In July, 1947, while
at summer camp in Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard, a fourteen-year-old
Sylvia Plath wrote a letter to her mother, Aurelia
Schober Plath. “I am very busy, but not too much to write regularly to
you,” she writes. “Last night I had three big helpings of potatoes
(mashed) and carrots for supper and a scant helping of meatloaf as well
as 2 pieces of bread and butter, 2 apricots & a glass of milk.” Amid
the
thirteen hundred or so pages of unexpurgated correspondence recently
published in “The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1, 1940–1956,” there
are dozens more examples of this sort of thing. At a much later point in
her life, when Plath is newly married to Ted Hughes and travelling with
him in Spain, she is still, in letters to her mother, describing her
meals. At this point, she is also responsible for preparing them. “I
have one frying pan, and a large boiling pan, and fry most everything in
olive oil. Ted is quite pleased with the tasty little tortillas and
battered things I make.” The division of labor is stark and unremarked
upon. Both poets wrote during this quasi-honeymoon, but only Plath
cooked.
Many women who have read Plath’s poetry in the half-century since her
death have seen in such domestic toil a partial explanation for the rage
that burns through her writing. Plath’s letters aren’t angry, but
several of them show her coming up against the boundaries of what was
permissible, or possible, and not knowing what to do about it. She
worked so hard—at her studies, at her writing, at being a young woman
worthy of approval—and wondered about what it all amounted to. “Don’t
you agree that one has to see in other people’s eyes that one is
appreciated and loved in order to feel that one is worthwhile?” The
question is posed in a letter written in July, 1951, to her friend Ann
Davidow-Goodman. By “other people” Plath means men (“girls’ company is
greatly unsatisfying”), who had the power to make her feel both valued
and inadequate. ... [mehr] https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-letters-of-sylvia-plath-and-the-transformation-of-a-poets-voice
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