The juxtaposition of godmothers—luscious Marilyn Monroe, quirky Marianne Moore—dramatizes the extraordinary confusions of the fifties for young women whose lives reflected but also rebelled against the conformity of the decade. Women in rapidly expanding suburbs claimed to be in love with their new fridges and pledged allegiance to the Joy of Cooking author whom Plath called her “blessed Rombauer.” Speaking for the new society of Westchester, Phyllis McGinley preached “suburban rapture” for young women.7 Yet in urban centers and small towns, psychoanalysts and sexologists disputed the nature of female sexuality, as the Beats promoted deviance, African Americans organized to protest racism, interracial couples joined civil rights activists in defying segregation, and lesbians established their own places and publications.
Amid these jostling imperatives, the evolution of the good, bad, and mad literary women who would become celebrities in seventies feminism shatters normative notions of this notoriously normative decade. Within the cauldron of the fifties’ contradictions, seventies feminism incubated.
SYLVIA PLATH’S PAPER DOLLS
For Sylvia Plath, a middle-class girl from an upwardly mobile immigrant family—and, during the Second World War, a vexingly German American one at that—the cultural pressures were intense. A voracious consumer of “girls’ ” magazines (Seventeen, Mademoiselle) and periodicals that targeted housewives (Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping), Plath began creating her own paper dolls and their stylish outfits when she was 12. Her idealized figures were babes, not babies—dolls that had movie star figures and seductive costumes, some of which she named as if she were writing copy for Vogue: “Heartaches,” “Fireside reveries,” “Evening in Paris.”8
A decade later, when she was studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright, she presented herself as a living doll in an article for the university newspaper titled “Sylvia Plath Tours the Stores and Forecasts May Week Fashions.”9 Here she appears in a ball gown, a cocktail dress, and most strikingly in two cheesecake poses (one on the front page of the paper) in which she is wearing a “white one-piece” bathing suit “with black polka dots, bow tied over each hip.” With or without irony—her intention is unclear—she sent clippings to her mother, autographing one “with love, from Betty Grable.”10 When she wrote this piece for Varsity, for which she was a reporter, Plath was already deeply involved with the scruffily handsome Ted Hughes, who owned only “one pair of dungarees” and a dirty black corduroy jacket.11
On the one hand, she adored him: he was the only man “huge enough for me,” a genius, etc.12 On the other hand, she wanted him to wash his hair more often, to clean his fingernails, to buy newer, nicer clothes. Together, she believed, they would conquer the literary world. And within months they romantically married on Bloomsday, 1956, then honeymooned like Hemingway characters, in the south of Spain, living on potatoes, eggs, tomatoes, and fish for next to nothing; writing ferociously; swimming and getting marvelously tanned. At the same time, forbidding her mother to disclose her secret marriage, Plath yearned for a real American wedding: “a shell pink dress . . . delectable drinks . . . and much much food both meats and sweets,” plus “all stainless steel kitchenware, brown-and-aqua baking dishes; and if possible, a white and forest-green bathroom towel set.”13
Even in Benidorm, Spain, living like a beatnik, Plath lamented the absence of ingredients stipulated by Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking. Yet she soldiered on, happily preparing three meals a day (“caffe latte” for her and “brandy milk” for Ted in the morning, picnics of deviled eggs on the beach, fish and potatoes on a single burner for dinner).14 Why, then, did her widower write one of his strongest poems in Birthday Letters about their honeymoon, disclosing that, as its title declared, “You Hated Spain”? Though she couldn’t speak Spanish and was merely “a bobby-sox American,” she “saw right down to the Goya funeral grin” as her “panic / Clutched back towards college America.”15
Hughes’s insight was acute. Despite his wife’s exuberant descriptions of Spain in letters home, she was glad to leave early, yearning for refrigeration. “College America,” with its dating games and Bermuda shorts, writing contests and junior proms, had made her into a living oxymoron, an intensely ambitious writer who was also a boy-crazy Betty Grable. Here is the teenage Plath, musing in a 1950 journal entry on her own image, as she strolled through Boston on a date: “I walked along, loving, narcissus-like, my reflection in store windows.” Here, in another journal entry from about the same time, she records that “I sit here, smiling, as I think in my fragmentary way: ‘Woman is but an engine of ecstasy, a mimic of the earth from the ends of her curled hair to her red-lacquered nails.’ ” And here she is, a few years later, proclaiming a moment of social triumph: “Miraculous, and quite unbelievably . . . I am going to that magnificent event, the Yale Junior Prom with him: the one boy in the whole college I give a damn about.”16
But then in entry after entry she railed against her sexual position, the social admonitions to preserve chastity, the imperative to marry and become a dutiful wife and mother. “I dislike being a girl, because as such I must come to realize that I cannot be a man,” she wrote with a certain hesitancy. Elaborating on her feelings, she explicitly described her discontent with having been born a woman:
Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than a penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars— . . . all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night . . .17
By the time she wrote The Bell Jar, Plath put the situation even more dramatically. Her narrator/protagonist, Esther Greenwood, confides that after a boyfriend told her she wouldn’t want to write poems once she had children, “I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”18 In its examination of fifties culture as manifested in the hothouse world of a fashion magazine, Plath’s only extant novel explores all the ills that American girls were heir to in a society that enjoined them to compete for prizes while presenting themselves as dolls.
The experience that inspired the novel was as bitterly confusing as the supposedly fictive narrative. In June 1953, Plath herself was a “guest editor” of Mademoiselle, then the magazine for the gung ho college girls whom Ted Hughes called “bobby-sox Americans.” In the journal’s stylish Madison Avenue offices, undergraduate women who won this prestigious position confronted the conflicts that haunted fifties femininity in especially dramatic ways. Sitting around long tables in conference rooms that resembled the seminar rooms they were used to on campus, they were asked to analyze not Plato or Shakespeare but the incoming season’s set of pleated plaid skirts and frilly blouses, in which all were then costumed to pose for the special issue they were ostensibly “editing.” On excursions that seemed like strange field trips, they were gifted with trousseau linens, perfumes, and even new hairstyles. In writing assignments curiously evocative of prompts for college papers, they were encouraged to discourse on fashion, not fiction, or to summarize cosmetic options rather than critical opinions.19
The 20-year-old Plath lived with the other guest editors in the women-only Barbizon Hotel, where she struggled to keep up both physical and social appearances, felt oppressed by the alienating New York dating scene, was depressed by Eisenhower-era politics, and was especially horrified by the globally controversial electrocution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on June 19. By the time she left town to return to her mother’s house for the rest of the
summer, she was sickened by what was supposed to have been a glamorous month in the big city. Like Esther Greenwood, she flung all her fancy New York clothes off the roof of her hotel, then went home to insomnia, shock therapy, a failed suicide attempt, and a stay at a mental hospital.
Over the following years, Plath brooded on the intersection between sexual and American politics that she felt she had encountered that troubled summer. Long an accomplished graphic artist, in 1960 she put together a sardonic collage summarizing her view of the era whose avatar she herself was to become. At the center of the piece is Eisenhower, a deck of cards in his hands and Tums on his desk, along with a camera pointed at a model in a swimsuit with the slogan “Every Man Wants His Woman on a Pedestal.” But a bomber is pointing at the female belly, and there’s another caption: “It’s HIS AND HER time all over America.”20
HIS AND HER TIME
What made the apparently “tranquillized” fifties such a bewildering turning point? For one thing, a new ideology of marriage shaped the middle-class white America in which both Plath and Rich grew up. In the society depicted in Plath’s collage, dominated by Eisenhower Republicans, “HIS AND HER time” epitomized the separate spheres of the sexes: the breadwinner and the housewife. When “the man in the gray flannel suit” returned home from his daily labors, his suburban helpmate, clad in the “New Look” of the fifties, with its long, full skirts and decorous sweater sets, was waiting for him in a tidy, clean, Betty Crocker/Betty Furness kitchen.21
Middle-class women had long since put aside the padded shoulders of the forties, as well as Rosie the Riveter’s bandana and trousers, and they had ostensibly, too, relinquished ambitions to work outside the home—though they could expertly drive station wagons to schools and commuter platforms. In the forties, Phyllis McGinley’s celebratory sonnet “The 5:32” had already set the scene for the romantic fantasy of suburbia, when the breadwinner returns in sentimental sunlight to the housekeeper poet who is his dutiful wife. “She said, If tomorrow my world were torn in two, . . . I think I would remember . . . This hour best of all the hours I knew: // When cars came backing into the little station, . . . the women driving . . . and the trains arriving, / And the men getting off with tired but practiced motion.”22
Oddly, given the dichotomized roles of breadwinner and housewife, an ideology of “togetherness” was dominant, as was an ethic of “adjustment” and “maturity.” McGinley’s own life was apparently as idyllic as the world of her sonnet. Not long ago, one of her daughters remembered that her family was “a sanguine, benign, adorable version of ‘Mad Men’ ”—which would seem almost as much of a contradiction in terms as Plath’s intellectual Betty Grable pose.23 But television itself was new and cheerful in those days. Families gathered on weekends to marvel at the Ed Sullivan Show or Sid Caesar’s Show of Shows, and slick serial comedies—I Love Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet—chronicled the charmingly nutty antics of middle-class wives and children (though in the end everyone professed to agree that, as the title of another series put it, “father knows best”).
Marriage rates rose rapidly: “almost everyone was married by his or her mid-twenties”—Plath married at 23; Rich married at 24—and “most couples had two to four children, born sooner after marriage and spaced closer together than in previous years.”24 Girls started “going steady” early and then hoped to be “pinned.” Plath continually insisted that she and Hughes wanted five children; Rich had three before she was 30. During the baby boom, the historian Elaine Tyler May has explained, “childlessness was considered deviant, selfish, and pitiable.”25 In one poem Plath herself excoriated the “Barren Woman” as a “museum without statues.” In another, she brooded that “Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children. / Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb.”26 Yet looking back on her child-rearing years in the fifties, Adrienne Rich was to remember that “every mother has known overwhelming, unacceptable anger at her children.”27
A glossy surface, darker stirrings below. Both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton attended Robert Lowell’s verse-writing workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they would have had to confront the implications of “the tranquillized Fifties.”28 And tellingly the word “tranquillized” reminds us that the ideology of separate sexual spheres arose in what W. H. Auden in 1947 called “an age of anxiety”—personal and public.29 The smiling suburbanites of the “silent generation” silently suffered from heartburn and headaches. The personal anxieties troubling the lonely crowd were often soothed by Miltown, a newly formulated tranquilizer that became widely popular. Public anxieties, no doubt doubling private ones, were focused on the mushroom cloud that ended the Second World War.
Fear of the atomic bomb intensified a need for security that was increasingly associated with home and hearth. While children “took cover” under classroom desks during air-raid drills, their parents built backyard bomb shelters and stockpiled them with canned goods. The McCarthy hearings and the investigations led by the House Un-American Activities Committee fanned the red scare by blacklisting the supposedly subversive doings of liberal intellectuals and artists. Loyalty oaths, the Korean War, and the execution of the Rosenbergs escalated the sense of dread, as did purges from the government of “sexual misfits,” prosecuted and persecuted as “security threats.”30
Even the poetry that dominated the literary scene for much of the decade was tightly formal and aesthetically conservative. Plath trained herself in her craft by churning out sonnets and villanelles and, in the manner of that “aging giantess” Marianne Moore, carefully counted syllabic verse. At this point, Moore incarnated the American ideal of a woman poet: spinsterish and eccentric, wearing a cape and tricornered hat à la George Washington, and in 1955 gamely trying to think up names for the shark-finned car that Henry Ford was eventually to call the “Edsel,” after his brother. (Among other monikers, Moore proposed “The Resilient Bullet,” “The Intelligent Whale,” and “Utopian Turtletop.”)31
Not only did Plath start out as an admirer of Moore, Moore herself was for a while an admirer of Plath, awarding her a prize in a 1955 Mount Holyoke verse-writing contest and posing amiably for a joint photograph. But the relationship soured, in part because the chasm between married and single women deepened during “HIS AND HER time all over America.” Moore was one of three judges (along with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender) who awarded a major first-book poetry prize to Hughes’s Hawk in the Rain, and it soon became clear that she preferred the husband’s work to the wife’s. After Plath sent Moore poems for critical appraisal, she admonished the younger woman not to be “so grisly” and not to be “too unrelenting.”32
When Plath wrote her asking if she’d be a referee for a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, according to one scholar, “unwisely asserted the value of her experience as a mother,”33 the spinsterish Moore took offense. By 1961, when she was queried about Plath’s candidacy for the Guggenheim, Moore was bizarrely hostile:
Sylvia Plath Hughes won a Glascock Award at Mt. Holyoke when I was a judge: work was attractive as well as talented. I thought and think her very gifted but feel cold toward this “project.” And way of presenting it. You are not subsidized for having a baby especially in view of world population explosion. You should look before you leap and examine your world-potentialities of responsibility as contributory parent. Sylvia Plath has been specialing [sic] lately in gruesome detail, worms and germs and spiritual flatness. Her husband Ted Hughes has moral force and twice the talent that she has, won the YMHA verse-book contest with W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and me, as judges and I’d rather give the money to him to continue his work than give it to Sylvia.34
As Vivian Pollak remarks in a discussion of this letter, “Hughes is not faulted for fathering children.”35 Nor had he, in fact, applied for a Guggenheim (he’d already had one).
Of course, Moore’s comments reveal much more about her than they do about Plath: in particular, they suggest the extraordinary complexity of the period’s attitudes toward marriage and
maternity. What Moore had avoided in pursuing a career as a single woman had rewarded her with power and prestige. What Plath celebrated—her determination to be a “triple threat woman, wife, mother and writer”—went beyond the bounds and bonds of womanhood.36 A young lady should be one or the other, should not aspire to “have it all,” as Plath did. Thus, the domesticity in which Plath might seem so dutifully to have reveled was paradoxically seen by Moore (and no doubt by others) as a rebellious gesture rather than a decorous one.
And, as we have seen, Plath herself had wanted to rebel against the “awful tragedy” of sprouting “breasts and ovaries rather than a penis and scrotum.” Yet once she had encountered Hughes she enthusiastically (and defiantly) celebrated the joys of a creative partnership in childbearing, child-rearing, householding, and art. Nonetheless, she refused to be a “housewife poet” like McGinley (“she’s sold out”). She yearned to be “The Poetess of America”—not suburbia—and for Ted to be “The Poet of England.”37 Her ambitions would have seemed, in different ways, problematic to Moore and McGinley—and each of them seemed problematic to Plath.
ANATOMY AND DESTINY
What biological and psychological assumptions about femininity shaped the clashing views of marriage, maternity, and creativity espoused by such divergent figures as Moore, McGinley, and Plath? Before feminists took on the subject of sexuality, it was monopolized by male as well as female psychologists and psychiatrists who made their names by advancing conventional strictures about women’s proper place in the nuclear family. To be happy and healthy, they preached, a young woman had to subordinate herself to a man and to children. Freudian theories of psychosexuality dominated the thinking of the fifties, even while the sexology research of Alfred Kinsey started to contest them.
Still Mad Page 4
