Table Of ContentSYLVIA PLATH
Women Writers
General Editors: Eva Figes and Adele King
Published tides:
Charlotte Bronte, Pauline Nestor
Fanny Burney, Judy Simons
Sylvia Plath, Susan Bassnett
Jean Rhys, Carol Rumens
Christina Stead, Diana Brydon
Forthcoming:
Margaret Atwood, Barbara Rigney
Jane Austen, Meenakshi Mukherjee
Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Langland
Willa Cather, Susie Thomas
Emily Dickinson, Joan Kirkby
George Eliot, Kristin Brady
Mrs Gaskell, Jane Spencer
Katherine Mansfield, Diane DeBell
Muriel Spark, Judith Sproxton
Edith Wharton, Katherine Joslin-Jeske
Women in Romanticism: Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft
and Mary Shelley, Meena Alexander
Further tides are in preparation
Women Writers
SYLVIA PLATH
Susan Bassnett
M
MACMILLAN
©Susan Bassnett 1987
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987 978-0-333-36780-3
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 Act 1956 (as amended).
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to
this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and
civil claims for damages.
First published 1987
Published by
MACMILLAN EDUCATION LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
Typeset by Wessex Typesetters
(Division of The Eastern Press Ltd)
Frome, Somerset
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bassnett, Susan
Sylvia Plath.-(Women writers)
1. Plath, Sylvia-Criticism and
interpretation
I. Title II. Series
811 .54 PS3566.L272/
ISBN 978-0-333-36781-0 ISBN 978-1-349-18600-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18600-6
Contents
Editor's Preface vii
AcknO'Wledgements
Vlll
1 The Many Sylvia Plaths 1
2 God, Nature and Writing 34
3 Writing the Family 63
4 Writing out Love 93
5 The Struggle to Survive through Writing 120
6 Sylvia as Muse 148
Notes 154
Bibliography 159
Index 161
v
For Clive
vi
Editors' Preface
The study of women's writing has been long neglected by a
male critical establishment both in academic circles and
beyond. As a result, many women writers have either been
unfairly neglected or have been marginalised in some way, so
that their true influence and importance has been ignored.
Other women writers have been accepted by male critics and
academics, but on terms which seem, to many women
readers of this generation, to be false or simplistic. In the past
the internal conflicts involved in being a woman in a
male-dominated society have been largely ignored by readers
of both sexes, and this has affected our reading of women's
work. The time has come for a serious reassessment of
women's writing in the light of what we understand today.
This series is designed to help in that reassessment.
All the books are written by women because we believe
that men's understanding of feminist critique is only, at best,
partial. And besides, men have held the floor quite long
enough.
EVA FIGES
ADELE KING
Vll
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Eva Figes and Adele King for sensitive
thoughtful editing, also Vanessa Peerless for her invaluable
help.
In the writing of this book, many people have contributed
in many different ways. I should like to single out Anne
Cluysenaar for her wisdom and unique knowledge of the
processes of making poetry, also Renate Becker, Barrie
Hinksman, Susan Melrose and Nilda Pettenuzzo who set me
on the road to writing again. Irene Pearson typed the
manuscript, correcting any spelling and syntax and offering
positive encouragement and feedback.
Finally, as ever, my thanks are due to those people whose
practical help gives me the necessary time in which to write at
all - Stella Dixon, my mother Eileen, my husband and my
two eldest daughters, Lucy and Vanessa.
Vlll
1 The Many Sylvia
Plaths
One of the most powerfully persistent myths of western
culture is the myth of the Doomed Poet, the figure touched
by greatness that causes poetry to be written but that brings
about the death of the writer, often at his (usually his) own
hand. The canon of great poets is littered with the bodies of
those who died tragically before their time - poets such as
Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and Byron, names which sum
mon up the image even for people who have never read any of
the poems.
The myth of the Doomed Poet takes on another aspect
where women writers are concerned, because here it clashes
with the myth of the Frustrated Female - poor lovelorn
Christina Rossetti for example, or Emily Bronte in wind
swept Yorkshire, Marina Tsvetayova whose suffering proved
too great to endure any longer, and, in recent times, Sylvia
Plath, the woman whose broken marriage led her to suicide
in a cold London flat in 1963, despite the presence of two
small children and despite being in the midst of a mighty flow
of creative energy in her writing.
Critics have tended to read Sylvia Plath's work through
lenses in which the two myths are reflected, seeing her as part
of the line running through history which decrees that great
poetry cannot be written without the poet paying the price of
happiness and also as part of the line that decrees that women
writers are unfulfilled human beings. Since the rebirth of the
feminist movement in the early seventies, another myth has
also begun to circulate, the myth of the Deprived Woman,
1
