The Fapal Atraction of Silvia Plath

Introduction

In the opening line of her engaging essay on Sylvia Plath, critic Sandra M. Gilbert explains, “Though I never met Sylvia Plath, I can honestly say that I have known her most of my life.” The familiarity that Gilbert reports is one that many readers of Plath share. The bare facts of her life come to us from multiple sources – from her Journals and Letters Home, her stories and prose essays, her novel, The Bell Jar, and of course from the poems themselves. Beyond this, we pick up clues and information from biographies and memoirs, from critical commentaries and, of late, from other people’s poems (notably Ted Hughes’s 1998 Birthday Letters) or fiction (Kate Moses’2003 Wintering) or film (Christine Jeffs’ 2003 Sylvia); Paul Alexander, in his biography, Rough Magic shares: “My connection with Plath did not result from any psychological identification. I was not then, nor have I been suicidal. I am not a woman. My father did not die when I was eight years old I simply fell in love with the beauty of the language of her poems.”

I myself must recognize that I am captured by the incredible passion and boldness encountered in her writings, weapons that are seizing the reader like a spider web. But the main attraction upon the ordinary reader is her way of living, in concordance with her way of writing, her controversial life taken to the extreme of perfection, obsession and ruthless pursuit of success.

Since her death, her biography has become the centre of an extensive market cult. It is her life in combination with her literary achievement that has created the myth of Sylvia Plath, both as a king of goddess of contemporary English poetry, and as an angry young woman iconised by the feminist movement. She has become a symbol for a number of different cultural and ideological phenomena, representing both high art and popular culture.

Her personal magnetism is also reflected in her physical appearances. Mallory Woeber, one of the many boys who came into her life during the first six months at Cambridge, writes of Sylvia: “Her physical presence was tangible- I swear that on one occasion I entered King’s College Dining Hall with her, it was arranged for a concert, full of people turned around to see who entered. Not me, of course. Her eyes, a medium brown color, really burned. I very soon came to feel that I had been privileged to encounter a genius, and never desisted from that view. She was, however, at least that time, possessed by a total determination to serve- perhaps control and master ( here perhaps hits a found of conflict, with its creative as well as destructive aspects) her muse. This presented her as self-centered, with its selfish and hence sometimes personally insensitive behavior, depending upon circumstances.” Nancy Hunter, a good friend of Sylvia describes her firs impression when seeing the poetess “She was impressively tall, almost statuesque, and she carried the weight with an air of easy assurance. Her eyes were very dark, deeply set under heavy lids that give them a brooding quality in many of her photographs, the face was angular and its feature strong ”

In the preface of his biography, Method and Madness, Edward Butcher explains his occasionally appellation “bitch goddess,” addressed to Sylvia: “the bitch, of course, is a familiar enough figure – a discontented, tense, frequently brilliant woman goaded into fury by her repressed or distorted status in a male society; and the goddess conveys the opposite image, a more creative one, though it too represents an extreme.”

What struck me most was Sylvia’s multiple personalities, always in a conflictual relationship, that were very hard to decrypt. Butcher also mentions: “to understand Sylvia at this point is to understand the complex nature of her divided personality. Though not yet schizophrenic in any medical sense she was three persons, three Sylvias in constant struggle with one another for domination: Sylvia the modest, bright, dutiful, hard- working, terribly efficient child of middle-class parents and strict Calvinist values who was grateful for the smallest favor; Sylvia the poet, the golden girl on campus who was destined for great things in the arts and glittered when she walked and talked; and Sylvia the bitch goddess, aching to go on a rampage of destruction against all those who possessed what she did not and who made her cater to their whims.”

This paper is a tribute for one of the greatest American poetess, a woman who was in a constant struggle with her own self, a woman who has felt with every pore all experiences that her life had to offer, a woman that never settled with the second best. Her fierce ambition was the thing that made her treat life with great depth and seriousness but the disillusionment society and people around her had to offer made her give up fighting.

My focus is on her literary career, analyzing major works, but also on the relationship between her and three important figures that shaped her personality and the course of her life.

The first chapter of my paper deals with aspects of the poetess’s literary style that ranks her among the confessional poets, and with issues concerning femininity and identity in Plath’s major poems.

The second chapter examines her only novel, The Bell Jar, from the perspective of a bildungsroman and the issue of the separative self.

The last chapter is a zoom into Plath’s private life, depicting her relation with the “ghost father,” the “medusa mother,” the ”fascist husband” and also her behavior in the background of marriage and motherhood.

The study of Sylvia Plath’s life and writing can not only promote a much more open-minded and invigorating view of the complex and contradictory personality she undoubtedly was. It can also offer different visions of poetry and culture, of sexuality, of the body and writing, in their relation to each other.

What remains behind Sylvia is a great gift to humanity: her poems, some of the most brilliant of the 20th century, the finest of which – “Daddy,” “ Lady Lazarus,” “Edge” - she wrote when in the most pain, in the last few months of her life: confessional, brutal, not-nice assessments of the viciousness of the world, her relationships with her father, mother and husband, and her belief that "Dying is an art I do it exceptionally well.