And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
—Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962
She looked like a 1950s dream. Her preppy twinsets, double-row pearls, and summer shirtwaist dresses are images that have helped build her myth. But Sylvia Plath’s clothes worked as fiction in the same way that her prose and poems told stories. She used, or tried to use, clothes as armor against the world, in order to portray a stronger, more engaged and useful self. The sartorial ideals of the 1950s seem playfully passé today, but the social reality for women then could be suffocating, as Plath recounts in her novel, The Bell Jar.
The uniform Plath dressed herself in appears now more like a woman playing a role in order to keep herself going. Her first suicide attempt took place in 1953, after she spent a triumphant month in New York at Mademoiselle magazine as student guest editor. She relished dressing up, and before coming to New York from Massachusetts she had spent precious Smith College scholarship funds on “blouses of sheer nylon, straight gray skirts, tight black jerseys, and black heeled pumps,” as detailed in Elizabeth Winder’s book about Plath’s experience. She wanted to look the part in Manhattan and intended to fit right in to the magazine world of Mademoiselle—at the time a crucible for the most elite and academically competitive twenty-one-year-old women in America.
Alamy Stock Photo: Everett Collection Historical
Sylvia Plath, mid-1950s.
Clothes equaled success, popularity, and prestige and protected her identity. They were code for Plath being in and able, yet there were cracks in the armor. Just a couple of years before her death, Plath got to know the poet Ruth Fainlight, who saw deeper than the surface and could tell that Plath’s dress worked as camouflage. In a feature in London’s Guardian newspaper in 2013, she reminisced: “My first impression was of a burningly ambitious and intelligent young woman trying to look like a conventional, devoted wife. She wore a small hat and a tight-bodiced, full-skirted shiny dark green dress—like one of my New York aunts dressed for a cocktail party. There was something almost excessive about that disguise.”
Plath and Ted Hughes got married on June 16, 1956, in honor of James Joyce’s epic Ulysses, which transpires in a single day, June 16, 1904. June 16 is known as Bloomsday and is celebrated worldwide, through people’s reenacting various portions of the story.
Plath said she’d “rather live in London than anywhere else in the world” and in 1959 rented a flat in Primrose Hill, near Regent’s Park, where the poet William Butler Yeats had also lived.
Plath finished The Bell Jar in August 1961. It was published under a pen name, Victoria Lucas, as it told an acutely autobiographical story and she did not want to offend her friends and family. It retells Plath’s time in New York, working at Mademoiselle, through the guise of her heroine, Esther Greenwood. On leaving Manhattan, Esther’s disillusion with the superficial is concrete enough that she discards her fine clothes. It is exactly what Plath herself did before leaving the world of Mademoiselle to go home.
Born in Boston in 1932, Plath would return there in 1958 with her new husband, the English writer Ted Hughes, and she and her friend, the writer Anne Sexton, would attend poetry seminars held by the poet Robert Lowell. Sexton is credited with encouraging Plath to find her “confessional” voice, and around this time Plath’s writing became more mature and developed.
Writers and artists are the most narcissistic people. I mustn’t say this, I like many of them . . . . But I must say what I admire most is the person who masters an area of practical experience, and can teach me something.
—Sylvia Plath, from The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets, by Peter Orr, 1966
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Sylvia Plath, 1957.
Plath’s pained and angry voice was not simply a response to a society that frustrated her, it emerged from her depressive psychosis and possibly from the sudden death of her father when she was eight years old. The confusion and grief Plath experienced was never resolved, and at the time of his death, she announced, “I’ll never speak to God again.” Her poem “Daddy,” written in 1962, wraps up with the line “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” A few months after she wrote the poem, she succeeded in her final suicide attempt at her apartment in London, leaving her two small children alone.
Plath watched the obscenity trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the press gallery in London’s Old Bailey court.
It was my last night.
I grasped the bundle I carried and pulled at a pale tail. A strapless elasticized slip which, in the course of wear, had lost its elasticity, slumped into my hand. I waved it, like a flag of truce, once, twice. . . The breeze caught it, and I let go.
A white flake floated out into the night, and began its slow descent. I wondered on what street or rooftop it would come to rest. . . .
Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, 1963