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

Criticism, Fall, 2000 by Steven Gould Axelrod

Britzolakis rightly observes that Plath's varying self-representations are "repeatedly confronting the reader with the rifts and discontinuities upon which narratives of selfhood are constructed" (13). Plath's writings "collectively root writing in a lack, estrangement, or disintegration of selfhood" (40). Thus does Britzolakis herself get drawn into the problematics integral to Plath studies and to textual critique generally: the vexed relations between the world of bodies, motives, objects, and events and the world of words. The latter world is indubitably other, and yet, as Melville wrote in The Confidence Man, it is one to which we feel the tie. One can neither "identify the speaker with the biographical Sylvia Plath" (123), as Britzolakis is quick to recognize, nor can one easily disidentify the speaker from the biographical Sylvia Plath, a point Britzolakis is uncomfortable with but too honest or driven to deny for long. Here we find ourselves at the heart of the current crisis: there is surely no way of going back to the old and simple ways of conceiving the relations of text and author, and there is no clear way of going forward with our present conceptions.

In a chapter on "Legacies and Dispossessions," Britzolakis suggests that "the figure of autobiography in the Plath canon may be seen as an aspect of her self-conscious rewriting of the cultural, familial, and sexual narratives available to her" (41). She thinks that Plath's poetry does not so much mythologize autobiographical details as put into question the notion of an autobiographical origin, "as itself a `myth' which must be endlessly reconstructed" (65). In a chapter entitled "Tending the Oracle," she argues that the many encounters with an oracle in Plath's texts indicate a quest for poetic authority The poet's struggle for voice is enacted through eroticized scenes of instruction. And in a chapter on "Gothic Subjectivity," Britzolakis studies the methods by which Plath reinvents "a psychic landscape" (not "her psychic landscape") as a "theatre of mourning" (101). In such poems as "Elm" and "The Moon and the Yew Tree," Plath deploys gothicism, irony, theatricalization, impersonation, and mimicry as ways of disabling readings that try to discover empirical correlatives for textual phenomena. Every aspect of every poem, that is, reveals itself as rhetorical.

In perhaps the most important chapter of all, entitled "The Spectacle of Femininity," Britzolakis exposes the rhetoricity and the performativity of the feminine position in Plath's work. The poems cross "Orphic myths of the inspired poet with an ironic deployment of stereotypes of alienated or objectified femininity" (135). Their ironic self-reflexivity is, at least in part, an effect of "a culture of consumption in which images of women circulate as commodities" (135). Britzolakis relates Plath's ironic and hyperbolic feminine imagery to intellectual arguments about popular culture raging in the 1950s and to images in popular films and magazines themselves. In this view, "Lady Lazarus" primarily becomes a theatrical parody of feminine archetypes.