| |
|
|
Sylvia Plath’s seething flair makes my interior life seem normal by comparison
BY JESSICA GROSE
|
|
|
|
|
Sitting in the darkened indie movie theater, gnawing silently on Peppermint Patties and shifting in the trendily uncomfortable wooden seats, I see Gwyneth Paltrow’s high cheekbones and smug expression flash across the screen during the previews. Her blonde hair is even more styled than her usual tightly pulled back and shellacked chignon. The stick straight locks are primly tamed under a headband. And then the title floats up. Sylvia. I almost choked on my chocolate. How dare she? How dare they — the amorphous evil Hollywood "They"? How can anyone even begin to represent the ephemeral, seething Sylvia Plath in celluloid? It doesn’t help that I already want to punch Gwyneth right in her satisfied little moue every time I see her — never having liked her celebrity dating and frigid, distant persona. Any actress trying to portray Plath would make me feel this way, though. My intense personal relationship with Miss Sylvia, after all, began when I was about 15. Most girls of that age have an Audrey Hepburn fetish. The A-line black dress and subservient gamine charm tickled them, I suppose. They plastered their rooms with Audrey’s image, usually that black-and-white still from Breakfast at Tiffany’s or the original poster from Roman Holiday. I couldn’t understand it. Audrey Hepburn, besides being emaciated and otherworldly, was a wimp. She always needed some dapper tow-headed man to take care of her, and her cinematic upsets were more of the feinting variety than the teenage temper tantrums I experienced. Sylvia, on the other hand, was an extroverted overachiever who gallivanted to Europe on a Fulbright. Even her physical presence was appealing. My introduction to Plath’s life and work was through Linda Wagner-Martin’s tidy biography. The book was one of my mother’s castoffs (she prefers depressing esoteric novels, rather than depressing popish biographies), and smack in the middle of the prose were 10 or so pages of Sylvia photos. Her broad, confident smile takes over each composition, projecting an image of studied perfection. Behind the flashing whites were her smallish eyes. Even from the blurry ’50s shades of gray photography, the burning and the twinkling behind the grin were visible. According to Diane Middlebrook, in the latest Plath bio, Her Husband, one Cambridge tutor was struck by "the concentrated intensity of her scrutiny, which gave her face an ugly, almost coarse, expression, accentuated by the extreme redness of her heavily painted mouth and its downward turn at the corners." Plath was tall, lanky, and all-consuming. As a straight-A suburban teen with keg party leanings and literary aspirations, I idealized not just the intellectual energy Sylvia embodied in a platinum pretty package. It was mostly her "craziness" that fascinated me. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if I’m crazy. I’m unarguably emotional. I’ve been called a "psycho" on more than one occasion — usually by a (now ex) boyfriend harried by the prospect of an unexpected crying jag brought on by a hangnail or a bad grade. Being an ice queen isn’t in my emotional lexicon, though I can’t count the number of times I wished it was. Sylvia was ever so much the same. She wore her heart on her sleeve, writing about it in her poetry and prose. Sylvia wasn’t afraid of her emotions. She reveled in them, letting them fuel her. For months after I discovered Plath, I carried around for protection a weather-beaten and dog-eared copy of Ariel, her final collection of poems. It was beauty born from heartbreak and suicidal depression, and to an adolescent with a penchant for melodrama, this legend was a fantasy worthy of wholehearted emulation. I cried, publicly and hysterically, after failing a biology test on the structure of the DNA double helix, and was so inconsolable that I had to be sent into the professor’s cold office. Staring miserably at a photo of his family, I thought, at least these tears are minimal compared to an unsuccessful suicide attempt by Plath, partly brought on by her difficulty with a college honors thesis on James Joyce. What I fear is that the recent movie Sylvia will trivialize Plath’s melancholia. It’s easy to do. She seemingly had everything going for her — a brilliant career and a solidly elite middle class New England background. Sure, her husband was sleeping around, but Plath otherwise lived a relatively charmed life. I’m afraid the film will depict her just as a superficially unhinged "crazy," not delving into the many facets of her art and experience. The genius of Plath’s poetry and The Bell Jar, for me, is that it made my intense emotional life seem normal. After a psychologically overwrought summer in New York City, Plath’s Bell Jar alter ego, Esther Greenwood, takes all her newly purchased clothes, the stylish shiny ones that she bought to be a true New Yorker (like a reversible raincoat with a bright pink lining), and tosses them out the window of her prim hotel room. "Piece by piece," Plath writes, "I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York." Plath not only reacted to her upsets, she overreacted in blossoming, billowing ways. At least I never defenestrated any raincoats. I have a kindred spirit in arts and letters, and what I fear most from director Christine Jeffs’s film is that she will have made Plath’s messy story into a finished piece of celluloid perfection. I’m afraid that the film is glossy and neat, and will fail to capture the reality of Plath’s life and depression. Okay, I’m afraid that the film will fail to capture my fantasy of the reality of Plath’s life and depression. And the fantasy lives on into my twenties. A few months ago, during a smashingly good second date with an artist type (like Sylvia’s star-crossed husband Ted Hughes), I was asked what I wanted from a relationship. "Part of me, and it’s a small part, wants insane, unfettered passion, like Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes," I said. "When they first met, he ripped off her headband and in a fit of passion, she bit him in the cheek. I want to be like that! I want to draw blood!" My date laughed and said, "Do you also want to end up with your head in the oven?" I always seem to forget the ending to Sylvia’s story. It’s the part that I don’t want to imitate. Jessica Grose, who still carries a copy of Ariel in her purse, can be reached at Jessica_grose@brown.edu
|
