The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath

Western Michigan University ScholarWorks at WMU Dissertations Graduate College 8-2005 The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath Kimberly Dawn Knutsen Western Michigan University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Knutsen, Kimberly Dawn, "The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath" (2005). Dissertations. 1040. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/dissertations/1040 This Dissertation-Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate College at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE LOST JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH by Kimberly Dawn Knutsen A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, Michigan August 2005 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE LOST JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH Kimberly Dawn Knutsen, Ph.D. Western Michigan University, 2005 Wilson A. Lavender is a doctoral candidate and instructor of women’s studies who is beginning to thing he knows nothing about women. His wife, Katie, is a recent graduate and stay-at-home mother of three—sexy, bored, and plagued by a violent past. Her sister, January, newly pregnant and obsessed with 80s rocker, Stevie Flame, arrives unexpectedly from New Mexico. As Wilson writes in the dissertation he fears will never be done: “Things begin to devolve.” Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3188450 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 3188450 Copyright 2006 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Copyright by Kimberly Dawn Knutsen 2005 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.” Sylvia Plath Katie I wish I was small again, I wish I was a kid again, I wish I was me again, the me I was before everything happened. I was four-years old and I wanted a canopy bed, pink and ruffled—a bed fit for a princess. One night after dinner Mom and Dad and I left our tiny apartment behind Grant’s department store where Dad worked—where he once let me pick out an imitation Barbie doll that came in a gray box with two pairs of rubbery high heels—and walked up a leafy side street to the neighbor’s house. It was a hot summer night, dark already, and my baby sister, January, was still curled in my mother’s womb, not quite ready to be bom. At the neighbor’s house, we watched Cinderella—the TV show, not the Disney movie—on their new color television set. I’d never seen color TV before and I sat, spellbound, in that strange rumpus room with the wall-to-wall carpeting. When Cinderella went to the ball, everything came alive, bursting into vibrant color. I wanted to go there, to her world, immediately, where life was brighter than the stars, more colorful than the flowers at the Japanese Rose Gardens. I knew it was where me and my princess bed belonged. There were two worlds when I was a kid. The Cinderella world, with its fancy light, is the one I miss. It lasted until I was eight. Then it disappeared. In the Cinderella world, I was small, and everything was fun and candy, and I wasn’t a body yet, I was everything, the whole world, humming along on my green 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Stingray like the cloud of bees at the camellia bushes, the lilacs wiggling in the wind, the raindrops dancing on the sidewalks. Everything was alive—the hill of stinging red ants at the edge of the driveway; the old oak at the curb with its trunk full of knotty, groaning faces and its mossy green lap you could rest in; the creek at the Duck Park, a sunlit universe of minnows and crawdads and billowing clouds of sludge. Everything was simple. 12 3. ABC. It’s what I love about being a mom now. Things become simple again, distilled to their elemental state. Before kids, life was too complicated. Now, I can wake up in the morning and know I don’t even have to leave the house. What a relief. All I have to do is fix meals—easy things like peanut butter and jelly—wash clothes, read the smallest, sweetest books. Sometimes I’m so touched by Clifford and Franklin and Blue, I could cry. They offer kindness and understanding, and the tiniest seed of knowledge, like the fact that sharing is good, and your mom and dad care, and it is safe to snuggle into bed at night and sleep because the moon that is your friend will watch over you. Maybe I need to get a life. But that world was real—it is real—and I miss it. I can still see us, me and my little sister January, in the last days of the Cinderella world, when its pink glow, like fog, had already started to bum away. The sky in Portland was the color of rose petals. It was 1973 and I was eight and it was the first summer that I had to wear a shirt. I could no longer go topless like the boys in the neighborhood, and I hated it. It was confusing—what was so shameful about a girl that she had to be covered when the idiot boys on the block 2 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. could do as they pleased, whipping off their tank tops in the heat of the day, running free at night, the summer breeze cooling their sweaty skin? It was my first hint that there was something wrong with being a girl, that we were dangerous, somehow, although I had no idea how. I didn’t think about it much, just wore the same baggy cut-offs and faded swimming suit top every day, as close to naked as I could get. My ponytail was long and tangled and orange, and my feet were filthy. We were always grubby kids. Back then moms didn’t care about baths or clean clothes—at least ours didn’t. By summer’s end, the soles of my feet were so tough, I could walk across the parking lot of the Safeway without feeling a thing. That summer evening, we were rolling down the big hill behind Reed College, away from the Renaissance Faire at the top, away from our mom and her stupid friend with the rainbow-colored Afro. The grass was cool and damp. The campus tennis courts—with their tom nets, rattling chain link fences, weeds growing through cracks in the concrete—sat at the bottom of the hill. Beyond the courts stood a clump of black, brushy fir trees, and beyond those, I knew, was the Willamette River sparkling blue and pink beneath the setting sun, the buildings of downtown rising from its banks like purple glass. January just three, couldn’t roll, only run behind, tripping and falling and pushing herself up, her tear-stained face furious. I sat on the grass halfway down, listening to the hollow thunk of tennis balls, the far-off drone of the fair. January caught up and sank down beside me, sniffling. “Don’t bother me, I’m thinking,” I said. She obediently stood and trotted off to collect dandelions, smashing their yellow heads in her fist. 3 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The Renaissance Faire was like a filthy dragon, puffing smoke, trailing dirty streamers. It was there that our mother had set up a small table with the macrame necklaces she’d brought to sell. It was exciting at first, the strange atmosphere of drums and trilling lutes, but after awhile, you couldn’t breathe. I thought of her, up in the middle of the celebration. She’d worked hard on the necklaces, staying up late nights with Johnny Carson on the TV and a bowl of popcorn on the dining-room table. I pictured all the little fired-clay faces, the suns and the moons, the goddesses and the bears and the stars, tinkling around her like charms. Her eyes would be quiet, the way they got when she was happy. I pictured her sliding quiet eyes at the guy with the rainbow-colored Afro. “Get me a 7-up?” she might say, touching his ankle with her toe the way she did when she was feeling nice. I was nervous. I hated it when she talked to strangers, men who liked her only because she was pretty.

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