Posted on 02/11/2013 2:30:56 PM PST by Borges
On the 50th anniversary of the day Sylvia Plath left milk on a tray for her two sleeping children and put her head into an oven, the cultural fascination with her shows no signs of abating. Though one might think that Janet Malcolm’s sublime study The Silent Woman, would be the last word on Plath, there is a spate of new books feeding the myth: Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted; An American Isis:The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath; Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953; and a new edition of The Bell Jar. Quite sensibly biographers and critics have always thought that Plath’s most famous poem, “Daddy,” was about her father. I would like to float out the theory that it is really about her mother. It is crudely reductionistic to do biographical readings of poems, of course, and it goes without saying that a poem of any accomplishment rises above the particular psychological alchemy of its making. However, in poems, as in dreams, one thing is often substituted for another; one thing stands in for another, or merges with another, codes are deployed, meanings shift and slide, often without the conscious efforts of the poet or dreamer. “Daddy” may very well, on some deeper emotional plane, mean “Mommy.”
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Interesting theory.
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We don't cotton much to literary highbrow lunatic poetesses from New England celebrated in death by liberal prissypants periodicals and all that there fancy book-learnin'.
Sylvia Plath probably did us all a favor, becase honestly, forced to sit through a semester of bad post-modern feminist poetry I'd probably want to stick my own head in the oven.
LOL!
Just when you think that another pimple on the ass of time has finally been lanced from public conciousness, it festers up again. We had to read The Bell Jar in english class in 1967, just after it came out in the U.S.
The feminist movement was a small kernel just taking form at the time and the english teacher was into that sort of thing. It was a glaringly mind-numbing and all around boring waste of ink and paper. It is one of the reasons that I hold literary critics, many writers and english teachers in such low regard and I never give any of them any notice.
Who cares about the theory? I was once asked by my college english prof why I thought that William Faulkner wrote a particular novel at the time that he did. My response was that he wrote it to have money to buy his next case of booze as he was a raging alcoholic. She responded like she was gut shot.
Yawwwwwn
Hey!
What if she was the one who could have explained” 2001 A Space Odessy”?
Thanks. I just turned on my oven. This is all your fault.
Groinologists groining gives me a pain in my groin..
Gays appearing to be intellectual are really groin centered..
Many hetero’s are the same... Groiniverous.. captivated by the smells and output of the groin...
It’s like “crack” to them... Crack-addicts... an obsession...
Groinologists are the only lifeform that worships toilet-paper..
But they refuse to read what is contained thereon..
and refuse to learn.. as they flush imperative morals..
Never advanced from the pee-pee and poo-poo stage of human development.. Pity..
Just think, back then they probably had ovens
you had to light by hand so you could possibly
commit suicide that way. Now there is a pilot
light that would keep you from being able to
do that, unless of course you want to stick
your head in a 400 degree oven. Ick.
You are better than this, Borges.
And frankly so was Sylvia Plath.
My oven is electric. I was wondering why this F'in hurt like hell.
Thanks for telling me. Glad that's over.
Plath's strongest negative feelings may have been directed against her mother, but I'm pretty sure the poem wouldn't have been written without the dead German father and wouldn't have won the fame it did without the possibility that it could be read as a feminist manifesto.
Roiphe got her start arguing in the Times that Tim Burton's Batman Returns was anti-semitic ... Like I said, in literary criticism everything turns out to "really" be something else (though there really is no "really" for a whole generation of critics -- it's all just different interpretations) ...
I would imagine it’s hard to type with
your hair on fire...
LOL... So true, thou!!
these people are all evil. It is evil to kill yourself. It is evil to kill yourself while children are in your house. Her husband was a huge malignant narcissist. She hated her dad, she hated her ma, sheesh, can you see why she needed Jesus?
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