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Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Memory

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Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Memory Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Memory Anita Helle IN THE CHRISTINE JEFFS/JOHN BROWNLOW film .Sy/via, there is a scene in which newlyweds Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, in a small boat off the waters of "beautiful Nauset" on the eastern shores of Massachusetts, are tipped overboard. The camera goes underwater and the scene is lit from the back; for a brief second, as the bodies of the couple played by Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig thrash upward to the surface, their heads are above the water and their limbs appear transparent from below. It is a scene both beautiful and lethal, designed to give us a naturalized experience of the couple's mythic intensides (the White Coddess and her consort, mermaid and merman), while foreshadowing eventual doom. A few weeks after the film's release, another version of this empty yet hyper- bolic imagery appeared in the caption and image accompanying A.O. Scott's New York Times review of the same film. "A Poet's Death/A Death's Poetry," the capdon reads. In this picture of Plath, the primordial freakish- ness is toned down, but the luminous whiteness and the unambiguous messages are similar. Inside the photographic frame is an American sweet- heart kind of beauty, blonde, with a pink headband and a black bohemian- style cape. Plath/Paltrow is depicted as "discovering" Hughes through their shared passion for language, as she reads his poems from a Cambridge- Femmist Studtes 31, no. 3 (Fall 2005). © 2005 hy Anita Helle 631 632 Anita Helle affiliated magazine, St. Botolph's Review. And yet there are obvious ways in which the capdon cannot frame the photograph, and the woman in the photograph, apparently brimming with life, exceeds the given frame. A poet's death becomes a death's poetry. We find ourselves in the presence of a paradox that besets Plath's legacy: a continual crossing of corpse and cor- pus, the body of the writer and the body of the writing.' The image of Plath that opens and forecloses on an obsession is neither Plath's fault nor the fault of the parallel lives Plath biography has lived BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE Ariel—The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement. Foreword by Frieda Hughes. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962. Edited by Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Her Husband: Hughes and Plath-A Marriage. By Diane Middlebrook. New York: Viking, 2003. Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics. By Robin Peel. Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. The Other Ariel. By Lynda K. Bundtzen. Amherst: University of Massa- chusetts Press, 2001. The Other Sylvia Plath. By Tracy Brain. New York: Longman, 2001. Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath. By Kate Moses. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America. By Deborah Nelson. New York: Colum- bia University Press, 2002. with feminism in the twentieth century. If there is too easy a passage between the popular obsession with her death and an interest in keeping her writing alive, it is encouraged by certain features of that writing itself. Plath is known for having invented an intimate form of address that opens up a liminal space between language and subjectivity, putdng idendty at risk ("What a thrill- / My thumb instead of an onion," Plath begins her poem "Cut," locating the reader along the seam of being and nonbeing).^ Anita Helle 633 But it is the canons of literary history, not Plath, or popular representa- tions of Plath, or poetry itself, that install woman and death as the "most poetical topic" at the heart of Plath's celebrity.^ With Plath, it often seems that we are stuck with an "art of dying" that cannot fmish its repetitions. But perhaps what is needed is a paradigm shift and a few jolts of the real. Plath scholars have recently been finding their way around the impasse of woman as death by returning to the archive to consider an abundance of new material from fresh critical perspectives. Yet it appears that preoccu- pations with "evidence" are not solely a return to the "thing," the artifact as object, as much as a turn toward a consciousness of history and method, a critical awareness of the politics of knowledge that have materi- ally and discursively framed Plath's legacy. This process of critical reassess- ment is far from finished. In the work discussed here, a return to the archive entails consideration of an abundance of previously unpublished or newly archived material, a broader array of texts (drafts, collages, pho- tographs, visual art), and attempts to broaden and deepen the historical textures in which Plath's works are suspended and in relation to which they can be understood. Emerging from renewed interest in Plath studies is a greater emphasis on and appreciation of interdisciplinary and cross- genre ramifications, as well as bold reformulations of the public and pri- vate forces that have shaped Plath's legacy as a "confessional" writer. Finally, because Plath is a writer whose post-Romantic aesthetic has long been associated with the transfer of meaning in private and reflective spaces, I suggest that the extension of literary activities to the cyber world raises questions about how the Plath archive is being reshaped by uses of technology, especially through the dynamic interplay of public and pri- vate spaces and identities on the internet. THE EVOLUTION OF THE ARCHIVE A literary archive functions traditionally as a guarantee that a body of work belongs to the author's self, in propria persona (in her own body). But the body ofa writer's work is more than a deposit in a library or a collection; it is also shaped by the social transactions surrounding the publication, edit- ing, dissemination, and reception of an author's image and work. A decade ago, one influential set of speculations about tbe Plath archive could be 634 Anita Helle traced to Jacqueline Rose's The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Departing from more empirical definitions of archival knowledge. Rose plucked from psychoan- alytic narrative the analogy of the disintegrated ego-a corps morcele (body-in- pieces)-to describe the status of the Plath archive as the "body of writing," reduced to oddments, scraps, and gossip.'' For Rose, the body-in-pieces was a figure for the morally objectionable or psychologically charged frag- ments that had been excluded from the body of Plath's published work, as well as an expression of symbolic violence. Rose was summarizing a state of affairs at a moment in the late 1980s when it appeared that nearly every- thing bad that could happen to a writer's work had happened to Plath's writing, much of it at the hands of those to whom it was entrusted for safekeeping, her husband and her mother, and she wrote an elegant protest against it. As the abundance of new material under discussion here would indicate, much has changed in Plath studies since Rose's path- breaking analysis. But the broader insight that Plath's legacy provides an absorbing instance of archive formation as a cultural process, occurring through a variety of means (historical, popular, biographical, fictional) and engaging a range of public interests, is still relevant. From this more situated perspective, the archive in modern history functions as a largely imaginary "wbole": a writer or executor makes deposits, entrusting tbe work to tbe safekeeping of family members, strangers, and literary profes- sionals; and archives are set up to prevent tbe decomposition of the body of writing (in compensation, perhaps, for tbe more literal decay of the body). The present moment is a remarkable one, in which scholars are responding to an abundance of new material and finding that Plath's legacy will never be the same. The "events" include publication of Hughes's Collected Poems, as useful as The Birthday Letters for what they reveal about the ongoing subterranean dialogues Hugbes carried on witb Plath throughout his career; the creation of a new archive at Emory University Woodruff Library (rumored to contain as much as two tons of material); tbe first exhibit of Plath's visual art in late 2002, coinciding with a seventi- eth birthday celebration; and the "unsealing" of materials previously off- limits to scholars (Hughes made several decisions about previously sealed materials before bis death).' It has been well-known tbat the typescript that Plath completed by the end of November or early December 1962 and Anita Heile 635 left in the black spring binder on her desk (in this the film 5y/vifl is accu- rate) differs significantly from the original published version, and its the- matic and symbolic center is not suicide. Now a wider pubUc also has access for the first time to a facsimile edition of Ariel (HarperCollins), as Plath had intended to publish it, differing in selection and arrangement from the book that made her name.' In the "big" picture that emerges from this new material, there is some news. First, Plath appears to have been a more prolific writer, by any stan- dard (versatility, volume, publication, discarded and abandoned lines, and unpublished manuscripts) than the narrower range of her "canonized" reputation for Ariel and The Bell far would allow. Second, her written and visual artwork engages a much broader range of cultural and historical reference than the many failed attempts at Plath biography would sug- gest. These new archival "discoveries" raise significant questions about whether and how new paradigms should be assimilated to or unsettle ear- lier, more sensationalist ones.
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