by Alana Massey
Young girls are smarter than they’re given credit for, and more resilient, too. They like what they like for good reason. They seek to build kingdoms out of their favorite people and things, and there is a certain subset of girls, even today, who have made Sylvia their icon-elect. The reputation of young girls for “wearing their hearts on their sleeves” is one that is discussed more often as unwittingly sharing too much information, rather than framing them as active agents making decisions on how best to publicly express themselves. Public derision is directed at girls wearing T-shirts of boy bands or one half of a best-friend-necklace pairing because we assume that such unsubtle devotion is the result of juvenile obliviousness, rather than bold and certain admiration. There is intention behind both the words and the images these girls share in their modes of self-expression, intention that we overlook at the peril of our own understanding of how affections operate throughout a lifetime.
At the convergence of adolescent admiration for Sylvia and the penchant to wear one’s interests in literal and visible ways is a massive selection of Sylvia paraphernalia available for purchase online. I discovered this treasure trove by accident when looking for a canvas bag with a quote from Joan Didion on the online crafting marketplace Etsy. I found the bag in an online shop that featured loads of items inspired by Sylvia Plath’s words and face. I conducted a search for her name that rendered 399 results. In contrast, “Joan Didion” presented a single page of 11 crafts dedicated to the author. A search for Flannery O’Connor and all of her haunted glory netted 35 results. The closest iconic twentieth-century author I could search, Toni Morrison, trailed with 58 items.
The clothes featuring Sylvia’s image and words vary wildly in cost and quality, but they are a collection so diverse in color, design, and selected imagery and text that one could wear nothing but Sylvia-related garments for weeks before anyone detected the pattern. In my initial search in the late fall of 2015, I discovered a pair of flats featuring her portrait, some poetry, and an image of her tombstone.1 And then there are the necklaces. Oh praise God, the necklaces! There are brass lockets on long chains and short typed quotes in literary serif fonts protected by a layer of glass, and there are small portraits of Sylvia in the style of a cameo. I imagine these pieces strewn across young necks throughout the world, standalone best-friend necklaces for the kind of girl who prefers the company of ghosts.
Beyond clothing and accessories, one could build a whole aesthetic around Sylvia trinkets, and I’m sure there are girls who have. Their bodies and pencil cases are transformed to shrines for the poet whose words helped them exhale at last what it meant to feel in the world as a girl. There is even a criminally unrepresentative doll meant to be Sylvia.2 It would be nice to believe that the women who make and purchase these devotional items are simply unaware of the disdain Sylvia has incurred from the literary establishment, but as a mere matter of probability, I have my doubts that they are.
“Sylvia Plath’s remarkable position today is only partly due to the brilliance of her writing” is as dull a way to start a book as it is an obvious one, but it is how Marianne Egeland begins Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure. Of course a beautiful, brilliant, mentally tortured, and dead young woman is going to be made something more special in the public imagination than a plain and neurotypical one who succumbs to heart failure in old age. Though Egeland admits in her final chapter that this mythology is more about how Sylvia has been used than how she herself lived or created, the narration at times makes Sylvia’s actions appear as if they were intended to be the spark to light some greater movement. “Killing herself in the same year that The Feminine Mystique (1963) was published by Betty Friedan, and leaving behind two small children and a manuscript of outstanding poems, Plath seemed to confirm romantic notions about the poet and to demonstrate the difficulties women artists had of surviving in a man’s world,” she writes.3 In other words, it was stunt marketing by asphyxiation.
In the New York Review of Books, Terry Castle goes so far as to blame Sylvia for the suicide of her son Nicholas in Alaska forty-six years after her own death. The facts that Alaska has the second-highest rate of suicide of any US state and that mental illness is widely accepted as genetic were immaterial, apparently, in the face of an opportunity to use the turn of phrase “Lady Lazarus caught up with him at last.” It is clever and spooky indeed, but it is hardly fair. That Castle uses the same piece to accuse Sylvia of making “a sensation still (sometimes) among bulimic female undergraduates” is but one of the scores of dismissals of life-threatening illness among young women as frivolous lifestyle habits.4
I was such an undergraduate, unknowingly worshipping at the altar of Sylvia before I formed the bridge in my mind from her work to her face and legacy. I regret not having been one of her apostles as a girl, but I am glad to have found her when I did: in my late twenties and on a mission of almost evangelical zeal to make the emotions of young women not just visible in the literary world but to make them essential components of it. Sylvia’s work had lingered in my periphery as it did for many girls who had not been assigned The Bell Jar in school but who managed to find her image sprinkled across the sadder corner of the women’s Internet.
I began frequenting anorexia and bulimia blogs in the late 1990s in the hopes of catching one of the few diseases that people actively covet. In an age before ubiquitous digital photography, these online shrines to eating disorders were home to meticulously curated collections of images scanned from magazines alongside quotes that ennobled the disease with a sense of almost divine purpose. A quote from Sylvia’s poem “In Plaster” made frequent appearances. “She doesn’t need food, she is one of the real saints,” it read, ripped brutally from its context in a poem about battling a personified disorder but ultimately starving the sickness to its own death. One of the most famous images of Sylvia served as the avatar for many users of the blogging platform LiveJournal, which I followed in the early 2000s, along with images of Twiggy and Brigitte Bardot.
I am glad that I found Sylvia by accidentally falling down a hole of her words alone, unstrangled by their troubling literary legacy. I was searching for a clever turn of phrase I knew was hers to quote to a man when I was twenty-nine years old. I didn’t know if it came from a novel or from her diaries, so I was looking up her quotes on the website Goodreads. The site is a helpful cheat sheet for those of us who appear to have read far more than we have; it features book reviews, quotes, and synopses of books and also serves as an odd consortium of legitimate bibliophiles and bizarrely resentful readers alike. Somehow I missed The Bell Jar in my formal education but saw it on enough bookshelves at friends’ homes to intuit that it was something I needed to eventually find time for on an extracurricular basis.
But where even prolific authors sometimes have a dozen or so web pages filled with quotes, Sylvia had over thirty. This would be unremarkable but for the fact that she wrote only one novel and a handful of poetry collections. This is a function of the site’s more democratic tools: Users can submit quotes and vote on them so that they are arranged in order of their popularity. Just as her Etsy story confirmed, for a sad woman dead quite young, she had certainly made an impression. With more than ten thousand votes, the quote at the very top had nearly double the votes of those of the two runners-up that dwindled in the range of five thousand or so. It read:
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
I found myself unmoved by the sentiment and reluctantly disappointed in the readers who had flocked to the site to vote it into the top spot. I had such high hopes for these devoted girls. Sure, I, too, have been frustrated by my own finitude at times. I have mourned the doctor and the movie star and the teenage witch I never became. I can’t speak any
foreign languages as well as I’d like to, nor can I juggle or play the piano. But when it comes to living and feeling all the shades of life, I have had quite enough of the ups and downs of mood and tone and would be perfectly content for dull tranquility to replace the sound and speed of chaos. Sylvia and I were off on the wrong foot.
Holding the honor of second place was the quote “If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” This had always been something of a personal motto, and so I felt back on track to liking this woman the girls couldn’t stop talking about. In third was “Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.” This was the kind of thing I wished I had said to a man when I was much younger, had I been in possession of some shred of that conversational boldness. I developed a literary tongue only after such darling proclamations would have long been inappropriate. I immediately bought a necklace bearing the quote from a store on Etsy. I have never worn it, but I have photographed it lying in my palm on more than one occasion.
I finally found the retort I was looking for on the fifth page of quotes. It read “No day is safe from news of you,” and it comes from Plath’s poem “The Rival.” I planned to use it in the event of receiving a text message from a man I’d been dating for five months who had disappeared unceremoniously on Christmas Eve, despite prior plans and his knowing that I would spend my favorite holiday alone were he to cancel. The line was meant to be a clever way of saying that I had been following his social media accounts, knowing full well that despite the existence of the term “ghosting” that we now have for abandoning romantic interests without a word, he was, quite unfortunately, not at all dead. I didn’t use it on him when he reemerged, but I was grateful for having made the excursion to the pages and pages of Sylvia quotes. Further excavation brought me a wealth of gems about love and loss and death. They have all the wit of Dorothy Parker and the devastating brutality of Virginia Woolf. Yet somewhere along the line, the literary establishment lost sight of the genius because they saw it as too wrapped up in girlishness, a niche interest that half the world endures.
I fell in love with Sylvia in that scroll of disjointed quotes and fell with an enthusiasm I had not felt since college when I discovered the especially unforgiving love songs of the Magnetic Fields and the renewed rage of a mid-career Fiona Apple. Sylvia’s words were reflections on love and doubt and suffering and the brutal nexus where they all come together in a tender corner of the human heart (“You are a dream; I hope I never meet you”). But they were also nonsense and melodrama without their contexts (“I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets”). I went through page after page until the quotes came to an end, and throughout my read, I tried to put together The Bell Jar in something like order only to realize it is a chronicle of disorder. When their origins weren’t labeled, I wondered which quotes came from her poetry and which from her diaries, trying to detect either her bright-eyed teen years or the shadow-stricken days that drew her toward the light at the back of the oven. I wondered if ovens had lights in the back in 1963.
Her words made me want to see her face, but there was only one image that dominated the Google image search: Plath in a half-grinning portrait in which she seems confidently unimpressed. Her hair hangs just below her shoulders and is pinned on the left side of her head. She’s wearing a cardigan of some sort. She looks like she’s in possession of either a brand-new secret or a very old one, and it’s how I’ve seen many women writers look at readings when they’ve been asked asinine questions by men. But knowing this image well, I searched for more images. I turned to Tumblr, where enterprising young people have reliably excavated archives of lesser-known pictures to bring texture and time to the lives of those who are long dead. These young curators did not disappoint.
I found her unflattering school portrait, better left to the dustbin for such a beauty. I found her wearing a white pillbox hat as she gazes at her interview subject, Elizabeth Bowen, during an assignment for Mademoiselle. There was an image of her lying on the beach with her eyes closed, bronzed and grinning in a strapless white swimsuit. It seemed Plath was always wearing swimsuits, even in the absence of any evidence of nearby water. In another photo, she wears a modest two-piece swimsuit and holds a dandelion as if it were a pet, the note reading that this was taken in 1954, during her “platinum summer.” In another, she wears a black halter top and takes a drink, of what I can only assume is an adult beverage. She appears as mostly an outline blur on the cover of The Colossus and Other Poems, bedecked in a scarf or cape of some kind, and she is a smile incarnate on the cover of her unabridged journals. For all the unruliness of her heart, she was certainly a compliant subject for photographers.
I write of these photographs as if I found them in rapid, orderly succession on Tumblr, but anyone familiar with the platform knows that its treasures do not come that way. Instead, these images are tucked into the folds of the infinite scroll that a reader finds when entering “Sylvia Plath” in the search bar. It is overwhelmingly the same quotes from Goodreads given new life in bigger, more artful fonts. I hoped to find rhyme and reason in them, an evident winner like the one on Goodreads: one quote to rule them all. But on Tumblr, each girl who posts about Sylvia Plath has her own kingdom to run. She cannot necessarily be bothered with choosiness. But when she can be bothered to choose, she will be meticulous to the point of obsession about making the correct choice.
Many of the girls I find on Tumblr reblog Plath quotes mechanically alongside a mountain of melancholy content. They are found with photos of wilted flowers and tattoos in Courier New and the occasional textual allusion to glorifying anorexia. These girls create heaping monuments to pain and subsequently gain impressive followings that suggest the world is every bit as heartbroken as we’ve suspected all along. Others are more careful curators, and they share less often but more thoughtfully. Sylvia quotes appear alongside photos of Virginia Woolf with her own words scrawled over them and GIFs of Fiona Apple writhing uncomfortably in her own sexualized body. The suffering is palpable in these media. Regardless of the format, it bears the fingerprints of femininity thrown off balance. With all that smiling she did in photos, she struck me as the kind of woman who didn’t want to cause a lot of trouble except when she was ready to cause nothing short of a disaster.
There are occasional photos of Sylvia’s books themselves and even more of books opened to particularly moving passages by her, a post habit to which I myself must also confess when I cannot resist transmitting a cutting word from Simone Weil or Flannery O’Connor or passages from that lonely grouch of a poet, R. S. Thomas, into the digital world. The open books feature in orderly stacks on white backdrops and on dirty sheets. There are also a number of tattoos of quotes from Sylvia’s books, her words etched forever onto female skin and preserved, at least for now, on the Internet for the masses to admire, judge, and envy accordingly. There is even an entire Tumblr account devoted to her words on skin, Sylvia Plath Ink.5 Many of the tattoos featured there are still surrounded by inflamed skin, indicating that these were photographed as brand-new markings and that their owners urgently wished to share with the world how their bodies and her words had become one.
“I desire the things that will destroy me in the end,” a collarbone reads. A rib cage cries out, “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me,” alongside a flower. I find a thigh bearing the words:
The claw
Of the magnolia
Drunk on its own secrets
Asks nothing of life.
Like the T-shirts on Etsy, the tattoo designs are impressively diverse in their colors and placements and the substance of their messages. But I find myself returning over and over to an image of skin bearing the haunting finale of The Bell Jar: “I am, I am, I am.” Sometimes it is unpunctuated. Sometimes it is etched next to an ideographic heart, and other times it is etched onto a realistic rendering of the heart as human organ. Sometimes it is accompanied by its preceding line, “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my hea
rt.” I struggle to think of any line of thinking more linked to being a socialized female than to consider the declaration of simply existing to feel like a form of bragging. But that, of course, is the plight of the feeling girl: to be told again and again that her very existence is something not worth declaring.
To read Sylvia’s diaries is to bear witness to an urgent catastrophe. Though the entries are not marked with dates, it quickly becomes clear that the days she chronicles are eventful only insofar as her feelings are events themselves. And that they are. New boys have approximately the same weight as the whole wide world, yet they have taken the liberty of taking up much more than their physically allotted spaces with larger gestures and excessive speech. They suffocate girls’ spaces, their intrusions of volume and flesh lingering long after they’ve left. “In the air was the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in,” she confesses, a rare and raw admission of how much we sometimes crave the opportunity to crawl into the arms of men who cannot or choose not to love us as fully as we do them. Sylvia describes the fickle affections of men in her early years in one-dimensional terms, speaking in the absolutist language that would come to characterize her observations of life in early adulthood. She writes, “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity.” Sylvia does not have just best friends, she has the absolute best friends that history has ever produced. “She is something vital,” she writes of a dear friend, imbuing the girl not just with significance in her life but with life-giving properties no less critical than the beat of a heart or the shine of the sun. Her experience of love has similarly high stakes. “What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?” Plath experiences first love as a reincarnation, unable to remember a time when her body had any purpose but the love before her. These are not expressions of hyperbole so much as they are expressions of gravity. These diaries are an exercise in the belief that the ordinary female life is no ordinary thing at all.