Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers

Janet Badia

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781613762523
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Depicted in popular films, television series, novels, poems, and countless media reports, Sylvia Plath's women readers have become nearly as legendary as Plath herself, in large part because the depictions are seldom kind. If one is to believe the narrative told by literary and popular culture, Plath's primary audience is a body of young, misguided women who uncritically—even pathologically—consume Plath's writing with no awareness of how they harm the author's reputation in the process.Janet Badia investigates the evolution of this narrative, tracing its origins, exposing the gaps and elisions that have defined it, and identifying it as a bullying mythology whose roots lie in a long history of ungenerous, if not outright misogynistic, rhetoric about women readers that has gathered new energy from the backlash against contemporary feminism.More than just an exposé of our cultural biases against women readers, Badia's research also reveals how this mythology has shaped the production, reception, and evaluation of Plath's body of writing, affecting everything from the Hughes family's management of Plath's writings to the direction of Plath scholarship today. Badia discusses a wide range of texts and issues whose significance has gone largely unnoticed, including the many book reviews that have been written about Plath's publications; films and television shows that depict young Plath readers; editorials and fan tributes written about Plath; and Ted and (daughter) Frieda Hughes's writings about Plath's estate and audience.

CHAPTER 1

“Dissatisfied, Family-Hating Shrews”

Women Readers and the Politics of Plath’s Literary Reception

THE LITERARY RECEPTION OF PLATH’S WRITING HAS BEEN summarized by at least a few scholars and biographers over the years, including Linda Wagner-Martin and Paul Alexander.¹ These summaries are invaluable to readers looking for either an overview of how Plath’s work has been generally valued within the literary establishment, an indication of whether her individual works were received warmly or not, or some insight into how Plath may have felt about the few reviews that were written in her lifetime. While I focus on the reception history of Plath’s work in this chapter, I do not offer simply another summary of her reception. Rather, I set out to examine the anxieties about women readers that permeate the vast collection of reviews written about Plath’s work and to situate these anxieties not only within the context of Plath’s career but, just as important, within the broader discourse about gender and reading that has shaped literary culture over the past few decades.²

As I demonstrate in this chapter, anxieties about women readers have driven (indeed continue to drive) critical assessments of Plath’s oeuvre, giving shape to everything from the language critics use when describing the work under review to the judgments they reach about its quality and literary worth. For some critics, Plath’s popularity with women readers represents an obstacle to a serious consideration of her work, a distraction that must be dealt with lest it continue to divert attention away from the brilliance of her poetry. For less admiring critics, Plath’s popularity with women readers is all the evidence that is needed to make a case for the lack of brilliance in her work; after all, these critics imply, if so many women like it, how good can it be, especially given women’s notoriously uncritical reading habits and undiscriminating consumption of such “low” cultural productions as soap operas? While arriving at different conclusions, both arguments situate women readers at the forefront of the debate about the value of Plath’s writing, and with alarming implications.

Given Plath’s undeniable popularity with women, it’s perhaps not surprising that this particular group of readers has found itself the object of critics’ attention. And to those familiar with the history of genres commonly regarded as “lowbrow” or simply “popular,” it’s not even surprising that women readers have become central to arguments about the aesthetic merits of Plath’s writing, especially to arguments that aim to discredit it. We need only remember how the reputations of certain genres, including the allegedly “lowbrow” genres of the contemporary romance novel and the nineteenth-century sensation novel, have suffered from their close association with women readers throughout literary history. What is surprising in the case of Plath’s reception is the degree to which the association is so ingrained that it can be easily overlooked or simply discounted as insignificant. This is especially true of those reviews of Plath’s work in which references to women readers are made so casually, even humorously, that as we read the reviews, we are made to feel as though we’re merely in on a joke the reviewer has made, rather than witnessing the reproduction of an invidious discourse. Such oversights are especially likely to occur when reviews are looked at selectively, without the entire reception history in view, say, while a reader simply pages through a magazine or journal, which, I would guess, is how most readers encounter book reviews. When we look at the larger collection of reviews, in contrast, the pattern of the references to women readers from review to review begins to emerge, making each reference impossible to ignore and giving the collective references added significance. And the significance of what exactly is said about women readers also becomes clear. For instance, a casual reference to Plath’s readers as “devotees” in one review might seem innocent enough, but when we look at the term “devotee” alongside some of the other, more obviously disparaging terms critics have used to describe her readers—including “hounds,”³ “necrophilia[cs],”⁴ and “shrews”⁵—the implications of a term like “devotee” become more obviously significant.

It is with this fuller picture in mind that I proceed in this chapter. Indeed, throughout my research I have aimed to be as comprehensive as possible in my examination of the reviews, basing the argument of this chapter on the hundreds of reviews written in response to Plath’s many publications over the past five decades. Throughout my discussion of this vast collection of book reviews, too, I have aimed to be as comprehensive as possible, so much so that I may well risk alienating my readers with the repetitive feeling of the evidence I present. But the point of this chapter, I suggest from the outset, lies precisely in the repetitiveness of the discourse across the large volume of reviews. That is to say, the repetition in this chapter is deliberate, and its purpose is to underscore the pervasiveness and persistence of the discourse about Plath’s women readers and thereby make the argument for its significance. What might stand out in particular is the way the discourse traverses different formats and venues, from local to national newspapers, from mainstream magazines to highbrow literary journals, and from American periodicals to publications abroad.

To move us toward a better understanding of this discourse, I focus most of my attention, some might say myopically, on the rhetoric of the reviews, zeroing in on examples of rhetoric that seem either visibly or obscurely relevant to the question of how critics have understood Plath’s women readers. In doing so, I identify a mode of understanding and talking about Plath’s audience that evolves over the course of her reception into a distinct institutionalized discourse about women readers, one that repeatedly determines the literary judgments rendered in the reviews themselves and that continues to shape our understanding of who reads Plath’s work, how they read it, and for what reasons. To provide focus to my examination, I spend most of this chapter discussing the circulation of this discourse throughout Plath’s reception in the 1970s and early 1980s, concentrating especially on the shifts that occur during this period that appear to be motivated less by the question of the aesthetic quality of Plath’s work than by critics’ patronizing and even misogynistic attitude toward women readers.

While more than a few critics are shockingly explicit and direct in how they express this attitude, often attacking women readers quite plainly as uncritical consumers prone to poor judgment and psychological problems, most are more subtle, veiling their concerns about women readers behind an array of tropes and anecdotes, some more original than others. To those who have read Steven Mailloux’s work on the cultural rhetoric of reception, my concern with tropes and anecdotes will sound familiar. In many ways, in fact, I am conducting an examination of Plath’s reception that aims, in a fashion similar to Mailloux’s “rhetorical hermeneutics,” to discover “how particular tropes, arguments, and narratives contribute to historical acts of interpreting.”⁶ Such an examination makes several key assumptions about the nature of literary reviews. First, it assumes that, as historical acts of interpretation, reviews can, in Mailloux’s words, “be read within the rhetorical context of their production and reception.”⁷ Second, it assumes that interpretation functions “as a politically interested act of persuasion” and thus that “claims for reading are always direct attempts to affect power relations through coercion or persuasion.”⁸ Third, it assumes that reviews are not ever just transparent and objective statements about the literary or aesthetic quality of a work; indeed, it assumes that the tropes used to discuss the act of reading tell us something important not simply about literary culture but about broader cultural politics and ideologies.⁹ And last, it assumes that the tropes, arguments, and narratives of “specialized professional discourse” (like that of literary reviews) can, to borrow Mailloux’s words again, “migrate” to and from “different sites within a cultural conversation.”¹⁰ If we understand reception along these lines, then the importance of studying not just individual reviews but the entire reception history of a literary work becomes clear, as does the importance of studying a particular author’s reception within its broader cultural network.

At the same time as I work from this set of assumptions regarding the cultural rhetoric of literary reception, I am also aware that Plath’s reception is laden with the complex history of the discourse about women’s reading, a history which teaches us that the tropes and narratives used to describe reading acts “migrate” not merely from “different sites within a cultural conversation” but from different conversations across historical periods. To reiterate the terms I outlined in the introduction, then, studying the role of women readers in Plath’s reception requires both synchronic and diachronic analysis; it requires us to consider how critics’ views of the Plath reader have both everything and nothing to do with Plath.¹¹ For this reason I aim throughout this chapter not only to position Plath’s reception within the discourse about women readers circulating broadly in the 1960s and 1970s but also to highlight those facets of the discourse that reflect the anxieties about women readers that have shaped literary culture over the past three centuries at least, including those anxieties I summarized in my introduction. Before turning to this question of women readers, however, I offer a brief overview of Plath’s early publications and their general reception for those less familiar with her career.

Plath in the 1960s and Early 1970s: The Initial Reception

At the time of her death in 1963, Sylvia Plath had achieved what might best be described as a respectable reputation as a poet, though hardly one commensurate with the success she had desired throughout much of her adult life, and certainly not one that presaged the level of success that would come in the years after her death as the full extent of her talents unfolded. Following several years of sometimes successful but (for the over-achiever Plath) often frustrating attempts to place her poems in leading magazines, her first book of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems, was picked up by Heinemann and released in England in October 1960. The book received mostly minor notices in British periodicals, many barely a full paragraph in length.¹² Those few magazines and newspapers that took the time to review the book more fully—Critical Quarterly, Time and Tide, London Magazine, and the Observer—responded to it with what I would characterize as qualified enthusiasm.¹³ In his review for the Observer, A. Alvarez, a critic who just a few years later would champion Ariel, characteristically summed up Plath’s poetic abilities this way: “The Colossus needs none of the usual throat-clearing qualifications, to wit: ‘impressive, considering, of course, it is a first volume by a young (excuse me) American poetess.’ … She simply writes good poetry…. She is not, of course, unwaveringly good.”¹⁴ While undoubtedly disappointed by the book’s reception, Plath continued to seek out an American publisher for The Colossus. In the summer of 1961 she found one in Knopf, which released the book in the United States the following spring. Unfortunately for Plath, the reception The Colossus saw in the United States proved even less momentous than in England. In the months that followed its publication in the United States, the book was the subject of only a handful of reviews in such periodicals as the Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Kenyon Review. While the reviews were uniformly positive, they were also brief, most as brief as a single paragraph.

Perhaps because the reception of The Colossus failed to match her ambitions for her poetry, Plath devoted much of her writing time in early 1961 to her novel The Bell Jar. Having contracted for publication in October 1961, Heinemann released the novel in England under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas on January 14, 1963, just a month before Plath’s death. Coinciding with rejections from American publishers to whom she had sent the novel months earlier, The Bell Jar arrived on England’s literary scene to a reception nearly as unremarkable as the one The Colossus had received. Approximately a dozen and a half magazines and newspapers, many of them local, reviewed the novel.¹⁵ A few early reviewers seemed to agree that The Bell Jar was a promising, even “clever first novel,” as Robert Taubman put it in his review for the New Statesman.¹⁶ One even called it a “brilliant and moving book.”¹⁷ But generally speaking, praise for the novel was not so enthusiastic. Simon Raven’s review for the Spectator, for example, finds The Bell Jar to be an appropriately “unpleasant, competent, and often very funny novel” but advises readers “to stick to home produce” since Lucas is “by no means as unpleasant, competent, or funny as her English counterpart, Miss Jennifer Dawson.”¹⁸ Of course, it is likely true that Plath fared no worse than most first-time novelists (or in the case of the publication of The Colossus, for that matter, most first-time poets).

As the early reception of The Colossus and The Bell Jar suggests, most readers caught their initial glimpse of Plath’s talents only after her death, first through the notices and tributes that immediately followed, many of which included selections from her poetry, and later that same year through the publication of her work in the Critical Quarterly, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Encounter, and The Review.¹⁹ The news of Plath’s untimely death, appearing next to previously unseen poems such as “Edge,” must certainly have grabbed readers’ attention, generating new interest in her work and shaping her reputation as a poet. Still, as instrumental as these tributes and publications were to the visibility of her work, Plath’s was not a meteoric rise to fame fueled, as some have suggested, simply by the tragedy of her suicide.²⁰ Rather, her reputation as a writer and an icon grew gradually over the decade as her work was slowly made available to the reading public. In fact, more than two years passed between her death and the publication of a new volume of her poetry.

When editions of Ariel were finally published—one by Faber and Faber in England in March 1965 and a second by Harper and Row in the United States a year later—the book receive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “There Is No Such Thing as a Death Girl”: Literary Bullying and the Plath Reader
• 1. “Dissatisfied, Family-Hating Shrews”: Women Readers and the Politics of Plath’s Literary Reception
• 2. “Oh, You Are Dark”: The Plath Reader in Popular Culture
• 3. “We Did Not Wish to Give the Impression”: Plath Fandom and the Question of Representation
• 4. “A Fiercely Fought Defense”: Ted Hughes and the Plath Reader
• Conclusion: “I Don’t Mean Any Harm”: Frieda Hughes, Plath Readers, and the Question of Resistance
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover