Voice and Vision: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (review)

Gender politics have dominated critical studies of the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Most male critics in the 1970s and 1980s saw in Plath a pathology of emotional indulgence that led the poet on a roller coaster ride toward suicide; in contrast, most feminist critics praised the mythic drive toward liberation from patriarchal constraints in the Ariel work. In Voice and Vision, Gayle Wurst offers a fresh approach by letting the poetry speak. Like Susan Van Dyne and others who have produced the best work on Plath, Wurst does not allow psychological, biographical, or mythic contexts to drive her investigation of the poetry; rather, she studies how Plath managed her creative inspiration from her juvenilia through “Edge,” her final poem. Wurst begins with an exhaustively researched account of how two heavyweight male critics, Alfred Alvarez and M. L. Rosenthal, advanced their careers by creating the Plath Myth, mislabeling Plath’s poetry as extremist or confessionally brutal.

Wurst then argues that in studying the actual themes of Plath’s oeuvre, what one finds is a dramatic struggle for self-appropriation and identity in language. This struggle is marked by Plath’s inability to accept a male-dominated conception of muse-as-silent-nature that denies women access to language. Plath’s struggle with silent nature produces a poetry of perpetual self-becoming, ongoing and open-ended, as she attempts to articulate female subjectivity before feminists revealed the limitations of patriarchal muses. Plath could advance her struggle, according to Wurst, only by staving off the patriarchal muse through either self-effacing suppression of her female identity or contests with a muse, or other, that inevitably dredged up negative male constructs of female power. According to Wurst, this dilemma produced a poetry of perpetual dissatisfactions, as Plath mistakenly located the source of her struggle in an imperfect self or in the disintegration of the female body subject to time, rather than in the inadequacies of language as a medium of expression or in male notions of perfection and subjectivity. Plath’s juvenilia consistently presents menacing images of disintegration, which Wurst interprets as expressions of the female poet’s frustrated desire to articulate herself. In The Colossus Plath expresses her alienation from her imagination in damning representations of herself and in interiorized negative images of muses as Medusas. After “The Disquieting Muses” and throughout her Ariel manuscript, Plath actively uses language to fight off the muse’s inspiration, and her final poems, written after mid-November 1962, take stock of the damage done.

Throughout Voice and Vision Wurst is engaging and often original in her interpretations. What is especially valuable about this book is how successfully Wurst uses her capacious knowledge of Plath’s Journals to illustrate how difficult Plath found it to articulate female subjectivity in her poetry.