[This Wednesday,
my summer
hybrid grad course on 20th Century American Women Writers kicks
off (we’ll be starting with a discussion of Sui
Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance!).
So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some exemplary such writers, leading up to a
weekend post on some of what I’m most excited for with that summer course.]
On the poet who
reminds us not to settle for accepted narratives about any writer or works.
This past semester my Major
American Authors of the 20th Century course spent two weeks with
Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, the
fourth time I’ve taught her and that book in that class; I have also twice spent
two weeks with her
novel The Bell-Jar (1963) in a post-1950 American novel
class. As I wrote in the opening paragraph of
this post, each time I’ve had the chance to read and study Plath’s work in
these settings, I’ve found more—more depth and complexity, but also, and most
importantly for my point here, more breadth and variety—in her writing. That
might seem to be logical enough, given the benefits of in-depth study of any
author, but I believe that my experiences with Plath, and the knowledge and
perspective I’ve gained through them, actually and very significantly reveal
two ways in which widely accepted, oversimplifying narratives can hinder our
analysis and understanding if we’re not careful.
For one thing, there’s Plath’s biography, and
more exactly the most famous detail from that biography: her suicide. It is
indeed the case that Plath committed suicide at the age of 30, in February,
1963 by turning on her gas stove and sticking her head inside; it’s also the
case, as both her confessional and heavily autobiographical
poem “Lady Lazarus” and similarly autobiographical work in The Bell-Jar illustrate, that Plath had
attempted suicide almost exactly a decade earlier, at the age of 20. So it’s
entirely understandable that the narratives about Plath’s suicide—which are, to
be clear, also the most prominent narratives about her writing—treat it as a
final, unsurprising moment in a consistent psychological and emotional pattern.
And that may indeed be a fair assessment, but I’m pretty sure that very few
AmericanStudiers or readers of Plath’s works know the details of her life at
the time of her suicide: Plath had moved to England to live with her husband,
the English poet Ted Hughes, but in late 1962 Hughes left her and their two
small children for another woman; the winter of 1962-1963 was one of the
coldest ever recorded in London, and Plath could not afford to pay for consistent
heat in her flat so she and her children were likely damn near frozen by
February; her kids were also apparently suffering from the flu and had been for
some time; and Plath was trying to write between roughly four and eight every
morning, because it was the only time that was genuinely hers and because she
needed to publish to earn enough to support her children. These facts do not
necessarily elide the long-term psychological causes, nor do they answer the
question (as noted in the hyperlinked bio above) of whether Plath hoped or
planned to be discovered and saved. But knowledge of them does, I hope, make it
impossible to treat Plath’s suicide as just the act of a disturbed or
self-centered and –pitying person.
And for another thing, there are
the poems. The Collected
Poems, compiled by Hughes over the two decades after Plath’s death and
published in one volume in late 1981, is most impressive for both the sheer
number of poems it includes (224, all written between 1956 and 1962; and
another fifty drawn from the many more she wrote prior to 1956) and for the
variety and breadth of those poems (even those from the same year, and often
from within a day or two of one another, are generally strikingly distinct in
structure, style, imagery, and theme). I could point to a particular poem or
two to make my case, but thanks to the magic of the web I don’t have to—just go
to the Google Books version above or to this “Browse
Inside” version and sample a few pages from anywhere in the volume (other
than the eleven pages devoted to Plath’s longest single poem, “Three Women”). The
poems of Plath’s that get anthologized and taught most frequently (including by
me in my second-half American lit survey) are “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” both
produced in her final months of writing and collected in the posthumous
Ariel (1966); each is well worth reading and analyzing, but that
standard pairing and focus are in some ways hugely limiting to our sense of
Plath, both as a poet (both poems over-use Nazi/Holocaust imagery) and as a
person (both lend credence to the whole “depressed and fixated on death”
narrative). To me, what the Collected
Poems proves is that Plath was a prodigious talent, one of 20th
century America’s most versatile and best poets—that is of course an opinion,
but it’s a much better-supported one thanks to the book; and those narratives
that seek to dismiss her talent, just like those that seek to oversimplify her
suicide, had at least better be prepared to engage with the evidence.
That, ultimately, is the only
broad point I’m trying to make here, but it’s a pretty key one. Sweeping
narratives aren’t necessarily a problem, and perhaps are inevitable—I’m guilty
of constructing plenty of ‘em I know—, but far too often they exist in spite
of, rather than in conversation with, the available evidence. So at least we
AmericanStudiers owe it our subjects, our audiences, and ourselves to read and
engage with that evidence as best we can before we deploy, endorse, or even
revise the narratives. Next writer tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other women writers (20th century American or otherwise) you’d
highlight?
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