Back in the bell jar

Sylvia Plath and the big strip tease

by Adam Kirsch

THE UNABRIDGED JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH. Edited by Karen V. Kukil. Anchor Books, 732 pages, $18.

It is impossible to read The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath without remembering these contemptuous, seductive lines from "Lady Lazarus":

The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot--
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies,
These are my hands
My knees.

Plath's long flirtation with death was consummated on February 11, 1963, when she gassed herself in her apartment in London. The degree of prurient interest and polemical violence she has excited since then makes it easy to forget how recent her suicide was -- recent enough, one might think, that some reticence concerning her private diaries would still be appropriate. But it is already clear that Plath, like Byron and Oscar Wilde, has passed out of the history of literature and into the popular imagination; and in the making of icons, such scruples have no place. With the publication of Plath's complete, unabridged journals -- greatly expanded from the earlier Journals of Sylvia Plath, and including two previously sealed diaries -- the last restraint on the peanut-crunching crowd has been lifted.

Written in spurts from 1950 to 1962, the journals were clearly not meant for publication. Their style ranges from purple description to telegraphic notation, but they are consistently directed inward, these exhortations to the self, and the compass they describe is claustrophobic. There is virtually nothing here about public events (except for a passage on the execution of the Rosenbergs, which will be familiar to readers of The Bell Jar); there is little detail about Plath's reading, and there are few portraits of the people she knows. Instead, we get the mournful spectacle of a deeply troubled mind trying to whip itself over hurdles, internal and external.

Plath has been cast as a feminist martyr or a poète maudit, a victim of either patriarchal society (and Ted Hughes in particular) or her own creative madness. The journals provide no unambiguous evidence for either view, especially given that the two most important crises in her life -- her first suicide attempt, in 1953, and her estrangement from Hughes in 1962 and second, successful attempt, in 1963 -- are mostly absent. (Some of the journal material for this last period was destroyed or "lost" by Hughes.)

Actually, it's the first half of the book -- the diaries from 1951 to '56, before she met Hughes -- that shows Plath suffering most intensely from patriarchal attitudes and individual men. She seems to have had a powerful sex drive, and that would have found much easier expression had she been born in 1953 rather than 1933. But at Smith in the early 1950s, she was paralyzed by fears and expectations about how a good girl behaves: "This is I, I thought, the American virgin, dressed to seduce. I know I'm in for an evening of sexual pleasure. We go on dates, we play around, and if we're nice girls, we demur at a certain point." She is disgusted by the brutish aggression of her dates: "to go to college fraternity parties where a boy buries his face in your neck or tries to rape you if he isn't satisfied with burying his fingers in the flesh of your breast." Yet her lust is just as great as theirs, and it finds curious, sublimated expression, as when she sunbathes on a rock and imagines that "I was being raped deliciously by the sun."

She feels herself too strong, too intelligent, too much for all the men she knows. Perhaps that's why, as soon as she meets Hughes, the sexual anxiety in the diaries vanishes almost entirely; she sees him at their first meeting as "that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me," and all her descriptions of him emphasize his size and power, as a match for her own. One can't help feeling that the "I accuse Ted Hughes" school of Plath martyrology is pretty well refuted by the journals -- though of course his affair and his separation from her, which are not discussed in the book, may have precipitated her final breakdown.

But marrying Hughes (less than four months after that first meeting) did not solve her problems; instead, her anxieties shifted to other, perhaps more primal grounds. The second half of the book covers the years in Massachusetts, when Plath and Hughes scraped together a living by teaching, writing, and doing office work; it breaks off just before their final move back to England, in 1960 (an appendix includes material from 1962). In these years Plath is continually wrestling with writer's block, never satisfied with her poems and stories; rejections from magazines are a continual torment. She seems not to have developed the objectivity, the artistic conscience, that most serious writers achieve. As she herself realized, she was often less interested in writing than in having written (and sold) something.

The most interesting portion of the diaries, covering the year 1959, ends on an almost hopeful note. (This was one of the journals previously sealed in the Smith College collection.) In therapy with Dr. Ruth Beuscher, Plath seems to be getting at the root of her lifelong anxiety, depression, and morbid fears; for the first time she writes explicitly about her childhood, her father's early death, and her mother's crushing conventional expectations. When her doctor tells her, "I give you permission to hate your mother," she feels like "a new person . . . alive & so-there." She even contemplates becoming a psychologist herself.

These passages suggest that Plath's life was not fated, though she herself sometimes saw and wrote about it that way -- especially in the brilliant and harrowing Ariel poems. The ardor with which she struggled against her misery is evident; it does an injustice to that struggle to see her as merely doomed. Perhaps the most moving thing in the journals is the way Plath constantly measures herself against peers and competitors like Anthony Hecht, Adrienne Rich, and Donald Hall. In the year 2000, they are still alive. Sylvia Plath defeated them only by being most terribly defeated herself.