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86 cha p te r 3 “We Did Not Wish to Give the Impression” Plath Fandom and the Question of Representation Be c a u s e t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n o f t h e w o m a n r e a d e r discussed in the preceding chapters frequently assumes a relationship to Plath’s actual readers, I turn in this chapter to an examination of these real or historical readers, focusing in particular on the female fan culture that has surrounded Plath since the 1970s. As part of this examination, I consider several important and, for the most part, well-known examples of this fandom, including the radical feminist activist and poet Robin Morgan, whose poem “Arraignment” has become virtually synonymous with Plath fanaticism; the women who reportedly began protesting Ted Hughes’s poetry readings in the 1970s; the virtual fans who contribute to the online Plath forums that have sprung up over the past ten years or so; and finally the self-described feminists who challenged Hughes’s management of Plath’s literary estate in the editorial pages of the Guardian in 1989. Even as I use the term “fan” to describe these readers, however, I want to make it clear that I do not embrace the term unproblematically. In fact, as I discuss later in this chapter, in some cases the very groups I identify here as fans reject the application of the term to themselves, aware as they are of the pejorative judgments that often go along with the use of the term. From my perspective, the term, though a contested one, fits well insofar as it reflects not only the scope of my examination of Plath’s historical readers but also the character of these readers’ own con- “We Did Not Wish to Give the Impression” 87 versations about Plath, conversations that frequently mark a significant— some would say extreme—level of engagement with the author’s work and life. There’s also the reality of public perception: while some of those I identify as fans might want to contest the term, I think the larger public, and certainly the mainstream media, would regard them as fans. And it is this point—the media’s frequent construction of Plath’s historical readers as fans—that I use as my starting point for this chapter. When one turns to recent mainstream news stories about Plath (or for that matter about Ted and Frieda Hughes), one frequently comes across references to Plath’s fans, even if the word “fan” itself doesn’t get used. Christina Patterson’s piece in a 2004 issue of the Independent, for example, offers a description of what she terms “the Plath effect” on readers , a phenomenon that apparently turns ordinary readers into fanatics.1 According to Patterson, this “afflicts not just adolescent girls, or armies of rabid feminists united against the (male, philandering, silencing, murdering ) devil, but also male literary critics of a certain age. It is, in short, hysteria.” Underscoring her fear that readerly interest has devolved into fanaticism, Patterson adds: “It is certainly a little depressing that the online Sylvia Plath Forum offers ‘in excess of one million words on Sylvia,’ and that a Google search brings up 85,200 hits. It is more than a little depressing that a confused young woman who finally succumbed to the siren call of suicide should be any kind of role model for anyone.” While Patterson doesn’t use the word “fan” to describe the particular group of readers she has in mind, her categorization of “the Plath effect” as “a hysteria” and her concomitant reference to the suicidal Plath as role model clearly point to her interest in Plath’s fan culture. Furthermore, the particular words she does choose to describe Plath’s readership betray a no less unambiguous attitude toward that fan culture, one that is unsympathetic at best. Because Patterson’s attitude toward readers aligns all too well with the one evident in the tropes of reading found in the book reviews I discussed in chapter 1, I don’t think it’s necessary here to explicate the troubling implications of her rhetoric.2 I open this chapter with her comments about “the Plath effect” merely to demonstrate succinctly the degree to which Plath’s fan culture is well known, widely talked about, and referred to by the mainstream media today. And yet when one...

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