Sylvia Plath and Sheila Ballantyne's Imaginary Crimes

27 SYLVIA PLATH AND SHEILA BALLANTYNE'S IMAGINARY CRIMES Mary G. De Jong* Conventional wisdom has it that a son needs to "kill" his father in order to become a man. He does so, the story goes, by asserting his own identity and prerogatives as a male and making his own mark in the world. It is less readily perceived and admitted that a daughter's quest for adult identity is also likely to entail a form ofpatricide. Because gender is a major organizing construct of patriarchal society, a maturing daughter can neither acquire male power nor assert independence from it on the son's model. Socialized to reproduce the mother, not to replace the father, she has little cultural sanction for self-defining and self-reliant behavior.1 On the contrary, the daughter is conditioned to look to her father, and men generally, for love, protection, and financial support, which are contingent on male approbation. Claiming the right to set her own value jeopardizes paternalistic approval and educes anxiety and guilt, as the life stories of Catharine Beecher, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Ann Evans, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, and other literary women attest. In the late twentieth century, with "the return of father to literature," non-fictional presentations of fathers from their daughters' perspectives are still relatively rare and written under taboo: daughters feel disloyal, unfemininely critical, and frightened when writing what they know about their fathers.2 Since published narratives, like cultural myths, shape women's visions of what they can be and do,3 stories of daughters separating from their fathers should be told in private journals and personal conversations and in autobiographies, fiction, and poetry. The cultural restraints on women's construction of cross-gender and cross-generational conflict must be broken, for daughters must confront their need to "kill" fathers who obstruct the process of self-definition. Sylvia Plath and Sheila Ballantyne have portrayed the daughter's struggle to claim an identity of her own. The protagonist-narrator of Ballantyne's Imaginary Crimes (1982), like the speaker of Plath's "Daddy," reveals in her act of writing a compulsion to rid herself of her father's influence. In both cases, the father withheld something that the daughter needed, and he died without settling accounts with her. Neither can know herself as a responsible adult as long as "Daddy" is within her, hot-wiring ambivalent impulses: resentment at his desertion, a'Mary G. De Jong teaches in the Department of English at Pennsylvania State University. She has published articles on Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Eliot and is currently writing a book about nineteenth-century women writers of religious poetry. 28Mary G. De Jong coupled with an uncomfortable notion that she might have repudiated him first ("You died before I had time," Plath's speaker declares); a need for autonomy, intermittently short-circuited by terror of taking responsibility for herself; outraged innocence at odds with the suspicion that she does not deserve the love she craves. However deeply buried the father may be—in the earth, in her mind, in her "pretty red heart"—he remains a dominating presence from which she must free herself to get on with her own life.4 For Plath's speaker and Ballantyne's protagonist, testifying to their love twisted together with rage is like performing an exorcism. Working themselves up to "kill" (cast off and disown) the father, they use the same historical and analytical methods: tracing his dark origins and recounting his crimes against humanity, thus to legitimate their efforts to create a new sense of self by ripping out old connections to a father they cannot simply forget. Plath's most famous poem about a dangerously seductive father was probably a source for Imaginary Crimes. Not only do the protagonists face the same psychological crux, there are also suggestive likenesses in the father-figures and the powers their daughters attribute to them. The mythic German Daddy of Plath's poem is a Nazi-Fascist victimizer of his daughter, of Jews, of innocents generally. Searching for the source of his capacity for destruction, the speaker studies her one photograph of him. But it yields nothing new: the pedagogue stands...