Sylvia Plath: Drawings

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Sylvia Plath: Drawings

Sylvia Plath: Drawings

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Who is the Sylvia Plath we, her readers, think we know? Nearly half a century after her suicide, the great poet is capable of surprising us. A selection of her drawings that have just gone on display at London's Mayor Gallery shows us a new side of her. I found these drawings moving: not because they feed into the legend, but because they sidestep it. They bring us a fresh look at a woman now so barnacled with myth it's hard to see her clearly. And – wow – they're really good.

Times Literary Supplement, May 5, 2000, Tim Kendall, review of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962,p. 12. To see these drawings as in some way complementary to the poems, as some will doubtless try to, seems to me off-beam. Plath did once tell the BBC: "I have a visual imagination." But what's so striking about these drawings is exactly their difference from the visual world of the poems. These are pictures that revel in the thinginess of things: in wine bottles, an old kettle, a pair of shoes, the uneven timbering of beached boats, the architectural curlicues of a Parisian roof. Ariel, Plath’s final, posthumously published collection of poems, shows us how. Understandably, these poems have often been interpreted in the light, or shadow, of her oncoming death. Sylvia Plath died of suicide 60 years ago today, at the age of 30. The circumstances around her death have been described, fictionalised, analysed – sometimes sensitively, more often voyeuristically – in biographies, memoirs, films and literature. Posterity loves a tragic female artist, a tendency that Plath’s daughter Frieda Hughes rightly objected to in My Mother, a furious poem written in response to the 2003 film about her parents, Ted and Sylvia. Its final lines read: Hers was an epitome of standard-issue 50s white, middle class American childhood, the kind of supposedly idyllic upbringing which no small number of people still remember today in a glowing, nostalgic haze. In Plath’s excavations of the identities that she cultivated herself and those she had pushed upon her, she gazed with radical intensity at America’s patriarchal social fictions, and the violence and entitlement that lay beneath them. The collage above from 1960 presents us with the kind of layered, cut-up, hybrid text that William Burroughs had begun experimenting with not long before. You can see more highlights from the Plath exhibit, “One Life: Sylvia Plath,” at the National Portrait Gallery. Also featured are Plath’s family photos, books, letters, her typewriter—and, in general, several more dimensions of her life than most of us know.Timothy Materer wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography,“The critical reactions to both The Bell Jar and Ariel were inevitably influenced by the manner of Plath’s death at 30.” Hardly known outside poetry circles during her lifetime, Plath became in death more than she might have imagined. Donoghue, for one, stated, “I can’t recall feeling, in 1963, that Plath’s death proved her life authentic or indeed that proof was required. ... But I recall that Ariel was received as if it were a bracelet of bright hair about the bone, a relic more than a book.” Feminists portrayed Plath as a woman driven to madness by a domineering father, an unfaithful husband, and the demands that motherhood made on her genius. Some critics lauded her as a confessional poet whose work “spoke the hectic, uncontrolled things our conscience needed, or thought it needed,” to quote Donoghue. Largely on the strength of Ariel, Plath became one of the best-known female American poets of the 20th century. At times, Plath was able to overcome the “tension between the perceiver and the thing-in-itself by literally becoming the thing-in-itself,” wrote Newman. “In many instances, it is nature who personifies her.” Similarly, Plath used history “to explain herself,” writing about the Nazi concentration camps as though she had been imprisoned there. She said, “I think that personal experience shouldn’t be a kind of shut box and mirror-looking narcissistic experience. I believe it should be generally relevant, to such things as Hiroshima and Dachau, and so on.” Newman explained that, “in absorbing, personalizing the socio-political catastrophes of the century, [Plath] reminds us that they are ultimately metaphors of the terrifying human mind.” Alvarez noted that the “anonymity of pain, which makes all dignity impossible, was Sylvia Plath’s subject.” Her reactions to the smallest desecrations, even in plants, were “extremely violent,” wrote Hughes. “Auschwitz and the rest were merely the open wounds.” In sum, Newman believed, Plath “evolved in poetic voice from the precocious girl, to the disturbed modern woman, to the vengeful magician, to Ariel—God’s Lioness.” A few years ago a friend sent me a photo of himself wearing a Sylvia Plath T-shirt. It was pale pink – the colour of the Smith College memorandum paper on which the poet drafted many of her poems – and printed with the iconic picture of Plath in side profile, wearing a white hairband. I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2001, Carlin Romano, "Martin and Hannah and Sylvia and Ted," p. B21. There are lots of photographs of the time they spent on the road trip in America which is very heavily recalled by Ted Hughes in Birthday Letters, for example. In terms of a portrait of their marriage, it’s really a very beautiful thing,” he added.

Plath, Sylvia, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 2000.One Life: Sylvia Plath” is the first exploration of the poet and writer’s life in an art and history museum. The exhibition reveals how Plath shaped her identity visually as she came of age as a writer in the 1950s. Visitors will get a look into Plath’s personal life and her dualistic nature she explained as her “brown-haired” and “platinum” personalities. Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The New Consciousness, 1941-1968, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987.

The Telegraph has a gallery of thirty of these drawings, which were on display at London’s Mayor Gallery between November and December of 2011. Plath’s writing has always been remarkably visual, her deft handling of sometimes startling imagery giving her work so much of its ability to seduce, enthrall, and unsettle. As in her poetry, the images of herself seem to attract the most interest. There are other pieces of Plath self-portraiture, but none contrasts so much with the youthful painting above, I think, as the accomplished pencil drawing below, with the poet’s fearless sidelong stare and bare shoulders expressing both her vulnerability and considerable personal and creative power. Haberkamp, Frederike, Sylvia Plath: The Poetics of Beekeeping, International Specialised Book Services, 1997. Sylvia Plath’s poetic talent should go unquestioned, but as Plath fans will know, she first intended to become a visual artist, and some of her earliest work—illustrated childhood letters like the adorable dog below—remained hidden away in the family attic until 1996. Editor Kathleen Connors included this juvenilia in a 2007 collection of Plath’s work entitled Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual, which also features sketches, photographs, and portraits—such as the brooding 1951 self-portrait above—that represent Plath’s work while an art student at Smith College. Several years earlier, the teenage Plath had begun contouring her consciousness and mapping its psychological promontories, its luminous surfaces and its dark edges, rhapsodizing about the joy of living, thinking deeply about free will and what make us who we are, and composing her first tragic poem in response to a minor domestic accident. Two years before she shaded in what was becoming an all-consuming darkness in “The Disquieting Muses,” she wrote to her mother in a letter included in the posthumously collected Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 ( public library):

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Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, First Series, 1980; Volume 6, American Novelists since World War II, Second Series, 1980; American Novelists since World War II, Fourth Series, 1995. Anderson, Linda, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1996. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts, Harper (New York, NY), 1979. In a “Monday P.S.” addition to the same letter, Plath relays to Hughes yet another drawing episode with equal parts irreverence and earnest excitement: Alvarez, A., The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1971, Random House (New York, NY), 1972.



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