Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 2 Number 3, December 2001

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Britzolakis, Christina, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 reprinted 2001) , 250 pages, ISBN: 0-19-818373-9. £ 37.50

Reviewed by

 

Leslie Barcza 

            She has done it again.  Sylvia Plath, the original Lady Lazarus of her autobiographical poem, is alive and well and keeps coming back from the dead, even in death.  That poem’s celebration of the synthesis of incidents from her life and from literature epitomizes her work.  Plath’s poetry and the controversy surrounding her life both continue to be sites of interest, not just for the steady stream of scholars weighing and refining her legacy, such as Christina Britzolakis.   In addition  to critical controversies that will not die, the actual output of the poet and author, keeps growing posthumously, even though she died in 1963.  Some of that growth is the inevitable consequence of a particularly eloquent voice stilled at a young age, as previously unpublished works find their way into print, brokered by the custodians of her works and official memory.   That the brokers of that  legacy—her mother Aurelia and her ex-husband, poet Ted Hughes-- have been popularly cast as the villains of her tragedy adds to the controversy; but there is no stopping Plath, whose life and work continue to attract interest.

            That combination of writings and incidents that was Plath’s life have become touchstones of feminism.  A precocious writer from an immigrant background in New England, Plath lost her father not long after she published her first poem, at the age of eight.   But the progress of this model daughter and award-winning writer was interrupted by a suicide attempt at the age of 20 in 1953, followed by a period of convalescence in a psychiatric hospital; the plot of her novel The BellJar, published under a pseudonym, in the year of her death, resembles some of the events of this period in her life, as she began to question the pathway she had been prepared for.  Plath’s ascent continued, with a Fulbright scholarship taking her to England, her romance and marriage to English poet Ted Hughes seeming to be the culmination of everything she held sacred.  Having left the United States and settled in England in 1960, Plath had two children with Hughes.   The idyllic union of two poets was shattered by her discovery of his infidelity; she moved away with her two small children, and a short while later killed herself in 1963 at the age of 30. In the testimony of her life in poetry, particularly through such eminently quotable phrases as “every woman adores a fascist”, Plath became a feminist icon.  Whereas questions of poetics normally are separate from biographical concerns, particularly for poets writing under the influence of the “New Criticism” (a school insisting on the autonomy of writing, especially from biographical influences), Plath’s personal style confounds attempts to make such distinctions.      

Britzolakis’ 1998 study, reprinted in 2001, embraces the confluence of Plath’s writing and her life, and the way both poetry and prose self-consciously explore the personages and incidents from her life; the resulting creations are the “theatre” of the title, Plath’s personal confessional space to mount her dramas in poetry or prose.  Theatre is more than a metaphor in this study, when one considers the performative tendencies in Plath’s poems, especially her later works, her elegant fusion of the personal and the poetic answering the aridity of the New Criticism.  Britzolakis’ reading is a comprehensive examination of poems, novels, stories and journals, undertaken without so much as a word devoted to questions of Plath’s greatness, her manifest merits being a premise of the study, and perhaps an indication of her expected readership.  Psychiatry only figures as content, as for instance, in The Bell Jar, rather than as a relevant discursive pathway or method, notwithstanding the conventional use of figures such as Freud as authorities in literary analysis; but this is not an agnostic or deconstructive reading of Plath, but one embracing her significance. This is not a book for a neophyte unfamiliar with Plath’s oeuvre, nor a work for the avid fan with only a passing acquaintance with a few poems; Britzolakis presupposes the reader’s knowledge of Plath’s work, and omits the synopses one might expect for lesser known works.  But for the reader familiar with Plath, Britzolakis synthesizes  over 160 works (not including collections) into a coherent argument for Plath’s relevance.