"Bodied Forth in Words": Sylvia Plath's Ecopoetics

College Literature, Summer 2009 by Knickerbocker, Scott

Despite the New Criticism's warning against the "intentional fallacy," poststructuralism's assertion that the author is "dead," and New Historicism's emphasis on ideology and historical context, much of the literary criticism devoted to Sylvia Plath has relied heavily on her biography. This is partly due to Plath's unfortunate categorization as part of the "confessional" school of poets, whose work, in reaction against the impersonality and irony of the high modernists, instead seems to draw directly on the poet's "real" life, particularly his or her inner, emotionally tormented life. Such a view of Plath is still ubiquitous despite her own dismissive description of confessional poetry: "As if poetry were some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion" (2000, 355).

As both cause and consequence of Plath's categorization as a confessional poet, the dramatic and famously tragic events of her Ufe have also contributed to the abundance of biographically driven criticism: "Before one has read much of her work, one has tumbled into the gossip, into the tabloid flattening of her artistic accomplishment, and the poems have begun to line up as lurid illustrations, vivid diary entries, exhibits for the defense or the prosecution if she or her former husband, her mother and father, or anyone else, happens to be on trial" (Young 1998, 18). Her troubled marriage to and separation from Ted Hughes and her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30 have given rise to wildly different readings of her work, which are simultaneously and perhaps mainly readings (and misreadings) of her life: "As a result of the poet's troubled and well-publicized personal life, as well as the extremely emotional and personal subject matter of the Ariel poems, these kter poems have received far more attention for what they are saying than for how they are saying it" (Hannah 2003, 232-33). That is, Plath sympathizers and detractors alike have frequently read her poems merely thematically, largely overlooking formal concerns, and also as keys into her psychology. In the worst examples, critics read Plath's poems as proof that she was selfobsessed, hysterical, and driven toward death from early on.1

The disappearance and destruction (by Hughes) of Plath's last journals, written during her difficult final year, only exacerbate critics' obsession with her death and relationship to Hughes. Into this mysterious textual gap in Plath's work have poured, in the most extreme cases, both misogynistic and feminist perspectives of critics whose political agendas clearly predate and supersede Plath and her work. Like Emily Dickinson, Plath has become a cultural icon onto which we project our own concerns; we use her life to justify and dramatize our own beliefs (literally dramatize, in the case of the 2003 film, "Sylvia"). Marsha Bryant describes the particularly American habit of consuming cultural figures: "Sylvia Plath is not only one of America's major poets, but also literary culture's ultimate commodity" (2002, 17). Despite the perhaps necessary function of cultural icons, the unfortunate result of Plath's persona is a lack of attention toward the craft and technique of her poems themselves. Although there are at least 500 articles and 85 fulllength published books on Plath, only a tiny minority of articles and chapters deals specifically with the formal aspects of her poems.2

Another significant result of emphasizing Plath's interiority and confessional mode is that many critics overlook and even flatly deny her connection to the outside world, including the nonhuman. For example, although Helen Vendler sensibly dismisses the fashion of applying psychiatric terms to Plath's poetry, in her review of Crossing the Water, Vendler charges Plath with solipsism: Plath refuses "nature any honorable estate of its own" and "binds nature into a compass much smaller than it deserves" (1980, 273, 274). Instead of Plath's responsibly granting otherness to nature, "all of nature exists only as a vehicle for her sensibility" (274). Many critics share this view, and even admiring critics of Plath continue to level the charge of solipsism, as in Adam Kirsch's recent book: "Plath's poetry never transcribes events in the real world, or even reacts directly to them. Instead, she creates a world in her own image, with only the most tenuous and contingent relationship to reality" (261). Kirsch describes Plath's late poems as representing the "intoxicating power of the completely unrestrained imagination" (2005, 265). When ecocritic Terry Gifford argues that Plath "uses nature imagery to [externalize] her inner life" (1995, 150), he doesn't make a uniquely ecocritical claim but rather expresses the common opinion that Plath's use of natural imagery is merely instrumental to her personal psychology. For most critics, the only sense in which Plath's poems do relate to the "real world" is that they serve as direct psychological transcriptions of her actual feelings as an oppressed woman angry with her husband, parents, and female rivals.Tracy Brain points out the critical limitations (not to mention the "unkindness") of considering Plath merely as a victim or angry woman: "To treat Plath's writing in this way is to belittle her work, for the implication of such an exercise is that Sylvia Plath was too unimaginative to make anything up, or too self-obsessed to consider anything of larger historical or cultural importance" (2001, 15).