Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (18 page)

If anything, Hughes is best seen in the context of another grieving husband: Where William Godwin’s response to Wollstonecraft’s unexpected death had been to publish everything, no matter how potentially scandalous it was, Hughes’s response was to withhold or destroy anything questionable, no matter how potentially scandalous it wasn’t. Two widowers took precisely opposite routes, and wound up in the same disgrace: In the age of women’s silence, unguarded speech was shameful. But in the age of women’s speech, male-imposed silence was intolerable.

The banning of “The Arraignment” was the last straw, the moment when Hughes’s controlling behavior came smack up against a political movement devoted to opposing male control. Feminists began to publish bootleg copies of “The Arraignment.” His readings were picketed, by women whose placards frequently bore lines from Morgan’s poem; sometimes women would stand up, during a lull in the reading, and begin to recite “The Arraignment” aloud. He began to cancel readings, for fear of disruption. By trying to make Morgan’s poem disappear, he’d turned it into a cause.

Meanwhile, Plath’s work kept coming. (And it was, to be clear, Hughes who let it come.) Her first novel,
The Bell Jar
was, if possible, an even more serendipitous work than
Ariel
. It was a blunt, witty, unsparing account of her first suicide attempt. It was also the tale of a girl who thought marriage would let a man “flatten [her] out under his feet,” who could get into Honors English but was still confounded by the sexual double standard, who was subjected to attempted rape when she did try to express herself sexually, and who would frankly rather kill herself than work at a ladies’ magazine and go without birth control. Everything second-wave feminists were ready to address, Plath had already talked about, simply by talking about herself. She had hung it out there, for God and all to see, and it wasn’t simply ranting and raving and pornography. It was the problem of an age, of thousands or millions of girls like her. When women spoke, it seemed, they really did start to say all the same things.

And so, Plath became a prophet, and a martyr, someone who had seen the problems before she had a feminist movement to help her fix them, and who had died in part because feminism arrived too late. Like Valerie, she was a cautionary case, someone whose life story meant what the observer’s politics needed it to mean. But, unlike Valerie, she had neither a criminal record nor the ability to disagree with her interpreters. She was more useful to her allies than to her enemies. She became the prototype of the woman who, in the absence of feminist activity, took tranquilizers, went insane, and committed suicide. Hughes’s name began to disappear from Plath’s gravestone. Over and over, “Sylvia
Plath Hughes” was chiseled away, until only “Sylvia Plath” remained. No one ever came forward to admit doing it; no one has ever given the reasons. It could have been an act of malice. It could have been a statement of her independent status as a writer: “Sylvia Hughes” didn’t write those books, after all. Or it could have been one last, cruelly sarcastic [OMISSION] mark. He destroyed her journal. They destroyed his name.

I don’t envy Hughes what he went through in the years after Plath’s death. And I sincerely doubt that we can solve the problem of trainwrecks—of our gruesome appetite to see women suffer, or to see them punished for violating our ideas of how women “ought” to behave—by simply wrecking more men. But Plath was never invulnerable to the wrecking process.

There have been many attempts, over the years, to paint Plath back into a more familiar picture of sexual and emotional excess:
“Sexually predatory, rabidly ambitious, mentally unstable,” as a review of one Ted Hughes biography calls her. Where feminists saw a prophet, Hughes partisans saw a raving, fame-hungry succubus. August critic Harold Bloom sniffed that her poem “Lady Lazarus” was merely a “tantrum,” and that Plath herself was just a fad:
“Hysterical insanity, whatever its momentary erotic appeal, is not an affect that endures in verse.” It’s rare that a mere fad is important
enough to merit a book-length takedown, but that seems to have escaped Bloom’s notice.

Other writers have followed Bloom’s lead, characterizing Plath’s work (and, particularly, the poems in
Ariel
) as purely a symptom of her mental illness: Transcribed delusions, or else compulsive and insane acts of violence against the people in her life, committed through the unlikely medium of verse. Her work has been framed as a disease. And, in the cultural attempt to figure out precisely
which
mental illness can magically force someone to write two massively popular and enduring books, Plath has been posthumously diagnosed with psychotic depression, bipolar disorder, overly strong PMS, and at least two different personality disorders. One
PsychCentral
article on narcissistic personality disorder and motherhood opens with a Plath quote, noting that
“[there] is a special place in hell for narcissistic mothers. Ms. Plath herself indulged in the ultimate narcissistic act when she committed suicide by sticking her head in the oven while her two young children were asleep in the same apartment.” (If suicide is a narcissistic act, it seems oddly unlikely to benefit the narcissist in question.) And then there’s this, from a 2003 article in the
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
, which diagnoses Plath with borderline personality disorder:

Plath’s poetry can be seen to be preoccupied with ‘borderline’ themes (loss, violence, and contradictory experiences of the self) but these do not necessarily generate poetry
.
The association of instability with creativity is probably linked with another borderline trait, the capacity for intense concentration. This represents a dissociation from current surroundings and preoccupations, even when these are difficult, as they were when she was writing
Ariel.

No one would suggest that Plath wasn’t mentally ill. Suicide is never a sign of radiant health. But this is another instance of the David Foster Wallace Conundrum: We say that David Foster Wallace was a genius (because he wrote
Infinite Jest
) and that he was also mentally ill (because he hanged himself). Even if his experience of mental illness substantially informed his writing (
Infinite Jest
, like
The Bell Jar
, is drawn largely from the author’s experiences after a suicide attempt in college; the addiction-recovery center Wallace fictionalizes was his first stop after McLean, which also happened to be the exact same hospital Plath stayed in, and that she fictionalized in
The Bell Jar
), his writing isn’t a symptom of his illness, but evidence of his ability to transcend it. But for Plath, even the most basic part of writing, the fact that she could sit down and concentrate long enough to compose a poem—the same skill displayed by every third-grader who has ever successfully completed a book report—is supposedly a form of madness. Men have problems. Women
are
problems.

Here we are again.

•

The promise of Plath’s work was that a woman could defang the charges of hysteria by owning them. Unlike Solanas, who seemingly never saw herself as flawed or sick, or Wollstonecraft and Brontë, who swept their flaws under the carpet so as not to compromise themselves, or even Jacobs, who was honest, but played a delicate game of apologizing for “sins” that were not her fault so as to reach her audience, Plath took her own flaws as her subject, and thereby made them the source of her authority. By detailing her own overabundant inner life, no matter how huge and frightening it was—her sexuality, her suicidality, her broken relationships, her anger at the world or at men—she could, in some crucial way, own that part of her story, simply because she chose to tell it. And, if she could do this, other women could do it, too.

It’s true that, for all that has been written against her, and for all the writing we never got to see, Plath’s ownership of her story gives her a measure of power. She could never be easily or completely slotted into the existing archetypes of crazy ex-girlfriend, half-dressed and hysterical Louise Augustine, or sexually voracious dirty girl, simply because we always have access to her own, complicated, individual story. We can still read “Daddy” and feel the hissing electrical voltage of her disillusionment rising through the page. We can still read
The Bell Jar
—the smirk of nice-boy Buddy Willard when she breaks her leg shortly after rejecting his marriage proposal, the “woman-hater” who calls her
“slut” after he tries to rape her—and see exactly why being a young woman, trying to obtain some sexual satisfaction, is a frightening and dangerous thing. For all the diagnoses and interpretations, she remains ferociously herself; her voice is too strong to disappear inside some generalization about madwomen. The love her readers had for her voice was proven by their anger at even well-intentioned attempts to limit it, their insistence that the world deserved to hear everything Plath had to say.

But that love has never been taken entirely seriously. Nor does declaring Plath your favorite author win you many points in lit-nerd circles. At the beginning of Plath’s fame, her fans were stereotyped as rabid, violent feminists. But, as early as 1979 and
Annie Hall
, the stereotypes were getting younger, drippier, and dumber: Woody Allen called her an “interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.” (Woody Allen, of course, being an infamously unreliable authority on what young girls enjoy.) Reading her was always gendered, and trivialized, but it got more trivial and more divorced from the political context as time went on. Now, consciousness-raising groups are hokey lentil talk, autobiographical writing is preferably done with a certain cool MFA-enabled distance, and Plath fans are mostly stereotyped as moody, melodramatic, self-absorbed teenage girls. Not exactly a glorious legacy.

If the movement for the feminist first-person has any
legacy at all, it has leaked down, out of the lofty realms of literature and into the low-culture and pop-culture world of blog posts, TV shows, and record collections. Which is, in and of itself, no bad thing. The true test of any radical theory or practice is whether it stays confined to the movement in which it originated—whether it’s solely adopted by initiates and die-hards, or leaks out and permeates the way the norms and squares interact with the world. If it stays cool, it’s not working. If it’s working, it’s probably not cool.

I, for example, cultivated most of my love for female confessional writing through the highly unserious and very norm-friendly medium of MTV. In 1993, when I was eleven years old, Liz Phair released
Exile in Guyville
: “I bet you fall in bed too easily with the beautiful girls who are shyly brave,” was its opening line, and it got more parental-advisory-worthy from there, alternating rage with fuck-and-runs, “I want to be your blow-job queen” with “I’m a real cunt in spring.” A year earlier, Tori Amos had released the self-described “diary”
Little Earthquakes
, delivering urgent first-person tales of religious repression, self-doubt, sexual violence, and boys who “said ‘you’re really an ugly girl, but I like the way you play.’ ” She’d name-check her menstrual cycle, describe her rape in wrenching detail, or just cry about her dad for five minutes, and it was all available in the resolutely apolitical aisles of Best Buy for only $9.99. She named Plath as a primary influence on her writing.

The list goes on—Fiona Apple’s frank accounts of emotional damage and sexual violence; PJ Harvey reinventing “crazy ex-girlfriend” as a triumphant body-horror giantess on
Rid of Me
; even Courtney, bless her, was opening up—but the point is, I was raised on a rich slurry of gooey, bloody, painful, hysterical girl stuff. Nor did I ever learn to regard said stuff as shameful; when you’re eleven years old, the coolest things are the ones famous rock stars do, so if famous rock stars were doing feminist first-person about sex and mental health, that was just what I liked. Of course, there was the not inconsiderable drawback that it was all market-researched and put on sale—I bought my feminist politics with my allowance, rather than joining an activist group for free—but that also made it widely available, and put the feminist first-person on offer to those without social connections to the movement. At the time, it felt immediate. It felt like community, even if I never knew the other women involved.

Community did enter into it, eventually. By the ’00s, the female first-person was the province of the ladyblogs. Under the editorial guidance of Anna Holmes,
Jezebel
ran election coverage next to stories about getting a tampon lost up your vagina.
xoJane
, another feminist-leaning media outlet, has a section entitled, simply enough,
“It Happened to Me.” Sample articles include
“It Happened to Me: I Let an Old Rich White Man Bankroll My Life … Even Though He Was Racist”; “I’m Being Stalked and Terrorized Because of My
Fat Acceptance Movie”;
“I Was Suspended from My Teaching Job for Being Transgender.” The political import is in the content, but the authority derives from the willingness to say
I, my, me
.

It’s worth noting that both
xoJane
and
Jezebel
came under fire, upon their creation, for being the wrong kind of feminist, due in part to that use of the I:
Jezebel
’s posts about drinking and drug use were called “irresponsible,” and their willingness to incorporate stories about dating or fashion next to stories about sexism and racism got them labeled fluffy. And it’s true that the political usefulness or cultural relevance of the
xoJane I
—
“It Happened to Me: A Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina,” ran one infamous 2015 essay—could be, uh, fluid. Their original tagline,
“a place where women go to be selfish, and where their selfishness is applauded,” came in for a particularly harsh round of mocking. Soon enough, it was rewritten into “where women go to be their unabashed selves.” But the same basic problem still applied: In a sexist context, and in the history of female silence, “unabashed selves” sounds synonymous with “selfish,” or self-absorbed, or just plain contrary to the strong and self-sacrificing attitude many people assume a feminist is meant to have.