Lessons from the Archive:
Sylvia Plath
and the
Politics of
Memory
Anita Helle
THE C H R I S T I N E J E F F S / J O H N BROWNLOW film .Sy/via, there is a
scene in which newlyweds Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, in a small boat off
the waters of "beautiful Nauset" on the eastern shores of Massachusetts,
are tipped overboard. The camera goes underwater and the scene is lit
from the back; for a brief second, as the bodies of the couple played by
Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig thrash upward to the surface, their
heads are above the water and their limbs appear transparent from below.
It is a scene both beautiful and lethal, designed to give us a naturalized
experience of the couple's mythic intensides (the White Coddess and her
consort, mermaid and merman), while foreshadowing eventual doom. A
few weeks after the film's release, another version of this empty yet hyperbolic imagery appeared in the caption and image accompanying A.O.
Scott's New York Times review of the same film. "A Poet's Death/A Death's
Poetry," the capdon reads. In this picture of Plath, the primordial freakishness is toned down, but the luminous whiteness and the unambiguous
messages are similar. Inside the photographic frame is an American sweetheart kind of beauty, blonde, with a pink headband and a black bohemianstyle cape. Plath/Paltrow is depicted as "discovering" Hughes through their
shared passion for language, as she reads his poems from a CambridgeIN
Femmist Studtes 31, no. 3 (Fall 2005). © 2005 hy Anita Helle
631
632
Anita Helle
affiliated magazine, St. Botolph's Review. And yet there are obvious ways in
which the capdon cannot frame the photograph, and the woman in the
photograph, apparently brimming with life, exceeds the given frame. A
poet's death becomes a death's poetry. We find ourselves in the presence of a
paradox that besets Plath's legacy: a continual crossing of corpse and corpus, the body of the writer and the body of the writing.'
The image of Plath that opens and forecloses on an obsession is neither
Plath's fault nor the fault of the parallel lives Plath biography has lived
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
Ariel—The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her
Original Selection and Arrangement. Foreword by Frieda Hughes. New York:
HarperCollins, 2003.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962. Edited by Karen V. Kukil. New
York: Anchor Books, 2000.
Her Husband: Hughes and Plath-A Marriage. By Diane Middlebrook. New York:
Viking, 2003.
Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics. By Robin Peel. Rutherford, N.J.:
Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.
The Other Ariel. By Lynda K. Bundtzen. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
The Other Sylvia Plath. By Tracy Brain. New York: Longman, 2001.
Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath. By Kate Moses. New York: St. Martin's
Press, 2003.
Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America. By Deborah Nelson. New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 2002.
with feminism in the twentieth century. If there is too easy a passage
between the popular obsession with her death and an interest in keeping
her writing alive, it is encouraged by certain features of that writing itself.
Plath is known for having invented an intimate form of address that opens
up a liminal space between language and subjectivity, putdng idendty at
risk ("What a thrill- / My thumb instead of an onion," Plath begins her
poem "Cut," locating the reader along the seam of being and nonbeing).^
Anita Helle
633
But it is the canons of literary history, not Plath, or popular representations of Plath, or poetry itself, that install woman and death as the "most
poetical topic" at the heart of Plath's celebrity.^ With Plath, it often seems
that we are stuck with an "art of dying" that cannot fmish its repetitions.
But perhaps what is needed is a paradigm shift and a few jolts of the real.
Plath scholars have recently been finding their way around the impasse of
woman as death by returning to the archive to consider an abundance of
new material from fresh critical perspectives. Yet it appears that preoccupations with "evidence" are not solely a return to the "thing," the artifact
as object, as m u c h as a turn toward a consciousness of history and
method, a critical awareness of the politics of knowledge that have materially and discursively framed Plath's legacy. This process of critical reassessment is far from finished. In the work discussed here, a return to the
archive entails consideration of an abundance of previously unpublished
or newly archived material, a broader array of texts (drafts, collages, photographs, visual art), and attempts to broaden and deepen the historical
textures in which Plath's works are suspended and in relation to which
they can be understood. Emerging from renewed interest in Plath studies
is a greater emphasis on and appreciation of interdisciplinary and crossgenre ramifications, as well as bold reformulations of the public and private forces that have shaped Plath's legacy as a "confessional" writer.
Finally, because Plath is a writer whose post-Romantic aesthetic has long
been associated with the transfer of meaning in private and reflective
spaces, I suggest that the extension of literary activities to the cyber world
raises questions about how the Plath archive is being reshaped by uses of
technology, especially through the dynamic interplay of public and private spaces and identities on the internet.
T H E E V O L U T I O N OF T H E A R C H I V E
A literary archive functions traditionally as a guarantee that a body of work
belongs to the author's self, in propria persona (in her own body). But the
body ofa writer's work is more than a deposit in a library or a collection; it
is also shaped by the social transactions surrounding the publication, editing, dissemination, and reception of an author's image and work. A decade
ago, one influential set of speculations about tbe Plath archive could be
634
Anita Helle
traced to Jacqueline Rose's The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Departing from more
empirical definitions of archival knowledge. Rose plucked from psychoanalytic narrative the analogy of the disintegrated ego-a corps morcele (body-inpieces)-to describe the status of the Plath archive as the "body of writing,"
reduced to oddments, scraps, and gossip.'' For Rose, the body-in-pieces was
a figure for the morally objectionable or psychologically charged fragments that had been excluded from the body of Plath's published work, as
well as an expression of symbolic violence. Rose was summarizing a state
of affairs at a moment in the late 1980s when it appeared that nearly everything bad that could happen to a writer's work had happened to Plath's
writing, much of it at the hands of those to whom it was entrusted for
safekeeping, her husband and her mother, and she wrote an elegant
protest against it. As the abundance of new material under discussion here
would indicate, m u c h has changed in Plath studies since Rose's pathbreaking analysis. But the broader insight that Plath's legacy provides an
absorbing instance of archive formation as a cultural process, occurring
through a variety of means (historical, popular, biographical, fictional)
and engaging a range of public interests, is still relevant. From this more
situated perspective, the archive in modern history functions as a largely
imaginary "wbole": a writer or executor makes deposits, entrusting tbe
work to tbe safekeeping of family members, strangers, and literary professionals; and archives are set up to prevent tbe decomposition of the body of
writing (in compensation, perhaps, for tbe more literal decay of the body).
T h e present m o m e n t is a remarkable one, in which scholars are
responding to an abundance of new material and finding that Plath's
legacy will never be the same. T h e "events" include publication of
Hughes's Collected Poems, as useful as The Birthday Letters for what they reveal
about the ongoing subterranean dialogues Hugbes carried on witb Plath
throughout his career; the creation of a new archive at Emory University
Woodruff Library (rumored to contain as much as two tons of material);
tbe first exhibit of Plath's visual art in late 2002, coinciding with a seventieth birthday celebration; and the "unsealing" of materials previously offlimits to scholars (Hughes made several decisions about previously sealed
materials before bis death).' It has been well-known tbat the typescript
that Plath completed by the end of November or early December 1962 and
Anita Heile
635
left in the black spring binder on her desk (in this the film 5y/vifl is accurate) differs significantly from the original published version, and its thematic and symbolic center is not suicide. Now a wider pubUc also has
access for the first time to a facsimile edition of Ariel (HarperCollins), as
Plath had intended to publish it, differing in selection and arrangement
from the book that made her name.'
In the "big" picture that emerges from this new material, there is some
news. First, Plath appears to have been a more prolific writer, by any standard (versatility, volume, publication, discarded and abandoned lines, and
unpublished manuscripts) than the narrower range of her "canonized"
reputation for Ariel and The Bell far would allow. Second, her written and
visual artwork engages a m u c h broader range of cultural and historical
reference than the many failed attempts at Plath biography would suggest. These new archival "discoveries" raise significant questions about
whether and how new paradigms should be assimilated to or unsettle earlier, more sensationalist ones. How will we, how can we, for example,
locate Plath's agency as a writer in an age in which biography of all kinds,
but literary biography in particular, is under attack? How much and what
kind of authority can be attributed to her authorship? With which facets
of recently exploded definitions of modernism should she be allied? Do we
come closer to an "authentic" Plath, or will her fragmentary remains
obscure her ever-elusive identity even more?
One impetus for returning to Plath archives is the 700-page Unabridged
fournals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, scrupulously edited and annotated by
Smith College archivist Karen V. Kukil, and the most comprehensive publication of Plath's lifelong practice of diary and note-keeping to date. It
includes much that has been off-limits to published scholarship, reinstating omissions from an earlier edition edited by Hughes and Frances
McCullough.' Plath began to explore the "little lusts" and "ideas" of her
"diary I" at age eleven. This edition takes Plath from the summer of her
eighteenth to her thirtieth year, including many pages devoted to erotic
description, comments on a wide range of subjects from travel, cooking,
and married life, and reflections on literary sources and infiuences. There
is little here to satisfy public curiosity about mental illness and suicide.
The highly anticipated sections dealing with the psychotherapy Plath
636
Anita Helle
received in her late twenties are fascinating and certainly useful for what
they tell us about Plath's wrestling with writing blocks. But for anyone
who imagines curling up in an overstuffed chair to gaze into the heart and
mind of the woman whose photograph appears on the cover with the
scarf casually draped over a smart choker necklace (a typical layering of
identities for Plath, the "straight," middle-class fashion plate and the
bohemian artiste), the unabridged journals will not make for a quiet exercise in reading. The text itself is jumpy, with photographs, facsimiles of
pages, and a notational system that preserves Plath's misspellings, odd
capitalization, and breaks, reminding us that what we are reading is not a
transcription of a singular "life," but a gathering of eight ledger-bound
notebooks and fifteen additional page groupings that were never meant to
be read continuously. For me, the format that preserves so much of the
irregularity of the original text inscribes Plath in an altogether different
register from the angst most of the world knows through her final poems.
Plath's changes of notebook often coincide with her shifts from place to
place and project to project. Given that the copy of her passport at the
Lilly Library was stamped more than twenty dmes before she reached the
age of thirty, it is understandable that the impression we receive is one ofa
migrant intellectual, a sensibility on the move, absorbing, assimilating,
and remixing wide-ranging influences. Precisely because we are dealing
with a writer's formative stages, the index notes on people, places, and
cultural references are especially helpful. As someone interested in surrealism, for example, I appreciated being able to trace the history of Plath's
encounters with surrealist-influenced film and theater by reading from
back to front, from indexed references to the text of the notebooks.
For those interested in mapping Plath's cultural geographies, the new
edition of the journals offers a record of conflicting voices and much that
challenges assumptions in well-known memoirs published about her. In
one sense, such contradictory selves could be seen as symptomatic of the
"open structures" that Julia Kristeva describes in what she terms "adolescent" writing, in which shifting borders of identity are as much social as
psychological.' For example, the journal hints at the ways in which Plath
locates herself simultaneously outside and inside narratives of class endtlement. We are not used to thinking of Plath as the "character" we meet
Anita Heile
6j7
in the opening pages of her journal, a girl who sets strawberry runners at
Lookout Farm by day (field labor was a regular part of Plath's summers
until she left for college) alongside the children of refugees and immigrants from the East Boston neighborhoods that her own family had only
so recently left behind; more familiar is the girl who worshipfully fantasizes about the great writers whose footsteps she would follow as one success builds on another. When she is physically accosted ("raped" [676], a
subsequent notation shows) by a boy she had been friendly with (a refugee
who appears, unlike Plath, to be housed as migrant labor), she is reluctant
to tell her mother because she fears she will not understand. But Plath
sees full well that her compatriots in the field will interpret her brush
with danger as a comeuppance to her middle-class airs.
The journal also now gives Plath's account of an uncomfortable dinner
party at the Boston home of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick in 1959.
Hardwick's impressions of Plath were of someone who wore her immigrant
origins as a badge of honor yet constantly wished to overstep their bounds,
and in her memoir she directs her attack at Plath's social manner and her
femininity. The Lowell-Hardwick's Marlborough Street residence, blocks
from where Hughes and Plath had settled, was a magnet for young professionals. Hardwick notes Plath's "overwhelming ambition," the "exceptional rasp of her nature," and a "special lack of national and local roots . . .
trace[d] to her foreign ancestors on both sides," somehow "cutting her
off.'" This from Hardwick, a migrant from the American South. The
under-the-surface friction might have been just regional, the difference
between Beacon Hill and the part tourist, part working-class town of
Winthrop, where Plath grew up, but Plath's rendering of the evening captures a different social awareness. Just back from Cambridge, revisiting old
haunts from her childhood, Plath chafed at a different order of civiUties in
Boston and at an American refusal to recognize nuances of class. The day
after the dinner party at the Lowells, Plath confided to her journal her
views on Hardwick's treatment of her Irish maid-Hardwick, Plath recalls,
"mimics their subnormal Irish house-girl whom they have just let go"
(463). From the same dinner, a caustic exchange between two female guests
captures the hard-boiled intonations of certain female voices from another
era. Overheard from the wife of American poet Peter Brooks, who is sit-
638
Anita Helle
dng near Plath at dinner: "Next to me I hear you're the biggest bitch in
Cambridge" (463). Tbe unabridged journals reveal the densely variegated
cultural world of the 1950s, and their evidence complicates the myths we
inherit about the stifling "bell jar" decade.
Yet tbe real gift tbe journals make to the Platb legacy is in the glimpses
it affords of the creative engines that were churning, driving Plath to be
somebody, and bringing terrifyingly intense and incandescent perceptions to
that task, long before the rest of the world had learned about her "breakthrough" voice. Much of the writing we recognize as distinctively Plathian
from 1961-1963 is present earlier, if not consistently, then certainly in large
chunks that startle with exacting powers of observation, passion, visual
memory-a mind determined to exceed itself Even at her girlish gushiest,
there is something edgy and sophisdcated in Plath's awareness of the possibilities of her written-ness, of the eye of the reader upon her. The journal allows us to read her more sophisticated artistic experiments as condnuing a dialogue with prerepresentadonal forms, artistic "scribbles" that
are fired up to stoke the creadve drive. When she is merely peeling off
descriptions, Plath's sense of representation often begins with color,
image, and line; we can sense the importance of visual memory to her verbal imagination.
Another phenomenon that is closely linked to Plath's capacity to represent so many selves is her special awareness of disappearing into the scene
and act of creadon. On the one hand, there is the headlong descripdon
tbat sbe writes to come as close as she can to recording sensations as she
experiences them. This kind of wridng offers the risk, the expectation, of
capturing the "authentic." Yet tbe more conscious Platb becomes of piling up description, of being-one-writing, the more conscious she is that
tbe self being constructed is an ardfice. Sometimes we can see that the
process makes her anxious, heightening her awareness of the operadons
of language, print, and liminality. This is a problem she will work through
later on, especially in the "bee" poems of 1962, which deal self-consciously
with what it means to have a mind "swarming" with sounds and letters.
In the following passage from her journal, Plath writes in the heat of
anticipation expecting, then missing, tbe sight of her lover (Hughes), running up the stairs of the apartment to greet her:
Anita Helle
639
Oh the fury, the fury. Why did I even know he was here. The panther wakes
and stalks again and every sound in the house is his tread on stair; I wrote Mad
Girl's Love Song once in a mad mood like this when Mike didn't come. And
didn't come, and every time I am dressed in black, white, and red: violent, fierce
colors (253).
The rhythms of poetry gallop in: but for whom do these colors and their
symbolic properdes ("violent" and "fierce") matter so intensely? Presumably, they matter for those who understand how these codes resonate symbolically, how they will be read when she is in print. Langdon Hammer has
written that Plath wanted so badly to succeed as a writer that she is famous
for it.'° Her journal fragments are the incunabula of that desire.
Her Husband: Hughes and Plath-A Marriage is the first booklength study to
take full measure of the abundance of new archival material on both the
Plath and Hughes sides, drawing extensively on Plath's journal as well as
the Hughes Archives at Fmory University. Similar to much of the work
under consideradon here, Diane Middlebrook's study responds to freshly
archived source material with attention to form as well as method of
inquiry. This study is not a biography of Hughes, it is a history of what
Middlebrook terms a "producdve collusion" (191) between Hughes and
Platb in the creation of poetic mythologies in which "his" and "her"
strands condnue in Hughes's work long past Plath's death. No longer are
we listening to just one side of a marital battle. Hughes appears no worse
than he has appeared in other contexts, but we understand a great deal
more about the "emotional matrix of each poet's creative stance toward
the disjunctive subject matter his or her art will seize upon" (48). The
study contradicts the earlier impression we may have had that Hughes
was silent about Plath's work undl the publicadon of The Birthday Letters: he
kept quiet only in public and formal contexts. As Middlebrook shows, the
Hughes who slipped annotations into files and invented the literary performer, "her husband," whose idendty slips between the sheets of her
wridng paper and into the edidng of Plath's Collected Poems, in the manner
of the purloined letter buries "in plain sight" a double-stranded narrative,
a narradve of "his and hers." The couple's life together emerges through
two narratives, each of which was informed dialecdcally, shaped from
within and outside the reladonship they had with eacb other, compU-
640
Anita Helle
cated by deferrals, hesitadons, and deflecdons, conscious and explicit as
well as inexplicit messages.
Fortunately for the reader interested in the effect of all this on Plath's
creative processes, Plath's side of the exchange is not eclipsed in Middlebrook's rendering of the complex, troubling, defensive set of allusions and
intertextualities as they appear in Hughes's creative mythologies. Tbe delicate structure of the book, alternating between histories of her and his
writing, pinpoints many new points of departure for further research on a
literary partnership that was also informed by the activides of everyday
life, such as the preparadon of food and the care of animals. Did we know
Plath was serious about cooking? The journals tell us she was, and that
somedmes she cooked instead of wridng. Middlebrook says it especially
well when she contextualizes Plath's culinary practices and cookbooks:
"Plath also viewed cooking as a pracdce that advanced her aim of developing a writing style grounded in womanly experience" (90). Here is a new
standard for reading Platb's journal in relation to the rest of her work, not
as "document" or "report" of daily life, but as the kind of text that allows
us to glimpse how the ardst's self-reflections ramify as she pracdces what
will later, in poetry and prose, become an extended performance.
More of the intricate pattern of intertextual conversadon that characterizes the Hughes-Plath "marriage" is illuminated by another important
release, Paul Keegan's 1,300-page edition of Hughes's Collected Poems.
Keegan's collecdon includes many of Hughes's supplementary notes, and
they confirm Middlebrook's suspicions that more remains to be done.
Long before his editing and handling of the business of the archive became
controversial, Hughes was engaged in building for posterity, mythologizing acts of remembering, forgetdng, violence, and reparadon-all tbemes
that suggest the stories told about the archive are as important as the stories the archive tells.
" O T H E R B O D I E S " AND T H E P O L I T I C S OF T H E F R A G M E N T
Amid the explosion of books and ardcles on Plath since the millennium,
the narrative in which the emergence of feminism coincides with Plath's
mythologization as a universal symbol of pathos and triumph has broken
down along a number of lines. A figure of great interest to Second Wave
Anita Heile
641
feminism and to histories of American womanhood at mid-century, Plath
and her identities still do not conform to any monocular feminist lens. But
the new archival research is also presenting us with a Plath who is more
historically located and multiple by teaching us to be interested in Plath for
her contradictory selves, accepting the disintegration we have to work
with, both in the history of her reception and the materials themselves.
The textual bodies of interest to contemporary Plath scholars are fragmentary in several senses: Plath's "haunting" of culture is an effect of the break-^
down of emphasis on singular authorship to a focus on history and reception. Scholars can now read fragments of her multiple drafts, bits and
pieces that have not yet found their place in broader narratives of interpretation, from Plath's visual collages to the enigmatic lists of topics for poems
that played a role in Plath's habits of composition.
In one sense, the art work any writer leaves behind might be seen as a
ghostly presence, a spectral "other body" of some kind, because the writer
is no longer around to speak for it. The cultural fantasies that attach to
Plath derive their phantasmagorical power from traumas that have been,
at least in part, internalized for the readers and speakers of her poems; yet
the historical process of reclamation and reinterpretation also draws us
outward, to material relations. The issue of how to value and interpret the
differing forms of fragmentary evidence and spectral "other bodies" that
constitute Plath's legacy suggests the need for broader debate and definition of what is meant by archival "remains." Elizabeth Grosz's definition of
"text" as a writer's partial or incomplete body of work, scattered but not
incoherent, is relevant for its suggestion that archival memory is a multilayered process, dependent on institutional forms of storage, access, and
retrieval, and, more likely than not, subject to operations beyond individual control.
A text is not the repository of knowledge or truths, the site for storage of information (and thus in danger of imminent obsolescence from the "revolution" in
storage and retrieval that information technology has provided) . . . so much as a
process of scattering thought, scrambling terms, concepts, and practices, forming
linkages, becoming a form of action. A text is not merely a tool or instrument...
rather, it is explosive, dangerously labile, with unpredictable consequences."
642
Anita Helle
At issue in reading Plath now is whether and how a new openness toward
multiple social and literary responses to "explosive and dangerously labile"
texts and materials can be sustained.
It is useful to compare the trajectories of feminist scholarship on Virginia
Woolf with scholarship and archival research on Plath, especially because
Woolf scholarship historically has been active and responsive to challenging new methodologies. In certain respects, Plath scholarship now is where
Woolf scholarship was in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Woolf archive was
opened up through the publication of her voluminous diaries and letters,
adding much that complicated the picture of her character and work. Yet
Woolf scholarship developed in the heyday of poststructural and postmodern feminist approaches, many of which cleared the way for playful and
labile connections between writing, gender, and sexuality, and geopolitical
locations, Plath studies, in part through their association with the confessional, have until recently been tied to private constructions of literary
identity, to ideas of authority, authorship, and intellectual property. Now
that biography has became impossible, at least according to Janet Malcolm
in The Silent Woman, and a new generation of scholars and readers is encountering Plath's writing, the effects of an era of criticism dominated by historiography, ethnography, geopolitics, and studies of popular culture are
beginning to be felt.'^ Building on recent approaches, Plath studies calls
for a politics of knowledge that considers wider definitions of archival
value and archive formation.
In the meantime, the perimeter of the Plath archive is widening in
important ways. More and different resources and narratives have developed from the "under life" of what has been thought worthy of archival
preservation (including, in Plath's case, photographs, scrapbooks, journals,
the "waste" from multiple drafts and discarded lines in addition to the published poems, novels, and stories). There are growing questions about how
the politics of form (especially the complex registers of poetic form) interact with the ephemeral and the nonliterary. The much-debated question
of what to make of Plath's practice of back-to-back writing, "recycling"
drafts as Susan Van Dyne describes it, is partly self-reflexive, but it also has
implications for other kinds of speculative economies, among them the
uses of the fragment to construct more disjunctive and transgressive
Anita Helle
643
meanings." Robin Peel in Writing Back: Syhia Plath and Cold War Polttics has bril-
liantly tracked the sources of references to global and international events
in Plath's collage compositions, arguing that this work represents a reappropriation of a more experimental and socially critical modernism.
Although Plath was not a poet who saw art as the equivalent of newspaper headlines. Peel claims that she understood and exploited these fragmentary references through her own practices of collaging the news.
Plath, I would contend, similar to Marianne Moore, understood the usefulness of collections for her art: she collected not only paper scraps, but
also cutouts of advertising art, "lucky purple stones" from the beaches of
eastern Massachusetts, poems from anthologies (including poems by
Addenne Rich, which she also backshadows), maps, and rug scraps for the
braided rugs she refers to in her journals. These are not all collections of
the same order, but they are relevant to reading Plath in the contexts of
material culture in the postwar years of "Victory Culture," when terrors
about the threat of extinction of the self were concealed and deferred
through amassing lost objects.
The materiality of the archive stubbornly asserts itself in a handful of
books in which the "other bodies" appear explicitly in the title or implicitly
between the covers: Lynda K. Bundtzen's The Other Ariel, Tracy Brain's The
Other Syhia Plath, and Kate Moses's Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath. Different
"other bodies" and histories are being studied here, but each depends on a
kind of archival research Plath scholars were unable to do a decade ago, research that distances itself from conventional biography and yet goes
beyond the image of Plath's remains as merely phantasmagorical effects of
her cultural "haunting." Bundtzen's The Other Ariel, a close reading of the
Ariel Plath intended to be published, although it appeared several years ago,
is likely to become increasingly important as a guide to the "restored" Ariel,
now that the newly published facsimile of the typescript housed at Smith
College will be more widely available. What I admire and find courageous
about The Other Ariel is its willingness to complicate a familiar narrative-the
narrative of Plath's own ordering of poems in Arie/-with a far grubbier
narrative about Plath's artistic life that scholars have generally not been
willing to touch. For anyone who sits down for five minutes to read the
Letters Home manuscript, the collection of letters edited by Plath's mother.
g44
Anita Heile
Aureha (an "unabridged" edition of these letters and the full text of Aurelia
Plath's intended introduction has not been published), it quickly becomes
apparent that economics were part of the context of Plath's letters. Plath's
habit was to give a regular accounting of what was earned and saved, as if
money and writing were interwoven facets of the cultural capital she and
Hughes were accumulating. Bundtzen writes: "[I] want to give priority . . .
to Plath's pecuniary motives, if only to complicate or perhaps ironize the
critical narratives that have elevated her writing ecstasy in the final months
to something like aesthetic sainthood" (11). An amalgam of narratives
about bees and beekeeping drawn from literature, history, and the practical
arts allows a nuanced and ambiguous reading of Plath's assumption of
authority and control, as well as her embrace of images of cycles of birth/
rebirth through female reproductive power in poems from October to
November 1962. Bundtzen finds multiple subject positions and forms of
address by which "authority is distributed across a range of voices" (107).
Despite Bundtzen's wry and important awareness of "commodity fetishism
in the rare book room" (12) and the privilege that accrues to scholarship
that builds on the "rare" body of the original text, the argument articulates what has become a majority view: Plath debates are not, as Bundtzen
concludes, a matter of "myth or confession, good or bad art, real or false
selves, because there is a way . . . this mass of material refuses to be tamed
by such single-minded critical narratives" (34).
Plath appears as a more politically radical and experimental midcentury modernist than her confessional peers in Brain's The Other Sylvia
Plath, especially in relation to issues that are close to our own time, such as
environmentalism and cultural hybridity. "Other" here evokes that
which is missing, marginal, or shunted aside as the "waste" or "errata" of
the archive, compared to the pure, aesthetic product. The "marketing" of
Plath through the ephemera of dust jackets, the material residues of
Plath's British and American accents, vocabularies, and inflections on
voice recordings, and the voluminous cuttings of Plath's art notebooks
and kitchen collages, all count as "evidence," not of the biographical subject, but of the subject-in-history who writes poetry and prose.
The book begins with a remarkable narrative about the thoughts that
go through the mind of the researcher in the small and sometimes "skin-
Anita Heile
645
bristling" m o m e n t s of contact in which she meets Plath with a "strong
sense of her physical presence and my own contact with the material
residues that she left behind. Those who work in the archives trail their
hands over letters covered in Plath's fingerprints, open letters that she
licked before smoothing them shut on her DNA" (51). My first thought
on reading this passage was to think, only with Plath: only with Plath does
this trope of the body of the writer's life merging with the body of writing
begin to become the frame for knowledge. My second thought was to be
reminded of how the very rationality of the scholarly enterprise teaches
us to be embarrassed by the powerful sensation that Brain's narrative
evokes. It is hard not to feel, given the impress of death over all of Plath's
work, that coming into contact with the body of writing is like coming
into contact with the body of the writer. We are not in a bodiless space,
after all, and we are active agents in keeping some kind of "body" alive.
Perhaps we are taught to be embarrassed because it is just the illusion of
distance u p o n which a n o t h e r kind of scholarly magic depends. But I
beheve, as Brain acknowledges in an exemplary reading of "The Thin
People" that follows the discussion I have just cited, that the temptation
to reify archival remains is effectively countered by commentaries such as
Brain's. As she notes, the drafts are not simply unmediated emanations of
the body:
Any idea that Plath's writing can be regarded as mere cries of personal pain can
only be shaken by a visit to Smith College Rare Book Room, where the handwritten drafts of sixty-seven of Plath's last poems are held
To achieve these sixtyseven poems, Platb generated enough paper to fill seven box files, each three
inches thick and filled to the brim. There are dozens of revisions for each poem.
Stanzas are crossed out again, and again, until she gets there. Plath calculates and
chooses. She selects and deletes. A line is written over and over, with countless
insertions, cancellations, and restorations of a single word or phrase-until Plath
pushes the poem into wbat she wants it to be. Tbe evidence of detailed planning
and careful craftsmanship-the very opposite of any uncontrolled outpouring of
rage and despair-is incontrovertible
We will discover through this book what
is happening on both sides of Plath's manuscript pages. (22)
Last in this trio of books that evoke missing or fragmented textual bodies, Moses's Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath may not ostensibly appear to be
646
Anita Heile
derived from what scholars are finding in the new Plath archive. But this
would be wrong. Although Moses has made up many details and episodes,
she also draws from Plath's daily household calendar, a spiral bound
"Letts" notebook in which grocery lists and recipes sit side-by-side with
notes on BBC programs and beekeeping supplies. If anything has contributed toward the momentum to publish Plath's version of Ariel, it has
been tbe spilling over into the public domain of so many scholarly projects attentive to Plath's version of that manuscript and the blurring of
what is public and private in attachment to tbings Platbian. Wintering,
named after the miraculous cycle implied by Plath's poem of that title,
joins a tradition of biofictional interpretation of Plath that includes,
notably. Rose Goldemberg's mother-daughter play. Letters Home, a Royal
Shakespeare Production in the 1980s, an Italian opera about Plath, and the
play Edge, which opened in the fall of 2003. In the age of the "death of the
author," biofictions are cultural symptoms: they respond obliquely to the
attack on traditional biography and open up a space for dialogue between
canonical and noncanonical readings. Moses's account of the book's composition suggests that her book, too, is a witness to archive formation as an
ongoing cultural process: having read Plath's poems while she was nursing a child (this is also a narrative of domestic repossession), she read biography and research, traveled to Plath archives, and found that the details
had been so hashed over that it was necessary to reinvent Plath in order to
write about her.'^ The resulting novel not only imaginatively includes
much that has been diminished in the official biographical record, but to
my ear, at least, the rhythms and textures of Moses's prose capture some
of the aural and visual intensities of Plath's language.
D I F F E R E N T I A L SPACES:
A POSTCARD FROM ATLANTA TO BOSTON VIA PLYMOUTH ROCK
There are the stories the Plath archive tells, the stories we tell about the
archive, and the histories that surround them all. The vertiginous reflections of what one critic has termed Plath's "IMAX-like authorship" have
tended to create conflict between the literary focus on her writing and the
popular fascination with her life and death." But a more precise definition
of the mediations of the archive is needed to avoid the conclusion that
Anita Helle
647
reproducing a hyper-real and depthless Plath is inevitable. Nowhere is it
more apparent that the work that goes on inside official literary archives
and the business that goes on outside them are materially different than
from the tenth floor of the Robert Woodruff Library Twentieth Century
Collections at Emory University, where the view from the window overlooking the parkway is a green landscape that obscures all but the urban
skyline, a buffer from the h u m of the city and the din of cicadas on a hot
day. I am here to trace Plath's movements between Boston and Winthrop,
chasing down letters that Plath wrote to some of Hughes's friends and family, as she struggled to write poems in the alcove of their apartment on
Willow Street, Beacon Hill, within walking distance of Lowell and Hardwick's residence. What I am learning is that for Plath, particular geographical and spatial references function as a language to chart shifting
identifications and affiliations. It is easy to figure out that Plath and
Hughes had a view of the Charles River with the John Hancock Building,
and that Plath enjoyed the play of light across gray granite, whereas
Hughes, feeling the view from his side of the study alcove disrupted his
c o n c e n t r a t i o n , at o n e p o i n t papered over t h e w i n d o w . " In "Point
Shirley," a poem written by Plath later in the same year, the speaker
stands on a stipple of a peninsula near her East Boston birthplace from
which she can look both ways, toward Plymouth Rock and the bloody
sunsets traced in the watery reflection of the skyline of Boston Harbor on
one side, to Europe and England, for which she'll soon embark, on the
other. Between two landmarks to which the poem refers, the low-lying
sandbar and the high "tower," geographical opposition serves as a point of
reflection for the past and the future, for moving beyond the fantasy of the
spatial privacy of "home" to greater public exposure."
Questions of space and location raise questions of how pubhc knowledge is constructed. Although acknowledging that my image of Plath
depends on the privilege of costly research trips to examine manuscripts
that are privately held in rarified spaces, I want to give full rein to my
imaginary identification with Plath in this instance, as a figure standing
"in between," to resist separation between the kind of research that is performatively marked off as "proper" for "art" and "cultural practice" in the
tower of the university library archive and the wider forays that occur, if
648
Anita Heile
not outside, then at least on the margins of the "official" site. Plath-related
internet activity is the means by which Plath audiences have grown exponentially. If Atlanta, where I sit now, is similar to most cities in the United
States, the chances are great that across town, at any moment, hloggers
and virtual intellectuals beyond the climate-controlled spaces of the
archive are using invisible circuitry to log on to other Plath sites from
home desktops and cyber cafes. Someone is likely contemplating questions not so very different from the ones I am asking. What were Plath's
intentions? What did she know? How does her writing become worldly,
implicating others? Too sharp a contrast between the presumed closed,
hermetic environment of the magnum opus of "the age of the author"
and the presumed open causeway of constant democratic exchanges with
e-writers and readers breaks down.
The online memories of Plath created by bloggers and Web masters are
not homogeneous. Just as the space of authorial archives is no longer
defined in relation to a classical political sphere in which knowledge is a
rational enterprise defined primarily through face-to-face interactions (I
am just as dependent on the internet for research in the archive as I am
outside it), Plath cyber bibliophiles also mix things up, downloading scholarly papers and (sometimes) running interference for students lost about
how to interpret poems such as "Point Shirley." There are Web sites that
exist to memorialize the writer and offer personal tributes, including
laments about her circumstances and a focus on personal memorabilia.
Other sites seek to add to or revise the historical record. Some of these
specialize in collecting artifacts that the "official" archives are not necessarily preserving, including references to audio recordings and photographs of all the places Plath lived and the dust jackets of her books. Still
others, such as the Sylvia Plath Forum, maintained by Elaine McConnell,
a writer and teacher from the town of Hebden Bridge where Plath is
buried, encourage cyber communities in which citizens talk back to literary professionals, initiating questions as well as contributing to wider
debates about films such as Sylvia." One characteristic that may differentiate the global blogger and the global "(wo)man of e-letters" is that the former is part of the online masses but may not feel a need to speak on behalf
of the internet-at-large, cite arguments by anyone in addition to herself.
Anita Helle
649
or even speak for a larger community, as literary critics sometimes do.
Online Plath discussion tends to be driven by the opinions of presumed
autonomous individuals in the singular voice; with the rare exception,
they are not concerned with representing the Other. Digital archivization
on the Web hardly promises the kind of stahility and authority that traditional scholarly resources and research depend on authenticating. There
is little yet, for example, of Plath's extensive drafting and revision of poems
online. Yet the binaries of public/private, and academic/popular memory
of Plath are challenged by its existence.
S H I F T I N G B O U N D A R I E S OF P U B L I C AND P R I V A T E
A powerful reformulation of Plath's legacy requires a better understanding of the shifting boundaries between public and private knowledge in
our era as well as in hers. One implication of Deborah Nelson's Pursuing
Privacy in Cold War America is that such shifts between pubUc and private
constructions of knowledge have profound consequences for how the
voices of speakers in poems and the images they produce are historically
received. The solitary individual in the twentieth century has been both
sheltered and exposed in privacy debates in literature as well as in law.
Similar to a few other studies that touch in whole or in part on Plath and
the Cold War era, including Peel's Writing Back and Edward Brunner's Cold
War Poetry, Pursuing Privacy perceives Cold War containment ideology as a
"topological" crisis in which the spaces of home and clinic were reboundaried and confessional forms of address (foregrounding intimacy, personality, "outings" of family crisis) modeled the conception of the "formally
autonomous" institutions of the self-contained individual and family."
Nelson argues that the regional context of Boston, home to hoth confessional lyric and privacy rights law (Brandeis's and Warren's constructions
of the rights of privacy were developed in response to Henry James's The
Bostomans) is an important but obscured part of the migration of twentiethcentury privacy from "a hierarchical and patriarchal privilege to a democratic and masculine right" (42). The invention of the confessional form of
address did not regender poetry, but it refreshed the terrain of this conflict. Nelson is especially convincing in demonstrating that where Plath is
concerned, the distribution of multiple subject positions in a poem such
650
Anita Heile
as "Lady Lazarus" works against a more literal reading of the poem as confession of a singular life. In Plath's poem, the speaker's mock striptease,
punctuated by mocking invitations to gaze on her body as a public spectacle, can be taken as a figure for Plath's ambivalent relationship of the
writer to mass spectacle. Shifting the ground to cultural and bodily practices. Nelson's reading of the poem reframes it through legal controversies
in the 1950s over the status of a woman's testimony about her body within
the confines of "her" doctor's office. Nelson proposes that what is given
up "layer by layer" and "piece by piece" to "Herr Doctor," the poem's
incarnation of masculine rights, is "not the mass audience, but the intimate listener who would turn her relics into his mass 'opus'" (136). The
meanings of the poem then turn on an irony about gendering of surveillance, in which intimate "souvenirs of the body—blood, hair, clothing—are
taken as totems of [the good doctor's] celebrity" (136), while the speaker
herself is caught up in the identifications (of care, solicitation, seduction)
that are being promoted:
I am your opus,
I am your valuable.
The pure gold baby
Do not think I underestimate your concern."
Because the feminine is so often linked to the apocalyptic props and actualities of the cold war era, the subjects of civil justice and individual rights
still arise when we piece together Plath's meanings. Modernity's obsession
with privacy genders Plath's writing in two ways: thematically, in the representation of the limits on the gendered body, and structurally, in the
ways that female speakers are often positioned to respond to and resist
various forms of social surveillance.
So here at last is my postcard from Atlanta to Boston via Plymouth
Rock, a disciplinary enterprise struggling with a cross-disciplinary opportunity. Recent criticism and scholarship on Plath has produced an expanded and more flexible definition of the archive Rose described a decade
ago as, in essence, "the body of her writing."^' Yet to apply the standard expectation that Plath's writing might be fully restored, as if the abundance
Anita Heile
651
of n e w material does n o t in every i n s t a n c e alter t h e history of exchanges
over h e r m e a n i n g s , is t o sweep away t h e m e d i a t i o n s t h a t have also sustained s u c h wide interest in Plath over four decades. Reading Plath m a y
still be described as a call to wrestle with the terrors of our own time
despite the temptation to discipline or curtail. But because Plath has
grown multitudinous, it may be time to urge that citizen critics online
and academic scholars and writers collaborate more often and more
actively in reshaping the legacy. If Plath scholars have sometimes labored
under the burden of the cultural obsession with Plath the high-voltage,
sensational female spectacle, there is also much to learn from the desires
and discourses that mediate attachment to the myth. Along with Nelson,
I find that the shifting zones of privacy have something to do with the various ways Plath's image might be reproduced. The first figure for the Plath
archive was Lowell's representation of Plath's poems as bullets loaded into
a cartridge through which the poet played a bloody game of "Russian
roulette "-and lost." Now, however, we can also read the image of Russian
roulette as a commonplace of cold war rhetoric, a belligerent taunt at ballistic missile development. Even as we remember Plath's fatal rushes into
destruction amid all the apocalyptic props of the cold war era, the file of
archival knowledge expands. In the meantime, it appears nothing Plath
left behind is going to waste.
NOTES
I wish to thank the receptive audiences at the Oregon State Center for the Humanities and
at the MFA Program in Writing at Pacific University for their many useful comments on
the changing contours of the Plath archive. An Everett Helm Fellowship from the Indiana
University Lilly Library enabled completion of this article.
1.
2.
3.
4.
Sylvia, DVD, directed by Christine Jeffs (New York: Focus Features, 2003); A.O. Scott,
"A Poet's Death, a Death's Poetry," New York Times, 17 Oct. 2003, sec. Bl.
Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 235.
Hereafter CP.
Elizabeth Bronfen citing Edgar Allen Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846),
in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992),
59nl.
Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1991), 72.
652
5.
6.
Anita Helle
Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
2003); Ted Hughes, The Birthday Letters (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998). The
"Eye Rhymes" exhibit of Plath's visual art, jointly sponsored by the Lilly Library and
the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, coincided with a symposium and
seventieth birthday celebration at Indiana University in November 2002.
Marjorie Perloff, "The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Ariel Canon," American
Poetry Review (November-December 1984): 10-18. For Plath's arrangement of her fmal
poems, see Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile ofPtath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original
Selection and Arrangement, with a foreword by Frieda Hughes (New York: HarperCollins,
2004); also see notes by Ted Hughes in the appendix to Plath's CP.
I.
8.
9.
10.
I1.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Syhia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough (New
York: Random House, 1982).
Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), 136.
Elizabeth Hardwick, "On Sylvia Plath," in Ariel Ascending: Writings about Syhia Plath, ed.
Paul Alexander (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).
Langdon Hammer, "Plath's Lives," Representations 75 (Summer 2001): 67.
Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995), 126.
Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1994).
Susan R. Van Dyne, Revising Life: Syhia Plath's Ariel Poems (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1993).
Carolyn Leavitt, "Interview with Kate Moses," June 2004, www.literarymama.org.
Marsha Bryant, in "IMAX Authorship: Teaching Plath and Her Unabridged Journals,"
Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, and Composition 4 (Spring 2004):
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
241-61, attributes the term "IMAX authorship" to Kate Moses's description of Plath's
"exaggerated, high-voltage, bigger-than-life personality" (242).
Ted Hughes, "The Art of Poetry LXXI," Paris Review, no. 134 (Spring 1995): 55-94.
Plath, CP, 187.
For example, see Emily Pollard's listing of "Audio Recordings," Plathonline,
www.plathonline.com; Peter Steinberg, "Sylvia Plath: A Celebration This Is," www.
sylviaplath.info.com; and Elaine McConnell, "Sylvia Plath Forum," www.sylviaplath
forum.com.
Edward Bruner, Cold War Poetry (Champaign: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003),
deals primarily with set forms as defensive fortification in cold war poetry, but his
chapter on Plath is relevant to her use of the sestina.
Plath, CP, 246.
Rose, The Haunting of Syhia Plath, 29.
Robert Lowell, foreword to Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), x.