Plath has become this cultural creation for young women that she would have hated. She was a serviceable-to-good/excellent writer/poet with a significant mental illness.
The fact that her devotees want her to be cast in this harpy/siren light is more a reflection of their expectations than her actual life.
Time-after-time her letters, her journals, her actual writing reveal a complex and tragic young woman who found her voice just months before her death - nothing more and certainly nothing less.
1
When I read the review what jumped out clearly for me, having lived through the same time period, was the cultural context that was killing this young woman. Women at the time felt they had to pay for having a career of their own by being a super housewife and mother. How could she have managed to write at all with two small children, the need to cook and clean and undoubtedly a husband who saw no need to help, but required adoration and a wife well dressed and her make-up on at all times! The women's magazines warned without this a husband would stray, and then of course he did. And clearly left her with no money to take care of these children which were his as well. While teaching at a university in the 70s I was appalled to find that young women were still drinking this Kool-Aid, expecting themselves to live their mother's lives perfectly while simultaneously striving to achieve in whatever sphere they had chosen.I believe there is more realism and balance in couples' lives now but as Virigina Woolf knew it is hard to have a room of your own, and it is required if you are to do creative work. The pressure on Plath to be everything at once in a perfectionistic personality that tended towards the depressive makes the outcome overdetermined.
6
Plath will be a writer and poet for whom many, myself included, will always want to know more, read more -- even the least of her work. Because it's all a matter of small things that make the larger whole. Her work changed much of poetry -- especially for women. Yet, I think she would be strangely resistant to the #metoo movement; her art was her own, and she understood all the impacts, hurt, disappointment. She had more strength than many give her credit for. She was so complicated, and this she knew, was a part of everything in her work, good or bad. She will be mined, for every small piece of gold or false mineral of her work. In the end, you must come to the work. And it will move you or not. If it does, there can be no helping that one would want more. I believe there will be more work to find, maybe after years. But if the last two volumes of the complete letters is any indication, what we have is all we can want for now. And it is so very much. Whatever comes later will add what it will. Of course, the great mystery and question is: was that last journal really destroyed? It is the only other key to anything we might seek, which is a hapless desire. If there were nothing but Ariel alone, she would continue to resonate across the centuries. But, we have so much more.
6
Thank you for the heads-up and the fascinating review - now that Olwyn Hughes has died, I was hoping for more Plathian treasures to be revealed, and perhaps this is one of several to come. Looking forward to reading this myself!
2
Not for nothing has the Plath gold mine been excavated ever deeper. Here prose, at 40 pages worth the investment, but when do readers, even Plathophiles, say enough?
Probably never and that's ok because she continues to challenge, inspire, and provoke all; her tale is too disturbing, too impossible, too irresistable.
Sylvia Plath made her bones as a poet and will forever be judged as one; significant, important to be sure, and more than even such an astute observer as Janet Malcolm could comprehend. She published The Silent Woman a generation ago and it has not aged as well as was hoped. Malcolm's psychological frame of reference, as comprehensive as it was, gave so many of the moving parts, but left us guessing as to the source of Plath's genius. We may find some in her prose, but don't hold your breath.
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