Who's Afraid of Sylvia Plath?
On Sad Girls, Narrative Control, and Growing up with Sylvia Plath
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
In a recent essay, Everything You Thought You Knew About Sylvia Plath Is Wrong, the always-excellent Sara Petersen of In Pursuit Of Clean Countertops talks to Emily Van Duyne, author of the Loving Sylvia Plath newsletter and new book1 of the same name (a volume I positively sprinted to order having read this interview, and which, in a development I can only interpret as serendipitous indeed, arrived just as I was putting the finishing touches to this essay).
Petersen shares what she calls her 'Sylvia Plath origin story': researching a high school writing assignment, she read Plath's Collected Journals, and was 'instantly transfixed by this creative, curious, constantly questioning person... charismatic, interesting, and full of life.' Petersen describes the subsequent sense of shock she experienced upon learning of Plath's reputation as 'one of poetry’s saddest of sad girls'.
My own Sylvia Plath origin story mirrors Petersen's almost exactly: my first exposure to Plath's work, in my late teens, was not her poems nor her novel, The Bell Jar, but that same Collected Journals, a copy of which sat, rather incongruously, on my father's study shelf amid legal reference tomes, the collected works of Anthony Beevor and a selection of mass-market mystery paperbacks. Like Petersen, my first, and enduring, mental image of Plath was well-represented by the image from that volume's cover: a shining, smiling young woman, slim fingers fluttering excitedly at the silk scarf knotted about her throat, gazing hopefully at something unknown, just out of shot.
My teenaged self managed a blissful few months with Sylvia before inevitably stumbling across her public reputation, by way of crude head-in-the-oven jokes from a good number of my school-aged peers, who didn't let the fact they'd not actually read any of her work - journals or poems or otherwise - get in the way of a confident and definitive appraisal of her character and identity. Plath, they said, was Morbid, was Depressed, was Crazy.
It was the late 90s; discussion of mental health, though arguably more acceptable than in years past, was far from where it is today. Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation and the film adaptation of Susannah Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie, dominated - certainly in the rural region of the UK in which I grew up - our shared teenage understanding of depression, particularly in women. These representations were helpful in advancing the conversation around mental illness - a friend of mine, who suffered from quite debilitating depression from her mid-teens, found tremendous solace in Wurtzel's work in particular, and utilised it as a tool to help her family understand her experience - but were, as with many other complex issues, ultimately folded into the 90s cultural miasma in a way that at best was reductive and lacking nuance and at worst was about as empathetic as a brick to the face.
‘Depressed’ trumped any other aspect of personhood in the battle for defining feature, and was near-impossible to shake off. From the cover of Prozac Nation, Wurtzel stared out, pale, dead-eyed and sullen; though a blurb quote informed us this was the story of a journey into depression and back, none of us ever remembered the recovering. What stuck was the look on Wurtzel's face, her perfect Sad Girl beauty, the thrum of danger - of crazy - that ran beneath it. And Sylvia? She, I learned, had was the Original Sad Girl.
The prevailing view of Plath seemed to be that her depressive illness was what drove and defined her identity and her work, and that, by association, if you admired Plath's work you were a) morbid and/or depressed and b) a goth-adjacent fangirl being spectacularly unimaginative in a manner that might, these days, be referred to as basic.
All of this proved deeply unsettling to me, both because of the startling discrepancy between the complex vibrancy of the Plath whose work I had come to love and her wider public characterisation, and my own continuing difficulty in understanding or defining myself. Around sixteen or so, I had begun to more obviously and awkwardly struggle in ways that didn't make much sense to me, or anybody else, for that matter. Having friends who'd battled with depression, I knew what I experienced didn't seem to be quite the same sort of thing, but neither I, nor my family, nor the GPs and counsellors I would go on to consult, could offer a better explanation for my difficulty with regulating extreme - and often disproportionate- emotion, for the cycles of intense activity followed by periods of barely being able to get out of bed, for the insomnia, for the near-constant suspicion that other people were in possession of essential knowledge about being a human that I had somehow missed.2
So when I read 'because wherever I sat —on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air' in Plath's novel The Bell Jar, I recognised immediately a sense of otherness. Whether or not what afflicted Plath was the same thing that dogged me, I found in that line, and that novel, and her poems, points of connection.
Always prone to starkly black and white thinking, I nevertheless found myself vulnerable to the tendency - so prevalent in the culture and media of my youth, which was gleeful in its reduction of women in the public eye to physical appearance or perceived sexual morality3 - to categorise people and things into invariably dichotomous categories - this or that. One or the other. I did this not out of a sense of superiority nor insight but rather desperation to scramble some semblance of control and safety over a world I frequently felt baffled by. If Plath was, for all her contradictions and complexity, her yearning and her vivacity, thought of as first and foremost the saddest of Sad Girls, then surely I should similarly classify myself?
I didn't, as my teens gave way to my twenties and then to my thirties, really attempt to interrogate the narrative that had grown up around Plath, despite privately thinking it reductive and insulting. Nor did I attempt to interrogate my own impulse to similarly classify myself in such bleakly simplistic terms (I was, it seems, a true product of my time).
I might not have been a Sad Girl, but I was, I decided, a Difficult one.
Things might have continued like this, had it not been for a particularly turbulent period in my early thirties, when, living alone for the first time in years after a significant break-up, I rediscovered Plath's work. Coming back to the poems older and more bruised opened new perspectives, as age and experience is wont to do.
Here was Plath, then: still brutally unflinching in her exploration of darker issues and themes, depression and suicide amongst them - but here she was, too, writing about motherhood and bees, about the sea and about the process of writing, about perfectionism and marriage and grappling with uncertainty, about the 'fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty'4 that make up life. Here were the whimsical sketches she made in the margins of her journals and on loose-leaf paper: a pair of heeled pumps, conkers, a thistle; Parisian rooftops, her husband's face in profile, a 'curious French cat.' Here was Plath setting her shining hair in glamorous waves, posing for smiling photographs in her bathing suit on the beach, or with her children amid an abundance of daffodils. Here she was writing about the details of domestic life. Here was her recipe, apparently handed down from her mother, for a cake made with tomato soup from a can5. Yes: here she was, just as I remembered her.
In the years following the aforementioned break-up, I embarked upon two missions that were entirely at odds with each other, a fact to which I was, of course, entirely oblivious.
First matter of business: a tentative, fumbling attempt to push back against my own self-classification as Difficult. Unsure as quite how to dismantle an idea of myself I'd carefully nurtured the better part of my life, I tried to work it out on paper: I made lists of questions to answer, having realised, with no small amount of dismay, that I'd built so much of my identity around there being something fundamentally wrong with me (and thus endlessly searching for the magic fix for said wrongness) that I didn't know much about myself beyond that premise. The list ranged from the stuff of a standard job interview to the most existential. What are my favourite things? What are my best qualities? What do I think happens when we die? Where am I happiest? Do I want children? What do I like to wear? What is my purpose?
The second mission: building a wholly new, more well-rounded idea of myself (so far, so good), by way of prioritising a new and different narrative (seems sensible) generated not by my own reflection and self-acceptance but by a new romantic partner I decreed the great arbiter of truth (sigh).
The thing, of course, about seeking admiration from someone as a means of proving to yourself that you are not Difficult (and, therefore, Difficult. To. Love.), is that you will settle for the merest crumbs of affection a partner deigns to throw in your direction, and that your very self-definition becomes dependent on their approval.
I re-read Ariel over and over again during this time period, in awe of the sheer visceral power of poems like Edge, written in the last week of Plath's life. I felt more connected to Plath's work than ever; I was writing a great deal, with a consistency I'd not previously been able to maintain, but the ill-fated relationship I had embarked upon left me swinging wildly between brief moments of almost manic, skidding joy and longer periods of feeling deeply unhappy and worse, anxious to the point of frenzy. Though I was ostensibly seeking to redefine myself, the misery only seemed to confirm what I had long suspected: that such attempts were quite pointless. Perhaps this was all I was, really, this mess of a person. It would always come back to this. I lingered over Plath's darker poems, feeling the electricity of her words pulsing from the page and into the marrow of my bones. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was reading and re-reading not Plath's original Ariel but the version as decided upon and defined by her husband Ted Hughes, from whom she was separated at the time of her death but who had acquired control over her estate - including all of her written work - on account of her dying without a will. As Emily Van Duyne explains in her interview with Sara Petersen, Plath had, in November of 1962 - about three months before her death - already typed and ordered a series of poems under the title Ariel; she had even dedicated the book. Plath's Ariel explores her experience of motherhood and the breakdown of a marriage underscored by violence. When she died, Hughes discovered the collection and some other more recent poems not included in Ariel, including Edge, largely written in the last weeks of her life, by which time she was experiencing a profound depressive episode.
'Hughes,' Van Duyne writes, 'thought the “psychotic depression” poems were more impressive than the violent marriage poems... he removed a dozen of the marriage poems, replacing them with the poems from the end of Plath’s life. The book’s publication was accompanied by mysterious reviews about Plath’s “mysterious” death and the rumors began to fly... And that is essentially the origin of the myth, although there is obviously a great deal more to it.'
Several months into that ill-fated relationship with a man who, at best, was cool in his affections and at worst cruel in a way that required a certain level of creativity and commitment6, I decided to reward his indifference by asking him to read some of my work, a request I'd made of precisely no-one to date for fear of judgment (the irony of this choice is not lost on me).
I gave him a few pieces - some prose, some poems I'd been working on. He skimmed through them before I could finish my coffee and then handed them back wordlessly. When I realised he was not going to offer a spontaneous response I asked him his opinion. 'Oh, I don't know- a bit... Plathy,' he said, in a careless sort of way, the conversation over. Now, this man had something in common with my school peers all those years ago: he had perhaps read one or two of Plath's poems, if that. He knew very little about her work, knew only the lazy caricature of her bandied about our cultural shorthand. What's more: despite lofty monologues about the genius of the writing he intended to do, he did not, in fact, do any writing. No: he did not intend his statement to be a compliment. It was a straightforward and unimaginative dismissal; a cheap way to diminish me, and to diminish her.
Reader, I want to tell you that as those words fell glibly from his mouth, I saw it all with staggering clarity: that however much I might labour for this man's love and esteem - and oh, did I labour for it! - both were quite impossible to attain: he had decided who and what I was, and neither my expressions of joy and whimsy - deemed by him to be silly or lowbrow - nor my most serious, private inner life, as explored in some of my written work, airily dismissed by him as depressing, would ever be enough. I would never be enough. I would only ever be a flattened, simplistic version of a woman, frivolous and unserious, all the easier to ridicule and dismiss: I would only ever be a woman writing about her feelings while the Men Made Art.
I want to tell you that I realised my own complicity in all of this, that I saw the extent to which I had unwittingly played along, trying to present a version of myself I thought might earn his love, trying to break free of the punishing way I'd viewed myself by seeking to override it with someone else's narrative.
I want to tell you that I silently rose from the ash with my red hair and - in lieu of actually eating him up like air - left this man without a word; that I went home to Sylvia on my shelf and told her that I was sorry to have ever even passively gone along with an idea of her - of me - created by anyone other than ourselves.
I want so very much to tell you that.
The way it really happened is that I gathered up my prose and my poems quietly, like a scolded child, and I continued to try to convince this man to love me - or at least to not actively dislike me so much - for the better part of another six months, until, inevitably, he broke it off by telling me that what he really wanted was to be in love with a beautiful woman by this time the following year.
The way it really happened is that I carried around this man's idea of me for a good long while, that I took his mockery and belittling of my interests and passions and experiences as proof that those interests and passions and experiences were somehow self-indulgent, that they lacked substance and value. The way it really happened is that my writing faltered because I worried that the things I wanted to write about and the way I wanted to write about them were similarly and fatally frivolous and unimportant. Mostly, I worried that I was just another one-dimensional Sad Girl, after all. And who wants to read about that?
Sylvia and I trundled on together. I printed out a copy of a photograph of her, sitting atop a dry stone wall in Yorkshire, a typewriter perched on her knee, and pinned it to the wall of my classroom and later, a cork board over my desk at home. When my friend's daughter was born, I couldn't think of quite the right thing to say, until I remembered the perfect words of Plath's poem You're, which I copied out in full into the New Baby! card I sent. When I moved abroad, I sold or gave away most everything I owned, bar my poetry collection with its beloved (and hefty) Plath section. When I remarried, when I quit teaching to write and edit full time, when I became a mother after years of doubting whether I was made of stern enough stuff (I am, it transpires, infinitely more capable than I once believed), when I received my first acceptance from an editor - Sylvia was there. Along the way, one of my (much younger) sisters, then in her late teens, came by her own Sylvia Plath origin story. We bonded over our shared love of the poet over text and old fashioned letter: I sent her a copy of Ariel in the post.
Some time later, a reciprocal parcel arrived for me: Ariel, The Restored Edition. Not Hughes's idea of what Ariel should be, but Plath's.
The mythology surrounding Plath, largely created by the circumstances of her mental state prior to her eventual suicide in 1963, and Hughes's decisions in the aftermath of her death, is still alive and well today; as Van Duyne points out, attempts over the years by feminists to reclaim Plath's story have been met with the gaslighting, trolling and straight-up denial you'd expect from 'a public already primed for misogynistic takes on great women writers.' Other great women writers - and female admirers of their work - are spared the casual judgements made of Plath and those who love her, perhaps, as Van Duyne tells Petersen, because their work does not diverge - at least not to the same degree as Plath's - from societal expectations for the performance of womanhood.
Has so little changed since my Sylvia Plath origin story nearly thirty years ago? What I know is this: so many of us have our own stories about Sylvia: how we found her, what she means, and continues to mean, to us - and each of them exists in spite of the reductive and unfair way in which she has oft been characterised. To love Sylvia Plath is to love her vibrancy and passion, her contradictions, her unshrinking explorations of both the darkest parts of life and the most hopeful. To love her is to recognise that she contains multitudes, an acknowledgement that should be a given in 2025, but that sadly still seems to be a luxury rarely afforded to women. And: in loving Sylvia Plath, I know that I, for one, have been able - little by little - to start shedding the stories other people have told about me, to create instead a narrative determined by no-one but myself.
It begins with a clean slate, with my own face on.
Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, Emily Von Duyne, WW Norton & Co., 2024. Link to purchase via Waterstones here.
I used to joke that I'd been absent from school the day the teachers explained the rules of life to everyone else.
This was an era in which Victoria Beckham was weighed live on national television two months after giving birth; in which Britney Spears was forced to tearfully apologise, again on television, after admitting to partaking in a perfectly normal amount of sexual activity for a young woman, while simultaneously dodging pointed comments from the female interviewer, Diane Sawyer, about how deeply Britney had supposedly hurt her ex, Justin Timberlake, by kissing someone else while they were together (it transpired Justin had cheated on Britney repeatedly, and her own infidelity was more an act of desperation than rabid lust); in which Heat Magazine and its ilk published weekly pictures of celebrities with various body parts they judged unattractive or repulsive highlighted by the what they brazenly called ‘the circle of shame.’ It was a fun time.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Plath, Karen V. Kukil (ed.) Bantam, 2000.
Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake: A Compendium of Classic Authors’ Favourite Recipes, Faber, 2024.
He was partial to ignoring me for days or even weeks at a time, reminding me that his flatmates liked me more than he did, and indignantly pointing out that I wasn't twenty-five anymore when I feebly challenged his heavy-duty flirting with other women, as if I had some audacity indeed, expecting him to refrain from the open pursuit of the higher-calibre women to which he was obviously entitled.
Hi! I loved this article. We discovered Plath in the same way . Her journals are truly something special I’m overdue for a reread of them!