Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers

Introduction: “There Is No Such Thing as a Death Girl”: Literary Bullying and the Plath Reader

1 i ntroducti on “There Is No Such Thing as a Death Girl” Literary Bullying and the Plath Reader In 2003 I completed work on an essay, “The ‘Priestess’ and Her ‘Cult’: Plath’s Confessional Poetics and the Mythology of Women Readers,” which later made its way into print in Anita Helle’s 2007 collection The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath.1 Although I had been researching and writing about Plath for several years, this essay marked my first sustained exploration into the topic of Plath’s readers. It begins, like chapter 2 of this book, with a brief description of the figure of Kat Stratford, one of the central characters of the 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You.2 Kat caught my attention because on two different occasions in the film she is depicted as a Plath reader; she is even shown sitting in a chair in her family room reading The Bell Jar. In my examination of Kat in my essay for The Unraveling Archive, I explained my interest in the question of Plath’s readership as I saw it embodied by the character of Kat this way: “As a scholar who once devoured Plath’s writings in daily doses, I am intrigued by this figure of the Plath reader.”3 At the time of its composition, the statement certainly seemed true enough. A little revelatory perhaps for the stodgy world of literary criticism, but an honest statement of how I saw my relationship to Plath’s work. Several years of research and a book later, however, the statement gives me pause. Part of me would like to take it back, or at least footnote it with a disclaimer. I would do so not because the statement now lacks truth, but because it does work I did not intend it to do. 2 i nt rodu ct i on I wrote the statement to convey a literal reality: my interest in Kat Stratford as a cinematic representation of a Plath reader springs at least partially from my recognition of myself in her. That is to say, I find Kat interesting because I see my own early interest in Plath’s writing reflected in her image. When I first discovered Plath in a poetry workshop at college (“Tulips” was my introduction to her work), I was struck by the originality of her voice, the authenticity of the emotions her images conveyed , and, perhaps most important to me then, her willingness to explore even the thorniest questions about what it means to be a young woman. I don’t remember if I did so immediately thereafter or not, but before too long I sought out her other works. My most vivid memory of myself as a young Plath reader is the Saturday I spent reading The Bell Jar on the living room sofa, chuckling at the scene in which Esther tries, rather clumsily and even comically, to strangle herself by wrapping the cord of her mother’s robe around her throat and pulling. The following Saturday I reread the novel, launching what would eventually become a singular scholarly interest, one that took me from senior thesis, to numerous graduate seminar papers, to dissertation, to book. In describing myself as one who “devoured Plath’s writing in daily doses,” I meant to capture this early interest, which, while it has evolved and taken different shapes over the years, has never waned. I am still struck by the originality of Plath’s voice, the authenticity of her expressed emotions, and the courage of her interrogations. Yet I do regret the statement, for reasons this entire book is designed to explain. For those looking for a more concise explanation, let me try to synthesize the reasons for my desire for redaction here. While I meant my statement to reveal the simple truth of my interest in Plath’s writings, the research I’ve conducted over the course of writing this book has revealed to me the troubling overdetermination of the tropes I used to convey that interest. What I didn’t fully realize in 2003 was that, by describing my reading of Plath as a process of devouring her writing in daily doses, not only had I offended the limits of alliteration in literary criticism but, more important, I had stepped into the very bog that would become the focus of my research: namely, the reliance of literary and popular culture on tropes meant to disparage Plath’s fans, especially...