A new generation of readers seeks to reverse the silencing of Sylvia Plath

It was Boris Pasternak, author of Dr. Zhivago, who issued a grim warning about what happens in the dire event that someone takes their own life: We have no idea of ​​the internal torture that precedes suicide.

In the most recent book on Sylvia Plath, Loving Sylvia Plath, From author Emily Van Duyne, we have a new version of one of the most notorious suicides in the context of a tragic love relationship that continues to torment writers and readers alike.

Plath’s fate and greatness have inspired the creation of a literary icon: the patron saint of confessional poetry, whose true genius has been stifled by the legacy of her suffering as a battered womanToday, a new generation of its readers is reclaiming its history to reverse what they see as The silencing of Sylvia Platha crime against his genius that seems to inspire a strange mix of sound and fury.

When the tragedy of Plath and (her husband, Ted) Hughes first came to light, it was conventional among critics to keep life and art rigidly separate. Yet writer Emily Van Duyne’s fervor appropriates Plath’s life not only to convey passages of literary criticism, but also to console her own subliterary anguish.

The task of loving Sylvia Plath also becomes a strong identification with her struggle: Van Duyne confidently mobilizes his autobiography to illuminate Plath’s tragic fate. Here, the relationship with Hughes, an unquestionably difficult marriage (no one disputes this) becomes a case study of intimate partner violence.

Van Duyne’s intensity leaves no room for doubt. From page 13, he declares that his view of Plath’s plight It was born out of my experience as a survivor of intimate partner violence with a man who is now the father of my oldest son, from whom I separated a long time ago..

Plath’s story first took root in Camden Town, a leafy but grey part of London known to Dickens. In the autumn of 1962, an expatriate American poet and novelist, mother of two and recently separated from her partner, a celebrated English poet, takes up residence on the second floor of a house previously occupied by W.B. Yeats.

There, the 30-year-old began writing as she had never done before, in a fever of self-awakening. We now know that both she and her husband, Ted Hughes, were on the cusp of greatness.

He had found his voice, and had been hailed for it, with The falcon in the rain. She, who had rented the rooms in Fitzroy Road, I lived like a Spartan to complete the poems of Ariel which would also make her famous, composing new works in the cold blue dawn, gripped by the conviction that she had to write to free myself from the past.

But as the year turned, she found herself caught in the worst English winter for 150 years. The weather was brutal. Heavy snowfall on the day after Christmas made travel impossible. By New Year, the country was at a standstill. Water pipes were sealed, with power cuts widespread. Everything was running low, as the frost continued on and on, a merciless offensive that pushed everyone to the edge.

To better understand the young poet’s collapse, her ex-husband’s letters tell us most of what we need to know about the terrible events of February 11, 1963, the day Sylvia Plath committed suicide by gas. around six in the morning.

She had gone upstairs with her two sleeping children (aged one and two), and left a plate of bread and butter and two glasses of milk, in case they woke up hungry before the au pair arrived. Then, according to the most credible sources, she returned to the kitchen, sealed the door and window with towels, opened the oven, stuck her head in and turned on the gas.

Within two decades of Sylvia’s death, an astonishing Plath-Hughes literature had blossomed, conceived through the lens of women’s liberation. By the 1990s, this had created, for better and worse, Plath’s first afterlife, in which (in Janet Malcolm’s description) she became the silent womansubordinate to Hughes as guardian of his estate.

Since then, and with the MeToo movement, the poet’s unforgettable presence and reputation have been overloaded by a mythical life story that has passed into the collective unconscious.

©The Independent

Translation: Jesus Abraham Hernandez