Feminism and the Abomination of Violence

[Editor's Note]

When I was working on Sylvia Plath more than twenty years ago, I discovered that, almost simultaneously, the distinguished critic and biographer Diane Middlebrook was working on Anne Sexton. Upon completion of our books—we shared at least one train ride on our way to readings across England—we were both in a state of not only exhilaration but also shock. Both poets had required us—a requirement each of us experienced as an exclusive, personal, invitation—to immerse ourselves in what it meant to suffer as a woman in the 1950s and early 1960s. But they did so with such vigor and riotousness as to deprive us of, or at least exceed, the most obvious narrative of subordination that you might expect such suffering to evoke. Sexton and Plath were angry—they had a lot to be angry about. But in both cases, the anger did not block, as it so easily can, the complex internal reckoning that as women they conducted with themselves.¹

If this central reality united our projects and fueled our respect and love for the two poets, it also overrode what was the most striking discrepancy between our experiences in writing our books. At every turn, I (like so many Plath scholars) had been obstructed by the Plath estate, Olwyn and then Ted Hughes, who hated my book, and insisted it was a biography, which it wasn’t.² They felt I had transgressed the boundary between literary criticism and life story, a life story whose true version they knew themselves, without reserve, to be in sole possession of. Diane’s problem was the opposite. If anything the Sexton estate had been too cooperative, flooding her with what today we call “too much information,” whether in the form of the release by Sexton’s analyst of the tapes she made after her sessions at his instruction to prevent her obliterating them from her mind or in the revelations by Sexton’s daughter, pressed on Diane, of being intimately invaded by her mother.

If that moment has stayed with me, it is because of the ethical dilemma we both faced. Neither Sexton nor Plath lived to see the birth of second-wave feminism. It is tempting, and not wholly inappropriate, to think that if they had enjoyed the advantage of feminist insight and solidarity they might both have been alive today. Certainly, their anguish as women was rooted in the perils of domesticity and child-rearing, which would become the target of that wave of feminism’s opening and loudest complaint and for which they were among the first to craft the poetic language, to give it voice. But that was not all. Sexton was an emotional hurricane. At the center of that hurricane there is a tale of domestic abuse—by her father, possibly by her beloved aunt, later of her own daughter. As this story migrates across genders and generations, there is no neat version to be told. It swallows up too many people, regurgitates through Sexton’s life and writing (such regurgitation is of course recognized today as the hallmark of abuse). Plath, for her part, felt herself trapped by a desire that drowned her in its intensity and left her stranded on the far shore of a domestic ideal that was a travesty of her own fierce and expansive imaginative reach.

What we shared was our respect for the psychic risks that being a poet allowed both these women to take, together with the conviction that the energy with which they did so is more important than the fact of their deaths. “What I most want to know about women in the past” is not, therefore, as Catherine MacKinnon puts it in an article first published in 1992, “how did she die?” but rather, “how did she live?” (2006a, 28). And I also want that question to be able to gather on its journey whatever it may find, however messy and unexpected, on its path. Central to what follows is the proposition that feminism has nothing to gain by seeing women solely or predominantly as the...