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| Image courtesy of the Poetry Foundation |
After reading The Bell Jar, and experiencing their own melancholy, young adults tend to throw the name “Sylvia Plath” around as if they know her. She carries the weight of her reputation, much like David Foster Wallace and his tragic bandana. There’s no question that Plath is one of the most widely recognized poets of the 20thcentury. But it’s problematic that most readers see her only as an image of mental illness and hip indie culture. Part of her mystery stems from the manipulation of her image by her husband as this woman of tragedy. Combined with her unpublished collection of poems, Ariel, it was difficult to see past that image. The restored version of Ariel—ordered by Plath rather than Hughes, had the capacity to change that. However, the continued focus on Plath’s biography rather than her work has added to the image of a cruel victim of mental illness and an oppressive marriage, without noting many of Plath’s more problematic characteristics.
In October, The Guardian announced that in honor of Faber’s 90thanniversary, Faber would publish a previously unknown Plath short story. The Guardian quotes Plath scholar Peter K Steinberg as claiming that the short story is ”different to what Plath’s readers are used to seeing.”[1]The article then goes on to depict Plath darkly as a young woman on a train; the depiction could serve that could work as a metaphor for Plath fighting against the fate to which she cannot escape. The article quickly becomes something we have heard before: a heartbreaking narrative of poor Plath, stuck in a world of emotional pain behind a mask of a young woman. In perhaps its only note of originality, the article does identify the short story as unique in its construction and connection to Dante’s Divine Comedy. But the remainder of the article—and the new story—simply repeats the standard Plath narrative. Frustration, anger, womanhood, suicide, Ted Hughes.
The question remains: Is this sealed perception of Sylvia Plath too airtight?
If she is a symbol of melancholy, problematic themes of her work could be overlooked. For instance, discussion of her most infamous poem, “Daddy,” may be limited. Lines in “Daddy,” such as, “Chuffing me off like a Jew/A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen/I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew,”[2]use overtly controversial Holocaust imagery. But the packaged melancholy of Plath could limit reader’s interpretation of these themes as a formal representation of pain rather than debating their controversy.
Her constructed popularity raises the question of whether a retrospective judgment should stop us from praising her life and work. Because of her marketed reputation as a (complex) martyr, these controversial themes are viewed as groundbreaking in their expression of her heartbreak and mental illness. With the rise of larger social movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the tragedy of the recent Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the questions of praise and free poetic expression becomes more complicated. I’m not encouraging readers to merely condemn Plath because of her controversy. Rather, I’m asking the publishing industry and readers to push back against the packaged image of the Queen of Melancholy.
Again and again, this limited, stale image of Plath shows up in publications of supposedly “groundbreaking” private accounts. This limitation of presentation is the result of two factors: the influence Ted Hughes had on the publication of Ariel after Plath’s suicide, and her resurgent popularity since 2004 with the publication of Plath in more editions. Most recently, in September 2017, The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume 1 was published and Volume II followed in September 2018. The publishing of Plath’s letters has been marketed as a telling the complete autobiography of Plath—including everything left out in Hughes’ constructed image of her. In a review for The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II, The Guardian refers to the collection as “infidelity, agony rage. . . . Plath’s correspondence captures life with Ted Hughes and her terror of being alive.”[3]The article goes on to conclude with a nod to the importance of the letters to Plath’s legacy: “Plath, who writes in the dark days before her death that ‘it is my great consolation just now, to speak & be heard’, has the last word.”[4]The review, working as an example of a larger collection of reviews of the volumes, represents the sensationalism of Plath’s personal life that has been created through the marketing of her work.
In order to combat Hughes’ influence on our perspective on Plath’s life, we publish more autobiographical details to give Plath the opportunity to speak for herself. But this “authentic” Plath turns out to be merely another reconstructed version of the poet—a shift from Hughes’ control of her narrative to control by the publishing industry.
What is our obsession with the autobiography of this pioneer of confessional poetry? The publishing industry was handed the torch by Hughes, and has undertaken to alter how we perceive her work. It’s ironic that this constructed idea of Plath—one of the most influential poets of her time—has overtaken the actual poetry itself.
It will be interesting to see if the new short story ends up controlled and packaged the same way that the biographical editions have been. One example of publishers’ control is the image of Plath chosen for the covers of these biographical editions. Below are three different covers of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, published by Faber & Faber and Harper Collins:
All three covers choose images of Plath that smell of nostalgia— each highlights Plath’s femininity, her youth, a hint of darkness – that only hint at the tragic reputation that follows her. The covers are confusing in that each displays a different face of Plath, and they make me feel guilty for struggling to recognize her. In some a sense, though, this correlates with her constructed image. Using vintage photo on the cover is just another way of curating her image: Unfortunately, Plath’s reputation transcends her picture, and increasingly, her poetry.
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