Damn this book is disappointing. It has a wonderful premise -- after all, Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes in a famous collision in early 1956, when she was twenty-three, and the couple separated in the summer of 1962,
after which Plath wrote most of the poems which made her famous, in a single autumn. As the jacket flap copy of this book says, "Before she met Ted....her father had died when she was only eight; she had....been unofficially engaged, had tried to commit suicide, and had written more than two hundred poems," as well as winning dozens of scholarships and awards, many for important publications. Plath herself insisted that both her poetry and life were born anew with her marriage, and supposedly dismissed everything she had written prior to 1957 as "juvenilia" (her
Collected Poems, which won the 1982 Pulitzer for poetry and was, inevitably, edited by Hughes, begins with that year as well). (This sweeping assessment is diluted slightly by a later announcement that everything she had written prior to "The Stones," in 1959, was juvenilia, and most modern critics go even further, dismissing everything written prior to October 1962 (a view Hughes pushed whenever he could, usually in introductions to collections of her work he edited), with a few exceptions such as "You're," "Morning Song," "Tulips," and so on. Plath gladly apprenticed herself to one master male poet after another: W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, Ted Hughes, Yeats, Blake, Shakespeare, Pound (female poets such as Dickinson, Teasdale, Millay and even Anne Sexton were more subterranean influences). In the last explosive year of her life, Plath vehemently cast off all the men she had idolized, from her father to her husband to all those long-worshipped literary mentors, and deliberately reclaimed what she saw as an authentic, speaking, long-buried and
female individual self, fluent and authentic. To understand and appreciate her breakthrough, which came only after her marriage broke up, it would seem helpful to examine her life -- and writing and publications -- before that marriage.
Unfortunately, if you have read the first turgid biography of Plath ever, by Edward Butscher, you have read this book, down to its utter pathologizing of Plath (one acquaintance claims that she had tried to cut her throat at ten -- as far as I can tell this is a complete misconception based on a line in "Lesbos": "She'll cut her throat at ten if she's mad at two" -- yet three biographies I've read have repeated it without questioning its source, yet another disappointed boyfriend ((there are many)) ). Plath's drawing on life for her writing is seen as vampiric, her considerable literary success at a young age is desperate perfectionism, she is boy-crazy and father-fixated, and only disappointed would-be and ex-boyfriends like Eddie Cohen and Gordon Lameyer (both of whom she rejected) really understood her. Even the debilitating sinusitis which she suffered from all her life (a condition she shared with her father, which suggests a genetic susceptibility possibly based on facial structure) is diagnosed by Cohen in the early fifties as "purely psychosomatic": "every cold which you have written me about has come on the heels of a breakup". Wilson unquestioningly picks this up, despite Cohen's complete lack of medical and psychiatric training whatsoever, and echoes "....the first occurrence of the illness came in the week after her father had died. It seems probable that her repeated attacks of sinusitis were physical expressions of separation anxiety." This is straight-up misogynist literary history: the
actual illness suffered by the woman in her physical body is blamed on her inadequate psyche, which is fixated on men.
The rest of the book is pretty much just like that. I'm over two-thirds done with it, yet finishing it is a struggle, because of the terrible writing and even more terrible ideas. Illness as a subconsciously willed physical expression of separation anxiety from men! Really!
