Back to Plath

Is Sylvia Plath assigned to high school English classes in this forsaken country? I wouldn't know — at least not from personal experience. I don't remember reading her in my Canadian high school. I don't remember much of my adolescence.

I remember English class as an idea: musty paperbacks, the instructor's colonial Caribbean accent, graffiti engraved into the desk, a chalkboard list of themes and characters. I remember Flowers for Algernon. I remember my tenth-grade English teacher calling my mother to warn her I was hanging out with the wrong crowd. I don't remember Plath at all, but I do, oddly enough, remember my Toronto high school like Plath wrote in her 1963 essay, "America! America!":

I went to public schools — genuinely public. Everybody went: the spry, the shy, the podge, the gangler, the future electronic scientist, the future cop who would one night kick a diabetic to death under the mistaken impression he was drunk and needed cooling off; the poor, smelling of sour wools and the ruinous baby at home and polyglot stew; the richer, with ratty fur collars, opal birthstone rings and daddies with cars . . .1

But we didn't know we were everybody. We didn't know anything. We just were. And then in undergrad I didn't major or minor in English, a field in which I am now getting, shall we say, a highly advanced degree. When I wasn't trying to pass microeconomics, I either worked, wrote for the school's independent newspaper, partied, or read drug novels. So, I missed a certain kind of literary education: The Classics. It's not even that I hadn't ever read them, it's that I couldn't have told you what they were or how they were meant to be read. I read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre to get after Bertha Mason, the creole woman confined to the attic. I read Jane Austen's Emma after watching Clueless four times in a row. In those days, I came late to most things considered intellectual, except the wine-and-cheese vernissage.

I'm better off now, I think. I can be a little promiscuous with my reading and writing. As they say in basketball, my fouls can be a little flagrant. Surrounded by a mix of professional harassers, grad students, and people whose work makes me fall in love with theory against my better judgment, a touch of irreverence seems sound. My dissertation looks at conversations, fragments, a short story, Marxist-feminist theory, a trilogy of novels as if they easily flow together. I almost never know what's going on with any single chapter let alone the entire project, but I just keep going because I like to dig through the mess. The point is that I came to most capital "L" Literature late, so since starting grad school, I have had a difficult time figuring out what exactly I am supposed to study, and how. Academics don't often footnote their hunches, but they're there. Emotions guide me. What I had for dinner often makes a difference.

When I finally stumbled on Plath, I didn't start where a professional would recommend starting, say, with the Bell Jar (racist!) or Ariel's "Daddy" (anti-Semitic!!). I started, instead, with her journals. Which meant I could start anywhere and end nowhere. And her journals are where I always come back. I see her name somewhere, and I choke. It's automatic, articulated somewhere in my gut. As I tweeted in 2018, "Once or twice a year I get obsessed with Sylvia Plath and then completely black out for several weeks. See you when I come to."

I like to read her in pieces, to pieces. For many months last year, I had trouble sleeping. I left her journals by my bed and when I woke up, I would leaf through the pages at random. Another day with Plath and "a crisis has passed."2 On a Sunday night in 1956 in Cambridge, February 19, she starts: "To whom it may concern: Every now and then there comes a time when the neutral and impersonal forces of the world turn and come together in a thundercrack of judgment. There is no reason for the sudden terror, the feeling of condemnation, except that circumstances all mirror the inner doubt, the inner fear."3 What a way to encounter the night. Each entry, it seems, swirls around the possibility that she might, or could, or will swerve in to traffic. Every day, a hard jerk. My midnight panic followed by uncareful but self-soothing reading became something of a practice. In lieu of routinely "journaling" upon my therapist's recommendation, I read someone else's. Full throttle disidentification.

It is hard to read Plath criticism without reading about suicide and mental illness. "The real problem is that it's impossible to read 'The Bell Jar' for its own esthetic sake," the New York Times book reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in 1971. "The knowledge of Sylvia Plath's doom colors its pages, heightens the terror, and makes all the more poignant the brilliance that shines through it — the wit and economy of style and self‐deprecating irony."4 We are often reduced to the things we do, not the things we don't.

Undoubtedly, Plath marks a long tradition of beautiful white women feeling sad, particularly in popular and public culture: Marilyn Monroe's life and death as spectacle or, you know, Lana Del Rey's entire oeuvre is so sad, so sexy. I've been tearing around in my fucking nightgown / 24/7 Sylvia Plath / Writing in blood on the walls / 'Cause the ink in my pen don't work in my notepad.

In the introduction to Plath's posthumous collection of stories, prose, and journal excerpts, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Ted Hughes places these two sentences from her journals together in order to illuminate a contradiction: "I must write about the things of the world with no glazing" and "I shall perish if I can write about no one but myself."5 Hughes, who everyone knows abused Plath physically and emotionally, fails to understand that the so-called objective world is inseparable from Plath's interior life. Because in the beginning, the world is a thing that happens to us. These days, antinatalists are big online; "choice" and "consent" are words with which to quarrel. Associating the accoutrements of white womanhood with what Lehmann-Haupt calls "doom" is something that happens not only in fiction and criticism and media and myth but also in the unconscious. What I mean to say is that I read journals like I read poetry and not as some kind of magical clue into who Plath was or what The Bell Jar really means. Writing about the world is intertwined with writing of oneself. Journals are a genre that make that clear. Day after day you write about the world from your singular perspective and no one gets to argue. I frequently resort to using the first-person in my academic writing. One's life is not enclosed, separate from the headlines or the thesis argument. While I might tell myself "I" is a placeholder for some other more generic theoretical conclusion, any replacement never feels as exact.

One night in February, when the moonlight was bleeding everywhere in my bedroom, I picked up the newly published tiny book Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom, which consists solely of one rejected short story that Plath wrote as an undergraduate at Smith College and a flat, mechanical introduction by Harper Perennial that runs just over a page. She was twenty when she wrote the now-published version, where a young woman, Mary Ventura, is shipped off on a train by her parents, and as the journey continues, Mary realizes the last stop is a "ninth kingdom," described by her seat-mate as "the kingdom of negation, of the frozen will."6

In Plath's conception of Mary's world, everyone is white until proven otherwise. Somewhere along the way, Plath's schoolgirl universal of "everybody" comes slamming back, now diluted. Meanwhile, I came to understand that I wasn't "everybody"; everybody was a designation that in fact stamped my existential separateness.

An early scene where Mary and a strange yet chipper woman order from the train's café car contained lines that made me put the book down for months until I picked it up again to write this essay:

"May I take your order?" queried the black waiter in the white tailored suit, the pencil poised in his hand above a tablet of paper. Mary had not even seen him approach. He brought ice water for each of them.

"I think I would like a glass of ginger ale," Mary said.

"I'll have the usual," the woman smiled at him.

"Sure thing...coffee, cream, and sugar." The black waiter flashed the woman a grin and scribbled hieroglyphics on his paper tablet.7

Up until this point in Mary Ventura, I had, for like a second, forgotten race existed, until "the black waiter" appears out of nowhere. Just in case you forgot, he's named again about a dozen lines later. He's still black; only because everyone else in the story is still not. He is our palpable sign that Mary Ventura is a horror story. On the first page, we are introduced to "the long black hand of the clock on the wall" but at first, it's just another fucking color among the "red neon lights" and the "gray felt hats."8 Then, a "black tunnel," "black crows...strutting to and fro."9 Literary judgment aside (too many color descriptions as filler, too much heavy-handed symbolism), the blackness starts to add up. As the sense of foreboding builds, like  "round black birds, and guilt, and guilt, and guilt," there's a climax — Mary's realization that the train is heading somewhere she does not want to go — anticipated by the waiter, promised to us by his mystery.10 Months later, I keep reading. Is this an undertone? Why do I care so much?

While writing a dissertation chapter on Alice Childress and Tillie Olsen, one of my advisors suggests I read The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol'niki Park to Chicago's South Side by Kate A. Baldwin. I leaf through, stopping on a chapter called "Reframing the Cold War Kitchen: Sylvia Plath, Byt, and the Radical Imaginary of The Bell Jar." Baldwin looks to the Russian and black American characters to show how "U.S. Cold War femininity was always already caught up in a summoning of the Soviet 'other.'"11 (She doesn't need to say "white Russian," and she prefers African American over black.) Baldwin reads something like Toni Morrison's "Africanist presence" — where moments of racialization and symbolic allusions are lodged in the narrative methods, the writer's consciousness, the enigma of style, and the characterological gloss — into where these othered characters appear in Bell Jar protagonist Esther Greenwood's life. Serving as instruments to Esther, they become keyholes into where the life of a white woman begins to disappear.12 The white housewife can slip into disappearance in the company of difference, near a Russian or a black waiter. "The Russians appear during her first failed attempt to dispense with her virginity," Baldwin writes, "while the 'Negro' appears following her first failed attempt to dispense with her life."13

When does Plath appear in mine?

Several months ago when I agreed to contribute to Summer's series, I thought I was emotionally willing enough to write this essay on Sylvia Plath. It was easier to draw a map than to encounter the path. Reading Plath enables me to tolerate a kind of midnight loneliness, but writing about her objectifies us both, forcing assumptions into the light, calcifying her into "this" and me into "that." The characteristics of her literature and the conversations around it — femininity, public versus private, mental wellbeing — enter my little corner, requiring me to respond to her presence.

But it's not always the middle of the night, and during the day, the neoliberal university rewards a seamless translation between a professional minoritarian subject and their object of study. Citing diversity and accumulating tax exemptions, a corporate agenda checks its cute little boxes. We all know this. In a job market workshop this past spring, we were told we should have a sense of our post-dissertation project for interviews. I whispered to my friend with delight, "Oh my god, Sylvia Plath!!" It was a joke but then again, why not? Finally, I could fit her in if only because it is often while reading her that I can notice the way out.

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Tiana Reid is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She has written for Art in America, Bookforum, The Nation, The Paris Review, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, VICE, and Vulture, among others. She's also a member of several editorial collectives, including The New Inquiry, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and Pinko, a new magazine of gay communism.

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