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Chapter 4 SYLVIA PLATH’S PHYSICAL WORDS sS Despite the New Criticism’s warning against the “intentional fallacy,” poststructuralism’s assertion that the author is “dead,” and the New Historicism’s emphasis on ideology and historical context, much of the lit­ erary criticism devoted to Sylvia Plath has relied heavily on her biography. This is partly due to Plath’s unfortunate categorization as part of the “confes­ sional” school of poets, whose work, in reaction against the impersonality and irony of the high modernists, instead seems to draw directly on the poet’s “real” life, particularly his or her inner emotional torment. Such a view of Plath is still ubiquitous despite her own dismissive description of confes­ sional poetry: “As if poetry were some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion” (Unabridged Journals 355). As both cause and consequence of Plath’s categorization as a confes­ sional poet, the dramatic and famously tragic events of Plath’s own life have also contributed to the abundance of biographically driven criticism: “Before one has read much of her work, one has tumbled into the gossip, into the tabloid flattening of her artistic accomplishment, and the poems have begun to line up as lurid illustrations, vivid diary entries, exhibits for the defense or the prosecution if she or her former husband, her mother and father, or anyone else, happens to be on trial” (Young 18). Her troubled marriage to and separation from Ted Hughes and her suicide in 1963 at the age of thirty­ one have given rise to wildly different readings of her work, which are simul­ taneously and perhaps mainly readings (and misreadings) of her life. “As a 123 124 s chapter 4 result of the poet’s troubled and well­publicized personal life, as well as the extremely emotional and personal subject matter of the Ariel poems, these later poems have received far more attention for what they are saying than for how they are saying it,” Sarah Hannah observes (232–33). That is, Plath’s sympathizers and detractors alike have frequently read her poems merely thematically, largely overlooking formal concerns, and also as keys into her psychology. In the worst examples, critics read Plath’s poems as proof that she was self­obsessed, hysterical, and driven toward death from early on. The disappearance and destruction (by Hughes) of Plath’s last journals, written during her difficult final year, have only exacerbated critics’ obses­ sion with her death and her relationship with Hughes. Into this mysterious textual gap in Plath’s work have poured, in the most extreme cases, both misogynistic and feminist perspectives of critics whose political agendas clearly predate and supersede Plath and her work. Like Dickinson, Plath has become a cultural icon onto which we project our own concerns; we use her life to justify and dramatize our beliefs (literally dramatize, in the case of the 2003 film Sylvia). Marsha Bryant describes the particularly American habit of consuming cultural figures: “Sylvia Plath is not only one of America’s major poets, but also literary culture’s ultimate commodity” (17). Despite the perhaps necessary function of cultural icons, the unfortunate result of Plath’s persona is a lack of attention to the craft and technique of her poems themselves. Although over five hundred articles and eighty­five full­length books have been published on Plath, only a tiny minority deal specifically with the formal aspects of her poems. (See the work of Karen Jackson Ford, Sarah Hannah, and John Frederick Nims as representatives of this minority.) One significant result of emphasizing Plath’s interiority and confes­ sional mode is that many critics overlook and even flatly deny her connec­ tion to the outside world, including the nonhuman. For example, although Helen Vendler sensibly dismisses the fashion of applying psychiatric terms to Plath’s poetry, in her review of Crossing the Water, Vendler charges Plath with solipsism: Plath refuses “nature any honorable estate of its own” and “binds nature into a compass much smaller than it deserves” (Part of Nature 273, 274). Instead of Plath responsibly granting otherness to nature, “all of nature exists only as a vehicle for her sensibility” (274). Many critics share this view, and even admiring critics of Plath continue to level the charge of solipsism, as Adam Kirsch does in his book The Wounded Surgeon: “Plath’s poetry never transcribes events in the real world, or even reacts directly to them. Instead, she creates a world in her own image...

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