An Analysis of the Sylvia Plath Issue of the Review Gina Hodnik, Northern Illinois University

Plath Profiles 259 Early Public Representations of Sylvia Plath: An Analysis of the Sylvia Plath issue of The Review Gina Hodnik, Northern Illinois University During its ten year run from 1962 to 1972 The Review was, according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, one of the "most influential British Literary Journals of the time" (Serafin 129). Other critics, such as Blake Morrison, have also commented on the magazine's literary prestige and relevance, noting that "the trenchancy of The Review was acknowledged far beyond Oxford and London" (Harsent 23). In short, having poems or a critical essay published in The Review meant that the author was a serious writer. This prestige stems from, in part, the editor Ian Hamilton's famous rigid standards and honest criticism of poetry. The Review was, as critic Michael Fried calls it, a "one-man show"; it was "guided by 'man alone' rather than a school of thought or by some doctrinal expression larger than the self" (Harsent 131, Hoffman, Allen, & Ulrich 190). Hamilton's heavy-handed involvement in the magazine made the magazine both, paradoxically, personally biased and unbiased. As an unsponsored publication, a little magazine is "one which exists, indeed thrives, outside the usual business structure of magazine production and distribution; it is independent, amateur and idealistic- it doesn't…need to print anything it doesn't want to print" (Hamilton, The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors 7-8). This made it possible to write more honest criticism without trying to please the larger forces of the publishing world. However, since little magazines, such as The Review, remained under the control of one editor, it would be impossible to say that personal predisposition did not bias the magazine. Specifically, the special Sylvia Plath issue of The Review appears to be shaped by personal involvement, not just by Hamilton but also by Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, and Al Alvarez, their friend Hodnik 260 and fellow writer. The issue was published in October of 1963, just eight months after Plath's suicide, and includes seven poems, some previously unpublished, as well as a critical essay by Alvarez. In an epistolary correspondence between Hughes and Hamilton before publication, Hughes told Hamilton that, in talking with Alvarez, they both felt that "his piece wouldn't make sense if some of the poems he mentions weren't with it," so Hughes sent Hamilton these poems, in addition to poems not mentioned in Alvarez's essay.1 Looking not only at the poems included ("Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," "Fever 103°," "Nick and the Candlestick," "Brasilia," "Mary's Song," and "Lesbos") and the Alvarez essay in the magazine issue itself, but also selected letters and criticism of the time, provides evidence that Hamilton, Alvarez, and Hughes together, purposely or unconsciously, argued for a very specific view of Plath and her poetry. The Plath issue of The Review, along with manuscript material, seems to suggest that the poems she wrote in the last few months of her life are a medium for Plath to forge a separate identity through self-control. Portraying Plath in this way additionally gives her a distinct identity as a writer, separate from her domestic life and the drama connected with it. One distinguishing characteristic of Alvarez's essay in the Plath issue is that he uses the poems to outline distinct personality traits. Alvarez does not merely examine connecting images in her poems; he uses repeated images in her poetry and her techniques to suggest that Plath, in her poetry, attempted to create a distinct identity through the obvious rejection of domestic roles. In his essay, Alvarez notes that Plath's "real poems began in 1960, after the birth of her daughter Frieda" while "her most creative period followed the birth of her son, two years later" ("Sylvia Plath" 77). For Alvarez, "it is as though the child were a proof of her identity, as though it liberated her into her real self" (77). Alvarez's essay and the selected poems in the Plath issue suggest that Plath attempts to reject these old roles to establish her own separate identity. More importantly, the essay and selected poems, by not focusing on her marriage to Hughes, separate Plath from the drama associated with her married life. Alvarez commends Plath on her ability "to make startling images out of humdrum objects"; she makes the familiar and predictable new (76). In other words, altering familiar domestic images parallels Plath's need to make her established roles new; she attempts to change her identity into something unique. In the poems selected for The Review Plath makes the 1 Found in Box 1, folder 9 of The Review Manuscripts collection in Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University. Plath Profiles 261 domestic realm startling by connecting it with mass extinction. Once again, of all the poems Hughes could have selected to send to Hamilton, Hughes selected a prevalent number of poems connecting domestic life to mass extinction and the Holocaust, such as "Mary's Song," "Daddy," and "Lesbos," perhaps attempting to emphasize Plath's need to destroy the binding established roles of mother and daughter. In "Mary's Song," the image of the "Sunday lamb [that] cracks in its fat," a sign of motherly domesticity in that it involves a woman preparing a meal for the household, turns from familiar and expected into the unexpected and violent when Plath compares cooking to "melting the tallow heretics, / ousting the Jews" (Plath, Selected Poems 257). First, connecting this domestic act to the mass destruction of the Jews subverts the domestic role; through her poetry, Plath makes a familiar role new. Also, the parallel to mass destruction illustrates the reason for making this domestic role new and unexpected: domesticity can damage a woman's sense of self. The Holocaust images in "Daddy" also suggest that Plath wants to recreate her previous role as daughter, a role that destroys her sense of self. She connects the father to Hitler by calling him "a man in black with a Meinkampf look" (224). By linking her father with Hitler and herself with a Jew, she subverts her traditional role of a daughter and emphasizes the destructive power of this established role. In "Lesbos," she also links a more standard domestic role with destruction when she describes the "viciousness in the kitchen" with the "fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine" (227). Here, the kitchen appears to be a painful place that can bring only harm to the occupant. In these selected poems, Plath rejects an old way of life by altering it into something new, but also in connecting domestic roles to images of mass destruction which implies that she needs to destroy these established roles before they destroy her as an individual. The vampire bat is one connecting image that illustrates an attempt to shed the pre- established roles of daughter and mother. The bat represents feeling suffocated from a domineering force, a dominant identity. In "Nick and the Candlestick," Plath is a "miner" exploring caves where the "black bat airs / wrap [her], raggy shawls" and "weld to [her] like plums" (240-241). The bat image enfolds the woman; by connecting the bat airs to a shawl, Plath suggests that it covers her. The word "weld" characterizes the bat as a force that wraps around her persistently, which covers her completely. Furthermore, by setting the scene in a cave, Plath emphasizes a feeling of being enclosed, suffocated. The bat imagery in "Lesbos" likewise symbolizes a larger force that encircles Plath, a force so dominant it begins to erase her Hodnik 262 identity. In "Lesbos," she complains that the other woman's "voice" is her "ear-ring, / flapping and sucking, blood loving bat" (229). Someone else's voice wraps around her; the voice, as a bat, is a force that dominates Plath, preventing her from hearing her own voice. In "Daddy," the bat acts again as a dominant force that muffles the Plath, literally sucking away her life; she experiences "the vampire who said he was [her father] / and drank [her] blood for a year" (224). Plath extends the image of the bat, connecting it even more to vampirism by then likening her father to a vampire with "a stake in [his] fat black heart" (224). Her father and the man who resembles him, Hughes, are portrayed as forces that drain her identity; her identity exists only in relation to them. Additionally, over half of the seven selected poems end with the image of Plath rejecting dominant forces that previously controlled her. At the end of "Daddy," she manages to throw off this dominant vampire that sucks out her life, her identity. She says to her domineering father that she "[has] had to kill [him]" (222). Significantly, she ends by again talking directly to her father, saying, "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through" (224). Plath finally stands up to the vampire-like force, the "black shoe" that she has "lived like a foot," trying to mold to (222). Alvarez notes that Plath "seemed convinced, in these last poems, that the root of her suffering was the death of her father […] who dragged her after him" (Alvarez, "Sylvia Plath" 81). "Lady Lazarus" revolts against a dominant parental force that shaped Plath's identity; the poem describes her as someone else's "valuable / the pure gold baby" (Plath, Selected Poems 246). She prefaces these descriptions with "I am," thereby connecting her identity to being an object of value, a child, for someone else (246). By telling the audience repeatedly to "Beware" and by rising up to "eat men like air," she then illustrates her revolt against the forces that previously shaped her identity; she finally stands up, rises, for herself (246-247).

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