Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies, Jun 21, 2010
It was the week of my fortieth birthday, a momentous event I'd celebrated with half a leftover bu... more It was the week of my fortieth birthday, a momentous event I'd celebrated with half a leftover burrito heated in the microwave and taken up to my tiny study. Shambling in my husband's faded bathrobe, coughing, I'd shut the door to the sound of my sick family coughing around the dinner
Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies, Sep 22, 2010
This article was originally published in Salon in May 2000. As the original was published in a jo... more This article was originally published in Salon in May 2000. As the original was published in a journalistic academic style, references and citations were not published. This piece was first published within those looser strictures and efforts have been made to identity quoted sources. It's the tally of "my lusts and my little ideas," wrote nineteen-year-old Sylvia Plath in her journals, where she confessed her thoughts, her "test tube infatuations," her story notes, her cake baking, her jealousies, her dreams and her fears from the age of twelve until days before her death by her own hand at the age of 30 (103, 144). Not merely coy in retrospect, Plath's characterization of her journal stands in stunning contrast to the monumentally revealing document that she created. Her journals amount to more than a thousand pages scattered through various handwritten notebooks, diaries, fragments, and typed sheets, the sum of it an extraordinary record of what she called the "forging of a soul," the creation of a writer and a woman whose many veils and guises have succeeded in forestalling anyone from knowing who she really was, despite her lifelong frenetic, fanatical quest to discover the answer for herself (230). "You walked in, laughing, tears, welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?" (137). Plath asked herself in the summer of 1952 when she was about to enter her junior year at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. With the publication of Plath's unabridged journals, which were released in England and the U.S. in 2000, we are closer than ever to knowing the identity of this disappointed wife and bereaved daughter, this suicidal mother of two, this poet of electrically charged perceptions and amplified imagination, this woman "enigmatical/ shifting my clarities," this Lady Lazarus who evolved out of her own inner torment, the record of which now opens fully, or almost, before us Plath, Collected Poems 242). The publication of The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil, was a watershed event. They allowed us, for the first time, to see this dazzlingly, maddeningly Plath Profiles 27 fragmented woman as an integrated being. The Plath that emerges here is paradoxically at once sanerless a creature of willful mental excessand more buffeted by forces beyond her control. Those forces, it seems tragically clear, were not just familial, but chemical. Almost from the day she died, readers and scholars, faced with the huge, faceless enigma of her suicide, have been perplexed and thwarted by Plath's mental condition. The unabridged journals and other new information, some of it published here for the first time, lend credence to a little-noticed theory that Sylvia Plath suffered not just from some form of mental illness (probably manic depression) but also from severe PMS. In the fall of 1962, during the final flood of creativity that preceded her death by a few months, Sylvia Plath alluded to her first suicide attempt in "Daddy," now her most widely recognized poem. "At twenty I tried to die," she wrote, "…But they pulled me out of the sack, / And they stuck me together with glue" (224). Four decades since Plath killed herself on the morning of February 11, 1963 (just a month after the British publication of her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar), it seems more accurate to say that she's been stuck back together with paper. Tons and tons of paper: her own posthumously published poetry collection, the fierce and mythic Ariel, which indeed, as she predicted, made her name; the maternally softened "corrective" of her dutiful, chirpy Letters Home edited by her mother, Aurelia Plath; her Pulitzer-prize winning Collected Poems, which builds inexorably from polite surface poise to crackling, incinerating force; a smattering of fairly neutral stories and telling journal fragments in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams; and her journals, published in heavily edited form in 1982 that, depending on whose side you were on, made Plath appear either mad or victimized. All of Plath's work, including her three additional poetry collections, remains vigorously in print. But even more voluminous than Plath's impressive output is the critical response her writings have generated-about a dozen biographies and "recollections" and hundreds of articles, critical studies and cultural commentaries. What's most noticeable about the veritable industry of books and articles about Plath is that none of them succeed in creating an integrated portrait of their subject. She is variously portrayed as a fragile, brilliant immigrant's daughter scarred by overarching ambition and her father's early death; a righteous proto-feminist shrugging off husband, children and the crippling reins of culturally prescribed domesticity; an unreasonable perfectionist whose outrageous demands alienated everyone who crossed her path; Moses 28 a devoted wife and mother shattered by her idolized husband's betrayal; and an unbalanced artist who would use and sacrifice everything, including her own life, in service to her art. This multiplicity of Plath's is understandable; by her own admission she was a woman of many masks, someone who felt it necessary to reveal only facets of herself in any given situation, social or professional. Her husband, the late British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, wrote in the foreword to her 1982 journals, "I never saw her show her real self to anybody-except, perhaps, in the last three months of her life" (xii). Hughes, as it is almost impossible to have missed, has been the central figure and object of suspicion, even persecution, in the vitriolic forty-year-old controversy regarding the "real" Sylvia Plath. In the summer of 1962, the Hughes' marriage broke down when Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair. According to Hughes' infrequent comments regarding his relationship with Plath, theirs had been a mutually creative, valuable symbiosis from the very start: "Our minds soon became two parts of one operation," he told the Paris Review in 1995 (theparisreview.org). But things went very wrong, as his 1998 poetry collection addressed to Plath, the internationally best-selling Birthday Letters, attests. When they separated traumatically in September 1962 after six years of marriage, the couple were parents of a two-year-old daughter, Frieda, and an eight-month-old baby son, Nicholas; Hughes moved to London, while Plath remained with the children at their house in the English countryside. With only sporadic childcare and often ill with fevers, flu and infections, Plath wrote the bulk of the Ariel poems in a seven-week rush during the pre-dawn hours before her children awoke. When Plath died, she was still legally married to Hughes, and the responsibility of conducting her literary estate fell to him. In 1969, Hughes' lover, Assia Wevill, mimicked Plath's suicide by gassing herself as well as the young daughter, Shura, whom she shared with Hughes. Hughes wrote to Plath biographer Anne Stevenson in 1989: "…I saw quite clearly from the first day that I am the only person in this business who cannot be believed by all who need to find me guilty." He was right. As Hughes eked out Plath's posthumous workswhich succeeded in winning for Plath an enormous readership as well as entry into the canon of American twentieth century poetry, a status she had decidedly not held during her lifetimehe was viciously attacked by scholars and critics, feminists in particular, who read the blistering Ariel poems and later the fragmentary 1982 journals as an indictment against him: he was controlling, egotistical, faithless and selfish; he had tried to shame Plath, a poetic genius, into sewing on his buttons.
... her quest to find Demos, supplying everything from encouragement and safe harbors to Pimm&... more ... her quest to find Demos, supplying everything from encouragement and safe harbors to Pimm's cups and chocolate on pillows: Tracy Brain, Sohair Hosny, Joanna Lincoln, Ruth Lopez, Diane Middlebrook, Laila Moussa, Mrs. Abdul Razik Sabah, Ahdaf Soueif, Mrs. Zienab Tawfic ...
Wintering is the story of a woman forging a new life for herself after her marriage has foundered... more Wintering is the story of a woman forging a new life for herself after her marriage has foundered. She shuts up her beloved Devonshire house and makes a home for her two young children in London, elated at completing the collection of poems she foresees will make her name. It is also the story of a woman struggling to maintain her mental equilibrium, to absorb the pain of her husband's betrayal, and to resist her mother's engulfing love. It is the story of Sylvia Plath. In this deeply felt novel, Kate Moses recreates Sylvia Plath's last months, weaving together the background of her life before she met Ted Hughes with the disintegration of their relationship and the burst of creativity this triggered. It is inspired by Plath's original ordering and selection of the poems in Ariel?which begins with the word "love" and ends with "spring"?a mythic narrative of defiant survival quite different from the chronological version edited by Hughes. At Wintering's heart, though, lie the two weeks in December 1962 when Plath finds herself still alone and grief-stricken, despite all her determined hope. With exceptional empathy and lyrical grace, Moses captures her poignant and courageous struggle to confront not only her future as a woman, an artist, and a mother, but also the unbanished demons of her past.
... her quest to find Demos, supplying everything from encouragement and safe harbors to Pimm&... more ... her quest to find Demos, supplying everything from encouragement and safe harbors to Pimm's cups and chocolate on pillows: Tracy Brain, Sohair Hosny, Joanna Lincoln, Ruth Lopez, Diane Middlebrook, Laila Moussa, Mrs. Abdul Razik Sabah, Ahdaf Soueif, Mrs. Zienab Tawfic ...
It was the week of my fortieth birthday, a momentous event I'd celebrated with half a leftover bu... more It was the week of my fortieth birthday, a momentous event I'd celebrated with half a leftover burrito heated in the microwave and taken up to my tiny study. Shambling in my husband's faded bathrobe, coughing, I'd shut the door to the sound of my sick family coughing around the dinner
26 The Real Sylvia Plath Kate Moses Editor's note: This article was originally published in ... more 26 The Real Sylvia Plath Kate Moses Editor's note: This article was originally published in Salon in May 2000. As the original was published in a journalistic academic style, references and citations were not published. This piece was first published within those looser strictures and ...
... MOTHERS WHO think TALES OF REAL-LIFE PARENTHOOD EDITED BY CAMILLE PERI AND KATE MOSES OF Salo... more ... MOTHERS WHO think TALES OF REAL-LIFE PARENTHOOD EDITED BY CAMILLE PERI AND KATE MOSES OF Salon.com FOREWORD BY ANNE LAMOTT n WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS ... Cover art by Jose Ortega Printed in the USA ...
Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies, Jun 21, 2010
It was the week of my fortieth birthday, a momentous event I'd celebrated with half a leftover bu... more It was the week of my fortieth birthday, a momentous event I'd celebrated with half a leftover burrito heated in the microwave and taken up to my tiny study. Shambling in my husband's faded bathrobe, coughing, I'd shut the door to the sound of my sick family coughing around the dinner
Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies, Sep 22, 2010
This article was originally published in Salon in May 2000. As the original was published in a jo... more This article was originally published in Salon in May 2000. As the original was published in a journalistic academic style, references and citations were not published. This piece was first published within those looser strictures and efforts have been made to identity quoted sources. It's the tally of "my lusts and my little ideas," wrote nineteen-year-old Sylvia Plath in her journals, where she confessed her thoughts, her "test tube infatuations," her story notes, her cake baking, her jealousies, her dreams and her fears from the age of twelve until days before her death by her own hand at the age of 30 (103, 144). Not merely coy in retrospect, Plath's characterization of her journal stands in stunning contrast to the monumentally revealing document that she created. Her journals amount to more than a thousand pages scattered through various handwritten notebooks, diaries, fragments, and typed sheets, the sum of it an extraordinary record of what she called the "forging of a soul," the creation of a writer and a woman whose many veils and guises have succeeded in forestalling anyone from knowing who she really was, despite her lifelong frenetic, fanatical quest to discover the answer for herself (230). "You walked in, laughing, tears, welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?" (137). Plath asked herself in the summer of 1952 when she was about to enter her junior year at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. With the publication of Plath's unabridged journals, which were released in England and the U.S. in 2000, we are closer than ever to knowing the identity of this disappointed wife and bereaved daughter, this suicidal mother of two, this poet of electrically charged perceptions and amplified imagination, this woman "enigmatical/ shifting my clarities," this Lady Lazarus who evolved out of her own inner torment, the record of which now opens fully, or almost, before us Plath, Collected Poems 242). The publication of The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil, was a watershed event. They allowed us, for the first time, to see this dazzlingly, maddeningly Plath Profiles 27 fragmented woman as an integrated being. The Plath that emerges here is paradoxically at once sanerless a creature of willful mental excessand more buffeted by forces beyond her control. Those forces, it seems tragically clear, were not just familial, but chemical. Almost from the day she died, readers and scholars, faced with the huge, faceless enigma of her suicide, have been perplexed and thwarted by Plath's mental condition. The unabridged journals and other new information, some of it published here for the first time, lend credence to a little-noticed theory that Sylvia Plath suffered not just from some form of mental illness (probably manic depression) but also from severe PMS. In the fall of 1962, during the final flood of creativity that preceded her death by a few months, Sylvia Plath alluded to her first suicide attempt in "Daddy," now her most widely recognized poem. "At twenty I tried to die," she wrote, "…But they pulled me out of the sack, / And they stuck me together with glue" (224). Four decades since Plath killed herself on the morning of February 11, 1963 (just a month after the British publication of her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar), it seems more accurate to say that she's been stuck back together with paper. Tons and tons of paper: her own posthumously published poetry collection, the fierce and mythic Ariel, which indeed, as she predicted, made her name; the maternally softened "corrective" of her dutiful, chirpy Letters Home edited by her mother, Aurelia Plath; her Pulitzer-prize winning Collected Poems, which builds inexorably from polite surface poise to crackling, incinerating force; a smattering of fairly neutral stories and telling journal fragments in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams; and her journals, published in heavily edited form in 1982 that, depending on whose side you were on, made Plath appear either mad or victimized. All of Plath's work, including her three additional poetry collections, remains vigorously in print. But even more voluminous than Plath's impressive output is the critical response her writings have generated-about a dozen biographies and "recollections" and hundreds of articles, critical studies and cultural commentaries. What's most noticeable about the veritable industry of books and articles about Plath is that none of them succeed in creating an integrated portrait of their subject. She is variously portrayed as a fragile, brilliant immigrant's daughter scarred by overarching ambition and her father's early death; a righteous proto-feminist shrugging off husband, children and the crippling reins of culturally prescribed domesticity; an unreasonable perfectionist whose outrageous demands alienated everyone who crossed her path; Moses 28 a devoted wife and mother shattered by her idolized husband's betrayal; and an unbalanced artist who would use and sacrifice everything, including her own life, in service to her art. This multiplicity of Plath's is understandable; by her own admission she was a woman of many masks, someone who felt it necessary to reveal only facets of herself in any given situation, social or professional. Her husband, the late British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, wrote in the foreword to her 1982 journals, "I never saw her show her real self to anybody-except, perhaps, in the last three months of her life" (xii). Hughes, as it is almost impossible to have missed, has been the central figure and object of suspicion, even persecution, in the vitriolic forty-year-old controversy regarding the "real" Sylvia Plath. In the summer of 1962, the Hughes' marriage broke down when Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair. According to Hughes' infrequent comments regarding his relationship with Plath, theirs had been a mutually creative, valuable symbiosis from the very start: "Our minds soon became two parts of one operation," he told the Paris Review in 1995 (theparisreview.org). But things went very wrong, as his 1998 poetry collection addressed to Plath, the internationally best-selling Birthday Letters, attests. When they separated traumatically in September 1962 after six years of marriage, the couple were parents of a two-year-old daughter, Frieda, and an eight-month-old baby son, Nicholas; Hughes moved to London, while Plath remained with the children at their house in the English countryside. With only sporadic childcare and often ill with fevers, flu and infections, Plath wrote the bulk of the Ariel poems in a seven-week rush during the pre-dawn hours before her children awoke. When Plath died, she was still legally married to Hughes, and the responsibility of conducting her literary estate fell to him. In 1969, Hughes' lover, Assia Wevill, mimicked Plath's suicide by gassing herself as well as the young daughter, Shura, whom she shared with Hughes. Hughes wrote to Plath biographer Anne Stevenson in 1989: "…I saw quite clearly from the first day that I am the only person in this business who cannot be believed by all who need to find me guilty." He was right. As Hughes eked out Plath's posthumous workswhich succeeded in winning for Plath an enormous readership as well as entry into the canon of American twentieth century poetry, a status she had decidedly not held during her lifetimehe was viciously attacked by scholars and critics, feminists in particular, who read the blistering Ariel poems and later the fragmentary 1982 journals as an indictment against him: he was controlling, egotistical, faithless and selfish; he had tried to shame Plath, a poetic genius, into sewing on his buttons.
... her quest to find Demos, supplying everything from encouragement and safe harbors to Pimm&... more ... her quest to find Demos, supplying everything from encouragement and safe harbors to Pimm's cups and chocolate on pillows: Tracy Brain, Sohair Hosny, Joanna Lincoln, Ruth Lopez, Diane Middlebrook, Laila Moussa, Mrs. Abdul Razik Sabah, Ahdaf Soueif, Mrs. Zienab Tawfic ...
Wintering is the story of a woman forging a new life for herself after her marriage has foundered... more Wintering is the story of a woman forging a new life for herself after her marriage has foundered. She shuts up her beloved Devonshire house and makes a home for her two young children in London, elated at completing the collection of poems she foresees will make her name. It is also the story of a woman struggling to maintain her mental equilibrium, to absorb the pain of her husband's betrayal, and to resist her mother's engulfing love. It is the story of Sylvia Plath. In this deeply felt novel, Kate Moses recreates Sylvia Plath's last months, weaving together the background of her life before she met Ted Hughes with the disintegration of their relationship and the burst of creativity this triggered. It is inspired by Plath's original ordering and selection of the poems in Ariel?which begins with the word "love" and ends with "spring"?a mythic narrative of defiant survival quite different from the chronological version edited by Hughes. At Wintering's heart, though, lie the two weeks in December 1962 when Plath finds herself still alone and grief-stricken, despite all her determined hope. With exceptional empathy and lyrical grace, Moses captures her poignant and courageous struggle to confront not only her future as a woman, an artist, and a mother, but also the unbanished demons of her past.
... her quest to find Demos, supplying everything from encouragement and safe harbors to Pimm&... more ... her quest to find Demos, supplying everything from encouragement and safe harbors to Pimm's cups and chocolate on pillows: Tracy Brain, Sohair Hosny, Joanna Lincoln, Ruth Lopez, Diane Middlebrook, Laila Moussa, Mrs. Abdul Razik Sabah, Ahdaf Soueif, Mrs. Zienab Tawfic ...
It was the week of my fortieth birthday, a momentous event I'd celebrated with half a leftover bu... more It was the week of my fortieth birthday, a momentous event I'd celebrated with half a leftover burrito heated in the microwave and taken up to my tiny study. Shambling in my husband's faded bathrobe, coughing, I'd shut the door to the sound of my sick family coughing around the dinner
26 The Real Sylvia Plath Kate Moses Editor's note: This article was originally published in ... more 26 The Real Sylvia Plath Kate Moses Editor's note: This article was originally published in Salon in May 2000. As the original was published in a journalistic academic style, references and citations were not published. This piece was first published within those looser strictures and ...
... MOTHERS WHO think TALES OF REAL-LIFE PARENTHOOD EDITED BY CAMILLE PERI AND KATE MOSES OF Salo... more ... MOTHERS WHO think TALES OF REAL-LIFE PARENTHOOD EDITED BY CAMILLE PERI AND KATE MOSES OF Salon.com FOREWORD BY ANNE LAMOTT n WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS ... Cover art by Jose Ortega Printed in the USA ...
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