SYLVIA PLATH Related titles from Palgrave Macmillan Claire Brennan, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (second edition) Sylvia Plath An Introduction to the Poetry Second Edition Susan Bassnett © Susan Bassnett 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First edition published 1987 Second edition published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-333-77127-3 hardback ISBN 978-0-333-77126-6 ISBN 978-0-230-80189-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-80189-9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Tracing a Life 4 2 Poetry as Process 27 3 God, Nature and Writing 47 4 Writing the Family 71 5 Writing out Love 95 6 Poetry and Survival 117 7 Plath Translated: Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters 139 Notes 164 Bibliography 168 Index 170 v Acknowledgements I am grateful to Janet Bailey for her tireless help in preparing the manuscript, and to Sonya Barker for her infinite patience. Anna Sandeman and Kate Wallis have provided excellent advice and I have endeavoured to incorporate the many helpful suggestions offered by my colleagues and students, without whom this book would not have been written. The author and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material: Faber & Faber Ltd for excerpts from Karen V. Kukil, ed., The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962 (2000); with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC for excerpts from Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters. Copyright © 1998 by Ted Hughes; with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., for excerpts from Sylvia Plath, ‘Watercolour of Granchester Meadows’, ‘Faun’ and ‘The Disquieting Muses’ from The Colossus and Other Poems by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1962 by Sylvia Plath; with HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. for excerpts from Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed., Ted Hughes (1981). Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath, editorial copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes; Aurelia Schober Plath, Letters Home by Sylvia Plath: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975). Copyright © 1975 by Aurelia Schober Plath; Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977). Copyright © 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963 by Sylvia Plath, copyright © 1977, 1979 by Ted Hughes; and Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1971). Copyright © 1971 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. vi Introduction Sylvia Plath is one of the best-known women poets of the twentieth century. Her fame has eclipsed even that of great, world-famous female poets, such as the Russian Anna Akhmatova, or Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean writer who won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1945. Yet unlike those poets, whose international reputations were established during their lifetime, Plath’s fame came more slowly, growing gradually after her death in 1963 to the point where, at the end of the century, she had acquired an almost mythical status, inspiring dozens of biographies, critical studies, memoirs, perform- ances and even, by 2003, a Hollywood film about her life, with Gwyneth Paltrow playing Sylvia. The rise of Plath to this iconic status has been rapid. In the aftermath of her death, she was first seen as a relatively minor though gifted poet, overshadowed by the powerful poetry of her husband, Ted Hughes. Early responses to her poetry focussed on its darkness, on the imagery of blood and violence that appeared to prefigure her eventual suicide. Later, her work was reassessed, particularly by feminist critics, who drew attention to the power of her language, to the expressions of rage and outrage that run through her writing and to the way in which her work can be seen as exemplifying many of the contradictions and dilemmas faced by women struggling for self-realisation while endeavouring to conform to social expectations. While some critics read into Plath’s work the story of a damaged individual whose death was the culmination of a long flirtation with the idea of dying, others saw her as an Everywoman, whose poetry spoke of the pain of being a women struggling to live up to impossible ideals of womanliness. The diversity of opinion as to the quality of Sylvia Plath’s poetry and the insistence of so many commentators to read her work as autobiographical have led to a proliferation of books, articles, docu- mentaries and personal memoirs, many of which have been criticised by her family as contributing to what some see as a Plath exploitation industry. When the first edition of this book came out, in 1987, as a volume in a series of introductions to women writers, that industry was only just starting, and even a quick glance at the number of Plath studies produced over the last two decades shows how rapidly 1 2 Sylvia Plath interest in her has grown. Today, her poetry, the Ariel collection in particular, and her novel, The Bell Jar are studied in secondary schools and universities and her life story continues to fascinate non-specialists. Because Plath wrote in a highly individualistic way, developing her own private mythology through the use of keywords and symbols, weaving together themes and images in ways that are not always immediately obvious to the reader, she has often been seen as a ‘difficult’ poet. Many of the studies of her writing seek to make connections with episodes in her life, and it is certainly true that on one level, Plath was a strongly autobiographical writer. Nevertheless, as she insisted and as Ted Hughes has always argued, she did not see poetry primarily as a conduit for her personal feelings, but rather as a conscious process of crafting through which experience and emotion could be refined in an alchemical sense and transformed into something new. Hers is a poetry about searching for identity, and part of that search was to find a voice as a writer and experiment with the craft of poetry. This book offers an introduction to that alchemical process, tracing ideas and imagery that run through Plath’s poetry. The structure is only loosely chronological, since the primary aim is to show how Plath’s writing changed and developed, and how she reworked particular thematic and linguistic patterns, rather than to argue that the poems mirror every stage in her life-story. The poems are not analysed so much as keys to a life, rather as readings that focus on Plath’s artistry and skills as a writer, relying on many of her own statements about the nature and meaning of writing. Nevertheless, because of the deliberate way in which Plath the poet transformed elements of her experience through writing, a brief account of her biography is provided. For many years after Plath’s death, Ted Hughes, her husband, was accused, not only of having abandoned her and precipitated her death, but also of having exercised control over her writing. He admitted destroying some of her last work, on the grounds that it would have caused too much pain for their children, but it was Hughes who put together the edition of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, and for the rest of his life, until his death in 1998, Hughes defended both his own and Plath’s reputation and insisted on his family’s right to privacy. He refused to give any public account of his relationship with his dead wife, though was occasionally goaded into angry rebuttals of particularly Introduction 3 painful accusations. Then, shortly before his death, Hughes published Birthday Letters, a collection of poems in which he broke his long silence and wrote about the years with Plath. The final chapter of this book focusses on Birthday Letters. The inclusion of a chapter on poems by Ted Hughes in a book about Sylvia Plath might be seen as controversial, but the reason for its inclusion is that Birthday Letters is, effectively, a collection of poems in which Plath’s poetry is translated by another poet. Hughes’ intimate knowledge of Plath’s writing led him to write poems that can be read in counterpoint to Plath’s own work, so that Birthday Letters can be used as an important tool to aid understanding of her poetry as well as of his. Hughes’ reading of Plath’s poems, a subjective interpretation that translates her work for another generation of readers, serves as a conclusion to this introductory study of the poetry of an extraordinary writer.