Biographer Emily Van Duyne mixes new Plath scholarship with raw, stunning self-confession
There are times a biographer becomes blinded by their own idealizations. But in Emily Van Duyne’s Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, the reverse is true and her infatuation with Plath seems to bring her more clarity. Perhaps that’s because Van Duyne refuses to let the rules of traditional biography restrict her, and intersperses her perceptions about Plath with her own personal experiences. Plath died tragically by suicide in 1963 while still married to Britain’s future Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, known for his unsentimental verse. The Queen would eventually knight Hughes, who was on extremely friendly terms with then Prince Charles as well as the Queen Mother.
After Plath’s tragic death, which occurred while her two young children were sleeping in an adjacent room, Hughes’s became the executor of her will which allowed him to shape her image by exonerating himself and explaining her death as her reaction to her confessional poetry. But the truth was far more sinister. Despite Hughes’s presentation of himself as an honorable man and grieving husband, he was in reality a violent serial philanderer who had already deserted Plath and left her alone with the two children while he cavorted with several other women at the same time. But the powers that reigned protected his reputation for decades, and it took time for the truth about him to come out.
Sylvia Plath was an early reader and loved to write and draw. Her father died when she was very young and Plath recalls enduring a suffocating closeness with her mother. She went to Smith College and her journal entries at the time show a woman trying to navigate an active social life with academic pursuits. She became depressed in college and was hospitalized and given electroconvulsive therapy. In hospital, she met her lifelong therapist Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, who was then a young resident in psychiatry. Plath recovered and went back to Smith and graduated and received a Fullbright Scholarship to study literature at Oxford. She met Ted Hughes shortly afterwards and they soon married.
Van Duyne guides us through the trajectory of Plath’s life and her poetry while sharing with us her own experiences and how they seemed to cross paths with Plath. The author admits to being teasingly called ‘Sylvia’ in high school by her closest friends who knew of her obsession. Like Sylvia Plath, Van Duyne wore lots of red clothing, as well as bright red lipstick that spoke to hidden desires. Van Duyne became involved with a poet early on and would refer to him affectionately as “my Ted Hughes.”
But he turned out to be monstrous drug addict; a man who would violently abuse her and managed to isolate her away from her friends and family by bringing her to his Texas hometown where she knew no one. Van Duyne writes movingly: “Bodies are houses of memory. My own is still the house where I cowered behind locked bathroom doors, in dark closets, where I wept in the shower, apologizing to my still-unborn son. Like Sylvia Plath’s, my body is an archive with hidden rooms, a straw thatch, a wall of old corpses, and a ruler, long gone. And yet here I sit, writing this book, using my body to help tell the story of hers. I need a special light to do so.”
Van Duyne stresses the repressive times in which Plath lived. This was the early 1960s and the explosiveness of the women’s movement was still a few years away, not to mention the #MeToo movement of our times. The world expected women to be polite, pretty, pleasing, and obedient. But even in the modern day, it took Van Duyne almost two years to flee her own abusive relationship with her then nine-month-old baby son in tow. She has rebuilt her life and teaches full time at Stockton University in New Jersey, is remarried, and has given birth to another child.
She was able to write this book “in stolen moments, snatching time, snatching silence, wrenching the words from a world that feels like it holds them under lock and key. From one that hisses, everything about her has already been said. Or she deserved it.” But Van Duyne knows better. She understands there were and still are conspiratorial forces that joined hands to keep Plath at a distance from us. Her editor warned her to be careful; telling her that she is entering dangerous territory and there are still many ready to pounce. That editor also suggested she might be revealing too much about herself and it might be better to leave some of it out. But Van Duyne doesn’t seem to listen, and we are the grateful for her defiance. Because when she is speaking about herself and the traumas she has endured, Plath’s troubles become more vibrant for us. We see their interconnectedness as part of the same still unresolved problem women have.
Van Duyne finds baffling the all the prestigious women writers who fell in line behind Ted Hughes, like Janet Malcolm who wrote The Silent Woman in 1994 and Diane Middlebrook who wrote Her Husband Hughes and Plath—A Marriage in 2003. And of course, Anne Stevenson, who wrote “Bitter Fame” in 1998 with Hughes’s consent. Why did they shy away from questions whose answers were already obvious? Why did they feel so afraid to challenge Hughes about his assumptions and his withholding nature? Hughes didn’t allow scholars access to Plath’s work and wouldn’t let anyone quote her in their discussions about poetry without his approval. He admits he destroyed one of her diaries. Her journals from the last two years of her life went mysteriously missing. Yet most biographers and academics fell in line with Hughes’s distorted story about Plath’s life and tragic death.
Van Duyne explains to us that the literary criticism dominant at that time was called the New Criticism and it insisted a poem was a “singular, self-contained thing, and to bring historical and biographical details into it was to destroy the aesthetic experience of reading.” Van Duyne understood that this approach to Plath’s work was woefully insufficient in trying to understand her struggles as a deserted wife, mother, and poet living in a foreign country with no real ally she could turn to for help. She was obviously depressed, and Van Duyne points out to us that the world knew so little about how to treat depression at that time. A lot of it was guesswork.
But more information about Plath has become available. making Hughes’s claims about her dubious at best. The author refers to Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. The book discusses the findings of Harriet Rosenstein, who was an earlier researcher of Plath under contract for Knopf, who never finished her project. She collected invaluable research including interviews with Plath’s friends, teacher, and family conducted less than a decade after her death. Another writer who refused to kowtow was Jacqueline Rose, who wrote The Haunting of Sylvia Plath in 1991, which made Ted Hughes furious because Rose interpreted much of Plath’s poetry and sexual imagery in a way Hughes felt denigrated her.
Van Duyne returns to her own story. She admits the voice of Sylvia Plath that remains lodged in her own head. She is a welcome companion and claims she speaks with her from time to time. Sometimes Van Duyne wonders why she is so smitten with the poet; thinking perhaps she herself is a lot like Plath was. Both felt pressured to be great at everything they attempted and chastised themselves if they fell short. Both understood the erotic pull a man could hold over you until it morphed into something else entirely.
Van Duyne gest annoyed at how often critics misunderstand Plath. She points to a line from the poem “Daddy,” where Plath writes “Everyone adores a fascist.” Many critics have offered unflattering interpretations of this uttering that Van Duyne rejects. Van Duyne believes Plath was simply making a declaration about how when one loves a man so wholeheartedly, the rest of the world becomes blocked from her vision. It is hard to break free. Van Duyne speaks of another line of Plath’s poetry that haunts her still: “And I have no face/I have wanted to efface myself.” which shehears as a desperate cry for help.
Van Duyne is a provocative and intriguing writer who understands both the visible and invisible forces that come to play upon women who refuse to cower into silence. She will leave many a female reader thinking about how they present themselves to the world and perhaps encourage them to think how they might do otherwise.
