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

Criticism, Fall, 2000 by Steven Gould Axelrod

In the last two chapters, Britzolakis emphasizes the historicity and oppositionality of Plath's poems. Again these ideas are not new, but the critic elaborates them interestingly Plath's celebrated later poems acknowledge the blow struck by World War II against Enlightenment ideals of rationality, and they express a revulsion against the extremes of Cold War ideology. They refract "a collective history through rituals of private mourning" (193). Such poems as "Ariel" complicitly and ambiguously critique racism, sexism, and violence. They point to a "madness within reason itself" (201).

This densely compacted book at times resembles a machine of signifiers. It provides hard and, frankly, impersonal reading. Britzolakis does not so much write theoretical discourse as allow it to write her, making herself, as an author, little more than an effect of high theory. She has produced a rather chilly book, in the same sense that Hath wrote chilly poetry: chilly not as the opposite of hot but of warm. Moreover, Britzolakis seems to present every one of her ideas as novel, though many of them are expanded versions of ideas present in previous studies. Reading this book one senses a struggle, perhaps unconscious, with belatedness as well as with voice.

Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning is, despite its limitations, a very concentrated, intelligent, and knowledgeable book. And it is a highly useful one. It reveals a variety of writing strategies by which Plath achieved her distinctive poetic power, and it models some reading strategies one can use to gauge that power. It exposes the paradox that Plath's texts cannot be read through biography and cannot be read apart from it. The book thus suggests something of the cultural, emotional, and linguistic vitality and the conceptual tensions that have made Plath such a central writer for the last half century. Taken all in all, this is probably the most penetrating analysis of Plath since Jacqueline Rose's The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991) and Susan Van Dyne's Revising Life (1993). It belongs on the expanding shelf of essential Hath commentary. All Plath scholars will want to know it and to grapple with its insights and its contradictions.

Steven Gould Axelrod University of California, Riverside