: review.
_ .of the
arts
volume II, number 2
by Dave Burtner
Sylvia Plath
"The only difference between artists and us
is that artists watch themselves die,
while we’re dead before we know it."
In her life, Sylvia Plath focused a remarkably
sensitive eye on her immediate mid-century experience,
a profoundly American-experience that stretched from
childhood to her death at 30, though most of the later
years were spent in England. And although the focus
never entirely steadied, from the outset, the vision was
one of death.
When I was learning to creep, my mother set me
down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I
crawled straight for the coming wave and was just
through the wall of green when she caught my
heels.
What the eye saw through that “wall of green” at
such an early age, the poetic voice projected later. And
like the eye, the voice was variable, at first precocious,
then feminist, finally transcendent, but always it was
deeply rooted in the rhythms and metaphors of the
destructive.
You have stuck her kittens outside your window
In a sort of cement well
Where they crap and puke and cry and she can’t
hear.
(Lesbos)
Devlish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
(Lady Lazarus)
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment.
(Edge)
To begin with we may ask what lure flutters in the
destructiveness, the horror, the bitterness, the
lacerating violence of this verse. Is it the brilliance of an
accomplished poet dragging forth the muse so
evocatively that the scorching subject matter never fails
the art? Or is the art smothered by the seductive ring of
the blood and the brutal which are so amiable and easily
accessable? The aesthetic is stated:
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
(Kindness)
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston to a mother of
Austrian descent and a Prussian father. Her first ex
periences were of the sea.
My childhood landscape was not land but the end
of the land—the cold, salt, running hills of the
Atlantic ... Like a deep woman, it hid a good deal;
it had many faces, many delicate, terrible veils. It
spoke of miracles and distances; if it could court,
it could also kill.
At nine her father died. The family moved inland for
economic reasons and also in hopes of benefiting
Sylvia’s acute sinusitiis.
. . those nine first years of my life sealed
themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful,
inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.”
During high school Sylvia submitted 45 pieces to
Seventeen before a short story was finally accepted In
1952 she entered Smith College and quickly established
herself as a disciolined. efficient, intelligent student.
Honors became more and more frequent. Seventeen was
now accepting almost everything she submitted. But
writing was not her only interest. She was also active in
social circles taking offices and chairing committees.
Nearly every experience was attacked with an almost
fanatic need for perfection. She was a model coed for the
1950’s.
In 1953 Sylvia won a fiction contest in Madmoiselle
magazine. She, along with 19 other “model” coll«4fcgirls
from around the country, were sent to New York as
guest editors of Madmoiselle for a month. In the August
issue of the magazine for that year there is a picture of
the twenty girls holding hands in a five pointed star,
flashing their all purpose cheek-to-cheek smiles.
At the peak of the star, with a Number 1 over her
head is Sylvia Plath. Below the star is a bold face
paragraph with her by-line:
We’re stargazers this season, bewitched by an
atmosphere of evening blue. Foremost in the
fashion constellation, we spot MLLE’S own tartan,
the astronomic versatility of sweaters, and men,
men, men—we’ve even taken the shirts off their
backs! . . .
Two months later, on a summer day in the suburban
void of Wellesley, Massachusetts, Sylvia left a note on
the kitchen table: “Mother. I have gone on a long walk.”
In fact, she had gone to her own cellar, crawled to a
dank, cobwebbed corner, piled fireplace logs around her
body and swallowed fifty sleeping pills. Three days later
she was found, miracuously alive.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
(Lady Lazarus)
After stints in several mental institutions, Sylvia
graduated from Smith and went to Newnham College,
Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship. There she met
Ted Hughes who was to become a prominent poet
himself. They were married on Bloomsday, 1956 and
settled first in London, then in Devon. In 1960, Sylvia had
her first child, a girl, and in the same year published her
first collected works, The Colossus. In 1962 she had a son.
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald
cry
Took its place among the elements.
(Morning Song)
Sylvia began working on The Bell Jar just after her
daughter was born. It was finally published in January,
1963 under the pseudonym, Victoria Lucas. It was
received with only minor interest because it usually
appeared in reviews alongside The Thin Red Line,
Pigeon Feathers, and One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich. It wasn’t until the second publication in 1967
when the pseudonym was dropped and the facts of her
suicide were clear that the novel created a stir.
The Bell Jar is the story of a young, precocious
female despairing of the alternatives adult life seems to
offer, but who tries to manage by creating or recon
structing her own world apart from the real in which she
can exist. As the terrifying truth seeps through the veils
of “college coed” and “Mademoiselle guest editorships”
Esther Greenwood finds she can trust only the creations
of her own world as real.
Whether or not we may call that the beginning of art,
it is surely society’s view of the beginning of sickness.
And if art can indeed be called therapy, even that is
made unavailable to Esther Greenwood who finds
herself caught in the vapid wastes of Suburbia USA
during a summer between years in college, unable to
write or even sleep. Once she loses the ability to project
her own world in her art, the vacuous bell jar slides in
over her own silence.
It takes the horror and hypocrisy of mental in
stitutions plus the suicide of a friend to whom she feels
partly responsible, to divert Esther’s attention from
herself to empathize with those around her. In doing so
she slowly finds herself able to deal with other people
even though they might still be in a very different world
from her own. It is this decision to deal with her peers
that ultimately lifts the bell jar enough for her to re
enter society.
Aside from this schizophrenic condition that the
narrator presents there is also a distinct consciousness
that emerges from the prose—that of the “new woman.”
The Bell Jar is one of the few modern novels we have
that rejects the conventional heroine role and in its place
puts the woman as hero. Charles Newman in a book he
edited. The Art of Sylvia Plath. points to the obvious:
The problem is that while we have granted the
woman a measure of sophistication and sympathy
in our fiction ... we have been loath to permit her
genuine despair. Somehow, while male
protagonists can wallow fcrever in the absurdity
of their existence, those female characters who
partake of a universal scepticism usually turn out
to be morose bitches whose rejection of the world
is considered presumptuous.
What is merely an echo in The Bell jar, clarifies
itself in Ariel:
I stand in a column
Of winged, unmiraculous women,
Honey drudgers.
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.
(Stings)
In the last year of Sylvia Plath’s life the persona
shifts. Just as the early precociouness gave way to the
“new woman”, so the voice of the new woman fades into
a mystical voice, brutal and destructive—a deathly
voice from the grave.
During this time, A. Alvarez, a critic for the Ob
server, met and became a close friend of Sylvia’s. In the
New American Review No. 12, Alvarez presents a
superb memoir to Sylvia Plath that abolishes some
myths and clarifies the often obscured personality and
events leading up to her eventual suicide. Alvarez wrote
a favorable review of The Colossus when it first ap
peared, suggesting that the craftsmanship of the poetry
was beyond question. His principal qualification was
that the poetry had a self-conscious, academic quality
that made the poems choppy and rigid and very simply
lacking the magic that raises the best poetry up from
mediocrity.
Two factors, according to Alvarez, are central to the
sudden flowering and explosion of poems that make up
the Ariel and Crossing the Water collections. One is
Sylvia’s insistence on reading the poems aloud which
was rare in the sixties: “It was ... after all, still a period
of high formalism, of Stevenesque cadences and Emp
sonian ambiguities at which she herself was, as her
earlier work proved, particularly adept.”
(Continued on Page 14)