{"id":4517,"date":"2017-10-09T12:31:01","date_gmt":"2017-10-09T12:31:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/sylvia-plath-looked-good-in-a-bikini-deal-with-it\/"},"modified":"2019-03-25T12:34:12","modified_gmt":"2019-03-25T16:34:12","slug":"sylvia-plath-looked-good-in-a-bikini-deal-with-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/sylvia-plath-looked-good-in-a-bikini-deal-with-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Sylvia Plath Looked Good in a Bikini\u2014Deal With It"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>There is an oft-repeated story in most biographies of Sylvia Plath, concerning her return to Smith College after her suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization. It was the start of the 1954 spring semester, and Plath was meeting, for the first time, the young woman who had occupied her dorm room during her illness\u200a\u2014\u200aNancy Hunter, later Nancy Hunter Steiner, who would go on to become Plath\u2019s close friend, and pen a short memoir about their relationship, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/closer-look-Ariel-memory-Sylvia\/dp\/0061278157\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1507310841&amp;sr=8-1&amp;tag-electricliter-20\"><em>A Closer Look At&nbsp;Ariel<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As the story goes, Hunter had spent her time in Sylvia\u2019s room feeling \u201chaunt[ed]\u201d by its former occupant. Plath had taken on a legendary status at Smith, thanks to both her brilliance as a student and her suicide attempt. According to Steiner, \u201c\u2026as the months passed I grew familiar with the details of the Plath legend through the speculative gossip that raged at the mention of her name.\u201d In Plath\u2019s absence, Hunter formed an image of her as a \u201cgirl-genius\u2026 as plain or dull or deliberately dowdy, a girl who rejected all frivolity in the pursuit of academic and literary excellence.\u201d Now, meeting this mysterious figure for the first time, at a campus luncheon, Hunter was so taken aback by Plath\u2019s appearance that she blurted out, \u201cThey didn\u2019t tell me you were beautiful!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This snapshot from Plath\u2019s college years already contains the amalgamation of myth, rumors, misinformation, and surprise turns that has hallmarked Plath\u2019s literary and personal legacies since the publication of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Ariel-Restored-Classics-Sylvia-Plath-ebook\/dp\/B01KT1845C\/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1507310877&amp;sr=1-1&amp;tag=electricliter-20\"><em>Ariel<\/em><\/a> in 1965. It\u2019s all there, from the sudden mysterious disappearance (\u201cspeculative gossip, [rage] at the mention of her name\u201d), to the wild projections of the missing woman (\u201cdull\u2026deliberately dowdy\u201d) to the gobsmacked reactions to Plath\u2019s actuality (Surprise! She\u2019s beautiful!). Plath is always either under\u2013 or overwhelming her readers\u200a\u2014\u200aJanet Malcolm famously wrote in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Silent-Woman-Sylvia-Plath-Hughes-ebook\/dp\/B00ATLA9IS\/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1507310909&amp;sr=1-1&amp;tag=electricliter-20\"><em>The Silent Woman<\/em><\/a> that Plath \u201cdisappoints her\u201d in photographs. She\u2019s looking for a red-haired witch who \u201ceats men like air,\u201d and all she gets is this lousy housewife, clutching her babies, hair done down in braids. Jessica Ferri, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/touching-sylvia-plaths-hair\">writing<\/a> of handling those very braids when she worked in special collections at the Lilly Library in Indiana, exclaims, astonished, \u201cThere was so much of&nbsp;it!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In my own life, more than once, I\u2019ve been asked \u201cWho\u2019s that, there, on the cover?\u201d while handling my dog-eared copy of Plath\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Unabridged-Journals-Sylvia-Plath-ebook\/dp\/B0012DZ34W\/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1507310938&amp;sr=1-1&amp;tag=electricliter-20\"><em>Unabridged Journals<\/em><\/a><em>, <\/em>which plainly state her name. When I reply, \u201cThat\u2019s Sylvia Plath,\u201d the response is almost always the same\u200a\u2014\u200a<em>it can\u2019t be. <\/em>They are looking for a magical witch, a goth girl, a myth. The image of Plath, smiling in her Smith graduation robes, causes cognitive dissonance and, ultimately, disappointment. It\u2019s the same cognitive dissonance we, as a culture, collectively suffer about Sylvia Plath, and indeed about any woman lauded for her intellect who also has the nerve to inhabit a body: <em>That\u2019s her? Isn\u2019t she a little too beautiful? Isn\u2019t she not beautiful enough?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignleft is-resized\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Letters-Sylvia-Plath-I-1940-1956\/dp\/0571328997\/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1507311036&amp;sr=1-2-fkmr1&amp;tag-electricliter-20\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/1*awkO3VlakHT3gBV_gIs5xw.jpeg\" alt='' width=\"248\" height=\"374\"\/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>This pattern plays out in reaction to Plath\u2019s image each time there is a new Plath publishing \u201cevent.\u201d The latest is the U.K. edition of Plath\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Letters-Sylvia-Plath-I-1940-1956\/dp\/0571328997\/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1507311036&amp;sr=1-2-fkmr1&amp;tag-electricliter-20\"><em>Collected Letters<\/em><\/a><em>, <\/em>which sports as its cover art a photograph of a twenty-something Plath grinning for the camera in a white bikini. I first became aware of the cover, and its accompanying outrage, in a Facebook post from a well-known American poet, in which she (and, in the comments, other well-known American poets) expressed deep anger and exhausted frustration at the inherent sexism the choice apparently symbolized. Last week, I woke to Cathleen Allyn Conway\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/booksblog\/2017\/sep\/28\/sylvia-plath-bikini-shot-its-time-to-stop-sexualising-a-serious-author-to-sell-books\">piece<\/a> about exactly this, in which she not only critiques the cover art for the <em>Letters, <\/em>but also that of a half-dozen other Plath&nbsp;books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As I write this, all of those books, sometimes in multiple editions, stare back at me from between their bookends on my desk, reminding me that the politics of Plath somehow always end up as the politics of reduction and essentialism. Conway notes that the same bikini shot appeared on the cover of a recent edition of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Johnny-Panic-Bible-Dreams-Writings\/dp\/0571049893\/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1507311250&amp;sr=1-2&amp;tag=electricliter-20\"><em>Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams<\/em><\/a><em>, <\/em>a collection of Plath\u2019s prose; she lumps this cover in with a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2013\/feb\/01\/the-bell-jar-new-cover-derided\">widely criticized<\/a> edition of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Bell-Jar-Modern-Classics\/dp\/0060837020\/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1507311279&amp;sr=1-1&amp;tag=electricliter-20\"><em>The Bell Jar<\/em><\/a> as \u201cproto-chick-lit\u201d imagery. Presumably she would prefer covers like that of an earlier edition of <a href=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/518LeiPQc0L._SX328_BO1204203200_.jpg\"><em>Johnny Panic<\/em><\/a><em>, <\/em>whose psychedelic colors underline the idea of \u201cmental illness\u201d while also reinforcing the popular conception of Plath as a magical witch. While Conway does write \u201cthe rationale is that pictures of smiley Plath counterbalance the darkness in her work, lending extra tragedy to her illness and death,\u201d she dismisses the notion because \u201cthis kind of correlation is not made for male authors.\u201d This assessment fails to take into account another possible reason for including photographs of Plath that aren\u2019t, frankly, morbid: they paint a fuller, more accurate picture of the living woman, rather than highlighting her tragic&nbsp;death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignleft is-resized\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Johnny-Panic-Bible-Dreams-Writings\/dp\/0571049893\/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1507311250&amp;sr=1-2&amp;tag=electricliter-20\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/1*j75Gge2nEBFNyyBIRNh34A.jpeg\" alt='' width=\"248\" height=\"374\"\/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>In his introductions to <em>Johnny Panic, <\/em>to the heavily abridged 1982 edition of Plath\u2019s <em>Journals<\/em>, and to her <em>Collected Poems, <\/em>Plath\u2019s estranged husband Ted Hughes claims that Plath had one, singular \u201ctrue self\u201d which she hid from everyone but him; her poetry and prose, he says, were an attempt to put this \u201ctrue self\u201d into writing. <em>Ariel, <\/em>Hughes once said, \u201cis just like her, but permanent,\u201d an incendiary statement that would invent and bolster two absurd facets of the Myth of Sylvia Plath: that the \u201cI\u201d of the <em>Ariel <\/em>poems was the \u201ctrue\u201d Plath, and that the book itself was a finished thing\u200a\u2014\u200aa mausoleum which you could enter at will, encountering the dead woman at every turn, enshrining one bleak version of Plath in the cultural mindset. Conway rightfully takes Hughes and his sister Olwyn to task in her piece, pointing out that they actively tried to construct Plath as an hysterical lunatic in the wake of her suicide; there can be no doubt about that. Unfortunately, in her assessment of Plath\u2019s image, her \u201ctrue\u201d self, Conway is netted in the same dull trap that Hughes built and set in his public writing about Plath. According to Conway, Plath had one definitive look that was deeply connected to her true self, and it wasn\u2019t a blond woman in a bikini. She quotes a 1954 letter from Plath to her mother, Aurelia, that states \u201c[my] brown-haired personality is more studious, charming and earnest,\u201d then extends this notion with her statement that, \u201cWe know brunette Sylvia was how Plath wanted to present herself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And herein lies the real problem: We don\u2019t actually know this at all. One line in a letter to a worrying mother in Eisenhower\u2019s America (who, as other texts describe, was shocked and dismayed when Plath dyed her hair blond in the first place) does not a \u201ctrue\u201d self prove. Moreover, this furthers Hughes\u2019 dangerous idea that Plath, or any of us, has a single, definitive \u201cself,\u201d an idea we visit almost exclusively upon the heads of women writers. We celebrate Whitman\u2019s celebration of himself, with its numinous notion that \u201cI am large, I contain multitudes.\u201d We have no problem reconciling the idea that he was both queer and a hetero-braggart who claimed to have fathered six illegitimate children, yet we take to task a photograph of a bikini-clad Plath in her college years\u200a\u2014\u200aas though she could not possibly be both the genius she was, and a woman who was body confident, sexy, happy to smile for the&nbsp;camera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote alignright\"><blockquote><p>The dangerous idea that Plath, or any of us, has a single, definitive &#8216;self&#8217; is an idea we visit almost exclusively upon the heads of women writers.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Conway notes that Robert Lowell, Plath\u2019s contemporary, is always pictured sitting gravely in a library or a study, with a back wall of books, as though this is the only way we can understand a writer or take them seriously. But to understand Plath at all is to know her as a woman of her time, which demanded that a woman of Plath\u2019s race and class choose a single narrative\u200a\u2014\u200amarriage and family\u200a\u2014\u200aand stick with it, as she so famously chronicled in <em>The Bell Jar. <\/em>In pursuit of this end, women had to be experts, if not slaves, to material culture, as exquisitely documented in Elizabeth Winder\u2019s <em>Pain, Parties, Work. <\/em>To deny Plath\u2019s love affairs with beautiful things is to deny the reality of the conditions of her&nbsp;life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it\u2019s also to deny the part of her personality that was not bleak, that was not morbid, that was not dictated by her illness or her marriage. She loved Revlon\u2019s \u201cCherries In The Snow\u201d lipstick and nail lacquer, and always dotted her clothes with a pop of red\u200a\u2014\u200ared ballet flats, red scarves, the famous red bandeau headband Hughes ripped from her hair the first night they met, as a souvenir. These were a result of the world she occupied, but they were also extensions of her passion for aesthetics, for fashion and fine art\u200a\u2014\u200athe current Plath exhibition at the Smithsonian contains the multitude of excellent paintings she produced in the Smith College studios. When Esther Greenwood, Plath\u2019s <em>Bell Jar <\/em>protagonist, goes to the roof of her downtown Manhattan hotel and tosses the beautiful clothes she took with her for her summer job as a guest editor for a fashion magazine, item by item over the sleeping city, she isn\u2019t doing so because she\u2019s become some kind of ascetic, or because she now understands her true self, and beautiful things have nothing to do with it. She does it because she lives in a world that demands she be either\/or, that makes no room for both\/and. Rather than choosing a self, she begins the terrifying process of giving up any self at all, which culminates in a suicide&nbsp;attempt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019d like to believe that by now, the room for both\/and exists, but reactions to the image of Plath in a bikini\u200a\u2014\u200awhich, incidentally, is a holiday snapshot taken by a boyfriend, not the calculated and manipulated result of a photoshoot\u200a\u2014\u200abode otherwise. This picture of Plath is not, as Conway claims, \u201ca visual antithesis to the ambitious, intellectual poet.\u201d It was taken, in fact, the summer she dated Gordon Lameyer and Richard Sassoon, who loved her equally for her physicality and her extraordinary intellect, and whom she loved for those things, in turn. The dialogue between the carnal and the intellectual was one Plath started as a very young woman, and did not give up until her death. At no point did she see these as mutually exclusive; she often described her love for Hughes as being the force it was <em>because <\/em>he embodied the physicality and intellectualism and artistry she both possessed and craved in&nbsp;another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote alignleft\"><blockquote><p>The reality, and it\u2019s astounding to me that I have to write this sentence down, is that we can take a writer who wears a bikini seriously.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The reality, and it\u2019s astounding to me that I have to write this sentence down, is that we can take a writer who wears a bikini seriously. I have three in my closet;, the most recent of which is a vintage-inspired red-halter. I bought it because I love red; I love red partly because I love Sylvia Plath. I wear \u201cCherries In The Snow\u201d lipstick to the classes I teach, to parties, to intimidating meetings with condescending men, and when I do, I invoke her, just a little bit\u200a\u2014\u200afor inspiration. For luck. For permission, which she gave me, which she gives me\u200a\u2014\u200ato be brave. To try and astound. To say the things no one wants to say, or hear. To be beautiful, <em>and<\/em> to be smart, and sexual, and to never, ever fall into the foolish trap that these cannot&nbsp;coexist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is an oft-repeated story in most biographies of Sylvia Plath, concerning her return to Smith College after her suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization. It was the start of the 1954 spring semester, and Plath was meeting, for the first time, the young woman who had occupied her dorm room during her illness\u200a\u2014\u200aNancy Hunter, later [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26068,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,85],"tags":[3447,92,294,5,377],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Sylvia Plath Looked Good in a Bikini\u2014Deal With It - Electric Literature<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/sylvia-plath-looked-good-in-a-bikini-deal-with-it\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sylvia Plath Looked Good in a Bikini\u2014Deal With It - Electric Literature\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There is an oft-repeated story in most biographies of Sylvia Plath, concerning her return to Smith College after her suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization. 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