Plath, Sylvia: General Commentary

views updated

SYLVIA PLATH: GENERAL COMMENTARY

CHRISTINA BRITZOLAKIS (ESSAY DATE 1999)

SOURCE: Britzolakis, Christina. "The Spectacle of Femininity." In Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, pp. 135-56. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Britzolakis surveys Plath's poems as examples of ironic self-analysis in response to the cultural objectification femininity as a commodity fit for mass consumption.

Although Plath is often celebrated as the poet of anguished authenticity, she can equally be seen as harnessing the expressive conventions of the lyric cry for a language of elaborate inauthenticity. Her rhetoric encodes a spectacular relation between poet and audience, foregrounding questions of sexuality and power in ways which have only recently begun to be acknowledged. The later Plath in particular makes her distinctive black comedy by crossing Orphic myths of the inspired poet with an ironic deployment of stereotypes of alienated or objectified femininity. In this chapter, I shall argue that the ironic specularity or self-reflexivity at work in Plath's language is an effect not merely of literary history, or of the literary market, but also of a culture of consumption in which images of women circulate as commodities. The visual objectification of femininity has now become a familiar theme of feminist cultural criticism and practice, especially in the area of film and photography.¹ Long before notions of the 'gaze' became current in cultural debate, however, Plath's poetry explored the ambivalent alignments of woman with both consumer and commodity.

FROM THE AUTHOR

JOURNAL ENTRY
November 7, 1959, Saturday.…

Dangerous to be so close to Ted day in day out. I have no life separate from his, am likely to become a mere accessory. Important to take German lessons, go out on my own, think, work on my own. Lead separate lives. I must have a life that supports me inside. This place a kind of terrible nunnery for me. I hate our room: the sterile white of it, the beds filling the whole place. Loved the little crowded Boston apartment, even though J. Panic visited me there.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle-age. Instead of working at writing, I freeze in dreams, unable to take disillusion of rejections. Absurd. I am inclined to go passive, and let Ted be my social self. Simply because we are never apart. Now, for example: the several things I can do apart from him: study German, write, read, walk alone in the woods or go to town. How many couples could stand to be so together? The minute we get to London I must strike out on my own. I'd be better off teaching than writing a couple of mediocre poems a year, a few mad, self-centered stories. Reading, studying, "making your own mind" all by oneself is just not my best way. I need the reality of other people, work, to fulfill myself. Must never become a mere mother and housewife. Challenge of baby when I am so unformed and unproductive as a writer. A fear for the meaning and purpose of my life. I will hate a child that substitutes itself for my own purpose: so I must make my own.

Plath, Sylvia. "Boston 1958-1959." In The Journals of Sylvia Plath. New York: Dial Press, 1982, pp. 328-29.

The Spectacle of Femininity: The Question of Style

One of the stock themes of Plath criticism is the stylistic transformation which the Ariel poems represent in relation to The Colossus : from an academic formalism heavily influenced by the New Critics towards a more colloquial, immediate voice, depending less on discursive logic than on a logic of elliptically juxtaposed, startling images. Alicia Ostriker sees this change of style as a form of 'Americanization'. A risk-taking technique which insists on the 'cutting edge' of immediate factual reality, 'a kind of journalism of obsessions', is, she argues, a peculiarly American one, also practised by Thoreau, Whitman, Williams, and Frost.² The language of Plath's later poems undoubtedly draws upon the 'flashy' naturalistic idiom of contemporary American speech. But this change of stylistic register cannot be seen merely in terms of liberation from a tradition-bound academicism, which thereby inserts Plath into another tradition: that of American literary anti-traditionalism. The project of 'making it new', of renewing and paring down the language of poetry, is a feature shared by a range of different modernisms. It has even been seen as part of the definition of literary history itself.³ The narrative of Plath's stylistic development as a process of leaving behind or shedding the trappings of literary history is therefore a deceptive one, even when Plath's own figurative strategies seem to underwrite it.

For some of Plath's critics, as we have seen, the stylistic 'break-through' of Ariel is part of a narrative of authentic self-realization or self-destruction. For others, however, it unleashes charges of theatricality and sensationalism. For example, David Shapiro deplores her reliance on cliché, hyperbole, and melodrama; Hugh Kenner claims that 'all her life, a reader had been someone to manipulate', and Philip Hobsbaum identifies her 'faults of style' as 'verbal conceit' and 'emotive sensationalism'.⁴ The later Plath has even been seen as an aestheticist, a poet of decadent sensation rather than of immediacy. One of the most striking features of her later style is, after all, the foregrounding of the individual detail, often at the expense of the larger syntactic unit. In 1968, Arthur K. Oberg, noting the recurrent fin-de-siècle iconography in Plath's work, hailed her as the prophet of 'a new Decadence'. He saw certain features of the Ariel poems as axiomatically Decadent: the association of aesthetic perfection with death; the attraction towards stasis and 'sculpted form'; the 'self-generating and self-sustaining' quality of the images; the internalization of objective reality and consequent 'loss of an available world'; and the 'histrionic exhibition of herself and her wounds'.⁵

The critical debate about Plath tends to be organized around an opposition between expressive depths and tawdry surfaces, between 'high' and 'low' culture. Yet it is this very opposition which her 'Decadent' style puts into question, since it situates itself as part of a culture in which self-revelation or self-expression has itself become a cliché. Plath cannot, as Jacqueline Rose has pointed out, be 'made into an emblem for the flight of poetry—poetry as the expression of a transcendent selfhood, poetry as rising above the dregs of the culture which it leaves behind'.⁶ Although at one level her Decadent tactics, such as the decomposition of 'organic' narrative into individual detail, purport to remove the artist from 'vulgar' or prosaic reality, at another they are revealed as entirely compatible with popular culture. They form part of a verbal landscape saturated with visual spectacle and the melodramatic plots of mass culture. The Decadent cult of artifice, performance, and libidinal excess becomes a metaphor for the aestheticization of everyday life in consumer culture, which, indeed, it anticipates.

Plath's formation as a poet coincides with the point at which modernism began, in the 1950s, to be canonized and institutionalized within the Anglo-American academy. At the same time, a debate about the origins and effects of mass culture was in progress, tending to position it as the antagonist of true culture.⁷ Clement Greenberg's opposition between true art and kitsch, Dwight MacDonald's description of mass culture as a 'spreading ooze', and Theodor Adorno's critique of the 'culture industry' all contributed to the prestige of modernist anxiety and alienation during the Cold War, as a trope of aesthetic resistance to totalitarian ideologies.⁸ The category of the 'classic' was being constituted in reaction against, but also as a product of, consumer society. High culture was thought to be in need of protection and custody, if the mass media with their 'unchecked circulation of high and low' were not to have 'the effect of transforming all culture into mass culture'.⁹

Plath's various styles imply a self-consciously appropriative and factitious, 'postmodern' relation to literary tradition; her poetry seems to consume culture as a random assortment of styles which circulate promiscuously. In a famous essay, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', Frederic Jameson sets up an opposition between 'pastiche', which he sees as characteristically postmodernist, and 'parody', which is properly modernist; while the latter assumes a norm, from which it deviates, the former is neutral and unmotivated, void of the critical distance which is capable of positing a norm, that is, 'blank parody'.¹⁰ Pastiche embraces the depthlessness of the simulacrum; it presupposes 'the effacement … of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture'.¹¹ By contrast, parody clings to modernism's adversary role as a critique of social reality.¹²

The element of pastiche in Plath's work turns 'style' into a dialogue with commodity culture that undermines the hierarchies of value implicit in the concept itself. However, Jameson's opposition between parody and pastiche, like the larger opposition of modernism and postmodernism to which it is linked, is notoriously difficult to sustain, and nowhere more so than in relation to Plath. If at one level her poems embrace the depthlessness of popular culture, at another they are, in the words of Terry Eagleton's 1985 rejoinder to Jameson's essay, 'still agonizedly caught up in metaphysical depth and wretchedness, still able to experience psychic fragmentation and social alienation as spiritually wounding'.¹³ I am not arguing, then, that Plath's work abolishes critical distance in some postmodernist carnival of schizophrenic 'intensities'. On the contrary, through the dominant trope of 'confession' Plath charts the operations of power upon the subject and upon language in intensely negative terms.

Style and the Woman

As a writer, Plath framed herself, and was framed, within a highly gendered literary market in which 'pulp' writing was associated with femininity and truly literary writing with masculinity. Andreas Huyssen has pointed out the historical tendency of modernism to position mass culture as its feminine 'other'. The 'imaginary femininity' assumed by many male modernist artists repudiates the strenuously active, self-defining bourgeois subject of modernity, while maintaining 'the exclusion of real women from the literary enterprise and … the misogyny of bourgeois patriarchy itself'.¹⁴ Flaubert's famous statement, 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi' positions 'woman (Madame Bovary) … as reader of inferior literature—subjective, emotional and passive—while man (Flaubert) emerges as writer of genuine authentic literature—objective, ironic, and in control of his aesthetic means'.¹⁵ With the institutionalization of modernism, and the consequent watering down of its oppositional status, this distinction—always a defensive and imperilled gesture, as Huyssen shows—becomes well-nigh impossible to maintain. Moreover, many of the ethical imperatives, such as the internalization of patriarchal authority, which structure the separate constitution and validation of male and female subjectivity in bourgeois society, are themselves eroded by the culture of consumption.¹⁶ Images of women circulate in both modernism and 'mass' culture as objects of identification and desire. As we have seen, Plath ironizes this collusion by exploiting the association of femininity with masquerade, with seduction and false representation. In her poems, the speaking subject invents and reinvents herself as an ensemble of staged and theatrical identities which range across both high and low culture.

Amongst the images of women which appear most frequently in Plath's poetry are those of the prostitute, the female performer and the mechanical woman. In male-authored fin-de-siècle literature, these figures serve, as Rita Felski has pointed out, as emblems of a crisis of modernity, signalling an ambivalent response to the rationalizing, technological vision of capitalist progress.¹⁷ Plath appropriates these images for her exploration of the fractured and crisis-ridden identities of woman as poet, wife, mother, consumer, and commodity-spectacle. In 'Fever 103°', for example, the quasicinematic 'cutting' from one apparently self-generating image to another corresponds to a series of rhetorical masks assumed by the peaking subject, who remodels herself endlessly, sometimes in the image of masculine desire, sometimes in that of her own. Performance and intoxication seem to feed upon each other in a kind of erethism of images, plotting a transcendence parodically redefined as an erotic, indeed orgasmic event. The parody of spiritual purgation and transcendence evokes Baudelaire's poem 'Élévation', in which the poet counsels his spirit to 'Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere | To a higher plane, and purify yourself'.¹⁸ The speaker of 'Fever 103°' arrogates to herself both the disease and the cure, the foggy, splenetic resentment of the time-bound self and the virile aspiring spirit. As in 'Ariel', the shedding of layers of 'impure' selfhood is seen as an autoerotic process. Notwithstanding its powerful sexual charge, this self-delighting language is fuelled by a Nietzschean will to appearance. The speaker becomes, successively, a lover 'flickering' with the fever of desire, a starved ascetic or saint who is 'too pure' for lovers, and an exotic object d'art with a high market value ('My head a moon | Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin | Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive'). She oscillates between the positions of artist and artefact, consumer and commodity. Amongst the explicitly theatrical incarnations assumed are the fin-de-siècle figure of the dancer Isadora Duncan, and the Virgin Mary. These roles are explicitly assumed for an audience, for the lover/reader to whom the poem is addressed:

The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him,

Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)—
To paradise.

The culminating moment in which the 'I' asserts its transcendence is a revelation of pure kitsch—'I | Am a pure acetylene | Virgin'. The conceit yokes together the 'white heat' of industrial technology with the Madonna's halo, parodying the Marian iconography of submissiveness and meekness; this is a Virgin burning with the fiercely corrosive, precisely directed flame of a blowtorch. Hyperbole in Plath's work tends to align itself with kitsch, which Theodor Adorno calls 'a parody of catharsis'.¹⁹ In this case it is a cult image that has been mechanically reproduced, making it the very apotheosis of insincerity: the virgin Mary as prostitute.

The self as pure invention, as the libidinally charged 'flickering' play of images: what could be more postmodern than this? Yet to represent these disposable 'selves' as 'old whore petticoats', i.e. as prostitution, is to invoke an older, ethical language of modernity. In exploiting the creative possibilities of illusion and spectacle—in producing herself as an ensemble of images for an audience—the speaker risks colluding in her own cultural objectification. Her ironic pleasure in this process is revealed as intimately in league with commodity fetishism. In 'A Birthday Present', the power of endless self-transformation is attributed to the mysterious object of the title, which is feminized through recurrent images of veiling and unveiling. The mystical, even transcendent character of the birthday present recalls Marx's description of commodity fetishism.²⁰ It marks a shift towards a non-representational aesthetic; the status of 'nature' is no longer given, no longer rooted in a recognizable life-world, but uncanny. As Elizabeth Wright argues, the uncanny 'makes us see the world not as ready-made for description, depiction or portrayal (common terms used to say what an artist or writer does), but as in a constant process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction'.²¹ This uncanny world, where nature threatens to do a disappearing act, is also the world of commodity culture, which thrives on images which endlessly veil and defer the truth.

Yet the seductive variety of the birthday present conceals a relentless logic of abstract equivalence, the logic of the 'adding machine', which erases all distinctive attributes of self and world.

Walter Benjamin's essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', famously argues that photographic technology transforms the mode of reception of art, abolishing what he calls the aura of the artefact, the cultic distance between the artefact and its viewer.²² In Plath's later poetry the pathos of lyric subjectivity is constantly undercut by the reproduced image. The element of compulsive visualization, the piling up of images with what Calvin Bedient calls an 'optic desperation', cannot be understood in terms of print culture alone.²³ These images have a hallucinatory vividness inseparable from a culture saturated and erotically charged with simulacra. In 'Fever 103°' the lines 'Greasing the bodies of adulterers | Like Hiroshima ash and eating in. | The sin. The sin' allude to a scene in Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1961). Exotic and brilliantly coloured plants and flowers, including spotted orchids, camellias ('Fever 103°' ), tiger lilies ('The Night Dances' ), and sea anemones ('Lesbos' ) form a décor, a Decadent iconography drawn from the collective imaginary of the mass media. The phantasmagoria of Ariel implies an ambiguous interdependence between aesthetic appearance and commodity fetishism.

Movie Nightmares

What I have called the 'phantasmagoria' of Plath's poems is, in part, an effect of her ironic exploitation of the 'sensationalist' or 'subliterary' resources of the Gothic mode. M. L. Rosenthal complains that poems such as 'Stopped Dead', 'The Tour', 'Eavesdropper', and 'A Secret', 'are hard to penetrate in their morbid secretiveness', 'make a weirdly incantatory black magic against unspecified persons and situations', and 'often seem to call for biographical rather than poetical explanations'.²⁴ These 'weird' scenarios recycle key motifs of Gothic popular culture, drawing on cinematic as well as literary texts, to probe the nightmarish underside of the Cold War suburban dream of normality. Their satirical target, like that of many contemporary thrillers and horror films, is the stifling family-centred and ethnocentric conformity of the 1950s small-town idyll. Frederic Jameson points out that 'Gothics are … ultimately a class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised: your privileges seal you off from other people, but by the same token they constitute a protective wall through which you cannot see, and behind which therefore all kinds of envious forces may be imagined in the process of assembling, plotting, preparing to give assault; it is, if you like, the shower-curtain syndrome (alluding to Psycho) '.²⁵

The cross-cutting of images in Plath's later poems generates a series of quasi-cinematic narrative moments. In 'Berck-Plage', 'A green pool opens its eye, | Sick with what it has swallowed—| Limbs, images, shrieks.' Another horror-film moment occurs in 'A Birthday Present' when a dismembered body turns up in the innocuous guise of a birthday present: 'Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.' Old love letters are described as 'unroll(ing) | Sands where a dream of clear water | Grinned like a getaway car' ('Burning the Letters' ). In 'Stopped Dead', the speaker addresses a murderous male companion, 'out cold' beside her in a car 'hung out over the dead drop' of a cliffside. The 'Eavesdropper' peers through windows, harbouring murderous designs on her neighbours, in a malicious parody of the suburban ethos of good-neighbourliness which recalls Hitchcock's Rear Window (1953).

The paradigmatic Gothic film scenario converts the threatened murder or victimization of a woman into fetishistic spectacle. Many of Plath's poems work ironic variations and reversals on this theme. 'Stopped Dead', for example, echoes the plot of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), where the young suburban heroine, Charlie, finds out that her beloved and long-lost uncle, newly arrived in 'our town', is the murderer of wealthy widows. 'Who do you think I am, | Uncle, uncle? Sad Hamlet, with a knife? | Where do you stash your life?' asks the poem's speaker. In Shadow of a Doubt, Uncle Charlie is indeed a 'sad Hamlet, with a knife', who at one point makes a speech railing against the corruption of women which has turned the world into a 'foul sty', 'a filthy, rotting place'. By threatening to expose his criminal identity ('I know a secret about you, Uncle Charlie'), the heroine uncovers his psychic weak spot, the paranoid instability that underlies his violence towards women.²⁶

'The Detective' draws upon the conventions of the detective story or film, in which a purely instrumental, masculine rationality typically applies itself to that most Poe-like and Hitchcock-like of themes, the murder of a woman. In its drive to construct an intelligible narrative, a 'case', the detective story must annihilate the materiality of the body. The woman's mouth, breasts, children, and finally 'the brown motherly furrows, the whole estate' undergo a 'vaporization'; Holmes and Watson 'walk on air'. In 'The Courage of Shutting-Up', the figure of the artistic-scientific male expert is replaced by that of the tattooist, representative of the 'primitive' aesthetic rituals of popular culture: 'A great surgeon, now a tattooist, | Tattooing over and over the same blue grievances, | The snakes, the babies, the tits | On mermaids and two-legged dreamgirls'.

For Plath, the world of 'two-legged dreamgirls' is the suburban ideal home, occupied by the perfect couple, where the sanitizing language of ladies' magazines reigns. In the surreal marital drama of 'A Secret' a 'dwarf baby' is discovered imprisoned in the bureau drawer where the 'lingerie' should be. The emergence of this monster unleashes a disgusting female sexuality: 'It smells of salt cod, you had better | Stab a few cloves in an apple, | Make a sachet or | Do away with the bastard'. In 'The Tour', the Ladies' Home Journal world of domesticity, women's work, and women's talk is satirized by the baleful mimicry of a witch-like persona who conjures madness in the familiar. The 'maiden aunt', who is shown round the speaker's house, becomes the victim of a gleeful circus sideshow of horror. This cartoon Gothic uses the nursery-rhyme rhythms and italicized verbal gestures of children's books:²⁷

O I shouldn't put my finger in that
Auntie, it might bite!
That's my frost box, no cat,
Though it looks like a cat, with its fluffy stuff, pure white.
You should see the objects it makes!
Millions of needly glass cakes!

Fine for the migraine and bellyache. And this
Is where I kept the furnace,
Each coal a hot-cross stitch—a lovely light!
It simply exploded one night,
It went up in smoke.
And that's why I have no hair, auntie, that's why I choke
Off and on, as if I just had to retch.

The exploding oven and the refrigerator which hovers between wild animal and domestic 'appliance' mock a suburban cult of normality underpinned by a paranoid fantasy of absolute instrumental control over nature. As in 'Kindness', there is a bitter confrontation between an older woman cast as the guardian of convention, and a younger, resentful, initiate into domesticity. The satirical malice directed against the female culture of domesticity and housework gains its edge from Plath's own powerful and disillusioned investments in this very culture.

In 'Eavesdropper' the parodic target is the suburban ethos of good-neighbourliness, a world of spying and prying doppelgängers. In this Browningesque monologue, a tour de force of extreme solipsism and paranoia, the speaker arrogates to herself witch-like powers, such as the ability to kill her neighbours through sympathetic magic. The dystopian setting of 'Eavesdropper' is 'a desert of cow people | Trundling their udders home | To the electric milker, the wifey, the big blue eye | That watches, like God, or the sky | The ciphers that watch it'. In this bizarrely involuted and flattened vision, people become automata, 'cyphers' that can be permutated with the animals they farm and the machines they operate, under the surveillance of an all-seeing 'big blue eye'. The 'schizophrenic' perspective of these poems produces a quasi-Brechtian alienation effect, confronting the reader with a world locked into the frozen grimace of cliché.

Writing from the Heart: True Confessions

One of the most distinctive features of Plath's later poetry is the predominance of the first person singular, the strongly inflected 'I', which has often led critics to see her as a 'Confessional' poet. The 'Confessional' view of Plath groups her with Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman as part of a movement towards a poetics of disclosure. It takes its cue from Plath's remark in a 1962 interview with Peter Orr that she had been 'excited' by Lowell's Life Studies (1959), with its 'intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal emotional experience'.²⁸ The 'Confessional' thesis configures the diverse careers of these poets around a shared moment of revolt against the New Critical orthodoxies (especially the doctrine of poetic impersonality) in which they had been schooled. The term 'Confessional' itself was first used in 1959 by M. L. Rosenthal, in a review of Lowell's Life Studies.²⁹ In The New Poets (1967), he expanded the review into a general thesis about contemporary poetry: 'the private life of the poet himself, especially under stress of psychological crisis, becomes a major theme. Often it is felt at the same time as a symbolic embodiment of national and cultural crisis.'³⁰ In Life Studies, Lowell had broken New Critical taboos by reconstructing details of his family history within a loosely psycho-historical interpretive framework. Rosenthal assumed, as did Al Alvarez, that the consequences of modernization—consumer society, mass culture, technology, and global warfare—were implacable enemies of poetic subjectivity, squeezing it into a corner where only subjective neurosis could prove the poet's autonomy: 'The intensity and purity of a realization are the measure of poetic sense and success. Thus the alienated sensibility reclaims the world on its own terms.'³¹ To hear himself speak, the poet must purify his insights, filtering out the noise of the mass media and the clash of social idioms. Yet the notion of a 'Confessional' style is, of course, inconceivable without the culture of True Confessions, of journalistic scandal and popularized Freudianism. While reacting against the New Critical distinction between the 'speaker' or 'persona' and the poet as biographical individual, between public and private, the earliest theorists of confessional poetry reinstated at another level the New Criticism's founding hierarchical oppositions between subjective value and society, inner authenticity and external facticity.³²

Recent restatements of the 'Confessional' thesis have continued to align it, as Rosenthal and Alvarez had done, with the earlier Romantic-Symbolist conception of the poète maudit, and to organize it around the exemplary case of Robert Lowell. Paul Breslin sees Plath's poetry as bent on the self-destructive pursuit of absolute authenticity, yet at the same time finds her guilty of rhetorical manipulation and sensationalism, of 'teasing the reader with half-veiled revelations' instead of transmuting autobiography into myth; her poetry constitutes 'a damning indictment of the whole confessional project'.³³ Jeffrey Meyers sees Lowell and his contemporaries in heroic-masculine terms as a Nietzschean cursed generation, cultivating extremities of experience and aggressively competing with each other in the art of madness.³⁴ The complex negotiations of gender, literary tradition, contemporaneity, and popular culture at work in the trope of 'confession' have therefore remained largely unexamined.

Amongst Plath's papers at Smith College is a typescript about her participation in a contest to write a 'true confession', which I quote below:

friday I got an idear. I am now in the midst of writing the biggest true Confession I have ever written, all for the remote possibility of gaignigh (that word the lady said is gaining, as in weight) filthy lucer. a contest in True Story is in the offing, with all sorts of Big Money prizes. being a most mercenary individual, because money can buy trips to europe, theaters, chop-houses, and other Ill Famed what-nots, I am trying out for it. all you have to do, the blurb ways is write the story of your life or somebody else's life from the heart. and a sexy old heart it is. grammar and spelling mistakes won't count in the judging, says the rules, only it must be written in english, and not on onion skin paper or in pencil … anyhow, sylvia just finished the roughdraft of a whopping True Confession of over 40 (you can count them) pages, trying to capture the style, and let me tell you, my supercilious attitude about the people who write Confessions has diminished. it takes a good tight plot and a slick ease that are not picked up overnight like a cheap whore, so tomorrow, I rewrite the monstrosity I have just illegitimately (everything gets done amid great conflict) delivered.³⁵

This confession about writing a 'true Confession' generates two versions of the authorial subject: a 'good girl' and a 'bad girl'. Whereas the former sees writing as an end in itself, the latter is a 'mercenary individual' who writes for motives of 'filthy lucer'. Popular culture is explicitly feminized; to write true confessions 'from the heart' is to become a gross body addicted to the fleshly pleasures of consumption ('that word the lady said is gaining, as in weight'). Even the mass of typographical and/or spelling errors seems to ventriloquize the sloppy, dissolute identity of 'sylvia' the trash writer, who is denied the dignity of a capital letter, and whose narrative is reduced to the abstract exchange value of 'over 40 pages'. Most importantly, writing for mass consumption is seen as prostitution, which at the end of the passage gives rise to a monstrous and illegitimate birth. Yet it is also an important avenue to professional success and financial security; although it invalidates the writer's aesthetic pretensions, it gives her a certain amount of economic muscle in the literary market-place. The metaphor of prostitution marks Plath's ambivalence towards popular culture and her investment in High Modernist rituals of impersonality, which stressed the importance of transmuting the raw materials of personality into the perfection of art. As a 1956 letter to Aurelia Plath (LH 211) puts it: 'When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. The important thing is the aesthetic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and as necessary for me … as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.' Whereas mass culture is stigmatized by association with the debased tastes of the female consumer, literary culture becomes the site of a sacred authority.³⁶

The trope of self-revelation assumes a listener. In Plath's later poems, the positing of an authentic 'I' tends to slide into theatre, into what George Steiner calls a 'rhetoric of sincerity'.³⁷ The poet's unstable and ambiguous relationship to her audience is anticipated by Baudelaire, who famously accosts his reader in the introductory poem to Les Fleurs du mal as 'Hyprocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère'.³⁸ Plath echoes Baudelaire's line in 'Eavesdropper', where the voyeurism of the prying neighbour caricatures the 'confessional' complicity between poet and reader: 'Toad-stone! Sister-bitch! Sweet neighbour!'. Her later poems are often addressed to a named or unnamed interlocutor, a 'You' whose implied presence shapes the poem's narrative ('The Other', 'A Birthday Present', 'A Secret', 'The Applicant', 'Daddy', 'Medusa', 'Lesbos', 'Stopped Dead', 'Eavesdropper' ), and whose relation to the 'I' is defined by various modalities of antagonism, rejection, or disavowal. This register of demand inscribes the speaking subject as structurally incomplete, or 'jealous', dependent upon a loved/hated other: a lover, a father, a mother, a reader.

Michel Foucault's analysis of cultural history gives confession a central place as the discursive structure that has historically constituted the notion of a subject possessing interiority, deep feelings, and a personal history. The Christian apparatus of confession is seen as the catalyst for a proliferating discourse about sexuality which has the effect not of liberating but of policing identity, and especially sexual identity, within the dominant structures of the 'episteme'.³⁹ True Confessions popular culture can be seen in these terms as a Freudianized discourse of licensed transgression or scandal, centred on the spectacle of the pure/impure, redeemed/prostituted female body. In the era of Senator McCarthy's witch-hunts, the word 'confession' had, in addition, a powerful political resonance, linking insurgent, inadequate, or deviant sexuality with Communism. Another social apparatus of confession in the 1950s, of which Plath had intimate and traumatic knowledge, was, of course, institutional psychiatry, a technology for the 'cure' of psychic disorder.

Many of Plath's later poems are organized around tropes of institutional or bureaucratic violence which summon up a nightmare vision of a wholly organized and administered world. In these dystopian scenarios of confession, the 'I' alternates between the positions of confessor and penitent. Confession is linked with machines that literally inscribe the flesh with a text: 'The secret is stamped on you, | Faint, undulant watermark. | Will it show in the black detector?' ('A Secret' ); 'O adding machine—| Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole? | Must you stamp each piece in purple, | Must you kill what you can?' ('A Birthday Present' ). 'The Other' is made up of a sequence of surreal images of crime, detection, and interrogation, circulating between speaker and addressee, and undermining the distinction between them. In 'The Jailer', the speaker declares herself an 'Indeterminate criminal' who 'die[s] with variety—| Hung, starved, burned, hooked'. In 'The Applicant' she satirically assumes the voice of a corporate 'Big Brother' interviewing a candidate for admission to the organization. A grotesque assortment of anatomical substitutes and surgical prostheses become the qualifications required for 'marriage' to the corporation, recalling D. H. Lawrence's 'Editorial Office', in which an applicant for the post of literary critic is asked if he has been surgically sterilized.⁴⁰ The 'corporate' voice is crossed with the rhythms of the pop song and advertising jingle; a mannequinlike 'ideal woman' is presented to the applicant in a bitter echo of Cliff Richard's 1959 hit song 'Livin' Doll': 'A living doll, everywhere you look. | It can sew, it can cook, | It can talk, talk, talk.'⁴¹ The woman is a mechanical appliance which accrues exchange value like a market investment. At the same time she is a commodity-spectacle to be consumed, a fetishistic 'poultice' or anodyne for masculine lack: 'You have a hole, it's a poultice. | You have an eye, it's an image.' In this Kafkaesque world, the 'image' of a reified and sanitized femininity—of the mechanical woman—plays a crucial role in cementing the paranoid-bureaucratic relationship between applicant and organization. It serves as metaphor for a wider violence of which the applicant is victim as well as perpetrator.

'Lady Lazarus' and Literary History

Although Plath's 'confessional' tropes are often seen in terms of a Romantic parable of victimization, whether of the sensitive poetic individual crushed by a brutally rationalized society, or of feminist protest against a monolithic patriarchal oppressor, her self-reflexivity tends to turn confession into a parody gesture or a premiss for theatrical performance. The central instance of the 'confessional' in her writing is usually taken to be 'Lady Lazarus'. M. L. Rosenthal uses the poem to validate the generic category: 'Robert Lowell's 'Skunk Hour' and Sylvia Plath's 'Lady Lazarus' are true examples of 'confessional' poetry because they put the speaker himself at the centre of the poem in such a way as to make his psychological shame and vulnerability an embodiment of his civilization.'⁴² The confessional reading of the poem is usually underpinned by the recourse to biography, which correlates the speaker's cultivation of the 'art of dying' with Plath's suicidal career. Although Plath is indeed, at one level, mythologizing her personal history, the motif of suicide in 'Lady Lazarus' operates less as self-revelation than as a theatrical tour de force, a music-hall routine.

With 'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus' is probably the single text in the Plath canon which has attracted most disapproval on the grounds of a manipulative, sensationalist, or irresponsible style. Helen Vendler, for example, writes that 'Style (as something consistent) is meaningless, but styles (as dizzying provisional scepticism) are all … Poems like 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' are in one sense demonically intelligent, in their wanton play with concepts, myths and language, and in another, and more important, sense, not intelligent at all, in that they wilfully refuse, for the sake of a cacophony of styles (a tantrum of style), the steady, centripetal effect of thought. Instead, they display a wild dispersal, a centrifugal spin to further and further reaches of outrage.'⁴³ Here, the element of 'wilful' pastiche in 'Lady Lazarus' is measured against a normative ideal of aesthetic detachment. Yet the poem's ironic use of prostitution as the figure of a particular kind of theatricalized self-consciousness—of the poet as, in Plath's phrase, 'Roget's trollop, parading words and tossing off bravado for an audience' (JP 214)—calls for a reading which takes seriously what the poem does with, and to, literary history.

Like 'Lesbos', 'Lady Lazarus' is a dramatic monologue which echoes and parodies 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. The title alludes, of course, not only to the biblical story of Lazarus but also to Prufrock's lines: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead, | Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'. Like Eliot, Plath uses clothing as a metaphor for rhetoric: the 'veil' or 'garment' of style. By contrast with Eliot's tentative hesitations, obliquities, and evasions of direct statement, however, Plath's poem professes to 'tell all'. Lady Lazarus deploys a patently alienated and manufactured language, in which the shock tactic, the easy effect, reign supreme. Her rhetoric is one of direct statement ('I have done it again'), of brutal Americanisms ('trash', 'shoves', 'the big strip tease', 'I do it so it feels like hell', 'knocks me out'), of glib categorical assertions and dismissals ('Dying is an art, like everything else'), and blatant internal rhymes ('grave cave', 'turn and burn'). As Richard Blessing remarks, both 'Lady Lazarus' and 'The Applicant' are poems that parody advertising techniques while simultaneously advertising themselves.⁴⁴ The poet who reveals her suffering plays to an audience, or 'peanut-crunching crowd'; her miraculous rebirths are governed by the logic of the commodity. Prufrock is verbally overdressed but feels emotionally naked and exposed, representing himself as crucified before the gaze of the vulgar mass. Lady Lazarus, on the other hand, incarnates the 'holy prostitution of the soul' which Baudelaire found in the experience of being part of a crowd; emotional nakedness is itself revealed as a masquerade.⁴⁵ The 'strip-tease' artist is a parodic, feminized version of the symbolist poet sacrificed to an uncomprehending mass audience.⁴⁶ For Baudelaire, as Walter Benjamin argues, the prostitute serves as an allegory of the fate of aesthetic experience in modernity, of its 'prostitution' to mass culture. The prostitute deprives femininity of its aura, its religious and cultic presence; the woman's body becomes a commodity, made up of dead and petrified fragments, while her beauty becomes a matter of cosmetic disguise (make-up and fashion). Baudelaire's prostitute sells the appearance of femininity. But she also offers a degraded and hallucinated memory of fulfilment, an intoxicating or narcotic substitute for the idealized maternal body. For the melancholic, spleen-ridden psyche, which obsessively dwells on the broken pieces of the past, she is therefore a privileged object of meditation. She represents the loss of that blissful unity with nature and God which was traditionally anchored in a female figure.⁴⁷ Instead, Benjamin argues, the prostitute, like commodity fetishism, harnesses the 'sex-appeal of the inorganic', which binds the living body to the realm of death.⁴⁸

Lady Lazarus is an allegorical figure, constructed from past and present images of femininity, congealed fantasies projected upon the poem's surface. She is a pastiche of the numerous deathly or demonic women of poetic tradition, such as Poe's Ligeia, who dies and is gruesomely revivified through the corpse of another woman. Ligeia's function, which is to be a symbol, mediating between the poet and 'supernal beauty', can only be preserved by her death.⁴⁹ Similarly, in Mallarmé's prose poem 'Le Phénomène Futur', the 'Woman of the Past' is scientifically preserved and displayed at a circus sideshow by the poet.⁵⁰ For Plath, however, the woman on show, the 'female phenomenon' is a revelation of unnaturalness instead of sensuous nature, her body gruesomely refashioned into Nazi artefacts. Lady Lazarus yokes together the canonical post-Romantic, symbolist tradition which culminates in 'Prufrock', and the trash culture of True Confessions, through their common concern with the fantasizing and staging of the female body:

I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

The densely layered intertextual ironies at work in these lines plot the labyrinthine course of what Benjamin calls 'the sex appeal of the inorganic' through literary history. They echo Ariel's song in The Tempest, whose talismanic status in Plath's writing I have already noted. Plath regenders the image, substituting Lady Lazarus for the drowned corpse of the father/king. The metaphor of the seashell converts the female body into a hardened, dead, and inorganic object, but at the same time nostalgically recalls the maternal fecundity of the sea. The dead woman who suffers a sea change is adorned with phallic worms turned into pearls, the 'sticky', fetishistic sublimates of male desire. In Marvell's poem of seduction, 'To His Coy Mistress', the beloved is imagined as a decaying corpse: 'Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound | My echoing song: then worms shall try | That long-preserved virginity: | And your quaint honour turn to dust; | And into ashes all my lust.'⁵¹ In T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the refrain 'Those are pearls that were his eyes' is associated with the drowned Phoenician sailor, implicit victim of witch-like, neurotic, or soul-destroying female figures, such as Madame Sosostris and Cleopatra.⁵²

Lady Lazarus stages the spectacle of herself, assuming the familiar threefold guise of actress, prostitute, and mechanical woman. The myth of the eternally recurring feminine finds its fulfilment in the worship and 'martyrdom' of the film or pop star, a cult vehicle of male fantasy who induces mass hysteria and vampiric hunger for 'confessional' revelations.⁵³ Lady Lazarus reminds her audience that 'there is a charge, a very large charge | For a word or a touch | Or a bit of blood | Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.' It is as if Plath is using the Marilyn Monroe figure to travesty Poe's dictum in 'The Philosophy of Composition' (1846) that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world'.⁵⁴ The proliferation of intertextual ironies also affects the concluding transformation of 'Lady Lazarus' into the phoenix-like, man-eating demon, who rises 'out of the ash' with her 'red hair'. This echoes Coleridge's description of the possessed poet in 'Kubla Kahn': 'And all should cry Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!'⁵⁵ The woman's hair, a privileged fetish-object of male fantasy, becomes at once a badge of daemonic genius and a flag of vengeance. It is tempting to read these lines as a personal myth of rebirth, a triumphant Romantic emergence of what Lynda Bundtzen calls the female 'body of imagination'.⁵⁶ The myth of the transcendent-demonic phoenix seems to transcend the dualism of male-created images of women, wreaking revenge on 'Herr Doktor', 'Herr God', and 'Herr Lucifer', those allegorical emblems of an oppressive masculinity. Yet Lady Lazarus's culminating assertion of power—'I eat men like air'—undoes itself, through its suggestion of a mere conjuring trick. The attack on patriarchy is undercut by the illusionistic character of this apotheosis which purports to transform, at a stroke, a degraded and catastrophic reality. What the poem sarcastically 'confesses', through its collage of fragments of 'high' and 'low' culture, is a commodity status no longer veiled by the aura of the sacred. Lyric inwardness is 'prostituted' to the sensationalism of 'true confession'. The poet can no longer cherish the illusion of withdrawing into a pure, uncontaminated private space, whose immunity from larger historical conflicts is guaranteed by the 'auratic' woman. As I shall argue in the next chapter, for Plath the female body, far from serving as expiatory metaphor for the ravages of modernity, itself becomes a sign whose cultural meanings are in crisis.

Notes

See Laura Mulvey's pioneering essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, 16, 3 (Autumn 1975), 6-18. Mulvey later qualified her binary opposition between active male spectators and passive female objects of the gaze in 'Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"', in Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 29-37. See also Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London: Methuen, 1985), 27-34; Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988); Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988); and Laura Mulvey, 'Some Thoughts on Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture', October, 65 (Summer 1993), 3-20.
Alicia Ostriker, '"Fact" as Style: The Americanization of Sylvia', Language and Style, 1, 3 (Summer 1968), 201-11. See also Stanley Plumly, 'What Ceremony of Words', in Alexander (ed.), Ariel Ascending, 13-25.
Paul de Man, 'Literary History and Literary Modernity', in Blindness and Insight, 142-65.
David Shapiro, 'Sylvia Plath: Drama and Melodrama', in Lane (ed.), Sylvia Plath, 45-53; Hugh Kenner, 'Sincerity Kills', in Lane (ed.), Sylvia Plath, 33-44; Philip Hobsbaum, 'The Temptation of Giant Despair', Hudson Review, 25 (Winter 1972-3), 612.
Arthur K. Oberg, 'Sylvia Plath and the New Decadence', in Edward Butscher (ed.), Sylvia Plath (London: Peter Owen, 1979), 177-85.
Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991), 8.
The contributors to Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (eds.), Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Free Press, 1957), included Ortega y Gasset, Dwight Macdonald, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe, Theodor Adorno, and Marshall McLuhan.
Clement Greenberg, 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch', in Rosenberg and White (eds.), Mass Culture, 98-107; Dwight MacDonald, 'A Theory of Mass Culture', ibid. 59-73; Theodor Adorno, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception' (1944), in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), 120-67.
Jed Rasula, 'Nietzsche in the Nursery: Naïve Classics and Surrogate Parents in Postwar American Cultural Debates', Representations, 29 (Winter 1990), 51. See also Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 42-64.
Frederic Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', New Left Review, 146 (1984), 65.
Jameson, 'Postmodernism', 54.
Jameson's view of the 'critical' vocation of modernism is indebted to Theodor Adorno's notion of a modernist 'dissonance' which 'negates' or criticizes reified social relations. See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
Terry Eagleton, 'Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism', in Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (London: Verso, 1986), 143.
Andreas Huyssen, 'Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other', in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1988), 45.
Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 46.
See Craig Owens, 'The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism', in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 57-82; Linda Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990); Margaret Ferguson and Jennifer Wicke (eds.), Feminism and Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).
Rita Felski, 'The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch', PMLA 106, 5 (1991), 1094-105.
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, trans. Richard Howard (London: Picador Classics, 1987), 14.
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 340.
Karl Marx, 'The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof', in Karl Marx: A Reader, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 63-75.
Elizabeth Wright, 'The Uncanny and Surrealism', in Peter Collier and Judy Davies (eds.), Modernism and the European Unconscious (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 265.
Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), 211-44.
Calvin Bedient, 'Sylvia Plath, Romantic', in Lane (ed.), Sylvia Plath, 10.
M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 88.
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 289.
Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943), cited by Tanya Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988), 108.
See, in particular, Ted Hughes's Meet My Folks! (London: Faber and Faber, 1961).
Sylvia Plath, 'Interview' (30 Oct. 1962), in Peter Orr (ed.), The Poet Speaks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 167-8. The interview notes the influence not only of Lowell's Life Studies, but also of Anne Sexton, with whom Plath had attended Lowell's poetry seminar in Boston in 1958. On the impact of Sexton's poems on Ariel, see Heather Cam, '"Daddy": Sylvia Plath's Debt to Anne Sexton', American Literature, 59, 3 (1987), 29-31, and Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell (New York: Random House, 1982), 183.
M. L. Rosenthal, 'Poetry as Confession', Nation, 190 (1959), 154-5.
Rosenthal, The New Poets, 15. Al Alvarez's preferred term was 'Extremist Poetry'. See Alvarez, 'Beyond all This Fiddle' (1967), in Beyond All This Fiddle: Essays 1955-1967 (London: Allen Lane, 1968), 3-21.
Rosenthal, The New Poets, 17. See also Al Alvarez, 'The Fate of the Platypus' (1958), in Beyond All This Fiddle, 59-66, and A. R. Jones, 'Necessity and Freedom: The Poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton', Critical Quarterly, 7 (Spring 1965), 11-30.
See Walter Kalaidjan, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
Paul Breslin, The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 97, 99. For another attack on Plath as exemplar of the worst excesses of 'Confessional' poetics, see Hobsbaum, 'The Temptation'.
Jeffrey Meyers, Manic Power: Robert Lowell and his Circle (London: Macmillan, 1987).
Sylvia Plath, 'Typescript on writing a true confession', Unpublished Journals, 5 Apr. 1953, Smith. Typographical and spelling errors are transcribed.
Compare Cleanth Brooks's reference to 'the young lady who confesses to raptures over her confessions magazine' in The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: The Cornwell Press, 1947), 233.
George Steiner, 'Dying is an Art', in Newman (ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, 212. Emphasis added.
Charles Baudelaire, The Complete Verse (London: Anvil Press, 1968), i. 54.
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, i, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). See also Jeremy Tambling, Confession: Sexuality, Sin and the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).
D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 582.
The song, whose chorus-line is, 'Got myself a walking, talking living doll', was at number 1 in the British hit parade for four weeks, 1-29 Aug. 1959. See Paul Flattery, The Illustrated History of Pop (London: New English Library, 1973), 129.
Rosenthal, The New Poets, 82.
Helen Vendler, 'An Intractable Metal', in Alexander (ed.), Ariel Ascending,ii. See also Breslin, The Psycho-Political Muse, 108-9.
Richard Allen Blessing, 'The Shape of the Psyche: Vision and Technique in the Late Poems of Sylvia Plath', in Lane (ed.), Sylvia Plath, 68.
Charles Baudelaire, 'Les Foules' (1861), in The Poems in Prose, trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press, 1989), 59.
References to prostitution are more explicit in the drafts of the poem. Draft 1, p. 2, includes the lines: 'Yessir, yessir | Though the doctors say its rare | Each time I rise, I rise a bloody virgin'. Alternatives given for the deleted phrase 'bloody virgin' are 'blooming virgin' and 'sweet whore'. Draft 1, p. 4, includes the lines: 'And there is a charge, a very large charge | For a night in my bed'. Ariel Poems MSS, 23-9 Oct. 1962, Smith.
See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1973), 56, 166, 171-2, and 'Central Park', trans. Lloyd Spencer, New German Critique, 34 (Winter 1985), 1-27.
Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 166. On Benjamin's use of the prostitute figure, see Angelika Rauch 'The Trauerspiel of the Prostituted Body, or Woman as Allegory of Modernity', Cultural Critique, 10 (Fall 1988), 77-88; Christine Buci-Glucksmann, 'Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern', in Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (eds.), The Making of the Modern Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 220-9; and Susan Buck-Morss, 'The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering', New German Critique, 39 (Fall 1986), 99-140.
Edgar Allan Poe, 'Ligeia' (1838), in Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London: Dent, 1908), 155-69.
Stéphane Mallarmé, Mallarmé's Prose Poems: A Critical Study, trans. and ed. Robert Greer Cohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 23-9.
Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), 51.
Eliot, Collected Poems, 63-79.
Marilyn Monroe's death on 5 Aug. 1962 antedates the composition of 'Lady Lazarus' (23-9 Oct. 1962). 'Lesbos' (18 Oct.) also contains allusions to the star system: 'In New York, in Hollywood, the men said, 'Through? | Gee baby, you are rare.' | You acted, acted, acted for the thrill.'
Edgar Allan Poe, Poems and Essays (London: Dent, 1927), 170.
S. T. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 103-4.
Lynda K. Bundtzen, Plath's Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 43.

Bibliography

1. Primary Sources

(A) MANUSCRIPTS

Sylvia Plath, 'Typescript on writing a True Confession', Unpublished Journals, 5 Apr. 1953.

2. Secondary Sources

Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory (1970), trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).

——and Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. John Cumming (1972) (London: Verso, 1979).

Alexander, Paul (ed.), Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).

——Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991).

Alvarez, A., Beyond All this Fiddle: Essays 1955-1967 (London: Allen Lane, 1968).

Baudelaire, Charles, The Complete Verse, 2 vols., trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press, 1986).

——Les Fleurs du mal (1857), trans. Richard Howard (London: Picador Classics, 1987).

——'Les Foules' (1861), The Poems in Prose, trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press, 1989).

Bedient, Calvin, 'Sylvia Plath, Romantic', in Lane (ed.), Sylvia Plath, 3-18.

Benjamin, Walter, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations (1955), trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), 211-44.

——Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973).

——'Central Park', trans. Lloyd Spencer, New German Critique, 34 (Winter 1985), 1-27.

Blessing, Richard Allen, 'The Shape of the Psyche: Vision and Technique in the Late Poems of Sylvia Plath', in Lane (ed.), Sylvia Plath, 57-73.

Bowlby, Rachel, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London: Methuen, 1985).

Breslin, Paul, The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Brooks, Cleanth, The Well Wrought Urn (New York: The Cornwall Press, 1947).

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 'Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern', in Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (eds.), The Making of the Modern Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 220-9.

Buck-Morss, Susan, 'The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering', New German Critique, 39 (Fall 1986), 99-140.

Bundtzen, Lynda K., Plath's Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983).

Butscher, Edward (ed.), Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (London: Peter Owen, 1979).

Cam, Heather, '"Daddy": Sylvia Plath's Debt to Anne Sexton', American Literature, 59, 3 (October 1987), 29-31.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Collier, Peter, and Davies, Judy, (eds.), Modernism and the European Unconscious (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).

Eagleton, Terry, 'Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism', in Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (London: Verso, 1986), 131-47.

Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1936).

Felski, Rita, 'The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch', PMLA 106, 5 (1991), 1094-1105.

Ferguson, Margaret, and Wicke, Jennifer (eds.), Feminism and Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).

Flattery, Paul, The Illustrated History of Pop (London: New English Library, 1973).

Foster, Hal (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985).

Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), i.

Greenberg, Clement, 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' (1946), in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (eds.), Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Free Press, 1957), 107-20.

Hamilton, Ian, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982).

Hobsbaum, Philip, 'The Temptation of Giant Despair', Hudson Review, 25 (Winter 1972-3), 597-612.

Hughes, Ted, Meet My Folks! (London: Faber and Faber, 1961).

Huyssen, Andreas, 'Woman as Mass Culture: Modernism's Other', in Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 44-62.

Jameson, Frederic, 'Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', New Left Review, 146 (July-Aug. 1984), 53-92.

——Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991).

Jones, A. R., 'Necessity and Freedom: The Poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton', Critical Quarterly, 7 (Spring 1965), 11-30.

Kalaidjan, Walter, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

Kenner, Hugh, 'Sincerity Kills', in Lane (ed.), Sylvia Plath, 33-44.

Lane, Gary (ed.), Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Lawrence, D. H., The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1964).

MacDonald, Dwight, 'A Theory of Mass Culture', in Rosenberg (ed.), Mass Culture, 59-73.

Mallarmé, Stéphane, Mallarmé's Prose Poems: A Critical Study, trans. and ed. Robert Greer Cohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

De Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1983).

——'Literary History and Literary Modernity', in Blindness and Insight, 142-65.

Marvell, Andrew, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972; rpt. 1985).

Marx, Karl, 'The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof', in Karl Marx: A Reader, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 63-75.

Meyers, Jeffrey, Manic Power: Robert Lowell and his Circle (London: Macmillan, 1987).

Modleski, Tanya, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988).

Mulvey, Laura, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, 16, 3 (Autumn 1975), 6-18.

——'Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"' (1981), in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 29-37.

Newman, Charles (ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1970).

Nicholson, Linda (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990).

Oberg, Arthur, 'Sylvia Plath and the New Decadence', Chicago Review, 20, 1 (1968), 66-73. Rpt. in Butscher (ed.), Sylvia Plath, 177-85.

Orr, Peter (ed.), The Poet Speaks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

Ostriker, Alicia, '"Fact" as Style: The Americanization of Sylvia', Language and Style, 1 (Summer 1968), 201-12. Rpt. as 'The Americanization of Sylvia', in Wagner (ed.), Critical Essays, 97-109.

Owens, Craig, 'The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism', in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 57-82.

Plumly, Stanley, 'What Ceremony of Words', in Alexander (ed.), Ariel Ascending, 13-25.

Poe, Edgar Allan, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London: Dent, 1908; rpt. 1981).

——'The Philosophy of Composition', in Poems and Essays (London: Dent, 1927; rpt. 1987), 163-77.

Pollock, Griselda, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988).

Rasula, Jed, 'Nietzsche in the Nursery: Naïve Classics and Surrogate Parents in Postwar American Cultural Debates', Representations, 29 (Winter 1990), 50-77.

Rose, Jacqueline, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991).

Rosenberg, Bernard, and White, David Manning (eds.), Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Free Press, 1957).

Rosenthal, M. L., 'Poetry as Confession', Nation, 190 (1959), 154-5.

——The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

Ross, Andrew, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989).

Shapiro, David, 'Sylvia Plath: Drama and Melodrama', in Lane (ed.), Sylvia Plath, 45-53.

Silverman, Kaja, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988).

Steiner, George, 'Dying is an Art' (1965), in Newman (ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, 211-18.

Tambling, Jeremy, Confession: Sexuality, Sin and the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).

Vendler, Helen, 'An Intractable Metal', New Yorker, 57 (15 Feb. 1982), 124-38. Rpt. in Alexander (ed.), Ariel Ascending, 1-12.

Wagner, Linda (Wagner-Martin) (ed.), Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984).

Wright, Elizabeth, 'The Uncanny and Surrealism', in Collier and Davies (eds.), Modernism and the European Unconscious, 265-82.