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
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eloquent voice stilled at a young age, as previously unpublished works find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.