The cult of Sylvia Plath has always been creepy, you have to admit. Now this year is the [sharp intake of breath] 50th anniversary of that time she stuck her head in the oven, so the cult has to get even creepier. (Why? I mean, why? Fifty years; so what? Why is that more significant than 49 or 51? Humans are so stupid sometimes. Honestly.)
Terry Castle thinks it’s stupid too. Terry Castle is right.
A clutch of new biographies (including the two reviewed here) are likewise among the morbid tie-ins. “Sylvia Plath may be the most fascinating literary figure of the twentieth century”—so the publisher’s copy for one of them gushes. “Even now, fifty years after her death, writers, students, and critics alike are enthralled by the details of her 1963 suicide and her volatile relationship with Ted Hughes.” Such ambulance-chasing fans no doubt also dote on Frida Kahlo’s near-fatal impaling by the tram rail.
Seriously? “Even now, fifty years after her death, writers, students, and critics alike are enthralled by the details of her 1963 suicide…”? Well get over it. Jesus.
It will come as no surprise that I’m one of those who will always be turning away from Plath. Or trying to. I find her tasteless, grisly—unbearable, in fact—precisely because, even five decades after her suicide, she and her corpse-infested verses hold on with such ghoulish tenacity.
Yeah.
I appreciate Sylvia Plath’s work. I understand (and regret) the anti-woman and anti-mental health attitudes that pushed her into her downward spiral.
But to fawn over her suicide like this is…morbid…
Morbid, grisly, safely dead and with a cult following – how long until Sylvia Plath achieves official sainthood?
John Keats wrote in “To a Nightingale” of being “half in love with easeful death.”
….”The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, 25
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;”
Better to die young than die old and feeble, so says the
romantic from that most romantic era. Nowadays, anti-depressants
and treatment for manic-depression (lithium) save many lives.
Or blame Ted Hughes and/or the responsibilities of two young
children on one so fragile.
It’s a form of entertainment really, imagining that one’s death could
cause such a stir, like winning the lottery. Psychiatry has made progress
but not nearly enough.
Poetry is “The Language of Life” says Bill Moyers (which I recommend).
If you have poetry in your life, you don’t need emotional self-indulgence
such as some teens embrace when they read the Bell Jar.
In the 18th Century women who struck out on their own all
ended up dead. That little trope kept many good women
in stutifying marriages and boring domesticity.
oops I meant in the 19th Century, novels about women who struck
out on their own featured heroines who ended up dead.
The “peanut munching crowd” from ‘Lady Lazarus’ * – still at it, it seems, even now. Wonder what she’d think about this?**
* http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Sylvia-plath-lady-lazarus-lyrics#note-1409098
One very powerfully memorable poem.
** I really doubt she’d be surprised.
Interesting that of the female poets aside from the first famous one Sappho of Lesbos (yes, really) the first ones to come to mind are Emily Dickinson** and Sylvia Plath all of whose works are notably, well, morbid.
Maybe that’s me and my education (was taught some poetry in English at high school), maybe not? Not sure what it says about well anything much really but still.
** “Because I would not stop for death he kindly stopped for me ..”
According to the Wikipedia, Plath’s husband set aside one of her journals and a collection of her papers with orders that they not be released until 2013, the 50th anniversary of her death.
Arrrgh! Make that : “Because I could not stop for Death.”
The fact that ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ is written in ballad meter, meaning it can be sung to the tune of Gilligan’s Island, has made it very difficult for me to study Dickinson’s work.
Gretchen Robinson;
When Keats said he was “half in love with easeful death” he knew he had T.B. and would die soon and unpleasantly anyway. He was describing a temptation to be resisted- to slump into inertia and wait for the end. The odes themselves are part of his resistance.
StevoR, don’t take this personally because I understand why you wrote what you wrote. But your comment together with the OP touched a nerve. It’s true that Dickinson’s most famous poems include several about death. Emily Dickinson wrote over 1,700 poems. She wrote about death among many, many other things. You might as well call Shakespeare morbid–there’s a lot of death in his work, too.
She was one of the two greatest poets America has produced, and her scope is not narrow. To anyone who’s interested in exploring her complete work, I highly recommend The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson.
I’m sensitive to dismissals of women artists. It’s happened a lot and it still happens (for discussions of how it happens and who gets overlooked, see Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing and Tillie Olsen’s Silences). Almost 40 years ago, Cynthia Ozick had her college students read an excerpt from a writer named Flannery O’Connor and describe “his” writing; when she revealed the author was a woman, one student backpedaled:
*
I haven’t read a lot of Plath, but I like what I’ve read. Yes, she had a troubled life and apparently suffered from depression. She wrote some good poems and an interesting roman a clef. It’s unfortunate her death has overshadowed her work.
* I can’t find Ozick’s essay (Previsions of the Demise of the Dancing Dog) online, but I did find Francine Prose’s wonderful essay Scent of a Woman’s Ink. I took the paragraph from Ozick’s essay from Prose’s piece, which refers to it.
http://harpers.org/archive/1998/06/scent-of-a-womans-ink/1/
I normally agree with you, Ophelia, but something about this post just really rubbed me the wrong way. Granted, I’m a fan of Sylvia Plath’s work (I first read The Bell Jar at a certain time in my life and it became an important book to me), so I guess I’m biased. Maybe it’s the implication that being interested in the circumstances surrounding one’s death is automatically the same as fapping over and romanticizing it?
There is definitely a morbid fringe who obsess about Plath and her romantic history, but this is a bit harsh. The main reason Plath is remembered is because she was an exceptionally fine poet, and shaping up to be an even better one. There aren’t so many fine poets of her class after all. I tend to agree with Martin Amis on this: ‘no writer is unjustly remembered’.
And, wow, the misogyny that bubbles up through that review! He really hates those nasty women ungrads, doesn’t he?
The cult is to blame here, right? Not the writer herself? In “Chapters in a Mythology”, Judith Kroll makes this disclaimer explicitly. The book was originally her dissertation and she seeked to explain why Plath matters as a writer regardless of gossip and morbid interest. She has an introduction talking about how most commentary of Plath was about how the writing relates to her marriage and death and she wanted to take the poems at face value and evaluate their merits in terms of literature for a change.
That’s definitely what sells, though. I can’t find a nice edition of the collected works, but man, can I find unabridged journals, secret diaries, annotated original versions and similar gossipy stuff.
Whenever I read about someone killing themselves, I almost always dig into the details. I file it under “morbid curiousity” probably inspired by curiousity about my own eventual death. To me, the way people who choose to die do it says – something – about them. I guess I search for symbolism in it; it’s probably a result of being too steeped in Japanese death-culture when I was a kid. I guess it’s just me feeding my imagination with various scenarios.
I admit that as soon as I read this, I went and researched how Plath killed herself (I didn’t know) And, as usual, I found it interesting. Not fascinating, just interesting.
Minot: I’m glad I’m not the only one who felt that the review would have been a little different if Sylvia Plath had been Silvio Plath instead.
I was one of those students, did a term paper about her some 30 years ago. I’d never heard of Sylvia Plath, and picked her from a list because it seemed a more challenging topic than the others on the list. I liked her work and went on to read some of her husband’s and just to expose myself more to poetry in general.
At the time, I didn’t come across any speculation along the lines of what I was thinking about her death, and I wonder if any of these biographies since then have. Sylvia Plath was on anti deppresants, which she stopped taking about ten days before she killed herself. I think she stopped them because she felt they interfered with her creativity, but going from hazy memory here. I believe she went into one of those side-effect spirals from stopping the anti-depressants without medical supervision.
There is discussion of that in at least one of the biographies. I think it’s pretty much agreed that she needed meds and would have been ok if she’d gotten them in time. There was a lot of bad luck in play – a weekend or holiday or both interfering with her ability to get medical help, that kind of thing.
The whole article is so hateful, I can’t believe we’ve read the same thing.
Is the author as frustrated with fans of Franz Kafka? He was one weird, morbid man, but I guess it’s the suicide that’s bothering the author and Kafka didn’t commit that particular sin.
Gah, that article leaves me furious, and I’m not even a fan of Plath. The contempt for Sylvia Plath and contempt for her fans are completely mixed, the contempt for the brouhaha around her suicide is made into another motivation to despise Plath.
And that last paragraph, part of which you quoted? Here’s the rest of it:
Oh do shit on people who commit suicide while pretending to care.
That last sentence of mine, about shitting on people who commit suicide, was referring to Terry Castle, the author of the article, not Ophelia.
— Joseph B. Keller delivering the fiftieth Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the American Mathematical Society, 1977.
“That’s definitely what sells, though. I can’t find a nice edition of the collected works, but man, can I find unabridged journals, secret diaries, annotated original versions and similar gossipy stuff.”
See here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Collected-Poems-Sylvia-Plath/dp/0571118380/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373531736&sr=8-1&keywords=plath+collected#
Here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sylvia-Plath-Selected-Poems-Poetry/dp/0571135862/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1373531736&sr=8-3&keywords=plath+collected
Or here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sylvia-Plath-Poems-Chosen-Carol/dp/0571290434/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1373531736&sr=8-4&keywords=plath+collected
Not hard to find really.
@11. Stacy :
Fair enough, I agree with that and thanks.
(Pressed submit instead of preview durnnit it. Sorry.)
Very true. Shakespeare and Brecht (Waiting for Godot) and Wilfred Owen (WWI poet) and, well, so many others.
Death is a key a part of life (so to speak!) and has a morbid fascination for an awful lot of people. Its something we all face and most of us fear and confronting it in any and every form of art from painting to poetry is common and understandable and in many cases good.
Her scope wasn’t narrow -but sometimes the choices of poems that get taught in classrooms are – I was talking about what poems of hers I heard and ones that which I remember now from decades ago so I’;m quite willing to admit I’m likely suffering from selection bias here.
Thanks for that reference and your other ones – hopefully I’ll have enough time to find and read them because I’d like to do that.
Ditto for #10.
Yep.