Portraits and the Portraitist

The first thing to say about One Life: Sylvia Plath is how hard it is to find at the National Portrait Gallery. Other exhibits have been announced there with large, unmissable standup signs straddling the marbled hallways. News of the Plath show is confined to a wall bordering immediately on the single room dedicated to surveying her life. The wall is blandly monochromatic, and thus at odds with the contours of Plath’s biography and her art. It’s almost as if the museum, awash in honorary depictions of long-ago generals and civil servants of various stripes, would rather we did not discover her there at all.

In fact the show, organized by Smith College archivist Karen Kukil with the NPG’s Dorothy Moss, is a model of well-chosen concision and—incongruously for Plath—the studious ducking of any and all controversy. (The museum’s Josephine Baker show some years back, originating in St. Louis, was not so timid.) The well-known and -documented history of interference with Plath’s investigative chroniclers by members of her family, her friends, and her descendants raises the question: In order to gain permission to mount Plath’s childhood ponytail here behind glass, was the museum asked to dodge or omit mention of Plath’s legendary tensions with her mother; her father; her husband, Ted Hughes; and his sister Olwyn, among many others?

To note just two silenced salient facts, her suicide is acknowledged, but her son’s isn’t, nor is the suicide and filicide of her husband’s common-law wife, who followed Plath chronologically in his affections. The problem with muting a writer in such ways is perhaps particularly pernicious in this case, for who among newcomers to Plath in Washington would be able to tell from the exhibit the central fact of Plath’s daemon—namely, that she was a diabolically provocative good girl, pilloried unfairly and fairly?

Take that ponytail, for instance. It is long and lustrously lifelike, with a ripple of blonde in the brown. The plume is anything but ascetic in the tradition of locks snipped from Miss Dickinson or Mr. Poe. Apparently her mother cut it off when the child was all of thirteen. Does this strike anyone as laughably Oedipal, or as almost crazily in love with just a kid? From the start, what were Plath’s chances at an ordinary happiness?

The blithe burden of her goody-goody-ism comes across in Plath’s old Girl Scout uniform, displayed with long sleeves primly crossed. Even so, a close look taken at the outfits she designed for her own paper dolls, perchance as stand-ins for her future self, expose things forbidden by parental guidance. The all-black lingerie ensemble is modeled by a paper doll much like the blonde bombshell Plath would will herself to become. The vamping, grinning paper female seems preternaturally sophisticated for a Boston brat of 1945 barely in her teens.

Plath briefly claimed Marilyn Monroe as “kind of a fairy godmother,” and posed on a beach with bleached blonde bob to evoke her for the camera. That was but one of her many masks. Seeing this plain as day in DC is more powerful than hearing secondhand about it in a biography. Likewise, laying eyes on Plath’s college typewriter, a large, dark Royal manual, gives the sense of what determination was required to clatter out an endless stream of writings, precociously.

The curators enjoy their ironies. Why else include a letter of...