As Joan fragments under the stress of her multiple identities—wife, mistress, celebrity poetess, Harlequin author—even her daydreams about the Fat Lady turn sinister. But after a fake suicide lands her safely out of Canada, Joan returns to the Fat Lady and also to the standard gothic plot: “I was getting tired of Charlotte, with her intact virtue and tidy ways. Wearing her was like wearing a hair shirt, she made me itchy. Even her terrors were too pure, her faceless murderers, her corridors, her mazes and forbidden doors.”74 Joan needs to change the plot so that she can escape the pernicious influence of Charlotte Brontë.
When the main character appears in the last installment of Stalked by Love, it is the wife Felicia, not the virginal Charlotte, who walks deep into the maze to arrive “in the central plot” where four women sit on a bench. All identify themselves as Lady Redmond, including the Fat Lady. Her various avatars, Joan realizes, have been trapped in an identical story, as the master appears either to whirl Felicia into the marriage plot or to kill her into the death plot, while Joan’s act of revision suggests that the two stories might be identical, as they are in the Bluebeard tale that fascinated Atwood. If, as Oscar Wilde claimed, life tends to imitate art, then the only way to get a life liberated from the tyranny of romantic clichés is to engage in revisionary imaginative acts, a point brilliantly made by the British storyteller Angela Carter with her reworked fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber (1979).
Four years before Lady Oracle, Atwood had explored not only psychological but also national colonization in a novel about an unhinged character traumatized by the endings of her relationships with her parents and a partner. In Surfacing (1972), the nameless heroine travels north into the Canadian wilderness with a new boyfriend as well as a couple who dramatize the sadomasochistic heterosexuality that Atwood anatomized in her verse: “you fit into me / like a hook into an eye // a fish hook / an open eye.”75 The suicidal heroine searches her parents’ lakeside cottage and her own memories to confront the injuries that have devastated her.
Repelled by the pollution of the wilderness, she swims toward the lake bottom, looking for the Native cliff drawings that her father had been photographing before he disappeared. Coming upon not a painting or a rock but “a dead thing,” she associates the body (probably that of her father) with something “in a bottle curled up, staring out at me like a cat pickled. . . . Whatever it is, part of myself or a separate creature, I killed it. It wasn’t a child, but it could have been one.” Previous tales about a lost marriage had been a smokescreen for this other loss of an aborted fetus, which alienated her from her parents and from the unborn baby’s father. Feeling contaminated by the destructiveness of the colonizers she calls “Americans,” the narrator determines to divorce herself from the human world, the realm of “men and women both.”76
Before Atwood’s heroine sets out to get in touch with the sacred gods and animals of nature, she uses her boyfriend to inseminate herself: she can feel her lost child “surfacing within me, forgiving me, rising from the lake where it has been prisoned for so long.” In and around the cottage, she goes about destroying vestiges of culture: rolls of film, her own illustrations of fairy tales, her parents’ maps, albums, plates; she makes a lair, and lives on remnants from the garden. The attempt to shed false selves and regain a primeval animal self is of course doomed to failure; however, she experiences a succession of visions that lead her to conclude that she has one overarching responsibility: “This above all, to refuse to be a victim”—which in part involves recanting “the old belief that I am powerless.”77 Spare as a fable about an anonymous everywoman, Surfacing speaks for all the seventies heroines who struggle to shatter the stale conventions of the past and seek rebirth into wilder forms of being.
The starkness of Surfacing contrasts with the broad historical sweep of The Women’s Room, which made a splash when it hit the best-seller list in 1977. Yet Marilyn French also presented a pessimistic view of “men and women both.” The first half of her novel reads like a depressing confirmation of Betty Friedan’s insights into fifties domesticity.78 All the wives suffer the misery of dependence on men who might work, or not; who might drink, or not; but “you’re no one without them.” Married to (the properly named) Norm, French’s heroine Mira—who sardonically thinks of herself as Mrs. Perfect Norm—finds herself “sick unto death of four thousand years of males telling me how rotten my sex is. Especially it makes me sick when I look round and see such rotten men and such magnificent women, all of whom have a sneaking suspicion that the four thousand years of remarks are correct.”79
But in the second part of the novel, about the sixties, feminism fails to save most of French’s characters. Its most important advocate, the divorce survivor Val, has given over hating her husband or “any of them. They can’t help it: they’re trained to be bastards.” After her teenage daughter is raped, though, Val slips into vitriol as she argues that “in their relations with women, all men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.”80 The Woman’s Room quickly became a symbol of feminism, though it was greeted with ambivalence by many feminists.81
Still, its desolation reflects the uncertainty of the other seventies heroines who find themselves at the end of their stories wandering between two worlds, one dead and the other struggling to be born. The landscapes they inhabit resemble the rooms in The Womanhouse installation that Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro created in 1972 in an old mansion in Hollywood: the Menstruation Bathroom with its trash can overflowing with used tampons, the Dollhouse with its miniature interiors filled with hidden monsters, the Nurturing Kitchen with its eggs and breasts covering the walls and ceilings, and especially the Bridal Staircase with a life-size doll fixed on a landing in full regalia.82
Reading many of these novels while we were working on The Madwoman in the Attic, we were astonished how they highlighted the more submerged protests voiced by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But unlike many of the central characters of Austen, Brontë, and Barrett Browning, the heroines of feminist fiction do not end up living happily ever after in committed heterosexual relationships. Maddened, unhappily married, divorced, or single, they offered their authors the opportunity to evaluate the institution of marriage during a period when divorce rates surged at least in part because the traditional relationship between the sexes was being so defiantly attacked by feminists.83
PLATH’S ELECTRIC TAKE ON THE FIFTIES
One of the most widely read novels of this decade was a critique of traditional American femininity, whose contradictions drive its depressed protagonist/narrator to madness—and a suicide attempt. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar was first published in London in 1963, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, less than a month before its author’s suicide. After her death, both her husband and her mother hesitated to let it appear under her own name in England, and were even more anxious about letting it appear in the United States. Finally, in 1971, the novel came out in America, to mixed reviews but also to eager readers, many of whom were aware that the plot of the work followed the grievous arc of Plath’s own history while also foreshadowing her grim future.
For a long time, Plath had hoped to write a novel in a “fresh brazen colloquial voice,” like Joyce Cary or, as it ultimately turned out, J. D. Salinger.84 And certainly her narrator, Esther Greenwood, has just the sardonic perspective on the world that Holden Caulfield has. But even darker: without Holden’s contempt for “phonies,” Esther is bizarrely alienated from the culture that has shaped her as she drifts toward self-immolation. The first paragraph of the book sets its tone: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” (Esther was in New York, of course, because, like Plath herself, she had won a guest editorship at a young women’s magazine.) But even before she begins to explain what she’s doing in New York, Esther continues to obsess about the Rosenbergs: “The idea of being electr
ocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers. . . . I kept hearing about the Rosenbergs over the radio. . . . I knew something was wrong with me that summer because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I’d been to buy all those uncomfortable expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet.”85
Esther’s obsession with the Rosenbergs isn’t surprising. She is beginning a sort of novel/memoir about the fifties, with all that decade’s McCarthyism and anti-Semitism—an anti-Semitism promoted even by the Jewish lawyer Roy Cohn, the prosecutor who sought the death sentence for the Rosenbergs and who was later to become Donald Trump’s personal fixer. Ethel Rosenberg’s electrocution was especially scandalous since there was little evidence that she had participated in the espionage engineered by her brother and her husband, so she is even more important to Plath. Her electrocution introduces a theme that is central to the Bell Jar: the dangerous misuse of electric shock therapy, from Plath’s point of view an analog of electrocution, from which she herself was to suffer in 1953.
Esther’s adventures during what ought to have been a triumphant month in New York are all misadventures. She admires the managing editor for whom she is interning, deeming that Jay Cee “had brains”—but is put off by the editor’s “plug-ugly” looks. Among her sister guest editors, she is drawn to two opposites: the rebel Doreen and the all-American Betsy, whom Doreen labels “Pollyanna Cowgirl.”86 Together with her widowed mother—a teacher of shorthand and typing, who urges Esther to learn the same skills—these figures might seem to represent different facets of herself or different roles she vaguely aspires to. But at the same time, none is adequate to her secretly stirring ambitions. In fact, together they are imprisoned in a world that is literally poisonous. All the guest editors—except, tellingly, for Doreen—are felled by food poisoning at a luncheon hosted by the magazine Lady’s Day. How did Doreen survive? By skipping what was meant to be a treat. But she too had earlier vomited and passed out from too much alcohol, supplied her by a freewheeling DJ she picked up in a taxi.
Nor are the men Esther encounters adequate to her desires. Her high school boyfriend, Buddy Willard, is as bourgeois as her mother, and his mother is even more culture-bound. Mrs. Willard strives to marry Buddy to Esther while also urging Esther to become a cookie-cutter cookie-baking fifties housewife. “What a man is is an arrow into the future,” Mrs. W. opines, “and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.” But what Esther wants is to be herself an arrow into the future. In any case, Buddy doesn’t present her with anything sexually attractive. When she finally gets a look at his genitalia, the first set of male reproductive organs she’s ever seen, she likens them to “turkey neck and turkey gizzards.”87 As for the other men she gets involved with—a Peruvian who tries to rape her, a passive simultaneous translator, a math professor who deflowers her (and triggers a massive hemorrhage)—all have nothing to offer while embodying everything to fear.
Esther’s anomie arguably signals the oncoming mental breakdown that will require shock treatments and hospitalization in the second half of the novel. But it’s also clearly a consequence of just the “normlessness” described by the sociologist Émile Durkheim in his famous study Suicide (1897). Such normlessness—a breakdown of previously agreed-on standards and values—increasingly characterized the smug culture of the fifties. Consider, after all, Esther’s colleagues in New York, at home, and later in the mental hospital. Each represents an entirely different way of being. In a world that idealizes the Betsy types—and Betsy was eventually to become a cover girl—rebellious Doreen continues to flourish, and Esther’s helicopter mother supports herself by teaching stenography at university, Mrs. Willard propounds the platitudes of Good Housekeeping, and Jay Cee is powerful but unattractive. All different, yet each in her way as compelling a cultural image as any of the others. No wonder Esther finds herself riveted by what she calls “the vision of the fig tree,” in which she imagines herself sitting under a fig tree, whose fruits traditionally represent female vulvas and here symbolize the range of roles represented by the women around her; as she is unable to decide which fig to choose, each withers and falls to the ground.88
After she has sleepwalked through her month in New York, Esther throws away all her new fancy clothes—the costumes of fifties womanhood—and goes home to spend her days trying to kill herself, finally almost succeeding by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills and entombing (or enwombing?) herself in her mother’s basement. Not only has her “normless” month of anomie in New York driven her to this Grand Guignol gesture; her first encounter with electric shock therapy, badly misapplied, is a calamity prefigured by the horrifying fate of the Rosenbergs. In “Hanging Man,” one of her Ariel poems, Plath was also to write about this experience: “By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me. / I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.”89
When Plath wrote all this bleak stuff in the early sixties, she didn’t name herself a feminist. Nonetheless, she and her work, both in prose and poetry, embodied what was to become seventies feminism: an alienation from the rigid female roles of the fifties, a nauseated response to sexuality—both virginity and its loss—and even a secret sense that, as in Millett’s The Basement, “to be female is to die.” By one of those quirks of fate out of which futures rise, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published a month after The Bell Jar appeared in England in 1963, and a little more than a week after Plath killed herself. Both books can be said to struggle with what Friedan labeled “the problem that has no name,”90 and together, along with Millett’s Sexual Politics, they birthed seventies feminism, as did the compellingly tragic life story of Sylvia Plath.
When The Bell Jar appeared in the States, it was rightly seen as an analysis of just the fifties culture against which seventies feminists were rebelling. As in some story of time travel, Esther Greenwood herself might be seen as a seventies feminist, complete with ambition, anger, and an awakening consciousness, transplanted to the fifties. Together with such poems as “Daddy,” which takes on the “marble-heavy” image of a patriarch, and “Lady Lazarus,” which announces the rebirth of a fire-breathing woman, the novel names on every page the problem that has no name.
No wonder its publication, added to the mystery that continued to surround Plath’s suicide, triggered a kind of literary riot. Robin Morgan’s poem “Arraignment,” appearing in 1972 in her first book, Monster, set the stage for feminist assaults on Ted Hughes, who was held accountable for his wife’s death.
How can
I accuse
Ted Hughes
of what the entire British and American
literary and critical establishment
has been at great lengths to deny
without ever saying it in so many words, of course:
the murder of Sylvia Plath?91
Hughes declared that Morgan’s poem was libelous and threatened to take her to court; his lawyers banned publication of the poem in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the Commonwealth. But feminists in England, Canada, and Australia produced pirated editions of the book while others set to work “desecrating” (or, from their perspective, revising) the name on Plath’s headstone: Sylvia Plath Hughes was repeatedly truncated to Sylvia Plath. Stones and shells from Devon that Ted Hughes had placed on the grave were regularly removed. Heated letters were exchanged in the pages of the Guardian and other papers.
Privately, Hughes said to a friend, “It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius,” adding, “I hear the wolves howling in the park”—Regents Park Zoo was near Plath’s apartment, where he was living with their two children—“and it’s very apt.”92 But in Birthday Letters (1998), the elegiac sequence of poems written to the ghost of Sylvia Plath, he chafed against the assaults of feminists who held him accountable for what had happened. One piece, in particular, dedicated to his children, expresses the sense of grievance he felt. Titled “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother,” the poem warns
that it’s “Too late / To salvage what she was,” then describes how he and his children lovingly decorated her grave, before “a kind / of hyena” appeared to desecrate the spot, to “batten” on her body and “Bite the face off her gravestone.”93
Lawyers and libel suits, riots and fierce retorts. When Hughes traveled to Australia for a poetry festival in 1976, he was met by women carrying a forest of signs that read “Murderer!” His response was to have a two-year-long affair with Jill Barber, his Australian hostess, while also bedding a number of other women. But he survived to become the Poet Laureate of England, to go fishing with the Queen Mother, and to have Prince Charles put up a sort of shrine to him in his royal household. In the meantime, Plath survived not only in her best-selling writings but in her material leavings: a hank of hair preserved in the Lilly Library at Indiana University, skirts and dresses recently auctioned off for large sums in London, and paper dolls also at Indiana.
In the 2015 poem “Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid,” Diane Seuss declares that Plath wielded her beauty like a weapon until her husband left her and when she took it up again it became “a word-weapon, / a poem-sword.”94 Seuss was working in a strain of verse about Plath established by writers from Erica Jong and Anne Sexton to Catherine Bowman. Jong’s “Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit,” which focuses on a female slave who beats herself “with the fine whip / of her own tongue,” describes the fate awaiting such a creature:
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