless, this line, which conveys

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such tremulous lack of confidence, is given to the woman who had declared to her mother the month that she wrote ‘Daddy’, ‘I am a genius of a writer … I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name’.46 Alvarez himself is a sharp and experienced critic, but his film counterpart can make only the most vacuous comments about poetry. He is made to say, ‘That “Daddy” poem. The use of metaphor. The way it builds the end … into an explosion of fury. It’s stunning’.47 The real Alvarez, in his funny and knowing manner, encapsulates the problem quite frankly. Assia Wevill is portrayed as saying breathlessly of the landscape near Plath’s and Hughes’s Devon house, ‘God it’s so, it’s so inspiring’.48 Alvarez refers to this as ‘a remark that would have stopped Hughes dead, even if Assia had been Helen of Troy’.49 The Alvarez character tells Plath, ‘You’re so beautiful. You’ve a wonderful mind. And you are a great – a great – poet’, lines that make the real Alvarez declare, ‘if I ever start talking like that I want to be put down like a sick old dog’.50 Alvarez’s scorn for Sylvia’s dialogue seems to have two, tightly connected, roots. First, Sylvia is not good art; the characters’ lines, and not just ‘Alvarez’s’ own, are weak and unconvincing. Second, Sylvia is not a good biography. A plausible sense of the film’s real subjects is not evoked: Alvarez and Wevill would not have talked ‘like that’, and Hughes and Plath would not have responded if they had. While novels and films about Plath sometimes borrow biographical methods, but fail to use them well, Plath biographers occasionally use the strategies of the novelist or even scriptwriter. It is not unheard of for biographies to do this, but this chapter has its roots in my desire to understand why such moments can be so startling, and why they are so seldom effective. One possibility is that there is a sudden rupture of the techniques or change in the nature of the material that biographies usually deploy: that is to say extracts or synthesized accounts based on letters, diaries, interviews or archival material that (at least in theory) foregrounds the existence and status of sources. Janet Malcolm writes, ‘The biographer is portrayed … tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses.’51 There is a premise that biography is a non-fiction genre with objectivity and distance as its founding principles, though many readers may be sceptical of this presumption. A close look at some of those moments where Plath is depicted as a character reveals how jarring the sudden slippage of a biography into fictional representation can be. My focus here will be on passages where a

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biographer briefly attempts what novelists do all the time, and tries to inhabit Plath’s viewpoint, as Paul Alexander does in Rough Magic and Ronald Hayman does in The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. I will also consider instances when Plath’s actions are described in highly emotive figurative language, as in the case of Yehuda Koren’s and Eilat Negev’s biography of Assia Wevill, A Lover of Unreason. I have deliberately chosen passages that offer no sources for their material. This is another factor that places these textual moments on a continuum that moves them further from biography and closer to fiction: the biographer abandons any pretence of objectively – or at least consistently and effectively – attributing thoughts, words and facts to sources. Alexander writes in Rough Magic: On the morning of July 9, 1962, Sylvia lay in the bed she shared with her husband. Already, the day was hot, but Sylvia did not think of the heat. Almost two months had passed since David Wevill and Assia Gutmann’s visit to Court Green. Over these two months, Ted’s behaviour had become increasingly odd. Sometimes, Sylvia did not know where he was, for Ted now regularly went into London alone. When they were together, they often argued, more so than they had in the past. But this morning, Sylvia tried to take her mind off Ted.52

This passage does not go so far as free indirect speech, but it does deploy novelistic techniques of imagining a scene that could not have been documented, of claiming to know what Plath thought and felt and tried to repress by dramatizing her thinking and feeling and repressing as she lies in bed in the heat. Hayman’s inhabiting of Plath’s view in The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath is more difficult to pinpoint and describe: [Assia] was peeling potatoes when Sylvia, who was with David in the front room, heard Hughes come in through the back door. Taking off her shoes in the corridor, Sylvia crept around to the kitchen where Hughes was with Assia, but found they were only talking.53

Given that biography can be described as the story of a life, it may not be surprising that it sometimes uses the tools of fiction writing. In the Hayman passage, there is no ‘David Wevill recalls’ or ‘Plath suggested in a letter’ or ‘A friend of Assia’s alleges that Assia told her’. Instead, the biographer provides drama and action that move the reader quickly away from the external view of Wevill in the kitchen (probably gleaned from an unacknowledged anecdote) to Plath’s own senses. Plath ‘hears’ Hughes from the ‘front room’; there are the details of her removing her shoes and ‘creeping’; there is a closeness to Plath’s perception in her discovery that ‘they were only talking’.

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Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev avoid any such inhabiting of Assia Wevill’s and Plath’s points of view in A Lover of Unreason. They do, however, slip into such fictional techniques occasionally when describing minor characters, as if they want to vary the pace and writing tactics without trespassing to a degree that might offend ethical sensibility. An example of this occurs when Plath’s doctor attends her after her suicide: It was close to eleven o’clock on Monday, 11 February, and Dr John Horder straightened up from the body that was lying in the middle of the sitting room. He estimated that his former patient had been dead for approximately six hours. Only when the ambulance doors had slammed shut behind the covered stretcher, did he turn to his car and drive the short distance to his clinic in Regent’s Park Road.54

Starting with the time and day and date, this passage mimics the tone of a report or true crime narrative. In it, the reader is entirely with Dr Horder: his actions of straightening up and driving to his clinic as well as his thought or ‘estimation’ of how long Plath had been dead. Are there differences between Alexander’s and Hayman’s occupations of Plath’s perceptions, and Koren’s and Negev’s of Dr Horder’s? One real difficulty for Alexander and Hayman is that few – very few – writers are good enough to imagine Plath’s thoughts or words in a manner that is even close to convincing, as earlier discussion of the ‘Plath’ novels and film suggested. Koren and Negev are not going to run into this challenge with Dr Horder. It might be said that Alexander and Hayman move into Plath’s perception only when they reach notoriously dramatic and difficult incidents in her life. Both of them slip into this kind of dramatizing when recounting Hughes’s affair with Wevill. They do not inhabit Plath’s view at other times. It is difficult to avoid the voyeurism – and exploitation – involved in imagining somebody at a moment of extremity, and for that reason too Alexander and Hayman seem ethically compromised as biographers. Is Koren’s and Negev’s act of occupying Dr Horder’s viewpoint less blameable because they only show him doing his job, and he is a character who, however real, is not central to Plath’s drama? Koren’s and Negev’s biography raises other representational problems. Although, strictly speaking, theirs is not a Plath biography, they do dramatize parts of her story, and put her photograph on the cover, as well as Hughes’s. Although it is a biography of Wevill, they capitalize on Hughes’s name. The book’s full, unwieldy title is A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love. Had it not been for her

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connection to Hughes and Plath, it is doubtful that anybody would have wanted to publish Wevill’s biography. Plath’s suicide itself is not directly described or depicted in A Lover of Unreason. Yet the events that precede it are: During the visit Sylvia made to Ted’s flat she spotted a familiar-looking edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Surprised at the apparent resurrection of the red Oxford volume she had slashed in jealous rage a year and a half earlier, she opened the book and read the inscription. Judging by her revulsion, it had been Assia’s consoling gift to Ted, to replace the volume he had lost. For Sylvia, it was a fatal blow, like a bullet striking a running animal. By then Assia was carrying Ted Hughes’s child.55

This is the end of chapter eleven, and the last thing the biographers have to say about Plath while she is alive. The next words relate to the aftermath of her death in the previously cited Dr Horder passage. The bullet/ pregnancy passage concludes with an evocative simile (‘it was a fatal blow, like a bullet striking a running animal’) followed by a dramatic revelation. The import of this revelation is emphasized by the fact that the eight words that comprise it occupy their own short paragraph and conclude the chapter: ‘By then Assia was carrying Ted Hughes’s child.’ Here, Koren and Negev are dealing with famously controversial and much-debated incidents, and the passage raises more questions than it answers. First, how do we know this happened? What work does the simile – ‘it was a fatal blow, like a bullet striking a running animal’ – do in making this a more certain interpretation of the event than is possible? Despite the light and brief occupation of Plath’s view in the assertion that she was ‘Surprised’, it is the simile in this passage that does the most work in tipping the writing from biography into fiction. If Koren and Negev had preceded the simile with ‘One can imagine this was a fatal blow’ or ‘this may have been a fatal blow’, this would not have been the case. Though they provide no sources for their account, it seems largely to depend on Hughes’s poem ‘The Inscription’. The biographers mention ‘The Inscription’ in the previous paragraph, but by failing to mention it again here, the impression is that they are presenting somebody’s unverifiable anecdote. The simile about the bullet appears to come from Hughes, though in the poem he builds the figurative language slowly, so that it is contextualized; thereby he avoids the melodrama that affects the biograph­ ers’ account. Picking up the ‘Resurrected’ book ‘That she had ripped to rags when happiness | Was invulnerable’ and ‘Wondering, with unbelieving fingers’, the Plath character ‘opened it. She read the inscription. She

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closed it | Like the running animal that receives | The fatal bullet without a faltering check | In its stride’.56 ‘The Inscription’ comes late in Birthday Letters. The poems that precede it are spoken to Plath in the second person, and often Hughes uses the first person plural ‘we’ to express their closeness  – a closeness that persists even at moments of difficulty. ‘The Inscription’ breaks this rule, and speaks about Plath in the third person, thereby capturing the sadness of the rupture between them, and her new separateness from her husband and marriage. And yet, even in the third person, the poem does not lose imaginative sympathy and respect for the Plath it depicts. This coexists with distance and opposition. In fact, Hughes’s use of the bullet simile, measured and controlled, expresses a kind of wonder and admiration at her external composure when sustaining a terrible blow. All of this goes missing in the biographers’ compressed third-person simile, in which Plath seems brutally likened to an animal as the bullet strikes her, and becomes pure victim. In Hughes’s poem, the animal analogy is used to express Plath’s controlled response to the shock of the inscription: the fact that, despite her intense hurt, she does not falter. There is a great deal of withholding of information in the passage from A Lover of Unreason, partly for the sake of dramatic effect, but also possibly because the biographers either do not recognize or do not want to foreground the slippery nature of their source material. Does the inscribed book still exist? If so, where is it? And what does the inscription say? Why do the biographers not tell us? Is it because Hughes does not tell us in the poem? Hughes himself emphasizes the uncertain and partial nature of memory throughout Birthday Letters, something the biographers do not appear to recognize when they treat imaginative literature – in this case poetry – as documentary source material. Chapter eleven of A Lover of Unreason concludes with the declaration of Wevill’s pregnancy. Chapter twelve opens with Dr Horder bending over Plath’s dead body. The death itself happens somewhere between the two. The message of this structure is that after seeing the inscription nothing else happened to Plath until she died. Is the absence of this death right? There can be no witnesses to it, no testimony beyond a pathology report or a pornographic speculation that attempts to excite response in the viewer or reader. It is perhaps one of the most un-representable of events. Elisabeth Gray’s Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath forced me to re-evaluate my assumptions about depicting Plath’s death, as well as the ethics of such a representation:

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Loosely based on Plath’s last moments, Esther Greenwood is a published poet driven to despair by an unhappy childhood, unappreciative parents, the genius of her husband, Ned Pews(!), and his philandering. Her last ten seconds of hallucinatory madness are depicted on stage as she discusses her life with the talking oven in which she has recently placed her head, and provides the voices for a [sic] expertly shot silent film, in which most of the action takes place.57

The publicity leaflet’s description seems to promise a lowness of humour that, with cruel and jokey lightheartedness, makes fun of Plath’s death. The play’s first line is ‘Wait. I’m not done yet’, as Esther pulls her head from the oven and begins to talk to it, and to the audience, whom she addresses during what becomes a darkly funny 1950s cookery show of her life, The Better Tomes and Garden Show. Despite the promotional material, the play itself is the product of intelligent, informed writing, of a real engagement with Plath’s thinking and with the period in which she lived. Gray names her protagonist ‘Esther Greenwood’, thereby linking her to The Bell Jar and also suggesting that she has envisaged the novel’s heroine some ten years on. It might be argued, though, that this is a mere device to dodge any accusation that Gray is directly depicting Plath. Recall that phrase, ‘loosely based on Plath’s last moments’, in the publicity leaflet. The naming, and the allusions to The Bell Jar, are at the very least distancing devices akin to those used by the Lahire trilogy and Hanna/Simmons animation. Unlike the heroine’s name, ‘Ned Pews’ makes no connection to The Bell Jar, and is clearly meant to evoke Ted Hughes. Obviously, this is partly a joke. But the rhyme is also an instance of near-mimetics, of resemblance but not equivalence: a version of the disclaimer’s affirmation of being both ‘true’ and a ‘work of the imagination’ at once. Another way the play circumvents the problem of ‘fact’ rests in its duplication of the unreliable narrative perspective of Plath’s novel; ‘crazy people’ who are about to kill themselves need not be trustworthy. What the play also seems to take from Plath, or respects in her, is a complicated combination of humour, sadness and darkness, and in particular the connection of these things to the deadliness of domesticity.58 Barbara Mossberg quoted from ‘Words heard, by accident, over the phone’ in a discussion that she led after a performance of the play on 25 October 2007. The black domestic humour of the line, ‘Oh God, how shall I ever clean the phone table?’,59 is striking. This is the response of the poem’s speaker to the suspicious voice of a woman – probably her husband’s lover – on the telephone, a voice that she characterizes as ‘muddy’, as dirty. Plath’s interest in the domestic is everywhere.60 Cancelled lines

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in ‘Child’61 reveal Plath’s multiple attempts to work the word ‘dishcloths’ into the poem. She rightly abandoned the word on this occasion. Imagine ‘Not this troublous | Wringing of dishcloths’ instead of ‘Not this troublous | Wringing of hands’.62 But the dishcloths are yet more evidence of Plath’s interest in the domestic. As in Plath’s 1962 poem, ‘The Detective’, the woman’s body can become a household implement or tool.63 The ­woman’s hands literally can become dishcloths. We see Plath’s blackly humorous conviction that the domestic is important, but dangerous and even deadly, and that it must be part of the fabric of any sustained imaginative response to the world. This is something that Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath seems to recognize. Gray also recognizes the need to give the audience a context for the death that must come at the end, so that by the time it actually occurs they are made to grieve for the heroine; this is because Wish I Had A Sylvia Plath has evoked some of the complexity and wonder of its heroine’s life. Yet, is it a kind of pornography to make the audience watch a faked version of a fake Plath’s death – and grieve through it? Everything that comes before these moments is tragic-comic.64 But, however funny Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath may be, the tears on the faces of many members of the audience suggest that its ending is devastating, even if unsurprising. What are the ethics in portraying this death? In showing the audience the body on screen, looking beautiful and comfortable and happy as she rests her head on a pillow, and on stage, slumped in the oven as the timer finally goes off to signal ‘Done’? In the theatre, the body on the stage is a three-dimensional physical presence that it can never be in purely textual representations of Plath, or even cinematic depictions. The timer lets the audience know absolutely that the death has finally occurred, and bookends the play’s first line of ‘Wait. I’m not done yet’, a finish few ­writers could resist. Is it aiming to elicit a combination of consolation (the head on the comfy pillow, once the eyes stop flickering) and horrified awareness (the body in the oven)? One member of the audience asked whether this was to make comedy of Plath’s death, and if this could possibly be right. This question seems very important, but the answer is not easy. If that timer were the last thing that the audience sees or hears in the play, the answer would have to be:  yes, in the end the play makes a joke of the heroine’s death. What the audience sees and hears continues, however, after the ding of the timer. The credits show a film of Esther with her toddler daughter in her arms, laughing and dancing and waving to whoever is shooting this home movie-like footage. It is plausible to imagine that

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the figure behind the camera is Ned Pews. This footage is certainly what heightened my own emotional response. But how does Gray mean the audience to read this home movie of the mother and child? As a reminder of an important part of how Esther lived her life? As evidence that the life and marriage were not entirely unhappy? As a riposte to those who criticize Plath for killing herself and thereby leaving her young children,65 whose beauty and preciousness she speaks so tenderly of a few days before she dies;66 so that Gray reminds the audience that Plath loved them? Or should the home movie images be read as Esther’s absolute last thought? Whatever the answer, I would like to imagine that Plath’s last thought was a similar one. But, when I saw the play (both of Plath’s children were alive then), I did not like to imagine their seeing it, and hoped they never would. This is not a thought I had had before, about anything depicting Plath. It was particularly odd to have it when I admired so very much about Gray’s writing and production. Such a provocative and contradictory admission, and one that is so personal, may be the most obvious, and yet unspeakable, thing for a Plath scholar to admit. Because the implication, here, if Plath is fictionalized across all genres, is that literary critics, like tabloid journalists, as well as novelists, playwrights and poets, can have an effect on real people with their words. Plath herself recognizes the circle that consumes celebrity melodrama, and herself as part of it:  ‘Liz Taylor is getting Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds who appears cherubic, round-faced, wronged, in pincurls and houserobe – Mike Todd barely cold. How odd these events affect one so. Why? Analogies?’67 Plath is unlikely, however, to have foreseen the full extent of her transformation from audience to star: her own part in such a story, and its potential fascination not just for readers but also its impact on those who knew her. Frieda Hughes writes, My mother’s poems cannot be crammed into the mouths of actors in any filmic reinvention of her story in the expectation that they can breathe life into her again, any more than literary fictionalisation of my mother’s life – as if ­writing straight fiction would not get the writer enough notice (or any notice at all) – achieves any purpose other than to parody the life she actually lived. Since she died my mother has been dissected, analysed, reinterpreted, reinvented, ­fictionalised, and in some cases completely fabricated.68

The passage is noteworthy not just because it addresses the ethics of fictionalizing – of turning real lives into consumer products – that has been central to this essay, but because of the particular writer’s perspective. ‘My

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mother’, says Frieda Hughes, the only person still alive who can call Plath this and claim her as this. There is personal anger here, in Hughes’s contempt for fictionalizing, those who do it and their questionable motives.69 To engage in this activity, the last sentence suggests, is to take a liberty, to behave intrusively, looking too closely where strangers have no right. It is to perpetuate inaccuracies that to critics and scholars may present a set of stimulating intellectual and theoretical questions, but to Plath’s daughter are material and painful. However much we talk about the slippery nature of representation or the complexity of the mimetic, in Plath’s own work and in work that tries to fictionalize her, people do still get hurt. However much we circle around it, that is what happens when we write about ‘real’ people. Perhaps this activity cannot and should not be avoided, but, at the very least, as much care as possible should be taken when engaging in it, and the admission of possible damage made. No t e s 1 John Brownlow, Sylvia:  The Shooting Script (New York:  Newmarket Press, 2003), p. vi. 2 David Jenkins entitled his review ‘Gwyneth in Love’, Daily Telegraph, (12 Jan. 2004), suggesting that the superstar actress was more important than Sylvia’s subject matter. 3 Suzie Hanna, Post-screening talk, Oxford Plath Symposium, Oct. 2007. 4 Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 128. 5 Ted Hughes, Letter to the Forward Poetry Prize judges (1998). Cited in Sarah Churchwell, ‘Secrets and Lies: Plath, Privacy, Publication and Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters’, Contemporary Literature, 42 (Spring, 2001): 102. 6 www.sylviaplathforum.com/poems.html. 7 Bert Almon, Review of After Ted and Sylvia, Canadian Literature, 184 (Spring 2005): 145–146. 8 See Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London:  Virago Press, 1991), p. xi. 9 Churchwell, ‘Secrets and Lies’, p. 103. 10 Churchwell, ‘Secrets and Lies’, p. 116. 11 Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London:  Faber and Faber, 2007), p. 560 (22 Apr. 1989). 12 This discussion of Wintering, The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted and Sylvia has its ancestry in Tracy Brain, ‘Dangerous Confessions: The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically’, in Jo Gill (ed.), Modern Confessional Writing (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 22–26. 13 Sandra Gilbert, ‘Dead Poet’s Society’, Women’s Review of Books (Mar. 2003).

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14 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 96. 15 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, p. 54. 16 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, p. 96. 17 Emma Tennant, The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (Edinburgh:  Mainstream Publishing, 2001), p. 7. 18 See, for instance, Paul Alexander, Rough Magic (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991) and Ronald Hayman, The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (New York, Birth Lane Press, 1991). 19 For examples of weak parodies, see chs. 62 and 63 of Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s Poison (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006) and ch.13 of Robert Anderson’s Little Fugue (New York, Ballantine Books, 2005). 20 Tennant, The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted, p. 112. 21 Tennant, The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted, p. 146. 22 Tennant, The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted, p. 146. 23 Daily Telegraph (2 June 2001). 24 Tennant, The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted, p. 149. 25 For instance, using Plath’s 1962 daily calendar (SPC), full of the details of her shopping and cooking. 26 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, p. 90. 27 Sylvia, directed by Christine Jeffs (USA: 2003). 28 Brownlow, Sylvia, p. vii. 29 Brownlow, Sylvia, p. vi. 30 One tagline for Sylvia reads, ‘Life was too small to contain her’. http://www. sylviamovie.com/. 31 See, for instance, Heather Neill, ‘The Fire that Still Burns after Sylvia’, Times Educational Supplement (30 Jan. 1998): 12 and John Carey, ‘Fatal Attraction’, Sunday Times, Books Section (25 Jan. 1998): 1–2. 32 Cited in Brownlow, Sylvia, pp. 133–134. 33 Hughes wins the prize for The Hawk in the Rain before his wedding to Plath rather than after, and their arrival in America is misdated. These errors do not occur in the screenplay (see Brownlow, Sylvia, pp. 43–45); perhaps the post-production editors or continuity advisors did not realize the impact of moving scenes around when dealing with biography. 34 SPC. 35 LH, pp. 379, 380. 36 LH, p. 374. 37 CP, p. 157. 38 Kate Moses, Wintering (London: Sceptre, 2003), p. 70. 39 See, for instance, Alexander, Rough Magic, pp. 276–277 and Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, A Lover of Unreason:  The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill (London: Robson Books, 2006), pp. 86–94. 40 Tennant, The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted, p. 115. 41 Tom Payne, ‘Her Words Prophesy Her Own Suffering’, Daily Telegraph (22 Jan. 2003). 42 Philip Hensher, ‘Ted or Sylvia: Who Was Better?’, Daily Telegraph (20 Jan. 2004).

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43 See the excerpts from reviews by Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, George Steiner and Al Alvarez (inside front cover), Ariel, 1st English edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1965). 4 4 See Richard Brooks and John Elliott, ‘Plath’s Daughter Hits at BBC Drama’, Sunday Times (2 Feb. 2003): 7. 45 Sylvia, dir. Jeffs. 46 LH, p. 468. 47 Sylvia, dir. Jeffs. 48 Sylvia, dir. Jeffs. 49 Al Alvarez, ‘Ted, Sylvia and Me’, Observer, Review Section (4 Jan. 2004): 2. 50 Alvarez, ‘Ted, Sylvia and Me’, 2. 51 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 9. 52 Alexander, Rough Magic, p. 282. 53 Hayman, The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, p. 171. 54 Koren and Negev, A Lover of Unreason, p. 115. 55 Koren and Negev, A Lover of Unreason, p. 114. 56 BL, pp. 172–173. 57 Publicity leaflet from Oct. 2007 production of Wish I Had A Sylvia Plath. 58 Plath wondered whether Anne Sexton’s grant really freed her from the ‘drudge of housework’. Karen Kukil, ‘Sylvia Plath’s Women and Poetry’. Paper given at the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium, 27 Oct. 2007, Oxford University. 59 CP, p. 202. 60 In Lahire’s Lady Lazarus we hear Plath’s own voice asserting, ‘the neatness, the wonderful tidiness that you see everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface’. The recording was made during Plath’s Oct. 1962 interview with Peter Orr: Sylvia Plath, Plath Reads Plath (Cambridge, Mass.: Credo Records, 1975). 61 Sylvia Plath, Child:  A Poem (Exeter:  Rougemont Press, 1971). This limited edition reproduces Plath’s manuscript copy of the poem, with revisions, as well as the typescript. 62 CP, p. 265. 63 ‘The fingers were tamping a woman into a wall, || A body into a pipe’ (CP, p. 208). And then, ‘There is no body in the house at all. | There is the smell of polish, there are plush carpets’ (CP, p. 209), as if the woman has vanished into the house itself, into the cleaning fluids and flooring materials. 64 See, for instance, the parody of Pews and Esther causing violence and havoc when they meet at a literary party (as opposed to the weak and humourless version the film Sylvia gives us), which has its basis in Journals, pp. 210–212 and Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, pp. 87–88. 65 Anne Stevenson, for instance, asserts that to her it seemed an ‘insoluble’ problem that Plath was able to take her own life and leave her two children. Stevenson made this comment in an episode of the television series Bookmark entitled Lifers: The Rise and Rise of the Literary Biographer (BBC2, 9 Mar. 1996).

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66 SPC, Plath to Marcia Brown Plumer, 4 Feb. 1963. 67 Journals, p. 420 (11 Sept. 1958). 68 Frieda Hughes, Foreword to Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition (London: Faber, 2004), p. 6. 69 One of Frieda Hughes’s poetic responses to this subject is ‘Readers’: Wooroloo (New York:  HarperFlamingo, 1998), pp. 61–62. One of Ted Hughes’s is ‘The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother’, where the speaker tells his children, ‘Protect her | And they will tear you down | As if you were more her.’ BL, p. 195.

ch apter 11

Primary representations: three artists respond to Sylvia Plath

Adolescent Plath: The Girl Who Would Be God Suzie Hanna Pl a y i ng at G od The inspiration for creating a short mixed-media film entitled The Girl Who Would Be God was found in Sylvia Plath’s diary entry of 13 November 1949. Her vivid descriptions of her domestic environment, and in particular the self-conscious sense of her emerging adult identity on the threshold between childhood and womanhood, seemed to contain an intrinsically filmic narrative: an immediate sense of mise en scène with a strong protagonist. The passage overflows with a sense of Plath’s emerging being; a young ‘Scarlett O’Hara’ debutante, full to the brim with self, blissful in her middle teenage years and wanting to retain this.1 Plath’s adolescent narrative constructs the figure of a girl who is selfconsciously writing in her room. It describes her view of the autumnal landscape framing an idyllic house (Fig. 2). In the background as she types are reminders of her recent romantic memories; these include the images of boyfriends that she has pinned up on her wall and a cardboard theatre that sits on her desk (Fig. 3). Casting herself as the protagonist in her own self-devised drama, the adolescent Plath is sentimental about her ebbing childhood and fearful of the future, including the possibility of marriage; at the same time she mines the power of her own enormous creative and intellectual potential. Her excited and elastic sense of possibility is palpable:  aged seventeen, she is entertaining complex thoughts about the development of her own emerging adult narrative and her powers of self-direction. Casting herself as auteur, she self-consciously plays at being God. She dares to articulate, ‘I want, I think, to be omniscient – and a bit insane,’ and goes as far as admitting, ‘ I think I would like to call myself “The girl who wanted to be God”.’2 203

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Figure 2.  ‘Autumn Leaves with House’ Still by Suzie Hanna from The Girl Who Would Be God (2007).

Figure 3.  ‘Typing’ Still by Suzie Hanna from The Girl Who Would Be God (2007).

Portraying herself as materialistic and vain, passionate and potent, a uniquely articulate teenager, the journal passage exudes joy for the sheer fact of her seventeen-year-old self. She extends this self-celebration  – ‘I have a terrible egotism. I love my flesh, my face, my limbs with overwhelming devotion’  – and, despite finding some physical imperfections in her own reflection, she continues to ‘pose and prink before the mirror, seeming more and more how lovely I am’.3

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Plath’s delight in her own egotistical self and its capacities is resonant with the swaggering ego of earlier American romantic writing heard in Emerson’s ‘The American Scholar’ address:  ‘The world, this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult.’4 Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ celebrates his self-love in a similar vein: ‘I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious, | Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy.’5 The film develops along these themes of enthusiastic love of self and expressive vanity; a celebration of a young girl devising her own world. Although the film points towards Plath as the protagonist, The Girl Who Would Be God is not a direct representation of the teenage Plath, but a version of her: a response to the sights and sounds emanating from her teenage diaries, journals and art work. The film’s protagonist is thus both Plath and not Plath; a stab at authenticity but also a deliberately staged, creatively devised understudy, commenting on the ‘real thing’. T h e e m e rg i ng de bu ta n t e My choice of actress for playing the part of the girl was influenced by Plath’s idealized tempera painting of Snow White6 rather than her numerous self-portraits. It is not the physical outward resemblance of Plath who is represented here, but a version of her fantasy self. The film plays with ideas of scale inspired by Plath’s own art work. The girl becomes ‘Stella’, her own dark-haired paper doll and self-fantasy prototype trying on a selection of the vast catalogue of miniature fashions she had invented for herself. Young Plath’s obsessive creation of tiny paper dolls and their exquisite clothes (Fig. 4) could be also be seen as another version of her ‘playing God’: ordering reality, describing and controlling a version of the world through cut-out silhouettes and characters. This vision of Plath directing her own life in miniature led to the design of a toy theatre peopled by couples dancing at a ball. At the centre of the scene Cinderella is holding out her paper heart towards an imagined partner (Fig. 5). Plath’s juvenile poem, ‘Cinderella’ seemed entirely relevant to the emerging themes of the film. These included a beautiful well-dressed girl on the verge of womanhood and the discovery of a potential ‘prince’ among the men she has already met. Plath’s poem reads like a version of Disney’s Cinderella (1950), a film that appeared two years before the publication of her poem in Christian Science Monitor: Plath’s prince ‘leans to the girl in

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Figure 4.  ‘Blue Dress’ Still by Suzie Hanna from The Girl Who Would Be God (2007).

scarlet heels’ and her hair flares ‘in a fan of silver as the rondo slows’. But the film attempts both to embrace and to subvert the Cinderella story. Plath’s palpable anxiety about the effects of time and her stated fear of losing happiness are mirrored in the sound of the ‘caustic ticking of the clock’,7 bringing reality back into sharp focus when playtime is up and real womanhood begins to kick in. But here the roles are reversed:  the prince is frozen in time and she takes him home as a keepsake for her toy theatre. The castle is an image frequently deployed in Plath’s early poems, paintings and drawings, and this fairy-tale environment was chosen as the location of the ball, where the girl emerges as if rehearsing for womanhood. In an early poem, ‘Fireside Reveries’ (1947), she sees ‘gold castles in the air’ and her ‘thoughts to shining fame aspire’.8

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Figure 5.  ‘Toy Theatre’ Still by Suzie Hanna from The Girl Who Would Be God (2007).

The question she poses in the journal entry, ‘Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be?’ led to the development of a tightrope sequence: a young girl crossing a threshold from one stage of life to another; ‘stepping out’, literally, and figuratively, into the world outside her domestic family environment, and testing her balance between the end of girlhood and the beginning of womanhood. The imagery for the tightrope walk was inspired by Plath’s juvenile poetry, in particular ‘Aerialist’. In this poem she continues to create a selfstaged performing identity, and, in a trance, leaves her bedroom for a carnival scene where she becomes the centre of the crowd’s attention, as ‘dream takes her body from bed to strict tryouts in tightrope acrobatics’.9 Magazines, found image sources, copying and cutting out were central to Plath’s development as a young artist, and the film imitates these aspects of her own expression. The style is literally a collage of ‘cut-outs’, and so even the live-action footage of the actress has been treated as a series of stills, each pose ‘cut out’ from the original blue background and

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Figure 6.  ‘Castle Tightrope’ Still by Suzie Hanna from The Girl Who Would Be God (2007).

placed in the virtual bedroom through the use of digital compositing techniques. In the 13 November diary entry Plath lists her immediate ­material world  – her desk, her bookcases, the pictures pinned up above her bureau – and she conveys the comfort that is given by her well-ordered surroundings. Clearly, she liked to be in charge of her possessions as well as her thoughts. But in the film the solid materiality of the bedroom environment is dissipated. As if inhabited by a poltergeist, the bedroom furniture moves to and fro, indicative of uncertain teenage volition. Dressed in her grown-up Cinderella red shoes, she hurries to her appointment at the party in the world beyond the window. The tightrope leads her through a landscape of painted pine trees and into a watercolour illustration of a castle (Fig. 6). Plath was drawn to the romantic landscapes of fairytales, a response, perhaps, to her early exposure to Grimm’s fairytales and to other German fables, including memories of her mother playing and singing ‘Lorelei’, the song of the Rhine siren.10 The film’s castle reflects some of the Germanic and gothic illustration styles that Plath imitated in her early drawings from the 1940s, including the pencil drawing ‘Mermaid and moon’11 and the distant castle in her painting of Snow White.12 There are other direct visual references to some of Plath’s paintings and designs. At the beginning of the film, two blue birds fly away (Fig. 7).

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Figure 7.  ‘Two Blue Birds’ Still by Suzie Hanna from The Girl Who Would Be God (2007).

These are modelled on Plath’s illustration of two tiny exotic birds from a journal created when she was twelve years old; her own comment at the time: ‘soon I may grow wings (not angels)’.13 The young girl’s bedspread is based on one of Plath’s giraffe-themed repeating patterns,14 and the paper dresses are painted in close imitation of some of the outfits she designed for her cut-out paper dolls.15 As a child and teenager, Plath was persistently creative:  her juvenile writings, drawings, paintings, photographs, cut-outs, journals, scrapbooks and schoolbook pages crammed with words and images all point to evidence of a vital sensibility that delights in describing and giving shape to thoughts and experiences. The colour script for The Girl Who Would Be God (Fig. 8) encapsulates the multitude of ingredients from nature, fairy tales and everyday life that formed her romantic imagination. The film tries to capture this sense of perpetual creative impetus as the protagonist moves between one activity and another until finally she anoints herself with a paper crown: designated princess of her own paper realm (Fig. 9). T h e s ou n d wor l d The film’s sound world is inspired by Plath’s writings and illustrations of musical experiences and desires, by contemporaneous musical idioms and by descriptive uses of sound in Plath’s early poems; in particular, a

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Figure 8.  ‘Colour Script for The Girl Who Would Be God ’ Still by Suzie Hanna from The Girl Who Would Be God (2007).

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Figure 9.  ‘Princess’ Still by Suzie Hanna from The Girl Who Would Be God (2007).

text written by Plath in 1949 entitled ‘Place: A bedroom, Saturday night in June’: ‘The light is over your bed, and you sit propped up against the pillows reading and listening to music on the radio. The windows are open, and the breeze blows the curtains against the screen.’ This passage is the imaginative prompt for the realization of the interior of the teenage Plath’s bedroom; an interior theatre. The passage continues: ‘Across the cool dark come the complaining sounds of crickets chirping … you put the book down and let the music fill the big, empty places inside you. You think of all the boys and girls dancing together tonight, lilting, twirling to waltz tunes, always laughing.’16 The complex relationships between music and sound, adolescence, domesticity and dreams of adulthood described in these and other extracts provided a background to the development of the film’s soundtrack. The notion of music as both an academic practice (Plath’s descriptions of her viola and piano lessons) but also a social or familial activity

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(teenage dances on Saturday nights, singing with friends around the college piano, to the recollections of Plath’s mother singing German folk songs at the piano)17 to the very individual crafting of particular sounds within the juvenilia poems (the ‘caustic ticking of the clock’ of ‘Cinderella’)18 as well as early diary entries (the ‘complaining sounds of crickets’)19 informed the musical composition and sound design. In the late 1940s, Plath’s musical world could be characterized by her own musical practice along with her teenage interests in the popular music of the time. Her 1950 High School entry reads:  ‘Sylvia Plath:  Warm smile … Energetic worker … Co-editor of Bradford … Bumble Boogie piano special.’20 The film commences with a Debussy-inspired waltz duet for piano and cello, the reverberating wood of the cello echoing the image of trees in the autumn wind.21 Passing into the young woman’s bedroom, the mournful cello drops away to leave a domestic piano sound integrated with percussive beats of her fingers on typewriter keys (the staccato of the ‘caustic tick’ or the ‘chirping cricket’). As she selects princes for Cinderella in the toy theatre the melody starts up again, but this time it is played on a toy piano, reflecting her engagement in ‘childish’ fairy tales, and her mimicking of the miniature world. Again, percussion is provided by the girl’s activity, this time scissors on paper. Her soundscape is portrayed through use of Foley as the beat of her hand or her feet, and the rustle of paper or the movement of her dress. The childhood and teenage diary writings give few specific details of the popular music forms with which Plath is likely to have engaged, and refer to waltzes, songs, instruments associated with contemporaneous popular music (trumpets, saxophones) and vocal styles (‘the vocalist hums, husky, mournful … ’, ‘[the] melody is slow and haunting … “Some enchanted evening … you will find a stranger … you will hear him call you … across the crowded room … ”’).22 The film pays homage to Plath’s acquisitive appetite, as a magpie of synaesthetic experiences, for sense impressions. As the young female protagonist strides about her bedroom trying on the paper dresses, the sound of a full-sized piano returns, but accompanied by saxophone: bebop replaces the waltz. The same year, 1949, Charlie Parker was topping the bill playing bebop in New York at ‘Birdland’. This fractured melody creates a sonic equivalent to the shifting furniture and the general feeling of the girl’s temporary loss of control. Silence on the roof outside allows her a moment of decision, and the only sound is of her

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bare foot as she climbs onto her tightrope to cross the twilit landscape to join the wider world. The music for the folk dance is a traditional Irish melody, ‘Speed the Plough’ played on fiddle and banjo, using common style and instrumentation for contra dancing in New England. As the prince appears, this upbeat tune is replaced by a slow predatory tango suggesting a more exotic and adult dance to music that was popular with Plath’s parents’ generation – a sound that also foreshadows the predatory Constantine of The Bell Jar. The film is designed ultimately to celebrate that moment of joy and power Plath describes in her journal. The girl’s selection and rejection of potential princes as partners for the tiny paper Cinderella in her toy theatre, reflected later in her final act of ‘cutting out’ Prince Charming at the ball, shows that she is in charge and that her own desires are paramount. She may find a prince when she is ready, but not a moment before, and, unlike Cinderella, she has left her shoe outside on purpose.

Bodily imprints: a choreographic response to Sylvia Plath’s ‘poppy poems’ Kate Flatt (with Sally Bayley) A n e w a n d c om m i s s ion e d b ody In 2007, I was commissioned to create a choreographic response to Sylvia Plath’s Poppies in July (July 1962)23 and Poppies in October (October 1962).24 I undertook this commission with solo performer and dancer Natalia Thorn. Our work focused on creating passages of movement material that could be later structured with music for stage performance  – as it was, in the first instance, for a gala performance at the Oxford Playhouse in October 2007. This chapter will examine the process of creating a danced response to Plath’s poems. Dance is a medium expressed through the body that occurs as gesture and movement in space and time. Ephemeral in nature, dance operates

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moment to moment, and just as the experience of any moment is different from any other, depending upon the individual subject, so dance in performance lives equally in the moment of the performer’s attention and the viewer’s perception. Generating choreographic material is a heuristic process requiring improvisation, and my work particularly focuses on the dancer’s ability to inhabit and identify with a specific set of words or given images and articulate them through the body. In the solo dance referred to here, there is no literal translation of word for movement, but, instead, a translation into the medium of abstract gesture and dance. Elements of movement material can be understood as fragments of time and space gathered from the dance studio and then recorded in the muscle memory of the dancer’s body. The editing and structuring of these elements makes the material legible for the viewer and is the process through which the voice, purpose and identity of the choreographer become visible.25 With this in mind, Plath’s ‘poppy poems’ are ideal subjects for exploring the vagaries of translating poetic language into dance. Plath’s two poppy poems, ‘Poppies in July’ and ‘Poppies in October’ both hover around phenomenological experiences of the world – that is to say, the way in which the body records and receives mental impressions. ‘Poppies in July’ deals more directly with the experience of disembodiment; ‘little bloody skirts’ that cannot be ‘touched’. Plath’s poem suggests pure effect separated from form, shapes that ‘flicker’ but in fact only dress up something that is not there: the ‘skin of a mouth’ but not the mouth itself. A poem of fragmentary shapes, it lends itself well to my interest in creating a series of short movement phrases or sequences in response to verbal imagery. ‘Poppies in July’ hints at several bodies of imagery rather than any particular image, and what this piece of movement is principally interested in is the gap and tension between several spectral forms of imagery – bodies of imagery, as it were – and the inner life of the dancer’s body. It is from this point of tension and ambiguity that the choreography emerges. Crucially, my choreography does not anticipate the audience grasping the precise metaphors from which the material is drawn. In the structure and articulation of the abstract dance, the aim is to achieve legibility for the viewer who senses, perceives and responds  – and Plath’s poem seems to validate this process generously. As an example, ‘Poppies in July’ takes as its chief conceit the intangible nature of imagery; the fact that poetic imagery cannot be physically received but only hinted at through the senses, suggested in the lines: ‘There are fumes that I cannot touch’ and ‘You flicker. I cannot touch you’. In this sense, the poem validates the choreographer’s instinct to reconfigure in bodily form images whose

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significance and meaning is then handed over to the viewer. In other words, the choreographer and the dancer together pass on another body of imagery. G e t t i ng t h e r e The process of the making of this solo piece was one that involved intimate work between dancer and choreographer. The handling of a flow of living material developed from improvised tasks and movements becomes choreography once it is shaped into an entity to share with viewers. The rehearsals involved finding a journey for the movement material avoided the recognizable symmetry of classical ballet or other existing dance forms. I needed to focus strongly on Natalia’s technical facility towards balance and harmony, developed through her contemporary dance training. It can appear that the dancing body traces multiple paths of projected lines into threedimensional space, achieving a sense of both flow and suspension as it does so. A significant aspect of a dancer’s technical facility is the defiance of gravity and is a key factor in achieving an essential balance point from which the body can also fall. Both poppy poems express a disdain for inertia, and, indeed, the poems track the process of movement being halted by obstructing forms or principles. In ‘Poppies in July’, this is the ‘[d]ulling and stilling’ effects of opiates. In ‘Poppies in October’, inertia is translated into the noxious vapours of carbon monoxide emitted by rush hour traffic. In both cases, movement is threatened by a more noxious counter-flow: drugs seeping into the bloodstream and a poisonous flow of traffic. Exploring inertia, Natalia and I worked with the principle of balance, a key area of maintenance and control of every professional dancer in her daily training. A dancer is expected to be able to stay ‘on balance’ and this presents difficulty and challenge when prolonged (Fig. 10). These technical factors are a form of muscular wrestling with gravity and are not aimed at portraying emotion. Instead, the dancer is working with physical limits and technical demands that are in themselves innately expressive to the viewer. Moments when the dancer appears to be teetering off balance can give an impression of controlled instability and express physical vulnerability. These are occasions when balance is lost and regained as the dancer works against gravity to maintain equilibrium. To enhance this effect, I asked Natalia at one point to reach upward and backward towards the ‘sky’ before falling (Fig. 11). I then directed her to hold her arms high above her head as if suspended by an unseen force or as though

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Figure 10.  Dancer Natalia Thorn in Dance to Poppy Poems Oliver Lamford.

she were clinging to a wire above her. In this way she was able to generate an off-axis balance (Fig. 12). I applied a similar idea to the image of ‘the red heart blooms through her coat’ of ‘Poppies in October’, the poem’s central conceit of a heart concealed yet beating. Natalia translated this concealment into a visual revealment by generating a rhythmic pulsation with her arm and upper body, her hand pressed hard against her left ribs and her back turned to the viewer (Fig. 13). From ‘Poppies in July’ a movement sequence emerged as an imagined sensation of water falling from an upstretched arm and through the body via the torso and into one leg. Working closely with Plath’s imagery of liquid movement – the verbs ‘seep’ and ‘bleed’ – we generated a fluid but

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Figure 11.  Dancer Natalia Thorn in Dance to Poppy Poems Oliver Lamford.

weighted sequence of lyrical phrases one of which ended with a subtle and soft fall to the ground. The aim was to exploit the poem’s frustrated movement suggested by the present participle verbs, ‘dulling and stilling’. In physical terms, this was a process of giving gently in to gravity as Natalia fell to the ground, her control of the falling weight of her body creating the illusion of silk falling. At one point Natalia applied a more naturalistic gesture through motion of gathering fallen petals or shattered shards from the floor, a movement suggesting that, having dropped or discarded the preceding material, she was beginning again. Gestures continued to develop in rehearsal. One strong physical image emerged when Natalia’s hand reached out for something imaginary – a response to the images of ‘flames’ in ‘Poppies in July’ – while the other hand grabbed the wrist in order to control the searching hand by pulling it away from the action. In another rehearsed moment Natalia touched her mouth, first tracing her lips and then, pulling her hand away, she smudged her mouth as if in response to the ‘wrinkly and clear red’ quality of the petals and their dark centre (Fig. 14). The poem’s references to the mouth were applied to movement in different ways: in the sense of her mouth reaching for air as if to suggest a smothered cry, and in the poem’s reference to ‘stilling’, that is to say, the end of hard breathing that comes with the end of movement (Fig. 15).

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Figure 12.  Dancer Natalia Thorn in Dance to Poppy Poems Oliver Lamford.

Figure 13.  Dancer Natalia Thorn in Dance to Poppy Poems Oliver Lamford.

Following on from this, Natalia lay on her back and made a gesture with her arm. The fingers of one hand were poised as if holding a pen and then lowered to touch her throat at the point where the voice box is located (Fig. 16). This somewhat silhouetted image developed spontaneously at the end of a rehearsal after responding to the phrase ‘liquors … in

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Figure 14.  Dancer Natalia Thorn in Dance to Poppy Poems Oliver Lamford.

Figure 15.  Dancer Natalia Thorn in Dance to Poppy Poems Oliver Lamford.

this glass capsule’ (‘Poppies in July’). Movement was slowed down and taken outside of clock time to something more cinematic. Placed at the end of a longer sequence, it developed into a self-determined and discrete entity. The movement suggested that the dancer was administering

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Figure 16.  Dancer Natalia Thorn in Dance to Poppy Poems Oliver Lamford.

capsules to herself, an idea prompted by Plath’s reference to n ­ arcotics in her poem ‘Lesbos’ (1962):  ‘I’m doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.’26 During the choreographic process, we explored rhythms and played with time in response to a specific vocabulary. ‘Flicker’ and ‘flickering’, ‘palely’ and ‘flamily’ present a lightness of dynamics. In dance, a rhythm is felt and experienced by the viewer, encompassing aspects of time in human form without playing out an emotion as a conscious event or action. We explored contrasts between motion and stillness. At one point, Natalia walked slowly forward, lowering her crossed arms to her waist in a natural gesture. She stood still as if surveying a bleak landscape, the ‘forest of frost’ of ‘Poppies in October’: a context of chilly, icy stillness, life and movement stopped (Fig. 17). The structure of the dance was influenced by several factors. The accumulated material, made without music but now existing as coherent phrases, needed to find an order, a scheme that would have legibility in the theatre. The movement material developed needed to find a musical form, a process reflective of the poems’ own search for form. I selected piano material Plath herself played – Poulenc’s ‘Mouvements perpétuels’ and the ‘Poetic Tone Pictures’ by Grieg.27 After much listening, the latter seemed the more appropriate choice for Plath’s impressionistic poetry. I decided

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Figure 17.  Dancer Natalia Thorn in Dance to Poppy Poems Oliver Lamford.

to use two pieces:  Opus 3, the Allegro cantabile, and the Allegro, ma non troppo. Both reflected a dance-like quality, a workable structure that would enable a dialogue between dance and music without over-dictating a particular rhythm. The music also allowed space for the dance to exist and generate a life of its own. The dance followed the broader structure of the music, picking out themes and sections in order to encourage an unfolding dialogue between dancer and music. The Oxford Playhouse, the piece’s first performance site, houses a thrust stage, and a grand piano was added to the left hand side of it that provided the piece with a point of departure and return; a means of getting to and fro, and a hint at the imaginative process of what Plath, in a poem from the same period as the poppy poems calls ‘Getting There’ (1962).28 Neither a musician nor the dancer ever plays the piano, but, by sitting at it, she identifies herself as a player. Having instated the piano, the dance piece was given a determined beginning: the form of a young woman, dressed in a coat, seated at a piano, her back to the audience, listening to a recording of piano music that Plath had once played. With her back to us, she looks out upon the stage space and then moves into the dance as if drawn by the music to do so. At the break between the two pieces of music, she returns to the piano as if to remap herself within her own imagined body and the body of the

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Figure 18.  Dancer Natalia Thorn in Dance to Poppy Poems Oliver Lamford.

poems. While the intention was never directly to personify Plath herself, the dancer’s movement from the piano signifies a movement away from an imagined Plath towards a series of choreographic sites or points of imaginative interpretation of the poet’s life as well as the life of the poem. The body of the dancer moving through time and space suggests an imagined Plath but also an imagined body of imagery whose moving outlines do not always translate into fixed shapes or forms – a body that does not quite settle. Keen to conjure and remain true to Plath’s ‘flickering’ aesthetic, the creation of ‘Poppies’ involved a heuristic process of putting the material together in different orders; intuitively searching for a new form in relation to the music. ‘Poppies in October’ suggests a rapturous opening up of feeling:  ‘Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts’: an unfurling of form from feeling – by means of direct comparison: ‘even the sun-clouds’. Plath’s poem is about managing the weight of feeling – its bodily expression – a weight of feeling so charged it must be displaced elsewhere: away from the body, towards the vaporous, formless shape of the clouds. Gradually, the finished dance began to reflect the transient nature of the poems, and to harness the tension between form and something that refuses form: snippets that dissolve into something ‘colourless’, fragments

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that ‘seep’ out and away. When I came to review the digital recording of the working process, I found the choreographic fragments and reviewed the means by which they were generated. I also rediscovered lost choreographic moments never completely absorbed into the final ‘whole’: a ­series of ephemera of the dancing body’s memory, the oral fragments of an incomplete history (Fig. 18).

Stella Vine’s peanut-crunching Plath Sally Bayley C r e at ion m y t h s ‘Stella’ was the name the young Sylvia Plath gave her prototype handmade doll: a cut-out copy of the 1940s starlets whose shimmery images floodlit her childhood imagination and lingered long into her adulthood. A fan of the grand cinema dames, the young Plath lovingly pasted images of screen sirens from the ‘moving pictures’ into her teenage diaries, where the sultry figures of Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis and Hedy Lamarr conspired with the effervescent forms of Disney dolls, leaping sylph-like and ribbony from the screen.29 Fantasia was her first film (1939) and its saccharine palette seeps into her poetic juvenilia and childhood art.30 The pop artist Stella Vine shares a similar artistic genesis with the young Sylvia, and, as her artistic pseudonym suggests, she has been just as willingly and wittingly star-struck.31 Given her admiration of Plath’s poetry and prose, it is hardly surprising that the diva of modern lyrical poetry has found her way into Vine’s painterly galaxy, where she hangs among the iconic and fetishized faces of popular culture:  the familiar outlines of Kate Moss, Elizabeth Taylor and Princess Di, whose melodramas we ingratiatingly inhabit until we almost imagine them as part of our own. Stella’s portraits of Plath are icons of a gratuitously confessional popular culture: directly gazing and vulnerably naive figures easily consumed and readily seized upon  – a fact demonstrated by the czar of popular art, Charles Saatchi, who in 2004 purchased several of her images for his exhibition New Blood and in doing so anointed her with trendiness.32

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Her versions of Plath and of Plath with Hughes unashamedly simulate the myth of the Plath kingdom we are now all so familiar with:  the Fulbright golden girl who meets her Prince Charming and out of the painful dissonance of their unpoetic lives wrests some of the most extraordinary images of modern poetry. Stella’s portraits are as unabashedly two-dimensional as the Plath myth, wantonly collapsing Plath into a fairytale world where the truth is quite unwarranted and certainly unwanted. And yet, in Stella’s figurative world, people appear as though the truth were being told: as straight up and as instantly recognizable as the faces she represents. These are faces that gaze out upon the world in a state of chemical comatose: ‘doped and thick’ upon pain, as Plath put it in her poem ‘Lesbos’.33 What Stella captures so brilliantly is the saccharine aftertaste of having told a lot, the tacky sensation in the mouth of the confessor as she expels what she knows may be used against her; what editor and literary critic M. L. Rosenthal termed the ‘flaccid gush’ of confession.34 She renders Plath in the guileless stance of the adolescent girl who would rather not tell all but cannot help herself, whose confession is as involuntary as the sudden sprouting of her youthful concupiscence. But for those of the ‘peanutcrunching crowd’, as Plath put it in ‘Lady Lazarus’ (1961),35 who would appropriate her talent, all this showing and telling is very much desired, as Stella herself was quickly to learn, snatching herself back from the jaws of the Stuckist artist Charles Thomson,36 whose story, another popular culture creation myth, was that he had created Stella.37 Hers was a brave if personal resistance against a possessive male auteur who would render her as a figurative ingénue in an art universe gone mad on concepts – a project that threatened to turn Stella, with unacknowledged deadly irony, into pure conceptual icon: part of a fashionable outsider’s resistance in a wider war against artistic haute couture. Out of this very personal and nonetheless ideological struggle, a star was born. And so Stella emerged, as real and as genuinely ingénue as Lady Lazarus threatens to be. T e l l i ng Di s n e y ta l e s Like Plath, Stella grew up cherishing Disney heroines, and, as with Plath, ‘Snow White’ was one of her earliest girlhood idols.38 In Stella’s version of snow white in the forest (2003), the flattened corpse of the Disney heroine is carried through snowy woods by seven pall-bearers. Here are the dwarves in the wolves’ clothing of the art establishment – metonymically speaking, the Disney empire with all of its sparkling conceits – carrying

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Figure 19.  ted and sylvia (2004) Stella Vine.

their fetish object off like a flat-pack mail-order child bride. Stella’s heroine is a rouged and tiresome young thing, a cheap doll sealed off in a glass coffin: the equivalent of Esther Greenwood’s suburban bell jar turned out into a dark psychic wood. And all around the conceits of Disney cheer and sparkle – toadstools, fauns and butterflies – parade their synthetic, sugary innocence. But this is a confessional space, where violence punctuates the dazzle of the snow: in the black forms of the pall-bearers, the splodges of blood red against the snow, and in the brooding tones of the woods that hark back to Munch’s Scandinavian doom. Stella’s portraits of Plath are drawn from this world of folkish nightmare; they present a Brothers Grimm series of girlhood confidantes whose pale blue forget-me-not eyes, wide and innocent on the world, suddenly turn cool and icy in the face of an adult stare. Impenetrably glacial, they force the viewers back upon themselves. sylvia (2005) (front cover) and ted and sylvia (2004) (Fig. 19) are Pierrot dolls of emotional crisis, wound-up

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Figure 20.  sylvia cooker (2003) Stella Vine.

automatons mechanically performing the emotional circus tricks expected of them. Keeping their own company, they tell us little except what lies upon their exaggeratedly made-up and over-made faces; this is the perfunctorily messy stuff of emotional upset. The details are omitted as they are from any childlike recounting of reality. In Stella’s Plath kingdom there is all the appearance of gushing confession, but none of the reality, as we see in sylvia cooker (2003) (Fig. 20); and so it is that we enter the sticky realm of what Jean Baudrillard called ‘the hyperreal’39 – that wavering place between fantasy and reality – with a queasy sense that any semblance of reality has been written over, if there ever was one.

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As the overextended Plath myth has done, Stella has provided fodder for the appropriating machines of celebrity and fame. Much has been made of her in terms of her talent and her femininity, and, along with her art, she has been swept up into the ruthlessly consuming, insatiable black hole of pop art gimmickry. Hailed a pop princess since sweeping onto the public stage in the arms of Charles Saatchi, Stella nonetheless lives with all the ‘scars’ of the celebrity performance.40 Pitied and scorned in equal measure by the press for her job as a stripper, something she took on to pay bills, Stella resists the role of princess as much as any creative spirit and prefers to avoid the crowds.41 Like Plath’s poetic stripper, Lady Lazarus, whose narrative Stella has personally drawn much from,42 she delivers little real confession, except what is mediated through the projections and unreal expectations of her audience and rivals. And in a similar manner to Plath’s performing femme fatale, she spends most of the time off-stage, sending instead her painted forms ahead of her to rebuff the questions. T h e m i m e t ic de e p f r e e z e Vine learnt this game of confessional dodging as a teenager, and, alongside an immersion in Plath’s poetry, she initiated herself into the ritualistic practice of the mime artist:  a form of canny self-protection that equipped her with the careful, fastidious camouflage of a purely gestural art. Under the sway of her idol Marcel Marceau, the young Stella performed at Norwich’s Royal Theatre, taking refuge from a painful adolescence in the utterly non-expressionist, un-self-revelatory practice of the mime artist.43 Mime, the most primitive of dramatic expressions, conjures a deep freeze on feeling, and it is this glacial shutdown one confronts in Stella’s portraits. The most reductive form of artistic alchemy, mime converts the artist into pure symbol, and, in that sense, her sylvia (2005) and the later sylvia robin (2007),44 confer the most cruelly exaggerated of symbolic portraits. In the world of mime, emotion is held by the rhythmic contortions of ritualized movement. It offers a safe place where subjective feeling is squeezed out by an excessively symbolic sequence of movement that bears all the weight of meaning.45 sylvia (2005) is undoubtedly related to the frozen lines of mime: thickly gestured pain hides everything and anything particular; indeed, the entire painting is summed up by the single black tear running down a sculpturally frozen face – the cruellest perhaps because it is the cheapest

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reduction of feeling. And, in this sense, it is an easy pull. A similar gestural reduction makes up the installation piece, sylvia cooker (2003). Here, a mascara-bleary, bathing-suit-wearing Plath is painted on the oven door, smiling like a bright-cheeked rag doll. Paint bleeds from her red mouth as if a child has not been able to keep within the lines of a colouring book. Fuelled by the portion of pain funnelling through her own story, this is Stella playing dress-up with a Plath personality:  an effort at recuperating a childhood lost to adult cruelty through the enduring and extrovert nature of the Plathian mythos.46 A form of artistic relief that begins with sympathetic self-identifying, you could say this is a cheap trick, but it is not; it confirms the availability of Plath’s image and story for projections of femininity and female self-emergence that are as playful as they are knowing. And it confirms Plath as a storyboard surface for the projections of other self-realizing narratives. sylvia cooker is another insignia of the infamous stripteasing posture of ‘Lady Lazarus’: the show that is the anti-show, with nothing on view that is crisp or clean; a show that defies the virginal immaculacy of the crimped and perfect Disney doll of Plath’s own painted, juvenile version of Snow White. In Plath’s adolescent world nothing bleeds or blurs around the edges; the boundaries of the female silhouette are tight and taut, as even as the symmetry of her picture-perfect features. In the world of Disney, feeling is contained; and like the tightrope walker of Plath’s early poem, ‘Aerialist’,47 the performing debutante knows she must keep her nerve if she is to win her Prince Charming. Excessive feeling will only tip her off balance. Feeling, then, is the enemy of mimesis, and in Stella’s sylvia (2005) ­feeling has been packed in as hard and thick as the potatoes in the deepfreeze kitchen hell that Plath imagined in ‘Lesbos’; it is all turned into pure gesture and the hyperbole of the expressionist.48 This hyperbolic line was an important mark for the artistic experiments of the young Plath, and she carried its heightened drama of feeling from her early career in the visual arts to the mature poetry of her Ariel poems. E x pr e s s ion i s t ic g e s t u r e s A student of the expressionist school, the young Plath imbibed a sense of the direct primitivist intentions of the German expressionist poets and painters from her Smith College art classes and trips to the Boston and New York Museums of Modern Art.49 As she quickly learnt, the lines of

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Egon Schiele or Ludwig Kirchener do not hold feeling in abatement, but, rather, to direct and immediate attention. As Plath put it in her poem ‘The Thin People’ (1957), the expressionist refuses to ‘obliterate’ feeling for the sake of form and her emotional colour ‘persist[s]’ through ‘[g]rayness’ to ‘blues’ and then ‘reddens’, picking up emotional intensity until the world is made ‘clear’ by colour. Her journey towards expressionism began with early experiments with mask forms, as her ‘Triple Face Portrait’ (1951), completed at Smith College, dramatically demonstrates:  an exercise in colour, pattern and overlapping silhouettes, in which a reverse Janusheaded female face stares out from black eyes concealing hidden depths – a portrait indicative of her fascination with conflicted identities.50 A fan of the Disney artist Mary Blair, whose work included conceptual art for Fantasia, Stella uses colours that follow a similar palette to that deployed in Plath’s own art work and early poetry:  pastels, rose pink, greens and gold. A true colourist, Plath enjoyed working, in her late poetic palette, with the primary modal tensions between red, blue, black and white, an aesthetic she perfected in the title-poem of her Ariel collection (1963), where red dramatically unfurls across her canvas as a symbol of pure expressionism in motion: the driving red eye of dawn that is the mission statement of her expressionist’s creed.51 A bold visual artist, Plath loved colour antimonies. Stella’s paintings fashion similar garish tensions from within a seemingly innocent world of colour. Her portrait of Plath’s friend, Anne Sexton, anne (2008) (Fig. 21), is a fine example of this, while sylvia robin is the visual equivalent of a Hallmark card taken to its most grotesque conclusion. In the latter, the tacky pink of Disney’s Cinderella clashes cruelly with a livid green – the sort of green of which Mary Blair was particularly fond, and a tone that infiltrates the schema of the work she produced for Disney’s early 1950s films:  Alice, Peter Pan and Cinderella. It is the Disney palette turned against itself: cynical and distrusting. The red robin perched to the side of Plath is a jibe at the American tradition of Hallmark greetings with all its masked pretensions of festive goodwill. In a wider sense, the piece takes a swipe at a viewing audience duped by the vicarious pleasure of believing that any image that looks like Plath could be Plath: the entire representational faith. sylvia robin is a cynical Plath, the Plath of Ariel’s ‘Purdah’ (1961), by which time her early fascination with doubles, the subject of her Master’s thesis at Smith,52 has mushroomed into something more artistically complex: a veil of ‘concatenation’, the double bluff of representation of the several not-Is.53

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Figure 21.  anne (2008) Stella Vine.

No t-I Plath’s artistic development almost certainly involved a necessary breach from her husband, Ted Hughes, whose influence on her creative process has been well noted. Watershed poems such as ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ (1961) and the earlier ‘Mushrooms’ (1959), written at the writers’ colony at Yaddo, came christened with Hughes’s approval – as though Plath herself, in her own words, and carefully recorded in his ‘Notes’

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to her Collected Poems, had not yet determined what constituted ‘trash or genius’.54 The most essential ‘not-I’ was Hughes himself, her male counterpart and professional rival, as it had been for Stella with the Stuckist camp. Both artists shed marriage and men in order to gain control over their own artistic lives. In the process, they accrued much biographical interest; but the chief profit was artistic independence and self-evaluation. We see evidence of this parsing from the male predicate in Stella’s ted and sylvia (2004), where Plath, in the guise of a catatonic mannequin, turns away from the canvas shop front, thereby avoiding the controversy of her audience and that of her partner. Ted, her primary audience member and first line of reception, hovers on the right hand side of the canvas in the louche posture of an unsatisfactory boyfriend. One of the callow men Esther Greenwood takes up with in The Bell Jar, he hangs about Plath like an undeveloped ‘Mills & Boon’ character; he is anything but promising marriage material. Meanwhile, all the knowledge and knowingness reside in Plath’s face. There is something of the female Bildungsroman heroine in Stella’s painting; of one who has left childhood innocence well behind, and, with it, the two-dimensional offerings of the Disney Prince Charming. There is a dramatic unveiling to this painting of relational failure; a version of the stagey paparazzi-snapped compositions of Charles and Di’s unhappy bifurcation, designed to draw simpers. sylvia (2008) (back cover) has something of the wide-eyed innocence and stiff vulnerability of the young Diana Spencer in early media photographs of the future Princess of Wales. ted (2004) is the end point of this star-crossed narrative, in which a Mills & Boon-style male appears beaten and bleeding in a corner, pulped by the weight of Plath’s glacial tears melting from her eyes; behind him, the graffiti statement, ‘Daddy, I have had to kill you’, is scrawled upon a wall. It is playground tragedy but also a ruined fairytale. And it is the tragic telos: that in the search for the ‘not-I’, others always have to go. It is the beginning of putting one’s self right, an adjustment that starts with the weight of another’s tears. We are reminded of King Lear and Oedipus and all the mythology of gory seeing and saying that Plath’s poetry attaches itself to; the ‘fluent’ rhetoric of visual sensibility heard in her poem ‘The Eye-mote’ (1959): that painful moment when the confounding diminishments of the past sear their way into the present, claiming them both for the darkness of experience. ‘What I want back is what I was | Before the bed, before the knife’, says Plath’s speaker. Experience leaves you blind to the past, and

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at the most searing moment of first impact, the point when the splinter needles through the eye, it renders you blind to the present.55 To make light of these diminishments, the artist turns to the more pleasurable ‘fantasia’56 of play-acting; the performative salve of the artist. In order to duck the knife and its splintering devices, the artist rents for herself other forms: other pin-ups and cut-outs, other pseudonyms, more room to move. Here, Sylvias and Stellas flirt promiscuously around the edges of scored lines, beyond the prototype and its hyperbolic sense of reality, towards a place and time gone out of its representational mind, where nothing and no one is accountable, and where the desire to play is everything. No t e s 1 Sylvia Plath, cited in Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley (eds.), Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 70. 2 LH, p. 40. 3 PM II, Box 7, Journal entry, 13 Nov. 1949, Diaries and Calendars, 1944–1957. 4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The American Scholar Address’ (1837), Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Harvard, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 59. 5 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia, Pa.: David McKay, 1900), p. 56. 6 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, plate 6. 7 CP, pp. 303–304. 8 PM II, Box 14, Folder 8. 9 CP, p. 331. 10 CP, p. 249. 11 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, illus. 4. 12 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, plate 6. 13 PM II, Box 7, Folder 1. 14 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, plate 27. 15 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, plate 15. 16 PM II, Box 10, Folder 16. 17 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, p. 8. 18 CP, p. 304. 19 PM II, Box 10, Folder 16. 20 PM II, Box 10, Folder 4. 21 Plath’s own collection of solo piano music books is recorded in the archive at the Lilly Library, and includes Debussy, ‘La Fille aux cheveux de lin’, Poulenc, ‘Mouvements perpétuels’ and Grieg, ‘Poetic Tone Pictures’. 22 PM II, Box 10, Folder 16. 23 CP, p. 203. 24 CP, p. 240.

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25 Kate Flatt and Susan Melrose, ‘Finding  – and Owning  – a Voice: Choreographic Signature and Intellectual Property in Collaborative Theatre Practices’, Dance Theatre Journal, 22/2 (2007): 41. 26 CP, p. 228. 27 SPC, Oversize Folder, 825 (memorabilia, sheet music). 28 CP, pp. 247–248. 29 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, p. 71. 30 I am indebted to Kathleen Connors for pointing this out to me in an email correspondence (10 Aug. 2005). 31 ‘Stella’, meaning, in zoological terms, ‘a star-shaped projection on the ­surface of a coralline’ (OED). 32 Interview with Stella Vine, conducted by Sally Bayley, 16 Dec. 2008. 33 CP, p. 229. 34 M. L. Rosenthal, ‘Poetry as Confession’, Nation, 190 (1959):  154–155 and ‘Introduction’, Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 15–17. 35 CP, p. 246. 36 Stuckist art declares itself to be ‘Against conceptualism, hedonism and the cult of the ego-artist’, and pronounces figurative art the only authentic form of artistic representation. Stuckism was founded by Charles Thomson and Billy Childish. See www.stuckism.com/. 37 Interview with Stella Vine, 16 Dec. 2008. 38 Plath painted a series of Disney-inspired portraits, including ‘Snow White’, 1944–1947. Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, plate 6. 39 Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988), p. 27. 40 CP, p. 246. 41 Interview with Stella Vine, 16 Dec. 2008. 42 Stella chose to perform ‘Lady Lazarus’ in the Purcell Room at the Royal Festival Hall, London as part of an evening of performances and discussion of Plath’s work (Dec. 2007). 43 Interview with Stella Vine, 16 Dec. 2008. 4 4 Created for the 75th Year Sylvia Plath Symposium, Oxford University (Oct. 2007) and later shown at the Royal Festival Hall. The painting was destroyed by Stella because she wasn’t happy with it as a piece of art. 45 Irene Mawer, The Art of Mime: Its History and Technique in Education and the Theatre (London: Methuen, 1932), p. 20. 46 Interview with Stella Vine, 16 Dec. 2008. 47 CP, pp. 331–332. 48 CP, p. 229. 49 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, p. 27. 50 Connors and Bayley, Eye Rhymes, p. 37. 51 CP, p. 240. 52 Journals, pp. 305, 308. 53 CP, p. 243. 54 Ted Hughes, ‘Notes on Poems 1956–1963’, CP, p. 289.

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55 CP, p. 109. 56 ‘Fantasia’ is the word Ted Hughes uses in a letter to The Guardian (20 Apr. 1989) to describe the manufacture of myth around Plath’s life. See Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London:  Faber and Faber, 2007), p. 554.

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Index

Alexander, Paul Edge (play), 183 Rough Magic, 191–192, 193 Almon, Ben Review of After Ted and Sylvia, 185 Alvarez, Al ‘Ted, Sylvia and Me’, 190–191 Anderson, Robert Little Fugue, 183 Arendt, Hannah Eichmann in Jerusalem, 79 Auden, W. H., 114 Axelrod, Steven Gould Sylvia Plath, 17, 22 ‘The Poetry of Sylvia Plath’, 2 Bal, Mieke ‘Light Writing’, 36 Barthes, Roland Camera Lucida, 37 Baskin, Leonard, 167, 170, 172 Batchelor, David and Jacqueline Lichtenstein Chromophobia, 111, 118, 123 Baudrillard, Jean America, 226 Bayley, Sally ‘The Performance Art of Sylvia Plath and Tracey Emin’, 16 Bayley, Sally and Kathleen Connors Eye Rhymes, 19–20, 93, 110–111 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 100, 102 Bell, Clive Art, 98 Bere, Carol ‘Complicated with Old Ghosts’, 168–169 Bergman, Ingmar Cries and Whispers (film), 172–174 Beuscher, Ruth, 56–57, 141 Bishop, Elizabeth, 28 ‘In the Village’, 15

‘One Art’, 15 review of Letters Home, 13–15 Blake, William, 92 Blanchot, Maurice The Writing of Disaster, 82 Bookmark (Lifers, The Rise and Rise of the Literary Biographer), 184 Bowlby, John Loss, 70 Bowman, Catherine The Plath Cabinet, 185 Brain, Tracy The Other Sylvia Plath, 177 ‘Unstable Manuscripts’, 19 Britzolakis, Christina Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, 1, 18–19, 70–71, 94 Bronfen, Elisabeth Sylvia Plath, 7 Brooks, Cleanth The Well-Wrought Urn, 113 Browning, Christopher R. Collected Memories, 80, 81 Brownlow, John, 188 Bryant, Marsha, 148 ‘Ariel’s Kitchen’, 148, 161 Bundtzen, Lynda K. ‘Poetic Arson and Sylvia Plath’s “Burning the Letters”’, 24 The Other Ariel, 8 Burke, Edmund, 93, 98 A Philosophical Enquiry, 92, 105, 106 Celan, Paul ‘Death Fugue’, 77, 80 Cheney, Dick, 67, 68 Chirico, Giorgio de, 117 Churchwell, Sarah ‘Secrets and Lies’, 185 Cohen, Eddie, 21–22, 28 Cole, Thomas, 93

244

Index Connors, Kathleen ‘Living Color’, 20 Cook, Fred J. ‘Juggernaut’, 77 Deotte, Jean-Louis ‘Benjamin, Lyotard’, 125 Dering, Wladislaw, 71 Dickinson, Emily, 114 The Complete Poems, 97 Dietrich, Marlene ‘How to be Loved’, 149 ‘How to be Marriageable’, 149 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 94, 143–145 Eichmann, Adolf, 72, 77–81 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 77 Eisenman, Stephen The Abu Ghraib Effect, 79–80 Eliot, T. S., 35, 189 El-Masri, Kahlal, 189 Emerson, Ralph Waldo ‘The American Scholar Address’, 28 England, Lynndie, 67 Estrich, Susan Real Rape, 75 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 114 Forrest-Thomson, Veronica Poetic Artifice, 2 Frank, Anne Diary of a Young Girl, 77 Freud, Sigmund, 139 Early Psychoanalytic Writings, 59, 60 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 72 Friedan, Betty, 152 Friedlander, Saul The Years of Extermination, 76 Friedrich, Caspar David ‘The Cross on the Mountain’, 97, 98 ‘Two Men Contemplating the Moon’, 96 Frost, Laura ‘S&M and Tea’, 78 Gifford, Terry Ted Hughes, 9 Gilbert, Sandra ‘Dead Poet’s Society’, 186 Gill, Jo The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath, 2 Gold, Ruth, 161 Goldemberg, Rose Leimen Letters Home (play), 183 Goldstein, Esther, 79 Good Housekeeping, 148, 157

245

Goodrich, Frances and Albert Hackett The Diary of Anne Frank (play), 78 Goya, Francisco de Inquisition, 81 Gray, Elisabeth Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath, 183, 184, 195–199, 201 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, 208 Hanna, Suzie and Tom Simmons The Girl Who Would Be God (animation), 184, 203–213 Hayden, Michael, 74 Hayman, Ronald The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, 192, 193 Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words, 117 Heinz, Drue ‘The Art of Poetry LXXI’, 169 Hemingway, Ernest, 156 Hensher, Philip ‘Ted or Sylvia: Who Was Better?’, 190 Herman, Judith Trauma and Recovery, 64 Hersey, John The Wall, 77 Hill, Mavis and L. Norman Williams Auschwitz in England, 71 Hoffman, Betty Hannah ‘Help Wanted!’, 149–150, 152 Holmes, Oliver Wendell ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, 36 Hughes, Frieda Foreword to Ariel, 49, 198–199 ‘Readers’, 202 Hughes, Ted, 17, 24, 26–27, 36, 54, 136, 141 Hughes, Ted, works ‘18 Rugby Street’, 52, 177–178 ‘A Picture of Otto’, 43, 45–46 ‘The Thought-Fox’, 24 Birthday Letters, 6, 45, 55, 167–168, 184–185, 195 Capriccio, 168–169, 178 ‘Capriccios’, 168–169 ‘Dream Life’, 55 ‘Dreamers’, 176 ‘Fairy Tale’, 55 Howls & Whispers, 167–179 ‘Howls & Whispers’, 169–172 Introduction to Johnny Panic, 147, 156 Letters of Ted Hughes, 174–175, 176, 179, 181, 185–186, 234 ‘Life After Death’, 179 ‘Notes on Poems 1956-1963’, 103 ‘Paris 1954’, 168, 169

246 Hughes, Ted, works (cont.) ‘Red’, 173 ‘Superstitions’, 168–169, 177–179 ‘Suttee’, 55 ‘The City’, 168 ‘The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother’, 202 ‘The Error’, 176 ‘The Hidden Orestes’, 64 ‘The Inscription’, 194–195 ‘The Minotaur’, 55 ‘The Offers’, 168, 169, 172, 173–177 ‘The Other’, 175–176 ‘The Table’, 55 Hurdle, Crystal After Ted and Sylvia, 185 Jenkins, David ‘Gwyneth in Love’, 199 Joyce, James, 143 Kant, Immanuel, 91 Kazin, Alfred, 155 Kendall, Tim Sylvia Plath, 2, 18 Klee, Paul, 116–117 Koch, Ilse, 81 Koerner, Joseph Leo, 93 Koren, Yehuda and Eilat Negev A Lover of Unreason, 172–173, 192, 193–195 Kramer, Stanley and Abby Mann Judgment at Nuremburg, 78 Kristeva, Julia Black Sun, 73 Kukil, Karen ‘Sylvia Plath’s Women and Poetry’, 201 Ladies’ Home Journal, 148–150, 152–154, 156, 157, 159–161 Lahire, Sandra Johnny Panic (film), 184 Lady Lazarus (film), 184, 201 Living on Air (film trilogy), 184 Laing, R. D. and A. Esterson Sanity, Madness and the Family, 161 Lameyer, Gordon ‘Dear Sylvia’, 21 Lant, Kathleen ‘The Big Strip Tease’, 33 Lawrence, D. H., 34, 91–92 ‘The Prussian Officer’, 97, 98 Le Rider, Jacques Les Couleurs et les mots, 111 Lengyel, Olga Five Chimneys, 77

Index Leonard, Garry M. ‘“The Woman is Perfected”’, 148 Levi, Primo Survival in Auschwitz, 78 Lifton, Robert Jay The Nazi Doctors, 71 Lowell, Robert, 32 Lukacher, Ned Primal Scenes, 59, 60 Macedo, Suzette, 170, 180 Mademoiselle, 150–151 Malcolm, Janet The Silent Woman, 17, 191 Marc, Franz Blue Horses, 119 Marsack, Robyn Sylvia Plath, 7 Marshall, Bruce The White Rabbit, 74 Matisse, Henri, 115 May, Elaine Tyler Homeward Bound, 74–75 Mayer, Jane The Dark Side, 68, 69, 75 McCullough, Frances, 43 McHale, Brian Postmodernist Fiction, 186 Meisnest, F. W. Elementary German, 48 Mengele, Josef, 71, 79 Meyerowitz, Joanne ‘Beyond the Feminine Mystique’, 148, 152, 161 Middlebrook, Diane, 48 Her Husband, 64, 172, 174, 175, 177 Milton, John Paradise Lost, 106 Mishra, Vijay The Gothic Sublime, 94 Moore, Marianne, 22, 114 Morgan, Robin ‘Arraignment’, 185 Moses, Kate Wintering (novel), 183, 186, 188, 189–190 Moskowitz, Eva ‘“It’s Good to Blow Your Top”’, 148 Moss, Michael and Souad Mekhennet ‘In Internet Jihad Aims at US Viewers’, 81 Mossberg, Barbara, 196 Nadel, Alan Containment Culture, 74–75 Ney, Tara

Index True and False Allegations of Childhood Sexual Abuse, 59–60 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 91 Nyiszki, Dr Miklos Auschwitz, 78 Oates, Joyce Carol The Fabulous Beasts, 185 O’Connell, Jean ‘Into the Here’, 153–154 Ophir, Ella Zohar ‘The Laura Riding Question’, 105 Orr, Peter Plath Reads Plath, 142 Owen, Alison, 188–189 Owen, Wilfred ‘Strange Meeting’, 46 Pastoureau, Michel Le Petit Livre des couleurs, 123 Patai, Raphael ‘Lilith’, 171 Paulin, Tom, 21 ‘Writing to the Moment’, 21 Payne, Tom ‘Her Words Prophesy Her Own Suffering’, 190 Peel, Robin Writing Back, 2, 77 Penn Warren, Robert, 112–113 Perloff, Marjorie ‘The Two Ariels’, 2 Phillips, Adam Terrors and Experts, 56–57, 66 Picasso, Pablo Guernica, 81 Plath, Aurelia, 33, 37 editor of Letters Home, 15, 17, 39–41, 43, 48, 65 Plath, Otto, 39–50 Plath, Sylvia art, 93, 110–111, 112, 119, 125–126, 130, 145, 205–209, 229–230, 233 choreographed response to Plath’s poems, 213–223 colour in Plath’s work, 110–126 ‘Daddy’ narrative, 54–65 letters, 13–29, 37 musical interests, 209–213, 220–221, 232 photographic images, 32–50, 52 representations of Plath by other writers and artists, 167–179, 183–199, 203–213, 232–233 short stories for women’s magazines, 147–162 ‘The Babysitters’, evolution from drafts, 129–145

247

torture and Nazi imagery in Plath’s poetry, 67–82 tree poems, 91–107, 113 Plath, Sylvia, poetry ‘A Secret’, 19 ‘A Winter’s Tale’, 46 ‘Aerialist’, 207 ‘Amnesiac’, 27 ‘An Appearance’, 25 ‘Apprehensions’, 120, 121 ‘April Aubade’, 114 ‘Aquatic Nocturne’, 112 Ariel, 16, 122–123, 124, 125, 141, 144, 162, 190 ‘Ariel’, 27, 95–96, 97, 98, 99, 125 ‘Battle-Scene from the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer’, 116, 117 ‘Black Pine Tree in an Orange Light’, 113 ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’, 102–103 ‘Bluebeard’, 44–45 ‘Burning the Letters’, 24–28, 123 ‘By Candlelight’, 122 ‘Child’, 120, 196–197 ‘Cinderella’, 205–206, 212 ‘Crossing the Water’, 93, 106 ‘Cut’, 27, 73, 124–125, 126, 173 ‘Daddy’, 27, 39–50, 54–55, 56, 57–59, 61, 62–63, 64, 72, 74, 77, 122, 123, 125, 173 ‘Death & Co.’, 27 ‘Eavesdropper’, 28 ‘Edge’, 25 ‘Elm’, 46, 93, 94–100, 106–107 ‘Event’, 120 ‘Fever 103º’, 25 ‘Fireside Reveries’, 206 ‘For a Fatherless Son’, 122 ‘Full Fathom Five’, 74 ‘Getting There’, 221 ‘In Plaster’, 94 ‘Kindness’, 124, 126 ‘Lady Lazarus’, 1–7, 8, 16, 25, 67, 69, 71–72, 77, 78, 79–82, 96, 123, 125, 173, 224 ‘Last Words’, 17 ‘Lesbos’, 219–220, 224 ‘Letter in November’, 24, 27–28 ‘Little Fugue’, 54, 55, 57, 60–64, 93, 94–95, 99–105, 106, 122 ‘Man in Black’, 46 ‘Mary’s Song’, 77 ‘Midsummer Mobile’, 114 ‘Morning Song’, 189 ‘On the Decline of Oracles’, 117 ‘Perseus’, 117 ‘Poppies in July’, 123–124, 125, 213–223 ‘Poppies in October’, 123–124, 125, 213–223 ‘Purdah’, 1–7, 8, 9, 15–16, 229

248

Index

Plath, Sylvia, poetry (cont.) ‘Pursuit’, 169 ‘Silver Thread’, 94 ‘Snakecharmer’, 117 ‘Solo’, 130, 136 ‘Sonnet to Satan’, 44–45 ‘Southern Sunrise’, 112 ‘Stars Over the Dordogne’, 91 ‘Stings’, 123 ‘Tale of a Tub’, 35–36 ‘The Applicant’, 27 ‘The Babysitters’ (‘Madonna (of the Refrigerator)’), 129–145 The Colossus, 37, 141 ‘The Couriers’, 19 ‘The Detective’, 122, 197, 201 ‘The Disquieting Muses’, 117 ‘The Eye-mote’, 102, 231 ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’, 116–117 ‘The Jailer’, 67, 69, 72, 74, 76, 77, 82 ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, 46, 91, 93, 94, 103–104, 120, 136 ‘The Munich Mannequins’, 171–172 ‘The Other’, 181 ‘The Rival’, 22–23, 24 ‘The Thin People’, 86, 229 ‘The Tour’, 22 Three Women, 97–98, 120–121 ‘Tulips’, 122, 125 ‘Two Sisters of Persephone’, 94 ‘Virgin in a Tree’, 117 ‘Winter Sunset’, 94 ‘Winter Trees’, 93, 99–100 ‘Words heard, by accident, over the phone’, 196 ‘Wuthering Heights’, 23–24 ‘Yadwigha’, 117, 118–119, 122, 125 Plath, Sylvia, prose ‘A Comparison’, 77 ‘A Winter’s Tale’ (story), 147 ‘Among the Bumblebees’, 73 ‘As a Baby-Sitter Sees It’, 130–131, 136 ‘Context’, 70, 77 ‘Day of Success’ (story), 147 ‘Den of Lions’, 134 Falcon Yard, 141 ‘From the Memoirs of a Babysitter’, 130 ‘In the Mountains’ (story), 154–156 Journals, 16, 17–18, 21, 36–38, 39, 56–59, 61, 65, 70, 77, 91–92, 97, 110, 111, 113, 115–116, 122, 125–126, 135, 143, 144, 156, 177–178, 198, 203–205, 207, 208, 209–211, 212 Letters Home, 13–22, 28, 37, 76–77, 112, 155, 156, 159, 190–191, 203

‘Operation Valentine’ (story), 147 ‘Platinum Summer’ (story), 147, 156–158, 159–160 ‘Shadow Girl’ (story), 147 ‘The Arts in America’, 112 The Bell Jar, 1, 16, 72–73, 141, 156, 162, 196, 213 ‘The Christmas Heart’ (story), 147, 154–156, 159, 160–161 ‘The Fabulous Room-Mate’ (story), 147 ‘The Laundromat Affair’ (story), 147 ‘The Lucky Stone’ (story), 147 ‘The Magic Mirror’, 142–145 ‘The Perfect Place’ (story), 147 ‘The Smoky Blue Piano’ (story), 147, 156, 159 ‘The Spectrum of F. Scott Fitzgerald’, 114 ‘The Trouble-Making Mother’ (story), 147 Pollak, Vivian R. ‘Moore, Plath, Hughes, and “The Literary Life”’, 22 Preminger, Otto Exodus (film), 78 Prestopino, Gregorio Pine Tree, 113 Prouty, Olive Higgins, 16–17 ‘Real Poets Don’t Gush’ (unsigned review of The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted), 187 Resnais, Alain Night and Fog, 78 Riding, Laura, 100, 105 ‘Introduction for a Broadcast’, 95, 98–99, 105 Roche, Clarissa, 64 Rombauer, Irma S. The Joy of Cooking, 138 Rose, Jacqueline, 48 The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 5–6, 69–70 Rosenbaum, Susan Professing Sincerity, 18 Rosenblum, Robert Modern Painting, 99 Rosenthal, M. L. ‘Poetry as Confession’, 233 Rousseau, Henri, 117 Rumsfeld, Donald, 68 Ruskin, John, 93 Russell, Edward The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, 76 Saatchi, Charles, 223–224, 227 Samuels, Charles Thomas ‘Ingmar Bergman’, 172 Sander, August, 41–43 Sansome, Odette, 73–74

Index Sartre, Jean-Paul Nausea, 105 Sassoon, Richard, 20–21, 28 Schumann, Horst, 71 Sexton, Anne, 201 ‘Sylvia’s Death’, 184 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 174, 175 Othello, 169–170 Shengold, Leonard Soul Murder, 63 Shirer, William The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 78, 80, 81 Sinfield, Alan Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-War Britain, 2 Skea, Ann, 172, 180 Skolnick, Arlene Embattled Paradise, 75 Staël, Nicolas de, 116, 126 Stafford Smith, Clive ‘Gitmo’, 75–76 Stevens, Wallace, 114 Stevenson, Anne, 201 Bitter Fame, 176 ‘Letter to Sylvia Plath’, 185 Stout, David ‘Supreme Court Won’t Hear Torture Appeal’, 76 Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright Practices of Looking, 33 Sullivan, Andrew ‘Bush’s Torturers Follow Where the Nazis Led’, 74 Swift, Jonathan, 35 Sylvia (film), 183, 184, 188–189, 190–191, 201 Taber, Gladys ‘The 12 Hour Magic’, 152–153 Tennant, Emma The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (US Sylvia and Ted  ), 183, 186–188, 190 Thomas, Dylan, 114 Thomson, Charles, 224

249

Thorndike, Jr., Joseph J. ‘Timeless Teutons’, 42 Thorpe, Benjamin Thorpe’s Northern Mythology, 178 Tickell, Jerrard Odette, 73 Uris, Leon Exodus, 71, 78 Mila 18, 78 Van der Poel, Priscilla, 39, 115 Vine, Stella paintings, 232–233 Voronsky, A. K. ‘The Art of Seeing the World’, 49 Vouilloux, Bernard La Peinture dans le texte XVIIIe – XXe siècles, 116 Wagner, Erica Ariel’s Gift, 41, 148 Wagner, Linda W. ‘Plath’s “Ladies Home Journal” Syndrome’, 148 Walker, Nancy Shaping Our Mothers’ World, 148, 152, 161 Wevill, Assia, 27 Whitehead, Anne ‘Refiguring Orpheus’, 174 Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass, 205 Wiesel, Elie Night, 78 Wimsatt, W. K. The Verbal Icon, 113 Woman’s Home Companion, 148 Woolf, Virginia, 28–29, 32, 34, 38, 41, 135 A Room of One’s Own, 3 Congenial Spirits, 13, 16, 25–26 Wordsworth, William The Prelude, 95 Wylie, Philip Generation of Vipers, 139 Yeo-Thomas, Forest (Tommy), 74