Sixty years have passed sylvia plath He committed suicide by gassing himself on February 11, 1963. She was thirty years old, and after her marriage to poet Ted Hughes broke up, it happened to her in a rented flat in London. Much has been written about the myth, the ghost, and the shadows surrounding the poet’s life and death since then.
sylvia plath He was born in Boston in 1932. His father, a biologist and professor at Boston University, died when he was eight. He later moved to Wellsley (Massachusetts) with his mother, brother and maternal grandparents. She started her first diary at the age of eleven, a task she would never abandon. His first poem was published nationally by the Christian Science Monitor magazine when he finished high school. She then entered Smith College, a women-only university, in 1955, where she graduated with honors and received a Fullbright scholarship to study at Cambridge. There she would also meet the poet Ted Hughes. He would publish his first poetry collection, El colosso, in 1960; Ariel would arrive in 1962, and in 1963 her only novel would be The Crystal Bell. She received the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1982. Collected PoemsCollected in three volumes by Ted Hughes.
Journalist and biographer said Janet Malcolm that the biography is very much like a “book scribbled by strangers” because after our death our history falls into their hands. He left it that way in La mujer en silencio (1993), one of the first texts to attempt to unravel the mystery of the Plath figure. The American’s death was a death told from legend, and it somehow distracted us from his figure. writer and intellectual
Now, handwritten by Valencian Bamba Editorial, Heather Clark’s Cometa Rojo: Incandescent Art and Fleeting Life of Sylvia Plath biography (scheduled for March 1) is coming to Spain and is one of the most insightful works on the Boston poet. presenting a critical and contextual vision of his poetic voice. It is not in vain that the author devoted his career to studying his work. Clark holds a PhD in English Philology from the University of Oxford and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the same biography (Red Comet) and Grief Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast.
Clark’s research represents a before and after, setting aside the pop icon to approach Sylvia Plath’s life and work objectively as part of the universal canon beyond “literature written by and for women.”
“I’m not a slave, but…”
In her own time, a housewife with great writing talent was seen as a wonderful companion to an award-winning poet. This concept of “comrade” very well sums up the inner conflict of Sylvia Plath, who was trained as something that seemed to “contradict” her talent and profession. She wanted to be a genius too, and she studied and trained for it all her life. This social obligation that women had to choose one thing or another drove Plath to impotence and sadness; For many, this could mean incarceration, submission to medical treatment and experimental and brutal psychiatric treatments. His depression, his first suicide attempt during his college years, and his end is an example of this.
Plath, like her peers in the 1950s, had to survive what Kate Millett would spend (especially through her Autobiography Journey to the Asylum) exposing her life; forced hospitalizations, experimental medicine and electroshock sessions. The torture that some of these women were subjected to is an example of how society prefers to imprison them rather than listen to them. From the author of The Bell Jar to Jackie Kennedy, who was admitted and electroshocked after an argument over her husband’s infidelity; The subversion of established rules was resolved by the incarceration of women, a methodology that was not new for the time. This was reflected in The Bell Jar, originally published under a pseudonym and still a portrait through catharsis, which Plath decided not to sign.
Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of the poet’s only novel, is part of the testimony of all women who were “crazy” before they became “geniuses”. It was not in vain that her poems (“Every woman adores a fascist” in Papi) were part of the seed from which the second wave of feminism sprouted. This social movement would culminate in exploiting Beauvoir, Friedan and the aforementioned Millett (as well as many other activists, writers and artists) ten years after his death.
Sylvia also used genealogy to count and tell herself. As Clarke points out, it seems no coincidence that Esther shares a name with the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins’ An Unnatural Mother. Perkins is also the author of The Yellow Wallpaper, a story that explores the isolation and experience of a woman suffering from depression who for months found herself staring at the same wall all day. Perkins wrote this story in 1890 to demand women’s autonomy and freedom. He explained that restricting freedom poses a mental health risk: an intellectual isolation, a powerful anti-depressant.
A detail as important as the name of the protagonist of The Bell Jar, which was considered and sold at the time as a novel for adolescents, helps us see to what extent Plath drinks and joins her literary and feminist pedigree. As Picadura wrote in his poem: “I am not a slave / For years I have bitten the dust, dried the dishes with my thick hair. […] I got a self to heal, a queen […] Now flying / scarier than ever, scar / red, red comet in the sky ».
red kite
This latest biography focuses on the evolution of Ariel’s author’s poetic voice from literary criticism, and explores Ariel’s relationship with her husband and lover, the nearly demonized Assia Wevill.
A prominent presence in all Plath biographies, Wevill was a woman as intellectually strong as Sylvia, and a victim of the same macho traditions and stereotypes: standards that required women to be well-educated only to be able to accompany the award-winning poet. Like Sylvia, Assia was a poet and the author of The Colossus was fascinated by her, a feeling that turned to worry and deep sadness when she learned of her affair with Ted. Hughes left Sylvia for Assia, with whom he eventually married and had a daughter named Shura. Six years after Sylvia’s death, Assia would likewise commit suicide, taking Shura with her. According to Clark, Sylvia called Assia the Traveling Jew: “she lived everywhere, did everything she. I know him, he is my alter ego ».
There were very harsh statements that Plath had burned his documents, among which he had destroyed the newspapers, or the poet wrote a “true novel” in the second part of “The Crystal Bell.” The fact is that it was Ted Hughes who in principle destroyed two of Plath’s notebooks. Exactly the last one, and this is indicated by the notes throughout the published Diaries, but Clark, faced with different versions, prefers complete rigor when he decides to open up the possibilities rather than close the charges: “He may have burned himself. A fire broke out at his home in Yorkshire in 1971” or Hughes may have burned it “to protect his children” as he went so far as to make Plath’s last diary (from 1963) public: Hughes, after Plath’s last diary disappeared sent mixed messages about notebooks
Other investigations and bickering between biographers and journalists have uncovered a story that could distract Wevill from the hard-hearted and cold femme fatale. Journalists Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev used diaries and testimonies close to her to portray Assia in A lover of mindlessness: the life and tragic death of Assia Wevill. According to this biography, Hughes’ demands and abuse of power would result in exhausting Assia, who had to juggle (like his previous wife) to fit the perfect wife mold.
According to this biography, Hughes demanded a range of work and behavior from Wevill, placing some prohibitions that we would immediately describe as abuse: he could not wear dressing gowns at home, and had to play with Frieda and Nicholas (his children). his relationship with Sylvia) and giving them German lessons, as well as at least once a day. According to the authors, he could not take a nap and had to cook, completely exempt from this task. Of course he had to instill his culinary knowledge in his daughter Frieda.
Benidorm and scriptural religion
In the now valued creative process (writing exercises in her diaries, her poems, her correspondence…), Spain and especially the coast of Alicante form an important part of Sylvia Plath’s work. The author lived off his affair with Costa Blanca for a few weeks for the honeymoon (1956); it is a stay from which a faithful portrait of the Benidorm of the time can be drawn, and through his diaries outlining its potential. Instinctive descriptions, far from complacency, are reflected to the reader, which makes him different as an author.
The couple rented a house at 59 Tomás Ortuño street, where Sylvia sketched and wrote articles. In The Complete Diaries, you can read a portrait of a city very different from the one we know today:
«Benidorm, Sunday morning, July 22: (…) we got up at seven o’clock, killed the flies that surrounded us, listened to the bells of the donkey carts and the cries of the cute little baker with the brioche basket ( … ) My table with the typewriter by the window looks out onto the porch by the front door and sees the vine leaves shading the pergola in the distance. I see mountains full of white houses through it ».
Although Benidorm doesn’t remember Sylvia Plath, Benidorm has a memory of what it was like thanks to her. Not only through his diaries, but also with pictures that the poet’s daughter Freda Hughes would later give up to publish (Nórdica Editorial).
In letters addressed to his mother, one can discern how this seaside town marked Plath in an important way: «Wait until you see these few people from Benidorm; The best thing I’ve ever done in my life, very clear and refined lines and shading…», he wrote.
Idyllic Benidorm, written in the author’s own handwriting, is far from what began to attract tourists and visitors at the time: «The sea-facing, bustling green neon lights, the delight of having changed the street filled with tourists, expensive hotels, offering a depressing view of the idle and bored crowds (… ) the joy of having replaced all this with an ordinary neighborhood full of people from here grows with each passing day ».
In these sketches and diaries the long-awaited daily life is observed, in which Plath was able to bring to life what he called “the religion of writing.” Write as if the verb were a quiet place to create and love people and places whose voice helped to spawn the genre of confessional poetry. Solving his mystery as a result of reading his works away from clichés and stereotypes will help to do justice to his work and literary contribution.