The Willing Domesticity of Sylvia Plath: A Rebuttal of the “Feminist” Label

by Michelle Kinsey-Clinton

www.sapphireblue.com 27 Maggio 1997

(Note for March 4, 1999: This paper was posted on an older version of my website, and was not re-posted when I ripped it down and redid it. However, I keep getting requests for it, and my referer logs keep showing people getting 404s from my site off search engine queries for materials on Sylvia Plath, so here it is. Do your own homework, kids: use this as a reference but don’t rip me off. I’ll send Guido after you.)

“I think I would like to call myself ‘the girl who wanted to be God’. Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be–perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it.”

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath has long been hailed as a feminist writer of great significance. In her 1976 book Literary Women, Ellen Moers writes, “No writer has meant more to the current feminist movement” (qtd. in Wagner 5), and still today, at a time when the idea of equality for women isn’t so radically revolutionary as it had been earlier in the century, Plath is a literary symbol of the women’s rights movement. Roberta Mazzenti quotes Robert A. Piazza as writing that there is “little feminist consciousness” in Plath’s work, and goes on to explain that because “Plath’s work [is] being read… by readers searching for political sustenance”, feminist sentiment that the author never held can easily be attributed to her writing (201). This kind of misguided attribution is illustrated in the opinions of critics like Sheryl Meyering, who states that Sylvia Plath’s intense desire to be accepted by men and to eventually marry and have children was purely a product of the constrictive 1950s social mentality during which the author came to womanhood (xi). A thorough examination of the Plath oeuvre paints a different picture, however. Although Plath’s awareness of and distaste for the submissive and insubstantial role a woman in the 1950s was expected to play is apparent from her early journals to the poems completed in the last month of her life, that same body of work also makes plain that she had accepted some of that role for herself on her own terms: a common theme throughout the writing is the author’s intense desire to be a beloved and loving wife and, perhaps even more strong, her desire to become a mother–as long as she could still speak from within her “deeper self” through her writing.
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Jane Bowles, 1949

The months I spent in Tangier, from early June 1962 to February 1963, were the same months during which Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’s marriage failed and she left their house in Devon for the flat in Fitzroy Road where she killed herself. In that same period of time, my friendship with Jane Bowles flourished. Not until now have I linked these two facts, nor understood that-though quite unconsciously-by returning to Morocco rather than remaining in London, I made a crucial choice between the two women.

Sylvia Plath, 1961

To all appearances I had much more in common with Sylvia than with Jane. Sylvia and I were almost the same age, two Americans in England married to men from what was labelled a working class background in the north of the country, though in fact there was little similarity between their families or childhoods. Both of them-Ted and Alan Sillitoe, my husband-were successful young writers, in the public eye, while Sylvia and I were more or less unknown poets when we met. But there were significant differences. The Colossus was already published and had been well received, whereas my first collection, Cages, would not appear for three more years. She was ahead of me also in that she had one child and was expecting another.
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