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1 the Writing Life Creating Lives Notes 1 The Writing Life 1. Aurelia Schober Plath, introduction to Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, p. 5. Much of the information about the Plath and Schober families is drawn from interviews with, and from letters and annotated pages of manu­ script from, Aurelia Plath. See also her 'Letter Written in the Actuality of Spring' in Alexander, Ariel Ascending; her introduction and head­ notes to Letters Home; and her interview in The Listener (April 22, 1976), as well as her 'Authors' Series Talk' (Smith College archive). The biographies by Paul Alexander (Rough Magic, 1991), Anne Stevenson (Bitter Fame, 1989), and Linda Wagner-Martin (Sylvia Plath, 1987) and the 1988 essay by Plath's cousin, Anita Helle, in Northwest Review provide much of this information; they are supplemented by this author's interviews with Wilbury Crockett and Perry Norton. Max Gaebler's memoir (unpublished) also provided new information. 2. Aurelia Plath, introduction to Letters Home, p. 13. 3. Ibid., p. 16. 4. Sylvia Plath, "Ocean 1212-W," Johnny Panic, pp. 124-25. 5. Sylvia Plath, "Heat," unpublished; used with permission of Lilly Library, Indiana University, and Olwyn Hughes. 6. Sylvia Plath, "The Brink," unpublished; used as above. 7. Sylvia Plath, "The Dark River," unpublished; used as above. 8. Sylvia Plath, "East Wind," unpublished, used as above. 9. Aurelia Plath, "Letter Written," Ariel Ascending, ed. Paul Alexander, p.216. 10. Ibid., p. 217. 2 Creating Lives 1. Aurelia Plath, letter to Wagner-Martin, March 27, 1988, p. 1. 2. Anita Helle, "Family Matters," Northwest Review, 1988, pp. 155-6. 3. Sylvia Plath, "The Colossus," Collected Poems, pp. 129-30. 4. Steven Gould Axelrod, Sylvia Plath: The Wouna and the Cure of Wounds, 1990, p. 25. Axelrod sees much of Plath's career as motivated by her ambivalence toward her father, including her choice of an Honors thesis topic. As well as focusing on the double characters of Dos­ toevski, the thesis treats Ivan Karamazov, who consistently desired his father's death (pp. 28-9). See also Lynda K. Bundtzen, Plath's Incarnations (1983). 5. Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 35. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 62. 146 Notes 147 8. Sylvia Plath, "Among the Bumblebees," Lilly Library, Indiana Uni­ versity; published posthumously in Bananas 12 (Autumn 1978), pp. 14- 15 and republished in the third edition - and the United States edition - of Johnny Panic (1979). 9. Sylvia Plath, "The Day Mr. Prescott Died," Johnny Panic, p. 46. 10. Ibid., p. 51. 11. Plath, Journals, p. 128. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., p. 25. 14. Ibid., p. 123. 15. Ibid., p. 143. 16. Sylvia Plath, "Lament," Collected Poems, pp. 315-16. 17. Sylvia Plath to her mother, Letters Home, p. 87. 18. Sylvia Plath, "Sunday at the Mintons'," Johnny Panic, p. 154. 19. Ibid., p. 165. 20. Sylvia Plath, "The Christmas Heart," unpublished, The Lilly Library, Indiana University. 21. Sylvia Plath, "In the Mountains," Johnny Panic, p. 174. 3 Creating the Persona of the Self 1. Sylvia Plath, "Mary Ventura," unpublished, The Lilly Library, Indiana University. The metaphor of the train suggests Plath's very late poem, "Getting There." 2. Sylvia Plath, "Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom," essay appended, "Teen-Agers Can Shape the Future," unpublished, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, p. 1 of essay. 3. Ibid. 4. See Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath, A Biography, pp. 185-91. 5. Sylvia Plath, "Stone Boy with Dolphin," Johnny Panic, p. 174. 6. Ibid., p. 175. 7. Ibid., p. 188. 8. Sylvia Plath, "The Smoky Blue Piano," unpublished, The Lilly Library, Indiana University. 9. Sylvia Plath, "housewife," unpublished, The Lilly Library, Indiana University. 10. Sylvia Plath, "Song of the Wild Geese," unpublished, The Lilly Library, Indiana University. 11. Alice Miller, For Your Own Good, pp. 255-56. Elaine Martin's 1981 essay (French American Review, pp. 24-47) reinforces the analysis, as she points out that the achieving mother represents "anxious pres­ sure" to conform to the patriarchy, particularly in the absence of the father. The middle-class value system, which makes little sense to a developing young woman, causes madness; and sexual acts are really overt acts against the repressive mother. 12. Miller, p. 257. 13. Ibid. 148 Notes 14. Sylvia Plath, "The Disquieting Muses," Collected Poems, p. 75. 15. Aurelia Plath, "Letter Written in the Actuality of Spring," Ariel Ascend­ ing, ed. Paul Alexander, p. 215. 16. Sylvia Plath, "The Disquieting Muses," Collected Poems, pp. 75-6. 17. See Anita Helle, Northwest Review, 1988, and Max D. Gaebler, 1983 interview, Smith College Rare Book Room. 18. Pat Macpherson, Reflecting on The Bell Jar, 1991, p. 61. For more dis­ cussion of this mother-daughter symbiosis, see Barbara Mossberg, "A Rose in Context: The Daughter Construct" in Jerome J. McGann, 1985; Anita Helle, 'Family Matters,' Northwest Review, 1988; and Mary Lynn Broe, "A Subtle Psychic Bond: The Mother Figure in Sylvia Plath's Poetry" in Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner, 1980. Also by Broe, 'Enigmatical, Shifting My Clarities' in P. Alexander, Ariel Ascending, 1984. 19. Aurelia Plath to Sylvia Plath, November 13, 1954 and December 4, 1962, Smith College Rare Book Room. 20. Sylvia Plath, "Aerialist," Collected Poems, pp. 331-2. 21. Sylvia Plath, "April18," Collected Poems, pp. 301-2. 22. Sylvia Plath, "Morning in the Hospital Solarium," Collected Poems, pp.332-3. 23. Sylvia Plath, Journals, p. 169. 24. Ibid., p. 166. 25. Ibid., p. 169. 26. Ibid., p. 172. 27. Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, p. 323. 28. Sylvia Plath to Warren Plath, Letters Home, p. 112. 29. Ted Hughes, "Introduction," Johnny Panic, p. 18. 30. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 1991, p. 127. 4 Recalling the Bell Jar 1. Aurelia Plath, "Letter Written in the Actuality of Spring," Ariel Ascend­ ing, ed. P. Alexander, p. 216. 2. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, p. 197. 3. For more about the complexities of the situation, see Patricia Hamp!' s "The Smile of Accomplishment: Sylvia Plath's Ambition," Iowa RevIew, 1995, pp. 1-28. 4. Ted Hughes agrees in his 1995 essay, intended as the introduction for an edition of The Bell Jar bound with Plath's Collected Poems. See "Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems and The Bell Jar," Winter Pollen, 1995, pp.466-81. 5. Stan Smith provides the most comprehensive defense of Plath's use of Jewish/holocaust personae and themes in his Inviolable Voice, 1982, pp. 200-25. He explains what he sees as the reciprocity between Plath's "intensely private" poems and their ability to record "so profoundly and distinctly the experience of living in history" (p. 202). "It would be wrong to see Plath's use of the imagery of the concentration camp simply as unacceptable hyperbole, in which a merely private anguish is inflated to the proportions of global atrocity. Rather ... Plath has seen Notes 149 the deeper correspondences between the personal and the collective tragedies, their common origins in a civilisation founded on repression at the levels of both the body politic and of the carnal body" (pp. 218- 19). Jerome Mazzaro had spoken to the wider scope of Plath's political interests in his ground-breaking essay, "The Cycles of History: Sylvia Plath 0932-1963)" in his Postmodern American Poetry, 1980, pp. 139-66. More recently, see James E. Young's" 'I may be a bit of a Jew': The Holocaust Confessions of Sylvia Plath" (Philological Quarterly, 1987), pp. 127--47. 6. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, p. 3. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 4. 9. Ibid., p. 5. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 33. 12. Ibid., p. 69. 13. Ibid., p. 93. 14. See Rose Kamel, "'Reach Hag Hands and Haul Me In': Matrophobia in the Letters of Sylvia Plath," Northwest Review, 1981, in Sylvia Plath, The Critical Heritage, ed. Linda W. Wagner, pp. 223-33; Marilyn Yalom's Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness, 1985; and Pat Macpherson's Reflecting on The Bell Jar, 1991. The latter states that the novel can be read "as a daughter's case of matrophobia [Plath's fear of becoming her mother] ... Esther's fear and hatred of her mother entrap her within a misogynist version of motherhood that is poten­ tially lethal." Macpherson also notes, "Encountering the fear of becoming one's mother is the central experience of female adoles­ cence" (p. 59). Plath's journal entries from the period of her second session of therapy with Dr Beuscher, pp. 266--70, illustrate this emo­ tion. 15. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, p. 100. 16. Ibid., p. 132. 17. Ibid., p. 193. 18. Ibid., p. 119. 19. Ibid., p. 98. 20. Ibid., p. 10l. 21. Sylvia Plath, Journals, pp. 318--19. 22. Ibid., pp. 319-20. 23. Pat Macpherson, Reflecting on The Bell Jar, 1991, pp. 78--9. 24. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, p. 125. 25. Marilyn Yalom, Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness, 1985, p.4. 26. Ibid., p. 20. 5 Lifting the Bell Jar 1. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, p. 158. 2. Ibid., p. 166. 150 Notes 3. Ibid., pp. 193-4. 4. Ibid., p. 164. 5. Ibid., p. 173. 6. Ibid., p. 89. The most memorable nakedness in the novel is the sight of Doreen's breasts bouncing from her clothes as she and Lenny jitterbug in his apartment - a sight which, presumably, sends Esther into shock; at least she leaves the apartment and walks back to the hotel, where she cleanses herself in a hot bath. 7. Ibid., pp. 89-90. 8. Ibid., p. 86. 9. Ibid., p. 91. 10. Ibid., p. 68. 11. Ibid., p. 51. 12. Ibid., p. 56. 13. Ibid., p.
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