Trainwreck

by Sady Doyle

  “As a movement woman, I’ve been pressured to be strong, selfless, other-oriented, sacrificing, and in general pretty much in control of my own life,” wrote Carol Hanisch, in her own landmark essay on the topic (it’s entitled “The Personal Is Political,” and yes, that phrase stuck around). “It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to say.”

  And while the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s rejected the idea that what they were doing was a form of “therapy,” they also felt clear on what the consequences of not doing it would be: “In the absence of feminist activity,” Cathy Levine wrote in her defense of consciousness-raising, “women take tranquilizers, go insane, and commit suicide.”

  Despite all the talk of collectivity, that is one strikingly specific vision. And it likely has its roots in one or two very specific stories, about what a woman’s oppression looked like, and where it might lead. Before the 1970s, before the formation of the radical collectives, before consciousness-raising, there was simply the consciousness, recorded on paper, of the former Mrs. Ted Hughes.

  •

  Anatomy of a Trainwreck

  SYLVIA PLATH

  The story of Sylvia Plath begins with her death. She committed suicide in the winter of 1963, shortly after writing the best work of her life. By the time those books were published—Ariel, in 1965; The Bell Jar, first released under her own name in 1971—she had been gone for years. She couldn’t speak for the work, or explain it, or defend it. Perhaps most crucially, she could not make any decisions as to where, how, or in what form it was published. This was where the fight began.

  The eruption of Plath into the American public consciousness can most likely be traced to the publication of “Daddy” in Time magazine, in 1966. She was already a well-regarded literary figure, especially after Ariel, but Time made her a star. Next to the poem, and a selection of photos, they described how “a pretty young mother of two children was found in a London flat with her head in the oven.” Then, in heavy-breathing prose, Time promised “a strange and terrible poem she had written in her last sick slide toward suicide,” calling Plath a “dragon who in her last months of life breathed a river of bile across the literary landscape.”

  Within the space of a few paragraphs, Time magazine had managed to transform Sylvia Plath from Betty Crocker into Godzilla. But then there was the poem itself. The rough beast that stomped its way toward Tokyo to be born: “Daddy, I have had to kill you,” it declaimed, in lurching, inexorable rhythm, and racked up the body count from there: “A man in black with a Meinkampf look / and a love of the rack and the screw / and I said, I do, I do … If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two.”

  She didn’t sound like a pretty young homemaker. “Daddy” was like an electrical line that snapped and landed on the family driveway. It hissed and writhed and gave off beautiful sparks, and trying to grab it with bare hands would end you. “Daddy” seethed; it threatened. It was decisively not a delicate, feminine utterance of melancholy, not the work of some flower-garlanded Ophelia floating passively downstream. Plath sounded angry enough to kill somebody, to be certain, but—in “Daddy,” anyway—she wasn’t on that list.

  So who was? Not just Dad: The vampire husband, the torturous screw, the Meinkampf looker? What did he do?

  It wasn’t idle curiosity. Plath died six days before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was first published. The Time article was published in the same year as Valerie Solanas’s first essay. By 1968, two years after “Daddy’s” appearance in Time, the New York Radical Women would be marching on the Miss America pageant; that same year, dissidents who found Friedan and her NOW organization too conservative would converge with Valerie, and make her shooting of Andy into a cause célèbre. Plath had released a poem of rage against husbands and fathers—a poem that identified husbands and fathers with brutality, with violence, with oppression—at precisely the moment that American women were ready to rage against the sexist men in their lives.

  And Sylvia had an advantage: Unlike Valerie, she was not living on the margins. She had published a book before her death, had studied with Robert Lowell, had given readings for the BBC, was a “real” writer with real credentials. “Confessional” writing itself was even a respected form, albeit one practiced largely by men like Lowell. Being white, straight, middle-class, a housewife, a mother, a good girl from a good college: All of these made her seem “representative” (at least, according to one very limiting definition of “representative”—which, to be fair, was the definition plenty of second-wave feminists used) and made her death seem like more than an isolated tragedy or an aberration in the pattern. And so, the groundswell of female anger underneath Sylvia, and the ways she resembled the American ideal, turned “Daddy” from a poem into an anthem.

  And when the details became clear—that Plath’s husband was a poet named Ted Hughes; that he had cheated on her while she was nursing their infant son; that she had kicked him out; that, because she had died before the divorce was finalized, and left no will, he controlled the publication of her work and received the profits from it—well, that anger had a very convenient place to go.

  “I accuse / Ted Hughes,” wrote Robin Morgan, in her poem “The Arraignment.” Specifically, she accused him of wife-beating and murder. As out-of-line as these accusations seem now, with five intervening decades of proof against them, Morgan also wrote a few things that were harder to deny. Namely, that Hughes was making “a mint / by becoming Plath’s posthumous editor.”

  Hughes threatened to sue. All copies of the offending book, Monster, were eventually pulled from Great Britain. This, it turned out, was where the rage against Hughes really originated: He kept a choke hold on any public utterance about Plath. If a friend published a two-part memoir of Plath’s final days in the Observer, Hughes would make sure the second part got pulled. If a biographer wanted to quote her substantially, her estate—Hughes and his sister Olwyn, who disliked Plath in life and didn’t get any fonder of her after death—would dictate Hughes-friendly rewrites before giving permission. And the people forbidden by Hughes to publish material about Sylvia Plath included, crucially, Sylvia Plath herself. Ariel came out—but Hughes had changed the order of poems and omitted some “personally aggressive” ones. Her journals were released—but Hughes admitted to burning or losing the ones from the last months of her life, and the edited versions were full of [OMISSION] marks. The Bell Jar was published—but Plath’s second novel, about a woman facing the dissolution of her marriage, managed to get “lost” as well, one more glaring [OMISSION] in what had come to be a highly suspicious list.

  Hughes was not evil. He grieved Plath, and suffered greatly: Assia Wevill, the woman for whom he left Plath, committed suicide herself a few years later, and killed their daughter as well. And, in all the censoring he did, he may have genuinely been trying to protect Sylvia’s reputation. When her unedited journals were published, in 1999, it turned out the most suspicious [OMISSION] marks weren’t hiding confessions of Hughes’s brutality, as many initially suspected; they were hiding Plath’s complaints about Ted’s personal hygiene. He hadn’t beaten her, he just didn’t want the world to know how rarely he showered.

  If anything, Hughes is best seen in the context of another grieving husband: Where William Godwin’s response to Wollstonecraft’s unexpected death had been to publish everything, no matter how potentially scandalous it was, Hughes’s response was to withhold or destroy anything questionable, no matter how potentially scandalous it wasn’t. Two widowers took precisely opposite routes, and wound up in the same disgrace: In the age of women’s silence, unguarded speech was shameful. But in the age of women’s speech, male-imposed silence was intolerable.

  The banning of “The Arraignment” was the last straw, the moment when Hughes’s controlling behavior came smack up against a political movement devoted to opposing male control. Feminists began to publish bootleg copie
s of “The Arraignment.” His readings were picketed, by women whose placards frequently bore lines from Morgan’s poem; sometimes women would stand up, during a lull in the reading, and begin to recite “The Arraignment” aloud. He began to cancel readings, for fear of disruption. By trying to make Morgan’s poem disappear, he’d turned it into a cause.

  Meanwhile, Plath’s work kept coming. (And it was, to be clear, Hughes who let it come.) Her first novel, The Bell Jar was, if possible, an even more serendipitous work than Ariel. It was a blunt, witty, unsparing account of her first suicide attempt. It was also the tale of a girl who thought marriage would let a man “flatten [her] out under his feet,” who could get into Honors English but was still confounded by the sexual double standard, who was subjected to attempted rape when she did try to express herself sexually, and who would frankly rather kill herself than work at a ladies’ magazine and go without birth control. Everything second-wave feminists were ready to address, Plath had already talked about, simply by talking about herself. She had hung it out there, for God and all to see, and it wasn’t simply ranting and raving and pornography. It was the problem of an age, of thousands or millions of girls like her. When women spoke, it seemed, they really did start to say all the same things.

  And so, Plath became a prophet, and a martyr, someone who had seen the problems before she had a feminist movement to help her fix them, and who had died in part because feminism arrived too late. Like Valerie, she was a cautionary case, someone whose life story meant what the observer’s politics needed it to mean. But, unlike Valerie, she had neither a criminal record nor the ability to disagree with her interpreters. She was more useful to her allies than to her enemies. She became the prototype of the woman who, in the absence of feminist activity, took tranquilizers, went insane, and committed suicide. Hughes’s name began to disappear from Plath’s gravestone. Over and over, “Sylvia Plath Hughes” was chiseled away, until only “Sylvia Plath” remained. No one ever came forward to admit doing it; no one has ever given the reasons. It could have been an act of malice. It could have been a statement of her independent status as a writer: “Sylvia Hughes” didn’t write those books, after all. Or it could have been one last, cruelly sarcastic [OMISSION] mark. He destroyed her journal. They destroyed his name.

  I don’t envy Hughes what he went through in the years after Plath’s death. And I sincerely doubt that we can solve the problem of trainwrecks—of our gruesome appetite to see women suffer, or to see them punished for violating our ideas of how women “ought” to behave—by simply wrecking more men. But Plath was never invulnerable to the wrecking process.

  There have been many attempts, over the years, to paint Plath back into a more familiar picture of sexual and emotional excess: “Sexually predatory, rabidly ambitious, mentally unstable,” as a review of one Ted Hughes biography calls her. Where feminists saw a prophet, Hughes partisans saw a raving, fame-hungry succubus. August critic Harold Bloom sniffed that her poem “Lady Lazarus” was merely a “tantrum,” and that Plath herself was just a fad: “Hysterical insanity, whatever its momentary erotic appeal, is not an affect that endures in verse.” It’s rare that a mere fad is important enough to merit a book-length takedown, but that seems to have escaped Bloom’s notice.

  Other writers have followed Bloom’s lead, characterizing Plath’s work (and, particularly, the poems in Ariel) as purely a symptom of her mental illness: Transcribed delusions, or else compulsive and insane acts of violence against the people in her life, committed through the unlikely medium of verse. Her work has been framed as a disease. And, in the cultural attempt to figure out precisely which mental illness can magically force someone to write two massively popular and enduring books, Plath has been posthumously diagnosed with psychotic depression, bipolar disorder, overly strong PMS, and at least two different personality disorders. One PsychCentral article on narcissistic personality disorder and motherhood opens with a Plath quote, noting that “[there] is a special place in hell for narcissistic mothers. Ms. Plath herself indulged in the ultimate narcissistic act when she committed suicide by sticking her head in the oven while her two young children were asleep in the same apartment.” (If suicide is a narcissistic act, it seems oddly unlikely to benefit the narcissist in question.) And then there’s this, from a 2003 article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, which diagnoses Plath with borderline personality disorder:

  Plath’s poetry can be seen to be preoccupied with ‘borderline’ themes (loss, violence, and contradictory experiences of the self) but these do not necessarily generate poetry. The association of instability with creativity is probably linked with another borderline trait, the capacity for intense concentration. This represents a dissociation from current surroundings and preoccupations, even when these are difficult, as they were when she was writing Ariel.

  No one would suggest that Plath wasn’t mentally ill. Suicide is never a sign of radiant health. But this is another instance of the David Foster Wallace Conundrum: We say that David Foster Wallace was a genius (because he wrote Infinite Jest) and that he was also mentally ill (because he hanged himself). Even if his experience of mental illness substantially informed his writing (Infinite Jest, like The Bell Jar, is drawn largely from the author’s experiences after a suicide attempt in college; the addiction-recovery center Wallace fictionalizes was his first stop after McLean, which also happened to be the exact same hospital Plath stayed in, and that she fictionalized in The Bell Jar), his writing isn’t a symptom of his illness, but evidence of his ability to transcend it. But for Plath, even the most basic part of writing, the fact that she could sit down and concentrate long enough to compose a poem—the same skill displayed by every third-grader who has ever successfully completed a book report—is supposedly a form of madness. Men have problems. Women are problems.

  Here we are again.

  •

  The promise of Plath’s work was that a woman could defang the charges of hysteria by owning them. Unlike Solanas, who seemingly never saw herself as flawed or sick, or Wollstonecraft and Brontë, who swept their flaws under the carpet so as not to compromise themselves, or even Jacobs, who was honest, but played a delicate game of apologizing for “sins” that were not her fault so as to reach her audience, Plath took her own flaws as her subject, and thereby made them the source of her authority. By detailing her own overabundant inner life, no matter how huge and frightening it was—her sexuality, her suicidality, her broken relationships, her anger at the world or at men—she could, in some crucial way, own that part of her story, simply because she chose to tell it. And, if she could do this, other women could do it, too.

  It’s true that, for all that has been written against her, and for all the writing we never got to see, Plath’s ownership of her story gives her a measure of power. She could never be easily or completely slotted into the existing archetypes of crazy ex-girlfriend, half-dressed and hysterical Louise Augustine, or sexually voracious dirty girl, simply because we always have access to her own, complicated, individual story. We can still read “Daddy” and feel the hissing electrical voltage of her disillusionment rising through the page. We can still read The Bell Jar—the smirk of nice-boy Buddy Willard when she breaks her leg shortly after rejecting his marriage proposal, the “woman-hater” who calls her “slut” after he tries to rape her—and see exactly why being a young woman, trying to obtain some sexual satisfaction, is a frightening and dangerous thing. For all the diagnoses and interpretations, she remains ferociously herself; her voice is too strong to disappear inside some generalization about madwomen. The love her readers had for her voice was proven by their anger at even well-intentioned attempts to limit it, their insistence that the world deserved to hear everything Plath had to say.

  But that love has never been taken entirely seriously. Nor does declaring Plath your favorite author win you many points in lit-nerd circles. At the beginning of Plath’s fame, her fans were stereotyped as rabid, violent feminists. But, as early a
s 1979 and Annie Hall, the stereotypes were getting younger, drippier, and dumber: Woody Allen called her an “interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.” (Woody Allen, of course, being an infamously unreliable authority on what young girls enjoy.) Reading her was always gendered, and trivialized, but it got more trivial and more divorced from the political context as time went on. Now, consciousness-raising groups are hokey lentil talk, autobiographical writing is preferably done with a certain cool MFA-enabled distance, and Plath fans are mostly stereotyped as moody, melodramatic, self-absorbed teenage girls. Not exactly a glorious legacy.

  If the movement for the feminist first-person has any legacy at all, it has leaked down, out of the lofty realms of literature and into the low-culture and pop-culture world of blog posts, TV shows, and record collections. Which is, in and of itself, no bad thing. The true test of any radical theory or practice is whether it stays confined to the movement in which it originated—whether it’s solely adopted by initiates and die-hards, or leaks out and permeates the way the norms and squares interact with the world. If it stays cool, it’s not working. If it’s working, it’s probably not cool.

  I, for example, cultivated most of my love for female confessional writing through the highly unserious and very norm-friendly medium of MTV. In 1993, when I was eleven years old, Liz Phair released Exile in Guyville: “I bet you fall in bed too easily with the beautiful girls who are shyly brave,” was its opening line, and it got more parental-advisory-worthy from there, alternating rage with fuck-and-runs, “I want to be your blow-job queen” with “I’m a real cunt in spring.” A year earlier, Tori Amos had released the self-described “diary” Little Earthquakes, delivering urgent first-person tales of religious repression, self-doubt, sexual violence, and boys who “said ‘you’re really an ugly girl, but I like the way you play.’ ” She’d name-check her menstrual cycle, describe her rape in wrenching detail, or just cry about her dad for five minutes, and it was all available in the resolutely apolitical aisles of Best Buy for only $9.99. She named Plath as a primary influence on her writing.