Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning. - Review - book review

Criticism, Fall, 2000 by Steven Gould Axelrod

Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning by Christina Britzolakis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. 250. $60.00, cloth.

Sylvia Plath wrote intensely and died immensely Her poems constructed stunning psychological landscapes and exhibited a verbal complexity rare in twentieth-century poetry. In death she achieved an iconic status usually reserved for celebrity suicides, political assassinations, and royal car crashes. Her texts and her death helped to shape private and public mourning in her time, and they continue to do so today Now Christina Britzolakis has written an important new book that attempts to make sense of textual patterns in Plath's writing while steering clear of the sensational life story. That her book is nonetheless drawn toward that story reveals not simply the continuing power of Plath as a cultural figure but also a crisis in critical theory as it attempts to separate its operations from those of its suppressed double, biography

Emphasizing the rhetoricity and self-reflexivity of Plath's writing, Britzolakis convincingly argues that the texts reflect a sophisticated awareness of audience, literary tradition, and the cultural authority of poetic discourse. These features, however, have not been as "neglected" as she suggests (5). Britzolakis does not actually blaze a trail here but proceeds down a path cut by numerous critics before her. Nevertheless, she does chart the territory in detailed and perceptive ways. She tells us at the outset that "the difficulty for Plath's critics is one of finding a critical language which does justice to her exploration of gender, subjectivity, and the unconscious, without reinscribing her within a poetics of unmediated expressivity" (6). That sentence vividly evokes the crisis in theory that animates this book. Old-fashioned expressivism could not admit the degree to which writing is artificial, whereas poststructuralism cannot find an adequate language in which to register the relations between writing and subject. How can the scholar inscribe a poetics of mediated expressivity without slighting either the mediation or the expressivity?

Britzolakis argues that Plath's "construction of the speaking subject displaces familiar distinctions between poet and persona" because the location of the textual `T' is "unstable and duplicitous" (6). She wishes to describe a Plath who, instead of expressing anguished authenticity, harnesses "the expressive conventions of the lyric cry for a language of elaborate inauthenticity" (135). Thus, she argues, Plath's poems enact a theatrical performance rather than a sincere expression of mourning. Plath's self-reflexivity "continually complicates and interferes with the possibility of a psychoanalytic reading" because she "interrogates psychoanalysis at the very moment when it purports to interrogate her" (7). Within its limits, this sort of analysis is very fine and helpful. The theatrical, allegorical, self-reflexive, and downright opaque aspects of Plath's texts have long been acknowledged, but this book studies them in an admirably sustained and focused manner. Conceding that the power of the texts "can never be entirely disentangled from the narrative of her life and death," the book nevertheless maintains that this power "exceeds the personalizations of biography" (8).

Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning continues this tense push-pull struggle with biography throughout its pages. It wants to slight the allurements of biography, and yet it cannot keep itself away from those allurements for very long. We witness here not simply the internal conflict of this particular book but that of most Plath critique over the last quarter century. Plath study, as a critical genre, brings to the surface a tension latent in critical theory: its trouble with human life, its almost theological desire to make discursivity a self-reflexive space, thereby rejecting John Dewey's position in Art as Experience that "art is ... prefigured in the very processes of living." Perhaps we must return to Plath so obsessively because we need to see her throwing a monkey wrench into our critical machinery. Without her, the machinery persuasively hums the reassuring message that our project is different from--and more significant than--mere individuals and their feelings. Plath's writings warn us that this is not entirely so. We don't want to hear that message, and yet we do want to hear it too.

Britzolakis tells us that "the autobiographical trope ... posits the fantasy of a recognizable face mirrored and authenticated by the text" (11). She works diligently to dispel that fantasy But our current disciplines of reading actually have no hesitancy in bracketing, problematizing, or dispensing with that fantasy The more serious problem for our critical practice is precisely the opposite: the fantasy that there is no recognizable face in the textual mirror. It is this critical fantasy that Plath's texts disrupt. Britzolakis writes that "Plath reinvents the lyric as the vehicle for a crisis of subjectivity which cannot be confined to a biographical narrative" (110). The problem that her book both evades and highlights is that the subjectivity in Plath's texts cannot be confined from biographical narrative either. Biography explicitly haunts Plath criticism, including this synecdochic example, just as it implicitly haunts the entire critical enterprise as a specter of positivism. We want to believe that the subject's proper name is unreadable so as to liberate our reading strategies. Our difficulty occurs when, despite our wishes, we do begin to read that name, that signature in the corner.