1/4/2024 0 Comments Fig thistle![]() ![]() Paul Alexander's biography of Plath, Rough Magic, is the first biography I've read of Plath that paints her as a human. Her life had sadness and hardship and ended in an awful manner, but among all of that was happiness. She wasn't just a sufferer of mental illness, or a scholar, or a writer, or a mother. Having perspective and looking back on my life has allowed me to view Plath as an entire person. Now let's jump ahead to myself as a 33 year old married mother working in an academic library and, yes, still writing (although I don't share poems anymore). I wanted each and every one of them, butĬhoosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable toĭecide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they Tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig Queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic ladyĬrew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs IĬouldn't quite make out. Was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with One fig was a husband and a happy home andĬhildren, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was aīrilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, andĪnother fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderfulįuture beckoned and winked. I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the Yes, Sylvia, the Fig Tree spoke to me, too: I understood how greatly stacked the world still is against women - especially women who want everything. I understood how goddamn hard it is to write and mother. Now Plath was back to being a writing role model and I felt a great personal affinity with Plath as a mother and a depressed woman. And I was going to do all of it perfectly. I was pursuing creative writing and had plans to go to graduate school and travel and write books of poems and be a single mother to the most perfect little girl. I resolved to only adore my favorite authors, Plath was one of them, on the merits of the writing.Īnd then I had a baby my freshman year of college. To say I was pissed would be an understatement. On the contrary, Dylan Thomas and Ernest Hemingway and other "writers with issues" were primarily writers with personal lives, mental illnesses, and suicide seen as a mere footnote. Other women writers I loved had the same issue: Anne Sexton, Shirley Jackson, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Virginia Woolf were all "broken." It was implied that this brokenness or illness caused these women to write or at the very least had a hand in the genius of the writing. As a burgeoning feminist I was dismayed by Plath's death and personal life seemed to over shadow her genius as a writer. In my later high school years my perception of Plath altered slightly. I don't think they "made" me depressed, but it made it okay for me to be sad and angry and smart in a world that wanted me to be complacent and pretty and Christ-like. In fact, my mom would take away my Plath and Sexton and other women poets because she said they made me maudlin. I truly believed that the sadder one was the better ones poetry (and we all know that isn't true). My middle and early high school self worshiped Plath as a poet and as a mentally ill person. They want us to think that to be a girl poet The sylvia plath story is told to girls who write As Bikini Kill sings in Bloody Ice Cream Song: I believed these things had to go together if you're a girl. ![]() Plath's journals - at least this version - focused on Plath the writer and Plath the Depressed. At this time I was hitting puberty, I was angry, I read voraciously, and I wrote poems that made no sense and usually involved ridiculous amounts of blood. It took us several weeks to get the books inside we'd smuggle a few a day and add them to the shelves in an attempt to avoid a lecture on "too many books in the house" from my father.Ī title that left the car on the first evening and found a home on my bookshelf headboard was a yellowed and battered copy of The Journals of Sylvia Plath (the Hughes-approved McCullough edition). As a bookworm with a love for the classics I threw in every stinkin' book that even looked enticing or if I sense an author name was familiar into the bag it went.We went home - the day was rainy - with the car trunk loaded to the brim. For $5 one could fill a giant paper sack full of books. It was about 1992 and my mom and I were in a gutted department store at the giant, annual library book sale. My love of Plath has manifested itself in many different ways since my first discovery of Plath when I was about 11 or 12 years old. If you've read my blog for more than five minutes then you know that I'm a bit of a Plath fanatic. ![]()
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