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LITERATURE & HUMANITIES SYLVIA PLATH Tracy Brain, on 15 May 2001 The packaging and physical design of any book can never be innocent. Books need to be sold, and this is often a much more pressing concern for publishers, agents, and sometimes even for writers, than if or how books are subsequently read. With Sylvia Plath's work, these commercial pressures are manifested in unusual ways, and magnified to an unusual degree. At the outset of Plath criticism, before we all knew too much, reviewers were able to discuss her work with originality, responding to what was actually in her books instead of confirming their expectations. It is instructive to open up and peer into an instance of Plath biography, in order to observe the insistent flaw of such knowledge. To do so reveals how very discordant the different accounts of one supposed incident in Plath's life can be. I want to look at Plath in different ways; to uncover what has always existed in Plath's writing, yet has been insufficiently seen. What we can know of Plath are the historical and cultural events in which she lived. There is much unkindness, not to mention little value and reliability, in using poetry and fiction as evidence for Plath's supposed anger towards her husband or parents or female rivals; or, at the opposite extreme, as proof of her presumed victim-hood. To treat Plath's writing in this way is to belittle her work, for the implication of such an exercise is that Sylvia Plath was too unimaginative to make anything up, or too self-obsessed to consider anything of larger historical or cultural importance. Any idea that Plath's writing can be regarded as mere cries of personal pain can only be shaken by a visit to Smith College's Rare Book Room, where the handwritten drafts of sixty seven of Plath's last poems are held. The Rare Book Room catalogues these poems as the Ariel poems (though not all of them appeared in Ariel). To achieve these sixty-seven poems, Plath generated enough paper to fill seven box files, each three inches thick and filled to the brim. There are dozens of revisions for each poem. The archives allow us to correct small, but very significant, corruptions of some of the most important poems of this century. For what we can learn about Plath's poems, her writing process, and the dates of composition, these drafts are very exciting. Another of the treasures of the Plath archives are the numerous, beautiful lines and stanzas that Plath discarded, though in many cases discarded uncertainly, restoring, deleting, restoring, and deleting again. There is a whole question of whether a poem was finished or not, and of whether it has a `final' form. Tracy Brain Discussion The discussion illustrated the difficulty all listeners and the speaker had, in getting away from the Greek Tragedy of Plath's life.This was shown by the persistent recurrence of the autobiographical questions on the Bell Jar including.- - Plath's conflicting relationship with her mother. She felt she had failed her mother when she lost her child. The very realistic description of Electro convulsive Therapy and Insulin treatment that she had. - Her masculine / feminine roll. - Her ambivalence about career and motherhood. - Her mother's jealousy of her career, although in her mother's time motherhood was the supreme objective of women. The book contributed to her mother's antagonism even after her death. Her mother takes out all the old letters, particularly those written to her by Ted Hughes, and annotates them, then keeps them calculatingly for archives. She does not attend the funeral. The sadistic poem " Daddy " is a Nazification of her father. Her marriage and suicide seen as a case study, supporting feminist cause. Peter Valentine |
